Can photographs capture the spirits of the dead? Erica Fretwell, associate professor of English at UAlbany, explains how 19th-century Spiritualism and mass grief from the Civil War fueled the rise of spirit photography and foreshadowed the modern AI tools that uncannily reanimate the dead. Fretwell argues these trends reflect an enduring human desire to connect with the unknown.
There were so many interesting threads to this conversation that we couldn't include in the final edit, including Erica's take on whether folks in the 19th century knew William Mumler might be a grifter (yes) — and whether that really matters (maybe not).
Why do you think spirit photography took off? Were people not aware that technological trickery was being used?
EF: It actually was controversial from the beginning. In fact, William Mumler went on trial in 1869 for fraud. So from the get-go, it was controversial. People were immediately saying, “This is a hoax.” This is the era also of P.T. Barnum, so lots of trickery. But then there are also people saying, “No, this is real.” Those who believed it were primed in two ways. One, they probably were already what we called Spiritualists. Spiritualism was a religious movement that started in Rochester, New York, in the 1840s but really took off around the Civil War. Spiritualism is this religious belief that the living can communicate with the dead, that the dead do not leave, that their souls, in some way, remain on Earth with us.
So already you have people who are open to this Spiritualist idea that the dead live among us and that we can access the dead. Combine that with the Civil War, America's bloodiest war to date. People were never not reading in the newspapers about the massive death toll or experiencing it themselves with family dying. We have Mathew Brady's Civil War photography being disseminated through mass media — images of deceased soldiers killed in battle. And so people would be especially primed to want to believe in these spirit photographs, both because of this already prevalent Spiritualist idea, not shared by everyone but widespread enough, that the living can communicate with the dead, and by the sheer toll of death, and how many people were experiencing grief on such a scale and trying to grapple with what this all means.
What are some famous spirit photographs you discovered during your research?
EF: The most famous one by far is Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her deceased husband, Abraham Lincoln. This was taken in 1872 by Mumler. His reputation was already somewhat besmirched by the fraud trial from 1869, but if anyone has seen the Broadway show, Oh, Mary!, or knows much about Mary Todd Lincoln, she was very invested in the Spiritualist idea that you can communicate with the dead. So I think that was probably one of the more striking photos I saw. That photo was actually the one that got me thinking I really need to look into not just the technology behind the spirit photograph, but I also wanted to know what's the philosophical or scientific or religious principles that need to be in place for a spirit photograph to exist? And some of those principles that need to be in place are the Spiritualist idea that the living can communicate with the dead. If we didn't have Spiritualism, we wouldn't have spirit photography.
What’s the deal with aura photos?
EF: The colors these aura photos have go back to a kind of offshoot of Spiritualism that developed in the late 1800s and early 20th century. This was an offshoot called Theosophy, and it was started by a woman named Helena Blavatsky, who is American but spent a lot of time in India, and she more or less appropriated some Hindu and Indian religious beliefs in chakras and various kinds of belief systems, and came up with these colors. Theosophy believes in the unity of souls — we're all a universal human soul, everyone is connected through energetic matter. This all comes back to this Spiritualist idea of the soul as energetic matter, which we see happening in aura photography. So these pictures pick out the energetic matter and then the colors that are associated with particular kinds of electromagnetic waves, those colors are rooted in Blavatsky's theosophical philosophy of individual chakras and energy fields.
Erica also shared some of her favorite articles about spirit photography, including this 2017 Smithsonian Magazine article about what happened when an esteemed photographer and skeptic sat for a photograph in Mumler’s studio, and this 2019 History.com article on what became of Mumler after his 1869 trial for fraud.
The Smithsonian Magazine article was adapted from The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost, a historical nonfiction book about Mumler written by Peter Manseau.
Seeing Ghosts: A Brief Look at the Curious Business of Spirit Photography discusses the techniques employed by spirit photographers to create their images.
Spirit Photography and the Occult: Making the Invisible Visible looks at the role played by imaging technologies such as photography and X-rays in the history of the supernatural, and how photographers and scientists tried to use images to reveal a hidden world.
The Alice Austen House Museum published a brief history on aura photography and its connection to Helena Blavatsky’s 19th-century Theosophy.
Shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association first book prize, Fretwell’s 2020 book, Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling, explores the history of psychophysics and how the science of the five senses offered late-19th century writers new conceptual foundations for representing lived experiences of racial and gender difference.
