Bridgett and I recently took a trip to Rochester, New York.
To recreate a photo from 1872.
Alright.
Turn just a little bit – that’s it, just like that.
Only your eyes, look here.
Okay.
It’s very strange where she’s looking.
This is Mark Osterman.
I was the process historian at the George Eastman Museum for 21 years.
My specialty is understanding the technical evolution
of photography from its inception all the way up to about 1900.
He and his wife, France, have been teaching and practicing
historic photo processes for over 30 years.
Using the original reference manuals from the 1800s,
the same chemicals, and the same cameras.
Starting...
now.
The photo we’re here to recreate is this one
of the widowed Mary Todd Lincoln
with the ghost of her dead husband, US President Abraham Lincoln.
Ghost is going to look slightly toward me with the head down.
That’s it.
The image is the most famous work of William Mumler
who claimed his camera could photograph the invisible spirits of dead loved ones
was driven to the edge of ruin in a sensational criminal trial
but got away with it.
Because no one could figure out exactly how Mumler did it.
So, we tried to.
In the mid-1800s, technological breakthroughs like photography and the telegraph
were seen as something sort of... supernatural.
For the first time, people could see true-to-life depictions
of loved ones who weren’t there with them.
And receive messages from hundreds of miles away, instantaneously.
So it was this sense that technology was shrinking the distance between people.
And so every time there was a new technology introduced during
this moment in American history
it had spiritual repercussions.
Peter Manseau is a scholar of American religious history and author of several books.
Including one about how photography’s rise in the mid-1800s
coincided with a new religious movement gaining ground in the US and Europe:
Spiritualism.
The principle belief of Spiritualism was that contact with the dead was possible
if you had the right means.
That connection was made through a “medium,”
a person who claimed they could communicate with the dead.
From the beginning, many people suspected spiritualist mediums to be frauds.
Still, the movement grew to include thousands — and, by some accounts, millions
of Americans in the late 19th century.
Including high-profile people, like Mary Todd Lincoln
who turned to spiritualism to help process the death of her son Willie, in 1862.
During this period in American history,
the need to reach the dead became more critical than ever.
With the coming of the Civil War
and with casualties on an order that Americans had never experienced before,
this hunger to communicate with the spirit world really took off.
So when an unknown amateur photographer in Boston
began developing photos that apparently included apparitions of the dead
it attracted the attention of the Spiritualists.
William Mumler, an engraver by trade, had been tinkering with photography
in a studio owned by his eventual wife, Hannah: a spiritualist medium and professional photographer.
It seems to be the case that Hannah Stuart taught William Mumler photography.
According to Hannah, William accidentally captured the spirit of his dead cousin
while taking a practice self-portrait
at a time he said he was alone in the studio in 1862.
And he soon was mobbed with Spiritualists in Boston
who were eager to see if he could do this again.
And, as it turns out, he could – always with Hannah nearby.
She was the experienced photographer here.
Mumler became the public face, but she knew what she was doing.
The Mumlers took photo after photo that, miraculously,
revealed that a spirit of a lost loved one, or sometimes a total stranger
was in the room with the sitter.
Even though the Mumlers’ spirit forms were usually faint and out of focus
people coming in for portraits often reported that they recognized the spirits in the photos
as the very family members they were hoping to connect with.
Spirit photography seemed to be the next level of connection to the afterlife.
You no longer needed to be there in the presence of the medium.
You could take these photographs with you anywhere and say, “See, this is real.”
And like all things Spiritualists did
spirit photography brought its fair share of skeptics
and people trying to figure out the trick.
You have a lot of people from the photographic community in Boston
who were seeking out his services
specifically to show that he was not who he said he was.
A variety of them went and tried to follow him through the full photographic process.
And no one could ever figure out exactly what he was doing and how he was doing it.
But enough accusations of fakery in Boston eventually prompted the Mumlers
to shut the studio down and relocate.
Mumler arrives in New York several years after he became notorious in Boston.
Maybe enough time had elapsed that his name would no longer mean anything.
New York City at this time was where all the top American photographers and galleries were.
And, starting in 1869, where a spirit photographer from Boston had opened up shop.
And he was really only operating there for a matter of months
before he ran afoul with the law.
Mumler was arrested on fraud charges and thrown in jail.
His trial was written up in New York newspapers
and appeared on the front page of Harper’s Weekly
which called it “remarkable and without precedent."
He was just beloved by the media because he was such a colorful character
in making such outrageous claims – that just made great copy.
The trial was kind of a circus.
The prosecution brought in P.T. Barnum
of Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” fame
as a key witness and self-described “expert of humbug.”
P.T. Barnum always had a problem with Spiritualists
because he felt that they were taking advantage of grief
and he felt that it was going too far.
So he made it very clear that he was happy to see Mumler caught and to see him go down.
But there was one small problem for the prosecution.
None of those experts, all of whom followed Mumler through his process
none of them could say, “This is exactly what Mumler did, and I saw him do it.”
