Lore - Episode 78: Exposure

Episode Date: January 22, 2018

We live in a very technological world today, with constant updates and improvements over last year’s model, and while many of the advancements are amazing, few have impacted humanity quite like photography. It opened up new worlds, and changed the way we think about time and space. Some, however, might have taken that too far. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's the sort of photograph any parent would want. All five children lined up in a neat little row, from youngest to oldest, like a set of stairs. Sure, the photograph is old and it's more than a little grainy and worn around the edges, but hey, it's family, right? Each of the five children is dressed in their Sunday best, and each of them has that polite yet annoyed look on their face that kids forced to pose for a family photo tend to get, all except for the youngest.

In fact, her eyes aren't even open and her head is tilted backward ever so slightly, and there is a good reason for that. She's dead. A century and a half ago, her parents suffered a loss that crushed them so deeply that grasped for any thread of hope they could reach, and they found it in photography. By gathering their remaining children alongside the body of their dead daughter, they attempted to capture a moment they would never experience again. People have always struggled with letting go.

For most of history, once a person was dead, they were gone. Sure, they might live on through story, and in the minds of the people who knew them, the time would eventually wear all of that away. While some had paintings to hang on the wall, the vast majority of humanity just had to move on. But photography changed all of that. All of a sudden, it was possible to capture more than a mere likeness. By pointing the camera at a loved one, it was possible to freeze time and capture memories

that might otherwise fade away and be lost. Almost overnight, humanity became masters of time and space in a way we'd never dared to dream. But the advent of photography ushered in more than just a world-changing technology. It offered perspective and entertainment and hope. It opened the door to worlds of new possibilities. And if the stories are true, one of those worlds was entirely unexpected. Photography, it seems, could even unlock the afterlife.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. William was having the time of his life. He was a skilled craftsman at the top of his game. His employer adored him, and the market was hungry for his work. So it made sense that he was about to throw it all away. It's not that he wasn't good at his job, or that it wasn't rewarding. Quite the opposite, in fact. For a man living in Boston in 1860, he was more than well off.

Most people of the time were lucky to earn around $10 a week, and yet William, thanks to his skills as an engraver, was bringing in almost as much each day. The firm that he worked for, Bigelow Brothers and Canard, was the premier stop for the wealthy elite of Boston. Sitting close to the Boston Common and the State House, its doors never stopped opening. People came in from all over to buy jewelry, watches, silver frames, and an assortment of other high-end gifts. It was William's job to engrave them.

It was an occupation with side effects, though. He spent most of his days seated at a workbench, hunched over the latest item. Engraving silver objects meant scratching off tiny pieces of the metal, etching the surface with acid, and then polishing the surface with more chemicals. And slowly, those metal shards and fumes were gathering inside his lungs. William was getting sick, and the symptoms were manifesting in his digestive system. So he reached deep into the past, to his youth growing up in a community of German immigrants in the Massachusetts town of Lawrence, where he hoped to find a cure.

With a little experimentation, he found it, and it worked so well that he decided to try and sell it to others as a digestive remedy. It was his side hustle, if you want to think of it that way. After by day, medicinal manufacturer by night. He gathered testimonials, gave the product a fabricated story about being an ancient German curative drink, and then set it up for sale. Before long, William's German remedy was a hit, and his bank account grew as a result. That's when he made the leap, and put his freelancer fantasy into motion.

William quit his job at Bigelow Brothers and Canard, and then set up his own independent engraving studio just down the street, and things took off. His reputation grew, he was free to explore his trade without a boss hovering over him, and he could even sell his own German remedy right there to the customers who came in. But the biggest change, the one that would transform his life, was still waiting for him just a few doors down. That's where Hannah Green Stewart worked. She was the owner of a photography studio nearby.

With her large shop windows for natural light, and Hannah's strikingly beautiful presence, it's no wonder William was drawn in, but it was more than that. She was a kindred spirit, a capable businesswoman who, like him, dabbled in more than one trade. Yes, she took portraits for Boston's wealthy elite, but she also crafted family keepsakes. If you think about it, they aren't that different. Both a photo and a keepsake are meant to be held on to, to remind you of a loved one who had passed away. But what made her keepsakes unusual was the material that she used.

Human hair. It was actually a fairly common practice before photography, and a natural evolution from simple hair clippings. Crafting objects out of the hair of a dead relative allowed that person to live on in a way. The hair could be woven into all sorts of items, too, from rings and bracelets to pocketwatch chains and crosses. And it was part of the larger role that Hannah saw as her calling in life.

