The Apparitionists Page 17

  The flames had spread from the engine room to the first floor and beyond by the time firefighters arrived. Moving past a Last Supper melted to thirteen pious puddles, the first firemen entering the building charged up the stairs, where they spotted—wonder of wonders in a burning building—a tank full of water. They hacked into the glass with fire axes until a leak sent spray into the air. Then came the deluge. The whales moaned and writhed as the tank drained onto the floorboards; their deaths did little to slow the flames.

  Nothing did. The same New York press that had been wringing drama out of heat stroke for a month now had a genuine disaster to contend with. As one reporter noted with a grand statement worthy of Barnum: “All is gone and nothing saved.” The museum may have been a transcendent intersection of the known and unknown, but there was no humbug that could save it from burning completely to the ground.

  Newspapermen looking for a silver lining announced with relief that a firefighter from Brooklyn had found Ned the seal in the firestorm and carried him out alive.

  While the oil-painted transparencies of Jefferson Davis spread the flames out onto Broadway and even blackened the columns of St. Paul’s Church, inside the museum the flames found their most potent fuel in the portrait gallery. Mumler’s spirit photographs on the wall, Brady’s cartes de visite on their sales carts—no matter the different intentions behind them, they all burned with similar ease, vanishing in plumes barely distinguishable from the haze that shrouded the city.

  Colonel Amos Cushman of the New York State Militia, with an unidentified female spirit image. William Mumler, 1862–1875.

  CHAPTER 18

  A Favorite Haunt of Apparitions

  REPORTS OF THE MUMLERS practicing their art in Boston became scarce after the latest and most damning rounds of investigations, and ceased altogether by the time the war ended in 1865. With the dead still being counted, it might have been a boon season for spirit photography, but Mrs. Stuart’s studio stood shuttered on Washington Street. Though its skylights stayed open, the sun filtering through the panes no longer captured images of either the living or the dead.

  Not that William Mumler had left the business entirely. For a time, he hoped to reinvent himself as a photographic artist who directed his camera only on the mortal side of the veil that separated this world from the hereafter. Like many an image maker out to cash in on scandal, he occupied himself throughout the summer of 1865 with the production of illustrations of Jefferson Davis in a dress, selling them to delighted northerners who could no longer hope to see the spectacle in person after the American Museum had burned.

  The Davis cards Mumler produced showed the disgraced Confederate spliced together with a hand-drawn tableau of two Union soldiers taking the bearded cross-dresser captive at gunpoint. Beneath the comic scene, Mumler wrote with a calligraphic flourish a few words Davis had uttered before meeting his ignoble end: “We are about making a movement that will astonish the world.”

  Crude though it was by later standards, this kind of art itself was an innovation. The idea of marrying a photograph with a more traditional pen-and-ink drawing would later become common in satirical weeklies that soon proliferated. Mumler might have become a pioneer in that field, creating clever photo manipulations that commented on the news of the day.

  But then William Guay returned to town.

  With his Boston aquarium liquidated and his services updating the studio no longer required, the Mumlers’ erstwhile assistant had gone home for a time to Louisiana, where the stigma of his desertion from the Confederate army had apparently been eclipsed by the bitterness of the war’s end. In a place desperate to forget rather than remember, however, photography was no longer as popular as it once was. Guay’s Photographic Temple of Art in New Orleans declared bankruptcy in 1868, and its proprietor drifted north again—apparently to encourage his former employers to give spirit photography another try.

  Mumler did not take much convincing. He had never gotten over the sting of the public rebuke he had received in the Boston press, and remained convinced that he was a truth teller offering spiritual advancement to a world not yet ready to receive it. “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country,” he said, quoting scripture.

  This time, the Mumlers would go somewhere they hoped their talents might be appreciated.

  FROM THE BEGINNING, New York had beckoned to Mumler as the capital of the nation’s photographic industry, the only place to go if he was to rebuild his reputation as a serious practitioner of the art. The city still was home to Morse, Brady, and Gurney, and had been the starting point for Alexander Gardner’s already legendary career. The fact that Barnum had sought Mumler’s work for display surely also contributed to Mumler’s sense that he might find a receptive audience.

  Just a few blocks from the gallery where Brady had his start, and not far from the recently rebuilt American Museum, Mumler found a new place of business in the photo salon of W. W. Silver, a successful portrait artist with six years’ experience. By November of 1868, when the spirit photographer arrived with his family and erstwhile assistant William Guay, he hoped the scandal of his earlier foray before the public had been long forgotten.

  Silver’s studio at 630 Broadway was a tastefully appointed two-story storefront. Customers waited in the parlor downstairs, then ascended a staircase to the sitting room when the photographer was ready for them. Though Mumler was renting space and equipment and making use of Silver’s developing chemicals whenever possible, he immediately made himself at home. He printed cards advertising the services of a “Spirit Photographic Medium,” with no mention whatsoever of who the actual proprietor might be.

  No Spiritualist himself, W. W. Silver was dismayed to see the address he had spent a half-dozen years establishing as a serious place of business associated with so dubious a pursuit. Mumler’s certainty tested his skepticism, however. By the end of his first week providing the newcomer with a studio and a camera, Silver’s interest was sufficiently piqued that he agreed to sit before the spirit photographer’s lens.

