Alleged 1911 spirit photograph of Emma Hardinge Britten taken by William H. Mumler. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Haunted Histories

A BackStory Halloween Special

10.25.19

How did two girls spark the 19th century Spiritualism movement? Could a Civil War-era photographer really commune with the dead? On this episode, Joanne brings you a sampling of some of our spookiest segments just in time for Halloween.

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Segments

The Fox Sisters

Reporter Nate DiMeo tells the story of Kate and Margaret Fox, the small-town girls who triggered the 19th century movement known as Spiritualism.

Music:

Nocturne by Podington Bear

Children’s Toy Box Nightmare by Audio Blocks

Orchestral Excerpts by Audio Blocks

Solace Acoustic Guitar Piano by Audio Blocks

Halloween; New York; Rochester; ghosts; horror films; spiritualism; superstition

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment For The Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities this is Backstory. Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman. If you’re new to the podcast, each week, my colleagues, Brian Balogh, Ed Ayers, Nathan Connolly and I explore a different aspect of American history. Now, October 31st is lurching towards us like a zombie stalking the nighttime streets. So many are decorating their haunted houses and stocking up on candy in preparation for one of America’s favorite holidays, Halloween. A Testament to its enduring popularity. Halloween spending is expected to top $8.8 billion this year according to a 2019 survey by the National Retail Federation.

Joanne Freeman: So today on the show, as ghosts and ghouls of all ages get ready to do descend on neighborhoods across the country, we’re digging into the archives and bringing you our spookiest segments. You’ll find out how one man made a fortune off photographs that allegedly captured spirits from the other side. And you’ll learn how Edgar Allen Poe’s horror stories reflected 19th century fears of slave insurrection.

Joanne Freeman: But first we’re going to begin in the 19th century when the idea that the living could commune with the dead turned into a full fledged American religion. It was known as spiritualism. And while there’s been plenty of debate about what to make of it, most people agree on when and where it started. In 1848 in a tiny town in upstate New York. I’m going to hand things over now to Nate Dimeo to tell us the story of the Fox sisters.

Nate: People said the house was haunted and that was even before the two girls started talking to the dead. Kate Fox was 11, her sister Margaret was 14 when they moved into a little house in a nothing village, 40 miles East of Rochester, New York. A little house that all their neighbors knew as the one where the traveling salesman had been invited in years before and was never heard from again. Never heard from that is until one night in March of 1848 when their parents first heard the sound. Some nights it would sound like knocking other nights like furniture moving and it always seemed to come from the girl’s bedroom. But they’d open the door and their daughters would be fast asleep.

Nate: They never suspected that their daughters could be tricking them. They were just young girls, but they were tricking them. What started with a little tap tapping on the wall and tiptoeing back into bed with giggles muffled by pillows, got more sophisticated as the nights went on. And on the night of March 31st the Fox sisters revealed the latest in their growing repertoire of ghost stimulating techniques. The one that would place the two girls at the center of a cultural and religious revolution.

Nate: They call their mother into the room. Margaret snapped her fingers once and they heard a tap and response. She snapped twice and it tapped twice the next night. All of their neighbors squeezed into the girls candle it room. They explained that one tap meant yes, two taps meant no. And then they started asking questions. And in the morning the audience left convinced that they had spent the night in the presence of a dead man and two girls with incredible powers.

Nate: Mr and Mrs. Fox wanted to protect their daughters and they sent them to live with their responsible older sister, Leah. But they soon found that the ghost followed the girls and Leah found an opportunity. She had booked her little sisters in a 400 seat theater in Rochester. By 1850 they were the toast of New York city. People would wait in line for hours to ask the sisters for words of their dead loved ones on the other side. William Colon Bryant caught their act, James Fenimore Cooper, George Ripley, though we don’t know whether he believed it or not. The newspaper man, Horace Greeley introduced them to New York nightlife in the pages of his paper, introduced them to the world. Soon people were holding seances like we hold dinner parties, but even as spiritualism was sweeping the nation, it was leaving the sisters who started it behind.

