Spirit photography: the double exposure that invented the ghost photo

The first ghost photograph was a self-portrait. In 1862, William H. Mumler, a jewelry engraver and amateur photographer in Boston, developed a glass plate of himself and found a faint figure standing behind him. He said it resembled a cousin who had died. What the plate shows is a double exposure: two images on one piece of glass, one solid, one pale enough to see through. Spirit photography, the trade of photographing the dead beside the living, grew out of that plate, and for the next sixty years it ran on the same trick.

This is how the trick worked, who paid for it, and who caught it. It belongs in On Camera because it is where every ghost photograph since begins.

The plate in Boston

Photography in the early 1860s meant glass. A plate was coated, exposed in the camera, developed and fixed, and plates were cleaned and used again. A plate that was not cleaned well enough could carry the remains of its last picture into the next one: a pale shape, slightly out of place, sitting in the background of a new portrait.

That is one way Mumler’s figure could have arrived. The other is a deliberate second exposure. The sitter is photographed, then the same plate is exposed again with someone standing behind the chair, draped in white, for less time, so that they register only faintly. Both methods give the same result. A living person and a translucent visitor share a frame they never shared in a room.

Mumler did not present his picture as either. He presented it as a spirit, and he began charging for sittings. He later moved his business to New York.

Who sat for him

The timing matters. The American Civil War killed hundreds of thousands of men, many of them far from home, buried where they fell or never identified. The families who sat for a spirit photographer were not buying a curiosity. They were paying for a picture of someone they would not see again.

And they trusted the camera. A painting was somebody’s hand and somebody’s opinion. A photograph, as people understood it then, was light falling on a chemical surface, a mechanical record with no hand in it. That trust was the engine of spirit photography. The picture did not need to be convincing as a picture. It only needed to be a photograph.

New York, 1869

In 1869 Mumler was tried in New York for fraud. The best-remembered witness against him was P. T. Barnum, the showman. Barnum had a spirit photograph made of himself, with the “ghost” of Abraham Lincoln standing behind him, to show the court how easily such a picture could be produced.

The demonstration did not decide the case. It was dismissed for lack of proof. Showing that a photograph can be faked is not the same as proving that a particular photograph was, and the prosecution did not prove that Mumler’s were. He left the courtroom without a conviction.

The widow and the president

Mumler’s most famous picture came a few years later. Made around 1872, it shows Mary Todd Lincoln seated, and behind her a translucent Abraham Lincoln standing with his hands on her shoulders.

It is the image most people see in their heads when they hear the words “spirit photograph.” It is also a textbook double exposure: the seated figure solid and sharp, the standing one pale enough to see through. Look at the hands on her shoulders, where the two exposures have to meet. That is where a double exposure always gives itself away, because the two layers never quite agree about which one is in front.

Barnum had already put Lincoln’s ghost into a photograph to prove it could be faked. Mumler put the same ghost into a photograph for his widow.

Across the Atlantic

The trade did not stay American. In Britain, Frederick Hudson began making spirit photographs in 1872, and others followed him through the rest of the century.

The second great wave came with the second great grief. After the First World War, spirit photography found a new public in Britain, and its best-known practitioners were William Hope and the group around him called the Crewe Circle. In 1922 the psychical researcher Harry Price investigated Hope and found that the plates had been switched.

Arthur Conan Doyle defended Hope. The man who wrote Sherlock Holmes was by then one of Spiritualism’s most prominent public advocates, and Price’s finding did not change his position.

Fairies and footballers

Conan Doyle’s name is attached to another set of photographs from the same years. In 1917, in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley, two girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, took photographs that showed fairies in front of them. Conan Doyle endorsed the pictures. Decades later, the two women admitted that the fairies were paper cutouts.

The Cottingley pictures were not double exposures. They make the same point from the other side: the camera recorded exactly what stood in front of it, and what stood in front of it was paper.

Then there is Ada Emma Deane’s photograph of the 1924 Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in London. Above the crowd, faces float in the air. At a ceremony for the war dead, the picture needed no caption to suggest whose faces they were. Some of them were later found to be the faces of footballers who were still alive.

What kept it alive

Look at the whole record and the method barely changes. A reused plate, a second exposure, a switched plate, a paper cutout, the face of someone still living. None of it required much skill. What it required was a sitter who wanted the picture to be true and a technology that almost everyone believed could not lie.

The demand came in waves, and the waves followed wars. The broader history, with more names than fit here, is collected in Wikipedia’s overview of spirit photography.

The mechanism outlived the plates. A figure that is solid in one layer and missing from another is still the most common ghost a camera makes, and it has a name in the glossary: ghosting. The other everyday culprits, dust lit by a flash and faces found in grain, are taken apart in orbs, mist and faces explained. This site’s name comes from the same idea, a ghost image left behind on a screen, as the origins section tells.

If you have a photograph with a figure in it that you cannot account for, send it to us with the original file.

The plate in your pocket

A phone in HDR mode does not take one picture. It takes several in quick succession, at different exposures, and merges them into one. If nothing moves, you never notice. If someone walks through the room between those frames, the phone does what Mumler’s plate did: it keeps a little of each layer, and the person who was crossing the doorway stays there at half strength, pale enough to see the wall through.

Nobody sets these pictures up. They turn up in the camera roll a day later, in a hallway that was empty when you looked at it, and for a moment you understand exactly why people paid.