SPEAKER_00 0:00

My name is Wendell Marshant. I'm a high school English teacher in Missouri, sophomore boys, Catholic school just outside St. Louis. And most weekends I sit at my kitchen table with the Library of Congress newspaper archive open on my laptop and a mug of coffee that I let get cold. I've been doing this for about 10 years now. My wife calls it my hobby. The school librarian calls it my problem. I think of it as a kind of slow companionship with people who have been dead a very long time. This is The Footnote. It's a show about the margins of history, the hoaxes, the frauds, the small swindles that didn't make it into the textbook, and the forgotten people who, for a few months or a few years, mattered more than they should have, and then stopped mattering at all. The kind of episode you'd find as a one-line citation at the bottom of a longer story about someone more famous. The footnote. I read the papers. The folks at Voido Studio handle the rest. That's voido.com. And what comes out the other end is this me talking about something I keep coming back to. I want to begin with one of those. In May of 1869, a Boston jewelry engraver named William H. Mumler stood up in a courtroom in Lower Manhattan, the Tombs Court, presided over by Justice Joseph Dowling, and read a long statement defending himself against a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses. The prosecution had spent two weeks parading photographers and skeptics through the witness box to show that the spirit photographs Mumler had been selling, likenesses of dead loved ones hovering at the shoulders of the living, were nothing more than elementary double exposures, a parlor trick that any competent operator with a glass plate and a steady hand could replicate before lunch. The most famous of those witnesses was P. T. Barnum. The defense's most famous witness was a former judge named John Worth Edmonds, who, when asked under oath whether he could see ghosts, answered yes. And then he told the court he had recently seen one, in Brooklyn, standing in the jury box. The trick isn't interesting. The buyer is. Because when you take the trick apart, it's nothing. A used glass plate, an extra exposure faintly burned in, a dark room dim enough that the customer can't quite see what's being slid into the camera. That's the whole thing. The interesting question is the one nobody quite asked at the trial, and the one I cannot stop asking when I read the testimony at my kitchen table at half past eleven on a Saturday night. Who needed a dead boy badly enough to pay $10 for a smudge? Before I get to him, before I get to Mumler and Barnum and the Brooklyn Ghost, let me tell you what else is coming on this show. Not as a teaser, I'm not in the teaser business, just so you know what kind of stories I'm interested in and whether they're the kind you're interested in, too. There is the story of Princess Caribou. In 1817, in a village outside Bristol, a young woman appeared on a country road speaking a language no one in England could identify. Over the next ten weeks, she convinced the family of a country magistrate that she was royalty from a kingdom she called Javasu. She drew her own alphabet. She prayed to a god named Alatala. She was, in fact, a cobbler's daughter from Devonshire named Mary Baker, who had failed at domestic service and gotten bored. There is the story of the Tichborne claimant. In the eighteen sixties, a butcher in Wagga Wagga, Australia answered a newspaper advertisement and announced that he was Roger Titchbourne Baronet, who had been lost at sea twelve years earlier in the wreck of a ship called the Bella. The court case ran 188 days. The claimant could not speak French. The real Tichborne had been raised in Paris. The dead boy's mother believed in him anyway. She believed in him until she died. There is Mary Toft's rabbits. In 1726, in Surrey, a woman convinced half the medical establishment of England, including the personal surgeon to King George I, that she was giving birth regularly and verifiably to dead rabbits. The king sent a man down to investigate. The investigator's report was titled, in the period style, a short narrative of an extraordinary delivery of rabbits. They eventually caught her smuggling them in. And there is the plate of brass. In 1937, a hiker in Marin County, California picked up a piece of corroded metal that turned out, on inspection, to be a 16th-century plaque claiming California for Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth. It was authenticated by the chair of the history department at Berkeley. It was displayed for decades. It was a prank. The hoaxers were members of a fraternal society of California historians, and the joke was on one of their own colleagues who failed to catch it and then could not be told. By the time the metallurgy caught up in the 1970s, he was already dead. Those are the kinds of stories I like. People who wanted briefly to be someone else. And the neighbors who let Mumler is the first one. So here we go. The story starts in Boston in 1861. This is the important date, 1861. The fall of Fort Sumter is in April. The first major land battle, Bull Run, is in July. By the end of that summer, the Union has begun to understand, slowly and against its will, that it has signed up for a war that will eat its young men by the tens of thousands. We will not finally know the body count until well after the surrender at Appomattox. The best modern estimate is around 750,000 dead. That number is twice as large as it was a generation ago, because a demographer at SUNY Binghamton named David Hacker re-ran the 1860 and 1870 census data and found a hole in the male population about twice the size historians had assumed. 