The Apparitionists Read online

  To Mumler, the great injustice was that he alone had been arrested for making images that held a mirror up to the living and asked them to consider what lay beyond. If the root of his transgression was to be found in the notion that human ingenuity might be harnessed to once again see those who had passed on, why was it not all photography now on trial?

  “The history of all pioneers of new truths is relatively the same,” Mumler would later say, “and happy is the man who is not the chosen one to meet the prejudices of a skeptical world in the development of some new discovery.”

  ACROSS THE CITY, it had been a week full of consternation over other supposedly new spiritual discoveries. A few days before, at Christ Church in midtown, an Episcopal liturgy had been interrupted when the organist abruptly stopped playing and ran from the choir loft, complaining that “every fibre of his body rebelled” against taking part in worship he had suddenly realized was a “burlesque.” On the same day, at a meeting of Methodists, debate on the question of allowing women to preach nearly brought the congregation to blows. And in Brooklyn, a hundred Spiritualists like those gathered in the courtroom on Mumler’s behalf had met to hear an inspirational lecture on how their beliefs would soon rise to become the country’s dominant creed.

  “Spiritualism is the future church,” the speaker had told them. “Its roof will be the stars; its walls the universe; the earth its foundation. Its choir the wild waving sea. Its idea the union of progress, steam, intelligence, and the locomotive; its aim God, Justice, and Immortality.”

  These were not beliefs held only by an oddball few. In the aftermath of the Civil War, during which more than three-quarters of a million were killed, the nation exploded with interest in the possibility of making contact with the spirit world.

  Though often remembered as a fringe pursuit run by séance-holding hucksters, Spiritualism was a major cultural force. For a time, it seemed it would become one of the most widely held religious perspectives in America. Unlike other fast-growing religions in late-nineteenth-century New York —Catholicism and Judaism —the majority of Spiritualists were neither immigrants nor outsiders, but men and women from moneyed and established East Coast families. Their pedigrees couldn’t protect them from the war and its emotional costs, and so in the war’s wake many American cities became home to a form of spiritual searching as peculiar as it was poignant.

  Mumler rarely became so expansive in his proclamations of faith, but he too believed, like the Brooklyn Spiritualist preacher, that the unimaginable transformations of this steam-fired, locomotive age would provide mortals with the keys to the life to come. Photography, in his view, offered truths unknown to earlier divine revelations. The images he had created were proof that scripture was now being, as the name of his art proclaimed, written with light.

  Unfortunately for Mumler, the prosecutor assigned to his case was having none of this. If he had the authority, he soon told the court, he would put the whole “future church” of Spiritualism on trial, along with the notion that the speeding locomotive of technology could provide any answers to questions of faith.

  Once the formal complaints had been entered into the record, the judge looked down at the defendant in his rumpled suit, his unruly beard. This Mumler was perhaps as unlikely a prophet of a new religion as had ever troubled the powers that be. But then, maybe being unlikely, rumpled, and unruly was a requirement of the job.

  “What is it you’ve got to say to these charges?” the judge asked.

  Though he would often be called “Mumbler” when his story began to find its way into the city’s daily papers, and from there into news published around the world, Mumler spoke clearly enough now to be heard by members of the press spread among the ghostly crowd in the gallery.

  In the weeks to come, these same seats would fill with witnesses for the prosecution and defense: eminent photographers and others who knew far more about the “black art” than his accusers ever could; the mayor’s henchmen from Tammany Hall, whose own large-scale corruption made them quick to crack down on penny-ante crooks; the showman P. T. Barnum, who hated all swindles except those he created and controlled; and most important, Mumler’s own satisfied customers, happy to have been given the opportunity to purchase final reminders of dear ones now gone.

  “I have nothing to say,” Mumler said.

  “Do you pretend,” the judge pressed, “that you take spirit photographs by supernatural means?”

  “Have no answer to make to this question either,” Mumler replied. “I demand an examination.”

  No doubt the judge thought that even if the defendant might be able to fool the world with his camera tricks, he would not be taken in. Yet despite his desire to dispense quickly with criminals of all kinds, he was intrigued by the figure before him, and likely supposed others would be as well.

  “The intensity of the interest manifested by the public in this case,” a reporter from the New York Daily Tribune soon wrote, “has perhaps never been surpassed in reference to any criminal investigation in this city.” Harper’s Weekly agreed: “The case of the people against William H. Mumler is . . . remarkable and without precedent in the annals of criminal jurisprudence . . . and strange as it may seem, there are thousands of people who believe that its development will justify the claims made by the spiritual photographer.”

  “The accused does not know and has never pretended to know by what power or process, other than that of producing an ordinary photograph, these spirit photographs are produced,” Mumler’s attorney declared. “There are a great many intelligent men and women who after careful investigation, are firm believers that the pictures are truly likenesses of the spirits of the departed, and every day the number of sitters, investigators, and believers is increasing. He and such believers are of the opinion that the taking of these pictures is a new feature in photography, yet in its infancy surely, but gradually and slowly progressing to greater perfection in the future, requiring for such perfection time and a scientific knowledge of the power that is operating.”

