"Before anyone can hope to secure spirit photographs with regularity, conditions must first be provided. This not only needs an operator with some skill upon the spirit side of life who understands the laws governing the phenomena, but requires some considerable practice on their part with a medium, before they succeed in manipulating the psychic forces. It also requires one with mediumistic qualities to supply from his body that refined psychic essence in which a spirit is able, temporarily, to clothe himself, and produce a form sufficiently tangible to affect the sensitive plate."
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Scholar Minor. As you may have gathered from our opening passage by British parapsychologist James Hewat McKenzie, this week we will be discussing the strange world of spirit photography. I apologize for the late release of this episode - it has been a chaotic week - but I sincerely appreciate your patience, and hope you enjoy.
Photography is one of the most impactful inventions in history. It’s difficult to conceptualize the magnitude of what photography means - that we can preserve moments, faces, and places exactly as they were - something almost akin to time travel.
And perhaps because there is something inherently magical about photography itself - even though it is a scientific process - as long as it’s been around, folks have been discovering inexplicable things in their photographs. Whether photographic anomalies have scientific explanations or paranormal ones, the idea that spirits can somehow shoehorn themselves into the photographic process is not new - and definitely still kicking around today.
The earliest ancestor of the camera was the camera obscura, or "dark chamber". By admitting a single tiny hole of light into a darkened room, the image of the subject outside is projected upside down on the wall opposite the light. Now, how the heck does this work?
Light travels in a straight line. This property is known as the rectilinear propagation of light. In a camera obscura, when the light reflected off a subject is condensed through the aperture - or light hole - the light, and therefore the image, is reflected on the opposite surface. If the aperture is smaller, the projected image will be sharper but dimmer - if it is larger, it will be brighter but softer in focus.
The earliest references to the camera obscura come to us from 4th century Chinese philosopher Mozi, and this method of projection was used throughout antiquity to observe eclipses without damaging the viewer's eyes. Some of the most influential and accurate writings on the phenomenon behind the camera obscura come from Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham, who conducted many experiments with what would become known as the "pinhole camera" in the 10th century BCE. The camera obscura was utilized for centuries - during the Renaissance, the camera obscura provided artists with a method of tracing the outlines of subjects.
The earliest versions of this system were large, sometimes even entire dark rooms that could fit several people inside them. Over time, the “cameras” were made smaller - even portable by the 16th century.
French inventor Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre created the Daguerreotype photography process in 1839, which built upon the foundation of the Camera Obscura. A sheet of silver-plated copper would be polished and treated with light-sensitive fumes, which would capture the image reflected on its surface by reacting to the light.
After further chemical treatments, the image would darken and appear on the surface. These daguerreotype images were incredibly delicate, as they were no more than a combination of silver and mercury resting on a metal plate, and the images are easily wiped or scratched away. For this reason they were usually kept in decorative glass cases and many existing examples are scuffed or damaged.
And Daguerre had competition. In England in 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot successfully invented a process to create negatives - chemically treated paper that would capture images that could be developed, transferred to another chemically treated paper, and fixed. Multiple copies of images could be produced using a single negative. Talbot’s method is considered one of the biggest influences of pre-digital photography - if you’re familiar with “old school” photograph developing, the process probably sounds familiar! By 1841 Talbot’s Calotype process had caught on as an alternative to Daguerreotype.
Inventors and entrepreneurs were soon in feverish competition for supremacy in this new industry. Frederick Scott Archer of England created a much cheaper and easier system known as the wet collodion process, which involved coating a plate of glass with light-sensitive silver salts and required a much shorter exposure time than its predecessors.
Ferrotype, or producing photographs on pieces of tin, was even cheaper - and in 1888, the Eastman Dry Plate & Film Company released the first Kodak camera. These early Kodaks were pre-loaded with chemically-treated film in a roll, and after the roll was used up, customers sent the camera back to the factory where the pictures would be developed and returned. Over the course of only a century, photography evolved from a convoluted science experiment to something everyday people could use to document their lives - as you can imagine, with sometimes strange results.