Nate: On October 21st, 1888 a 54 year old Margaret Fox sat on the stage at the New York Academy of Music in front of 2000 paying customers and her sister Kate and showed them all how she spoke to the dead. She told them about how 40 years before back in that little house in the nothing town after a few nights of knocking and tiptoeing back to bed, she and her little sister realized that they could both crack their toes and no one could see them doing it. And that when they did, people actually believed they were hearing from dead people. Because sounds are hard to place in space and because you believe pretty much anything if you really want to believe it.

Nate: She revealed all of that but not everything. She didn’t tell them about how she and her little sister started to unravel not long after Horace Greeley introduced them to the world. And to worldly things like power in wealth and wine. She didn’t tell them about how her sister began to believe that maybe there was something to it all, even as they both struggled under the growing weight if their shared secret. And she certainly didn’t tell them about the night she tested her own belief. After scurvy had taken the life of a polar explorer who had taken her heart. Now she broke down and tried to contact him, tried to do for real what she had spent the last nine years pretending to do. She didn’t say how she called out to him and how he didn’t call back. And how she sat in the dark knowing that he never would.

Nate: Kate and Margaret Fox weren’t forgotten, but at the times of their deaths, they weren’t remembered fondly. Each died poor, neither living to see 60. The people who still clung to spiritualism were glad to see them go. And people who never believed, they were too. Now, there is a postscript here that really can’t be resisted and you can do with it what you will. They tore that little house down in 1904 and inside one of the walls near the girls room. They found the skeleton of a man believed to be a traveling salesman who appeared to have been murdered a few years before the Fox family moved in. It’s true.

Joanne Freeman: That was Nate Dimeo. You can listen to a longer version of the story as well as many more of Nate’s American history stories at thememorypalace.us.

That’s The Spirit

Peter Manseau tells Brian the story of William Mumler, who claimed to capture ghosts in his Civil War-era photographs. But as Mumler’s fame for his so-called spirit photographs grew, so did the doubt that he could commune with the dead at all.

Music:

Conscious Drifting by Ketsa

deception; ghosts; photography; spirit mediums; spiritualism

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Joanne Freeman: One day in 1861 amateur photographer William Mumler sat down to take a self portrait in his Boston studio. Mumler later claimed that when he went to develop the image, he found quite the surprise.

Brian: Because he discovered that though he had been alone in the room where the picture was taken, he was not alone in the photograph. Standing next to him was a picture of a ghost.

Joanne Freeman: Brian spoke do Peter Manseau last year. He says that Mumler had miraculously captured a hazy image of a young woman hovering above his shoulders.

Brian: He first thought it was something of a joke and he showed it to people saying, look at this strange mistake I have made, but then he became convinced that he had in fact captured the image of a lingering spirit in his photo studio.

Joanne Freeman: The photographer believed that the phantasmic figure was a cousin who had died 12 years earlier. The picture and the story it told soon found a ready audience. As we’ve just heard, spiritualism was sweeping the nation during the Civil War era, and spiritualists were hungry for evidence of their beliefs.

Brian: They thought that this new technology of photography was leading to a new revelation, a new moment in the interaction between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

Joanne Freeman: Mumler and his wife, Hannah, saw a lucrative opportunity and began selling spirit photographs. Their most famous customer was Mary Todd Lincoln, who emerged from their studio with a portrait of her murdered husband, protectively resting his hands on her shoulders.

Peter Manseau: So you could visit the Mumler studio the same way you would visit any portrait studio at the time. You would sit in a well-appointed room, and when you had your photograph given to you, you might see, if you were lucky, the image of a deceased loved one lingering behind you, a ghost floating in the air very often. So the Mumlers became the toast of spiritualist Boston and for a time they were selling people the solace that they needed, this connection to loved ones who were gone.

Brian: I don’t want to bad mouth another New England industry, but was this a little like whale watching? Where you know you’re kind of pay your money, you go out to see the whales and you know, sometimes they show up and sometimes they don’t. I mean, could people be asked to come back again and again and again in the hope that the spirit would show up?

