The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Author’s Note

Epigraph

Happy Is the Man Who Is Not the Chosen One

The Black Art

Procure the Remedy at Once and Be Well

Love and Painting Are Quarrelsome Companions

Ties Which Death Itself Could Not Loose

A Palace for the Sun

I Thought Nobody Would Be Damaged Much

A Lounging, Listless Madhouse

My God! Is It Possible?

She Really Is a Wonderful Whistler

No Shadow of Trickery

A Craving for Light

Philosophical Instruments

The Message Department

A Big Head Full of Ideas

Chair and All

Did You Ever Dream of Some Lost Friend?

War Against Wrong

Whose Bones Lie Bleaching

Humbugged

All Is Gone and Nothing Saved

A Favorite Haunt of Apparitions

The Spirits Do Not Like a Throng

The Tenderest Sympathies of Human Nature

Weep, Weep, My Eyes

Are You a Spiritualist in Any Degree?

An Old, Moth-Eaten Cloak

By Supernatural Means

Figura Vaporosa

They Paid Their Money, and They Had Their Choice

Those Mortals Gifted with the Power of Seeing

Image and Afterlife

Calm Assurance of a Happy Future

The Mumler Process

Acknowledgments

Notes and Sources

About the Author

Connect with HMH

First Mariner Books edition 2018

Copyright © 2017 by Peter Manseau

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Manseau, Peter, author.

Title: The apparitionists : a tale of phantoms, fraud, photography, and the man who captured Lincoln’s ghost / Peter Manseau.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017018074 (print) | LCCN 2017021898 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544745988 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544745971 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781328557063 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Mumler, William H. | Photographers—United States—Biography. | Psychics—United States—Biography. | Spirit photography—United States—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC BF1027.M86 (ebook) | LCC BF1027.M86 M36 2017 (print) |

DDC 133.9/2 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018074

Cover design by Jackie Shepherd

Cover photograph: Cabinet card portrait by unknown photographer

Author photograph © Gwenann Seznec

v7.1220

For Gwen

List of Illustrations

Page xvi. Artist unknown, The Bridge of Sighs at the Tombs Police Court (c. 1896). The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.

Page 12. William H. Mumler, First spirit photograph. Carte de visite, 1862. From the Collection of Carl Maunz.

Page 22. Louis Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple, Paris. Daguerreotype, 1838. Photo by VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images.

Page 32. Thomas M. Easterly, Kate and Margaret Fox, Spirit Mediums from Rochester, New York. Daguerreotype, 1852. Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.

Page 44. Samuel F. B. Morse, Portrait of a Young Man. Daguerreotype, 1840. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005, acsn. no. 2005.100.75.

Page 52. William H. Mumler, Unidentified woman and an unidentified spirit image. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Though unidentified, the woman is most likely Hannah Mumler. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 58. Mathew Brady, self-portrait, c. 1875. Library of Congress.

Page 68. James Wallace Black, Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 1860. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005, acsn. no. 2005.100.87.

Page 80. Tudor Horton, engraving based on a daguerreotype by Mathew Brady, printed in Marmaduke B. Sampson’s Rationale of Crime (1846). Library of Congress.

Page 92. William H. Mumler, William Lloyd Garrison. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 100. Mathew Brady advertisement, New York Herald, August 21, 1856. Library of Congress.

Page 112. William H. Mumler, Mrs. Conant. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 122. Alexander Gardner, The Sunken Road at Antietam. Stereograph, 1862. Library of Congress.

Page 138. William H. Mumler, Child spirit with photograph and figurine on table. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 152. Alexander Gardner, President Lincoln on the battlefield of Antietam. Albumen print, 1862. Library of Congress.

Page 162. William H. Mumler, Mrs. H. B. Sawyer. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 170. Alexander Gardner,The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter. Copied from glass, wet collodion negative, 1863. Library of Congress.

Page 182. Artist unknown, The great conflagration in New York City, July 13 —total destruction of Barnum's Museum with its millions of rare and wonderful curiosities (1865). The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print Collection, The New York Public Library.

