In 1861 an amateur photographer named William Mumler took a self-portrait.
When he developed the photograph he found, to his astonishment, that he was not the only
person visible in the portrait.
Sitting in the chair next to him, hazy and diaphanous, was his cousin — his cousin
who had died twelve years before.
Somehow, William Mumler’s camera had captured not only his own image, but the image of his
dead cousin’s spirit.
Or at least, that’s how Mumler would tell it.
There are a few things about Mumler’s story and the photograph itself that cause me to
be somewhat skeptical of his account.
For one thing, Mumler was still learning the art and science of photography at this point
— if cameras were capable of capturing images of ghosts, it’s unlikely he would have figured
that out while the numerous experienced professionals who had been experimenting with various photographic
techniques for the previous few decades had somehow missed it.
For another, look at that photograph again: Mumler claimed he was surprised to see his
cousin’s ghostly image sitting there when he developed the picture, but how does the
composition make any sense without her?
Was his intention to take a portrait of himself standing next to an empty chair?
It’s a good thing the framing of the shot left plenty of room for his cousin’s ghost
to slide in and sit down, huh?
Oh, and there’s one more thing that makes me suspect Mumler might not have been completely
honest about the origin of that photograph, just a small, insignificant detail, probably
nothing, really, but it’s that he CLAIMS IT’S A PICTURE OF A GHOST!
This video isn’t going to be about debunking the existence of ghosts.
It shouldn’t have to be.
We’re all grown-ups here.
Right?
Or at least most of us are, judging by my analytics.
So, I don’t need to tell you that someone who claims to have a photograph of themselves
standing next to an actual ghost doesn’t deserve to be taken any more seriously than
a person who claims to have a photograph of themselves sitting on the lap of the actual
Santa Claus.
Do I?
I hope not.
Anyway, not long after he made that portrait, Mumler became a full-time professional photographer,
specializing in spirit photography — producing images of subjects alongside the ghosts of
their dead loved ones.
He soon had a thriving business, relocating from his hometown of Boston to New York City.
There were plenty of customers, it seems, who did not share my — hopefully our — skepticism
about the authenticity of Mumler’s work, who were willing to pay to have themselves
photographed alongside the spirits of their dead parents, spouses, friends, children.
There were certain factors in Mumler’s favor at the time.
There was a spiritualist movement in the United States that had been growing in prominence
since the 1840s.
There was great interest in things such as hauntings, divine healing, and communication
with the dead.
William Mumler’s wife, Hannah, was a medium who claimed the ability to heal the sick and
channel the dead.
The art of photography was also relatively new, at least as far as the general public
was concerned.
Its principles were not yet well understood by most people.
That being the case, even some of those who doubted the authenticity of Mumler’s spirit
photographs — and there were many who did — found it difficult to imagine precisely
how he was carrying out his fakery.
There was also the Civil War, which began the same year William Mumler produced that
photograph of himself and the ghost of his cousin.
The war was the most significant event of the era in the United States — arguably,
the most significant event in the entire history of the United States — and it affected virtually
every facet of American life.
The two effects of the Civil War that are particularly relevant to our subject are:
One — it greatly increased the popularity of photography, both through soldiers getting
self-portraits made to give to loved ones, and through the grim but unforgettable images
of the aftermaths of battles captured by photographers like Matthew Brady, which were widely exhibited
both during and after the war.
And, Two — depending on which estimates you believe, it killed somewhere between six-hundred
thousand and one million people.
Even if we take the low end of that, it still equals around two percent of the population
of the United States at the time.
That might not sound like a lot, but if two percent of the U.S. population were to die
today, that would be six and a half million people.
That’s nine times the number of Americans that have died in the coronavirus pandemic
so far.
In 1865, at the end of the war, there were hundreds of thousands of Americans — mostly
young men — dead who, if not for the war, would still have been alive.
It was a devastating, catastrophic loss of life that left behind a lot of grieving people
— parents who lost children, children who lost parents, wives who lost husbands.
Many of these people, heartbroken, searching for comfort, were more than willing to hand
their money over to people like William Mumler, who promised to provide them with photographic
evidence that their dead loved ones were not really lost, but still with them, literally,
in spirit.
Mumler’s most famous subject was such a person.
She was the widow of the Civil War’s most famous casualty, and also one of its last:
Abraham Lincoln.
Mary Todd Lincoln sat for her portrait in William Mumler’s Boston studio in February
1872, seven years after her husband’s assassination.
Mary was a devotee of the spiritualist movement.
In 1850 her son Eddie died at age three.
In 1862 her son Willie died in the White House of typhoid fever.
He was eleven years old.
Both Lincolns were devastated by the death of Willie, but Mary took it particularly hard.
She stayed in bed for three weeks.
