The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  The impression created by Bogardus’s image that spirit photographs were necessarily irreverent was a genuine problem for the defense. It suggested that Mumler held the beliefs of the majority of his countrymen in contempt, and created his blasphemous photographs for spite as well as profit. Townsend set to work turning this assumption on its head.

  Knowing Bogardus to be an ardent Christian, he wondered whether there was much of a difference between the beliefs supporting Mumler’s work and the photographer’s own.

  “Are you a believer in the Bible?” Townsend asked.

  “Yes, I am thoroughly,” the photographer answered.

  “Allow me to read from 1 Samuel 28, third verse to the seventeenth verse.”

  Before Judge Dowling or opposing counsel could question its relevance, Townsend opened a Bible and began to recite a lengthy passage of scripture. He had previously alluded to the story, but now declaimed it as if it provided irrefutable evidence supporting his client’s claims.

  Now Samuel was dead, and all Israel had lamented him and buried him in Ramah, his own city. And Saul had removed from the land those who were mediums and spiritists. So the Philistines gathered together and came and camped in Shunem; and Saul gathered all Israel together and they camped in Gilboa. When Saul saw the camp of the Philistines, he was afraid and his heart trembled greatly. When Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord did not answer him, either by dreams or by Urim or by prophets. Then Saul said to his servants, “Seek for me a woman who is a medium, that I may go to her and inquire of her.” And his servants said to him, “Behold, there is a woman who is a medium at Endor.”

  Then Saul disguised himself by putting on other clothes, and went, he and two men with him, and they came to the woman by night; and he said, “Conjure up for me, please, and bring up for me whom I shall name to you.” But the woman said to him, “Behold, you know what Saul has done, how he has cut off those who are mediums and spiritists from the land. Why are you then laying a snare for my life to bring about my death?” Saul vowed to her by the Lord, saying, “As the Lord lives, no punishment shall come upon you for this thing.” Then the woman said, “Whom shall I bring up for you?” And he said, “Bring up Samuel for me.” When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice; and the woman spoke to Saul, saying, “Why have you deceived me? For you are Saul.” The king said to her, “Do not be afraid; but what do you see?” And the woman said to Saul, “I see a divine being coming up out of the earth.” He said to her, “What is his form?” And she said, “An old man is coming up, and he is wrapped with a robe.” And Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground and did homage.

  Then Samuel said to Saul, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?”

  “Now, sir,” Townsend continued, “that spirit, or whatever it was, if it was true, had language and appearance, had it not?”

  From the prosecutor’s desk, Gerry called out, “I object to the question. I do not oppose my learned friend reading from the Bible in court, because there is as much good to be learned from it by a lawyer conducting a case or in the privacy of one’s closet. But when it goes to the purpose of confounding a witness, and for the purpose of putting theological questions, a witness not skilled might render an answer which would not be proper. I defy him to produce a precedent for such a course.”

  Judge Dowling considered the objection. “The Bible has been read as an authority before the jury,” he said, “but I have never known it to be brought up before a witness on the stand, and I do not intend to permit it.”

  “I have not asked a question yet,” Townsend complained.

  “You ask him his belief,” Judge Dowling answered.

  “I have not asked any question touching his theological knowledge,” Townsend said. “I ask him only as a photographer.”

  “He need not answer.”

  “I put the question, and take the exception.”

  “What is the question?”

  “The question is, if in the reading of that, if the spirit appeared with form and language, would there lie anything remarkable if photography had been introduced and had taken the image?”

  Prosecutor Gerry laughed. “What an absurd theory! Every well-read man—”

  “I have overruled it,” the judge said.

  But Townsend pressed on. “Now, I propose to offer particular texts at once, to save time, so that it may appear upon the record, so that—”

  Dowling cut him off. “You can offer the whole Bible and I will accept it.”

  Undeterred, Townsend referred to his notes and suggested a litany of scriptural references he claimed would support his case.