When it comes to spirit photography, there is one incredibly important aspect of all the early methods we just talked about - exposure. These systems relied on light reacting with chemicals in order to form an image. While this process was sped up as technology advanced, it still took time - and time was what made spirit photographs possible.
The time it took for light to interact with the chemicals sufficiently to create a reaction, and therefore an image, was the exposure time. Daguerreotypes required 20 minutes. Later methods reduced that period to around 20 seconds, but that is still a long time to sit for a photograph. Interestingly, this is one of the reasons that folks in old photographs often look so serious - getting your picture taken with a good result required staying perfectly still during the entire length of the exposure. Holding a smile for 20 minutes, as you could imagine, would be a nightmare. So most folks opted for their resting . . . serious face.
Small children would sometimes be put into physical restraints to keep them from squirming around during photography sessions. And the strangeness didn’t stop there. As is no surprise given the state of the 19th century, society had an intense preoccupation with death. It was everywhere all the time, and many cultural rituals grew out of this incessant exposure to mortality.
Death from consumption - or tuberculosis - became romanticized, featuring prominently in literature and art. Locks of hair were cut from dead loved ones and worn in lockets or rings. And upon a death, it was not uncommon to take a photograph of the person prior to burial - often propping them up or painting open eyes over the finished photograph to give them a more lifelike appearance. In the early part of the century, prior to the release of the Kodak, getting a photograph taken could be prohibitively expensive. It was a luxury and few could afford to have their picture taken more than once. This meant that if you wanted a picture of your loved one, and they passed away - you only had one last chance to capture their likeness before they were gone forever.
It will likely come as no surprise that spirit photography was born in the mid 1800s. The 19th century saw the birth and rise of the Spiritualist movement, which championed direct communication with the spirits of the dead through seances and mediumship. For more information about the history of Spiritualism and some of the key players, check out Scholar Minor episode 3, Spiritualism and Seances.
While I recommend checking that episode out for a little more context, suffice to say that communicating with dead loved ones struck a chord for folks in the 19th century. Diseases were rampant, child mortality was high, and many families in the United States were grieving the incredible loss of life that came about as a result of the American Civil War. People needed closure, and Spiritualism provided an opportunity for that closure.
Unfortunately, there were people who took advantage of this widespread need and tapped into it for financial gain. Hoaxers were rampant during this period - and spirit photography grew from the imaginations of these shrewd opportunists.
William Mumler, an American career jewelry engraver and amateur photographer, took note of the rising interest in spiritual contact. After developing a self-portrait in the 1860s and discovering an apparition of his deceased cousin at his side, Mumler embarked on a new life as a professional spirit photographer. His wife, Hannah, became a medium - or a practitioner of ghostly communication - and together they steadily grew in popularity.
Mumler took photographs that showed the ghostly outlines of lost loved ones standing or sitting nearby their living relatives or friends. One of the most famous of his spirit photographs was taken for none other than former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Mary sits in the foreground of the photo, and sure enough a faint outline of Abraham Lincoln appears to be standing behind her - his hands comfortingly resting on her shoulders.
Almost immediately, skeptics began to criticize Mumler's new - and very lucrative - methods. He was denounced by some as a fraud, drawing the ire of high-profile individuals like showman and circus magnate P.T. Barnum. At first, it was difficult for authorities to decipher how exactly Mumler's photographs were made. But these days we know that the process relies on exposure - in this case, double exposure.
To take a photograph with a 19th century camera like Mumler's, the image of the subject would be projected onto a chemically prepared glass plate, upon which the necessary chemical and light reaction would take place to produce the photograph. Spirit photographs were likely the result of double exposure - meaning a pre-prepared glass plate, already containing an image, would be placed in front of the blank glass plate. The light entering the camera's aperture would filter through the existing image and onto the blank plate - overlaying the two onto the final photograph. The result? A ghostly image projected on top of the real-life subject.
Accusations began to fly - and Mumler was taken to court for being a fraud, with many - including P.T. Barnum - testifying against him. Some witnesses said they had encountered actors that had posed for Mumler’s “ghost” photographs - in costume to appear more like the desired spirit visitor. Others declared that Mumler had gone so far as to break into homes to retrieve existing images of the deceased relative. Mumler was acquitted, as many of the claims couldn’t be proven, but the damage to his career - and to the reputation of spirit photography - had been done.
