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Feb. 24, 2015 - Skeptoid
19:42
Skeptoid #455: Ghost Photography

The history of ghost photography and its many problems as evidence. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Ghosts in Photographs 00:08:40
When we talk about ghost hunting, the very first question we need to answer is, what are the known physical properties of a ghost?
Because without those, there's nothing to hunt for and no way to identify our quarry as a ghost.
But many throughout this ghoulish history have claimed at least one proven physical property, that ghosts show up in photographs.
Ghost photography is up next on Skeptoid.
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Ghost Photography.
In books promising you a glimpse of the beyond, you find page after page of chilling photographic evidence that spirits of the dead walk the earth.
A ghostly baby sits on a grave.
A translucent figure descends a staircase.
A child's face emerges from the flames of a devastating fire.
Do these photographs offer real glimpses of ghosts?
Or is there a more rational explanation for ghost photography?
Let's expose these mysterious images to the light of science and see what develops.
The history of ghost photography is closely tied to the history of photography itself.
Early photography was much like all new technology in that enthusiasts had to become skilled with the various equipment and chemicals required for producing images.
Before the invention of photographic film, the photographers worked with chemically treated glass plates which could be cleaned and reused to make new images.
Early photographers were often running small businesses using their photography to make portraits for 19th century families.
Because of the bulk of their equipment, most worked in small studios rather than moving their equipment about.
Sittings were arranged and paid for.
The expensive glass plates were often cleaned and reused.
But if not cleaned properly, the remnants of the old image could be seen in subsequent photos.
This method of producing multiple exposures was certainly widely known within the field by the photographers, but was not well understood by the general public.
Before we dive into the story of the early spirit photographers, it's important to talk about the cultural stage upon which they performed.
The spread of photography was happening simultaneous to the rise of a new religion or belief system called spiritualism.
The main ideas of spiritualism centered around the belief that the dead continue to exist as spirits and maintain their consciousness here on earth after they've died.
Interaction with these spirits was said to be possible through the use of psychics or mediums.
Spiritualism began in the 1840s and grew through the early 20th century, attracting millions of followers and adherents.
In the wake of this growing movement, ideas such as parlor seances grew very popular and it was quite easy to find people who openly believed in spirits as a scientific reality.
A large population of people seeking proof of life after death made it possible for a robust network of mediums to set up shop in the northeast of the United States during this time.
It was in this environment that Boston photographer William Mummler introduced spirit photography to a community eager for more proof of life after death.
Mumler had been a jewelry engraver before he began his new career as a spirit photographer with a single photo which he alleged showed the image of one of his deceased relatives who had died several years before his self-portrait was taken.
In a time when photography was already an expensive proposition for a family looking for a portrait, Mummler was able to fetch several times the normal cost of a traditional photograph for one of his special portraits which would show a ghostly image of some alleged dead loved one along with the mundane image of the living subject.
How would he accomplish this?
How did he fool people with his blurry but easy to reproduce multiple exposure photographs?
It was a success for him because he worked with a network of mediums who would gather details about the dead subject from the grieving loved ones.
Then in exchange for half the profits, the mediums would send these details to Mumler.
The mediums told the customers to arrive at Mumler's studio at a particular time.
Mummler would have never met them and never been personally told details by the victim, yet he already had everything he needed to find a similar subject from his library of traditional portrait negatives to find a person who somewhat matched the image of the deceased.
His portraits were indistinct enough and the customers desperate enough in their wish for a signal from beyond that most accepted the photographs as genuine psychical phenomena.
Mumler's wife assisted with the business and they added all sorts of theatrical contrivances to enhance the magical nature of the spirit photography session.
In 1868, Mumler and his wife moved to New York, the state that was the birthplace of spiritualism, to set up shop.
Business boomed and in just a few months Mummler was able to purchase his studio instead of renting it.
But then a skeptical news reporter investigated and convinced the mayor of New York to pursue fraud charges.
A sting operation took place and Mummler was arrested and put on trial.
The trial of William Mummler was a spectacle that included testimony from P.T. Barnum, whose cynical and amusing testimony against Mumler often brought the proceedings to a halt as the courtroom erupted in laughter.
