The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  Hickey was not simply a journalist, however. He was also a steadfast Roman Catholic, a man of deep devotion whose faith informed every aspect of his life.

  At the time he crossed paths with Mumler, Hickey was beginning a long career as one of the pioneers of Catholic journalism in the United States. He was soon to launch a number of sectarian publications, including the Catholic Review and the Illustrated Catholic American, that would set the standard for the church’s approach to engagement with a country that remained blatantly anti-Catholic despite—or because of—the growing influence of men like himself who were loyal to Rome.

  To a devout Catholic, a man like Mumler represented not only a swindler but a spiritual threat. It would be a gross understatement to say that Hickey’s faith took a dim view of the beliefs of those who looked for departed loved ones in Mumler’s images. The church’s position on Spiritualism was that it was nothing less than the “work of the devil, a tangle of blasphemies, of contradictions, of brazen absurdities; frauds accepted by a faithless and credulous people.” As an 1866 meeting of Catholic bishops known as the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore had warned, “There is little reason to doubt that some of the phenomena of spiritism are the work of Satan.” And as the Roman newspaper La Civiltà Cattolica had approvingly noted, “In the United States, the evil consequences on the public and the private morals are so evident that many journals are asking the government to stop this situation.”

  The great fear of the growing Catholic population in the United States was that even with the influx of immigrants like Hickey, the ranks of the Roman Church were in fact being dramatically outpaced by the Spiritualists. The same Catholic conference that argued that Spiritualism was the work of the devil claimed—hyperbolically—that occult communication with the dead had eleven million adherents in America.

  Working for the secular World, Hickey was not yet in the position to voice a plainly religious opinion of Mumler and his alleged photographs of the departed. He could, however, follow Rome’s counsel by asking the government to stop this situation—not as a journalist, but simply as a New Yorker. Hickey resolved to take his concern about the spiritual crimes being committed at 630 Broadway directly to the newly elected mayor, Abraham Oakey Hall. The new administration made it easy. He had only to go to City Hall and write his concerns in the official complaint book.

  On the pages of the World he would have had more readers, but in this case he hoped one might be enough.

  Ella Bonner with the spirit image of a child. William Mumler, 1862–1875.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Spirits Do Not Like a Throng

  CITY MARSHAL Joseph H. Tooker was a native New Yorker, a proud product of Public School 7 on Chrystie Street, son of a sailor based at the South Street Seaport, and grandson of a Jacob Street hide merchant. He had come up on the hardscrabble Lower East Side and seen every crooked scheme that slithered into Manhattan, from the recent counterfeit-watch craze bilking tourists out of $40,000 a week to the “sawdust swindle” that tricked the guileless into buying boxfuls of dust. Mumler’s apparitions left him unfazed.

  More than being Mayor A. Oakey Hall’s confidant and crony, Tooker was, the famously corrupt mayor once said, his “modern Yorick.” This description might have derived from the marshal’s jovial demeanor, his fondness for pranks, and the theatrical interests he would pursue after he retired from city government, but his resemblance to Shakespeare’s poor fellow of infinite jest no doubt also could be found in his bald pate and protruding brow, which gave him an unmistakably skeletal presence. The image evoked of Hamlet with the jester’s skull in hand also seemed particularly apt for a man tasked with investigating images from beyond the grave.

  By the spring of 1869, Mayor Hall had been in office just four months, and as a former district attorney he continued to take an interest in seemingly minor crimes, especially those that might reflect badly on the metropolis he now led. In all such cases, he turned to Tooker.

  The marshal reveled in his proximity to power and long remembered the thrill of wielding outsized authority for the first time. When he was a boy, the blatant Protestant bias in the city’s schools was becoming a source of tension between the Public School Society, a Quaker-oriented philanthropy that oversaw the only free schools then available, and the growing ranks of New York Catholics, led by a pugilistic prelate in the person of Archbishop John Hughes—known as “Dagger John” for his aggressive style and the belligerent flourish he put on the small cross every Catholic bishop included as part of his formal signature. When Archbishop Hughes won a minor skirmish in an ongoing theological conflict over student reading materials, school officials deputized a handful of boys to blot out offending passages in classroom texts, including Hale’s History of the United States, Maltebrun’s Geography, and The English Reader.

  “These books were gathered together,” Tooker later recalled, “and a committee of boys was named to open them at the heretical places.” Urged on by Dagger John, the Public School Society armed young Joe Tooker and a few other juvenile censors with pads dipped in printer’s ink, and the future city marshal reveled in blacking out pages at a time. He already displayed traits of the man he would become: pragmatic and problem-solving, with a strict moral sense, but ultimately less concerned with personal conviction than with getting the job done.

  His involvement with the Mumler affair had begun as soon as the name of the spirit photographer appeared in the complaint book kept always open on his desk.

