SYMHC Live: William Mumler's Spirit Photography

In the 1860s, Mumler rose to fame as a photographer of spirits. Whether Mumler was earnest or was just fleecing people is a tricky question, in part because while evidence mounted against him, he always professed his innocence. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, everybody. As
you know, we are on tour as we record this intro.
We were actually on a quick break between two legs
of our autumn tour, and today we are sharing a

(00:21):
live show that we recorded recently in Chicago at Park West.
We had an amazing time in the Windy City and
the audience and the venue were both spectacular. So here
we go. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I am
Holly Fry and I'm Tray c V. Wilson. You guys

(00:43):
are so cute. Okay, So if you look at old photographs,
which we all have done at some point in time,
they all look a little ghostie and magical and ethereal.
But that is because they're old. The technology used to
create them wasn't as advanced as what we have now, obviously,
and they have aged, but almost since French inventor Nisifor

(01:05):
Niepp's uh started experimenting in the eighteen teens and eighteen
twenties that far back with bitumen of Judea to create
uh heliographs. Basically, they were like sun developed images. People
started thinking about the possibility of whether or not a
camera could capture the supernatural, that which could not be
seen with the naked eye, but which a lot of

(01:25):
people believed was there. And of course, today, if you
look online for like a quick google of ghost pictures,
you will see a cajillion of them. You'll even see
tutorials on how to make your own ghost pictures that
are very, very convincing. Um. But then there are a
lot that people think are real, and whether or not
that's the case is a whole matter of debate that
I don't need to wait into. Um. You believe what

(01:46):
you believe, that's cool. Um. But tonight we're going to
talk about a man who similarly continues to be debated
as to whether or not he was legitimate or not
in this area. Uh, there are people who say that
his work was definitely the Ordeal and others who point
out a lot of the problems which we will talk about,
some of which are, in my opinion, hilarious. But first

(02:06):
I want to set the stage about some of the
ways that people have wanted, really genuinely wanted to actually
capture the unseen photographically. And so we're first going to
start with a brief story about the man who actually
inspired this episode, and I wanted to do an episode
all about him, but there just isn't really enough material.
But he is worth mentioning because he's fascinating. He thought

(02:29):
he was on to something super groundbreaking, which was the
photography of thoughts, and that man was Louis Darg. So
Luis Darg was born in eighteen forty seven. He was
a military man and rose up through the ranks of
the French military to become a commandant. What he is
most known for, as Holly just said, is trying to
take pictures of thoughts, and in nineteen eleven, Darg wrote quote,

(02:52):
when the human soul produces a thought, it sends vibrations
through the brain, The phosphorus it contains starts radiating and
the rays are projected out. By that point, he had
actually been working in this area of study for about
fifteen years, and his inspiration to start in this field
was the work that eventually led Vilhelm Rontkin to discover

(03:15):
X rays. In it was kind of like two similar
ideas that branched out. So X rays were happening, they
were in development, and he started to think, hey, if
we could photograph the inside of someone's body. Why couldn't
we maybe photographed pictures of what is inside the human mind?
It is such a cool idea, it is it requires

(03:36):
a creativity that sort of love. Yeah, and Darj wanted
so badly to capture these radiating phosphorus thought rays that
he developed a mechanism that he sincerely believed could do
exactly that as the thoughts exited the human head. And
this was a pretty simple apparatus. It was a strap

(03:57):
that went around the head and it had an atachment
for a photographic plate and the subject would wear this
portable radiographer and the images that appeared in the photograph
would be interpreted by Darge. So last night it occurred
to me as we were doing this, and I gave
that audience this idea, and I also give to you

(04:17):
if you want to go really esoteric with your Halloween costuments,
just strap a photographic plate to your head and be
a Louis Dalga experiments. No one will get it. You'll
be that jerk at the party that's explaining your esoteric
costume over and over. But it might be fun. When
you find that person who's like this is amazing, just
marry them. It'll be great, be perfect, um. But here's

(04:40):
the thing. Tracy mentioned that these these thought photos were
interpreted by Darg and the interpretation aspect of the whole
thing had its own poetry. Um. At one point he
asked his wife to hold a photographic plate in front
of her forehead to capture her thoughts. She was a
good sport, but she allegedly dozed off in this little

(05:02):
experiment um. And when Darja developed this plate, he was
absolutely convinced that the image that it had captured was
that of an eagle. And he actually notated this picture
photograph leg, which translates to photo of dream the eagle.
But Madame Darge was always very frank that she did
not recall dreaming of an eagle, or any bird for

(05:24):
that matter. Another Darge photo was produced um when the
subject referred to as Monsieur h wore the portable radiographer
while playing the piano, and Darj believed that the resulting
image was a portrait of Beethoven. And this interpretation requires

(05:45):
some creativity because the image is a series of blurs,
and then the diamond shaped area that Darj outlined as
Beethoven's image is like just a slightly sharper series of blurs.
It is the longest walk to get to that looking
like a picture. I'm like, bless your heart, Louis darja Um.

