Spirit Photography

Spirit photography began with William H. Mumler, a Boston jewellery engraver who discovered the effect by pure accident, or so he always claimed, that a self-portrait he developed in 1861 showed a faint second figure he identified as his deceased cousin. Mumler turned the effect into a business, photographing paying clients, most famously a widely circulated image purporting to show the widowed Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghostly figure of her assassinated husband Abraham Lincoln standing behind her, and the practice found an eager, paying market among the bereaved, particularly following the enormous casualties of the American Civil War and, decades later, the First World War, when spirit photography enjoyed a second wave of popularity across Britain and continental Europe.

The trade spread to other named practitioners internationally, including the French photographer Edouard Buguet, who built a substantial Paris and London clientele in the early 1870s producing similarly composed images of deceased loved ones appearing alongside living sitters, charging fees that made the trade a genuinely profitable business rather than a private hobby practiced only among believers.

Spirit photography drew legal scrutiny from its earliest years, precisely because it was sold as a paid service to grieving customers rather than practiced as a private belief. Mumler stood trial for fraud and larceny in New York in 1869; showman P. T. Barnum, among other witnesses, testified that an ordinary photographer could produce a convincing spirit photograph through simple double exposure, and the court heard extensive testimony on the technique, but the judge ultimately ruled the prosecution had not proven fraud beyond reasonable doubt in Mumler's specific case and acquitted him, while noting he remained personally convinced deception was likely; Mumler's professional reputation never recovered regardless of the acquittal.

The Buguet case reached a more decisive legal conclusion: a June 1875 Paris police sting operation found that plates Buguet was about to use already carried pre-exposed images, and a subsequent raid on his studio uncovered two dummies dressed in white sheets, of different sizes to represent adults and children, along with nearly three hundred mounted photographs of heads used to compose fraudulent images. Buguet confessed and was sentenced, along with an associate, to a year in prison and a fine; he later retracted the confession, claiming it had been extracted under a false promise of leniency, but the physical evidence found in his studio was not in dispute. Between the Mumler trial's exposed double-exposure technique and Buguet's documented studio props and conviction, spirit photography's method was established in court twice within six years, even though only one of the two practitioners was formally convicted.