  “I offer these: the sixteenth chapter of Genesis, as showing appearances in the form of spirits; also the nineteenth chapter of Genesis, first verse; the twenty-first chapter of Genesis, verses 17–19; the twenty-second chapter of Genesis, 10–19; the twenty-second chapter of Numbers, 21–35; the fifth chapter of Joshua, 13–15; the sixth chapter of Judges, 11–23; the thirteenth chapter of Judges, 2–22; the twenty-eighth chapter of 1 Samuel, 3–17; the nineteenth chapter of 1 Kings, 5–8; the first chapter of Ezekiel, 4–6; the seventeenth chapter of Saint Matthew, 1–4; the twenty-seventh chapter of Saint Matthew, 53–54; the twenty-eighth chapter of Saint Matthew, 1–8; the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, 9–11; the fifth chapter of Acts, 18–21; the tenth chapter of Acts, 1–5 and 15; and 1 Corinthians, forty-fourth verse.”

  Mumler’s lawyer had held forth on the Bible for far longer than anyone could have expected. Doing so, he not only put the question before the court of what exactly Christians should find so objectionable about the beliefs to which Mumler’s photographs attested, but hinted at a concern no one had dared to mention: why had belief become the focus of this trial?

  “That is all I desire to ask,” he said.

  Phineas T. Barnum and Ernestine de Faiber. Mathew Brady, 1864.

  CHAPTER 26

  They Paid Their Money, and They Had Their Choice

  “DO YOU BELIEVE in spooks?”

  The prosecutor’s question had been asked and answered in a variety of ways throughout the trial, but posed to P. T. Barnum—expert on all manner of frauds and the people who create them—it finally laid bare the stakes of the proceedings. If the dead truly could make contact with the living, then Mumler’s claims were in the realm of the possible; if they could not, then all the experiences of those who had spoken on his behalf were either delusions or lies.

  Barrel-chested, avuncular, and flashing an impish grin, Barnum weighed the question, then said simply, “I do.”

  It was surely not the answer expected from the state’s surprise star witness. He let it linger only a moment before complicating his response. Reluctant to lose any of the audience that now sat in rapt attention, Barnum added for the benefit of skeptics a winking suggestion of his awareness of the obvious childishness of the idea.

  “It is very easy to see them, if you only believe in them,” he said. “When I was a boy I believed in them, and saw lots of them.”

  The testimony that followed danced around the question he had just implied: which comes first, the seeing or the believing? On this point, the showman would not be pinned down. He had made his career blurring the lines between perception and reality, and he wasn’t about to play it straight now.

  Despite his coy performance in Judge Dowling’s court, Barnum was no Spiritualist. Far from it; a few years earlier, he had written a great deal against such beliefs. During the war years, the nation’s apparent need to commune with the dead had become so intense that he was moved to comment on it at length. As a result of his provocations, he was now Spiritualism’s Public Enemy Number One. Many adherents had become “much exercised in their minds by my letters about them,” Barnum lamented with tongue-in-cheek chagrin. “Some of them fly out at me very much as bumble-bees do at one who stirs up their nest.”

  The Spiritualists had caused him trouble, but he couldn’t help himself wh
en it came to debunking their claims. He regarded table rappers and behind-the-curtain whisperers with the disdain of a master cabinetmaker confronted with a cobbled together scrap-wood box. The amateurish execution of most Spiritualist performances was to Barnum an insult to the humbugger’s craft. “I have devoted a portion of my life to the detection of humbugs,” he explained when prosecutor Gerry asked how he first became aware of the spirit photography phenomenon. “I have never had a personal interview with Mr. Mumler. I have known him by reputation for seven years. I had some correspondence with him. I do not know where the letters are now, but I think perhaps they burned in the museum.”

  Barnum had followed the rise of Spiritualism closely for more than a decade, and took particular note when one of the owners of the jewelry firm where Mumler once worked, Bigelow Brothers & Kennard, had told him that a former employee had left engraving behind for the more lucrative art of photographing ghosts.

