The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  Gerry finished his questions there and returned to the prosecution’s table. The case was straightforward as far as he was concerned. Since it was manifestly impossible that the spirit photographer had done what he claimed, Gerry needed only to present the details of the swindle to the court.

  The facts, he believed, would speak best for themselves.

  LEADING MUMLER’S DEFENSE, John D. Townsend was a lawyer comfortable with lost causes and unpopular defendants. Until now, his specialty had been helping men get away with murder. Of the forty-five accused killers he had represented, only one was executed, and he, having committed a crime the press called “infamously brutal,” had certainly had it coming. During his ten years in practice, Townsend’s vigorous efforts on behalf of the city’s most dangerous had earned him the sobriquet of “The Fighting Lawyer.”

  With the fight for Mumler now begun, however, he chose not to enter the ring. When the self-satisfied Gerry turned his star witness over for cross-examination, Townsend stayed in his chair, allowing his assistant to continue the questioning.

  Like Townsend, Albert Day had served ten years in the New York bar. Though he had developed a reputation for “marked ability, moral integrity and fair success,” he had not endured the scrutiny of high-profile cases as the lead defense attorney had. Townsend likely instructed him to handle the interrogation of the early witnesses less for his trial experience than for his experience in spiritual matters. Some of this was personal—Day’s wife, Olive, was a woman known to delight in “recondite themes of mental contemplation, scientific, philosophic, metaphysical and mystical, even to astrology”—but it was professional as well. Day had more than once in his career found himself putting his sensitivity to theological issues in service of the law. When a client’s will was challenged on the basis that he had lost his senses by claiming to hear divine voices, Day successfully argued that men in biblical times did much the same, and few would question their sanity today.

  Faced now with the imposing Marshal Tooker, Day similarly sought to call into question assumptions made about truth and falsehood and the contexts in which both are employed.

  “Have you, Mr. Tooker, any other name that you are known by besides your proper name of Tooker?” Day asked.

  “No, sir, no name that I am known by.”

  “Did you ever, for any purpose lately, assume the name William H. Wallace?”

  “Yes, I did, sir.”

  “Wallace is not your real name?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why did you assume that name?”

  “I assumed it for the purpose of prosecuting inquiries into the spirit photography business.”

  Tooker had hoped to avoid any complications to his investigation that offering his own well-known name to Mumler might create, so his use of a pseudonym was perhaps understandable. Indeed, it was not the first time he had done so. He had been a journalist before his turn toward the law, and in that capacity he had written under several noms de plume—going by the name “Bolivar” when he wrote for the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette and “Walton” when his work appeared in the Sunday Atlas. From time to time he even signed his articles “The Widow Rogers.” Hiding his identity to write “incisive but never rancorous political articles,” he was no stranger to bending the truth—perhaps not as drastically as he alleged Mumler had done, but enough to raise doubts about his credibility.

  Returning to the subject of promises Tooker claimed Mumler had made when he visited 630 Broadway, Day asked him to be specific.

  “What promise did he make to you?”

  “He promised or undertook to give me a spiritual photograph of a deceased relative, or of someone in close sympathy with me at the time,” Tooker said, “and this he failed to do.”

  “He failed to do that, did he?” Day asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tooker’s testimony might have been damning. He was a well-respected man acting on the authority of the highest office in the city, and he seemed to have common sense on his side. But one further detail worked against him: he had in fact never seen his father-in-law when he was alive.

  How, then, Judge Dowling wanted to know, could he be certain the image Mumler showed him was not the man in question?

  To those who saw spirit photography as an obvious fraud, the question was absurd, but the doubt it created lingered in the air of the court. The prosecution had planned to rest its case after Tooker’s testimony. It had not proven the knockout punch Gerry had expected, however. The defendant’s lawyer spoke with renewed confidence, now certain the case would not be as open and shut as Mumler’s doubters supposed.

  “That will do, Mr. Tooker,” Day said. “You can go.”

  The medium Bronson Murray with the spirit image of Ella Bonner. William Mumler, 1872.

  CHAPTER 21

  Weep, Weep, My Eyes

  HAVING HEARD HIS name invoked more than once during the proceedings, W. W. Silver at last raised his voice above the courtroom din.

  “I have nothing to do with the establishment!”

  Other than the obvious fact that his name appeared on the door where the alleged crimes had been committed, he expressed bafflement over why he had been compelled to be there at all.

  Judge Dowling peered down at the shouting man with bafflement of his own, until Marshal Tooker spoke up from the gallery, where he remained to watch the proceedings even though he would give no further testimony.

  “That’s not the Mr. Silver I saw at 630 Broadway,” the marshal said. Mumler did indeed have an accomplice, he indicated, but this was not the man.

  “You had better find that stray piece of silver, and the quicker the better,” Judge Dowling said. “This one is probably counterfeit.”

  When William Guay reluctantly took the stand, he made no explanation or excuse for leading an officer of the law to believe he was not Mumler’s longtime partner and accomplice but W. W. Silver, the previous owner of the studio. Instead, he insisted that in fact he remembered very little of the day the marshal had come calling.