Barnum had written about the deceptive methods of spirit photography in a book titled The Humbugs of the World, explaining that photographs of famous statesmen had been made by the photographer inserting indistinct reproductions from famous paintings through multiple exposure techniques.
In the trial, Mummler was criticized and mocked, but the prosecutors failed to demonstrate his fraud and he was found not guilty, though he was financially destroyed.
Mumler moved back to Boston where he made the most famous spirit photograph of his career.
In 1872, a woman traveling incognito came to Mummler's studio to sit for a spirit photography portrait.
When she returned for her photograph, it was everything she had hoped for.
The photo showed her own image being spiritually embraced by the ghostly image of her late husband, Abraham Lincoln.
Mummler's success led to many other early photographers duplicating his methods.
It may seem amazing, but even when fraud was demonstrated or when the phony photographers themselves confessed to fraud, desperate clients still believed that the photographs they had bought were real proof of continued consciousness after death.
Were all these photographs fake?
There's ample evidence to suggest they were, but these multiple exposure tricks were just the first kind of spirit photography.
As spiritualism grew, mediums began to produce an astonishing array of physical manifestations in their seances.
Witnesses saw glowing figures, floating trumpets, and, as famously demonstrated by the ghost called Slymer in the film Ghostbusters, a mysterious spirit substance known as ectoplasm.
It was not a simple case of spiritualists versus skeptical scientists when investigations occurred.
There were many scientists who were open to the idea that such phenomena was real.
And there is a robust body of historical investigations from this time period.
Entertainers, scientists, intellectuals, and people from a broad spectrum of backgrounds looked into the question.
Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, Herwood Carrington, Camille Flammarion, Alfred Russell Wallace, Pierre and Marie Curie, Scientific American, and the Society for Psychical Research all conducted investigations.
Some found fraud, and others found self-delusion, but ultimately none found reproducible scientific evidence for the paranormal that could survive scientific scrutiny.
From this era come a variety of strange photographs that are alleged to show ectoplasm emerging from the nostrils and mouths of mediums.
Scientists Open to Phenomena 00:02:13
Shodily constructed puppets hanging from wires or emerged from closets.
To the modern viewer, there's little mystery about these photos.
They show obvious fraud.
But at the time they were taken, many saw them as real proof of the paranormal as scientific reality.
But these early cases represent just one kind of ghost photo, deliberate fraud for profit.
There are other kinds of ghost photographs, and many of them still make the front page of tabloid newspapers and silly segments of 24-hour cable news networks.
Let's look at the most common examples.
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Orbs and Pious Fraud 00:07:07
Orbs Glowing dots float in the images, but when the photo was taken, there was nothing there.
Some of these glowing shapes even seem to have faces in them.
They call them orbs.
Once the darling of the paranormal world, more and more researchers have begun to recognize these for what they really are, dust particles illuminated by the flash of the camera.
What about the alleged faces in these orbs?
We'll get to that next.
Pareidolia.
Perhaps the most common cause of alleged ghost photos, a photograph is taken and into the shadows, in a window pane, in a darkened doorway, faces appear, or mysterious human-like forms.
What are they?
Why didn't the photographer notice them when they took the photo?
Science has a term for this, and so do amateur ghost hunters.
In scientific terms, this is called pareidolia, which describes the human tendency to see faces where there are none.
Such faces are called simulacra.
It is a type of apophenia, which is the human tendency to find patterns and meaning in chaos.
Pareidolia is discussed in more detail in the Face on Mars episode of Skeptoid, but it accounts for a very large percentage of ghost photos.
It has also been the source of cryptozoology, fairy, angel, and saint photos.
Occasionally, orb photos show tiny smiley faces made from random pixels.
For reasons unclear to me, paranormal enthusiasts have started using the term matrixing to describe the same phenomena.
It's almost like they're being deliberately unscientific by eschewing the proper terminology and making up their own.
Insects In November 2007, a security video at an Ohio gas station went viral after being picked up by multiple news organizations.
