Spirits, Apparitions, and Traditions of Supernatural Photography

Abstract

For nearly 150 years, the photographic process has been attributed with the apparitional ability to reveal discarnate beings and miraculous phenomena. In the nineteenth century, members of the Spiritualist movement embraced photography as a technological medium that provided evidence of the afterlife and contact with departed loved ones. Today, traditions of supernatural photography continue to thrive, particularly among the Catholic faithful at Marian apparition sites who regularly use cameras to document miraculous phenomena. This article examines the meaning and appeal of beliefs about photography as a revelatory technology, the popular desire for visible proofs of invisible realms, and the ways that the photographic process allows believers to ritually engage the otherworldly, the sacred, and issues of ultimate concern.

Keywords:

• Spirit Photography
• Spiritualism
• Marian Apparitions
• Lueken, Veronica (1923–1995)
• “Baysiders”
• Eschatology
• Religious Visions

Acknowledgments

A preliminary version of this article was presented at the conference, “Visionaries and Vision Hunters,” at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 8–10 February 2007. I am grateful to the organizer, Lisa Bitel, for inviting me to that event and for her continuing encouragement, and thanks also to the other conference participants, and especially Paolo Apolito, William A. Christian, Jr., Carl Diehl, Robert Dobler, Robert Glenn Howard, Mandy Lindgren, Kate Ristau, and Sandra Zimdars‐Swartz for comments and references.

Notes

1. See Rolf H. Krauss, Beyond Light and Shadow: The Role of Photography in Certain Paranormal Phenomena: An Historical Survey, trans. Timothy Bell and John Gledhill (Munich: Nazraeli Press, 1995); Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography's Uncanny,” in Patrice Petro, ed., Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995): 42–71; Andreas Fischer and Veit Loers, eds., Im Reich der Phantome: Fotographie des Unsichtbaren (Ostfildern‐Ruit: Cantz, 1997); Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography (West New York, NJ: Mark Batty Publisher, 2006).

2. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000).

3. Joe Nickell, Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994).

4. Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching, The Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal, Issues in Cultural Theory 9 (Baltimore: University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2005).

5. Clément Chéroux et al., eds., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 12–15.

6. Although Spiritualists usually date the beginning of their movement to the activities of the Fox sisters in 1848, historians have shown that the movement had multiple origins and influences, including Swedenborgism, Harmonialism, Mesmerism, Fourierism, and Methodism, among other traditions. For further discussion of the Spiritualist movement historically and in various contexts, a sampling of more recent publications include Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth‐Century America (Boston: Beacon, 1989); Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Robert S. Cox, Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); John J. Gutherie, Jr., Phillip Charles Lucas, and Gary Monroe, Cassadaga: The South's Oldest Spiritualist Community (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2000); Stan McMullen, Anatomy of a Seance: A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 2004); Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004 [1989]); Eric Leigh Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

7. Ann Braude in Radical Spirits argues that Spiritualism challenged gender and power relations and served as a means of progressive social reform; in The Darkened Room, Alex Owen explores similar issues, but says that the movement was not entirely empowering for women, and that it often trapped them within existing essentialist definitions of femininity. Robert S. Cox in Body and Soul tends to agree with Owen and examines some of the internal tensions and conservative aspects of the movement, as well as issues of race and diversity within the broader context of the history of emotions.

8. Sconce, Haunted Media, 28.

9. The first individual to take up ghost photography and make a career out of it was William H. Mumler (1832–1884) of Boston whose photographs caused a sensation, and he soon opened a studio that was visited by prominent people from around the country. Of his many spirit photographs, his best‐known portrait is of Mary Todd Lincoln, who visited Mumler after her husband Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865; in the photo a spirit image of Lincoln appears behind her with its hands placed on her shoulders.

10. Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead, 15.

11. Jay Ruby, “Portraying the Dead,” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 19, no. 1 (1988–1989): 16–17; Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

12. Krauss, Beyond Light and Shadow, 107; Cyril Permutt, Photographing the Spirit World: Images from Beyond the Spectrum (1983; repr., Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England: The Aquarian Press, 1988), 88–113.

13. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case for Spirit Photography (1922; repr., New York: George H. Doran Company, 1923).

14. For accounts of gullibility, fraud, and the techniques of photographic manipulation, see Krauss, Beyond Light and Shadow, 126–43. A representative account of the belief in spirit photographs is illustrated in the case of Edward Wyllie of Los Angeles, who was exposed as a fraud on several occasions, yet one individual, A. K. Venning, who believed, stated, “In fact, even if Mr. Wyllie should proclaim himself a fraud and show how it was all done, I should not believe him, because I know that I have received things through his mediumship that nobody on this side of the veil knows anything about but myself. The best tests I have received have always been too private for publication.” (cited in Fred Gettings, Ghosts in Photographs: The Extraordinary Story of Spirit Photography [New York: Harmony Books, 1978], 29).

15. Andrew Glendinning, ed., The Veil Lifted: Modern Developments of Spirit Photography (London: Whittaker, 1894); Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations.”

16. Glendinning, Veil Lifted, 159.

17. Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations,” 43–45.

18. As Freud writes of the uncanny, “many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts”; Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. James Strachey, Pelican Freud Library 14, pp. 335–76, trans. James Strachey (1919; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 335–76, at 364.

19. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3, 2–3.

20. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), 6.

21. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 9.

22. Gillian Bennett, Traditions of Belief (London: Penguin, 1987), 50–81.

23. Miller cited in Gettings, Ghosts in Photographs, 95.

24. Doyle, The Case for Spirit Photography, 106.

25. Chéroux et al., eds., The Perfect Medium; Krauss, Beyond Light and Shadow, 13.

26. Permutt, Photographing the Spirit World; Robert Rickard and Richard Kelly, Photographs of the Unknown (London: New English Library, 1980); Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips, Voudoun Fire: The Living Reality of Mystical Religion (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1979); Leonore Sweet, How to Photograph the Paranormal (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2005).