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman and Zach Durocher
Interview and written by Bethany Bump
[0:01] Bethany Bump: Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I’m Bethany Bump in UAlbany’s Office of Communications and Marketing.
[0:16] Erica Fretwell: My interest is not in saying, ‘Oh, these are hoaxes.’ My argument about spirit photographs is that they are real, and they’re real if we think about them as real manifestations of people’s grief. Whether or not we want to say, ‘Oh, this is a trick’ or not, that spirit photograph is actually doing something for those people.
[0:34] Bethany Bump: Is seeing believing?
That was a popular question when spirit photography arrived on the scene in the mid-19th century and it’s a popular question today, as advancements in artificial intelligence cause us to question if what we are seeing on our screens is real.
Erica Fretwell, an associate professor of English at UAlbany, has spent a lot of time exploring this question. As a scholar of 19th-century literature and culture, she has been fascinated with the 19th-century phenomenon of spirit photography — you know, those black and white, Victorian-era photographs of some well-dressed person sitting prim and proper, seemingly oblivious to the presence of a spectral figure nearby.
One of the most famous spirit photographs depicts the ghostly outline of Abraham Lincoln resting his hands on the shoulders of his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. In the years following her husband’s assassination, a grieving Mary Todd Lincoln commissioned the portrait from the inventor of spirit photography himself, William H. Mumler, who had recently discovered through an accident of double exposure that he could create a ghostly figure in the background of photographs.
Sensing a business opportunity as large numbers of Americans were grieving loved ones who had perished in the Civil War, Mumler, with the help of his wife, Hannah, a famed spirit medium, began advertising spirit photography as a way for individuals to reconnect with the dead.
The camera was still new technology at the time and people were not immediately aware that Mumler was creating these haunting images by combining multiple images together. But whether the phenomenon was a hoax or not is less interesting to Erica than the function it served at the time — as a balm for a grieving public.
She sees connections to modern-day trends, such as aura photography that claims to capture a person’s unique energetic frequency and AI tools that use photos and audio recordings to reanimate the dead. Humans seek comfort during times of grief and uncertainty, and emerging technologies promise to vanquish some of that uncertainty by showing us far more than we previously imagined possible.
For this week’s episode, I spoke to Erica about spirit photography, its accidental origins and convergence with 19th century spiritualism, psychophysics and technological innovations, and its connection to modern trends.
This is the first of two episodes that wrestle with photography, technology and what it means to see, believe and know.
Here’s our conversation.
[2:56] Bethany Bump: Tell us a little bit about how you ended up looking into this area of spirit photography.
[3:01] Erica Fretwell: I am an English professor, and one of the great things about doing undergraduate, but ultimately graduate study in English is that you're looking at the production of art and culture. And so one might wonder, "What the heck does an English professor have to say about photography?" These are all artistic and cultural documents that are interlaced with what we would call literature or other kinds of artistic forms. And so what's great about coming at spirit photography through the kind of methodological lens of the discipline of English is that you get to ask questions that maybe if you were looking at these documents from another discipline, you wouldn't get to ask. So English wants to know not only how did these documents function, but what made it possible for them to have the function that they did? And to do that you have to look at other literatures. Part of what I loved about spirit photography is that it seemed to me a beautiful distillation of what the novelist Henry James said in his fantastic novella, The Turn of the Screw. One of the children in that novel says, "Not seeing is the strongest of proof." So to not see is actually proof in and of itself, which is precisely what spirit photography does.
[4:33] Bethany Bump: Can you tell us, what is spirit photography? When and how did this phenomenon come about?
[4:38] Erica Fretwell: Absolutely. So spirit photography was invented in 1861 by a jeweler in Boston named William Mumler. And his wife was a spirit medium. So Mumler had, like most inventions, this was an accident. What he had done was he was taking a photograph of someone, and at the time, the photographs used a glass plate. The image would be effectively imprinted or impressed upon a glass plate. But he used a glass plate that had already been used for a photograph, so there's already someone's image on that glass plate. He sticks it into the camera to take a photo of someone else by accident, and then what emerges is a picture of the person he took the photograph of, but also this kind of shadowy figure of the original figure on the glass plate. So this is what they call double exposure.
