Chasing Ghosts, page 20
Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, as captured by spirit photographer William Mumler.
P. T. Barnum, always one to enjoy a good humbug, was intrigued as well and displayed several Mumler photographs in his American Museum in Manhattan. But with growing success came more skeptics. And eventually some of them recognized several spirits as people who were still living.
By 1869 the police were on the case and claimed Mumler was swindling his clients. The spirit photographer went to court, supported by the Spiritualist community, who maintained the belief that he was innocent and genuine.
P. T. Barnum, however, wasn’t buying it. In fact, he had planned to include Mumler in a book about humbugs.
“I went yesterday to Mr. Bogardus’s gallery, and asked him if he could take a spirit photograph, telling him that I did not want any humbug about it,” Barnum testified.11 “He said he could do it. I examined the glass, and discovered nothing in it. I saw the process of pouring over the first liquid, and afterwards the pouring over of nitrate of silver, and then saw it placed in the camera. When done it had my likeness and the shadow of Abraham Lincoln. I saw the ghost of Lincoln as soon as it was developed in the dark room. I was unconscious of any spiritual presence.”
Others testified in Mumler’s defense, swearing the images were real. “I have had a photograph of my deceased daughter, who died in August, 1863,” a believer, Paul Bremond, told the court. “She told me when she died that if it were permitted she would return to me from the spirit land. By this photograph I see that she has returned.”
Another photographer, William Slee of Poughkeepsie, New York, testified that Mumler produced spirit photographs in his own gallery and had no idea how he’d done it.
Ultimately, no proof was given that Mumler had been deceptive in his techniques and he was acquitted. Despite the win, Mumler’s business suffered afterward and he faded into obscurity. Spirit photography, however, did not. In fact, it spread across the pond to Europe.
PASS THE GHOST, PLEASE
Séances were all the rage in the late nineteenth century, but if you were having guests over on short notice and couldn’t book a medium, you could still see plenty of ghosts—guaranteed—all thanks to another craze that spread through Victorian parlors: stereoscopy.
Long before evenings of Netflix and chill, friends passed around stereoviewers and stared at three-dimensional photos of spirits flying over sleeping children, ghosts drifting through rooms, and people shrieking in fear of phantoms.
The two images seen on stereoview cards look identical but are slightly different, representing the views from the left and right eye. Seen through a stereoscope, each eye views its corresponding image and the brain merges them into one miraculous 3D image. The remarkably rich effect allows you to see right through the ghost, transporting you directly into the room with it, but without any pesky fears of being haunted.
Today the same technology still works but is presented in shiny new wrappers. You know it as Google Cardboard and virtual reality headsets.
Édouard Buguet was a Parisian photographer who made a name for himself capturing ghosts in London. Picking up where Mumler left off, Buguet’s images were sharper, more defined, and often recognized by his eager customers. The devout Spiritualist William Stainton Moses hailed Buguet’s work as “very decidedly the gems of spirit photography” and lauded their lifelike appearance. After studying 120 of his images, Moses concluded that forty of them featured recognizable dead people.
Édouard Buguet’s spirit photographs captured the imaginations of devout Spiritualists but ultimately landed him in hot water.
With such high praise, the future looked bright for Buguet. Well, at least, for about a month. That’s when the French government cracked down and had Buguet arrested for fraud. During his trial, like Mumler’s, many came to support the photographer and testify to his mediumship. Buguet, however, confessed that he’d simply been creating double exposures.
Buguet initially employed a team of three to four assistants to play the parts of ghosts. As his success grew, he had to get more creative to avoid repetitive apparitions. Two headless dummies were constructed to serve as the bodies of the spirits. The assistants would meet with the clients first, gather information, and then select an appropriate visage from a large stock of heads tucked away in the studio. These props were shown to the court. Still, witnesses swore the figures in their photos were the real deal. One instance of testimony went as follows:
WITNESS: The portrait of my wife, which I had specially asked for, is so like her that when I showed it to one of my relatives he exclaimed, “It’s my cousin.”
COURT: Was that chance, Buguet?
BUGUET: Yes, pure chance. I had no photograph of Mme. Dessenon.
WITNESS: My children, like myself, thought the likeness perfect. When I showed them the picture, they cried, “It’s mamma.” A very fortunate chance!…I am convinced it was my wife.
Double exposure plus desire plus a dash of coincidence proved to be the perfect formula—until, of course, it landed Buguet in prison for a year and cost him a five-hundred-franc fine.
Despite all the evidence, Moses didn’t take kindly to looking like a fool. He denounced the trial, accusing the judge of being biased and declaring that Buguet had been forced to confess or had been bribed. This alleged ruse included conjuring up the collection of dummies and heads shared as evidence.
WANT TO SEE A GHOST IN THE NEXT TWENTY SECONDS?
In the mid-nineteenth century, author J. H. Brown didn’t bother with séances or spirit photographers to see ghosts. He believed each and every one of us already has a perfectly designed machine capable of seeing ghosts. Our eyes.