Peter Manseau: It was precisely like whale watching in the sense that Mumler would never guarantee that ghosts would appear in the photographs. He would say that he had no control over the spirit world. He did not know why some spirits chose to appear before his camera and some did not. He could not determine in advance which spirits would arrive to be in your photograph. And so certainly people who were dissatisfied but still believed in the possibility of spirit photography, they would come back.

Peter Manseau: But very often people did receive what they wanted to. They received images of their late spouses or very often of their children who had too young. So Mumler again was filling this real need and he was giving those who believed in him exactly what they paid for.

Brian: Do you have any specific cases of believers and can you give us a sense of what they thought they had found?

Peter Manseau: The Mumler story unfolds during the civil war, and many of the people who visited Mumler were haunted by their own particular feelings of personal loss, but often by their role that they played within the war. So in Boston there was a man named Alvin Adams. He was the founder of a company called Adams Express. And he began is just a courier service, but he soon became the leading shipper of bodies in both the North and the South. Shipping the casualties of war, they would be shipped in special Adam’s Express caskets. And Adams felt the weight of all these young men whose deaths he was profiting from. And when he visited Mumler he wanted to be relieved of that feeling of guilt. And he was given a spirit photograph showing a young man who he believed to be one of these casualties. And in receiving this image, he did seem to receive some kind of relief.

Brian: I gather that most of the people who went to the Mumlers were satisfied customers or at least believing customers.

Peter Manseau: Initially, they were believers in spiritual wisdom, but they were also skeptics who wanted to see if it was what people were claiming it would be. And soon the skeptics began to out crowd the believers in the Mumler’s studio. So many people came hoping to be the ones to reveal the fraud that Mumler felt endlessly investigated by these photographers who thought that this was someone abusing their pure art. And it also became popular among spiritualists as a spiritualist in Boston actually believed that spirit photography was possible. But something about the Mumlers eventually just didn’t smell right. And they decided that those spirit photography may be possible in the future this fellow, William Mumler was not in fact doing it.

Brian: What were they smelling?

Peter Manseau: Well as it happens in Boston, it began to be come known that there were many ghosts depicted in William Mumler’s photographs who were in fact alive and well and walking the streets of Boston. So when you began to recognize…

Brian: Rumors of their death were premature.

Peter Manseau: Exactly right. That you would find the same faces of spirits on multiple people’s spirit photographs. People who have no relation and they would be looking at the same supposedly dead aunt. And when it began to be known that there were living people being used as ghosts in Mumler’s images, that did put an end to one part of their career in Boston. They had fewer people coming to sit in their studio. But they at that point expanded such that they offered to coast photographs by mail. You could send them an image of yourself and a lost loved one and they would use their mediumistic powers to recreate an image of both the living and the dead and send it back to you.

Brian: Did the Mumlers ever get in trouble for this?

Peter Manseau: The Mumlers eventually needed to pick up stakes in Boston and they needed to find a new field in which to sell their wares. So they moved down to New York city in 1868 and Mumler set up shop again. Set up a shop on Broadway where there were more than 200 portrait photographers working at the time. So in some ways he fit right in, but he was the only one offering spirit photographs. So he immediately made a name for himself in New York City. But that unfortunately also drew the attention of the law.

Peter Manseau: So the mayor of the city at the time, A. Oakley Hall made it a personal mission of his to crack down on small time swindlers. And he saw Mumler…

Brian: He must’ve been a busy man.

Peter Manseau: He was at the time and he the city Marshall, his personal investigator. A man named Marshal Tooker, he put Tooker on the case investigating Mumler. The marshal of the City of New York goes Mumler’s studio in disguise using a fake name and demands to have spirit photographs taken. When he is given the photographs he decides that now he has caught Mumler red handed. He arrests Mumler and sends him to the wonderfully named City Court of New York, called the Tombs at the time.

Brian: Oh I know the Tombs.

