The Apparitionists Read online

  Even in Manhattan, usually so quick to move on to the novel and the new, there remained something heavy in the July air. After four years of losses so numerous they would never be fully known, it was a time when more Americans than ever believed their land must be haunted. Grief clung like humidity on the skin. While the mercury flirted with triple digits, the avenues filled with soldiers anxious to shed their blue woolen sack coats. Every day it seemed another regiment passed through the Battery Barracks at the foot of the city, returning from the South by steamship on their way to the rail lines that would take them on the last legs of their journeys home. Those hoping to find slightly less oppressive weather once back on northern soil were sorely disappointed. No matter if they joined the maimed housed by the hundreds in the nuns’ hospital at Central Park, or marched miraculously whole of body through Union Square, they arrived in a summer as searing as it had been in the battle-scarred places they had left behind.

  Some mornings in the first week of July began near ninety degrees. By afternoon, outdoor workers dropped from sunstroke in the street. Newspapermen, well versed in the art of transforming injury into column inches, carried on with daily casualty reports as if the war were still raging, though now with a new enemy. New York City, the Herald said, had become “too torrid for human endurance.” Evidence of this mapped the boroughs: at Third Avenue and Eighty-Fourth Street, an Irish laborer was “prostrated” by the heat and transported to Bellevue Hospital. In Brooklyn, a teamster fainted under the midday glare and was crushed by the wheels of his cart as it crossed Myrtle Avenue. In Greenwich Village, a private of the 1st New York Cavalry Regiment died of heat exhaustion barely a week after mustering out.

  For relief from all this—from the heat, from the grief, from the malaise both inspired—there was really only one place to go: Barnum’s American Museum, which had the undeniable distinction of being a semipublic space in a sweltering city that maintained a tomb-like cool throughout the summer.

  The permanent draft moving through five floors of exhibit rooms and performance halls was rare enough that Barnum had made the temperature inside the museum one of his starring attractions. Daily advertisements in the press boasted of a revolutionary new ventilation system that diffused thirty thousand cubic feet of air per minute through its chambers with the force of a steady seaside breeze. The recently installed network of fans and water pipes ensured that the thirteen wax figures of Barnum’s life-size Last Supper would not go soft, that his mermaid pieced together from a monkey’s torso and a fish tail would not wilt and show its stitches, and that the two living white whales imported from the North Atlantic swam in a tank as cool as the waters of home. Ned the Learned Seal leaped out of the water and played his hand organ in delight.

  Did anyone paying the twenty-five-cent admission price know what a cubic foot of air might feel like? Never mind—on these hot and somber days when it seemed you could survive a war only to be killed by daylight, thirty thousand of them sounded like just the thing.

  Such masterly marketing of air was the most literal expression yet of what Barnum had long called his “puffery,” his instinctive understanding of how best to inflate and exploit an audience’s collective desires—or, as he put it, the “insatiate want of human nature.”

  History generally remembers P. T. Barnum as a confidence man more than willing to fleece the gullible public. But he was less interested in playing his patrons for fools than in giving them what they wanted. If they often wanted to be played for fools, well, it was only his duty as a showman to oblige. While he probably never uttered the words most famously attributed to him, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” he did offer a more interesting assessment of the human condition where perception was concerned. “The American people,” he said, “like to be fooled.”

  After all, to be tricked—“humbugged,” in Barnum’s English—was in some instances not merely to be lied to. It was to be coaxed from one understanding of reality to another. It was to make the unreal real, if briefly, simply by experiencing it as such. To be humbugged at the American Museum, its proprietor insisted, might even be seen as an elevating experience. It was, in its way, transcendent. In a place where the city’s otherwise inescapable heat could be thwarted, the usual rules of living seemed no longer to apply. Perhaps even the terms of life’s end were open to negotiation.

  NOT FAR INSIDE THE entrance to the American Museum, one of the latest featured attractions made this possibility plain. With his ear ever to the ground to detect far-off rumblings of the new and the strange, Barnum had recently learned of the existence of images purporting to provide proof positive of life after death. He had immediately purchased as many as he could lay his hands on.

  The fruits of this effort were now arrayed in a small section of the museum’s impressive portrait gallery. The series of framed photographs showed several views of the same bespectacled man with long curly hair and a somewhat quizzical gaze. A few museum patrons might have recognized him as the eccentric New Englander turned gold-mining adventurer William Cornell “Colorado” Jewett, who had recently made a name for himself—and not a particularly good name—as a deluded busybody who had spent the war years insinuating to foreign governments that he had the authority to broker a truce between the Union and the rebel states.

  Curious figure though he was, Jewett was not in fact the true subject of Barnum’s display. Of far greater interest—both to those who came to see the photographs and to the man who had hung them—were the specters floating within each frame: ghostly faces staring down at the odd-looking fellow from above, each seeming to provide a partial explanation for the otherworldly expression the man wore.

  What little Barnum knew in July of 1865 of William Mumler, the photographer who had made these images, was that he then lived in Boston, the spiritual center of Spiritualist America. He knew, too, that Mumler was a man of science, and that he was probably exceedingly shrewd. Barnum judged him to be “ingenious,” and noted with evident respect that he was no mere artist or con man but “a scientific chemist.”

