by Sherry G
University of Chicago MADD 14920: Comparative Media Poetics – Horror
Autumn 2022

What leads someone to believe in ghosts? Perhaps a spooky encounter that can’t be explained. But if ghosts are supposed to be scary, why does it seem like so many people wanted to believe in them with the spirit photography craze of the latter half of the 1800s?

William Mumler was a jewelry engraver turned (spirit) photographer who claimed to have taken the first “ghost photo” in 1862. According to Mumler, he was alone in his studio taking a self portrait, and when he went to develop the image, a ghostly figure resembling his late cousin appeared in the frame. Mumler went on to self-promote his abilities as a medium in various newspapers to attract people to his studio with promises that he could coax their dead relatives to appear in a photo with them. He charged $5-10 per photo, roughly $150-300 in today’s dollars, and quickly became quite wealthy with the high public demand for pictures of people’s dead family members.

However, Mumler’s rise to fame came about as quickly as his fall from grace. From the beginning, Mumler had vocal skeptics. Though no one was ever able to exactly recreate his photographs, photographers and scientists at the time gave at least a dozen different plausible explanations for ways the images could have been faked in Mumler’s 1869 fraud trial. But photography was still a new medium, having only been invented in 1822, and was expensive so the mechanisms of the technology were not widely understood by the general public. It was argued that the limits of photography were unclear, so perhaps ghosts could really be captured on film. Damningly though, there were multiple instances where someone who was still alive was captured as  “ghost” by Mumler, including people he had recently photographed in the studio. Not only that, it was alleged that Mumler broke into people’s houses to steal photos of dead family members prior to sessions they had scheduled with him. 

So, with all this evidence against Mumler’s claims, why did so many people go along with Mumler’s claims that he could communicate with those beyond the grave? Looking at Mumler’s photography today, it’s clear that they were faked. Many of the ghosts in the images have the exact same silhouette with no clothing details, only different faces.

Noticing this immediately, I was initially baffled at why anyone would have believed Mumler or believed in ghosts in general. However, times were different back then. There was no internet, no database of every photo Mumler ever took for people to compare and scrutinize. Upon further investigation with this in mind, I argue that in this period of rapid change and uncertainty, people were desperate to hold onto any semblance of constancy. For many, ghosts were comforting because they represented a continuity of life after physical death.

The 1860s was a period of rapid change and uncertainty in the US with the Civil War spanning the first half the decade. The country was split and families were separated as men went off to fight with no guarantee of returning home alive. News traveled slowly, so people waited anxiously for weeks to hear from their loved ones and no one knew when the fighting would end. This war brought an unprecedented number of casualties. Grief was overwhelming and there was widespread mourning across the nation.   

The mid-1800s was also a period when new technologies were constantly being invented and changing vital aspects of life multiple times throughout a person’s lifetime. Notably, the invention of the telegraph in 1844 fundamentally reshaped communication and peoples’ relationship to and understanding of the body. For the first time, the human voice could be disembodied from the corporeal. With this new concept of disembodied communication, Spiritualism rose in popularity as a religious movement that proclaimed communication with the dead was possible because the soul and body are separate entities. 

With the Civil War’s devastating aftermath and the rise of belief in spiritualism, ghosts became a source of comfort rather than fear. Death is horrifying. Losing loved ones fundamentally alters how someone looks at life. Processing death is difficult and painful. How do you begin to process a loved one’s death when all you get is a letter that says they were killed in battle, knowing that you will never get a chance to see their face again? 

While Mumler was a savvy businessman who capitalized on mass mourning, it was clear he understood the power of nostalgia. Seeing the smiling faces of their dead relatives one last time, even the form of a hazy translucent figure (that most certainly was a photo from when they were alive), allowed many people to feel that their loved ones were still with them on the other side. Although death is inevitable, the existence of ghosts means that life still exists past death. Spirits do not die because the soul is eternal. Mumler’s spirit photos gave his clients a physical reminder of this, that just because their family members are dead doesn’t mean they are completely gone from their lives. 