So by doing this, he realized you get this image of a person, usually a portrait, someone sitting very prim and proper in a studio, and then usually next to them or over their shoulder, you see this kind of ghostly figure, which is someone else's portrait. And so he claimed, basically, if a psychic or a spirit medium has access to these spirits, then surely a camera has almost like a supernatural lens, and so the camera could see these spirits. And so that's how he popularized the spirit photograph, claiming that a sitter could come to his portrait studio, and also with his wife, Hannah, the spirit medium would be also nearby. So there was some kind of interaction, supposedly between the camera and his wife, the spirit medium. And between these two, this technology of the camera and the spirit medium of the wife, the camera could pick up the ghost of the person who was grieving. So you would come and say, I lost my son in the Civil War. I want to see him. So you'd go to the studio and get your portrait taken, and when you got the picture back, you would see the portrait of yourself with this picture of a figure who was kind of not a clear figure, kind of grainy, but it was just enough that you could say, oh yeah, that's my son. That's my deceased son with me. He's still present with me.
[6:56] Bethany Bump: What was it that first spurred your interest in spirit photography? How did this area of interest come into your orbit?
[7:03] Erica Fretwell: I'm a scholar of 19th-century American literature and culture, and so in the scholarship I was reading, people would sort of make mention of these spirit photographs. And I'd also been interested just generally in the history of photography. The camera was invented in 1839, and so when I came across these images, just through the scholarship I was reading, I was really just blown away. As I like to tell my students, it's always good to start from a position of bewilderment — being kind of curious, and say, "What's this weird thing?" So I was really taken aback by these images that I'd never heard of or seen before, and I just wanted to learn more about them and how they came about and why they were so popular at the time.
[7:48] Bethany Bump: How does that connect to your research into the senses and sensory experience, things like vision or felt sense?
[7:56] Erica Fretwell: I'm going to start with the psychophysical researcher Gustav Fechner. He argued early on what would become the Law of the Conservation of Energy, which was that matter never dies, energy doesn't die, it just changes form. It becomes a different kind or form of energy. So one of his arguments, and this is going to sound crazy, was that the body dies, right? The soul is made of energetic matter, basically. But because matter doesn't fundamentally fully die, it becomes this kind of invisible energy. And that specifically, he argued, the kind of energy it becomes is optic light waves. There's already this idea that the living can communicate with the dead. Now, Fechner comes in and says that not only are souls a kind of invisible energy that still remain on Earth, but they actually become light waves. So you have people like Mumler saying, "Well, of course then, of course we have spirit photography because the camera can pick up these light waves that the human eye cannot see, and those light waves are the dead."
So that's the thread from psychophysics, the science of the senses, and in this particular case of visual perception, where Fechner is saying basically that souls become invisible, that they're still present. Part of what psychophysics does is intervene in this discussion in the sciences and in philosophy and ultimately in culture in the early to mid-19th century about whether seeing is believing. You have in the early 19th century new theories of light, and that's the theory that light operates in waves that the eye can't fully see. So that's in physics. In physiology, you have discoveries that the retina is fallible, that the human eye is not picking up on everything. Now all of a sudden, based on how we understand light waves working, how we understand all of a sudden people realize," Oh, you can have astigmatism? You're not getting a perfect image of the world through your eye." There's this crisis in whether or not we can actually know the world through vision. And so again, spiritualism, alongside psychophysics, there's all these other kinds of sciences and philosophies and religions that pop up that say, well, yeah, there's a whole world out there that is physically, materially real but we cannot see. And once you sort of acknowledge that, that opens up space for something like spirit photography.
[10:40] Bethany Bump: You raised this point about the crisis of, is seeing believing, and boy does that feel relevant to today. Can you talk a little bit about that? Is there a modern-day equivalent to this historical phenomenon of spirit photography?
[10:55] Erica Fretwell: Well, I was recently tuned into this new phenomenon called aura photography. So aura photography is so interesting because obviously the camera that William Mumler was using in the 1860s, it's very different from the cameras being used now. But it's still a form of double exposure. So basically, the camera is hooked up with these electromagnetic plates, and those plates have physiological sensors, so they're kind of picking up on the photographic subjects on the body. So it's not just a visual image of the body, but they're actually picking up the kind of electromagnetic waves that the photographic subject is generating. And then that gets converted into colors from those electromagnetic waves onto the image of the person. One could easily just say, "Fine, those are electromagnetic waves. All living things produce them. How does that tell us anything about a person other than that you're like every other living creature?"