(06:07):
But to be clear, as cookie as this all sounds
to us, there were plenty of people who really thought
that the work that Darges was doing had a lot
of merit and should be explored further. And part of
the reason that they were so very convinced was the
way that Darjay talked about this work was in very
scientific terms. That quote that we read earlier, you know,
he referred to things radiating out and projecting and raise

(06:30):
in his mind. He was not talking about something supernatural
or anything hocus pocusy. He really thought that this work
was scientific, and he borrowed from the parlance surrounding the
work that was going on with X rays. So there
was a scientific explanation for the creation of these photos.
But it was not that he was rendering human thoughts.
He was rendering body heat uh uh. And then the

(06:54):
photo developing was also pretty amateur. So Darji's assertion was
that he was capturing in images, and that was debunked
using a corpse because initially, well initially it seemed like
this whole corpse experience experiment proved that Darge's work was
legitimate because when they put the portable radiographer on the corpse,
no image was produced because corpses don't think. Um, But

(07:20):
when they warmed up the corpse, low and behold, the
warm corpse produced some thought photos. I am so curious
how they warmed up the corpse. I have this really
really ridiculous cartoon in my head that involves a human

(07:42):
sized chafing dish. I mean they were French, right, that
seems right. Um, I don't know. I didn't I didn't
find anything that said how they heated those corpses up.
But those experiments that were conducted with the corpse were
done by the French Academy of Arts and Sciences, and

(08:03):
they took hold of this whole thing because Darja had
been writing to them to explain his work and what
he really thought was a scientific breakthrough. And some writings
about this whole event kind of frame this as like
revealing a fraud and that, you know. They pointed out
that Darge was a complete fakir. But really, Luis Darje
was a believer. He was not a con man. He

(08:26):
did not intend to deceive anybody. He was just really
really wrong about what was going on with his photos.
His work does live on though. That J. Paul Getty
Museum has nine darg photos in the collection, including his
wife's dream eagle. Uh. Some of these images have basic
drawings on them, sort of like you might like draw

(08:47):
what the constellation is supposed to look like to point
the viewer. So what Darge believed was the important part
of the photo. So one looks like an image of
a cane, and two are what he perceived as bottles,
one ground and one petite. And there is also a
photo in that group at the Getty that suggests that
in a way Darj was onto what was actually happening

(09:07):
with these image images, but he just didn't quite connect
the dots. There's one that's titled Inferior Plate Light and
not Heat, and it is a really blobby mess of blurs,
and his note kind of hints that he knew that
heat was involved, but he didn't realize that body heat
was the entire thing. It wasn't heat and thoughts that
was just the whole deal. Uh. Still, though, there were

(09:30):
and are people who work in this area and believe
that Darge was actually onto something he's sometimes referred to
as the father of thought photography and the experiments that
he was doing. Uh, there were experience experiments that were
inspired by the word that he was doing, and that
went on for decades. Yeah, even today there are people
still trying to figure out if we can capture what's

(09:50):
going on in the human brain and render an image.
It's a little less um about sort of the ethereal
and legitimately scientific and not just borrowing scientific words. But
the important thing here is that Darjay was by all accounts,
entirely earnest in his belief that he was capturing the invisible.
We kind of said as we started his story that
we were using this as a contrast because he had

(10:12):
no desire whatsoever to deceive. And that contrast is against
the next man that we were going to talk about,
William Mummler, who was doing his work which was in
spirit photography decades before Darjay actually, and whether Mummler was
earnest himself or was just fleecing people is a trickier
question that continues to be debated, in part because even

(10:33):
while evidence mounted against him and that he might be
doing something dicey he always, unfailingly, with absolutely no waiver,
professed his innocence. Yeah, so, William Howard Mummler was the
big name in spirit photography and a man who made
a lot of money doing it. He was born in
eighteen thirty two, and then there's not a lot of

(10:54):
information readily available about his early life or his education.
But by the time he was in his mid twice
ns he had settled into this nice career as a
professional engraver at Bigelow, Brothers and Canard in Boston, Massachusetts. Uh.
This was an import and sales business that dealt in
quote watches, clocks, rich jewelry, silver, silver plated and fine

(11:15):
hardware goods Ivory table cutlery, Geneva musical boxes, watchmakers, tools,
files and materials per their advertising. It was a very
focused business. Um he had a lot of stuff to
engrave though. It kept in busy and he was really
well respected in this regard. And the start of Mummler's

(11:36):
spirit photography was accidental. Allegedly, he was interested in this
still new field of photography in the early eighteen sixties.
That was just a little more than twenty years after
Louis daguer introduced the Daguerra type camera, and in eighteen
sixty one Mummler started learning how to make wet plate
photography at a studio that was the Mrs h. F.

(11:56):
Stewart Photographic Gallery, and in his obbyist work, when he
was alone in the studio one afternoon, he took what
he intended to be a self portrait and that picture
changed his life. Yeah, because when the photo was developed,
it looked like there was a girl in it with him,
and she looked very ethereal, as though she was made
of light. And there are two different versions of how

(12:18):
Mummler perceived this event. Depending on the source that you read,
you might read two totally different versions. So one is
that Mummlair claimed that he believed that this image was
that of his dead cousin who had been deceased for
I think it was twelve years but sometime, and he
marveled in this version at having caught a spirit with

(12:39):
his camera, and he started to show people this photo.
But the other version is that Mummler immediately thought that
because he was a novice photographer, he had somehow messed
up and he had used a plate that had already
been exposed, and then he was just showing it to
friends as an example of what a bumbler that he
was in the developing um space. So in this version,

