Manseau says that Mumler had a knack for self-promotion and his otherworldly photo was written up in popular spiritualist newspapers like the Banner of Light and also the mainstream press.
Although he was “quite alone in the room” when the shot was taken, there appeared to be a figure at his side, a girl who was “made of light.” Mumler showed the photo to a spiritualist friend who confirmed that the girl in the image was almost certainly a ghost. While taking self-portraits for practice, one of Mumler’s prints came back with an unexplainable aberration. Trained as a silver engraver, Mumler decided to try his hand at photography, this wondrous new technology that produced portraits that people would pay a whole dollar to purchase. Mumler was, in Manseau’s words, a “kitchen tinkerer”-an amateur chemist and incurable entrepreneur who once peddled his own homemade elixir for curing dyspepsia. “It was a genuine religious movement that meant a lot to people a time when the nation was going through mourning and loss like it had never had before,” says Manseau. As he notes in his book, The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost, he also doesn’t discount the healing function that Spiritualism served. Peter Manseau, curator of American religious history at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, says Mumler was surely a fraud, although he doesn’t know exactly how the photographer managed his trick.
Self-proclaimed mediums performed seances in which the living could speak with the dead, and photographers like Mumler granted the wishes of the bereaved to see their lost sons or brothers one last time. Deep in mourning, Americans were drawn to anyone who offered even a fleeting connection to the souls of their dearly departed. When spirit photography appeared in the 1860s, the United States was reeling from the Civil War, which claimed an astonishing 620,000 lives. Barnum decried spirit photography as a sham. It’s not hard to understand why 19th-century Americans enamored with the growing Spiritualism movement would have believed that these photographic apparitions were real, even as high-profile skeptics like P.T. A mutton-chopped widower, his head hung in grief, is comforted by the glowing soul of his loving wife, her hands draped across his heavy shoulders. A mourning mother is visited by the angelic silhouette of her departed daughter, the young girl resting her tiny hand on her mother’s lap. Even 150 years later, the eerie spirit photographs taken by Boston photographer William Mumler pack an emotional punch.
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