  “Were you present on the occasion which Mr. Tooker visited the premises of 630 Broadway, relative to the spirit photograph business?” Day asked.

  “I don’t know Mr. Tooker,” Guay answered.

  At Judge Dowling’s direction, the marshal stood to identify himself, but still Guay professed ignorance.

  “I don’t recollect his appearance from being there,” he said.

  “Do you know whether Marshal Tooker had any interview with Mr. Mumler?” Day asked.

  “I don’t know,” the witness said again. “But I have reason to believe that he had. I think the gentleman to whom you refer went upstairs to see Mr. Mumler.

  “As well as I can recollect,” Guay added carefully, “the gentleman you refer to came into the room and inquired about spirit photographs. He then expressed a desire to have spirit photographs taken. I told him what were the necessary conditions in order that he may have a picture taken as he desired. I told him that he must pay ten dollars in advance; he at once pleaded that he did not have that amount on him. I told him he must make some deposit to guarantee his return; he said he was willing to give two dollars as a deposit. I said that was quite sufficient for a guarantee. He made the deposit, and I gave him my card accordingly, and directed him to go upstairs. That is all the interview I had with him.”

  “What do you know yourself about these spirit photographs?”

  “All that I know is that I tried to find out how they were done.”

  “Have you examined the process?”

  “Yes, about eight years ago,” Guay said. “I was specially delegated by Andrew Jackson Davis to investigate the subject. I then spent three weeks with Mr. Mumler in Boston, visiting his place every day, and during that time making the most minute examination in endeavoring to discover how these photographs were taken by him, and I confess I failed.” As the Seer of Poughkeepsie had paid him well for his efforts, he suggested, he had nothing to gain by allo
wing any trickery on Mumler’s part to go unnoticed.

  “During your examination of his process,” the lawyer continued, “did you notice anything out of the ordinary course of procedure, or anything beyond the usual mechanical requirements for taking pictures?”

  “I remarked nothing unusual in his action,” Guay said. “Though I tested the process by every means I could devise, I could find no trick or device, and became convinced that the spectral pictures appearing on photographs of living persons were actually and truly likenesses of those departed, and were produced by means other than those known by artists. I know of two or three methods of producing ghost-like figures similar to these: one by placing a person behind the sitter, another by a peculiar arrangement of reflectors, and the third by chemical means.” None of these, Guay insisted, had been used in Mumler’s gallery.

  When prosecutor Gerry rose for his cross-examination, he was less concerned with photography than with belief.

  “Are you a Spiritualist or do you believe in the existence of spirits?” he asked.

  “I cannot answer,” Guay said.

  “Are you a believer of incorporeal presence?”

  “That I cannot answer.”

  “Are you a disciple of Andrew Jackson Davis, or a believer in his philosophy?”

  “Yes, I am,” Guay finally admitted.

  How he had gone from serving as Davis’s investigator to becoming Mumler’s partner, he was not inclined to say.

  FROM THE OPENING OF the inquiry in Judge Dowling’s court, the presence of another man who preferred to be addressed as Judge had complicated the proceedings.

  When the man on the bench asked the defense if it was ready to proceed, it was often Judge John W. Edmonds, the ardent Spiritualist and former state prison inspector, who answered. When a shout of Objection! rang through the Tombs, it was as often as not Judge Edmonds’s voice that could be heard.

  One of the most respected figures of New York’s legal community, the jurist and social reformer Edmonds stood close by Mumler’s defense team. Though technically present as a witness, he appeared ready to jump into the legal fray, and Judge Dowling, erring on the side of collegiality, appeared willing to indulge him. Edmonds had followed the spirit photographer’s career for years, and saw clearly what the images he made might mean.

  When called to the stand, Edmonds admitted that though he had heard of Mumler’s experiments with spirit photography in Boston years before, he had only recently met the accused.

  “I have known Mr. Mumler some two or three weeks,” he said. “On the occasion of my becoming acquainted with him I had gone to his gallery.”

  He had sat for two pictures, he explained, which he now showed the court.

  “These are the photographs. In one, I assumed a position which allowed only the taking of my side-face. In the other, I faced the camera.”

  On each image, he indicated, a spirit form shadowed his own. It was a different form each time, but both were clearly female. As a reporter present later noted, both also were “charmingly pretty.”

  “One of these pictures is a face which I think I recognize,” he said of the ghosts floating in the upper right corner of the photographs. “The other is unknown to me.”

  Edmonds himself, in profile and frontal poses, appeared in the images as distinguished and distinct as he did while seated in the witness chair.