(13:00):
it is a spiritualist friend of his who took that
photo public, claiming that it was a real picture of
a ghost. And that second version is the one that
Mummler related in his autobiography, And it is very convenient
because it very carefully makes him in no way responsible
for the claim that this was an image of a spirit. Yeah,

(13:21):
but neither either way. Regardless of which of those versions
was the real one. The photo was soon written up
in two prominent spiritualist periodicals, New York's The Herald of
Progress and Boston's The Banner of Light. Mummler wrote later
on that he was mortified by the attention that this
whole thing was bringing to him, But then it just
kept happening when he took more pictures. Then he started

(13:43):
to think that it was not the error of an
amateur photographer but an actual spiritual phenomenon. Again, that is
the version he told of this story years and years later.
So for spiritualists, this picture was huge. This was cited
as an instance of absolute proof that spiritualism was scientifically
grounded and Mummler, it seemed, had validated the entire movement

(14:06):
with this one image, and as a consequence, to put
it quite plainly, he blew up. He was an overnight sensation.
So this was right in the middle of the Victorian era.
Spiritualism was all the rage. There was just a deep
fascination with the idea of maintaining some kind of tie
or communication with the dead. Abraham Lincoln was president at
the time, and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln was an

(14:28):
ardent spiritualist. Additionally, there was all kinds of technology developing
that showed that sometimes mechanical things like telegraphs could capture
information in a way that humans could not do on
their own. This was really exactly the right time culturally
for people to just buy into this whole idea of
ghosts appearing on film. And of course, I mean this

(14:49):
is not uh specific just to this era in time.
Anytime someone comes up with something cool, everybody else wants it, right,
That's how it works. And plenty of people were ready
and willing to give William Mumler money to take pictures
of their deceased loved ones. So in addition to the
interest in spiritualism. Part of the driver was that this
was also a time when a lot of people were

(15:11):
losing loved ones on the battlefields of the U. S.
Civil War. So those sudden losses made families really long
for any sort of connection to or memento of the dead.
So William Mmler stopped working as an engraver and transition
to working full time at the Stewart Studio making these portraits.
He charged as much as ten dollars for a portrait

(15:32):
at a time when getting a photo that did not
have spirits, and it costs twenty five cents. Uh. And
then yeah, he charged this sitting fee regardless of whether
a spirit decided to appear in the picture or not,
because sometimes they didn't want to. Uh. His business was
really booming. Yeah, I uh, I like the idea that

(15:57):
sometimes the spirits like that. I don't like that guy,
I've I've I don't feel my best today. I know,
I'm feeling a little puffy and I got two hours
of sleep. Um, so the client, excuse me. The client
would come in for a sitting and then they would
pose perfectly still for a minute to have their photo taken,
and then after that photo was developed, they would have

(16:18):
an image of not only themselves but also their dead
loved one, usually just behind them or just to the side.
Hopefully that's what they wanted. This whole thing was so
successful that William Mumbler also started a mail order business.
Clients could mail him seven dollars and fifty cents along
with a detailed description of their dead loved one, and

(16:38):
then Mummler would commune with the spirits photographically and then
mail the photo to them after processing. Those ones, of course,
only contain the spirits, not anyone else. I am also
very curious about, um like, what like if he if
somebody said, hey, when you're commuting with these spirits photographically,
what are you doing? Exactly what he would have had

(17:00):
as that answer. He would just say, like, I just
take the picture they show up or not. Yeah, he
put it all on the spirits. He was very not
about responsibility. It's really up to your nana if she
wants to come and be in a picture. Um So.
In the midst of his growing interest in photography. As
all of this was playing out, Mummler had also taken

(17:21):
an interest in the receptionist at Mrs Stewart's studio, whose
name was Hannah, and Hannah was a medium, and she
had been a medium since she was a child. She
was well known in the spiritualist community of Boston as
being very gifted in this regard, and William and Hannah
were married and Mrs Mummler soon became part of the
spirit portrait experience for their patrons. So our customers were

(17:45):
spending that full minute sitting in front of Mummler's camera.
Hannah would tell them all about the spirits that she
could see around them. Sometimes she would lay hands on
the camera, acting as sort of a conduit for the
spirits to make their way into the image. Mummler also
started to build himself as a medium along alongside her,
claiming that his work as a photographer had connected him

(18:07):
to the spirit world. I want to know so much
more about Hannah because she's always described sort of as
like almost a nineteen twenties starlet, kind of like strolling in,
maybe a little sleepy looking, and like I'm feeling it.
I'm really feeling it. Like she really had like the
whole jam down. She was good. So Mummler's business was
going fantastically at this point, but trouble was on the horizon.

(18:30):
And we're going to talk about that, but first we're
going to pause for a little sponsor break. So, photography,
as we mentioned, was an industry at this point that
was still in its infancy. So for a newcomer to
the scene who was very open that he was really

(18:51):
something of an amateur to be doing booming business in
a niche area using a mystery technique that no other
photographer was all to achieve, that attracted a lot of attention. Uh,
so much so that skeptics, some of whom were photographers themselves,
started hiring investigators to visit Mummler and see if they
could figure out exactly what it was he was doing. Yeah.