Peter Manseau: And Mumler is made to face trial in New York City. And it becomes the trial of the century at the time, because not only was one petty swindler being put on trial, but all of spiritualism, this idea that you could communicate with the dead, that you could see the dead to really settle this matter once and for all.

Brian: And what was the evidence?

Peter Manseau: Well, the evidence as far as the prosecution was concerned was that it was it was apparent that every photograph Mumler took was evidence against him because this simply was not possible. Their star witness ended up being PT Barnum. They decided to bring in Barnum because they thought, here is the world’s preeminent expert on humbug. And we’ll bring in Barnum to show that Mumler is just one example of humbug.

Peter Manseau: And in fact, Barnum had in his American museum in New York City, he, for several years, had shown Mumler images in his gallery of humbug. The great humbugs of the world. He considered spirit photography to be one of them. So Barnum testified against William Mumler to great fanfare. The newspapers of course loved it at a time because the trial had already been a circus. And then here comes the ring master to make it official. But Mumlers defense attorneys response to this was, “We’ll prove it. Prove that it is not possible for photography to do this.” We have seen throughout the 19th century, they would claim all the many marvels of technology. People scoffed at the telegraph, people scoffed at electricity. And now look at what these things are able to do. Who is to say Mumlers attorneys argued that photography, this marvel of technology could not see the dead, could not have sight beyond human sight. And it ended up being a very persuasive argument.

Brian: Well, how did things end?

Peter Manseau: The prosecution a mounted strong case against William Mumler. But ultimately the judge had to admit that there was not the evidence to show how William Mumler had done this. The prosecution brought in a parade of expert photographers who said, if I was to create spirit photographs, this is the way I would do it. And they would give a number of theories, a number of techniques they would use. But then each one of them had to admit, “I did not see Mumler do any of these things.” And so we can not know. We cannot know how these spirits appeared in his photographs.

Brian: So Mumler was acquitted.

Peter Manseau: Mumler was acquitted and he soon left New York and went back to Boston where he continued to take spirit photographs off and on for the rest of his life.

Brian: Okay, so all our listeners now want to know because we have you, Peter, not PT Barnum. How’d he do it?

Peter Manseau: It remains something of a mystery. There are certainly experts in photography, experts in 19th century photographic techniques who can show how they would have done it just as those experts and who testified at the trial suggested how they would do it. But no one knows precisely how Mumler did it, in fact. He was able to through some some kind of slight of hand, he was able to perform some kind of double exposure on his glass plates without being detected in doing so. So he certainly was perhaps not spiritually gifted, but technically adept with the photographic arts. Enough so that he was able to fool the experts of the day and to create this ongoing mystery.

Brian: What does this tell us about this particular moment in the history of photography?

Peter Manseau: Well, when I began writing Mumler story, it seemed just this quaint moment in 19th century history, but the more I began to investigate the story, the more it seemed to have some resonance with the world we are in now. This world in which radical changes in technology produce these challenges to human perception such that we are unable to know if we are looking at fact or fiction.

Peter Manseau: What was happening at this moment of the intersection of the technology of photography and spiritualism seems to have some resonance to me with where we are now in our digital age where we are encountering constantly upgraded and remade technologies. And we too are an able to look at an image and really know what we’re looking at. And to me this reminds me that it’s not simply the case, that those who believed in William Mumler were more gullible or they were less savvy interrogators of images than we are. In fact, they were at precisely the same moment we are in where technology promises so much and yet the questions that we have about human existence, about what comes next, they remain. And we inevitably use those stupid new technologies toes ask those questions and to find new answers.

Joanne Freeman: That was Brian and conversation with Peter Manseau. He’s the author of The Apparitionist: a Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost.

Nevermore

Edgar Allan Poe helped invented the modern horror story. So we talked to Paul Jones, an English professor at Ohio University about Poe’s enduring appeal.

Music:

Watching, Waiting by Audio Blocks

*Additional Music in Show Intro:

The Kids Old Record Player Horror by Audio Blocks

Edgar Allen Poe; horror films; storytelling; writing

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Joanne Freeman: I want to finish today’s show with a segment that aired on our American Horror Story episode back 2016 in it, Brian, Ed and former cohost Peter Onuf discuss Edgar Allen Poe, America’s original horror writer. Here they are in all their campy, gory, glory.