Page 196. William H. Mumler, Colonel Cushman. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 208. William H. Mumler, Ella Bonner. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 214. William H. Mumler, Unidentified man with muttonchops seated with arms crossed, a female spirit in the background. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 222. William H. Mumler, Bronson Murray. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 234. William H. Mumler, Mrs. Tinkham. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 242. William H. Mumler, Unidentified man with a long beard, seated with three spirits. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 250. William H. Mumler, Unidentified woman seated with a female spirit in the background. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 258. Jeremiah Gurney, the last photograph of Abraham Lincoln, 1865. Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum (ALPLM).

Page 276. Mathew Brady, Phineas T. Barnum and Ernestine de Faiber. Attributed to the Mathew Brady Studio. Modern albumen print from wet plate collodion negative, 1864. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Page 282. William H. Mumler, Harry Gordon. Albumen silver print, 1862–1875. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Page 294. Mathew Brady, Samuel F. B. Morse. Albumen silver print, 1866. Library of Congress.

Page 304. William H. Mumler, Mary Todd Lincoln with spirit of Abraham Lincoln. Carte de visite, 1872. Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, courtesy of the Indiana State Museum and Allen County Public Library.

Author’s Note

IN THESE DAYS when an unprecedented number of amateur image makers carry cameras everywhere they go, taking more than a billion photographs every day, it is my hope that this story of photography’s infancy will provide a fresh view of a time shaped by war, belief, new technology, and a longing for connection across ever greater distances —a time not unlike our own.

The entwined narratives told here —concerning photography’s coming of age and the ghostly visions peddled by a photographer of dubious repute —together form an account of how captured images, and the possibility of manipulating them, overtook all other means of recording memories, documenting history, and understanding the past.

While those portrayed throughout walked a line only then being drawn between fact and fantasy in the development of their art, this is a work of nonfiction. Wherever dialogue or quoted passages appear, they are taken from the historical record: letters, memoirs, public lectures, or transcriptions of court proceedings made by the indefatigable journalists of the nineteenth century.

I make no claims for the reality of the apparitions that hover over many of these pages, but let the women and men who believed in such hauntings speak for themselves.

Nothing can be so deceiving as a photograph.

​—FRANZ KAFKA

Late-nineteenth-century view of the Bridge of Sighs at the Tombs prison.

PROLOGUE

Happy Is the Man Who Is Not the Chosen One

New York City, April 12, 1869

THE ACCUSED MAN sat in a dark corner of the city known as the Tombs. Since its construction in the late 1830s, no one could remember a time when lower Manhattan’s combined police court and detention center had not been so called. That the origin of the name was a mystery only made it seem all the more fitting. Some claimed the imposing granite complex had earned the macabre title due to its resemblance to an ancient Near Eastern mausoleum, complete with Egyptian columns suggesting forgotten pharaohs might be buried under the surrounding Five Points slum. A writer of the day proposed that the nickname had caught on because anyone who entered the gray, begrimned citadel instantly recognized it as the tomb of purity, order, peace, and law, despite its official purpose as defender of such virtues. Others supposed it was called the Tombs simply because so many of those brought behind its walls were never seen again.

In any case, to the man listening to details of the charges made against him on an otherwise pleasant spring morning, the building’s official name, the Halls of Justice, likely seemed no closer to the truth.

Though accused of attempting to swindle the public with photographs he claimed showed the souls of the dead keeping company with the living, William H. Mumler remained impassive, either oblivious to his surroundings or a true believer in the righteousness of his cause. As the words fraud, felony, larceny, and, most unexpected in a place like this, supernatural echoed through the courtroom, Mumler sat with a stolid calm. Only the collar and tie straining around his thick neck suggested the bind in which the big man now found himself.