She was, in many ways, a midwife for the grieving. For William, no, she was a fellow business owner and a skilled craftswoman, which led to a friendship, a friendship that allowed him to spend time in her studio learning the art and science of photography. Because in a lot of ways, those trades were very similar. Both used chemicals to process the final object. Both worked with silver, requiring training under a master in the craft. Hannah, though, was also a spiritualist.

She was part of that growing movement of people who sought to connect with the world beyond our own. And with the Civil War already claiming thousands of lives, Americans were finding themselves having to face death in a way they never had before. While spiritualism had been born in Rochester, New York, it was Boston that became the capital of the new movement. America's premier spiritualist newspaper, The Banner of Light, was published right there, on the very same street as the shops of William and Hannah, in fact, and the city also played

host to numerous lectures and public seances. So as William was spending more and more time in Hannah Green Stewart's photography studio, he was also becoming more and more aware of the swirling eddy of spiritual awakening that permeated the community around him. He had fallen into an invisible river, and the current was beginning to move him downstream. Where it would take him would be a surprise to everyone. One day in October of 1862, William was in Hannah's studio by himself, organizing some of her chemicals, when he decided to take a picture of himself.

Today, that's as simple as pulling out your phone and smiling, but in 1862 it involved a lot more effort. After setting up a chair and table within a good patch of light, he stepped over to prepare the camera. That was a lot more difficult. There was a glass plate that needed a coating of what was referred to as collodion, a solution of microscopic cotton fibers and a handful of chemicals. Then the plate was dipped into silver iodide before being placed into the camera.

When he was ready, William uncovered the lens and stepped into his place beside the chair, and then he waited. Exposures took much longer in the 1860s, which meant that he had to stand as still as a statue for over a minute. When he was done, William took the plate to the dark room to process the negative, and as the image came into view, he frowned. Nothing had gone wrong, and a large portion of it was taken up with a bright patch. But as the image materialized, he caught his breath, because that bright spot wasn't

a random mistake after all. William was in the photo, of course, and he was standing right there with his suit coat dangling from his left hand while his right hand rested on the back of the chair he had set up for decoration. But there was someone sitting in the chair, someone who hadn't been there when he took the photo. The figure was blurry and white and more than a little transparent, but he could see the shape of hair, a dress, even a hand resting on the table.

It was the figure of a young woman, which, of course, was impossible. William, it seems, had taken a photograph of something no one should be able to capture. A ghost. Mistakes happen. That's one of the main themes of the human existence, after all. We screw up every now and then. We lock our keys in the car, or drop our phone on the sidewalk. It's what we do.

So it was only natural for William Mummler to assume his photo of the ghostly woman was just one more of those random, unplanned mistakes. Still, it intrigued him, and so a few days later he showed it to a prominent Boston spiritualist named Dr. H. F. Gardner. He was the man who first brought the traveling mediums known as the Fox Sisters to Boston and was known to have a good eye for tricks and frauds. A photo of a spirit wasn't something to be taken lightly, so William handed it to the older man for his opinion.

As he did, he added one new detail. The young woman in the photo was actually his cousin, who had passed away 12 years prior. Gardner was astonished and soon left with William's photo in hand. Days later, he wrote the story up for a spiritualist magazine in New York City called The Herald of Progress and shared the full story. That article was soon picked up by the Banner of Light, which is how William found out about it. Actually, what he discovered was a bit more shocking.

When he opened the magazine, printed and distributed right there in Boston, he was shocked to find his full name included in the article. If there had ever been a chance to stay under the radar and just go about his work, that chance had slipped away. The trouble was, Hannah's studio had also been mentioned in the story, and that worried William more, so he rushed down to warn her and explain what had happened before she got caught off guard by the mess. When he arrived at her door, though, it was clear he was too late.

The entire front reception area was absolutely packed with people, and an excited buzz seemed to hum throughout the room. William swallowed hard and opened the door, bracing himself against Hannah's wrath. That wave of anger never materialized. Instead, as he stepped inside, she turned to him from her place behind the counter, smiled wide, and then motioned toward him with a dramatic flourish. Here comes Mr. Mummler, she announced to the crowd, turning every head with the power of her words.

Life changed in a flash for William Mummler. That first photo of the ghostly woman sparked a fire in Boston that extended beyond the boundaries of the spiritualist community. He began taking spirit photos for other people just a couple of hours each day, but soon the demand was so strong that he was forced to close his engraving shop and move into Hannah's studio full-time. Not long after, he and Hannah were married. They became partners in every sphere of their lives.

