William Mumler’s Spirit Photographs

William H. Mumler was born in 1832 and worked as a jewellery engraver in Boston. According to the story he told, in the early 1860s he was making a practice self-portrait when the developed plate seemed to show a second, ghostly figure beside him, which he and his Spiritualist friends took to be a cousin who had died about twelve years earlier. Whatever the truth of that first plate, he soon gave up engraving and made a living selling “spirit photographs”: portraits in which a pale, hazy figure hovers behind or beside the living sitter. The timing mattered. The Civil War had left a generation of mourners with few or no images of their dead, and Spiritualism was growing quickly.

In 1869 Mumler moved his business to New York City, where he was arrested and tried on a fraud charge. According to hoaxes.org, the police sent an undercover agent to sit for him, and the prosecution called professional photographers who explained that double exposure and other tricks could produce the same effect. The showman P. T. Barnum, who had publicly called spirit photography a sham, testified against Mumler. The photographer Abraham Bogardus produced a staged picture of Barnum with the apparent ghost of Abraham Lincoln over his shoulder to show how easily it could be done. Moses A. Dow testified in Mumler’s favour, and his defence put forward many clients who said they believed their pictures were real.

Mumler was acquitted. Reports agree that the prosecution could not prove how, or even that, he had faked the plates, and the court was left with a gap between suspicion and proof. He went back to Boston and later developed a process for printing photographs in newspapers; he died on 16 May 1884. His best-known image is the portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln with a shadowy figure of her late husband behind her. Its date is disputed: sources place it anywhere from about 1869 to the early 1870s, and Mumler himself claimed February 1872.

Historians do not know his exact method. Double exposures and reused negatives are the leading suggestions, and critics said some of the “spirits” resembled living people who had recently sat for him. The case still matters because it was an early public contest between belief, showmanship and the new science of photography, held in a courtroom.

Faint, translucent figures appearing beside or behind sitters in studio portraits, which clients accepted as the spirits of dead relatives or public figures.

Mumler’s studios in Boston and later New York City; the 1869 trial took place in New York.

The trial is a staple of the history of Spiritualism and of photography. Mumler’s images remain widely reproduced, including the Lincoln portrait held by the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, and his ‘ghost’ tradition set the template for later spirit photography.