27. For discussions of Catholic visionary culture and the uses of photography, see Paolo Apolito, Apparitions of the Madonna at Oliveto Citra: Local Visions and Cosmic Drama, trans. William A. Christian, Jr. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 15–16, 204–15; Paolo Apolito, The Internet and the Madonna: Religious Visionary Experiences on the Web, trans. Anthony Shugar (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 101–21; William A. Christian, Jr., “Believers and Seers: The Expansion of an International Visionary Culture,” in D. Albera, A. Blok, C. Bromberger, eds., L'anthropologie de la Méditerranée (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose/Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l'homme [collection L'atelier méditerranéen], 2001), 407–14. See also the work of Lisa Bitel (in this volume), and Peter Jan Margry, “La terra di nessuno dei devoti: Devozioni informali tra localismo e transnazionalismo nell' Europa contemporanea,” Sanctorum: Revista dell'associazione Italiana per lo studio della santità, dei culti e dell'agiografia 1 (2004): 153–78.

28. Portions of this discussion of the Baysiders' use of photography appeared in another form in Daniel Wojcik, “‘Polaroids from Heaven’: Photography, Folk Religion, and the Miraculous Image Tradition at a Marian Apparition Site,” Journal of American Folklore 109 (1996): 129–48. For a history of the Bayside apparitions and discussion of the apocalyptic and traditionalist themes associated with the shrine, see Michael W. Cuneo, The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 152–77, and Daniel Wojcik, The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), 60–96.

29. Our Lady of the Roses, Mary, Help of Mothers: An Introductory Booklet on the Apparitions of Bayside (Bayside, NY: Our Lady of the Roses, Mary, Help of Mothers Shrine, n.d.), i.

30. Like the vast majority of Marian apparitions, the Bayside apparitions have not been approved by the Catholic Church. After an investigation in 1973 and again in 1986, the Diocese of Brooklyn declared that it had no basis for belief that Veronica Lueken had seen the Virgin Mary, and it issued a statement directing the faithful to “refrain from participating in the ‘vigils’ and from disseminating any propaganda related to the ‘Bayside apparitions’”; Bishop Francis Mugavero, “Declaration Concerning the ‘Bayside Movement,’” in Rev. James J. LeBar, ed., Cults, Sects, and the New Age (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 1989), 209–11.

31. For further discussion of the apocalyptic themes of Marian apparitions, see Apolito, Apparitions of the Madonna at Oliveto Citra, 136–46, and Apolito, The Internet and the Madonna, 79–99; William A. Christian, Jr., “Religious Apparitions and the Cold War in Southern Europe,” in Eric R. Wolf, ed., Religion, Power and Protest in Local Communities: The Northern Shore of the Mediterranean (Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1981), 239–66; William A. Christian, Jr., Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); Élisabeth Claverie, Les guerres de la vierge: une anthropologie des apparitions (Paris: Gallimard, 2003); Thomas A. Kselman and Steven Avella, “Marian Piety and the Cold War in the United States,” The Catholic Historical Review 72 (July 1986): 403–24; Ann Matter, “Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the Late 20th Century,” Religion 31, no. 2 (2001): 125–53; and Sandra L. Zimdars‐Swartz, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 245–70.

32. Our Lady of the Roses, Mary, Help of Mothers: An Introductory Booklet on the Apparitions of Bayside, 9.

33. Our Lady of the Roses, Mary, Help of Mothers: A Book about the Heavenly Apparitions to Veronica Lueken at Bayside, New York (1981; repr., Lansing, MI: Apostles of Our Lady, Inc., 1986), 22.

34. Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon in which an individual identifies something recognizable and significant in an otherwise vague and arbitrary stimulus (an image, a sound); examples include the “man in the moon,” the face of Jesus seen in the burn marks of a tortilla, or the Virgin Mary's face on a grilled cheese sandwich.

35. Our Lady of the Roses, Mary, Help of Mothers: A Book about the Heavenly Apparitions to Veronica Lueken at Bayside, New York, 22.

36. The cover of the issue of Life magazine that introduced Edwin H. Land's Polaroid SX‐70 camera to the public, for instance, is entitled, “A Genius and his Magic Camera” (27 October 1972).

37. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 37.

38. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 87.

39. Victor W. Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 140–71.

40. Richard P. McBrien, “Roman Catholicism,” in Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 12 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987), 441.

41. Hierophanies, according to Mircea Eliade, involve a disclosure of the transcendent through matter and represent a numinous realm of an entirely different order from the profane world; Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959): 11–12.

42. For a concise discussion of the sacra and liminality in relation to ritual and rites of passage, see Victor W. Turner and Edith Turner, “Religious Celebrations,” in Victor Turner, ed., Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 201–19.

43. Apolito, Apparitions of the Madonna at Oliveto Citra, 208–9.

44. Apolito, The Internet and the Madonna, 3–13.

45. In his well‐known discussion of simulacra, Jean Baudrillard claims that the rage of the iconoclasts was based in the realization that icons were dangerous simulacra that threatened to replace and efface the concept of God, revealing perhaps that there is no God, only captivating simulations of God; see Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of the Simulacra,” in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 255–56.

46. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (1936; repr., New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–51.

47. For a classic discussion of the concept of sympathetic magic, see James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (1922; repr., London: Macmillan, 1976), 12–55.

48. Leonard Norman Primiano, “Vernacular Religion and the Search for a Method in Religious Folklife,” Western Folklore 54, no. 1 (1995): 44.