V – The Photograph

There is something inherently unsettling about old photographs.

Perhaps it is the faces. People who have been dead for more than a century stare straight back at us from another world, caught during the brief period when light touched a photographic plate. Or perhaps it is because photography made us a promise almost from the moment it was invented.

This happened. This person stood here. The camera saw it.

A painting could lie. An artist could add a figure, remove an inconvenient detail or make the sitter considerably better looking than nature had managed. A photograph seemed different. There was a machine involved. Chemistry. Light. Science. And then somebody photographed a ghost.

One of the earliest people to make a business from photographing the dead was an American engraver named William H. Mumler. Mumler’s strange career began in the early 1860s when another figure appeared in a self-portrait he had taken. He initially regarded it as an accident. Other people saw something considerably more interesting. A spirit.

Before long, Mumler was producing what became known as spirit photographs. The formula was very simple.

A living sitter posed before the camera.

The photograph was taken and developed.

And somewhere beside or behind them appeared somebody else.

Usually pale. Sometimes translucent. Occasionally little more than a face. Most importantly, they were dead. Or at least they were supposed to be.

Mumler had arrived at precisely the right moment. Modern Spiritualism was flourishing. Séances, mediums, table-turning and attempts to communicate with the dead had become enormously popular. Photography, meanwhile, was still sufficiently new that most people had little understanding of what an experienced photographer could make it do. Put those two things together and the result was almost inevitable. People began visiting Mumler hoping that somebody they had lost might appear beside them. Sometimes, apparently, somebody did. Then one of Mumler’s spirits was recognised. Unfortunately, the supposedly dead man was still very much alive.

That was awkward.

Questions began to be asked about exactly what was happening inside Mumler’s studio. In 1869, after moving his business to New York, Mumler was arrested and prosecuted for fraud. His hearing became something much larger than an argument over one photographer. Could these strange figures be produced artificially? Could Mumler have obtained photographs of deceased relatives beforehand? Or had the camera genuinely recorded something invisible to the human eye? The case against him was not strong enough. Mumler was acquitted. And the ghosts continued.

His most famous photograph came later.

Mary Todd Lincoln, widow of Abraham Lincoln, reportedly visited Mumler under an assumed name. The resulting photograph shows her seated before the camera. Behind her stands the unmistakable figure of her murdered husband. His hands appear to rest gently upon her shoulders. Today it is one of the most famous spirit photographs ever produced. It is also remarkably easy to dismiss until you remember who the woman sitting in that chair was.

Mary Lincoln had endured the assassination of her husband and the deaths of three of her four sons. Whatever she believed about the photograph, grief is important to this story. Because spirit photography wasn’t simply about gullible people being fooled by clever photographers. Sometimes it was about people who desperately wanted one more glimpse of somebody they loved.

The ghosts soon crossed the Atlantic. In 1872, Frederick Hudson began producing spirit photographs in Britain. His surviving photographs contain all the familiar ingredients: pale faces, veiled women and strange white figures appearing beside perfectly solid sitters. Among those fascinated by Hudson’s work was Georgiana Houghton. Houghton was already deeply involved in Spiritualism. She was a medium and artist who produced extraordinary abstract works which she believed had been created under spirit guidance.She became closely involved with Hudson’s photographic experiments and appeared in numerous photographs accompanied by supposed spirits. Even after questions were raised about Hudson’s methods, Houghton remained convinced that genuine manifestations had occurred.

To modern eyes, some spirit photographs look almost painfully obvious. But we have an enormous advantage over the people looking at them in the 1870s. We already know photographs can lie. They were still discovering that. And producing a ghost was surprisingly straightforward. A photographic plate could be exposed more than once. A person could be included for only part of an exposure and then removed. When the background was subsequently recorded across the same area, the figure appeared transparent. There were variations involving prepared plates, copied photographs and manipulated negatives. Eventually these techniques weren’t even particularly secret. Walter Woodbury’s 1896 Photographic Amusements explained how to make ghostly photographs as entertainment. No medium required. No séance. No dead relative standing patiently behind the curtain. But knowing how a photograph could be faked isn’t quite the same thing as proving how every photograph was made. And that distinction became extremely important.

By the early twentieth century, Britain’s best-known spirit photographer was probably William Hope. Hope was a carpenter from Crewe who claimed that around 1905 he had accidentally photographed a spirit. He subsequently became associated with a group of Spiritualists known as the Crewe Circle, and his reputation spread.

Then came the First World War. And spirit photography acquired an entirely different weight. Britain was full of empty chairs. Sons, husbands, brothers and fathers had disappeared into France and Belgium. Some families had graves. Others had nothing more than a telegram. For people living with that kind of loss, the possibility that a camera might capture the face of somebody who had died was extraordinarily powerful. People travelled to Hope. And sometimes another face appeared on the plate. One sitter, J. H. D. Miller, visited hoping for contact with his son Hardy, who had been killed during the war. When another head appeared beside Miller’s on the resulting photograph, he recognised it as his son. We can look at an image like that now and discuss double exposures and plate substitution. Miller wasn’t looking at an interesting example of photographic history. He believed he was looking at his dead child. That difference matters.