  Judge Edmonds was now a man of seventy, nearing the end of a long and tumultuous career in service of the public and the law. Born in 1799, he was roughly as old as the century, and had counted himself part of the country’s transformation from struggling new republic to rising global power. As a young lawyer he had worked in the Albany law office of Martin Van Buren and from there had climbed steadily up the ladder of New York politics. At the age of thirty-three he was elected to the state senate, and at forty-four he became the state prison inspector, a role in which he became known as “a man full of sympathy for the unfortunate and erring.” He distinguished himself through reforms—including abolishing the whip and hiring the woman for whom Mathew Brady made his phrenological portraits on Blackwell’s Island—and soon won the spot in the judiciary that earned him the title by which he would ever after be known.

  Prior to his fiftieth year, he had enjoyed the kind of worldly success that made inquiries into the world to come seem inconsequential. He had no interest in questions of what kind of existence there might be beyond life on earth. In the autumn of 1850, however, his wife died suddenly. They had been married thirty years, and he was, it was said at the time, “warmly attached to her.” In the months following her death, Judge Edmonds was often seen standing by her grave, speaking aloud as if in deep conversation. On the monument he faced during these visits, he’d had inscribed lines from Pierre Corneille’s play Le Cid:

  Pleurez, pleurez, mes yeux, et fondez-vous en eau!

  La moitié de ma vie a mis l’autre au tombeau.

  (Weep, weep, my eyes, and melt into water!

  One half of my life has sent the other to the grave.)

  Just three years before, Edmonds had been elevated to the state supreme court; his life following his wife’s untimely death became an unending round of days spent hearing the troubles of others, and nights spent in private desolation. “I was at the time withdrawn from general society,” he later recalled. “I was labouring under great depression of spirits. I was occupying all my leisure in reading on the subject of death, and man’s existence afterward. I had in the course of my life read and heard from the pulpit so many contradictory and conflicting doctrines on the subject, that I hardly knew what to believe, and was anxiously seeking to know if, after death, we should again meet with those whom we had loved here, and under what circumstances.”

  Late one night while he was reading an investigation of the subject, he thought he heard his wife. She spoke clearly, a full sentence addressed to him. Far from filling him with love or longing, he felt as though he had been shot. He lit lamps throughout the house and searched the rooms for any sign of a source for the voice he had heard. When he found nothing, he attempted to sleep, convincing himself that his lingering grief had created a powerful delusion.

  As fate would have it, however, this all came to pass at the very height of the Fox sisters’ revelations.

  “I was invited by a friend to witness the Rochester Knockings,” Judge Edmonds later remembered. “I complied, more to oblige her and to while away a tedious hour. I thought a good deal on what I witnessed, and determined to investigate the matter, and find out what it was. If it was a deception or delusion, I thought that I could detect it. For about four months I devoted at least two evenings in a week, and sometimes more, to witnessing the phenomenon in all its phases.

  “I kept careful records of all I witnessed, and from time to time compared them with each other, to detect inconsistencies and contradictions. I went from place to place, surveying different mediums, meeting with different parties of persons, often with persons whom I had never seen before, and sometimes where I was myself entirely unknown—sometimes in the dark, and sometimes in the light—often with inveterate unbelievers, and more frequently with zealous believers.”

  Eventually he became one of the latter. “There is in Spiritualism that which comforts the mourner, and binds up the broken-hearted,” he said, “that which smoothes the passage to the grave, and robs death of its terrors.”

  Despite the personal solace he found in these newly born beliefs, he knew his public life might be impaired by his conversion. When word began to spread that a justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York spoke to the dead, he resigned from the bench and published a book that both defended his legacy and evangelized for his nascent faith. He was allowed to keep his title as a matter of respect for past service.

  His support for Mumler now, he told the court, was not merely about his own experiences. “I know a great many persons who have visited Mumler, some of whom have met with astonishing success in procuring spirit pic
tures of departed friends. Mr. Livermore of Wall Street has been peculiarly successful.”

  Edmonds’s longtime friend Charles Livermore was perhaps the second most respected Spiritualist in the city. After making his fortune, he devoted himself to spiritual pursuits. For a time, he had hired one of the Fox sisters to be his private medium, hosting regular séances in his home.

  Edmonds produced an image of his friend for the court. It showed a man with sideburns as thick as paintbrushes and with his eyes cast downward. A spectral woman floating above him seemed to cradle his head in her arms. With her body behind Livermore’s shoulders and her hands clearly evident on the lapels of his jacket, the image briefly caused an uproar among the photographic practitioners seated in the courtroom. “This is the most remarkable of the photographs exhibited in court,” a reporter noted, “from the fact that the photographers present declared that by no means known to them, other than the bodily presence of some one behind the chair, could the picture of the lady’s hand be produced.”

  When asked how such an image might come about, Edmonds did not claim to understand. “Spiritualists reason that these photographs are actual pictures of disembodied spirits, but they do not know,” he said. “I am myself not prepared to express a definite opinion. I believe, however, that in time the truth or falsity of spiritual photography will be demonstrated, as Spiritualism itself has been demonstrated, and I therefore say that it would be best to wait and see. The art is as yet in its infancy.”

  After the defense had finished, prosecutor Gerry pressed for answers on questions Edmonds could more conclusively provide.