  The complaint book—an ever-growing compendium of perceived slights and alleged injustices committed by and against New Yorkers—had in fact been Tooker’s idea. First tried briefly a decade before, as a place where citizens might call attention to “any violations of the ordinances and derelictions of duty upon the part of any person holding office under the City Government,” the municipal log of residents’ grievances as revived by Marshal Tooker quickly filled with outrage over crimes ranging from petty theft to attempted murder. “From 10 to 4 the big space in front of the marshal’s desk was daily crowded by a miscellaneous throng,” he remembered. “Probably as eighty is to a hundred were the preposterous to the good causes of complaint.”

  To sift the worthwhile cases from the wastes of time, Tooker oversaw a staff of a dozen ordinance officers who “sometimes were obliged to be rather rough in their efforts to drive away the persistent cranks.” Much of the work could not be delegated, however. “One man, a voluble Frenchman, suspected his wife of homicidal intentions,” he said, “and in all seriousness begged that I would taste of a plate of butter that he had brought with him, and which he was sure was poisoned.”

  P. V. Hickey had visited City Hall to make his complaint against Mumler while the details of his investigation remained fresh in mind. Though he might have been dismissed as one of the many cranks Tooker’s gatekeepers routinely turned away, or else as a troublemaking busybody—he had not, after all, been a victim of Mumler’s swindle himself—his complaint was novel enough and sufficiently indignant to draw the mayor’s attention.

  It surely did not hurt Hickey’s cause that many of Mayor Hall’s political enemies, including the well-known editor and politician Horace Greeley, whom Hall had once called “a harlot, a gorilla, and a three fingered Jack,” were known Spiritualist sympathizers. Shutting down a man like Mumler might send a message to other supernaturalists that Hall’s control of the city would extend even into the world to come. The mayor told his marshal to look into the Mumler matter personally.

  Tooker knew something about the photography business. He had sat for pictures in the very earliest days of the daguerreotype, when only Samuel Morse and a few other entrepreneurial artists in New York had hung out their shingles as writers of light. As he had when visiting those earlier studios, Tooker went to 630 Broadway as if he were merely a client desiring an image of himself.

  Greeted at the studio door by an associate of Mumler calling himself Mr. Silver, Tooker explained that he was skeptical that
the likeness of a deceased person could be made by a photographic process, but asked if it was possible to produce such a likeness.

  “Not only is it possible,” the man answering as Silver said, “but Mr. Mumler, an operator and spiritualistic medium, actually produces such pictures by supernatural means.”

  Tooker was by then well known around town, especially among the sorts of grifters he assumed he was dealing with now. He invented a tale of his interest in spiritual phenomena that included the use of a pseudonym—William Wallace—and then inquired if the spirit pictured could be one designated by the living subject of the photograph. If so, he added, he would very much like to have a portrait of his deceased father-in-law.

  When the man calling himself Silver told the man calling himself Wallace that the price of these pictures would be ten dollars per dozen, Tooker scoffed. Ten dollars was more than three times the going rate.

  “The spirits do not like a throng,” the man who claimed he was Silver said. A premium fee was necessary to protect the gentle souls of the departed from the “vulgar multitude.”

  There was also a woman working in the studio that day, and Tooker came to understand that it was Mrs. Mumler, a pretty woman whose age he found difficult to determine. After ringing a bell, she led him up the stairs to the posing room, where her husband was waiting by his camera.

  A few minutes later, Tooker held in his hand a glass plate showing a likeness of himself sitting beneath the faint outline of a man’s face. He studied the plate for a moment and declared that he did not know anyone resembling the indistinct features. Surely, Mumler insisted, it must be the face of Tooker’s late father-in-law, as requested. Heading off any possible skepticism, the photographer warned that such visions of the dead could at first be difficult to recognize but then “produced surprising effects,” including ladies fainting on the gallery floor. “Think of the matter seriously,” Mumler told him, and insisted he come back the next day to pick up photographic prints of the image.

  When he returned the following morning, the mayor’s chief marshal was presented with a bill reading “one dozen spirit photographs, ten dollars.” He collected the pictures, paid the fee, and then, with what he believed to be clear evidence of fraud in hand, Tooker took Mumler into custody. No less than a heretical line in a textbook, the spirit photographer was deemed a threat to the public good and hastily removed from view.

  A crowded waiting room watched as the man who captured ghosts was taken to the Tombs.

  Unidentified man with unidentified female spirit image. William Mumler, 1862–1875.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Tenderest Sympathies of Human Nature

  IN HIS SIX years seeing the city’s worst from his perch inside the Tombs police court, Judge Joseph Dowling had gained a reputation for ruthless efficiency. It was said that he plunged through cases with a swiftness that kept the human sewer of the justice system blockage-free. “He has a hard class of people to deal with,” a report said of Dowling shortly before Mumler arrived before his bench, “and this has made him not a little sharp in his manner.” Even his critics noted that the “penetrating power” of his glance was legendary for striking fear in the hearts of those who thought they might deceive him. He directed the full searching force of that gaze now at Mumler, whose trial was about to begin.