And all those wealthy, elite clients who used to come to William for personalized silver lockets or serving dishes were coming back, this time with the hope that he might capture the image of one of their dead loved ones in a new photo. Of course, in a community as close-knit as the spiritualist movement, it didn't take much for news to travel far and wide. Andrew Jackson Davis, the seer of Poughkeepsie and the editor of the Herald of Progress, sent a German photographer named William Guay to investigate. When he was finished, Guay declared Mummler authentic, and Davis ran the story in the

Herald. A local Boston photographer by the name of J.W. Black also visited William. Black had been practicing photography for over two decades. He understood everything there was to know about the process, how mistakes could happen, and how it could be twisted to deceive people. So he shadowed Mummler for an entire photo session. You are not smart enough, he told Mummler, to put anything on that negative without

my detecting it. When it was all said and done, though, he was astonished, holding the final negative in his hands and looking at the ghostly image upon it. He became a believer. There were some issues, though. Despite the visits from prominent, experienced photographers, or the public declarations of authenticity by highly respected leaders in the spiritualist movement, there were still some who were absolutely positive that it was all a fraud.

The proof, they said, was right in plain sight. One of Boston's spiritualists came into the shop out of curiosity and was shocked to recognize one of the ghostly figures on display. Yes, it was a loved one, his wife, in fact, but his wife was still very much alive. Another man named John Latham, who edited his own spiritualist magazine, saw the same ghostly face in two separate Mummler photos and managed to track the real woman down at her home in Boston. She is said to have produced a copy of her own of the same image, a print, from Hannah

Stewart's photography studio. Just as quickly as word of Mummler's miraculous photos had spread, so too did the rumor of their deception. And for a lot of people, it really did make sense. You see, as the era of glass negatives had matured, photographers had learned that they could touch up the images. Sometimes it was to remove a blemish or to make the eyes appear more open than they were. All it took to do this were some chemicals and etching instruments, the very same tools

that Mummler had used in his previous occupation as an engraver. Oh, and remember William Gway, that German photographer who had investigated and signed off on Mummler's work? Mummler hired him a short while later. So yeah, of course, it was easy to believe the rumors. William Mummler, the spirit photographer of Boston, had to be a fraud. Whether it was true or not, that wave of bad press crashed over William's new career like a tsunami.

Everything he'd built was washed away almost overnight. Even Gway left him. Without a job, he was forced to fall back on engraving and copper plate printing, taking whatever work he could find. By the summer of 1865, it was all too much. William Mummler, a brief superstar in the world of spiritualism, quietly packed up and left town. William Mummler was supposed to lay low, but that was proving a lot more difficult than

he'd anticipated. Maybe it was the lure of the camera, that magical device that captured a moment in time on a piece of glass. Perhaps it was that thrill of new technology we still fall for today. Some, however, think it was something else. Right there, in his new home of New York City, was another man known for unusual things. P.T. Barnum was a showman best known for his vast collection of oddities.

Things like the Fiji Mermaid, General Tom Thumb, the Siamese Twins, Chang and Aang, as well as other, less bizarre, but no less sensational exhibits. And one of those was a collection of William Mummler's spirit photography. Their inclusion showed Mummler how his photos still held sway over a population of people grieving through the enormous loss of life from the Civil War. People didn't want photos of ghosts as much as they wanted peace. His photos were just a delivery device for that much needed solace. That attraction to his photographic work eventually led Mummler to set up shop inside

the studio of another New York photographer, a portrait artist named, appropriately, Mr. Silver, who owned a place on Broadway. By 1868, he was renting space there, using Silver's chemicals and equipment, and selling more of his spirit photos to a fresh audience. This went on for months, and you have to hand it to William Mummler because he really did seem to bounce back from his failure in Boston. He honestly believed that his photos were real. He even sat his landlord in front of the camera to show him there were no tricks.

Silver watched him the entire time, and didn't see a single opportunity for Mummler to fool him. Mummler was no longer afraid. In fact, he was maybe even getting a little cocky. In March of 1869, he paid a visit to the Photographic Section of the American Institute, a group of professional photographers who met regularly at a local college known as the Cooper Union. There, he displayed a collection of his photos and explained his theory about why they work and what they mean.

Even they, he told them, could learn to take similar photos. At least one of the men in the room, Patrick Hickey, took him up on the offer, but after his lesson with Mummler, he walked away more than skeptical. So he filed an official complaint with the city, alerting the city marshal, a man named Joseph Tucker, to what he felt was a crime in progress. Tucker made quick work of the complaint. He arrived at Mummler's studio under a false name, sad for a photo, and then when the prince were offered to him for a price, he arrested the photographer.

