The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  As part of his investigation, Guay sat for photographs before Mumler’s camera on multiple occasions. He could not contain his surprise at what he saw when the images were developed. “The result was,” he said, “there came upon the glass a picture of myself, and, to my utter astonishment—having previously examined and scrutinised every crack and corner of the plate holder, camera, box, tube, the inside of the bath, etc—another portrait!”

  In one image, the better of the two, he explained, he saw clearly his father’s visage, presumably not seen since he had left Germany, or perhaps longer, depending on when Herr Guay had left the world. In the other, far more faintly, he saw his late wife. Mumler had never seen a picture of any of his family members, Guay insisted, so the notion that the photographer worked from existing images was not a possibility.

  Guay closed his letter to Andrew Jackson Davis with an unambiguous testimony on behalf of Mumler’s work:

  Having since continued, on several occasions, my investigations as described above, and received even more perfect results than on the first trial, I have been obliged to endorse its legitimacy.

  Respectfully yours,

  WILLIAM GUAY

  Between them, J. W. Black and William Guay claimed thirty years of photographic experience. Mumler hoped the fact that each had made similar findings known would be the end of it. But it was only the beginning.

  In Philadelphia, a successful commercial photographer with Spiritualist leanings, Isaac Rehn, had likewise sought a visitation at 258 Washington Street.

  Rehn had been trying for years to take pictures proving his belief that “the spirits of those who once dwelt with us do still hold intercourse with mortals.” As early as 1848, he had traveled to New York to have a private meeting with the Fox sisters, and since then had joined all the important Spiritualist circles in his city. With his own eyes he had seen undeniable manifestations that a new age of communication with the dead had begun, from mediums speaking for the residents of the eternal place called Summerland, to invisible agents moving furniture across a room. “These movements became unusually violent,” he said of one such experience. “Two card-tables, around which the company sat, having been drawn to the centre of the floor, were thrown backward and forward with great force. After moving thus for some minutes, one of the tables started toward some two or three of the company, and pressed heavily against them, causing them to recede until they had reached the wall.”

  Any photographer who had seen such forces at work naturally would want nothing more than to capture them on glass and share them with the world. That a man like Mumler had succeeded in doing so, though he was not only a metaphysical neophyte but an amateur behind the camera, must have been galling to Rehn. When he asked to see for himself how images like those given to Guay had been attained, Mumler declined. “I have been harassed enough by self-appointed investigators,” he said haughtily, “and find there is no end to it.”

  He made a point of turning all would-be detectives away. From now on, only those like Guay—and perhaps only him—who had seemed genuinely sympathetic to Mumler’s mission were to be permitted behind the curtain.

  IF THE FACT THAT photographers were frequently the most intent on challenging him surprised either of the Mumlers, it would have been William rather than Hannah. While he was still new to picture-making and its particular customs and culture, she had run her studio in the midst of many others on Washington Street for years, and no doubt knew photography to be a cutthroat business. Even photographers who happened to be Spiritualists, those supposedly invested in aiding human progress through bridging the gap between the living and the dead, often seemed willing to climb over corpses for professional advancement.

  Take Isaac Rehn, for example. Anyone who kept up with the gossip of the trade surely knew that several years before, the Philadelphia photographer had collaborated with another in developing improvements on the photographic process that had fast became the industry standard. Though Mumler’s spiritual achievements lay beyond their grasp, for a time they both reaped the material rewards. Mortal partnerships are always only temporary, however.

  Rehn’s Boston-based associate, James Ambrose Cutting, held a series of patents on the new and wildly popular photographic process called the ambrotype, which some have said he named for himself, but more likely found its inspiration in the Greek ambrotos, “immortal.” At the start, Cutting was first among equals in their partnership, with Rehn relegated to serving as witness on the ambrotype’s original patent application.

  The two men not only worked together but had sat side by side at séances, and in this pursuit it seems it was Rehn who was the more advanced. Once, while Cutting was visiting Philadelphia, the photographers attended a circle with a local medium as part of a mystical coffee klatch known as the Penetralium.

  Cutting was a big man, tall and stout, and so it was a remarkable sight when his chair moved suddenly beneath him. All present felt the power in the room palpably. Rehn was more sanguine about such events by then, but Cutting lifted his feet in alarm, like a child sliding on a sled, clutching at the sides, afraid he might fall. The spirits present in the room then hoisted him fully from the floor—“chair and all,” Rehn said.

  Cutting was childlike in other ways as well. Having come from a more humble station than the trained artist Rehn, Cutting had no experience with money when his patent payments began to come in. His first invention—an improved beehive—had earned him enough to move from rural New Hampshire to Boston, but it was nothing compared to the money his new photographic process would bring him. For a time, he received a license fee or a percentage from every studio in the country taking ambrotypes, which was nearly all of them, given how much time they saved over the patience-taxing daguerreotypes.