750,000, out of a country of 31 million, one in every 41 Americans. Mostly young, mostly killed in places their mothers had never heard of, and in most cases, not sent home. There was no system for sending them home. That is the country William Mumler set up his camera in. Mumler, in 1861, is not a photographer. He is an engraver. According to his own statement in court, read aloud on the 3rd of May 1869 and printed verbatim the next morning in the New York Tribune, he was in the habit of visiting a young man employed in a photographic gallery kept by a Mrs. Stewart on Washington Street, Boston. One Sunday, alone in the gallery, he tried to take a picture of himself. When he developed the plate, a second form had appeared beside his own. His own words, as the Tribune recorded them. He was a complete novice in the art of photography and had no experience whatever in the composition of chemicals used in the business. His first explanation to himself was the rational one. The plate had not been clean, and the second form was a residue from some earlier sitting. He says he told his employer this. He says he told his friends this. Then he stopped saying it. He started selling the pictures. Five dollars for a sitting, ten for a special one. He moved his operation to New York to 630 Broadway in late 1868. He took on a partner named William Gay, who, on the stand, described himself as a believer in the system of philosophy emanating from Andrew Jackson Davis, that is, the spiritualist movement's founding theorist, and who split the profits with Mumler 50-50. The way it worked was this. You came in, you sat for a portrait. While you were waiting, Mrs. Mumler, Hannah, his wife, would chat with you in the reception room. She was, according to Gay's testimony in the Tribune of April 22nd, a medium. She would tell you, sometimes, which spirit she felt nearby. When the plate was developed, the spirit she had named was, often enough, the one that appeared beside your face on the negative. People walked out with photographs of their mothers, their children, their dead soldiers. They paid $10 and they walked out crying. Here is where it gets strange, because what gets Mumler arrested in the spring of 1869 is not a grieving widow. It is not even a defrauded family. It is a city marshal in disguise. His name was Joseph H. Tooker. He worked for the office of Mayor A. Oakie Hall, the same Oakie Hall who would shortly become a footnote himself in the Tweed Ring scandal, but that is a story for another night. Tooker had been tipped off by a reporter at the world named P. V. Hickey. He went to 630 Broadway under the assumed name William H. Wallace. He sat for a portrait. The plate came back with a ghost in the corner. Mumler, or his assistant Gay, told him the form was the spirit of his father-in-law. The New York Tribune records Tooker's reaction with admirable dryness on the 22nd of April, 1869. He did not recognize the worthy old gentleman, and emphatically declared that the picture neither resembled his father-in-law nor any of his relations, nor yet any person whom he had ever seen or known. That was the basis of the charge: obtaining $10 by false pretenses, a misdemeanor. Mumler was hauled into the tombs, the great brooding granite police court at the corner of Center and Leonard, and arraigned before Judge Joseph Dowling. Here is where the case stops being a fraud case and starts being something else. Because what happened over the next two weeks in Dowling's courtroom was not strictly a trial of William Mumler. It was, in some unofficial way, a trial of an entire belief system. The New York Herald of the 22nd of April, 1869, and here I am going to quote the headline verbatim because nothing I could write would beat it, ran its account of the first day under the banner Grim Goblins stalked about the tombs long after the cock's shrill clarion proclaimed the dawn of yesterday. The reporter went on to inform his readers that the great council of ghosts was assembled to plead the justice of their cause, and that the spirits had been permitted on this occasion only to revisit the glimpses of the moon. That is how the Herald covered a misdemeanor fraud case in 1869. That is the register. They rechristened Judge Dowling for the day as Judge Radamanthus, the judge of the dead in Greek mythology, and they ran the whole proceeding as comic opera. The point I want to make is that the press was already, before any evidence had been entered, treating the case as a circus, which meant that the audience showed up expecting a circus and got one. The prosecution called Marshall