Hope attracted influential supporters. One of the most famous was Arthur Conan Doyle. The creator of Sherlock Holmes was deeply committed to Spiritualism and became an outspoken defender of spirit photography. He believed Hope capable of producing genuine results. Others were considerably less convinced. One of them was Harry Price. In February 1922, Price took part in a sitting with Hope at the British College of Psychic Science. He came prepared. Special photographic plates had been secretly marked using X-rays so that identifying marks would appear when they were developed. The principle was beautifully simple. If Hope used those plates, the marks would be there. If different plates came out of the camera, they wouldn’t. A spirit appeared in the resulting photograph. The secret marks did not. Price concluded that Hope had substituted the plates. Case closed.

Except it wasn’t.

Hope’s supporters challenged Price’s methods. Price had deliberately deceived Hope about the marked plates because he was trying to catch him committing fraud. At an important stage of the proceedings, Price was alone with Hope, leaving room for argument about precisely what had happened and who had handled what.

A century later, historian Efram Sera-Shriar re-examined the investigation. His assessment is wonderfully inconvenient. The wider evidence strongly indicates that Hope was producing fraudulent spirit photographs. But Price’s celebrated exposure wasn’t quite the flawless scientific trap that later retellings sometimes suggested. Which leaves us with something much more interesting than simply deciding whether William Hope was cheating. It leaves us with an argument about evidence.

The Spiritualists had photographs. Price had marked plates. Hope’s supporters challenged Price’s procedure. Price challenged Hope’s photographs. Everybody believed physical evidence could settle the matter. Nobody could agree what that evidence proved.

And that is the real story of spirit photography, in part at least.

The Victorians didn’t simply discover a new way of photographing ghosts. They discovered something considerably more troublesome.

A photograph could lie.

For generations afterwards, we continued behaving as though it couldn’t. We talked about photographic evidence. We said the camera never lies. A photograph possessed an authority that paintings, drawings and eyewitness accounts never quite achieved. A machine had made it. Therefore it must have recorded reality. Yet almost from photography’s beginning, people were manipulating exposures, negatives, glass plates, staging and processing to create things that had never stood in front of the camera at all.

Today the glass plates have gone.

We have Photoshop, filters, CGI, manipulated video and generative AI. A phone can alter an image before we’ve even finished taking it. William Mumler would have had an absolute field day. But the question hasn’t changed. We still look at an extraordinary photograph and ask:

Is that really there?

And perhaps that is why spirit photographs remain so compelling even when we know perfectly well how such images can be manufactured. They contain two things that humans find extraordinarily difficult to resist.

Proof.

And hope.

Look again at the old photograph.

There is someone behind the sitter.

Perhaps it’s a double exposure. Perhaps somebody switched the plate.

Perhaps a photographer knew precisely what a grieving customer wanted to see.

But for one moment, more than a century ago, somebody held that photograph in their hands and recognised a face they thought they would never see again.

And whatever was on the glass, that moment was real.

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The Card’s Meaning

The Photograph is the card of memory, evidence and the past refusing to disappear.

It asks you to look carefully at what appears to confirm something you already believe. Evidence can reveal the truth, but our hopes and fears influence the way we interpret it.

Sometimes the thing captured in the background matters more than the subject in the foreground.

Upright: memory · evidence · revelation · remembrance · the past resurfacing · looking again

In shadow: deception · false certainty · selective memory · wishful thinking · seeing what you want to see

The question: If the evidence showed you exactly what you wanted to find, would you still question it?

Tomorrow, another card turns. 🖤📷

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Sources & Further Reading

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. William Mumler: Spirit Photographs. – Collection material on Mumler’s pioneering commercial spirit photography, including his rise in the 1860s, the embarrassing appearance of a supposedly dead “spirit” who was actually alive, and his 1869 arrest for fraud and larceny. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

National Science and Media Museum / Science Museum Group Collection. Album of the Crewe Spirit Circle. – Surviving examples of William Hope’s spirit photographs, including images made using double and multiple exposure techniques. The collection also places Hope’s popularity in the context of widespread bereavement following the First World War. Science Museum Group Collection

Sera-Shriar, Efram. “Photographic Plates and Spirit Fakes: Remembering Harry Price’s Investigation of William Hope’s Spirit Photography at its Centenary.” Science Museum Group Journal, 2022. – Detailed scholarly reassessment of Price’s 1922 investigation of Hope, the secretly X-ray-marked photographic plates, allegations of plate substitution, and contemporary Spiritualist challenges to Price’s methods. Science Museum Group Journal

Woodbury, Walter E. Photographic Amusements. 1896. – Contemporary instructions demonstrating how convincing transparent “ghosts” could be created photographically using partial and double exposure. The National Science and Media Museum reproduces and explains Woodbury’s method. National Science and Media Museum blog

National Science and Media Museum. “G is for… Ghosts: The Birth and Rise of Spirit Photography.” – Overview of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spirit photography, photographic trickery and the technical methods available for creating apparently supernatural figures. National Science and Media Museum blog

Chéroux, Clément et al. The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. Yale University Press, 2005. – Major study of the relationship between photography, Spiritualism and attempts to obtain visual evidence of supernatural phenomena, including the work of early spirit photographers such as Frederick Hudson.

Sources accessed September 2026.