  It was a time when rapidly increasing scientific knowledge was regarded not as the enemy of supernatural obsessions, but an encouragement to them. Electricity had given credence to notions of invisible energies operating beyond human comprehension. The telegraph had made communication possible over staggering distances, which raised hopes of receiving messages from the great beyond. Now came Mumler and his camera offering sight beyond sight.

  With other cases to get to on this busy Monday morning, the judge instructed officers of the court to hold the spirit photographer in the Tombs until such time as a formal trial might begin. As Mumler was led away to the jailhouse, the gathered Spiritualists dispersed into the streets. Passing by the Egyptian columns and down the granite stairs, the troubled souls floated through Manhattan like mist, as if a vast catacomb beneath the city had creaked open at last.

  PART I

  The Black Art

  William Mumler’s first photograph, 1862.

  CHAPTER 1

  Procure the Remedy at Once and Be Well

  BEFORE THE SUMMER of 1862, William H. Mumler had never seen a ghost, but he had been bewitched by a woman.

  It was under her spell that he first stood in front of a camera—his coat casually off, his thick arms holding the draping black lens cloth as a horseman might a saddle—and took an accidental self-portrait that would change his life. The image showed not only Mumler himself—a big man with an untamable mane bristling past his ears, and bushy whiskers that often obscured his bow tie—but also a faint figure sitting beside him in a room where he had thought himself quite alone.

  At the time, Mumler was only dabbling in photography. An engraver by trade, he had for many years been gainfully employed by Bigelow Brothers & Kennard, Boston’s premier fabricator and importer of high-end metal goods. Learning the craft of picture-making at a nearby studio was a weekend pastime, a way to fill the empty hours of a bachelor’s Sunday afternoons.

  The mechani
cal tinkering and chemical experimentation that then were part of the photographic process were not wholly alien to him, however. His paid work consisted of using fine tools and solvents to repair and add detail to jewelry, clocks and watches, sterling flatware, and the silver altarpieces favored by churches for liturgical use. In a city that had produced Paul Revere and still rang out with the tones of church bells the Revolutionary silversmith and bell founder had made, to work with metal was to be part of a respected tradition.

  Mumler was an engaging if enigmatic sort. “A rather portly man, with an agreeable presence,” in the view of one acquaintance. He was known for showing “a manner of somewhat reserved good-fellowship” and “a glance out of seemingly good-natured black eyes that yet conveyed the impression that they took in more than they gave out.” His dark hair, while getting scarce on top, grew lavishly on his cheeks and chin through the end of his life, and probably beyond.

  Despite his lumpy appearance, he was a careful man, and had done his job well enough to become the principal engraver for a successful and growing company—one that would stay in business another full century, in fact. Located at 219 Washington Street, a short stroll from the Boston Common and the Massachusetts statehouse, the showroom was a regular stop for ladies of leisure out for an afternoon of shopping. “Those desirous of making purchases of jewelry, watches, or articles of virtu will find one of the richest and best selected stocks at the store of Messrs Bigelow Bros & Kennard,” a tourist guide to Boston recommended. “Their store is well-stocked, and their goods are all warranted of the best quality.”

  In an era when a laborer such as a blacksmith or carpenter counted himself lucky to make ten dollars per week, Mumler’s specialized skills earned him as much as eight dollars a day. He might have enjoyed a long career with the firm and perhaps even followed another former employee of humble beginnings, Martin Kennard, into partnership with the founders John and Alanson Bigelow, and from there onto a higher social plane. “Although a self-made man,” it was later said of Kennard, “he acquired rare culture and gained an unusually discriminating taste in art.”

  Mumler was on course for a similar ascension. Yet he was increasingly unsettled by a vague feeling of discomfort that determined he would take another path. “I had the reputation as an honest and trustworthy person,” he recalled wistfully some years later of the turn his fortunes would soon take. With the full confidence of employers who provided luxury items for the nation’s wealthiest families—far from merely a local concern, Bigelow Brothers had regular clients as far away as New Mexico—he was proud to note that he was often “entrusted with their valuables to a large amount.” But, he lamented, “this reputation, which I had been years in establishing, vanished like a soap bubble.”

  At first his troubled spirit had manifested itself physically. The nature of his engraving work—long hours stooped over his bench, inhaling tiny shards of silver and polishing fumes—had brought about chronic gastrointestinal distress. Doctors were no help; as often as not, their prescriptions exacerbated existing symptoms and created new problems of their own. Mumler was not only an engraver, however, but a lifelong intuitive inventor with a well-developed understanding of chemical properties. Though he would eventually hold a handful of patents, the ability to mix a variety of ingredients to beneficial effect was a skill he had first learned in the hardscrabble mill town of Lawrence, some twenty miles northwest of Boston, where his parents worked as confectioners for a time, and his mother became known for “being the first to introduce into that place a superior article of molasses candy.”