She did not attend Willie’s funeral.
And, yearning to speak to her son in the afterlife, she consulted mediums.
Her faith in spiritualism only grew following the murder of her husband.
Then, seven months before she visited Mumler’s studio, Mary Lincoln endured yet another tragedy
when her youngest son, Tad, died at the age of 18 following a sudden illness.
Three years after sitting for the Mumler portrait, Mary’s only surviving son, Robert, would
have her committed to an asylum.
Ten years after the Mumler portrait, Mary would be dead.
The final years of Mary Lincoln’s life were defined by unthinkable loss, and the grief
and depression that followed.
She was vulnerable, credulous, careless with her money, and longing to reconnect with the
husband and children who had been taken from her.
Most importantly to William Mumler, she was also quite famous, which, along with everything
else, made her the ideal mark for his particular brand of flimflam.
The result of Mary’s sitting with Mumler was this photograph, showing Mary seated,
dressed in black, with what appears to be the apparition of Abraham Lincoln standing
behind her, his hands resting reassuringly on her shoulders.
If I look at this image and focus purely on its technical and artistic qualities, I must
admit that it is a well executed and even haunting piece.
The effect is subtle, especially compared to some of Mumler’s other work, Lincoln’s
body outlined faintly against the background, the details of his head and face pale and
indistinct, yet unmistakable.
Mary Todd, wife to a murdered husband, mother to three dead children, sits there staring
peacefully, perhaps even hopefully into the camera with those eyes that had cried so many
anguished tears.
It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking photograph.
The problem is, it’s difficult to appreciate the photograph for its aesthetic qualities
because of what it represents, namely the callous exploitation of a desperate and suffering
person.
Within a month of having taken the photograph, Mumler had sent a copy to the Boston Herald,
along with a letter where he claims to not have known the identity of his subject before
she arrived, and concludes, with sickening false modesty, “who the ‘ghost-like image’
looks like I leave you to judge and draw your own inferences.
Suffice it to say, the lady fully recognized the picture.”
Mumler’s Mary Lincoln portrait is offensive enough in its own right, but it becomes even
more so when you judge it in the context of what I’m about to tell you:
In 1869, three years before the Mary Lincoln portrait, William Mumler was brought to trial
in New York City on charges of fraud.
His fakery had been revealed after he made several portraits depicting the “spirits”
of people who, it turned out, were still very much alive.
He had also been accused of, though not formally charged with, resorting to burglarizing the
homes of his customers in order to obtain photos of dead relatives, which he could then
use to manufacture their ghosts.
One of the witnesses who testified against Mumler was none other than P.T.
Barnum, who denounced Mumler for taking advantage of grieving people, whose judgment had been
compromised.
By the way, when the guy who coined the phrase “there’s a sucker born every minute”
calls you out for being a conman who exploits gullible people, you know you’ve gone too
far.
That’s like being accused of racist dog-whistling by Tucker Carlson.
To demonstrate that anyone with proper knowledge of certain photographic techniques could reproduce
the effect of Mumler’s spirit portraits, Barnum hired the renowned photographer Abraham
Bogardus to create this image: That’s Barnum himself as the primary subject, and in the
upper right-hand corner of the frame, apparently standing behind him, is the spectral visage
of . . . Abraham Lincoln.
Imagine the audacity, the shamelessness of Mumler, to make a spirit photograph depicting
Abraham Lincoln, a mere three years after an image featuring Lincoln had been used at
his trial to demonstrate that his spirit photographs were hoaxes.
Audacity and shamelessness were, seemingly, two qualities of which Mumler was never in
short supply.
The punchline to that particular chapter of the story is that Mumler’s trial concluded
with him being acquitted of fraud — the judge determined that the prosecution failed
to prove beyond a doubt that Mumler was knowingly fabricating his spirit photographs.
However, this story does have somewhat of a happy ending.
Despite his acquittal, the trial destroyed Mumler’s reputation.
He was forced to close his New York studio and return home to Boston, which is where
he was when Mary Lincoln called upon him in 1872.
Most of the small fortune he had amassed in his career as a spiritualist hoaxer was wiped
out by legal fees.
Mumler never revealed the exact methods he used to produce his spirit photographs, but
late in his life, he did finally manage to make a legitimate contribution to photography,
patenting a method that allowed photographs to be easily reproduced in print that came
to be known as the Mumler process.
That was not enough to rebuild his demolished finances, however, and in 1884 he died in
poverty at the age of 52.
His pitiful fate did nothing to restore the money or the trust he had stolen from his
customers/victims during the course of his twenty-three year career, nor did it serve
to discredit the bogus spiritualism that was still enabling other con artists like him
to swindle unsuspecting people, but at least it provided the modest satisfaction of knowing
that at least the motherfucker didn’t die rich.