(19:14):
So in eighteen sixty two, James Wallace Black took an
interest in Mumler's work. Black himself was also a photographer.
He had actually forged some new paths, although they had
nothing to do with spiritualism. He had traveled at a
hydrogen balloon in eighteen sixty which glad that went okay. Uh.
Doing this, he had taken the first aerial photographer, the

(19:37):
first aerial photographs in the United States. Those were of
the city that he and Mummler shared, which was still Boston. Yeah,
it turned out that their studios were just a couple
of blocks away from each other, and Mummler came onto
Black's radar when a potential customer brought Black one of
Mummler's spirit photos and asked if Black could also photograph ghosts,
whether actually and authentically or through any sort of manipulative means.

(20:02):
And Black, who was a very accomplished photographer, I mean
he was well known before those aerial photos, could not
and he didn't have any theories about how exactly this
whole thing was being pulled off by Mummler. So he
was really curious about Mummler's work and really skeptical that
it was probably a scam. So he sent his assistant,
who was named Horace Weston, to pose as a customer

(20:23):
at Mummler studio and see what he could find out.
So not long after that, Weston went back to Black,
and he had a portrait of himself seated near a
window and the image of his dead father was next
to him. Horace Weston knew a lot about photography, and
he had not seen anything and Mummler's whole process that
looked like it was out of the ordinary. Um several

(20:46):
of Black's other employees laughed at him. Yeah, he had
gone back him in like this guy's legit, and they
were like, it's great, horace, are you drinking um So
at this point Weston, who had been laughed at, was
absolutely convinced of Mummler's authenticity, and so he went back
to Mumler's studio and he explained what had just gone
down that like nobody else believed him, he tried to

(21:07):
explain that it was real, and then he asked Mummler
if Mr Black himself could come and visit and examine
how these photos were taken. And Mummler happily agreed. He
had no hesitation in saying yes, send him over. Uh,
and he especially agreed when when Weston told him that
Black was going to pay him fifty dollars just for
the chance to prove him wrong. So Black went to

(21:28):
visit as planned. Mummler opened up their talk by saying,
Mr Black, I have heard your generous offer. All I
can say is be thorough and your investigations. And then
Mummler invited back to investigate anything involved in the entire process,
from the camera to the chemicals that were involved in
doing the processing. But here's the thing. Black was um

(21:50):
conceded to be Frank. He was so proud of his
own level of knowledge, and he had a lot of
corollary doubt that Mummler was anything but a bumbling amateur,
and so he made a decision in this whole process
that probably was the step that made him unable to
figure out exactly what Mummler was doing. At one point,

(22:10):
William Mummler said, You're welcome to take my camera apart
if you want, just you know, examine it, take it
all apart. That's fine. But Black didn't think that Mummler
was smart enough to manipulate the mechanics of photographic equipment,
and he even told him as much, and at one
point during the visit he said, you are not smart
enough to put anything on that negative without my detecting it. Right. Yeah,

(22:33):
I kind of love him because it's fun to read people.
But at the same time he shot himself in the
foot on it. Yeah, I'm I'm annoyed at him because
I'm like, not only were you real mean right there?
You had you maybe could have figured it out in
that moment. We would know now, but we don't. Anyway,
Black set sat for his portrait and followed Mummler around

(22:56):
the studio and into the dark room while the photo
was being processed, and he been offered to let Mummler
even offered to let Black do the developing himself, which
Black once again declined, although he did watch while Mummler
did it. William Mummler mentioned to Black that the spirits
don't always appear like I said earlier. Sometimes they didn't
want to. But as this image developed, a second figure

(23:19):
did appear, and it was a spirit, and James Wallace
Black was convinced. He offered that promised fifty dollars to Mummler,
and this, you know self, self professed medium, wouldn't take it.
And that might have been his best pr move of
his entire career, because then Black went and told the
whole story all over Boston. So to have Black and

(23:40):
other photographers as well endorsing his spirit work was of
course a huge boon for Mummler. Business continued to grow,
and one thing that often comes up when this is
discussed in the modern era is how if he was
in fact leasing these people, he was able to produce
these images that they were recognizing as their loved one.
And there are a few different factors that go into

(24:02):
explaining this. So one, people were really working from memory.
This was a time when there just weren't a lot
of photographs are floating around. So if somebody was remembering
what their aunt or their brother, or their their late
parent looked like, a lot of times they did not
have a picture of them. Um, they were trying to remember,
so if things like hair and height and build were

(24:24):
kind of close, then their brains would fill in the
details as recognizable because you know, they might not have
had another photo for comparison, They might not have seen
that person in quite some time. And secondly, I mean
these images of spirits were kind of soft by design.
They were both a little blurry and translucent, translucent often
so that same sort of fill in the blanks effect

(24:45):
would happen for people who just really really wanted to
believe ensure they saw what they wanted to see. They
had just paid dead get a spirit photograph taken, and
they were going to see that. Um. Third, these pictures
are generally pretty small. Like I think when we talk
about portraits, everybody imagines those like horrible portraits we all
got in our senior year that are like eight by ten.

