The Ghost and Mr. Mumler

Mumler had assembled a crack defense team for the hearing, led by an aggressive lawyer named John D. Townsend. The first witnesses Townsend called were photographers, all of whom had keenly scrutinized Mumler at work in his studio without detecting any chicanery. Townsend then summoned to the stand a parade of Mumler’s clients. One by one, these heart-sore people testified in defense of their oracle, clutching their spirit photographs, which were shown to the courtroom and entered into evidence.

Charles Livermore testified that it was indeed his wife in his photographs, an identification with which all of his friends agreed. “I went there with my eyes open, as a skeptic,” Livermore said. He had tried to outwit Mumler: He made an appointment for a sitting on a Tuesday, but went on Monday, “to disconcert him. [I] suddenly changed my position so as to defeat any arrangement he might have made….I was on the lookout all the while.” The two pictures of Livermore and his ghost wife appeared in the May 8, 1869, edition of Harper’s Weekly , which covered the trial and ran nine engravings of Mumler’s photos on its frontpage.

Judge John Edmonds, a former justice of the New York Supreme Court, astonished the assembled by testifying that not only could he see the dead, but he also often conversed with them during trials, when they assisted with his decisions. He told the court that he was satisfied with his pictures, as the spirits were “charmingly pretty.”

Perhaps the most heart-rending testimonial came from Luthera Reeves, who identified the spirit in her picture as a son she had lost. Her boy, she explained, had suffered from the same curvature of the spine as the spirit. It must be him.

With these witnesses, Townsend opened a gaping sinkhole at the prosecution’s feet: How could Mumler be accused of cheating people who clearly claimed to see their loved ones in his pictures?

Realizing now that the prosecution had rested too soon and could not rely solely on Tooker’s testimony to prove Mumler a fraud, prosecutor Gerry reopened his case. Gerry summoned his own battery of photographers, each of whom laboriously explained how using double exposures, costumed confederates, trick lenses and other arcane, but purely mechanical, devices, Mumler created his apparitions.

“A transparent lie on its face,” declared one photographer, examining Charles Livermore’s picture, explaining how Livermore cast a shadow in one direction, while his wife’s spirit shadow slanted in the other, an affect which could only be achieved with two different light sources. The images must have been made separately. It was either a double exposure or a manipulated negative. And why should an ethereal vapor cast a shadow anyway?

Phineas Taylor “P.T.” Bar-num was called as a witness for the prosecution and was his own greatest exhibition. As the country’s leading wizard of sham and spectacle, his appearance in the courtroom was a showstopper. A sort of expert on the artful deceptions popularly known as “humbugs,” Barnum had recently published an exposé on spiritualism, excoriating its leading adherents as “blasphemous mountebanks and impostors.” In this same book, Barnum described his purchase some years before of spirit photographs, which he displayed in his museum. Now Barnum testified that the man he had purchased those pictures from was none other than William Mumler. In letters they exchanged, Barnum claimed, Mumler had essentially confessed his pictures were fakes. Alas, Barnum said, the letters were lost when his museum burned down in 1865.

Defense attorney Townsend’s cross-examination of Barnum was character assassination leavened with bursts of pure farce. “He is a man who smells of fraud in the very nostrils of the people of New York,” Townsend said. When Barnum could not produce any of the letters he had purportedly received from Mumler, Townsend accused Barnum of lying. He also declared that Barnum, the purveyor of such dubious curiosities as the “Feejee mermaid” and “the woolly horse,” was an even greater “humbugger” than simple William Mumler. Barnum responded testily that he did not display anything that did not give people their money’s worth “four times over.”

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