The Strange Victorian Craze For Photographing Ghosts

Hard reality check: some of the earliest “ghosts” caught on camera were simply a side effect of how photography worked back then. Early cameras required long exposure times, sometimes lasting several minutes, to capture an image. If someone walked through the frame during that time, they could appear as a faint, translucent figure. Photographers usually discarded plates like these, but all it took was one surviving image of a ghostly-looking passerby to help spark the ghost photography craze. And really, if I saw one of these without knowing how long exposures worked, I probably would’ve had questions too!

Fake ghost photography was actually around before anyone tried passing it off as legitimate. In 1856, a Scottish scientist named Sir David Brewster wrote a book on the stereoscope. In it, he explained how to create a fake photograph of a ghost using double exposure. The London Stereoscopic Company even made novelty cards using Brewster’s recipe. But these were sold as parlor tricks for entertainment, not as photographs of actual spirits. It just took a few more years before someone realized people might pay a lot more if you simply told them the ghost was real.

Boston engraver William H. Mumler first noticed the spirit photography phenomenon when processing a self-portrait around 1861 or 1862. He discovered a translucent figure beside himself that he claimed was the apparition of his dead cousin, Rachel. Though Mumler was adamant that the ghosts appeared without prompting, historians believe that a previously used glass plate created a double exposure effect.

Given the toll of Civil War casualties, there was a demand for keepsakes as grieving families sought out ways to cope with their melancholia. Mumler actually gave up his engraving business for this, setting up a studio in Boston specifically for spirit photography, at prices of as much as $10 per portrait (a typical portrait cost as little as a quarter).

In April 1869, however, New York City authorities arrested William Mumler on fraud and larceny charges. During the People v. Mumler trial, prosecutors called photographers as expert witnesses. They demonstrated in court, step by step, how to counterfeit a double exposure in a darkroom and argued Mumler’s spirits were fabricated for monetary gain.

P. T. Barnum commissioned photographer Abraham Bogardus to fake a spirit photo of Barnum with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, to prove how simple the trick was. While on trial, Justice Thomas W. Clerke decided that the prosecution hadn’t shown Mumler’s fraud beyond a reasonable doubt, a far cry from Mumler proving that his photos were genuine. Mumler was acquitted in April 1869.

Even Mary Todd Lincoln eventually visited Mumler’s studio in hopes of a photograph of her late husband. Yes, the Abraham Lincoln. Still in mourning and dressed in black crape, she went to his Boston studio under a false name around February 1872. Mumler recorded her as “Mrs. Tyndall,” although some scholars think he recognized her anyway. The resulting photograph showed a translucent Abraham standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders. It became one of Mumler’s most famous spirit photographs, and probably the best advertisement his ghost photography business could’ve asked for.

Frederick A. Hudson’s studio, opened in March 1872 as the first of its kind in Britain, replicated the Boston trick: inquisitive investigators discovered that some of his spirits were generated using a trick camera, built by a specialist in magic illusions, that dropped pre-exposed glass slides over an unexposed plate, while others were posed by sheet-draped assistants.

Even respected scientists weren’t immune to the appeal of spirit photography. In 1874, physicist Sir William Crookes took more than 40 flash photographs of a supposed spirit that appeared during séances with teenage medium Florence Cook. Crookes declared the spirit, known as “Katie King,” to be real. Critics were less convinced. They pointed out that “Katie King” looked an awful lot like Florence Cook herself wearing a white sheet. Not exactly the most convincing disguise!

Belief in spiritualism had taken hold among many serious parties. Naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, in the 1875 publication Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, wrote in support of spirit photography, claiming that Hudson’s studio had provided him with an authentic depiction of his deceased mother. In 1882, medium Georgiana Houghton published a book treating spirit photographs as sacred images; in it, she discussed more than 50 spirit photographs from over 250 sittings.

Édouard Buguet, a spirit photographer in Paris in the early 1870s, enjoyed considerable success with photos of levitating mediums and telekinetic events from his studio until the police raided it in April 1875. Wooden mannequins, false heads, draped fabrics and pre-exposed photographic plates were seized. During the trial, Buguet made a complete confession of his counterfeits and demonstrated how the trick photos were made. He was sentenced to a year of imprisonment.

Buguet went on trial in 1875 and confessed that his spirit photographs were fraudulent, but dozens of former clients gave evidence and swore under oath that Buguet was lying for his own protection and that they had unquestionably seen the faces of their dead relatives. Imagine having client reviews so good that your customers defend your work even after you personally admit it was fake! I’ll personally take it as the best compliment.

On December 5, 1891, Sybell Corbet took a 60-minute exposure in the library of Combermere Abbey, and the resulting photographic plate included a translucent man sitting in a chair. This man was supposedly Lord Combermere, who had recently passed away and was in fact being buried in that moment, four miles away. Physicist Sir William Barrett confirmed that a servant had briefly taken a seat in the chair at some point during the lengthy exposure.

In 1910, Tomokichi Fukurai attempted similar photographic experiments under the term “nensha,” but in 1913, the Tokyo Imperial University condemned his research as unscientific, and Fukurai resigned. In the 1890s in France, Louis Darget, a French officer, claimed that the waves emanating from the brain could directly imprint human thoughts onto a photographic plate held over the forehead. Among his blurry photographs is The Bird Head (1896). His photographs were the result of chemical marks and body heat.

If you’re familiar with the term “masking” in graphic design, you’ll probably recognize the basic idea here, except these photographers were doing it long before Photoshop existed. In 1902, magician John Nevil Maskelyne examined a spirit photo by medium Richard Boursnell that had been sent to journalist W.T. Stead. He discovered that the “spirit extra” had been lifted from an 1899 newspaper illustration of Boer commander Piet Botha. Then, in 1908, F.C. Barnes analyzed another photo by Boursnell and found that its spirit had been lifted from a popular portrait of the late Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Simply put, they just copied and pasted faces in these photographs!

Active in the 1910s, medium Eva Carrière supposedly produced “ectoplasm” from her body during séances. In 1913, Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing published photos of this ectoplasm, taken with a flash. On examination, however, the ectoplasm turned out to be composed of masticated paper pulp, cheesecloth, and faces cut out from a magazine called Le Miroir. The trickery had now moved from the darkroom to the séance room.

A carpenter from Crewe, William Hope, set up a lucrative spirit photography business after World War I through the Crewe Circle. He attracted a similar clientele to Mumler. The sitters had brought with them a package of glass plates, still sealed, to show Hope had not tampered with them, but using sleight of hand, he switched these for other, pre-exposed plates.

Another famous case was that of Harry Price and spirit photographer William Hope in February 1922. Price provided Hope with photographic glass plates that had been X-rayed with a secret corporate logo marked on them. Hope returned a ‘completed’ photo with no logo, which was proof of plate switching by the medium in the darkroom.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s December 1922 defense of the spirit photographer William Hope and Doyle’s accusation that Harry Price had planted switched plates played a part in breaking up his friendship with Harry Houdini. Houdini’s long-running debunking of fraudulent mediums in the 1920s, in which he re-created their tricks on stage, also contributed. The disagreement centered on whether the Hope photos were genuine.

When Helen Duncan’s “ectoplasm” was revealed by flash camera to consist of papier-mâché, cheesecloth, and rubber gloves, she was convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, an anti-fraud law. She was jailed for nine months in Holloway Prison in 1944. Another famous case of photographic trickery was the “Brown Lady of Raynham Hall” photo, published in Country Life in December 1936, and later revealed by technical experts to be a double exposure or grease on the lens.

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