  It was perhaps this that most intrigued Barnum. How could a scientist, a man of reason, be drawn into such an elaborate hoax?

  Not that the charms of the photographs were entirely lost on him. He found the images “remarkably ghostlike and supernatural,” he later said, and believed that a man like Mumler must have been as amused by them as he was.

  As Barnum understood the story of their creation, Mumler had originally made this type of image by accident while teaching himself the photographic process. It was only when prominent Spiritualists learned of the pictures and offered money for them that Mumler had headed down the swindler’s path. The “spirit photographer” now sold copies of his pictures for ten dollars apiece. This was many times the going rate for photographs of any kind, but then he wasn’t really selling photographs. No, Mumler was selling solace, which any salesman worth his salt would not sell cheap.

  Barnum knew such temptations well. One of his most popular publications was called The Art of Money Getting. The years spent in devotion to this art had been financially turbulent but ultimately rewarding beyond a scale he never could have imagined. Barnum understood the allure of a fast buck as well as anyone, and he never let himself forget how quickly it could lead even a good man astray. “Money is in some respect like fire,” he said, “it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.”

  In any case, the prospect of fortune seemed to be only part of Mumler’s motivation. There was also clearly an emotional impulse behind it all. Barnum had heard of grieving mothers who had gone to Mumler desperate for images of children lost. He had heard of widows seeking final visions of their husbands, and of widowers eager for a last glimpse of departed wives. Every story offered a comforting suggestion that the partnerships made in life were not so easily dissolved.

  Barnum at the time had been married thirty-five years to a wife he called the “best woman in the world”; they had four daughters together, one of
whom died just before her second birthday. Who would not want the solace of a parting glance made permanent, a suggestion—no matter how improbable—that love endured? The years of Mumler’s earliest photographic activity had coincided with the steepest decline in population the nation had ever known. Six hundred thousand Americans here and then gone as suddenly and as finally as Barnum’s lost daughter. For those convinced of Mumler’s powers, ten dollars was never better spent.

  The spirit photograph display was not Barnum’s only foray into the gray area between life and death. His first promotional triumph, thirty years earlier, had involved an elderly woman named Joice Heth who seemed to have attained immortality because, it was claimed, she had served as George Washington’s wet nurse more than a century before. With the nation’s origins now beyond living memory, Barnum sensed the American hunger to make direct contact with someone present at its naked and needy infancy. When the huge crowds the supposedly 161-year-old woman had first drawn dwindled, Barnum spread a rumor that Joice Heth was not a living person at all, but a clockwork automaton. He staged this performance until the day she died, and then he sold more than a thousand tickets to her autopsy so the world could judge for itself.

  Then just twenty-five years old, Barnum had taken a common type of traveling, carnival-style entertainment popular in the early nineteenth century and, by making it a spectacle fit for the urban press, had expanded its relevance. The questions he encouraged his audience to ask about the death and life of Joice Heth—who, it must be added, was not in fact an automaton but a living woman, and a former slave, estimated by the doctor who performed her autopsy to be in her eighties—were those that blurred the line of science and spirit. Was there some medical explanation for her alleged longevity? Had such intimate contact with the secular saint George Washington granted her immunity from death?

  Barnum had become famous with the Joice Heth performances in the 1830s in part because the mechanistic view of the locomotive age fueled audiences’ desire to understand the invisible engines that drove all living things. Thirty years later, when the nation was consumed more with grieving than with gadgets, Mumler’s images offered visions of ghosts in the machine.

  THOUGH THEY HUNG IN the American Museum for some time, the spirit pictures of William Mumler were not the photographs most closely associated with Barnum and his world. That distinction belonged to the works of an artist far better known than Mumler would ever be.

  Barnum was what we would call today an early adopter. Just as he had sought out the newest and best ventilation system available to cool his museum, he embraced other novel technologies as well. He was likely the first to use illuminated signs in Manhattan, making him the pioneer among those who turned a stretch of Broadway into the Great White Way. He was undoubtedly the first—and probably also the last—to use steam engines to pipe river water into a city building for the purpose of filling a custom-made tank for the trained seal Ned and his newest companions, a pair of beluga whales.

  Through his long career, Barnum embraced no technology as naturally as photography. By the 1860s the various methods of permanently affixing images to glass, tin, or paper were no longer so new. They were in fact ubiquitous. Broadway was home to no fewer than two hundred photographic studios. The most famous, that of Mathew Brady, had for many years been located directly across the street from the museum. A sitting before Brady’s camera was an essential stop for all those who imagined themselves as players on the world stage. Along with St. Paul’s Church and the museum itself, Brady’s studio established the corner of Ann Street and Broadway as a crossroads of image-making, a place where one’s soul, one’s appearance, and one’s understanding of the world could be transformed.