Each year, thousands climbed stone steps worn smooth by the footfalls of crime and punishment to reach the Tombs’s entrance on Centre Street. On any given day, some four hundred men could be found crammed into a jail designed for half that number. There they lingered and suffered for weeks on end, before eventually making their way from holding cells to the spot where Mumler now sat, and then to the island lunatic asylum floating like a body in the East River, or to Sing Sing, the state penitentiary up the Hudson, or to the gallows assembled when needed in the cobblestone prison yard just beyond the courtroom’s walls.

That this was a place of dire consequences was apparent all around him. Screams from the main holding pen, where ten dozen huddled as if in steerage, could be heard even through granite. Making his way to the arraignment that morning, Mumler would have seen wooden planks for the hangman’s scaffold stacked and ready beneath an elevated gangway that the condemned ascended during their final walk on earth. In homage to the similar passage found in Venice, some doomed but worldly souls had taken to calling it Ponte dei Sospiri. The Bridge of Sighs.

The Tombs has a history, and a very sad one, a reporter noted earlier that year. Men have spent terrible days and nights there, with death, for which they were wholly unprepared, staring them in the face from the gallows’ beam. What ghostly visions of murdered victims have trooped through those cells!

Mumler saw no such visions during his stay in the Tombs. He did, however, bring ghosts of his own. If not for the specters that had followed him from New England to New York these past few years, and if not for the universal hunger for proof of their existence, he would be a free man.

THE COURTROOM THAT MORNING was crowded with other kinds of otherworldly figures as well, though these were indisputably made of flesh and bone. Pale, gaunt men with wild eyes and wilder beards shifted in their seats. Older women, dressed primly in the style of churches they no longer attended, wore looks of faraway concern. Though accustomed to exploring the darker corners of the spirit realm, they found something about these proceedings more disconcerting than the grave.

The defendant’s assembled supporters claimed to feel the presence of the departed not only in a place as close to the veil between this world and the next as the Tombs was thought to be, but throughout the Empire City and the haunted nation around it. They filled the courtroom on a Monday morning in springtime not just because Mumler was in danger, but because they feared their beliefs might be.

Corpulent and full-whiskered, with a head of unkempt hair and a suit coat snugged tight to button over his barrel chest, Mumler was not as insubstantial as some of his gathered supporters. He belongs to the heavy order of the Spiritualists, of which there are two kinds —the heavy and the fragile, a correspondent from Philadelphia wrote.

The meaty opposite of incorporeal, Mumler was an imposing man, sometimes called athletic or robust in the euphemisms of the day. Yet still there was a delicacy to him. Trained as an engraver, he had remade himself first as a chemist, then as an artist. He would be an inventor, too, before his time in the physical world was done. Each of these professions required fine work done by punctilious hands, and he had some success in all of them.

Though possibly safeguarded by his heft, he would likely not do well among the criminals the press labeled hardened and degraded creatures who were confined to the Tombs each night. Nor could he simply hope to blend in and go unnoticed. A telltale smell of lavender followed him into every room. Black stains lingered on his fingers —evidence that at least some of the charges made against him were true.

THIS MUCH HE WOULD admit: William Mumler, late of Boston, recently of 630 Broadway, was guilty of making pictures.

Without question, he had used his camera and an array of potent chemicals to create images for those in need. Also true, in this work he had doubtless served some higher metaphysical purpose. He had frozen moments in time. He had used sunlight and silver to etch captured instants on rectangles of glass, which through some further alchemy of memory and imagination then became windows on love and loss for all who beheld them.

If there was a lawlessness to any of this, it was one to which the hundreds of photographers then working in New York City might also have pleaded guilty. His block of Broadway alone was among the most photographed acres on the planet, crowded as it was with tourists who never tired of seeing their own eyes stare up at them from newly varnished photographs, and the practitioners of this relatively new art eager to sell to them.

As for the accusation that he had convinced the gullible that he was able to make images not only of those who visited his studio, but of men, women, and children who had passed on to the next world —well, might it not be said that every photograph of a living person will eventually become a picture of the dead?

