Case file · High strangeness
William Mumler's spirit photographs
An engraver turned photographer in Boston and New York who, from the early 1860s, sold portraits showing ghostly 'spirits' beside grieving sitters, and was tried for fraud in April 1869.
1869 CE · 42.36, -71.06 · status: hoax
The account
His most famous image shows Mary Todd Lincoln with a faint figure of Abraham Lincoln. Business boomed among families who lost relatives in the Civil War.
The sceptical view
Some of his 'spirits' were recognized as living people, and P. T. Barnum testified against him; he was exposed as a fraud.