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    The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost
    The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost
    The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost

    Written by Peter Manseau

    Narrated by Jefferson Mays

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A story of faith and fraud in post-Civil War America, told through the lens of a photographer who claimed he could capture images of the dead In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer," William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation: The affluent and influential came calling, including Mary Todd Lincoln, who arrived at his studio in disguise amidst rumors of seances in the White House. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges, starring P. T. Barnum for the prosecution, to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation. And even then, the judge sided with the defense-nobody ever solved the mystery of his spirit photography. This forgotten puzzle offers a vivid snapshot of America at a crossroads in its history, a nation in thrall to new technology while clinging desperately to belief
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 10, 2017
    ISBN9781501966323
    Author

    Peter Manseau

    Peter Manseau is the author of Vows and coauthor of Killing the Buddha. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. A founding editor of the award-winning webzine KillingTheBuddha.com, he is now the editor of Search, The Magazine of Science, Religion, and Culture. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Washington, D.C., where he studies religion and teaches writing at Georgetown University.

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    Reviews for The Apparitionists

    3.5/5

    22 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This turned out to be rather different from what I expected, but I found it interesting. The subtitle, “A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost,” suggests that the book is about William Mumler and his spirit photography, and that is, indeed, the spine that runs through the book and holds it together. The bulk of Manseau's work, though, is an exploration of the early days of American photography and its revolutionary impact on the culture. The Civil War, with its legacy of loss and grief on a vast scale, created an ideal market for a man offering to reveal a last glimpse of lost family members or friends, and the wonder of the recently invented telegraph machine and other advances in the use of electricity made the capture of other “invisible energies” seem more plausible. The organization of the book feels a little random, but each topic visited is fun, and does help provide a context in which Mumler's spirit photographs, clearly fake as they appear now, might seem credible to the many people who found comfort in the photos purporting to show the spirits of dead loved ones. I found the sections on Alexander Gardner (who took many of the photos credited to Mathew Brady, a fellow whose marketing skills seem to have equaled his gifts as a photographer) and P.T. Barnum particularly enjoyable. The story of Mumler himself was a little disappointing, in large part because Manseau can't tell us how he actually made the photographs, and there are no “secret” letters to his wife or friends in which he crows triumphantly about his fraud or complains, martyr-like, about the skepticism of his critics. No personal insights about him at all, really. We get the facts of his careers – as an engraver, an inventor of a dyspepsia remedy, a photographer, a spirit photographer, and, later in life, as inventor of a photographic process for printing photos in newspaper – but never much sense of the man himself. I assume this is due to a lack of information, as Manseau successfully conveys the personalities of other figures, but his central character remains rather an enigma. I listened to the audio version of this, so I missed out on the illustrations, but Wikipedia offers a fine selection of Mumler's spirit photographs. Jefferson Mays was the reader on the recording, and it took me a while to get used to his accent, which struck me as “affected,” but eventually I did, and aside from that he did a fine job.
    • 5/5
      In the prologue, William Mumler, in April 1869, is charged in New York with fraud by attempting to swindle the public with his Spirit Photography. The tale afterwards backtracks and presents the interesting details of the rest of the book's long title. It's organized, however, in such a way that it avoids being a jumble, intersecting the mid-19th century innovators and giving their roles in the then-new technology of photography. Appropriately, each chapter opens with a vintage photo, though not all are taken by the spirit photographer, William Mumler. It seems like a who's who of that century. Yet, it's all in the presentation that makes this a remarkable tale because the stories of those highlighted so complements the history of events that the reader gets to know, and understand, the personal motivations of people such as Daguerre, Samuel Morse, and the Civil War photographers, Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner. Throughout, there are specifics of the Spiritualism movement, from its beginnings with the Fox sisters to including their many followers. It shows how things connect to one another in an interesting and informative, and more importantly, insightful way. All that and its climax of a courtroom drama -- where even P. T. Barnum makes an appearance-- too. An integrated presentation makes APPARITIONISTS a very worthwhile read for any of those interested in any one of its many connected topics.