  For a decade, Cutting and Rehn reaped huge rewards, but eventually many photographers decided they’d had enough. Some made their own small adjustments to the process to avoid the fees; others who paid grudgingly were rankled by a perceived lack of collegiality on the inventors’ part, particularly Rehn, who pushed for extensions of the patent’s applicability. Though the ambrotype was widely adopted—including by big studios like Brady’s in New York—many photographers were nostalgic for the time when they had all seemed to be working toward a common goal, and were eager for the days of the ambrotype to pass.

  Cutting responded to these negative feelings by getting out of the business altogether. He used much of the fortune he had so far amassed—$40,000, according to one estimate—to design a boat and have it custom built. Naturally, he called it Ambrotype.

  At the time, excursion steamers and pleasure yachts constantly plied Boston Harbor and the ocean beyond. They were a useful conveyance between many points in the city, and a fine vessel like Ambrotype was an unmistakable marker of social standing. Cutting occasionally used the boat for grand fishing tours, taking a handful of ladies and gentlemen on a twenty-five-mile sail, then baiting hooks and encouraging all to cast into the deep. As one of Cutting’s invited guests recalled, “The noble rock cod, haddock, hake, not omitting an occasional sculpin, nibbled most gloriously, and we soon had enough and more than enough for a fry for our supper.” An on-board cook prepared and served the meal in grand style.

  Cutting did not build Ambrotype solely for pleasure, however. Following his specifications, the shipwright had installed an opening in the boat’s hull. Much like the windows in a photo studio that looked always up into the sky, this portal looked always down into the abyss. Through it, Cutting was able to track and catch schools of sea life. Along with the fish caught by his guests and fried by his cook, Cutting hauled in lobsters, sharks, eels, and turtles off the New England coast, then ventured farther north and south for more exotic species, including a pair of seal pups.

  Using his yacht to gather specimens and his knowledge of glass and metallurgy to design and patent the first aquarium tanks built in the country, Cutting soon opened the Boston Aquarial and Zoological Gardens, located on the ve
ry boulevard that had become home to so many menageries of Spiritualists and photographers, Washington Street. To his own Atlantic haul he added alligators from the bayou and porpoises from the Arctic, and he trained his two seal pups until they were star attractions. He named them Ned and Fanny and worked with them from the time they were three months old. Soon they could swim to Cutting on command and perform a variety of tricks. Ned’s specialty was playing a hand organ.

  Despite this bit of showmanship, Cutting intended his Aquarial Gardens to be a place of science. He was no doubt chuffed when the New York Tribune reviewed his holdings and found that “the exhibition has already drawn numerous visitors of the most intelligent people.” The interest of those who attend “increases at every visit,” the Tribune added, noting that such an increase in interest was “the natural consequence of an investigation into the habits of a hitherto unknown class of living creatures.”

  Just as he had made a bad decision working with Rehn, however, he soon made another business mistake. Perhaps because he knew him through his book, Aquaria of America, Cutting partnered in his enterprise with one Henry D. Butler, late of New York, more recently relocated to Boston. While he did have a bona fide interest in fish, Butler was also a longtime associate of P. T. Barnum. He served as manager of the American Museum for a number of years, and for a short time was even the museum’s official owner while Barnum sorted out a brief period of financial insolvency.

  If Butler provided resources necessary to the Aquarial Gardens’ existence, the benefits of this arrangement were counterbalanced by his pronounced Barnumizing influence. In November 1860, Cutting’s aquarium began to display not just sea creatures and exotic animals, but humans. The first were “South African aboriginees”; then came “the red men of the forest,” including a “Mohawk chief . . . with his wife and family.”

  The press judged this to be an entertainment one would visit only in “desperation of dullness.” Indeed, those drawn by its “flaming advertisement of five real living native savage Africans” were disappointed. Not only were the human exhibits vacant, but many of the undersea specimens Cutting had acquired were also gone. “We went and found the fish tanks drained and deserted, no stickleback building his nest, no soldier-crab going through the broadsword exercise with his eccentric right claw,” one of the visitors said. In one tank, “a solitary seal flopped about, occasionally holding up one melancholy flipper as if soliciting sympathy.”

  If the sad creature described in this tableau was Ned, the sympathy was well deserved. Fanny had not survived the Aquarial Gardens’ transition from living naturalist’s cabinet to sideshow entertainment.

  The cloud lingering over Cutting finally turned to a full-on curse in the first half of 1861. In February, three of the “aboriginees” assaulted Butler. In April, one of them was found hanging by the neck inside the aquarium, an apparent suicide. Whether or not the two incidents were connected, by May, Butler had returned to New York, leaving Cutting in sole control. He made plans for the remaining Africans’ exodus from the city, and for the museum’s return to serious scientific and intellectual pursuits.

  But it was not to be. A few months later, P. T. Barnum himself bought the Aquarial Gardens, taking advantage of Cutting’s newly perilous fiscal circumstances. The great showman kept Cutting around for a short while, largely to feed the fish and carry on his work with Ned, now called “the Learned Seal.”

