The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  This honor was not without irony. Saint Gregory, who was pope in the sixth century, spoke at length about spirits and drew distinctions between those with bodies and those without, and perhaps—who knows?—would have been far more convinced by Mumler’s images than Hickey was. To the journalist’s chagrin, similar interpretations of religious tradition also accounted for the most unexpected legacy of the fame Mumler had earned through a trial in which scripture played a central role. Seeing a marketing possibility in the uproar around spirit pictures, an enterprising American publisher soon produced an edition of the Bible with “photographic portraits of Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus Christ, and the Apostles,” all attained with techniques as mysterious as Mumler’s own.

  Mumler’s accomplice William Guay seems to have left photography behind after the charges against his employer were dropped. Though it cannot be known with certainty what became of Guay, several years later a bank clerk sharing his name in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was arrested for attempting to leave stacks of blank paper in the vault in place of cash. Given the trajectory of both his wanderings and his career, it seems likely to be the same man.

  Of the legal minds who worked to determine the spirit photographer’s fate for three weeks in 1869, the lead attorneys for the defense and the prosecution both went on to distinguish themselves with apparently no ill effects of having defended a swindler or lost an open-and-shut case.

  In 1874, Elbridge Gerry founded the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, also known as the Gerry Society, which promised “to rescue little children from the cruelty and demoralization which neglect, abandonment and improper treatment engender” and “to aid by all lawful means in the enforcement of the laws intended for their protection and benefit.” Those tasked with enforcing such laws, which often included rounding up truants playing in the streets, were known as “Gerrymen” and became infamous among the city’s tenement dwellers as child snatchers, figures of fear rather than salvation.

  Gerry’s other efforts at social reform had similarly ambiguous results, and returned him for a time to lengthy discussions of death. From 1886 to 1888, he led a committee of prominent New Yorkers to reconsider capital punishment. After looking into thirty-four methods of execution (discussed alphabetically in their published report: dismemberment, drawing and quartering, drowning, exposure to wild beasts, flaying alive, flogging . . .), Gerry and his colleagues determined that the current preferred means, hanging, was a medieval practice best abandoned. Much as Mumler had been inspired by science in his visions of the afterlife, Gerry turned to technology for a solution. Consulting with Thomas Edison, the Gerry Commission adopted a plan to build the first electric chair. The gallows kept ever at the ready would no longer trouble defendants brought to the Tombs.

  Defense attorney John Townsend could not claim similarly broad social influence, but he did continue to build on his reputation as the Fighting Lawyer. Shortly after winning Mumler’s freedom, Townsend turned his attention to corruption in the courts. His efforts ultimately brought the downfall of three members of the state judiciary and eight police magistrates, including Judge Dowling.

  Among the Spiritualists, opinion regarding Mumler’s legacy remained divided, but the battle lines shifted over time. In New York, the early supporter Andrew Jackson Davis eventually renounced spirit photography as a fraud, while in Boston, the formerly reticent medium Fannie Conant reconsidered.

  At the Banner of Light offices, Conant carried on with her work of channeling the dead, including the spirit of her longtime collaborator Lieutenant William Berry, who returned just once more to her séance circle to tell his Spiritualist friends why he had not reported back from the Summerland as often as many had wished he would. It had been eight years since he had last appeared among them, and the medium hoped a final word delivered through the Message Department might help them keep from losing faith.

  “At the urgent solicitations of many of my friends, I presume to occupy this place for a few moments,” Conant said in the trance voice she used for Berry. “They want to know why it is that I have not returned, manifesting through the Banner of Light. They expected it long ago, they said. They expected much of me. They are disappointed. They thought I would bring them news that would perhaps eclipse all that they had ever obtained. They thought I was so well posted on spiritual matters here, that I should be able to do much for them.” Yet despite what one might think of being dead, the afterlife could keep a man busy. “I have been largely occupied in the spirit-world being the publisher of a daily journal very much larger than the dear old Banner,” the medium’s Berry voice said. “I have an able corps of assistants . . . Notwithstanding all their assistance, I have enough to do, and have found it much more profitable to stay behind the scenes.”

  His hectic schedule aside, Conant added, the real reason Berry had stayed away might be difficult for his mortal audience to hear: the more he had learned of the realm of the living from his privileged position outside it, the less inclined he was to help them. “I am afraid, seeing all I am able to see of their prejudices,” the supposed spirit of William Berry said, “that if I were to stand too near I would be likely to use the mallet instead of moral suasion. Instead of going on month after month, and year after year, trying to prove the immortality of the soul, and the power of the soul to return after death, I should speedily open those blockheads and let the soul out where it would fly higher and see clearer. And as we spirits are largely possessed of power over matter, I might be tempted to make a bad use of it.”

  Berry was not heard from again in Fannie Conant’s circle, but she continued giving séances until her death in 1875. Shortly before then, she had sufficiently overcome her uncertainty about Mumler’s abilities to sit before his camera a number of times. There is no evidence that, upon leaving her physical body behind, she returned for the purpose of haunting his photographs.