The prosecution listed 9 different ways Mumler might have done his trick.
Some of them pretty elaborate, like placing a “microscopic picture of the spirit”
inside the camera through a screw hole.
Or a secret light that impressed the ghost onto the glass plate when it’s coated with
photosensitive chemicals inside this tank.
They argued that his photos must be explainable by at least one of the methods.
And that Hannah Mumler was somehow involved
possibly as a distraction.
One of the simplest ways to get a spirit photo then and now
is a technique called “Sir David Brewster’s ghost”
where the “spirit” is only in frame for a few seconds
while the main sitter holds still for the rest of the exposure.
In our case, nearly a full minute.
Leaving a faint ghostly form behind the sitter.
And we did that.
We did the easy way first, just to show how that can be done.
But this can’t be how Mumler did it in front of skeptical photographers
watching his every move.
If you're going to try to show this as real spirit photography in front of witnesses
you can't have somebody dressed up as a ghost and walk in.
Even though the prosecution demonstrated that spirit photos can be made through trick photography
they couldn't confidently identify Mumler's method
and therefore failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt
that his pictures were not of spiritual origin.
And Mumler was acquitted.
So how did he do it?
Mark thinks he has an answer and agreed to try his theory out with Bridgett and me.
First, Mark took a regular portrait with no ghost
the kind Mumler would have been observed doing.
Then, he carefully outlined my position on the ground glass of the camera.
Bridgett dressed in a white suit, and we covered her face and hands with white powder
and Mark created a separate negative of the ghost.
Lining it up so the hands landed in the right place: on my shoulders.
And you can see the parts of it have been scraped away
so that when I put them together
they're exactly in the place I want them to be.
But it’s the next step that’s the most crucial to this potential method.
Because it's in the printing where he's making the magic happen.
Mumler – like most portrait photographers at the time – printed his photos on albumen.
Specially treated paper, that, when placed against the glass negative
in this printing box and exposed to light results in a positive print.
Mark thinks that, after passing the original negative around
to show witnesses there was no trickery with a bit of sleight of hand
Mumler could have slipped the ghost negative underneath the portrait negative.
Then in front of their eyes you then put it into the printing frame like so.
As long as I keep that against something dark, you don't see the secondary ghost negative
because white will photograph as dark on the negative
which will then be white on the final print.
When Mumler opens it up to show the final positive print
the ghost is there.
With this potential method, the Mumlers could have had a collection
of already-made “spirit” negatives, and could line up the sitter with a “ghost”
that matched the general appearance of their lost loved one.
It should be noted that Mark’s technique
concealing one negative and printing the two of them simultaneously
isn’t listed as one of the 9 methods the prosecution against Mumler came up with.
Though the prosecution was probably right in saying
that the Mumlers used several different methods
going with whichever process was least capable of detection.
That 1869 Harper’s Weekly story about Mumler’s trial
predicted that now that he’d gotten away with it
he was probably going to keep taking spirit photographs
pointing out that “he has been prosecuted, and thus extensively advertised.”
And they were right.
In fact, the Mumlers made what is arguably their most celebrated work
after the trial, from 1869 onward
including this one of Mary Todd Lincoln in 1872.
And this one of prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in 1874.
Mumler even ran regular ads in the spiritualist newspaper “Banner of Light"
for a mail-in service in which a client could send a photo of themselves to the Mumlers
and receive a photo of the photo, plus the presence of a spirit.
Because for the people that did believe, like Mary Todd Lincoln
the spirits they saw in these images brought them a unique form of comfort.
As far as she was concerned, it was proof that her late husband was still there
still a presence in her life.
Proof of something that she always believed.
Mumler insisted for the rest of his life that his photos were authentic
and proved the existence of an afterlife.
In the opening line of his memoir, published in five parts
in “Banner of Light” in 1875, he wrote that his spirit photographs
"contributed evidences of a future existence”
And, though persecuted, he was satisfied
at having been “a humble instrument
in the hands of the invisible host that surrounds us.”
If you want to read first hand accounts
news reports from the 1860s about spirit photography
and Mumler's memoirs:
the best and most often cited resource for all things Mumler
is this book, The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer, by Louis Kaplan
who I also interviewed for this episode.
As more researchers are digging into Mumler's sort of murky story
one thing is starting to become clear:
that Hannah Mumler, aka Helen F. Stuart, is likely the mastermind behind the man
and has been credited as the true inventor of spirit photography
in this fascinating research paper written by Felicity Tsering Chödron Hamer.
Both of those resources and more are linked in the description of this video.
And this is the final episode of Darkroom season 3!
This season took us to a lot of amazing places
and I want to give a huge thanks to all of our sources
who generously gave us their time and knowledge to help bring you these stories.
You can watch every Darkroom episode from this season
and the first two season in the full playlist
which is also linked in the description.
Thanks for watching and see you next time.