  Naturally, all other eyes in the room likewise fell on the spectacle of the lumpen, rumpled figure who had once again become the center of so much attention. Studying the accused from a few feet away, a young prosecutor by the name of Elbridge Gerry already saw that this was a case with which he might make his reputation. Mayor Hall himself had taken a special interest, and Gerry, equipped with both wisdom and a mustache well beyond his years, wondered how he might turn this open-and-shut case to his long-term advantage. Closer still to the man at the center of the proceedings, the attorneys for the defense appeared resigned to their lot, remaining as silent as would any lawyers whose client’s future seemed to rest on spectral evidence.

  In the two weeks since Mumler’s arrest and preliminary appearance at the Tombs, lawyers for and against him had gathered a motley assortment of Spiritualists and photographers, scoffers and true believers, sideshow hucksters and members of the fourth estate. The questions they sought to answer concerned not only the possibility of otherwise invisible figures being captured through methods the likes of Daguerre and Morse had brought into the world, but the very nature of the soul and the religious commitments of the country.

  “What is this modern Spiritualism?” prosecutor Gerry asked the court. “Only a form of infidelity in a new dress.

  “The truths of the Christian religion, as asserted in the Bible, have always been acknowledged by the people of this nation,” he continued. “That religion is the basis of all human law, and constitutes the vital essence of our legal system. It was for this reason that in our own state the court held that blasphemy against God, and contumelious reproach and profane ridicule of Christ or the Holy Scriptures, were offenses punishable at the common law.”

  To help him make this grand case out of such a small-time affair, the first to be heard in the proceedings against William Mumler was the man who had started the spirit photographer’s troubles in New York.

  Though the prosecutor was from an esteemed patrician family and his opening witness was an immigrant only a few years off the boat, the lawyer shared with Patrick Hickey a visceral dislike of the spiritual threat Mumler represented. The grandson and namesake of a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a Revolutionary War hero, Elbridge Gerry was not one for revolutions himself, but was an ardent defender of orthodoxy. From the moment he took charge of the case against Mumler, it was clear this would not be a simple prosecution for fraud.

  As Hickey explained to the court, he had met Mumler some six weeks before the start of the trial. It was then that, as part of his “duty to procure scientific news” for the World, he had attended a meeting of the Photographic Section of the American Institute at the Cooper Union. “At that meeting,” Hickey testified, “pictures were exhibited having thereon an image which was said to be of a living person and an indistinct or shadowy outline of a person in the background.” These images, he continued, “were stated to be specimens of cards taken by a person named Mumler, doing business as a photographer at number 630 Broadway. Mumler and his agents represented such cards to be produced by supernatural causes. In other words, that the shadowy face was the likeness of a spirit present at the time.”

  Before the Cooper Union meeting adjourned, Hickey had requested one of Mumler’s booklets, but was told there were no more available. The photographer had given Hickey his business card instead, and Gerry now submitted it as evidence to Judge Dowling’s court:

  WILLIAM H. MUMLER

  Spirit Photographic Medium

  No. 630 Broadway, N.Y.

  N.B.—All are respectfully invited to call

  and see the specimens, and get a pamphlet

  giving full information.

  In the interest of science, and perhaps for the chance to pass a test of deduction his peers had failed, Hickey had taken Mumler up on this invitation the very next day. On visiting the address provided, he discovered that the studio to which he had been directed was not operating in Mumler’s name. The sign above the door indicated the establishment was owned by a W. W. Silver. Once inside, he was told that this was indeed the place to find Mumler.

  With Gerry’s questions walking him through his visit, Hickey reported that after leaving the studio that day, he discovered that Mumler “had practiced similar deceptions in Boston until he could no longer remain there.” With a believer’s ardor and an immigrant’s zeal to protect his new home, he had resolved to take his concern about the spiritual crimes being committed at 630 Broadway directly to the highest office in the city.

  THOUGH MAYOR HALL HAD considered attending the proceedings, and briefly thought he should prosecute the case himself, he apparently thought better of it. His mod
ern Yorick, Marshal Tooker, appeared in his place.

  “What led you to enter upon the prosecution of inquiries into this matter,” Gerry asked as soon as the marshal took the stand, “and what was your motive of proceeding to the photographic gallery of the defendant here?”

  Tooker explained to the crowded courtroom that the mayor had told him to look into the Mumler business personally.

  “For what purposes were you so directed?” Gerry asked.

  “A complaint had been made before Mayor Hall relative to certain photographs issuing from the premises of 630 Broadway,” Tooker said.

  “And you repaired to the premises so designated?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did you expect to get there, if anything?”

  “I expected to have my portrait taken.”

  As he had when visiting the city’s first daguerreotype studios years before, Tooker had gone to 630 Broadway as if he were merely a client desiring an image of himself. This time, however, he did so with a clear sense from Hickey’s complaint that this was not only a place where pictures were made, but one where “the tenderest sympathies of human nature were daily outraged.”

  “Did you, as you expected, have your portrait taken?” Gerry asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you notice any trick or deception practiced by the photographer on that occasion?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What was it?”

  “Well, when I went into the room certain representations were made to me which were not afterwards carried out as promised. Mr. Mumler promised to give me a picture of a relative or of someone deceased near in sympathy to me, this he failed to do, and I therefore consider that was a trick and a deception practiced on me.”