  “I wrote to Mumler saying that I wished to expose all the humbugs of the world. He sent me a lot of photographs,” Barnum said, “and I paid him about ten dollars apiece.”

  Though he had displayed these images proudly in the American Museum, he did not think much of them. They were not singular works of a genius of flimflam, but rather easily reproducible by anyone who knew his way around a darkroom.

  “I went to Mr. Bogardus yesterday and asked him to take my photograph with a spirit on it,” Barnum said. As the respected photographer had testified, he had done so without difficulty. Yet for a layman like himself, as for most of those who purchased Mumler’s works, how the trick was done was not immediately apparent. “I could detect no fraud on his part, although I watched him closely,” he said of his time in Bogardus’s studio. But nor was he tempted to believe there was anything remotely supernatural involved. “The spirit on my photograph was that of the departed Abraham Lincoln,” he said as the courtroom filled with laughter. “I didn’t feel any spiritual presence.”

  When the defense’s turn to question Barnum came, Townsend wasted no time. He asked why Barnum ought to be trusted when he had said himself that he was in the humbug business. His greatest successes as a showman—such as the Feejee Mermaid and Joice Heth, the unfortunate enslaved woman represented as George Washington’s nursemaid—had been clear deceptions. How could the stories he told about Mumler be trusted now?

  “I have never been in the humbug business,” Barnum protested. “I have always given the people the worth for their money.

  “The mermaid was represented to me to be what I represented it to be to the public, and I have never been disabused of the idea,” he said. “I have never taken money for things I misrepresented. I may have draped one or two of my curiosities slightly. The nurse of General Washington was bona fide. I paid $1,000 for her. I believed in her at first, but subsequently may have had a little doubt about her. I never put myself out of the way to disabuse the public, even after I began to doubt the genuineness of the old lady.”

  His role as an entertainer, he explained, was only to present phenomena that might require his audience to reconsider their understanding of the world. “They paid their money, and they had their choice. I never showed anything that did not give the people their money’s worth four times over. These pictures that I exhibited, I did so as a humbug, and not as a reality—not like this man who takes ten dollars from people.”

  Unrepentant charlatan though he was, Barnum had a clear sense of when a moral line had been crossed in the making of claims that beggared belief. “If people declare that they privately communicate with or are influenced to write or speak by invisible spirits, I cannot prove that they are deceived or are attempting to deceive me,” he said of Mumler’s work. “But when they pretend to give me communications from departed spirits, I pronounce all such pretensions ridiculous.”

  The medium Harry Gordon with a spirit image handing him a cross. William H. Mumler, 1862–1875.

  CHAPTER 27

  Those Mortals Gifted with the Power of Seeing

  THE THIRD OF MAY was a fine spring Monday in Manhattan, the kind of day one might see sunlight brighten the trunks of the newly green sweetgums in Central Park, or even the faux Egyptian columns of the downtown courthouse, and wonder how it had ever been winter. There could be a sense of certainty on such mornings, despite all experience, that the lingering darkness of the colder months would never return.

  Judge Joseph Dowling awoke that morning with such a sense of certainty. He had first set eyes on William Mumler three weeks before, and since then his courtroom had been the subject of dozens of newspaper stories, few of them presenting Dowling’s handling of the trial in a positive light. Despite years on the bench dispensing hard justice to the city’s worst criminals, it now seemed as if he would be remembered not as a respected police magistrate but as the grand marshal of a Halloween parade.

  More than a month after the spirit photographer’s gambit had made its debut in the press, journalists were still finding ways to peddle his story—perhaps profiting more from the ruse than Mumler himself.

  Far more than he could have anticipated, Dowling had put himself at the center of this drama. For weeks now, he had been on the receiving end of complaints of all kinds. One woman wrote to him greatly agitated that the case was “the first time our belief has been made the subject of a judicial determination.” In her estimation, the judge himself would be responsible for the resulting implications for her faith.

