Can you photograph a ghost

Not only did photographs become ubiquitous, they emerged as the standard of proof for whether or not something had actually happened. Even those who hoped to prove him a fraud might have appreciated the irony: a likely falsifier of images played a pivotal role in the creation of the image-obsessed culture that still defines the nation.

Mumler would later appear in court accused of fraud for his photographic deceptions, a crime for which he was acquitted. Casting doubts of his honesty aside, there is no denying that many entered his studio with private aches and left with hearts filled. Parents saw visions of children gone for years. Widows who had seen husbands broken by dementia before death found them whole again. Widowers who missed wives with unbearable intensity looked upon their faces at last. And tears pooled on Washington Street like collodion on photo glass.

All rights reserved. The views expressed in the book are his own and not those of the Smithsonian. Despite the best efforts of many investigators, no one was able to solve the riddle of exactly how Mumler created his apparitions. The images that J. Black made from a hot air balloon above Boston—the first aerial photographs taken anywhere in the United States—were a revelation.

Black Not everyone found the aerial images so astonishing. Post a Comment. He told them that, while the human eye couldn't see their spirits, the camera could. They believed him. But: Why? It's one thing to miss a loved one, to want him or her to be with you, infinitely if invisibly. It's another thing to trust that the photographer's lens could capture what the eye could not.

Mumler's time, however, was also a time that would find people tentatively reshaping their relationship with information—and with, Scott points out, their own bodies.

The midth century in the U. As the media historian Jeffrey Sconce argues , technologies like the telegraph—and like the camera, as well—gave cultural aid to the Spiritualist movement by effectively separating messages from the bodies of their senders.

Images were disentangled from their subjects; information was disentangled from its sources. Ghosts were, in their way, everywhere. Spirit photography would live on well into the 20th century, fueled in part by the Civil War and, later on, by World War I.

In the U. Sherlock Holmes's creator, supporting Hope against claims of Mumlerian fraud, would write a book called The Case for Spirit Photography in He would also end his friendship with Harry Houdini when the magician claimed, publicly, that spirit photography was "farcical. Mumler, for his part, saw his career decline after repeated claims of fraud.

Like Mumler, Hope was dogged by claims of fraud, and an investigation by the Society for Psychical Research — led by famous paranormal researcher Harry Price in Unlike Mumler, Hope continued to practise as a medium and spirit photographer after the exposure, supported by many of his ardent followers.

More than a decade later, Price also investigated a more baffling case. In , two men from Country Life magazine were pictured standing at the bottom of a grand staircase in Raynham Hall, Norfolk, England. Photographer Captain Hubert Provand and his assistant Indre Shira had been about to take a snap of the main staircase when Shira suddenly saw "a vapoury form gradually assuming the appearance of a woman" heading down the stairs towards them.

Seconds later, a photo had been hastily captured. Some believed it was the figure of Lady Dorothy Townshend, who was said to have haunted the hall since her mysterious death in The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall: The ghostly form seen here was thought to be caused by the camera being shaken during a long exposure Credit: Captain Provand. Price was of the opinion that the photographic evidence was untampered. A shout — and the cap was off and the flashbulb fired, with the results, which we now see.

I could not shake their story, and I had no right to disbelieve them. Only collusion between the two men would account for the ghost if it is a fake. Others, however, were less confident. In , The Society for Psychical Research, concluded that it was simply because the camera had been shaken during a six-second exposure. Yet that hasn't happened; in fact, the evidence for ghosts seems to be getting worse, not better, in large part due to pranksters and ghost-generating apps.

Several smartphone apps allow their users to easily tweak photos to make them look strange or mysterious, adding quasi-transparent ghostly images in the background. Up until a year or two ago, it took at least a little bit of effort to Photoshop an even halfway convincing snapshot of your recently departed grandmother's spirit appearing in an otherwise ordinary photo. With the help of these mobile apps, all it takes is a few pushes of a button to add shadowy or faint figures of spooky little girls, Confederate soldiers, outlaws, monks and any other historical or horror film caricature you can think of.

Faking images of spirits for fun and profit has a long tradition. In fact, the very first ghost photographs were hoaxes. William Mumler , a Boston-based photographer, first produced "spirit photographs" in and dozens more in the following decade.