(25:06):
These and not those. They were little mine looks like
an ad for the wonder years, by the way, but
it's not good. It's not cute. Um. But so a
lot of these were on what are called UM card
to Visit, which were essentially these little calling cards that
were very very popular at the time. They were kind
of trendy, so it was hard to make out the
details even of the living person that had sat for

(25:26):
the portrait, let alone the spirit that was next to them. Eventually, though,
there was a problem. In eighteen sixty three, people started
to recognize the images of the spirits and the photos
that Mumler was taking as people who were still alive
and had sat for him before. Yeah, sometimes the ghosts
of people who had died many years before. We're wearing

(25:48):
the latest fashions. Um. One of the main people who
had this experience was Dr H. F. Gardner, And to
be clear, Gardner was a spiritualist and he had been
a believer and a big supporter of mum There's work.
But after seeing a spirit and his second Mumbler photograph
who he knew was a living person, Gardner was then
intent on exposing this photographer as a fraud. So Gardner

(26:10):
wrote the periodical The Banner of Light to tell them
about how Mummlers work in his second sitting with him
was a deception, although he also noted in that letter
that he still believed that some of Mummler's photos were
in fact real pictures of spirits. Um This, combined with
other people who similarly thought that the spirits and their
portraits were maybe people who were still alive, started to

(26:31):
turn the tide against Mummler, who was plagued not only
of accusing with accusations of using pictures of people that
had appeared in his studio previously for for portraits of
their own, but that in between someone booking their sitting
and actually coming for the sitting, he might have been
breaking into their houses to steal pictures of their dead relatives.

(26:56):
Accusations only, Yeah, that wasn't prue. I love the idea
of him as like a cat burglar taking pictures so
he can fake them into other pictures. It's kind of great.
So Mummler started watching his business dwindle down to the
point that he had to go back to engraving as
his source of income. But then a few years of
life in a city where people just thought he was

(27:17):
a total fraud. That was about as much as he
wanted of that. So he decided to do what anyone
else in this that that position might do, which was
to run away. Uh, he didn't go into hiding. Now
it was much harder to just track people everywhere they
went at this time, so it was easy enough for
him to just move to New York and start a
spirit photography business there. This was in eighteen sixty eight,

(27:41):
and initially things in New York started out really okay.
Mummler worked at the William W. Silver Gallery. He did really,
really well in his first year. After less than five
months there, he had taken more than five hundred spirit
photographs and he had made enough money that he bought
Silver out. And just a few days after he purchased
the business from Silver, he was visited by a client

(28:02):
named Joseph h took her. Took her was no ordinary
client though, he was the Chief Marshal of New York
City and he was there to investigate Mummler at the
request of the mayor, who had heard a number of
accusations against him. Took her sat for a photo after
paying Mummler for it, and then when it was developed
there was a faint figure in it, which Mummler said

(28:23):
was took her steadfather in law. So took her, took
that picture and left, and he also took some other
samples of Mummler's work and one of Mummler's advertising leaflets.
All of this was being gathered as evidence to charge
Mummler because I was definitely not his father in law
in the photo, didn't look like him at all. Yeah,

(28:44):
took her. Just to Mummler, it seemed like another satisfied
client out the door. He liked me so much, he
took a leaflet. It's all going into evidence. Um. So
soon after that, Mummler was arrested for fraud and larceny
and he was jailed in the Tombs, which was and
still is the nickname the Manhattan House of Detention. And
on April twenty one, eighteen sixty nine, the preliminary hearing

(29:06):
for William Mummler began. So this hearing was really big news,
and sometimes you'll see it referred to as his trial,
but to be clear, it was not a trial. It
was a hearing to determine if the case should go
before the grand jury. It's understandable for it to be
confusing though, because this thing went on for weeks, and
it was all over the papers, and it featured some
big names, both from a legal standpoint and from a

(29:28):
celebrity standpoint. And that was in part because when Mummler
was revealed as a possible fraud, it fueled a growing
skepticism that had been really burning pretty brightly against Spiritualism.
So the City of New York hired Elbridge T. Gary,
who was a very high profile lawyer. That name sounds familiar.

(29:49):
This is not the Elbridge Gary who we talked about
in our gerrymandering episode. Uh, This in in fact, is
that man's grandson. Because history connects a bunch of different points,
um and in hiring Gary to head this prosecution team
against Mummler, the city was making a very very clear
message that this case was really all about trying the

(30:11):
charlatanism that was so closely associated with Spiritualism. At this point,
we're going to talk about the testimony of two particular
witnesses from the hearing, But first we're going to pause
for another quick sponsor break. Abraham bog Artists, which is

(30:32):
a name that is so spectacular I don't want to
hear anyone ever criticize it. Uh was an expert de
garatypeist and photographer, and he testified at Mummler's hearing that
there were several ways in which Mummler might have created
hoax photographs. And when Gary asked him how many processes
there are for making spirit photos, Bogardis answered, quote, I

(30:52):
cannot say. We may count them by scores. I can
take a man with an angel over his head, or
with a pair of horns on his head, just as
I wish. But Gardis even produced a fake spirit photo
of his own and showed that it was entirely possible
to produce an image of a ghost similar to what
Mummler was doing, and he explained one possibility for such

(31:13):
trickery to of a detection. He said, quote, I've made
exhibits by a process not already described produced. They are
made by taking a plate and coding it in the
usual way, having an impression taken by any camera out
of reach or side of the sitter, and then putting
the plate back into the coding bath. It might be left.
It might be left there as long as you like,