The case for and against spirit photography’s legitimacy was intense and lasted into the early 20th century. Well-known Spiritualist and author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, expressed his frustration at the situation in The Case for Spirit Photography, published in 1923.
"At present the system adopted in quarters which should be responsible ones,” he writes, “is to concentrate attention upon whatever may seem failure or deception, and to take no notice at all of the broader aspects of the question. In every science the methods of advance are to pay strict attention to the positive results and to regard the negative ones as mere warnings of what to avoid.
This process has been reversed in considering psychic photography, and the world has been deceived by those who should have been its guides. Truth will, of course, prevail, but its progress has been grievously retarded by this unhappy and unscientific mental attitude."
Strange anomalies in photographs didn’t always appear on purpose, however. Remember those long exposure times we talked about? Well, if a person or animal happened to pass through the frame during one of those exposures - it would be caught in the photograph as a faint blur. If you take a look at 19th century photographs of people - living ones, that is - they are usually a little fuzzy around the edges, because they are breathing or fidgeting or moving around a little bit.
In 1891, after developing a photograph of the empty library at Combermere Abbey in England, photographer Sybell Corbet was shocked to find the faint image of a distinguished looking gentleman sitting in one of the chairs. Believed right away to be the specter of recently deceased Lord Combermere, after some analysis it was concluded that a servant had briefly sat in the chair while the exposure process was taking place. No doubt realizing someone was taking a photograph, he quickly got up and left - leaving a ghostly imprint behind in the photograph.
Other famous spirit images, like the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, were determined to have been caused by the camera itself being shaken or moved during exposure. Moving things around during this process led to a strange blurry area at the center of the photograph - evidence of the disruption of the chemical reaction process.
Smartphones are just as guilty of capturing strange images that could be perceived as supernatural. Your smartphone captures an image in stages, and if it is moved or bumped during this process, the subjects in the photograph can become distorted or stretched. This is especially typical of photos taken in the dark - you’ll notice that your smartphone, especially if it’s a little older, takes a little longer to take a picture in low light.
This is because digital cameras work in a way that is actually quite similar to old-school cameras. In the case of a smartphone camera, light enters the phone's lense through an aperture, which allows an amount of light to reach the sensor. The shutter determines how long that light is exposed to the sensor and then the sensor captures the image - converting the information into pixels which make your final photograph.
When it comes to spirit photographs and unusual apparitions, ISO - or camera sensitivity - is often to blame from unclear images. In low light, a phone camera will adjust its gain - or input signal strength - to counteract having less light to work with. The result is grainy or "noisy" photographs. Other circumstances can cause grainy or unclear digital photos, too - such as heat or - and this one will be encouraging news for modern ghost hunters - electromagnetic interference.
If, like me, you enjoyed the myriad of ghost hunting shows at the height of their popularity in the early 2000s, you'll know that spirit photography is alive and well. Modern paranormal investigators will talk a lot about “orbs” appearing in photographs at haunted places. These bright, semi-transparent spherical objects seem to float around the camera and are sometimes attributed to ghostly phenomena.
However, most orbs can be explained by an optical phenomenon called "backscatter", which is the result of a camera's flash reflecting off of circular debris in the air - like dust or water droplets. If you’re in a dark and dusty haunted place, taking digital photos in no light with flash, you will likely catch some pretty good orbs by the end of the evening.
While most spirit photography, historical or modern, can be debunked with scientific explanations or was outright fraud - I would be absolutely thrilled if a real ghost someday resigned to letting us take their photograph. But until then, we might as well keep trying and get some nice photos of our loved ones and favorite old buildings in the process.
I hope that you enjoyed this episode of Scholar Minor - as always, I am immensely grateful that you are listening and I can’t wait to talk to you again next week.
Check out my website, www.ursaminorcreations.com for additional content, and keep an eye on the Scholar Minor YouTube channel for some cool new stuff in the coming weeks.
Take care all, have a beautiful week, and until next time.