Mummler was taken to the New York Halls of Justice and House of Detention, an Egyptian revival structure built in 1838 that nearly everyone in town simply called the tombs. It was there, in a dark and unsanitary cell, that Mummler waited for his trial. That trial was one of the more bizarre court cases in New York's long history. The city's case was built on the idea that Mummler was a fraud who was faking his photos of the spirit world in order to take advantage of a vulnerable audience. He brought in a long line of witnesses who testified to that end, people who had sat for photos with him, such as Patrick Hickey, Joseph Tucker, and even Mummler's landlord

and convert, William Silver. They couldn't explain how, but they were certain that they'd been tricked. In Mummler's defense, a number of spiritualist friends were brought to the witness stand. One man, though, John Edmonds, was more than a spiritualist. He was a state senator, and he swore to the honesty and integrity of the man on trial. Mummler's former assistant, William Guay, also made an appearance and spoke from his expertise as a photographer. Customers were even brought in, and their passionate belief in his work was used by

the defense. Near the end of the trial, though, the city brought in their star witness, their ace in the hole, the man who would take William Mummler down and settle the case for good. The man was P.T. Barnum. Now, if you're a bit skeptical about their choice, I can understand. Barnum made a living fooling people. He literally had the torso of a monkey sewn onto the tail of a fish and passed it off as a real mermaid.

He certainly wasn't a man known for his integrity. But that was their point. Here was a man who understood confidence games. He was renowned for testing the limits of human belief, and had made a lot of money doing so. In the minds of the prosecutors, no one was a better witness than P.T. Barnum, because he could smell a fraud from a mile away. So they brought him in and put him on the stand.

To him, it all came down to giving customers what they paid for. His goal was always to deliver on his promise, but never to charge too much for it. It helped the deception go down a bit easier that way. Mummler, though, was charging an enormous amount of money for a single photograph, and that was asking too much of his customers. People can believe what they want, Barnum summed up, but when they try to force that belief on others, that's a line no one should cross. When that happens, he told the court, I pronounce all such pretensions ridiculous.

On the morning of May 3rd, 1869, after weeks of trial and coverage by the press, the court assembled for one final session. Judge Joseph Dowling took his seat and then instructed both sides to make their closing arguments. Mummler's defense attorney went first, followed by the prosecution. Both men talked for hours. They each made a powerful case for their side, walking through all of the charges, the logic behind it all, and then sat down.

Finally, after a short break for deliberation, Judge Dowling made his final verdict known. However, I might believe that trick and deception has been practiced, he told the courtroom. The prosecution has failed to prove the case. And then Dowling pronounced his decision. I have come to the conclusion that the prisoner should be discharged. William Mummler, at least in the eyes of the court, was innocent. There's something compelling and attractive, comforting even, about holding a photo of a lost loved one.

They might be gone, separated from us by months or decades, and yet they're still there, smiling at us from inside that image. It's no wonder that photography was seen, at least in the early days, as a sort of magic. To many of the first witnesses to photography, capturing the image of a person seemed to defy the natural laws of the world. It pinched the distance between the subject and the viewer, like a wormhole in a science fiction movie. Photographers were manufacturing memories in a way that had never happened before.

There, in a photo, you might see your dead grandfather alive and smiling. In a way, it was nothing short of necromancy. But a tool is only ever part of the equation. Movements grow when pieces combine into something larger than the sum of its parts. So it's important to point out that photography was still very young when the Civil War broke out. If it had been an infant, it would still have been learning to walk and speak. All of a sudden, in a country suffering through wave after wave of bad news, loss, and grief,

there was finally a way to hold on just a little longer. The dead would never again completely leave us. Add in the rise of spiritualism and you have the perfect cocktail for the supernatural. So if a photo could do that much, we can't blame the people around William Umler for taking it further. What if a photo could capture something beyond our world, they wondered? Going deeper than what we can see on the surface. The photographs of actual spirits, as crazy as they sound to us today, were the logical

next step for many people in the 1860s. They were willing to pay for it, too. Umler charged $10 for each of his photos, close to a full week's wages in his day. He was charging iPhone prices for a piece of paper. But of course, that's not really what people were buying. They were buying hope. And that sort of power, that magnetic pull of the what if upon a broken nation, inspired a whole generation of copycats.

