Ghost Photography

Since the beginning of time, people have imagined ghosts to haunt the world. These creatures were thought to be either hindered in their transfer to the afterlife or reluctant to leave their loved ones like the restless spirit of Catherine in Emily's Brontë's epic novel Wuthering Heights. Ghosts were seen as troubled and eager to intervene in the affairs of the living. To the audience, their punishments and corrections of injustice defined moral guidelines.

Folk tales about ghosts found their way into novels, theater plays, and the illustrated press. In Renaissance times, people were excited to see visible ghosts evoked by the use of the camera obscura in combination with the effects of mirrors and smoke. The camera obscura, a darkroom that through a lens in the wall projected an image on the opposite wall, was a device used by astronomers and portrait painters. About 1600, the instrument was applied for entertainment purposes. The invention of the laterna magica, which projected glass slide images, is attributed to both the German [Page 515]Athanasias Kircher and the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens. About 1800, moving lanterns created the eerie effect of ghosts approaching the audience. The German Paul Philidor de Philipsthal discovered the even more convincing back-projection display of ghosts, the “phantasmagoria,” that was shown in Austria, England, and France.

The Belgium-born Étienne-Gaspard Robertson impelled the phantasmagoria to international success with “fantascope” ghost shows. In 1805, the Germans Schirmer and Scholl presented the “ergascopia,” a camera obscura combined with mirrors. Whatever the technique, in this period lantern ghost shows were more than just entertainment, they were an enlightenment instrument to destroy superstition. It could be a risky business, however. A ghost show of the German entertainer Oehler in Mexico City in 1806 put him in prison for months, as he was suspected of diabolic magic.

The projection of ghosts by painted glass slides in a magic lantern was popular entertainment well into the 19th century. After 1839, the suggestive reality of the new medium of photography increased the persuasiveness of projected ghosts. Photographs documented living and deceased loved ones in family albums, picture frames, or medallions. Photographs of ghosts appeared, showing dead people as transparent, supernatural apparitions that were meant to convince people of either the existence or the nonexistence of ghosts. Furthermore, photos originated which, to the willing beholder, depicted real ghosts by coincidence. It is a genre of ghost photography that still is very popular today, as can be deduced from the numerous ghost photos on the Internet.

Photography, the production of images by means of light, was considered a medium perfectly equipped to depict ghosts. The alleged objectivity of photography contributed to its reputation as a reliable and scientific medium. Nevertheless, photography sometimes instigated feelings of superstition. To some, photography seemed as if it could take possession of one's shadow and spirit. In line with this reputation was the medium's fame as an instrument that documented death and afterlife.

Ghost photography had innocent origins in early photographic experimentation. Long exposure times turned people into vague, see-through figures. It was the inventor Sir David Brewster who understood that this quality could be used to create “ghosts.” His stereoscopic device caused a sensation in 1857 with a series of colored ghost scenes. An American, William Mumbler, is credited as the first to have photographed a spirit. The success of his photo of a deceased cousin started his career as a spirit photographic medium in 1862. In England, the first examples of ghost photography appeared in 1872. A portrait of the famous medium Elizabeth Guppy and her husband depicted a third veiled person. Many examples of spirit photography soon followed. By the end of the 1800s, spirit photos became crude and hardly convincing, sometimes even comical. By about 1900, the public preferred the moving ghosts of early cinema.

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