  As he had so many times in Boston, Mumler positioned his subject in a chair lit from windows in the ceiling. He placed his hand on the camera, removed the cloth covering the glass, and stood still as the plate was exposed. Silver watched him closely the entire time, so nothing Mumler did with the equipment would escape his notice.

  And yet when he looked at the picture Mumler had made of him, Silver saw the face of another sharing the frame. It was the form of a woman—his mother. He had no doubt about it.

  He still could not call himself a believer, but from then on Silver allowed Mumler the full use of his property, and by extension, his reputation. Soon enough, he accepted that, despite the sign reading SILVER above the door, most of the customers who crossed the threshold did so looking for the man with the power to peer into the world to come. War widows, bereaved parents, successful businessmen gripped by emptiness that fortunes could not fill—the sorrowful parade that had ended abruptly on Washington Street in Boston several years before recommenced at 630 Broadway.

  One day David Hopkins, a well-known wealthy railroad contractor, arrived seeking Mumler’s services. An ardent Christian, he thought there must be some trickery at work and hoped to detect it, but he kept his opinions to himself. In the photograph taken of him, Hopkins saw himself seated before a neighbor who had died earlier that year. He at first would not believe his own eyes, but then took the image home to show others who had known the dead woman. Friends and family gathered around and studied it, and all agreed it must be her. Why she had chosen to visit him, he could not say.

  On another day, Mumler photographed Lutheria Reeves. A housewife of the city, she was still mourning the loss of her eleven-year-old son when a nephew visiting from Vermont, a scientifically minded young man, announced he was going to investigate the rumors of Spiritualist activity on Broadway. Eager to be distracted from her grief, Mrs. Reeves went along, and soon found herself sitting before Mumler’s camera. I
n two separate sittings she received pictures showing herself and her son. To her relief, the boy appeared healthy in one of the photographs, as if the world to come had healed him at last.

  As sorrowful solitaries and in raucous groups of skeptics, they came for months. For a time Mumler’s salon seemed to have the same gravitational pull as Morse’s studio had a generation before. Now, however, it drew not just photographers but scores of men and women, all haunted by loss. And once again, breathless accounts of ghostly happenings began to appear in the press. “The great commotion of the week with us has been the production of spirit-photographs at a gallery up Broadway,” a correspondent wrote in a column that soon was reprinted as far away as San Francisco. “The locale is supposed to be a favorite haunt of apparitions from the ‘world to come’ who propose to distribute their photos among their friends here. This may be a humbug,” the reporter added, “but I am too stupid to discover it myself. I felt it in my boots that the whole thing was a grim joke while I was witnessing the phenomenon, and yet I was helpless to effect a sensible solution to the mystery.”

  Closer to home, the New York Sun noted that Mumler’s work had recently come up at the regular meeting of the New York Spiritualist Conference, which proposed that a committee of their choosing should visit the spirit photographer and investigate his claims. When Mumler told them they were welcome to watch him work, but only if they paid for their pictures in advance, they voted on a proclamation that suggested a fierce division in the ranks of the city’s believers:

  Resolved, That this conference considers that Mr. Mumler does not meet this attempted investigation in such a manner as we should expect from one conscious of having a great truth in his possession, and that while thus refusing to the Committee of this Conference the privilege on fair terms of such an investigation as must necessarily help to confirm his claims if true, he had no right to expect from us as a body the endorsement which some individuals see reason to give him, or any confidence whatever.

  Resolved, That Mr. Mumler’s treatment of the Committee does not prove pro or con the truth or falsity of spirit photographing; neither does the adoption or rejection of the Committee’s report establish one or the other proposition.

  If the ambivalence of the city’s Spiritualist community troubled him, Mumler gave no indication of alarm. Far more of his effort was expended attempting to win over the thriving local photography community, beginning with the meeting of the Photographic Section of the American Institute at the Cooper Union, the same intellectual center that Lincoln had credited with winning him the presidency (with Mathew Brady’s help) nine years before. Since that time, New York’s elite artists and eager amateur camera enthusiasts had been gathering there regularly to make presentations on their craft, its past and its future.

  “Too often in the busy life which most of us lead,” the Photographic Section’s founding president and early Samuel Morse collaborator John William Draper said at the start of one meeting, “we are apt to be looking at the future, occupying ourselves with its promises, and neglecting a review of what we have realized in the past.” Young as photography was, the hundreds now plying the trade in New York recognized they had much to learn from those who had come before, and from each other. As an art form still finding its way, it was collaborative and supportive even as competition among the professionals was fierce. “Experience, they say, is the best of all teachers; but what is experience without reflection, without meditation?” Draper asked. “We advance with all the more certainty and with all the more pleasure, if we look back and deliberately weigh what we have accomplished, and examine without any concealment what are to be considered as our shortcomings.” Toward this end, the meetings of the Photographic Section followed a format of addressing several categories of inquiry, from “improvements in developing chemicals and lenses” to the “application of the art to astronomy in the obtaining of impressions of the heavenly bodies” to “photographic methods of preventing counterfeiting of bank notes.”