Tooker. They called four affidavits. They called P. T. Barnum, who at 59 was the most famous showman in America, and who in 1865 had published a book, Humbugs of the World, that included a chapter on spirit photography in particular, lambasting it as an old, tired trick. Barnum testified that Mumler's spirits were nothing more than double exposures and demonstrated the technique to the court. The defense did not bother to deny that Barnum knew his way around a humbug. Mumler's lead attorney, John Townsend, called him in his closing, and I am quoting straight from the Tribune of May 4th, where Townsend's summing up was printed at length, a man who smells of fraud in the very nostrils of the people of New York. Townsend's tone was contemptuous. He hated being put in a position where his client had to be defended against Barnum of all people, as if the question were which showman the jury liked better. But the prosecution's most famous witness was not, in the end, the prosecution's most interesting witness. The defenses was. His name was John Worth Edmonds. Let me tell you about Edmonds, because if you have never heard of him, and you probably have not, he is one of the most genuinely odd figures in 19th century American jurisprudence. He had been a justice of the New York State Supreme Court. He had been the president of the state senate. In the 1850s, he had quietly converted to spiritualism, written several books about it, and become, by 1869, its most respectable public defender. When the defense put him on the stand on the 22nd of April, they were not making a desperate move. They were calling their best card. Edmonds testified that he had sat for Mumler. That two photographs had been produced, one full face, one in profile, and that each contained a different female spirit. He was asked, under cross-examination, whether he could see spirits. He said yes. He said he had seen the spirit of a friend, the late Judge Talmadge, leaning against a window casement, and that he had been able to see the window casement through Judge Talmage's body. Then, and this is the part I keep coming back to, he was asked about a recent case in Brooklyn. He had been sitting in a Brooklyn courtroom during the trial of a life insurance suit, and, looking toward the jury, had seen the spirit of the dead man whose policy was in question. The spirit, he testified, had communicated to him the circumstances of the death. It had told him that the claimant was not entitled to recover because the death had been a suicide. Edmonds said he had drawn a diagram of the place where the death had occurred and shown it to the lawyer, who had told him it was exact in every particular. He had never seen the place. He had never heard the man's name until he walked into the courtroom that morning. The prosecutor, a young man named Eldridge Jerry, who would later become famous as a founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, asked Edmonds how exactly the spirit had spoken to him. Edmonds answered, as the Tribune of April 22nd prints it. I do not know how he spoke, but I know that he conveyed to my mind the impressions he desired to leave there. Jerry asked him whether spirits wore clothes. Edmonds said he had seen them, as the Tribune records it, in their everyday dress and in their grave clothing, but had never seen one without clothing. Spoken under oath in open court by a former justice of the New York State Supreme Court. When Jerry asked him to define the word hallucination, Edmonds reached for an analogy. The fairest case, he said, was Othello, who labored under an idea that his wife was unfaithful to him. Hallucination, he said, was a phase of insanity arising from some imaginary or erroneous idea. He delivered this definition straightfaced. He did not appear to notice that he had just described his own testimony. What I want to point out, and what nobody pointed out at the time, as far as I can tell from any of the papers I have read, is that Edmonds was not crazy. He was lucid. He was a competent attorney. He had run for office. He had presided over cases. What he was, was bereaved. He had lost his daughter. He had lost his wife. Most of the prominent spiritualists of the 1850s and 1860s had lost somebody. And most of them had lost somebody recently because the war had killed 750,000 sons. The Lincolns themselves had lost Willie in 1862 and held seances in the White House. Mary Todd Lincoln would, after her husband's death, sit for William Mumler herself. That photograph, Mary Todd Lincoln in Morning Black, with the ghostly hands of her assassinated husband resting on her shoulders, is the most famous spirit photograph in American history. It was taken in 1872, three years after the trial we are talking about. After Mumler had been discharged, after he had moved his operation back to Boston, after everyone who was paying attention knew exactly what kind of trick this was. She came anyway. She paid the $10. She wept. The other defense witness I want to mention is a man named David Hopkins. Hopkins manufactured railway machinery in New York. He testified on the 23rd of April that he had gone to Mumler's gallery as a