  Mary Todd Lincoln with the spirit image of her husband. William Mumler, 1872.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Mumler Process

  AFTER THE END of his ordeal in the Tombs, William Mumler seemed on course toward the same bleak financial future as Mathew Brady. He had been cleared of the charges of fraud and larceny, but his reputation was so tarnished in New York that he knew he could not remain.

  He moved back to the place where it all began, Boston, and soon recommenced taking spirit photographs, though now with far less fanfare. The trial had made him sufficiently well known that he could advertise his services in newspapers throughout the country and sell spirit photographs by mail, without the risks inherent in letting too many people peek behind the darkroom curtain.

  As Spiritualism itself waned, the Mumlers made an effort to spread the word of Hannah’s ongoing work as a healer. Updating her husband’s cure for dyspepsia, Hannah began to manufacture and sell a product she called Mesmerine, “a clairvoyant remedy” that “acts on the blood through the digestive organs.” In time, she had enough patients that even the mainstream press took notice.

  “One of the most powerful imparters of the Life Principal (animal magnetism) is Mrs. Dr. H. F. Mumler, of this city,” the Boston Globe reported. “By simply placing her hands upon the head of the patient, the Vital Element is felt coursing through every nerve and tissue of the body, displacing disease and imparting renewed health and vigor to the invalid. When Dr. Mumler is mesmerized, she sees the whole Internal working of the system, detecting the disease at once and prescribing its remedy . . . Mrs. Dr. Mumler has met with unparalleled success in treating every form of disease, both chronic and acute, which statement is supported by the testimony and affidavits of many of our best and well-known citizens, both in public and private life.”

  As Hannah’s star ascended in the world of healers, Mumler continued to take the occasional spirit photograph, but his interests began to wander further into the technical side of his art.

  Despite the best efforts of so many investigators, no one was able to solve the riddle o
f exactly how Mumler had created his apparitions. One reason for this mystery was perhaps that Mumler had found new ways to control the chemical reactions on which all photography at the time depended. The ultimate fruit of his mastery of manipulation was a method of printing images directly from photographs to newsprint. The “Mumler process,” as it was known, allowed printers to forgo the usual step of having a photographic plate copied by hand by an illustrator or wood engraver, revolutionizing the ability to reproduce images by the thousands.

  The illustrated magazine American Punch, the U.S. answer to the London journal of humor and satire with a similar name, is generally regarded as a precursor to such publications as Time and Life. Though he was just the sort of character who might have received a skewering in its pages, Mumler played a role in making such publications possible. “‘Punch’ depends upon what is known as the ‘Mumler’ process of photo-engraving, and comes from the establishment of the Photo-electrotype Company of Boston,” according to an 1879 description of the magazine. “This process offers numerous advantages, which, to the wood-engraver, are wholly unknown.”

  The editors of the publication Facts likewise credited him with making their work possible. “Nearly all the pictures which have been published in the Facts magazine during the last four years have been made by the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston, of which Mr. Mumler was the originator and treasurer. Other companies who have the right to use Mr. Mumler’s patents are doing similar business in other cities. The process makes it possible to obtain a facsimile of handwriting or any line drawing desired, at much less cost than it could be done by wood engraving. The illustrations of the daily papers are many of them made by this process in a few hours.”

  Mumler helped usher in a new era in which the news, until then mostly reliant on text, entered the picture business. Not only did photographs become ubiquitous, they emerged as the standard of proof for whether or not something had actually happened. Barnum would have enjoyed the irony: a likely falsifier of images played a pivotal role in the creation of the image-obsessed culture that still defines the nation.

  By the time Mumler died in 1884, fifteen years after he walked free from the Tombs, he had accomplished enough that spirit photography appeared only as an afterthought in the obituary provided by the Photographic Times:

  MR. WILLIAM H. MUMLER, a well-known inventor and treasurer of the Photo-Electrotype Company, died at his residence in Boston. He was born in Hanover Street, Boston, in 1832, and if he had lived a few days longer would have reached his fifty-second year.

  He first began business as an engraver, and in the twenty years in which he followed that profession attained considerable prominence, but becoming much interested in photography, he entered that business and succeeded in securing a wide reputation as a photograph publisher. He had much inventive genius and a taste for experiment, which finally resulted in the discovery of what is known as the Mumler process, by which photo-electrotype plates are produced and as readily printed from as wood-cuts on an ordinary printing-press, and at great saving of expense. A company was formed about seven years ago, and he had been treasurer of it ever since.

  He had lately been further experimenting upon improvements in dry plates for instantaneous photography, and the mental and physical strain brought on a disease which became fatal in about two weeks. The deceased at one time gained considerable notoriety in connection with spirit photographs.

  It was without a doubt his “considerable notoriety” that caused his most famous subject to return to his studio.