His 1864 book Spectropia, or Surprising Spectral Illusions Showing Ghosts Everywhere hoped to put to rest “the absurd follies of spiritualism” through the brilliance of the eyeball.
“With perhaps the exception of the ear, the eye is the most wonderful example of the infinite skill of the Creator,” Brown wrote. “A more exquisite piece of mechanism it is impossible for the human mind to conceive.”
He then went on to explain that mechanism in exquisite detail—complete with illustrated diagrams—giving the reader a scientific, rather than a Spiritualistic, explanation for why people might see ghosts. For example, people “startled by what they fancy an apparition” could simply be seeing a glimpse of a retinal artery. Or it could be an afterimage, which leaves a brief retinal impression of a visual after the stimulus has gone away. Spectropia demonstrates how this works through a series of sixteen color images of spooky ghost figures. Well, fifteen ghosts and one rainbow to end the book on a cheery note.
Try it for yourself. You can see the Creator’s infinite skill in action by staring at the black asterisk on the ghost featured here for twenty seconds (inside the skeleton’s nose). Then turn your head and look at a white wall or ceiling in your newly haunted house. You’ll see the image float by in front of you and then vanish into nothingness, beyond the veil.
Other Spiritualists weren’t dissuaded by Buguet’s case either. After all, they loved their spirit photos. A letter in the November 1883 issue of Gallery of Spirit Art, for example, praised the spirit photography skills of New York City’s Dr. William Keeler. The author, J. L. O’Sullivan, showed his support by proclaiming that the medium’s “genuineness as a spirit photographer is beyond all question” and had sat for him seven times in one day for just a dollar a photo. Six images successfully showed a ghost of his mother. In each she held a cross, which he said was the way she always announced her presence to him through other mediums. As a result, O’Sullivan claimed, “it would be impossible for the photographic art to have produced these by fraud or trickery.” He urged the Spiritualist readers to share the photographer’s gift with all their non-Spiritualist friends. Decades later Keeler was exposed after a thorough examination by the American Society for Psychical Research.
Not surprisingly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle raved about spirit photos. His favorite shutterbug of the spirits was William Hope. Like Mumler, Hope’s career started by accident. An Englishman from the town of Crewe, he snapped his first miraculous photo in the early 1900s while taking pictures of a friend. Upon developing the film he noticed the figure of the subject’s sister in the print—his recently deceased sister. Hope embraced his newfound mediumship and embarked on a career that would last nearly thirty years.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sits for a spirit photo with his photographer of choice, William Hope. More of Hope’s spirit photos can be found on this page.
It certainly helped that Doyle swore by his authenticity. Just looking at Hope, the Sherlock Holmes creator could hardly conceive how he could be deceived. “His hands with their worn nails and square-ended fingers are those of the worker, and the least adapted to sleight-of-hand tricks of any that I have seen,” Doyle noted in his 1922 book, The Case for Spirit Photography.
Doyle’s first experience with Hope came in 1919 with a visit to Crewe with two Spiritualist companions. Like his Holmes character, he played detective and tracked Hope’s process throughout the sitting. As was often the case with Doyle, everything looked kosher.
“There is a hazy cloud covering us of what I will describe as ectoplasm, though my critics are very welcome to call it cotton-wool if it eases their feelings to do so,” Doyle wrote. “In one corner appears a partial materialization of what seems to be the hair and forehead of a young man.”
The next day Doyle went back for more. Eventually he got a photo with a spirit that he claimed resembled his son eight years before his death. Doyle was sold.
Harry Price didn’t share the same confidence in Hope. A few years after Doyle’s first experience, Price caught the photographer changing his plates, which had been specially marked beforehand. “Arthur Conan Doyle and his friends abused me for years for exposing Hope,” he wrote in Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter.
Another Doyle favorite was Alexander Martin of Denver, Colorado. He told Harry Houdini that Martin was “a very wonderful man in his particular line.” So the magician paid him a visit, and once inside the studio he attempted to explore the dark room.
“Now don’t you go in there, just wait a minute,” Martin said.
The photographer proved to be quite particular. Houdini had to stand where Martin wanted him. “This led me to think he was keeping that side of the plate clean for something to appear,” Houdini reported. After further secretive photographic tomfoolery, Martin finally shared some ghosts. Houdini’s conclusion: “I have not the slightest doubt that Mr. Martin’s Spirit photographs were simply double exposures.”
Houdini also noted the lack of creativity not just in Martin’s photos but in those of his peers and predecessors. The spirits always posed and appeared as they were in life. “How much more interesting it would be and how much more such photographs would add to our knowledge and aid the advancement of science if once in a while the Spirits would permit themselves to be snapped while engaged in some Spiritual occupation.”
Hippolyte Baraduc: Capturing the Mind and Soul on Film
The camera allowed for wondrously creative images, but not every spirit photographer tried capturing ghosts of friends and loved ones. French physician and parapsychologist Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc took the concept one step further: he claimed to take photos of thoughts and emotions—and even the soul.
