By Samuel Houlberg
Ghosts. Perfect Autumnal Halloween fare. Who doesn’t love sitting around a fire on a cold evening telling ghost stories? There’s something in the human psyche that’s easily drawn to them, with tales of ghostly occurrences stretching from Roman chain-jangling horrors, to the Romantic competitions of the Villa Diodati, and reappearing in the cinema each October.[1] Yet these stories do not necessarily sit easily alongside academic studies. The dry formality of historical essays can take out some of the fear and excitement from stories that might otherwise draw large audiences. This is certainly a problem that I encountered in the past year when writing about one particular example of society’s interest in the supernatural in my research.
For my MPhil dissertation, I wrote about spirit photography, a phenomenon first identified in the United States in the 1860s, and which allowed someone to sit for a portrait in the hopes that a spirit – perhaps a lost friend or family member, or potentially even a celebrity, returning to offer advice – would appear in the background. The process became surprisingly popular, to the extent even that Mary Todd Lincoln, grieving wife of the dead president, sat for a photographer, while P.T. Barnum, pioneering circus master and fraudster himself, led a campaign to discredit spirit photography’s leading practitioner.[2] My own interest in the subject was sparked by reading a critical essay by Harry Houdini, and indeed Spiritualism, of which spirit photography is an eye-catching example, has been described as foreshadowing today’s celebrity culture.[3] I initially intended to explore the relationship between spirit photography and the grief unleashed by the contemporaneous American Civil War, but my dissertation ultimately discussed the ideas around modernity that the phenomenon illustrates.
As we all are, I was always intensely interested in my own research, but I was aware throughout my MPhil year that in some ways writing an essay about Spirit Photography does it an injustice. I may not be a believer in the truth it present but nor, perhaps, were many of those who sat in front of cameras. People might equally go for a sitting simply to take part in a popular trend, or to conduct their investigations into its veracity. Or, they might be intrigued by the gothic, spiritual implications of the photographs, and drawn in by the claims they make about the afterlife and our relationship to the dead. These photographs were a way to live out a real-life ghost story. But writing about them 150 years later loses part of the experience that made spirit photographs so exciting in the 1860s.
I tried to resist this in a number of ways. Participating in ghost tours around Cambridge allowed me to try to imagine what might have drawn punters to the studios of spirit photographers in the nineteenth century. Throughout the year I tried to listen to the stories of others, friends and acquaintances, who had had ghostly encounters, trying to get into the spirit of a sincere belief in spiritualist communication. And I tried to find opportunities to share my research with others, thinking of it almost as a ghost story in itself. In principle, the central story my dissertation told was one that people tended to find interesting. It’s intriguing and plays on our own fears and uncertainties regarding both the afterlife and photography. Last March (sadly I hadn’t done enough work by October to do the presentation for Halloween!), I organised an opportunity to present on my research to the History Society at my old secondary school. This was an exciting and new experience for me, and a useful one too, because it forced me to think about what elements of my research would be most interesting to an unspecialised, non-academic audience. I structured my presentation around the 1869 trial of the leading spirit photographer William Mumler, an easy way to introduce tension. And throughout, I sought to maintain ambiguity around the authenticity of spirit photographs. Mumler, after all, was ultimately acquitted of fraud, so it is not entirely implausible that his photographs may have some basis in truth.[4] Thinking about the compelling ghost story at the heart of my research helped me to convey my academic interests to an audience that might not otherwise have been very interested, and in turn to maintain the gothic spirit which motivated these photographs in the nineteenth century.
Featured Photo Credit: Spirit photograph taken of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Ada Deane, 1922
[1] Letter from Pliny the Younger to Sura, Book 7, Chapter 27, https://vroma.org/vromans/hwalker/Pliny/Pliny07-27-E.html, accessed 30/10/23; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6-10.
[2] William H. Mumler, The Personal Experiences of William H. Mumler in Spirit Photography, (1875), reprinted in Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 92-93; P.T. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World (London: John Camden Hotten, 1866), 81-83.
[3] Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924), 138-165.
[4] “The Triumph of the Ghosts,” New York World, May 4, 1869, 2.
Doing History in Public 