(31:34):
and when a sitter comes it can be used and
the first impression will appear with the figure of the sitter.
This is easily done. Yeah, So he's basically describing a
double process where you would pre set the plate with
an image on it and then put it in the bath,
and then when the sitter came, you would act like
it was a fresh, clean, unused plate and put it
in the camera and take the picture. In that way
you would get this this image. Um. The other huge

(31:57):
name that was involved in this hearing was none other
than P. T. Barnum, who had not met Mummler in
person before any of this, although he didn't know of
him and they had correspondence and he was there to
be an expert on deceit. In his opening answer to
the court to state who he was and why he
was there, he gave his name in his address and

(32:19):
then he said, quote, I have devoted a portion of
my life to the detection of humbugs. This whole idea
cracks me up. Uh. Barnum had heard about Mummler years
earlier and had written some Mumbler that he intended quote
to expose the humbug of spirit photographs. Barnum also purchased

(32:41):
some of Mummler's work to hang in his museum, and
he wrote about Mummler's work in his book Humbugs of
the World. Although that's a great book title, he never
used his Mummler's name, instead just referring to him as
something like the photographer the whole way through, and he
concludes the the the chapter of the Spirit photos by

(33:02):
calling calling them quote delusions daily practiced upon the ignorant
and superstitious. Yeah, he had been pretty vocally against Mummler
for a long time, saying that like, you're taking advantage
of people who are grieving, and that sucks. Um. Barnum
was certainly plenty problematic in his own right, so we
don't want to paint him as any sort of saint,
but he was essentially there to say that he knew

(33:23):
a deception when he saw one, and that Mummler's work
was exactly that. And when Mummler's lawyers questioned Barnum, they
brought up his expertise on such matters, citing many of
the entertainer's own deceptions that he had made money off of.
Uh He denied this characterization of himself as deceitful, though
he claimed that when he was representing the Fiji Mermaid

(33:45):
as a real thing, for example, that he had believed
it to be real himself and he only found out
later it was fake. Um. At one point he was asked, quote,
have you never presented to the public matters you know
to be untrue and taken money for the exhibition of
spurious curiosities? In response, he said, quote, I think I

(34:07):
may have given a little drapery with it sometimes. Of
course that response elicited some laughter in the core room,
but they were basically making a case that his testimony
wasn't trustworthy because he was a known deceiver. Yeah, it
was kind of interesting that both both sides were kind
of making the same case, but as evidence for themselves.

(34:28):
It's like, you can't testify you're a deceitful And they
were like, you're an expert because you're deceitful, um, which
I sort of love. Uh. That photo that we mentioned
earlier that was taken by Abraham bog artists and introduced
of evidence as evidence, was actually a picture of P. T. Barnum,
and floating to the right of Barnum's head is a
ghostly version of Abraham Lincoln. Uh. You can see this

(34:50):
picture online. It's pretty cute. The photo showed how easy
it really was to make a pretty convincing spirit photo
with no ghost whatsoever involved. Mummler had a significant thing
on his side, and all this the prosecution just couldn't
figure out how specifically he had created the hoax images.
So Bogardis had offered up some possibilities, but they couldn't

(35:12):
prove with any certainty that any one of these specific
things were what Mummler was doing. And then for Mummler's
party stuck to his story that they were in fact
spirit photos. He was making them by taking pictures of ghosts,
and he said that he just took the pictures was
up to the spirits whether they wanted to be in
them or not. And so on May third, sixty nine,

(35:33):
Justice Dowling, who presided over this hearing, made the following
statement quote. After a careful and thorough analysis of this interesting,
and I may say extraordinary case, I have come to
the conclusion that the prisoner should be discharged. I will
state that, however, I am morally convinced that there may
be fraud and deception practiced by this prisoner. Yet I,

(35:55):
sitting as a magistrate, to determine from the evidence given
by the witnesses according to law, and compelled to decide
that I would not be justified in sending this complaint
to the grand jury, as in my opinion, the prosecution
has failed to make out the case. I therefore dismissed
the complaint and ordered the discharge of the prisoner. And
that was that. And since this was all tied up

(36:17):
in the overall questions of the spiritualism movement, you might
think that that would have helped them out because the
charges had been dismissed. Uh. Oddly enough. Uh. The opposition
to spiritualism also thought that the wide publicity of the
case and the fact the judge said that he was
personally convinced of Mummler's deceptions. Uh, they thought that was

(36:38):
a success. So the people who were for spiritualism thought
they won because the charges were thrown out. The people
who were against spiritualism thought they won because the judge
was like, I know you're guilty, we just can't breast charges.
Nobody wins. Everybody thinks they do. Ye. Uh. And there

(36:58):
was another pretty significant low to Mummler's reputation. Two weeks
after this case was concluded, the American Institute's Photography Section
issued a statement denouncing Mummler, making it clear that he
was not welcome in the New York photography community. So
after this hearing and then what amounted to public shaming
by his entire profession, Mummler moved again, this time back

(37:20):
to Boston. For a while, he kept taking spirit photographs
in a studio that he set up in his wife,
Hannah's mother's house, and the demand for his work was
a lot lower, but he did make his most high
profile portrait in that studio that he set up. Booking
was made for a Mrs Lyndall around eighteen seventy. But