In 1896, he informed the Paris Académie Nationale de Médecine that he had successfully photographed ideas. According to reports, Baraduc’s method was simple: “The person whose thought is to be photographed enters a dark room, places his hand on a photographic plate, and thinks intently of the object the image of which he wishes to see produced.”
Most of the images Baraduc supplied as evidence were very cloudy, but some, according to reports, offered distinct “features of persons and the outlines of things.” He even claimed it was possible to produce thought photos from a distance, simply by willing an image from the mind to the photographic plates.
The doctor, along with others, believed we all exhibited auras. That our emotions produced energies. These too, Baraduc claimed, could be captured on film.
Two years after his announcement to the Académie, the doctor addressed the Society of Psychical Sciences in Paris. Newspapers reported that he informed the group that photography could “measure and register the volatile matter of which every living thing is constantly ridding itself.”
Baraduc explained that he experimented on himself for ninety days by photographing himself whenever he felt his soul was particularly active. This early pioneer in selfies said the luminous points of images were full of light and vitality when he was happy and dim when nervous or sad. He found similar results with other people.
But he didn’t just perform tests on humans: “I have experimented on pigeons, as well as on fresh milk. Moreover, there is evidence that even plants possess a sufficient amount of sensibility to render them fit subjects for such experiments. A Portuguese whom I know photographed some plants which he had just gathered, but obtained no result. Thereupon he tore them to pieces, crushed them in his hands and otherwise tortured them, and this time he was not disappointed. The plate contained fluidic impressions very similar to those which are obtained when a sickly person is the subject.”
In April 1907, Baraduc took his studies to another level. His son, André, passed away at the age of nineteen. Nine hours afterward, Baraduc photographed the coffin and discovered a misty cloud emanating from all around it. Six months later, on October 15, Baraduc sadly had a chance to continue his studies with his wife, Nadine, on her deathbed. With his cameras all set up for the event, he captured a photo twenty minutes after her passing, which he claimed revealed her departing soul. The image appears to show three misty luminous clouds over her body. A photograph taken about thirty minutes later exhibits one larger cloud. Soon after, it left the body and floated into Baraduc’s bedroom, creating an icy breeze before leaving entirely.
Hereward Carrington covered the phenomena in his 1921 book The Problems of Psychical Research:
There is no inherent absurdity in the idea, as many might suppose. Of course the spiritual body would have to be material enough to reflect light waves, but where is the evidence that it is not? There seems to be much evidence, on the contrary, that it is. It must be remembered that the camera will disclose innumerable things quite invisible to the naked eye, or even to the eye aided by the strongest glasses or telescopes. Normally, we can see but a few hundred stars in the sky; with the aid of telescopes, we can see many thousand; but the photographic camera discloses more than twenty million! Here, then, is direct evidence that the camera can observe things which we cannot see; and, indeed, this whole process of sight or “seeing” is a far more complicated one than most persons imagine. As Sir Oliver Lodge has pointed out, there is no reason why we should not be enabled to photograph a spirit, when we can photograph an image in a mirror—which is composed simply of vibrations, and reflected vibrations at that! We are a long way from the tangible thing, in such a case; and yet we are enabled to photograph it with an ordinary camera. Any disturbance in the ether we should be enabled to photograph likewise—if only we had delicate enough instruments, and if the “conditions” for the experiment were favourable. The phenomena of spirit-photography, and especially the experiments of Dr. Baraduc, to which I shall presently refer, would seem to indicate this.
Many think all these photographic effects could’ve come from tiny pinholes behind the camera lens, though Carrington’s theory is much more exciting. So was Baraduc on to something? Could evidence of the soul—an afterlife existence—be proven? At the same time Baraduc was using a camera to find out, Dr. Duncan Macdougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts, was using a simpler tool: a scale. Macdougall theorized that the human soul occupied the entire physical body. If it had weight, then upon death and the soul’s departure, the body would weigh less.
Sir Walter Raleigh had the same idea in the sixteenth century. Not about souls, but about smoke. Raleigh believed he could weigh smoke and, as the story goes, he made a bet with Queen Elizabeth I to prove he was right. She made the wager and then watched as Raleigh weighed a cigar, smoked it, and carefully tapped the ashes back onto the scale. The ashes and butt indeed weighed less, proving that smoke accounted for the before-and-after difference. The queen paid up. Macdougall hoped for similar results by weighing a body just before death and again at the moment of death.
He’d been working secretly on the experiment for six years with the help of a sanitarium. There, he found a dozen test subjects on the verge of death, usually from tuberculosis. The dying patients gave him the results he sought. With each death, the scale showed an immediate drop in weight of three-quarters of an ounce to one ounce. Thus, he proclaimed, the soul weighed roughly three-quarters of an ounce. Macdougall, it seemed, had scientific evidence of the soul’s existence. Though the testing preceded Edison’s spirit phone project, the concept aligns with the inventor’s theory of tiny life units moving on to a new life. Macdougall wasn’t interested in talking with the souls, just acknowledging their existence. Problem solved, right? Well, not so fast.