To bridge the chasm created by death had been arguably the single greatest change the art and technology of photography had brought to human experience. Just a generation before, a departed loved one’s features began to decay in the mind’s eye of the survivors with the final closing of the coffin lid. For the dead to remain in this world, even if only as a shadow, was to inch closer to immortality. The art had been born of this hope, and inevitably all the great photographers of the day had sought to depict death in ways that reframed the terror of oblivion for the limited comprehension of the living.

Hadn’t the most celebrated image maker of the age, Mathew Brady, been lauded for displaying the casualties of war on Broadway, mere blocks from where Mumler had committed his supposed crimes? Hadn’t Brady’s Scottish protégé, Alexander Gardner, trailed doomed armies like a carrion eater across the battle-scarred South? And hadn’t Brady’s jealous rival, Jeremiah Gurney, hoped to one-up the master by training his camera on the corpse of Mr. Lincoln himself? Even Samuel Morse, father of both the telegraph and photography in America, acknowledged that his two distance-erasing inventions were born of the same hard fact: that death was the greatest separation of all.

It was not going too far to ask if photography itself might be complicit in this morbid fixation. From its earliest days scarcely thirty years before, it had been called the black art —a phrase referring primarily to the silver nitrate stains on a photographer’s hands, but also suggestive of a possible connection to the much older dark arts of magic and sorcery.

To make images of any kind was to traffic in the uncanny; to make images of such perfection that they approached the divine was to invite the widespread belief that a camera somehow captured a sliver of its subject’s soul. Every photographer was called upon to become a necromancer now and then.

To Mumler, the great injustice was that he alone had been arrested for making images that held a mirror up to the living and asked them to consider what lay beyond. If the root of his transgression was to be found in the notion that human ingenuity might be harnessed to once again see those who had passed on, why was it not all photography now on trial?

The history of all pioneers of new truths is relatively the same, Mumler would later say, and happy is the man who is not the chosen one to meet the prejudices of a skeptical world in the development of some new discovery.

ACROSS THE CITY, it had been a week full of consternation over other supposedly new spiritual discoveries. A few days before, at Christ Church in midtown, an Episcopal liturgy had been interrupted when the organist abruptly stopped playing and ran from the choir loft, complaining that every fibre of his body rebelled against taking part in worship he had suddenly realized was a burlesque. On the same day, at a meeting of Methodists, debate on the question of allowing women to preach nearly brought the congregation to blows. And in Brooklyn, a hundred Spiritualists like those gathered in the courtroom on Mumler’s behalf had met to hear an inspirational lecture on how their beliefs would soon rise to become the country’s dominant creed.

Spiritualism is the future church, the speaker had told them. Its roof will be the stars; its walls the universe; the earth its foundation. Its choir the wild waving sea. Its idea the union of progress, steam, intelligence, and the locomotive; its aim God, Justice, and Immortality.

These were not beliefs held only by an oddball few. In the aftermath of the Civil War, during which more than three-quarters of a million were killed, the nation exploded with interest in the possibility of making contact with the spirit world.

Though often remembered as a fringe pursuit run by séance-holding hucksters, Spiritualism was a major cultural force. For a time, it seemed it would become one of the most widely held religious perspectives in America. Unlike other fast-growing religions in late-nineteenth-century New York —Catholicism and Judaism —the majority of Spiritualists were neither immigrants nor outsiders, but men and women from moneyed and established East Coast families. Their pedigrees couldn’t protect them from the war and its emotional costs, and so in the war’s wake many American cities became home to a form of spiritual searching as peculiar as it was poignant.

Mumler rarely became so expansive in his proclamations of faith, but he too believed, like the Brooklyn Spiritualist preacher, that the unimaginable transformations of this steam-fired, locomotive age would provide mortals with the keys to the life to come. Photography, in his view, offered truths unknown to earlier divine revelations. The images he had created were proof that scripture was now being, as the name of his art proclaimed, written with light.