  By the fall of 1862 Cutting was out, his name unceremoniously scrubbed from signage and advertising. Now known as Barnum’s Aquarial Gardens, the space Cutting had created became a mere satellite of the American Museum. It hosted visits by New York’s most popular freak show performers and served as an aquatic way station for the more exotic sea creatures Barnum shipped via Boston to New York. Obviously aggrieved, Cutting was determined to open a new aquarium to compete with Barnum’s—which was how, in November of 1862, immediately following his published investigation of Mumler, William Guay entered the aquarium business.

  Exactly when and why Guay began his partnership with James Cutting is a sunspot on the historical record. Andrew Jackson Davis had hired Guay; Cutting certainly moved among Spiritualists frequently enough that he knew the Seer of Poughkeepsie; and Davis could have sent Guay Cutting’s way. Even if Guay had taken on Davis’s assignment with some faint hope that he might cash in, it is difficult to see what he possibly had to gain from entering a partnership whose success would depend on live animals remaining alive with the help of a steam engine pumping 860,000 gallons of water a day.

  Still, he seems to have given it his all. Guay soon secured a contract for the popular “Family of Esquimaux” to travel to Boston after their New York engagement, and, apparently working with resources he had at hand, the Confederate deserter assembled an exhibit he called “Rebel Relics from Recent Battlefields.”

  Against Barnum, however, Cutting and Guay’s New Aquarial and Zoological Gardens didn’t stand a chance. It remained open less than a month. While Guay found new employment with the Mumlers, Cutting never recovered. Photography abandoned, his finances in ruin, and his latest dream failed, he had one further blow to endure.

  Deciding earnest Boston was not the right market for his sensibilities after all, Barnum closed the aquarium he had so recently acquired. He shipped many of the most popular live attractions to the American Museum, including Ned.

  Cutting died soon after, in the same lunatic asylum in which the Mumler apparition Isaac Babbitt had seen his last corporeal days.

  Abraham Lincoln meets Union troops at Antietam. Alexander Gardner, 1862.

  CHAPTER 14

  Did You Ever Dream of Some Lost Friend?

  THREE WEEKS AFTER the Battle of Antietam, as Boston’s Spiritualists were conversing with the ghost of Lieutenant William Berry in the Banner of Light’s séance room, Mathew Brady opened his New York studio to the public to show images of the carnage Alexander Gardner had captured, bringing the casualties of war home in a different way.

  “The living that throng Broadway care little perhaps for the Dead at Antietam,” the New York Times began its startling review of the exhibit, “but we fancy they would jostle less carelessly down the great thoroughfare, saunter less at their ease, were a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement. There would be a gathering up of skirts and a careful picking of the way; conversation would be less lively, and the general air of pedestrians more subdued. As it is, the dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams.”

  As an artist, Gardner could only have been pleased by such high-profile notice of his work. To urge the nightmare landscape through which he had walked upon those who would look away had been precisely the point of his labors in Maryland. Not only did the Times recognize the significance of his individual images; it suggested that, collectively, they might remake the American public’s perception of the war and its costs.

  By the fall of 1862, the public for the most part did not even know what it didn’t know. Though a roll call of the dead was published regularly in the northern press, printed letters alone could convey only so much. “We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee,” the Times review continued. “There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type. The roll we read is being called over in Eternity, and pale, trembling lips are answering to it. Shadowy fingers point from the page to a field where even imagination is loth to follow. Each of these little names that the printer struck off so lightly last night, whistling over his work, and that we speak with a clip of the tongue, represents a bleeding, mangled corpse.

  “We recognize the battle-field as a reality, but it stands as a remote one. It is like a funeral next door,” the unnamed reviewer wrote. “It is very different when the hearse stops at your own door, and the corpse is carried out over your own threshold.”

  To deliver bodies to the doorways of every willfu
lly ignorant household in America—that was the potential of taking a camera into battle. For a utopian like Gardner, there could be no more powerful tool for working toward the end of human suffering than to show it in all its horrific detail. With his glass plates and chemicals, Gardner had turned the war into art so visceral it could not be ignored. True to those earliest dreams of Daguerre or Morse, he had used photography to close the distance between the living and the dead.

  Yet if the first few paragraphs acknowledging this in the exhibit review had pleased the war’s most tireless chronicler, the next lines would have stopped him cold:

  Mr. BRADY has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it. At the door of his gallery hangs a little placard, “The Dead of Antietam.” Crowds of people are constantly going up the stairs; follow them, and you find them bending over photographic views of that fearful battle-field, taken immediately after the action.

  Of all objects of horror one would think the battle-field should stand preeminent, that it should bear away the palm of repulsiveness. But, on the contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes him loth to leave them. You will see hushed, reverent groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes.

  It seems somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on the faces of the slain, blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblance to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their features upon canvas, and given them perpetuity for ever. But so it is.