(37:41):
really this was an appointment for Mary Todd Lincoln, and
as we mentioned earlier, she was a spiritualist. She wanted
a photo of herself and her late husband, and that
is exactly what William Mummler gave to her. In this photo,
Mrs Lincoln is facing directly toward the camera and then standing.
She's wearing all black or what looks like all black
and a black bonnet, and then the spirit of Abraham

(38:03):
Lincoln is behind her just to the right and looks
to be looking down at her lovely, lovingly, with his
hands resting on her shoulders. You can see this on
the internet. It's actually pretty cool it is. It's a
very sweet picture. And this photo was reproduced many times.
It became a really popular souvenir, but it did not
reinvigorate William Mummler's photography career. The last years of Mummler's

(38:26):
life actually diverge completely from his life as a photographic medium.
He wrote an autobiography in eighteen seventy five in which
he told his side of the whole story of his
work in that area. That uh is is the one
that we have referenced before, and once again he admitted
he never admitted to any kind of deceit or fraud um.
William and Hannah, though divorced four years after that book

(38:47):
was published, and after they split up, he never took
another picture. He died in eighteen eighty four, in his
early fifties, and his obituary in the Photographic Times is fascinating.
It mentions that he was the nter and treasurer of
the Photo Elector Type Company, an engraver of prominence, a
successful photograph publisher, and an inventor. His Mummler process was

(39:10):
what enabled papers to stop using woodcuts in their news
stories and instead to print actual photographs using photoelectric plates.
The obituary also mentioned that he was working with some
new technology that would let photo that would let photographers
use dry plates instead of having to wet coat the
plates before use. It's only at the very end of
this obituary that it says quote the deceased at one

(39:33):
time gained considerable notoriety in connection with spirit photographs. Yeah,
his last several years of his life apparently eclipsed all
of that crazy, heady time he was really quite famous for.
I don't know if that was just a really kind
oh bit writer or if at that point people were like, good,
I don't want to talk about the spirit photography anymore.

(39:55):
Mummler is still to this day considered the first spirit photographer,
but he definitely was not the last. Particularly as photography
became less and less of a specialized hobby or profession
and was progressively more accessible to a wider range of enthusiasts,
the number of people claiming to photograph the paranormal and
supernatural grew. In some cases, as was claimed with Mumbler's

(40:17):
first photo, these images were accidental. There was an effort
to take a photo of the Cumbermere Abbey in Cheshire, England. UH,
and this puts Civil Corbett on the map as a
spirit photographer. Corbett had set up a camera to take
this photo with an hour long exposure, and then when
the picture was developed, there was what looked to be
a slightly blurred and transparent but still very present figure

(40:41):
of a man sitting in one of the foreground chairs.
And in the case of the Cumbermere image, many believe
to this day that it is the ghost of Lord
Combermere himself, Civil Corbett's brother in law, who was recently deceased.
Apparently he was actually being interred in the hour that
this photo was being taken. And while my skeptics will
point out that the most obvious explanation is that during

(41:03):
this very long exposure some servant came in, took a
seat for a second to rest, then got up to
go about their duties and that's what created this sort
of ghost image. UM. Other people like to point out
I believe in the photo that he was an important
man and all of his servants would have been required
to attend his funeral. Civil Corbett did not try to
make a career out of this as a spirit photographer.

(41:25):
Any information on what her actual opinion was as total mystery,
we don't know um. World War One also had a
pretty significant impact on the interest in spirit photography, just
as was the case with the U. S. Civil War,
The losses of loved ones by so many families kind
of stoked the fires of hope that they could somehow
see their dead again, even if it was only an

(41:47):
a static image. And into that moment that was so
filled with grief, step photographer William Hope. And Hope, like Mummler,
was offering the consolation of a photograph with a dead
loved one for a price. In Nine Seen two Hopes
work had gained enough attention that he was investigated by
paranormal researcher Harry Price, and Price was able to pretty

(42:08):
quickly determine that Hope had been using two glass plates
simultaneously to create his fakes, so one of the plates
would already have a ghost image on it, and the
other was a clean plate that was used to capture
the live subject that was sitting for the portrait, and
he would kind of stack these in the camera simultaneously
so that when the image was captured, it looked for

(42:28):
all the world like a ghost sitting or standing next
to the person who was still alive. Even though Hope
was exposed, he just kept doing it. He had plenty
of followers who dismissed Price's findings and kept patronizing him
both as a photographer and a medium. Sometimes evidence doesn't
make people believe the truth. Um, look, we're all on

(42:49):
the same page here. We all know it's going on. Okay,
y'all know. Um. In ninety six, there was another mysteriously
haunted photo that was taken in Norfolk, England, And in
this case there were two men involved, Captain Hubert Provand
and Indri Shira, who was Provin's assistant. Then these two
were working for country Life magazine and they were there

(43:11):
on a assignment at Random Hall taking pictures of this
beautiful estate. So they were getting ready to take a
photo of the building's main staircase and Indra Shira saw
what he described as a vapory form that slowly took
on the features of a woman floating down the stairs
and Sira exclaimed in shock. And then Provend, who was

