Spirit Photography: William Mumler and the 1869 Trial

In the 1860s, grieving families in Boston and New York paid William Mumler to photograph them. When the pictures came back, a pale, translucent figure stood behind them: a dead husband, a child, a soldier lost in the war. Mumler called himself a spirit photographer.

His pictures are now recognised as fakes, yet in 1869 a court could not convict him, and his most famous photograph, of Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her husband, still circulates today. His story is a good lesson in why a puzzle nobody can solve is not the same as proof.

An engraver with a camera

Mumler, born in 1832, worked as a jewellery engraver in Boston and took photographs in his spare time. In the early 1860s he developed a self-portrait that seemed to show a cousin who had died twelve years earlier. It is widely credited as the first spirit photograph.

The picture caused a sensation. Mumler gave up engraving to work full time as a spirit photographer, first in Boston and later in New York. His wife, Hannah Mumler, was a healing medium who ran her own spiritual business and helped with his.

Why people wanted to believe

The timing mattered. The American Civil War killed soldiers on an enormous scale, and thousands of families wanted reassurance that the people they had lost lived on. Spiritualism, the belief that the living can contact the dead, was already popular, and a photograph seemed to offer something a séance could not: physical proof.

Photography was also new enough that most people did not know how it worked. Experts who examined Mumler's work in New York reportedly found no evidence of fraud, and for many customers that settled the matter.

How the ghosts got there

From around 1859 photographers used glass plates for their negatives, and the plates could be cleaned and reused. If a plate was not cleaned properly, an earlier image could stay faintly visible when the next one was taken. A deliberate double exposure, or a second negative printed over the first, gives the same pale, see-through figure.

None of this was secret. As early as 1856 the scientist Sir David Brewster had pointed out that such effects could be used deliberately to make ghostly pictures, and the London Stereoscopic Company sold a series called The Ghost in the Stereoscope. Mumler's supposed spirits are thought to have been double exposures of earlier sitters.

The trial of 1869

Accusations grew. Critics said some of Mumler's ghosts were people who were still alive, and that he obtained photographs of customers' dead relatives by breaking into their homes. In April 1869 he was tried in New York for fraud. The showman P. T. Barnum testified against him, saying Mumler was exploiting people whose judgment was clouded by grief.

To show how easy the trick was, Barnum had the photographer Abraham Bogardus make a picture of Barnum with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Mumler had supporters too, including the magazine editor Moses A. Dow, whom he had photographed. In the end Mumler was acquitted, because the prosecution could not prove beyond doubt that he was faking the pictures. Accounts differ on what followed: some say he was disgraced, others that the publicity helped his business.

Mary Todd Lincoln's portrait

Mumler's most famous photograph shows Mary Todd Lincoln seated, with a figure resembling her assassinated husband standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders. Even its date is disputed. Some accounts place it around 1869, others in the early 1870s, and Mumler himself said it was taken in February 1872. Stories also say she came under a false name, so that Mumler would not know who she was.

The picture has long been dismissed as a double exposure, but it is one of the most reproduced ghost photographs ever made. For believers, the false-name story was proof that Mumler could not have prepared a fake. For skeptics, it was exactly the kind of detail that is easy to add to a story afterwards.

After Mumler

Mumler later moved on to ordinary photography and developed a printing method known as the Mumler Process. When he died in 1884, his obituary praised his photographic work and mentioned the spirit pictures only in its last line.

Spirit photography did not die with him. In 1875 the French photographer Édouard Buguet confessed to faking spirits with dolls wrapped in gauze. In 1922 investigators exposed the British photographer William Hope by secretly marking his glass plates with X-rays; the plate that came back with a spirit on it had no marks. Even then Arthur Conan Doyle defended Hope, just as he had defended the Cottingley fairy photographs.

What the case teaches

The 1869 court could not explain how each photograph had been made, and that was enough to acquit Mumler. But not being able to explain an image is not evidence that it is supernatural. The investigators Kenny Biddle and Joe Nickell call that leap arguing from ignorance.

The better question is always which explanation needs the fewest new assumptions. A reused glass plate needs none. Our guide on how to evaluate a claim shows how to apply that test, and famous hoax photos covers the other pictures that fooled people for years.