  This sort of thing came with the territory for a man in Dowling’s position. You could not wield the authority to send men to Sing Sing or Blackwell’s Island without being subject to accusations and threats now and then. Yet it was not often he was told that the dead would be watching.

  “Let me say to you that a great responsibility rests upon you,” the woman’s letter continued. “Your decision, which will no doubt be given after a careful consideration of the subject, will be looked after by the ‘spiritual world’ with more than ordinary anxiety.”

  Of course, he had brought this upon himself by agreeing to hear Mumler’s case, but now Dowling was done with ghost stories. His city had talked long enough of death. When he called court to order at ten that Monday morning, he instructed the attorneys for both sides to deliver their concluding remarks. As soon as they had finished, he would offer judgment.

  As protocol dictated, John Townsend rose first to speak for the defense. He began by asking why a relatively minor crime had come to receive such outsized attention. “The case under investigation is one that has excited more than ordinary interest,” he said. “Not only because of its intrinsic merit, but because of the grave charges in which it involved my client. Public attention was not, however, exclusively directed to the prisoner. The interest in the case has spread itself among those who have religious views differing materially from those entertained by the community generally.

  “I will, therefore, direct the mind of the court, in the first place, to the legal aspect of the case, and subsequently will touch upon the belief popularly known as Spiritualism. I am compelled to do this because the question as to what is the belief of Spiritualists has been introduced into this examination, and I should do it, too, for the purpose of showing that there is nothing in the Spiritualistic doctrine that should tend in any way to throw doubt or suspicion on the testimony adduced for the defense.

  “Mumler may be wrong in saying he can give a spirit picture,” Townsend said, “but that does not constitute a crime, unless he knew he could not give one.” The charge against Mumler, the lawyer continued, rested on the accusation that the city marshal Tooker had been defrauded by the photographer because he had paid for a spirit photograph and did not receive one. “When Tooker visited the gallery, he asked if a spirit picture would be guaranteed him, and he was told it would not. Tooker himself expressly swears, on the stand, that Mumler would not and did not guarantee any such thing.

  “Mumler is charged with fraud because the prosecution cannot understand how the spirit f
orm was produced; and owing to the fact that Tooker and those who testify on the part of the People are unable to account for the appearance of these shadowy forms, therefore it is sought to hunt down the prisoner, and fix on him the brand of cheat and humbug.

  “Suppose, when Morse was struggling to put before the world the great fact that by means of electricity communication might be had on the instant between persons hundreds of miles apart, some skeptic should have asked to have a message sent from New York to Boston; that Mr. Morse, confident of the truth of his discovery, should attempt to send the message, but that owing to some cause not clearly known to him, the continuity should be broken, and the attempt to transmit the message should fail. Would such a failure be counted as a fraud by any court in Christendom?

  “And yet Mumler is charged with fraud because the spirit figure which appeared on Tooker’s photograph is not recognized by Tooker as being the representation of any person known to him. Then, again, when these forms are recognized, the recognition is attributed to insanity, or something approaching thereto, which is said to characterize Spiritualists. Now, we have the authoritative statement of the Catholic Council which not long since assembled in Baltimore, called by a mandate of the Pope, that although the Christian denominations in the United States number about ten million members, there are eleven million Spiritualists in the country. Can it be alleged that all these Spiritualists are insane?

  “It is singular that Mr. Mumler, if he be the man represented by the prosecution, was able to produce in his defense such unimpeachable witnesses as have testified on his behalf,” Townsend argued. “Five hundred persons could have given similar testimony to those who had been called for the defense. Mr. Mumler has been here but a few months, and it is wonderful that so many respectable people would come without demand. He obtained pictures of persons dead, who had no pictures taken during life. He took these pictures sometimes without even touching the camera. There is no evidence that Mumler pretended to do what he knew to be false, and consequently the whole element of the crime is wanting.