The colors that these aura photos have go back to a kind of offshoot of Spiritualism that developed in the late 1800s and early 20th century, and this was an offshoot called theosophy. This all comes back to this Spiritualist idea of the soul as energetic matter, which we see happening in aura photography. So these pictures pick up the energetic matter and then the colors that are associated with particular kinds of electromagnetic waves — those colors are rooted in the theosophical philosophy of individual chakras and energy fields. And I think that it makes sense. I'm thinking about the connections with spirit photography.
My interest is not in saying, "Oh, these are hoaxes." My argument about spirit photographs is that they are real. And they're real if we think about them as real manifestations of people's grief, whether or not we want to say, "Oh, this is a trick" or not. That spirit photograph is actually doing something for those people. And similarly, I think with aura photography, especially today, basically we're all products of algorithms at this point, and I don't think any of us feel especially unique. I think that there's something about getting an aura photograph done, where you get this special color palette that tells you who you uniquely are. People are looking for an affirmation of their individuality and of their personality.
[13:23] Bethany Bump: One thing I think of in connection to all this, although it probably wouldn't qualify as spirit photography, I think of those AI videos of people's lost loved ones. Can you talk a bit about that?
[13:34] Erica Fretwell: Yeah, my interest is less is this fraud or not, is this fake or not, to what is the cultural work or what's the personal work that this document is doing? And what these AI videos are doing for some people is helping them work through their grief. So it's less a value judgment of, "Oh, this is fake and this is real," versus just kind of asking what function do they have for us now? We tend to think that as history progresses, as human society progresses, we become more rational and less religious. This is something that scholars call the secularization thesis, this idea that as we move through modern time, we've become more secular and less religious, less superstitious. But what these scholars are saying is that the secularization thesis is wrong. And I think spirit photography shows us that. I think aura photography, or these AI videos, show us that. It's not to make a value judgment, but I think we are prone to saying, oh, look at spirit photographs, for instance, and say, that's so backwards, how could people possibly have believed that? Oh, we in the 21st century are so much more rational and smarter. But in fact, we also abide by particular beliefs. Our belief systems may look a little different, the technologies may look a little different and work differently, but they're doing the same thing. So even the person who's looking at the AI simulation of someone who's deceased — on some level, of course, they know they're looking at a simulation. But that image is emotionally doing something for them that is valid, that's real, and so just because it's "fake" or might be something that seems ‘backwards,’ that doesn't mean that it doesn't have an important function.
[15:27] Bethany Bump: There seems to be this innate human desire to preserve things that are mysterious and invisible, and also deep hunger and fascination with this idea that technology will advance to the point where we can make these previously invisible things visible, or we can measure, capture them in some way that we previously weren't able to.
[15:48] Erica Fretwell: We think we want technology to make things more visible for us. I'm not sure that we always do. I think there's always going to be some mystery. Even the more that we try to prove something, the more questions that always generates. Mumler set out to prove that the dead do live among us, but that only produced more questions and more mystery and more uncertainty. I just think that there's a kind of metaphysical or spiritual excess to what it means to live on this earth that no technology will ever fully capture or represent or solve for us. And I think it fundamentally comes down to being comfortable with uncertainty at an existential scale. I think that's what spirit photographs helped people work through in the 19th century. I think aura photographs or these AI simulations are all ways that people are trying to deal with not just grief, but just the uncertainty about being human and how sometimes that's uncomfortable and not everything can be secured and solvable and fixable and clear cut.
[17:03] Bethany Bump: That was Erica Fretwell, associate professor of English at UAlbany, discussing the 19th-century phenomenon of spirit photography, which claimed to capture spirits of the dead in photographs with the living.
To learn more about spirit photography, its controversial origins and the connection between aura photography and an esoteric 19th century philosophy known as theosophy, be sure to check out The Longer Version in our show notes.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people. Audio production and editing for this episode were provided by Scott Freedman and Zach Durocher in the UAlbany Digital Media Studio, located deep inside the Podium tunnels. Which are definitely not haunted.
We’ll be back next week with Art & Art History Professor Danny Goodwin for the second of two conversations on AI, photography and the way humans lie to themselves about the certainty of what we see.
Danny Goodwin: “We’re doing it wrong with photography. We — collectively, culturally. And I think a lot of photographers are aware that we’re doing it wrong.”
You’re not going to want to miss the rest of that conversation.
I’m Bethany Bump at the University at Albany, and this has been The Short Version.