  Brady had been a Barnum collaborator for years. He had photographed nearly all of the museum’s human-oddity performers, providing a never-ending stream of keepsake cartes de visite, which could be purchased in the museum. Brady and Barnum had each reaped the benefits of successive generations of misfits and exiles: men, women, and children who because of physical defects or intentionally altered features had come to call the American Museum home. These were the princes, jesters, and courtesans of King Barnum’s court, and Brady was the court’s artist, capturing likenesses of them all. The motley assortment gathered into his camera’s dark chamber early in his career suggested his true calling was to catalog life’s great variety.

  But that hot July Barnum had something no photographic studio could boast: images captured by the famous Brady in the same gallery as those concocted by the infamous Mumler.

  ALL YEAR LONG THE American Museum drew a crowd, but summer mornings were especially good for business. Women in petticoats and men in straw hats flocked to a place so impossibly comfortable it seemed that human ingenuity could confound nature itself.

  The museum’s patented circulation system was the work of the father of steam heat, Joseph Nason. Not long before Barnum had brought a machine-made chill to the premier tourist attraction in Manhattan, Nason and Company had provided the same service to the U.S. Capitol in Washington. That Barnum would turn to the best in the country for his patrons’ comfort surprised no one; his museum was another kind of American capital, the spiritual center of a nation always at the intersection of known and unknown.

  Such great comfort came at a cost, however. Its supernaturally pleasant air, the inviolability of its otherworldly sights—all this relied on machines kept carefully out of public view. Coal-fired boilers and steam engines chugged away endlessly underground. Paradise above was made possible only by an inferno below.

  Midway through the month, beneath the “always cool and delightful” salons with which Barnum had made his name, something went wrong. To explain his singular success in a snake-oil era when hucksters were everywhere, he once said, “My ‘puffing’ was more persistent, my advertising more audacious, my posters more glaring, my pictures more exaggerated, my flags more patriotic, and my transparencies more brilliant.” These “transparencies” were the massive backlit painted banners that draped the museum’s façade, announcing his newest attractions with letters that glowed as if written in fire.

  The latest transparency was in its way the most audacious, for it made light even of the war, though it was barely won. The latest would also prove to be the last.

  At the time, the papers were full of calls for the head of Jefferson Davis. The former president of the Confederacy had recently been taken into federal custody. Just before his arrest in May of 1865, Davis made a decision that would haunt him. As a Union general reported, he “hastily put on one of his wife’s dresses” while attempting to escape.

  In fact, he was apprehended wearing not a dress but his wife’s raincoat and shawl, which his defenders argued were nearly unisex in the style of the day. To the northern press, however, the story was too good to check. Newspapers and magazines rushed to publish sketches of Davis as a bearded southern belle. “Nobody will attempt to make a hero of such material,” one account said. “He will appear in petticoats in history.”

  Barnum instantly announced that he would pay $500 for Davis’s dress, and sent a telegram to his museum manager: “Put outside a picture of Jeff Davis in petticoats, represented as running, exposing his boots.” The mere possibility that it would soon be on display at the Manhattan headquarters of Barnum’s entertainment empire set the nation abuzz. “If Barnum can get possession of the rig in which Davis was taken,” one newspaper predicted, “it will be worth an overflowing oil well to him.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wryly predicted, “Before a month expires, the dress . . . will be in every museum in the country—genuine, of course, in every instance.”

  Since the actual dress did not exist, Barnum had to improvise. Banners painted with the feminized image of the Confederate leader draped the museum’s façade. A song from the war promised to “hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree,” but Barnum had other plans. Why hang a man once when you could mock him for profit all season long?

  Inside the mus
eum, Barnum installed a Davis display he called “The Belle of Richmond.” With a wax figure of a man wearing a dress similar to those seen in the sketches that had already made the story notorious, it might have enjoyed an epic run. But the fervor that made it a hit also doomed it from the start.

  THE FIRE THAT BROKE out at the American Museum on July 13, 1865, was a destructive marvel. Thirty thousand people turned out to watch the conflagration while Barnum’s menagerie spilled out onto Broadway. In the midst of this mayhem, Jefferson Davis came tumbling down. As the crowd jeered, a bearded mannequin dressed in women’s attire was hurled into the street, its skirt acting briefly as a parachute. “As Jeff made his perilous descent,” the New York Times reported, “his petticoats again played him false, and as the wind blew them about, the imposture of the figure was exposed.” Landing to “cheers and uncontrollable laughter,” the statue was then promptly hanged, just as the song suggested.

  While the cause of the fire remained a mystery, many assumed arson. “It is suspected,” the Pittsburgh Gazette reported, “the guilty parties were rebel sympathizers offended by the prominence Barnum has given to the manner of Jeff Davis’ capture.” A Confederate partisan who witnessed the blaze wrote that the banners painted with Davis’s image “gave the flames such an impetus, that they could not be controlled.” That diehard Confederates had started the fire made a good story, and Barnum spread it far and wide. He had many other enemies as well, not least of all various Spiritualists, though an attack such as this did not seem their style.

  Rumors of arson aside, it is far more likely that the conflagration began within the machinery beneath the museum, in the fires that kept the air cool. The technology that had made the fantasy possible was also its undoing.