(43:33):
under the camera's cloth, jumped and snapped the photo and
then captured an image of a ghost in the process,
and the magazine published this photograph because why would you not. Uh,
And of course it was a sensation. Ranhom Hall kind
of already had its own ghost lore attached to it,
specifically that it was haunted by Lady Dorothy Townsend, and

(43:53):
Lady Townsend was the sister of Robert Walpole and she
had died at Random Hall in sev Her legend involves
a possible adulterous affair and being held there at the
Hall while the outside world was told that she was
dead as a punishment for that affair. Um. All of
the reality of this is super blurry, and the historical record,

(44:13):
I'm just telling you, like the mythology that fed this
picture's popularity. Um. So, yeah, we don't have evidence, but
it sure makes a really good story that supports the
idea that this is a ghost picture. And a lot
of the magazine's readers believed that clearly Provond and Shira
had managed to get a picture of Lady Town's end.
Once again, Harry Price was on the case. He opened

(44:34):
an investigation into the so called Brown Lady of Random Hall,
named so because she was allegedly wearing a brown brocade
dress when her picture was taken, and then Unlike his
work uncovering hopes fraudulent photos, Price couldn't find evidence of
specific trickery or foul play on provond and share his parts. Uh.
He wrote of this investigation quote, I could not shake

(44:56):
their story, and I had no right to disbelieve them.
Only collusion between the two men would account for the ghost.
If it is a fake, the negative is entirely innocent
of any faking. And Price's word carried some significant weight.
But there were still a lot of skeptics who did
not believe that the random Hall photo contained an actual ghost,
and in n seven, the year following the pictures publication

(45:18):
and it's huge surgeon popularity, the Society for Psychical Research
determined that the ghost that was captured was actually just
the result of the camera being shaken during the sixth
second exposure at some point. So, no, they were not
being deceitful, But they also did not take a picture
of a ghost. Maybe when he cried out an alarm, yes,
and he jumped. Wasn't imagine that would shake the camera?

(45:42):
What I don't. But here's the thing that going back
to Mumbler, looking at this Mary Todd Lincoln portrait and
the other photos that becomes really apparent that even if
you think he was a fraud, he was taking a lot,
he was taking a lot of care and how these
images were composed, and he probably did give a lot
of people some comfort through his work. This stands in

(46:03):
a lot of contrast to William Hope, who for example,
had photos that were like way less finessed. Sometimes they
looked like really sloppy collages, or like he had kind
of scratched the negative to make a spiritual presence with
no form there. Whether he was a fraud or legitimate,
Mummler was a much better artist when it came to
the composition. I mean, like we said earlier, a lot

(46:26):
of these photos you can see online. They're really lovely.
The other in some cases, that Mary Todd Lincoln image
is actually quite moving. It's really beautiful. But the thing
that remains unknown to this day is exactly how William
Mumbler was taking these spirit photos. He may have had
a previously prepared glass plate sitting in front of an
unused plate in his camera. One of the ways that
we've talked about this being done so that when he

(46:47):
took that image of the client, it also captured the ghost.
But he also could have used any one of the
methods that Abraham Bogardis had described during Mummler's legal hearing,
but nobody really knows. Yeah, it's all speculation, and it's
part of why mom Where Can continues to fascinate a
lot of people, and why is case does used as
evidence both by skeptics who think that the photos are
obviously fake and by believers who point out that their

(47:10):
creation is still a mystery. So that is William Mumler,
spirit photographer and history mystery. We really cannot can not.
I cannot stress this enough. Thank the staff at Park
West enough for their hospitality and their incredible level of organization.
We felt so pampered while we were there in that
building is really cool. Yeah, they were absolutely great. And

(47:31):
if you would like to come to one of our
live shows, we have good news. If you are in Texas,
we will be touring there starting November and you can
get more information if you go to our website click
on where it says live shows the top of the page,
or just go to Misston History dot com slash shows
And then I think Holly to close us out, have

(47:51):
some listener mail I do. It's a this is the
longest episode, so it's a quick one, and this is
from our listener, Uh Catlin, I think that is. She
goes by. She says to start, thank you guys for
all the things I get to learn by listening to
your entertaining podcast. I'm emailing after the Robert Liston episode
because it just so happened to be released the same
day that my little kitten went to the vet to

(48:12):
amputate his nub. He was born without a paw on
his right back leg, causing it to grow a bit weird,
and it usually stuck out from his side like a
chicken wing. She goes on to describe a little bit
more of it, but basically she had to they had
to have a little surgery for it. She said, your
episode was a nice thing to tell me that this
guy had it down way back when and taught others
to do well also, and that gave me a little

(48:33):
extra confidence that the technique for the tiny kitty would
be geared for helping him to She also attached pictures
of this incredibly weaponized level cute cash, for which we
thank her. I'm so glad he's doing well. And then
his surgery went well. I have said many times on
the podcast. My hat is always off to veterinarians for
the work they do, because, uh, they are learning to

(48:53):
deal with many species, not just one human species like
a human doctor. Just also no shade to human doctors,
but it's a lot of and I think they don't
always get enough credit. So I am so glad your
kitten is doing well and again always happy for a
chance to shout out the awesomeness of veterinarians. If you
would like to write to us, you can do so
at History Podcast at how stove works dot com. Do

(49:13):
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(49:38):
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