Photographs of ghosts were first produced as a regular thing, it appears, by William Mummler, a commerical photographer in Boston who produced his first pictures in the 1860s. He generally produced pictures of people who had sat for portraits which included “extras”, hazy images of other people standing beside or behind the sitter. Sometimes the sitters would identify these people as deceased persons they knew.
The raitonale given was that Mummler had some special sensitivity that caused the images to appear in the photos. At the time the whole process of photography was mysterious to most people, and photographs were often granted an automatic validity and importance which was unwarranted. It is interesting in this connection that in Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables it is the young dauggerotypist who serves as the voice of reason, and who provides the explanation at the end of the story.
In Mummler’s time pictures were not produced on rolls of film. The first cameras with prepared film were produced by the Eastman Kodak company decades later, and even then a photographer had to mail his whole camera in for processing. Rather, photographic negatives were produced on glass plates. When a photographer was finished with a negative, it was often the case that he would wash the plate clean so he could reuse it. Photographers who cleaned their plates imperfectly found that hazy double exposures formed when the plates were resued. Very likely this is how the process of producting “ghost” images was first discovered.
Mummler moved to New York City after a number of people in Boston noticed that “ghosts” in pictures he had produced looked precisely like people on the streets in Boston. Later ghost photographers were sometimes more creative in dealing with such embarassments. I recall seeing an old and incredibly credulous book on ghost photography years ago. In it was a ghost photograph which showed a hazy image of a woman in a tiara. A few days after the picture was taken, the sitter had found the identical image in a book; the “ghost” was, in fact, a living member of European royalty. The photographer had explained that the sitter had been blessed with a rare instance of “photographic clairvoyance”; that is, the camera had read her mind days in advance and taken a picture of the image that would be there when she saw the picture in the book!
It is said that the greatest single blow to the reputation of ghost photographers came after World War I. There is in London a cenotaph honoring war dead whose remains were left overseas. A picture was circulated showing a crowd of “soldiers” hovering around it. It was eventually found that the crowd was, in fact, a football team, all of whose members were still alive.
Double exposure photography seems to have done a lot to develop the image of ghosts as being white and hazy; often in accounts of sightings people have said they didn’t think that a figure was a ghost until it disappeared, but even in magazine illustrations of such stories the convention of a transparent, ethereal image is used to depict the ghost.
There are, of course, plenty of supposed ghost photographs which do not rely on double exposures to create effects. Some photos from 19th Century seances appear to simply show photos cut from magazines pasted on walls, sometimes with a little gauze attached to their edges. And, now and again, there have been pictures which are genuinely enigmatic and impressive.
In the 1960s one of the major American television networks–I believe it may have been NBC–produced a special which included footage shot in a supposedly haunted mansion or castle in England. There was a time lapse sequence in a desserted hallway where the hands of an old clock can be seen to spin around as a bright streamer of light crawls slowly across the floor. What was causing the light, and what was causing it to move, was supposedly unexplainable.
This is, of course, not what one normally expects from a ghost picture. Similarly, American Photo once printed a photo of supposed ghostly phenomenon–its only one in the magazine’s history. It shows children on a bed. Over their heads is an unidentified streamer or bolt of light, which appears to be casting a shadown on the wall behind them.
Since about 1990 there has been a vogue for pictures of “Glowing vortices of energy”. These generally take the form of a bright loop down in one corner of a photograph. Fate Magazine held a photo context in which all six winners were pictures of this type.
Such “vortex” pictures are readily explainable as pictures of camera straps. In many “Instamatic”-type cameras the user looks through a window, not through the camera lens. This means that if the camera strap gets in the way of the lens, it may not be apparent to the user. Such cameras typically have a very intense flash, and the strap can reflect this flash when the picture is taken. One such picture which I found identified on a website as being without question of an “energy vortex” was so clear that you could plainly see the weave of the camera strap.
There has also been excitement from time-to-time about apparent double exposures taken with Polaroid-type cameras. It is supposed to be impossible to double expose a self-developing picture; the first exposure causes chemical changes on the film’s surface which makes a second exposure impossible. The magicians Penn and Teller not only demonstrate in their book Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends that such a thing is possible, but provide apparatus for doing it.