Ed: Now Peter, Brian. There’s just no way we can do a show on horror without talking about Edgar Allen Poe. I mean, he helped invent the modern horror story.

Paul Jones: Yeah. I wouldn’t pit anybody against him, Ed.

Ed: Because the pendulum swings back the other way?

Paul Jones: Exactly.

Ed: Oh, those are terrible. Fortunately, we’re not the only ones creeped out by Poe’s stories. His work seems to have universal appeal. And he was born in 1809 and died of mysterious circumstances in 1849. And during his short lifetime he had legions of fans in both United States and in Europe. And in the 20th century his tales were translated into dozens of languages and inspired dozens of movies.

Paul Jones: I mean there really hasn’t been a time period since these works were published where people weren’t reading them and intrigued by them.

Peter: This is Paul Jones, professor of English at Ohio university. He says one explanation for Poe’s enduring appeal is that his most popular horror tales like the Raven, the Telltale Heart and the Fall of the House of Usher are not set in a specific time or place. Narrators and characters often go unnamed.

Ed: But Jones says that much of Poe’s work spoke to some very specific 19th century American anxieties. Though Poe was born in Boston, he was orphaned as a toddler and grew up in Richmond, Virginia. There he became intimately familiar with one of the great fears of white southerners, slave revolts.

Paul Jones: Poe was raised by the Allen family. They were wealthy merchants. That meant he had slaves in the household, likely he was raised by a mammy figure. Likely he played with slave children as a child.

Ed: Does Poe ever express his feelings about slavery?

Paul Jones: He’s very good about avoiding any expression of opinion on topical issues in his public writing. There are definitely things he was writing for the Southern Literary Messenger book reviews for instance where he very clearly seems to be embracing his region and his times view of slavery as necessary, justified, mutually beneficial to both master and slave. But he’s in Virginia in the 1830s. The significant event in the 1830s is Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, which happens in 1831.

Ed: South Hampton County, Virginia, sort of a middle of nowhere place that a man named Nat Turner rises up from within this slave community and persuades dozens of his fellow and slave people to lead a rebellion that would bring the end of slavery in some unspecified way. And along the way they will kill their own masters and mistresses and the children of those masters in mistresses beginning with Turner’s own. It became famous throughout the whole country and it would have been resonating in Richmond certainly four years later when Edgar Allen Poe sets up shop there for the Southern Literary Messenger.

Paul Jones: Yes. As Poe starts his career writing horror, he’s in a culture where that is not forgotten. And that possibility that slaves could rise up and kill their masters is I think a real anxiety for that moment in time.

Ed: But he doesn’t address it directly. So your, your argument is that he addresses it quite richly, but obliquely and this is where some of the horror and his stories come from. Can you make that connection for us?

Paul Jones: I guess the thing I would say about it is that in some ways it was kind of reality contesting the public rhetoric about slavery. And so much, especially in the South, the writing about slavery was romanticized. You have all of these depictions of kind of happy plantation life and loving servants and master relationships. And I think Poe would have just seen it as this is proof that our literature, the stories we tell ourselves, don’t actually fit what’s actually happening. And I think he’s so interested then in I’m kind of taking that tension between those two rhetorics and exploiting it.

Peter: So I’m intrigued. Tell me what’s the most famous story that feeds into the American tradition of horror that you think is a kind of sublimated wrestling with these anxieties of slavery?

Paul Jones: The moment in his works where I see kind of most clearly, trying to evoke the specter of Nat Turner or the, the murderous slave is the one novel he wrote called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. And his hero finds himself on his ship and a mutiny occurs. And that mutiny is led by a black cook who we see slaughter 22 crew members with an axe. And definitely that vision of a black figure leading a murder spree would have evoked Nat Turner for the the American reader and certainly the Virginia reader.

Ed: Okay. Paul, that seems pretty overt. Are there better known stories or Poe place upon this fear of slave revolt but maybe a little bit less directly?

