Occult Origins of Technology · 4/7 · 1861 – 1920 CE

Spirit Photography → Image Forensics

The first pictures nobody could trust. In 1869 a New York court had to decide whether a photograph could lie. The techniques the prosecution used — look for the reused plate, the doubled edge, the light falling from two directions — are the questions image forensics still asks, and the same questions a deepfake now has to survive.

REVISED 2026-07-24 · 10 THE CLAIMS, LABELLED

1. CL-01
   William Mumler produced the first commercially successful spirit photographs in Boston from 1861, selling portraits in which a translucent second figure appeared beside the sitter.Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer (2008).
   Documented
2. CL-02
   Mumler was tried for fraud in New York in 1869 and acquitted: the prosecution could not prove to the court's satisfaction how the images had been made.Contemporary trial reports, New York Herald and Harper's Weekly, April–May 1869; Kaplan (2008).
   Documented
3. CL-03
   P. T. Barnum testified against Mumler, and commissioned a faked spirit photograph of himself with Lincoln's ghost to demonstrate how easily it could be done.Trial testimony, 1869; the Barnum image survives in several collections.
   Documented
4. CL-04
   Several of Mumler's “spirits” were identified by witnesses as living residents of Boston who had sat for him previously.Testimony reported in the 1869 proceedings; Kaplan (2008), ch. 8.
   Documented
5. CL-05
   The tests developed against spirit photographs — inconsistent illumination, doubled edges, traces of a previous exposure on a reused plate — are the same classes of inconsistency that computational image forensics measures today.Continuity of the question is clear; the modern discipline was not built by reading 1869 case notes. Farid, Photo Forensics (2016), ch. 1, traces the lineage of the questions rather than of the tools.
   Technique
6. CL-06
   Arthur Conan Doyle publicly accepted the Cottingley fairy photographs as genuine and published a defence of them in 1920.Conan Doyle, “Fairies Photographed”, The Strand Magazine, December 1920; expanded as The Coming of the Fairies (1922).
   Documented
7. CL-07
   The Cottingley photographs were faked with paper cut-outs, admitted by both cousins in 1983 — sixty-six years after the first exposure.Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, interviews and correspondence, 1981–83; Cooper, The Case of the Cottingley Fairies (1990).
   Documented
8. CL-08
   Spirit photographs fooled only the credulous, and any competent photographer could see through them.Mumler was acquitted, and professional photographers testifying in 1869 disagreed with one another about method. Deciding from the image alone was genuinely hard, which is the reason the discipline had to be invented.
   Myth
9. CL-09
   Conan Doyle was simply gullible.He applied a test that was reasonable and wrong: he checked the character of the witnesses and the plates' provenance from Kodak, rather than the image. It is the same error as trusting a photograph because a trusted person sent it — which remains the most common way people are fooled now.
   Myth
10. CL-10
    Spirit photography was the nineteenth century's deepfake problem.A useful comparison, not a historical claim: the scale, the automation and the motive differ entirely. What genuinely carries across is the finding of the Mumler trial — that inspecting an image may not settle it, and provenance has to do the work.
    Reinterpretation