The Apparitionists

A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost

Peter Manseau

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780544745988
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

A story of faith and fraud in post–Civil War America, told through the lens of a photographer who claimed he could capture images of the dead.
In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer," William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation: The affluent and influential came calling, including Mary Todd Lincoln, who arrived at his studio in disguise amidst rumors of séances in the White House.
Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges, starring P. T. Barnum for the prosecution, to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation. And even then, the judge sided with the defense, suggesting no one would ever solve the mystery of his spirit photography. This forgotten puzzle offers a vivid snapshot of America at a crossroads in its history, a nation in thrall to new technology while clinging desperately to belief. 
An NPR Best Book of 2017
"A rare work of historical nonfiction that is both studious and just plain entertaining."— Publishers Weekly, Top Ten Books of 2017
"An exceptional story."—Errol Morris,  New York Times Book Review
"Manseau has become the foremost chronicler of the deep American desire to believe in the weird, the strange, and the oddly wonderful."—Jeff Sharlet, New York Times–bestselling author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

Notes and Sources

Though The Apparitionists is the first attempt to consider William Mumler’s story in the context of early-American daguerreotypists and the photographers of the Civil War, I have relied on many books on these and other subjects to stitch together several historical strands into a single narrative.

The secondary sources to which I have turned for inspiration, leads, and understanding of the times in which Mumler lived include D. Mark Katz, Witness to an Era: The Life and Photographs of Alexander Gardner (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999); Bob Zeller, The Civil War in Depth (New York: Chronicle Books, 1997); Robert Wilson, Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Roy Meredith, Mr. Lincoln’s Camera Man: Mathew B. Brady (New York: Scribner, 1946; Dover reprint, 1974); James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography (London: British Library Board, 2006); Clément Chéroux et al., eds., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); and Louis Kaplan’s collection of Mumler-related documents, The Strange Case of William Mumler (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

I am also indebted to other researchers on nineteenth-century Spiritualism, including Marc Demarest, whose blog Chasing Down Emma: Resolving the Contradictions of, and Filling in the Gaps in, the Life, Work and World of Emma Hardinge Britten (http://ehbritten.blogspot.com/) is a treasure trove of information about Spiritualists, their beliefs, and their communities. My work was also made much easier by the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (http://www.iapsop.com/), whose digitized collection of nineteenth-century newspapers served as a primary research portal for this book.

PROLOGUE

page

1 “gray, begrimned,” “the tomb of purity, order, peace, and law”: Junius Henri Browne, The Great Metropolis: a Mirror of New York (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1869), 528.

2 “fraud,” “felony,” “larceny”: New York Tribune, May 4, 1869.

2 “The Tombs has a history”: Browne, 530.

3 “He belongs to the heavy order of the Spiritualists”: Emporia Weekly News (Kansas), May 14, 1869.

3 “athletic” or “robust”: “Spirit Photographs: A New and Interesting Development,” Journal of the Photographic Society of London, January 15, 1863.

4 “hardened and degraded creatures”: Browne, 529.

6 “The history of all pioneers of new truths is relatively the same”: William Mumler, “The Personal Experiences of William Mumler in Spirit Photography, Part 1,” reprinted in Banner of Light 36, no. 15 (January 9, 1875), 1.

6 “every fibre of his body rebelled”: “Topics of Today,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 13, 1869.

6 “Spiritualism is the future church”: “Spiritualism,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 13, 1869.

7 “What is it you’ve got to say”: New York Herald, April 13, 1869.

8 “The intensity of the interest”: “Spiritualism in Court,” New York Daily Tribune, April 24, 1869.

8 “The case of the people against William H. Mumler”: Harper’s Weekly 13, no. 645 (May 4, 1869), 289.

8 “The accused does not know”: “Spiritual Photography,” The Illustrated Photographer, May 28, 1869.

1. PROCURE THE REMEDY AT ONCE AND BE WELL

14 “A rather portly man”: Earl Marble, “The Round Table,” Folio, September 1884, 94.

14 “Those desirous of making purchases”: Edward Hepple Hall, Appletons’ Hand-Book of American Travel (New York: D. Appelton & Co., 1869), 90.

14 “Although a self-made man”: Annual Report of the Perkins School for the Blind (Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1904).

15 “I had the reputation”: Mumler, “The Personal Experiences . . . Part 1,” 1.

15 “being the first to introduce”: Reading (Pennsylvania) Times, May 13, 1869.

15 “I am an engraver”: Mumler advertisement, 1860s, reproduced by Marc Demarest in Chasing Down Emma: Resolving the Contradictions of, and Filling in the Gaps in, the Life, Work and World of Emma Hardinge Britten, http://ehbritten.blogspot.com/2015_03_01_archive.html.

16 “For the cause of suffering humanity”: Ibid.

17 “After a man has passed”: William Mumler, “The Personal Experiences of William Mumler in Spirit Photography, Part 2,” reprinted in Banner of Light 36, no. 16 (January 16, 1875), 1.

17 “magnetism”: William Mumler, “The Personal Experiences of William Mumler in Spirit Photography, Part 5,” reprinted in Banner of Light 36, no. 22 (February 27, 1875), 3.

18 A. M. Stuart: Henry Augustus Willis, The Fifty-Third Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers (Fitchburg, MA: Press of Blanchard & Brown, 1889), 247.

18 “Hair braided to order”: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 30, 1848.

19 “natural clairvoyant”: Mumler, “The Personal Experiences . . . Part 5,” 3.

19 “What is electricity?”: Ibid.

20 “I have seen men faint”: Ibid.

2. LOVE AND PAINTING ARE QUARRELSOME COMPANIONS

24 “I can imagine mama wishing”: Samuel Finley Breese Morse, Samuel F. B.Morse, His Letters and...

Table of 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