Death leaves many questions that will forever go unanswered and brings on many fears. Perhaps the greatest fear that death brings is whether that person’s presence will continue to be felt in the mourner’s life, or whether their memory will eventually fade to nothing. A ghost photo serves as a permanent memorialization of the dead, a memory physically externalized so that it cannot be completely lost. Grief never fully goes away, but those grieving eventually learn to live with that uncertainty. When the unknown becomes the only constant in a sea of change, it becomes a source of comfort.

by Cal S
University of Chicago MADD 14920: Comparative Media Poetics – Horror
Spring 2022

From Telegraphs to Text Chains

The invention of the telegraph brought with it a bevy of confusion regarding its stunning capability to transmit messages over such long distances. People were baffled at how this technology could possibly work, and so, naturally, many turned to the supernatural to explain its function. Wild ideas of communicating with other dimensions and ghosts were popular among those “true believers” who were a part of the growing spiritualism movement of the 19th century. But as ridiculous as these claims may sound today, one would be remiss to say that we as a society have moved past such antiquated notions regarding the paranormal. Rather, it would seem that with every step forward in technology, we take a step backward in our collective reason (depending on your perspective regarding the supernatural, of course). The most prominent of these steps has been through the growth of the internet and social media. In the web’s early days, it wasn’t uncommon to be sent an email chain regarding some sinister haunting or conspiracy. As frightening as it may have been to be a sixty-year-old or especially a young child receiving an email that said if they don’t forward this chain to five other people they will be visited in the night by Bloody Mary, the more damaging messages came in the form of political misinformation. And as ready as people were to believe in ghosts, they were just as ready to believe in any wild conspiracy that was told to them in the email. With this newfangled technology, it was easy to convince and rope people into the alt-right pipeline, and this only continued with the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The internet, with its many niche spaces and corners, is a world full of echo chambers, making it easier than ever to be convinced of something outlandish. Back when the telegraph was invented, as out-there as many claims were, everybody was still living in the same world. After a while, and as the general population began to catch up on its science, these claims became less popular. However, that’s not to say we stopped believing. Technology such as the telegraph, the radio and even the phonograph still carry with them a sort-of “haunted” connotation. It’s common knowledge that self-proclaimed “ghost hunters” try to carry around radios to try and reach a frequency through which a spirit can communicate. We still have an odd obsession with these devices. It would appear that, rather than having fallen by the wayside, we as a society accepted this notion of the telegraph and such as being gateways to the paranormal.

Glass Half Empty

It is important to note the tone of the Spiritualist movement. Today, we might look back and assume that this was a frightening phenomenon spurred on by figures who wished to torment themselves and others. However, the reality is quite the opposite. Those who sought out mediums, or a spirit photographer like Mumler, were not doing so seeking a cheap thrill. They wanted assurance that their loved ones were alright. They wanted to know that they were happy in Heaven, or the like. It was not horror-based at all but rather a quite positive and optimistic movement. Which is why the assumption of horror and spookiness from today’s perspective is so fascinating. Why has there been such a shift in mindset? Why do we view the concept of a ghost as being scary, rather than reassuring? Stanley Kubrick once noted in a conversation with Steven King that any ghost story is surely a rather optimistic one, because it confirms the existence of an afterlife, that we don’t just cease to exist upon our death. And yet, ghosts scare us. Perhaps this has something to do with Spiritualists themselves. As time passed, we began to see these people more as swindlers with bad intentions rather than goodhearted people wishing to help us see our loved ones. But, almost paradoxically, as our mistrust in mediums grew, our superstition remained the same, if not was strengthened. Because we associated the paranormal with these people who we start to view as bad, we naturally began to ascribe those bad intentions to the paranormal as well. We cannot help but believe in ghosts, but humans are easy to lose faith in. Therefore, as the reputations of the people associated most heavily with the supernatural began to sour, so did the that of ghosts. Nowadays, a picture that claims to have captured a ghost will not only be met with skepticism, but also fear, fear of an unknown to which we no longer have a trustworthy human connection. Without that human connection provided by mediums, ghosts become more alien, less like us. We don’t understand them anymore, and so we are afraid.