skeptic. He had watched Mumler closely. He had asked, in advance, whether Mumler would guarantee a spirit picture, and had been told, by both Gay and Mumler, that no such guarantee was possible. The spirits, Mumler had said, were not under his control. Sometimes they appeared, and sometimes they did not. The Tribune of the 24th records Hopkins's reason for going at all in his own words. He went, he said, under the impression that Mumler was a cheat. Hopkins sat. The plate developed. A female form appeared next to him. He recognized her, he said, as a woman who had died seven or eight months earlier. A woman who was no relative of his, but who had been living in the house of his wife's sister, and whom he had met several times in his wife's company. He showed the print to her widower, a Mr. Staughton, who lived at 18th Street and 3rd Avenue. The dead woman's children, Hopkins testified this under oath, at once recognized the spirit form as the portrait of their mother. I want to be careful here, because the obvious read is that the children were primed, that they were small and grieving, and shown a smudgy photograph by an adult who told them it was their mother, and that they wanted, badly, for it to be their mother, and so it was their mother. That is the cynics read. That is the read Barnum would have made. That is probably the read I should make. But I keep getting stuck on the detail that Hopkins did not know the dead woman well. She was not his wife, she was not his sister, she was, at most, an acquaintance, glimpsed a few times across a parlor in Brooklyn. He had no portrait of her, he had no strong memory of her face. And yet, when a blurry humanoid smudge appeared in the corner of his portrait, his mind reached for her specifically. Out of all the dead people he had ever seen. That is what the trick was doing. That is the actual mechanism. It was a smudge that the customer's grief did the work of identifying. On the 3rd of May 1869, Judge Dowling came back with his decision. He discharged Mumler. Here is the part where, if you go to Wikipedia, the article will tell you Mumler was acquitted. He was not acquitted. There was no jury verdict in this case. There was never a jury, because the case never got past the examining magistrate. Dowling's ruling, and the Tribune of May 4th, records the substance of it, even where the OCR I have is fragmentary in the closing paragraphs, was that the prosecution had failed to prove fraud beyond reasonable doubt. He did not find that Mumler's photographs were genuine. He did not find that the spirits were real. He found that the prosecution had not, in his courtroom, on these specific facts, met its burden. There is a distinction. It is the distinction between a defendant being innocent and a defendant being released for lack of evidence. And every time I see Mumler described as acquitted, including by some otherwise careful historians, I feel a small, completely unproductive flicker of irritation at the casual erosion of a useful distinction. So Mumler walked out of the tombs on the 3rd of May, 1869. He went back to Boston. He kept taking pictures. He took the Mary Todd Lincoln portrait in 1872. He died in Boston in 1884, poor, having never repudiated his work. That is the case. Those are the facts. The trick was a double exposure on a dirty plate. The witnesses on one side were a city marshal in disguise, the president of the National Photographers Association, and the most famous humbug in America. The witnesses on the other side were a former justice of the New York Supreme Court who saw the dead in courtrooms, a railway machinery manufacturer who thought he recognized his wife's sister's housemate in a smudge, and several hundred grieving New Yorkers who sat down at 6.30 Broadway and paid five or $10 to see if anyone would come back to them. The thing I keep coming back to, the reason I keep opening this file at half past 11 on a Saturday night, is not the question of whether Mumler believed it himself. I think the answer to that is actually complicated. His May 3rd statement, reprinted in the Tribune, reads like a man partly persuaded of his own innocence. He says that his first instinct in 1861 was the rational one, that he told his employer the plate had not been clean, that he had been a complete novice and had no chemistry knowledge. And then he describes how the experiments continued, how the results became, as he put it, most remarkable. He sounds, in places, like a man who has talked himself into something, and in other places, like a man who knows perfectly well what he is doing and is choosing not to look at it directly. I think both things are probably true. I think Mumler was, in the way most successful cons are run, partly his own first mark. I think he had a thing that worked, and he watched it work on people who needed it to work, and after a while he stopped asking himself the hard question. The hard question is not whether he was a fraud. The hard question is what country he was operating in. 750,000 dead, mostly young men, mostly under 25, mostly killed in places their mothers had never heard of, in ways their mothers could not bear to imagine. The