A girl holds flowers while faint figures crowd the space around her. The Library of Congress identifies the 1905 Chicago image as a double-exposure photograph by G.S. Smallwood. Its ghosts belong to the history of photographic trickery.
The picture leads the Library's October 26 Halloween feature, which draws on a recent staff presentation about unsettling material in its collections. Spirit photography supplies one of its stranger stories: photographers sold apparent encounters with the dead to people who wanted those encounters to be real.
A second exposure on glass
The Nebraska State Historical Society explains the underlying technique. Exposing a glass photographic plate twice could add another image to the finished picture. Its collection includes a man with a supposed spirit above his head and a woman beside a distorted apparition. It also preserves a photograph of Annis Cobb impersonating a spirit with a dummy.
William H. Mumler made a business of these portraits in the early 1860s. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hazy figures appeared beside or behind living sitters, attracting supporters of Spiritualism, whose adherents believed the dead could communicate with the living.
Mumler had worked as a jewelry engraver in Boston. His photographic career there suffered when a figure presented as a ghost proved to be a living local resident. He opened a New York studio in 1868 and was arrested the following year on fraud and larceny charges. The Library's account says he was acquitted for lack of evidence.
Mary Lincoln sat for Mumler
One of his best-known customers was the widowed Mary Lincoln. The White House Historical Association dates her portrait to 1872 and explains that Mumler superimposed Abraham Lincoln's image on her photograph.
The association attributes the circumstances of the sitting to Mumler's own account. He wrote that she arrived under a pseudonym, wearing a thick veil that she removed shortly before the exposure. That description of the sitting comes from the photographer selling the experience, rather than an independent witness.
The Library connects the market for spirit photographs with nineteenth-century mourning and the losses of the Civil War. The images offered bereaved customers a portrait that appeared to reunite a family.
The Met's catalog records the physical form of one Mumler work: an albumen silver print made from a glass negative, with an image measuring 9.5 by 5.7 centimeters. Its title, Three Spirits with Photograph on Table, describes an arrangement small enough to hold in a hand. The catalog currently lists it as not on view; the online record remains available to read.
