First "Spirit Photograph"

The earliest known example of a photograph that purportedly showed the spirit of a deceased person was published in the Banner of Light (a spiritualist newspaper) by amateur photographer William Mumler (USA) in November 1862. The picture was a self-portrait that showed Mumler seated against a plain backdrop, with the faint white outline of a woman (which he claimed was his cousin, dead some 12 years ago).

Spirit photography was a popular mediumistic practice in the late 19th and early 20th century. Photographers would use mysterious processes or secret mixtures of development chemicals to produce images of their living sitters with the spirits of those that they had lost. The most famous example of a spirit photograph is that taken by Mumler himself in 1872, showing Mary Todd Lincoln with the spirit of her dead husband, assassinated US president Abraham Lincoln.

Despite its popularity, the phenomenon was the subject of considerable controversy from the outset. Mumler himself was put on trial for fraud in 1869, and photography experts put forward nine methods that could have been used to produce identical photographic results. None could prove, however, beyond a shadow of a doubt, which of these processes Mumler was using, and so the judge reluctantly dismissed the charges. This was despite reports of Mumler having been caught breaking into customers' houses to steal reference photographs of dead relatives, or cases where the "spirit" was positively identified as a local actress who had modelled for him in the past.

Today these photographs are understood to have been the result of various photographic tricks, including multiple exposures (in which one photographic plate is exposed twice, superimposing one image over another), pepper's ghost illusions (in which a glass panel is used to reflect a semi-transparent image over the subject in view) or manually drawing images onto the photographic plate during development.