  No stranger to taking precise measurements and blending compounds, he drew on the kitchen lessons of the Mumler household and soon concocted a series of digestive remedies to test on himself. So pleased was he with the eventual results, he placed an advertisement in the local papers offering to share his discovery with the world. “I am an engraver,” he wrote. “My sedentary habits brought on Indigestion and Dyspepsia, from which I suffered terribly for a number of years.” He then included a dubious-sounding backstory to give his new remedy a tried-and-true history with a dash of invented Old World provenance. “I tried various doctors and advertised nostrums to no avail: they only seemed to aggravate the disease, and I began to despair of finding relief, when I came into possession of an old German Receipt from an eminent German physician. I made the medicine and found instant relief. I have never suffered since I took the first bottle. I take this method to put it before the public, not to make money, but to relieve those who are suffering from the same disease.”

  Of course, he was not so invested in the relief of suffering dyspeptics that he intended to give his bottles away for free. Guessing his own experience might not be enough to inspire sales, he enlisted testimonials from others who had tried his treatment. Whether real or imagined, they were all similarly satisfied: “For the cause of suffering humanity,” one wrote, “I consider it my Christian duty to place before the public, UNSOLICITED by any one, the wonderful cure in my case of dyspepsia, by the use of Mr. Mumler’s German Remedy. I have been troubled over six years with this terrible disease, procured one bottle only and am a WELL MAN today. To those who have suffered as I have I say PROCURE THE REMEDY AT ONCE and be well.”

  Mumler apparently enjoyed enough success with his German remedy that he soon was able to leave his job behind and strike out on his own. He opened an engraving and copperplate printing business just up the road from the workshop where he had spent so many hours through the previous years. Washington Street then was still a dirt road, but it was well traveled and thick with commerce. To have his name on an awning alongside the likes of the Bigelow Brothers & Kennard and the hugely successful wallpaper merchant Samuel H. Gregory should have been a milestone assuring a bright future.

  But the malaise that had troubled him lingered. As he grew older and the sweet smells of his parents’ confectionary kitchen became an ever more distant memory, he was increasingly interested in what might be called a dyspepsia of the soul—a gnawing dissatisfaction with the possibility that, no matter whether he worked for himself or others, the labor of his days might add up to nothing. The war just begun in the southern states meant the end of certainty for nearly all men his age. Barely thirty, he was perhaps too young for a midlife crisis, but questions of mortality and meaning haunted him.

  “After a man has passed into the middle age,” he later wrote, “he looks forward, at the best, to but a few years of earthly existence, and naturally asks, ‘Is this all of life?’”

  The answer, Mumler soon found, was no. There was so much more to life—and death—than he had ever imagined.

  To begin with, there was Hannah.

  MRS. HANNAH GREEN STUART was the proprietress of a photographic studio and gallery in between Mumler’s new and former places of business. When and how the two first met is not known, but given that such studios usually had large windows to let in natural light, it is possible he simply spotted her through the glass one day. The quality he soon described as her “magnetism” undoubtedly did the rest.

  That she was now a few storefronts closer to his day-to-day activities than she had been was probably not a detail he had overlooked when scouting a location for his nascent printing and engraving enterprise. By all accounts, Mrs. Stuart was an intensely charismatic person. Her prominent brow and pronounced cheekbones had the look of a classical statue, while her dark hair parted down the middle and pulled to a loose bun in back was all New England. Boston at the time grandly regarded itself as the Hub of the Universe. To Mumler, Hannah was a Venus at the Hub’s very center.

  The proximity of Mrs. Stuart’s studio, along with his skill as what was known then as a “practical chemist,” soon led Mumler to take an interest in photography—or rather, to take an interest in Hannah’s interest in the same.

  There was plenty he might have found intriguing about this young married woman with an absent husband. They were roughly the same age, yet she seemed far more experienced spi
ritually, professionally, and otherwise. What became of Mr. Stuart remains unknown, though a name sometimes also associated with the Washington Street photographic studio, A. M. Stuart, may belong to one Adelbert M. Stuart, who enlisted as a private in Massachusetts’s 53rd Regiment in 1862 and was killed in Louisiana the following year.

  Given the discomforts with which he had recently contended, and the remedies he pursued as a result, Mumler was likely drawn first of all to the fact that Hannah, too, was an entrepreneur in the business of helping people. As a younger woman she had supported herself through the braiding of hair—not as a stylist or barber, but rather as a kind of midwife for the grieving, applying her skills to the sensitive work of weaving the hair of the dead. It was common practice of the time to save hair clippings from loved ones lost and craft them into elaborate keepsakes. In the years Hannah learned the art, one of the dozens of advertisements offering this service read: “Hair braided to order in the form of Guards, Necklaces, Bracelets, Vest Chains, Finger Rings, Crosses, etc, etc, with faithful attention to the identity of the person furnished.”

  A remnant of the pre-photographic era, this Old World craft had recently begun to incorporate the latest innovation, using small photographs in a cameo or locket attached to the braided hair. As an extension of the same consolation she had long provided to the bereaved, she started taking these photographs herself. While Mumler greeted his thirtieth year with dyspeptic dread, Hannah in the same stage of life acquired photographic equipment and opened her own studio.

  The services she provided were not limited to enshrining the relics of the dead or capturing their likenesses, however. She also claimed to speak to the deceased as clearly as one might call to a lover in a nearby room.