As the trial twisted its way through this catacomb of fantasy and despair, Mumler remained a “calm and fathomless” presence in the courtroom, with “a face which one would scarcely be able to believe in at first sight.” On May 3, the photographer rose for the first time to address the court. Again, he confessed nothing: “I positively assert that in taking the pictures, I have never used any trick or device, or availed myself of any deception or fraud.”

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When Mumler finished, Townsend and Gerry stepped forward to give their closing remarks. Townsend spoke first, rousing himself for two hours of “powerful and highly finished” argument. “Men like these would have hung Galileo, had he lived in their day,” Townsend thundered, oratorically thumping the prosecution and its witnesses.

Gerry swatted back with a “lengthened dissertation” that roved through hallucinations, Biblical phantoms, the heathenish nature of spiritualism and the nine methods of faking spirits. “There is no positive proof whatever of any spiritual agency,” in Mumler’s photographs, Gerry exclaimed. “Only evidence that certain persons believe it exists.”

And then, without much further ado, Judge Dowling announced his decision with a verdict fogged in ambiguity. The judge shared Gerry’s belief that Mumler was crooked, pronouncing himself “morally convinced,” that Mumler had practiced “fraud and deception.” And then he set the photographer free. Prosecutor Gerry had not pinpointed Mumler’s trickery and, therefore, had not made his case.

It was a decision that satisfied neither party. Did Judge Dowling take the easy way out with this mixed decision? Or did he take a deeper view and conclude that in matters of belief there are degrees of reality and degrees of truth, and it was not in his power to decide upon them? In any event, Mumler was released, and his comrades in the movement of the “new light” rejoiced that their martyr had escaped the bonds of the Tombs.

Even though Mumler had garnered a certain amount of fame from the case, he left New York immediately after the trial. He had accumulated thousands of dollars worth of legal fees and decided to return to Boston, where he opened another studio, this time in diminished circumstances in his mother-in-law’s home at 170 W. Springfield St.

He continued his strange profession there, photographing believers such as Mary Todd Lincoln and providing them with dubious jewels of consolation. Mumler understood that this belief is its own fact, its own vision. That insight, beyond whatever devices he employed in the dark room, was the most cunning tool in his trick-bag of deceptions. Mumler’s Lincoln image is his most reproduced photograph, and it is believed to be the last one taken of Mary before her death in 1882. Yet the former first lady’s patronage was no mark of improvement in Mumler’s fortunes. He died in 1884 holding patents on a number of brilliant photographic techniques, including Mumler’s Process, which allowed publishers to directly reproduce photographic illustrations in newspapers, books and so forth. Indeed, his skill as a photographer rivaled his talents as a con artist, but he was somehow still poor. In spite of it all, he maintained to the end that he was “only a humble instrument” for the revelation of a “beautiful truth.” Should there be any doubt, Mumler destroyed all of his negatives shortly before he died.

William Mumler’s photographs may be products of pure hoaxing, but the question of whether technology is capable of catching phantoms is still relevant. In 2003 a security camera at Hampton Court Palace, just west of London, picked up the image of a robed figure opening and closing a fire door. The enormous press generated by the event suggests the deeply enduring charm of the supernatural. Even in the modern era, an age of computer manipulation and air brushing, there remains a willingness to believe not only in the world beyond but also in the power of the camera’s prophetic eye to reveal it.

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