The Apparitionists Read online

  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 on Social Media

  Copyright © 2017 by Peter Manseau

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  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)

  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

  v1.0917

  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 si
lver 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 m
en, 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.