  Though it might have been ill advised to share his work with a group that had so recently considered the use of photography in detecting fraud, Mumler arranged to exhibit several of his best images for the Photographic Section’s March 1869 convocation.

  After his photographs had been displayed, he explained that his spirit pictures were best understood not as a religious or metaphysical phenomenon, but as a new application of existing technology that they all would soon come to embrace. He then distributed a booklet he had printed to introduce himself to potential clients. “My object of placing this little pamphlet before the public is to give to those who have not heard a few of the incidents and investigations on the advent of this new and beautiful phase of spiritual manifestations,” Mumler’s booklet said.

  It is now some eight years since I commenced to take these remarkable pictures, and thousands, embracing as they do scientific men, photographers, judges, lawyers, doctors, ministers, and in fact all grades of society, can bear testimony to the truthful likeness of their spirit friends they have received through my mediumistic power.

  What joy to the troubled heart! What balm to the aching breast! What peace and comfort to the weary soul! To know that our friends who have passed away can return and give us unmistakable evidence of a life hereafter—that they are with us, and seize with avidity every opportunity to make themselves known; but alas, in many instances, that old door of sectarianism has closed against them, and prevents their entering once more the portals of their loved ones and be identified.

  But, thank God, the old door is fast going to decay; it begins to squeak on its rusty and time worn hinges; its panels are penetrated by the worm holes of many ages, through which the bright, effulgent rays of the spiritual sun begin to shine, and in a short time it will totter and tumble to the earth.

  Boston has been the field of my labors most of the time since I commenced taking these wonderful pictures, where I have been visited by people from all parts of the Union; but at the earnest solicitation of many friends, I have concluded to make a tour through the principal cities of the United States, that all may avail themselves of this opportunity to obtain a likeness of their loved ones.

  Rather than insist that his powers were unique, Mumler suggested to the Photographic Section that any photographer might similarly take up this new application of the art. And if any were interested, naturally he would be available to provide instruction at a reasonable rate.

  DESPITE MUMLER’S EARNEST EFFORTS to enlist new apostles of spirit photography, just one attendee of the Cooper Union meeting sought him out to learn more.

  Patrick V. Hickey had been born in Dublin and remained in Ireland long enough to complete what a later biographer called “a brilliant collegiate course” before the age of twenty. Within a few years of his emigration he had sufficiently acclimated to his new country that he had risen to the rank of science correspondent of the New York World. In an era of unprecedented innovation, it was a coveted beat that kept him constantly moving through a city that at times seemed peopled entirely with inventors. Perfect for an ambitious young journalist out to make a name for himself.

  Hickey’s employer, a decade-old daily owned and published by the former Confederate sympathizer Manton Marble, had seen its share of controversy, no less so than in 1864 when it had published a forged statement purportedly made by Abraham Lincoln calling for an “immediate and peremptory draft” of 400,000 additional troops at a time when the Union victory seemed to be in sight. Marble had been arrested and the World building put under armed guard for undermining the war effort, and ever after the broadsheet had tried to debunk hoaxes rather than be duped by them.

  Hickey regularly attended photographic exhibitions, but had never before seen the kinds of pictures Mumler put on display. The spirit photographer was probably not unknown to him, however. The previous month, the World’s chief rival, the New York Sun, had run an account of the goings-on at 630 Broadway that would have made any self-respecting scien
ce correspondent cringe. “What our reporter thinks about it he declines to say,” the Sun noted. “If there is a trick used, he does not know what it is. He gives us the facts, and we give them to our readers, to think about as they please. The whole thing is a marvel anyway, and deserves to be investigated by scientific men.”

  To a man of P. V. Hickey’s intelligence and aspirations, this was an unignorable challenge. He decided he was just the scientific investigator needed to call Mumler on his ruse. Armed with his nose for a good story, and urged on by his tabloid writer’s competitive streak, Hickey made an unannounced visit to the spirit photographer’s studio.

  At first glance, W. W. Silver’s place of business seemed an ordinary photographic gallery. Far more bustling than he had expected, it was, Hickey noted, not a one-man operation, but was staffed by a small team, including a woman who took a special interest in arranging the subjects to be photographed. Others in the studio presented themselves as those who had previously engaged Mumler’s services, but in their efforts at conversation they seemed less like clients and more like salesmen. They insisted to Hickey that paying ten dollars for a dozen images made by Mumler was a bargain, even if it was well above the going rate. “Many persons would gladly give a thousand dollars to obtain the likeness of a deceased friend or relative,” an apparently satisfied customer said.

  All told, Hickey spent an hour that day observing the comings and goings before Mumler’s camera. It did not take nearly that long for the journalist, skeptical to begin with, to be convinced there was something amiss, and likely a story to be told.

  Yet if his initial aim had been merely to write an article attacking the spirit photographer’s credibility, something about the visit altered his plan. He had entered 630 Broadway as an investigator, and might have reported a fine story of his brief interactions with Mumler’s associates and the doubts they raised.