bodies were not, in most cases, sent home. There was no system for it. There was, in many cases, no grave. There were telegrams and lists in the newspaper, and the long silence of a chair that didn't get pulled out at dinner anymore. And here is a man in Boston who, for ten dollars, will put your boy back in the photograph. Not really. You know, not really. Edmonds, even Edmonds, said he was not prepared to express a definite opinion. The Tribune of April 22nd prints him hedging like a lawyer, saying it would be best to wait and see that the art was yet in its infancy. Hopkins, the railway machinery man, said straight up that he had gone under the impression that Mumler was a cheat. They knew. The whole country knew. And they came anyway, by the hundreds, with ten dollars in their hand, and they sat in front of Mumler's camera, and they waited. The question that is never asked at the trial, and that I think is the only interesting question, is this. Suppose Mumler is, in fact, a fraud. Suppose every single photograph is a double exposure on a dirty plate. Suppose the spirit you see at your shoulder is not your son, not your daughter, not your husband. Just a chemical residue from someone else's grief smeared across the negative of yours. Are you the customer defrauded? The prosecution said yes, obviously. The prosecution said you paid for one thing and got another. Townsend's actual argument was narrower and stranger. He said that since Tooker had come into the gallery under a false name, with a falsehood in his mouth, was how Townsend put it in his summation, printed in the Tribune of May 4th, the spirits had punished Tooker by giving him the most villainous face they could find. Tooker had paid his ten dollars and gotten exactly what he had earned. Stripped the spiritualist machinery out of that argument, and what is left is the claim that the customer, in every case, is the one writing the meaning onto the plate. I do not know which side I am on. I lean toward the prosecution most days. I lean toward the defense at 1130 on a Saturday night when I have been reading the testimony of Mrs. Luther Reeves, who, on the 23rd of April, told the court that her nephew Charles had sat for Mumler, and that beside Charles's likeness had appeared the spirit form of a boy of nine, who had passed away a year ago, and that she herself had sat in March, and that the spirit of her own little boy, eleven years old, had appeared next to her, and that on her nephew's card the likeness resembled the boy as he had been when he died in sickness, but on her own card, he looked as he had been when he was in health. Read that again. On her nephew's card, sick. On her own card, well. I do not know how to think about that. I cannot prove it was a coincidence. I cannot prove it was not. What I can say is that whatever else William Mumler was doing in his gallery on Broadway, he was doing something that a grieving aunt walked away from, carrying a photograph in which her dead son, on her card, looked the way she most wanted to remember him. Well, healthy. Eleven years old forever. Not coughing. Not in pain. That is, in a certain sense, the product. Whether it was a fraud depends entirely on whether you think the customer knew what she was buying. Mummler died poor in Boston in 1884, at the age of 51. The Boston Papers carried short obituaries. He never repudiated the photographs. His wife Hannah, the medium, outlived him by 21 years. By the time she died, spirit photography had become a recognized fraud everywhere in the photographic press, and a thriving cottage industry everywhere else. The First World War produced a second great boom. William Hope ran a gallery and crew in the English Midlands, photographing the dead sons of British mothers. Ada Dean ran one in London. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had lost his own son Kingsley to the war, defended both publicly. The 1918 influenza pandemic added a third wave. The premises change. The supply follows the bodies. Eldridge Jerry, the prosecutor, founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children five years later in 1875, and spent the rest of his life, successfully, making the case that children's grief and children's bodies were legal objects worth defending. He never, as far as I can find, wrote about the Mummler trial again. Judge Edmonds went on giving speeches about spiritualism, seeing ghosts in courtrooms and writing books. He died in 1874. He believed until the end that he had communicated with his dead daughter.

unknown 31:27

P.

SPEAKER_00 31:27

T. Barnum opened the greatest show on earth two years after the trial. You know how that one ends. And Justice Joseph Dowling, Judge Radamanthus of the Herald's headline, kept presiding at the tombs. He had ruled, narrowly and correctly, that the state had not proved its case. He had not ruled on whether the dead come back. That was, properly, none of his business. The moral, such as it is, a country that had buried three quarters of a million sons paid a Boston engraver ten dollars at a time to put one back in the frame for an afternoon. And the frame, not the boy, was the whole point.