A blurry, semi-translucent image moved around on the video and seemed to fly and move through objects around the pumps, but did not seem to be seen by the patrons.
The media coverage was mostly uncritical and just seemed to ask, was this a ghost?
Skeptical researchers were able to identify the culprit as an insect walking upon the lens of the camera.
This kind of easily explained video phenomena comes up again and again from fixed location security cameras.
The effect is caused when insects walk on the lens and produce blurred images.
Spiders, moths, and ladybugs have all been misdiagnosed as spirits in these kind of videos.
Accidental multiple exposure With the popularity of digital photography, this kind of error is becoming rarer and rarer.
In film-based cameras, it was sometimes possible to accidentally shoot the same piece of film twice without advancing to the next frame.
In most cases, the result would be easily recognized as garbage when the two merged images were developed.
Occasionally, a merged image would result in a ghostly figure or the face of the recently deceased, who had been photographed while alive, who then showed up in a later photograph as a multiple exposure artifact.
Long exposures and moving figures Many alleged ghost photos from the early 20th century resulted when photographers took photos with long exposure settings and someone moved through the scene.
This type of photo can show a faded figure similar to those seen in multiple exposures, but the telltale sign of this kind of photo is when a portion of the ghostly figure is repeated or motion blurred as they pass through the frame of the shot.
Camera straps A mysterious glowing blob appears in the photo, yet no one saw anything unusual when the photo was taken.
What could it be?
Was it an angel?
A ghost?
Chances are it was your camera strap, partially obscuring the lens and out of focus from the rest of the photo.
These weird-looking shapes convince many people they've captured a ghost.
A cold breath.
Ghost hunting on a cold winter night can often produce a creepy-looking fog that no one noticed when the shot was taken.
But if the photographer was alive and the air was cold, there's a good chance that as the photograph was taken, it captured the foggy breath that accompanies such shooting conditions.
These foggy patches sometimes even catch the camera flash and create weird shapes and figures.
But they're not ghosts.
An unnoticed person or feature.
Many alleged ghost photos are shared and published because the photographer says there was nobody in the frame when they shot the photo.
This is quite common on photos where the photographer was shooting a beautiful building or a lovely landscape.
The photo turns out but shows some unexpected person in the shot who's unremembered.
Skeptoid has talked about the fallibility of memory before, but it is worth repeating that human memory is very poor indeed.
And when we are focused on a particular activity, we are not good at noticing background details.
Strangers in the background of photographs shot at tourist sites are much more likely to be unnoticed visitors than visitors from beyond the grave.
Deliberate hoaxes.
Sadly, this is a very common source for many famous ghost photos.
The urge to hoax ghost photos can be done for fame, for profit, or for many other motivations.
Some people see ghost photos as a way to help bolster the belief in ghosts, and in this sense, like people who fake miracles, a ghost photo may be a type of pious fraud.
But there are tabloid papers who will pay very good money for a new ghost photo, and that temptation is enough to drive them to create hoaxes.
People will also hoax because it entertains them to fool people.
To paraphrase author and artist Daniel Loxton, a hoaxer doesn't need to make a lot of money to self-justify the fraud.
They merely need to make enough money to justify the fraud.
For some, this is a very low bar indeed.
Whatever the source of the ghost photo, whether it is fraud or one of the aforementioned types of errors, the big problem with these kinds of pictures is that they are useless as evidence for the paranormal.
What they are much more effective at is showing the apparently limitless ability of the human mind to find special meaning in images.
To date, no ghost photograph has come close to providing convincing proof of life after death.
Even more annoying is the fact that photographs which have been demonstrated to be frauds or accidents are still shared on countless websites and in books as real paranormal phenomena.
Yet for grieving loved ones, even the most tenuous hint that their dear departed connections are still out there somewhere waiting for them is enough to dismiss all evidence to the contrary.
The next time you go looking for ghost photos on the internet, please do me a favor, add the words skeptic or explained to your search string.
Chances are that researchers may have already figured out what's really going on, but even if they haven't, an unexplained photographic anomaly isn't proof of anything except that something hasn't been explained.
Unexplained Anomalies 00:01:37
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