Some of them were contemporaries to Umler, while others came decades later in the aftermath of another war, World War One. Just like Umler, they, too, were hounded as frauds and hucksters. The only difference, I guess, is that he was the only one to make it out of the courtroom without a conviction and punishment. It's important to point out that many of Umler's subjects were repeat customers. In fact, we have the story of one woman, Mary, who visited him in Boston in the middle of the Civil War, hoping for a photo that captured the spirit of her brother, a recent casualty

of battle. Umler took her money, took her photo, and after processing the negative, handed her a bit of peace. Right there, beside her seated form in the photo, she could see the ghostly face of her brother. Years later, with his criminal trial and acquittal behind him, William Umler tried to rebuild the pieces of his broken life. The court case had left him deeply in debt, close to $100,000 in modern American dollars,

so retirement wasn't an option. But then again, how could he close up shop when people still wanted his services? So he kept at it. In 1872, that same woman from Boston stepped back into his studio. Like Umler, Mary was older now, and the weight of hardship hung around her like a grim shawl. But he remembered her all the same, and invited her to take a seat in front of the camera. She folded her hands across her lap, and in the photo, they stand out as pale objects against the blackness of her dress and hat.

She didn't smile, but, and again, she had very little reason to do so. She'd lost her husband, and was in a never-ending state of bereavement. Umler told her to hold still, and then pull the black cloth off the camera, exposing the glass negative to light. A minute later, he covered it back up, and then rushed off to process the image. When he returned, he seemed to be more than a bit unsettled. Reluctantly, he handed the photo to Mary. When she saw it, she brought a hand to her mouth in a way that conveyed sadness and joy,

all at the same time. Her eyes probably shimmered with tears as she glanced back up at him. She paid him, and thanked him, and then she disappeared back out the door of his studio. I have to imagine that the photograph haunted him for the rest of the day, possibly longer. Yes, William Umler had taken hundreds of spirit photos over the years, but they rarely connected so deeply with him. I can't blame him, to be honest. You see, any of us would have recognized the figure in the photo as well.

It would be difficult not to. That tall, lanky form, those long arms with hands resting on Mary's shoulders. That gaunt, bearded face. The face of Abraham Lincoln. Before Mumler was taking photos of the spirits of dead relatives, photographers around the world were propping bodies up for one last snapshot. If the idea of post-mortem photography interests you at all, stick around after the sponsor break to hear one last bit about that morbid and unusual practice.

So, another word about post-mortem photography. You see, for a very long time, people have been trying to capture an image of their dead loved ones. We can go back to the Middle Ages and find examples of paintings that were commissioned in honor of those who passed away, but when photography arrived, well, I'm sure you can understand how things changed. So families like the one from today's opening story began to use photography to capture real images of their dead relatives.

A young child, grandparent, infants, even young adults, but dead bodies were sort of a mixed bag for photographers. On one hand, they were the perfect client, because in the earliest days of photography, it was incredibly important to stay perfectly still or else you'd produce a blurred image, and bodies never moved. On the other hand, they also didn't follow instructions. To help them stand beside their living siblings, corpses of children were often propped up on wooden racks.

Sometimes their eyes refused to open, and the photographer would be forced to add pupils to the negative in an effort to literally liven up their subjects. One man, Charles Orr, opted for a different method. A spoon. Here, let him explain it for me. Using the handle of a teaspoon, put the lower lids down. They will stay, but the upper lids must be pushed far enough up so that they will stay open to about the natural width.

Turn the eyeball around to its proper place, and you have a face nearly as natural as life. Like I said, we have a hard time letting go of the dead. If postmortem photography is anything, it's photographic proof of that obsession. Each photo of a body, dressed in their finest suit and standing beside their siblings, is a testament to how long our love holds on. But that doesn't make it any less difficult to see. In the meantime, I don't know about you, but I'm never going to be able to look at a teaspoon the same way again.

If you love today's topic and want to dive deeper into the world of spirit photography and William Mummler, then I want to point you toward a book called The Apparitionists by Peter Manso. It's a wonderful exploration of photography and spiritualism and the key players in Mummler's story. You can learn more about Peter's book and find links to purchase it over at his website, petermanso.com. That's Peter, M-A-N-S-E-A-U, dot com.

And a reminder that subscribers to the Epitaph email newsletter receive source material the same morning episodes are released. If you want to read further on topics you love, the Epitaph is a great place to start. Learn more about that over at lorepodcast.com slash newsletter. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me with research assistants from Carl Nellis and music by Chad Lawson. If you're new around here, this is my friendly reminder that Lore is a lot more than just bi-weekly audio stories.

There is an ongoing book series from Penguin Random House, a television show available on Amazon Prime, a membership site with extra episodes, and so much more. And you can learn about everything all over in one place, theworldoflore.com slash now. And if you're a social media sort of person, you can follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, click that follow button, and when you do, say hi. I love it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.