Unfortunately for Mumler, the prosecutor assigned to his case was having none of this. If he had the authority, he soon told the court, he would put the whole future church of Spiritualism on trial, along with the notion that the speeding locomotive of technology could provide any answers to questions of faith.

Once the formal complaints had been entered into the record, the judge looked down at the defendant in his rumpled suit, his unruly beard. This Mumler was perhaps as unlikely a prophet of a new religion as had ever troubled the powers that be. But then, maybe being unlikely, rumpled, and unruly was a requirement of the job.

What is it you’ve got to say to these charges? the judge asked.

Though he would often be called Mumbler when his story began to find its way into the city’s daily papers, and from there into news published around the world, Mumler spoke clearly enough now to be heard by members of the press spread among the ghostly crowd in the gallery.

In the weeks to come, these same seats would fill with witnesses for the prosecution and defense: eminent photographers and others who knew far more about the black art than his accusers ever could; the mayor’s henchmen from Tammany Hall, whose own large-scale corruption made them quick to crack down on penny-ante crooks; the showman P. T. Barnum, who hated all swindles except those he created and controlled; and most important, Mumler’s own satisfied customers, happy to have been given the opportunity to purchase final reminders of dear ones now gone.

I have nothing to say, Mumler said.

Do you pretend, the judge pressed, that you take spirit photographs by supernatural means?

Have no answer to make to this question either, Mumler replied. I demand an examination.

No doubt the judge thought that even if the defendant might be able to fool the world with his camera tricks, he would not be taken in. Yet despite his desire to dispense quickly with criminals of all kinds, he was intrigued by the figure before him, and likely supposed others would be as well.

The intensity of the interest manifested by the public in this case, a reporter from the New York Daily Tribune soon wrote, has perhaps never been surpassed in reference to any criminal investigation in this city. Harper’s Weekly agreed: The case of the people against William H. Mumler is . . . remarkable and without precedent in the annals of criminal jurisprudence . . . and strange as it may seem, there are thousands of people who believe that its development will justify the claims made by the spiritual photographer.

The accused does not know and has never pretended to know by what power or process, other than that of producing an ordinary photograph, these spirit photographs are produced, Mumler’s attorney declared. There are a great many intelligent men and women who after careful investigation, are firm believers that the pictures are truly likenesses of the spirits of the departed, and every day the number of sitters, investigators, and believers is increasing. He and such believers are of the opinion that the taking of these pictures is a new feature in photography, yet in its infancy surely, but gradually and slowly progressing to greater perfection in the future, requiring for such perfection time and a scientific knowledge of the power that is operating.

It was a time when rapidly increasing scientific knowledge was regarded not as the enemy of supernatural obsessions, but an encouragement to them. Electricity had given credence to notions of invisible energies operating beyond human comprehension. The telegraph had made communication possible over staggering distances, which raised hopes of receiving messages from the great beyond. Now came Mumler and his camera offering sight beyond sight.

With other cases to get to on this busy Monday morning, the judge instructed officers of the court to hold the spirit photographer in the Tombs until such time as a formal trial might begin. As Mumler was led away to the jailhouse, the gathered Spiritualists dispersed into the streets. Passing by the Egyptian columns and down the granite stairs, the troubled souls floated through Manhattan like mist, as if a vast catacomb beneath the city had creaked open at last.

PART I

The Black Art

William Mumler’s first photograph, 1862.  

CHAPTER 1

Procure the Remedy at Once and Be Well

BEFORE THE SUMMER of 1862, William H. Mumler had never seen a ghost, but he had been bewitched by a woman.

It was under her spell that he first stood in front of a camera—his coat casually off, his thick arms holding the draping black lens cloth as a horseman might a saddle—and took an accidental self-portrait that would change his life. The image showed not only Mumler himself—a big man with an untamable mane bristling past his ears, and bushy whiskers that often obscured his bow tie—but also a faint figure sitting beside him in a room where he had thought himself quite alone.

At the time, Mumler was only dabbling in photography. An engraver by trade, he had