Paul Jones: So, yeah, I would say most famously it would be the story of the Murders in the Rue Morgue. A story that many people see as the first detective story. And the detective in that story is trying to solve the brutal murder of a woman and her daughter who have been found in a locked room. And I guess at this point we should say this is a spoiler. If you’re planning on reading the story and have not, the murder are turns out to be an orangutan. An orangutan who has escaped from its master, and taken a razor to these two women.

Paul Jones: And the scene where he escapes from the master because the master eventually tells the detective what has happened. He has gotten out of the room, he’s locked in and he begins…

Ed: Let me pause here, why’s an orangutan locked in a room in Paris?

Paul Jones: This is a good question. So the owner is a sailor who has gotten the orangutans from where ever orangutans are. So the one thing to say is that in the 19th century, especially in the antebellum period, there is a whole body of race science that basically says the African race is one step away from primates.

Ed: Thomas Jefferson says it in his notes on the state of Virginia.

Paul Jones: Yes. So this orangutans is, I think importantly discussed repeatedly as the property of this white owner, a possession. When his master tries to get him back into the closet he’s kept in, he raises the whip at him and the ape jumps out a window and then is repeatedly called a fugitive. Almost saying this is a runaway slave who is armed and then heads to this house where these women live and then, enacts his violence on them.

Ed: So you think that a lot of the horror than in this story in another’s is not merely on the surface, but is a pressure that’s sort of building within Americans who are worried about this kind of possibility of horror that they’ve built into the heart of their society? Yes. And it’s in their own homes. Or for many of these readers, the source of terror is actually, it’s how they’re living and if it’s not in their homes, it’s in their neighborhoods, on their streets of their cities. So do you think that the readers of Poe were aware of what he was doing?

Paul Jones: I’m not even sure he’s aware of partially. I think that’s the real question about Poe’s writing. What makes him such a talented writer of horror? Does he know what he’s doing or is he just kind of really intuitive about what scares him, what scares his neighbors, what scares the people he knows? And the story of the telltale heart, it can be read about this anxiety. In that story you have a narrator plotting the murder of an old man and it’s never very clear the relationship between these two figures. It’s either maybe a lodger or a servant of the old man and having then the then telltale heart narrator basically say, “This man has no idea what I’m thinking about him, what I’m plotting.” And he says, “I was never kinder to the old man than during the week I was going to murder him.”

Paul Jones: How has that not scary? And we do actually have southerners writing things like that in diaries in the antebellum style, Mary Chestnut’s diary, I think most famously, even though it’s 10 or so years after Poe’s death, I mean she’s basically saying that the slaves could kill us anytime they wanted. The slave that you told yourself…

Ed: Loved you.

Paul Jones: loved you. Yes. This whole rhetoric, this familial affection. That may only be such a story that you tell yourself that doesn’t actually match reality. So it seems that Poe’s genius in some ways is two sort of trans late, that deep anxiety of a particular time and place into something that people can feel more universally. But you say that’s kind of the secret of his longevity and also of his pan-American and trans-American appeal.

Ed: Yeah, you do wonder how I work that I think really is aimed at its time, has, has managed to constantly be thrilling, enjoyable, scary to readers and in very different places. One thing that we would have to say is that while we today aren’t afraid that our human property is going to rise up against us, people are always afraid of very similar things like other people. And I think that’s the one thing just to note is that there’s hardly any supernatural things really in Poe’s work. I mean, it’s almost always about real people and what they’re capable of doing.

Joanne Freeman: That was Ed with Paul Jones. He’s a professor at Ohio university and the author of Unwelcome Voices: Subversive Fiction In The Antebellum South.

Joanne Freeman: That’s going to do it for us today. Thanks for joining me as we delve into the Backstory archive, there are hundreds of other shows available at our website backstoryradio.org. You can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. Send us an email to Backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @Backstoryradio.

Joanne Freeman: Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger. Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment For The Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment.

Speaker 8: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale university. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins university. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia humanities.