  When Mary Todd Lincoln arrived at Mumler’s salon in 1872, it was the second time the former first lady had sought out the spirit photographer’s services. If she had followed the court proceedings against him—which, given her interest in Spiritualism, she almost certainly had—she was apparently not put off by the impression given by many newspaper accounts that he was a grifter out to swindle the foolish or the vulnerable.

  Dressed entirely in black, wearing a bonnet with a bow that obscured her face, Mrs. Lincoln clearly did not want to be recognized. The Mumlers would later claim that Hannah saw that the spirit of the martyred president had come with her, however, and so they knew immediately who she must be.

  Mumler seated and posed this unexpected guest as any photographer would, folding her hands one over the other just as Mathew Brady had done for her a decade earlier, when she was bound for the White House and neither her family nor her country had known the great losses to come.

  The picture she left with that day would become the most famous spirit photograph of all. It shows the former first lady sitting in the lower left corner of the frame, a faint outline of her husband seeming to comfort her from behind. He cradles her shoulders as if he is helping her on with her cloak.

  To some, the photograph—the last of Mary Lincoln’s life—is evidence of either her gullibility or her madness. To others, it suggests not just the psychological damage done to one woman, but the suffering of the nation that she represents in her grief. To her, it was simply the kind of comfort that made all other meanings irrelevant.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK WOULD not have been possible without the support and encouragement of the MacDowell Colony, which provided me with space to work and think in the early stages of writing.

  I am grateful also to the Baltimore photographer John Milliker for initiating me into the mysteries of the wet-plate collodion process, and for answering many questions about the chemicals, the risks, and the art involved in making images in the nineteenth century.

  The editorial team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, particularly Bruce Nichols, Nicole Angelero, and Larry Cooper, helped this book take shape from initial inspiration to the final draft, while throughout the process my longtime agent, Kathleen Anderson, has been as encouraging and supportive as ever.

  All remaining thanks are due to my family—my wife, Gwen, and my daughters, Annick and Jeannette—for accompanying me on explorations of Civil War battlefields, indulging my interest in ghosts, and believing me when I said it was all part of the same story.

  Notes and Sources

  Though The Apparitionists is the first attempt to consider William Mumler’s story in the context of early-American daguerreotypists and the photographers of the Civil War, I have relied on many books on these and other subjects to stitch together several historical strands into a single narrative.

  The secondary sources to which I have turned for inspiration, leads, and understanding of the times in which Mumler lived include D. Mark Katz, Witness to an Era: The Life and Photographs of Alexander Gardner (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999); Bob Zeller, The Civil War in Depth (New York: Chronicle Books, 1997); Robert Wilson, Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Roy Meredith, Mr. Lincoln’s Camera Man: Mathew B. Brady (New York: Scribner, 1946; Dover reprint, 1974); James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography (London: British Library Board, 2006); Clément Chéroux et al., eds., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); and Louis Kaplan’s collection of Mumler-related documents, The Strange Case of William Mumler (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

  I am also indebted to other researchers on nineteenth-century Spiritualism, including Marc Demarest, whose blog Chasing Down Emma: Resolving the Contradictions of, and Filling in the Gaps in, the Life, Work and World of Emma Hardinge Britten (http://ehbritten.blogspot.com/) is a treasure trove of information about Spiritualists, their beliefs, and their communities. My work was also made much easier by the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (http://www.iapsop.com/), whose digitized collection of nineteent
h-century newspapers served as a primary research portal for this book.

  PROLOGUE

  page

  1 “gray, begrimned,” “the tomb of purity, order, peace, and law”: Junius Henri Browne, The Great Metropolis: a Mirror of New York (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1869), 528.

  2 “fraud,” “felony,” “larceny”: New York Tribune, May 4, 1869.

  2 “The Tombs has a history”: Browne, 530.

  3 “He belongs to the heavy order of the Spiritualists”: Emporia Weekly News (Kansas), May 14, 1869.

  3 “athletic” or “robust”: “Spirit Photographs: A New and Interesting Development,” Journal of the Photographic Society of London, January 15, 1863.

  4 “hardened and degraded creatures”: Browne, 529.

  6 “The history of all pioneers of new truths is relatively the same”: William Mumler, “The Personal Experiences of William Mumler in Spirit Photography, Part 1,” reprinted in Banner of Light 36, no. 15 (January 9, 1875), 1.

  6 “every fibre of his body rebelled”: “Topics of Today,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 13, 1869.

  6 “Spiritualism is the future church”: “Spiritualism,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 13, 1869.

  7 “What is it you’ve got to say”: New York Herald, April 13, 1869.

  8 “The intensity of the interest”: “Spiritualism in Court,” New York Daily Tribune, April 24, 1869.

  8 “The case of the people against William H. Mumler”: Harper’s Weekly 13, no. 645 (May 4, 1869), 289.

  8 “The accused does not know”: “Spiritual Photography,” The Illustrated Photographer, May 28, 1869.