. . . October 1995
That's Positively (or Negatively) Spooky!
In 1861, William Mumler began making large sums of money for the day ($10 a photo by 1869) for offering ‘scientific,’ photographic proof of the existence of spirits. Mumler would make a portrait of a bereaved person and, lo and behold, when he developed the negative, the ‘spirit image’ of the sitter’s deceased loved one had appeared mysteriously on the print.
Mumler was once arraigned on charges of deceiving the public, but his acquittal was seen as further vindication of the existence of ancestral, household spirits. Clements Library Curator of Manuscripts Rob Cox tells the story of Mumler and other photographers of the dead and living dead in ‘The Transportation of American Spirits: Gender, Spirit Photography and American Culture, 1861-1880,’ in Ephemera Journal 7, 1995.