Anglo-American and French spiritualism
Spirit photography: Mumler, Buguet and the plate
1860s–1920s · United States and France
Spirit photographs after Mumler and Buguet, late 19th century.
Source & rights
- What this is
- Image produced by the claim
- Object
- Photograph
- Title
- Two portraits of unknown men with spirit apparitions - Mumler and Buguet
- Date
- Late 19th century
- Held by
- Rijksmuseum
- Licence
- CC0
- This copy
- Rendered at 3840 × 2565 from an original of 7112 × 4750; not otherwise altered.
- Retrieved
- 2026-08-29
An image produced by the practice under discussion rather than about it. Its interest lies in how it was made.
These are images produced by the practice under discussion rather than images about it, which is why they are catalogued as such. Both photographers are historically associated with fraud - Mumler was tried in 1869, Buguet convicted in 1875 - and the interesting question here is not whether the figures are real but how the plates were made and how the claim was tested at the time.
From the 1860s a customer could sit for a photographic portrait and receive a print with somebody else in it: a translucent second figure, usually a dead relative, standing behind the chair. The trade ran for decades on both sides of the Atlantic and made money.
It also produced something the rest of this archive almost never gets. In 1869 William Mumler was tried for fraud in New York; in 1875 Édouard Buguet was tried in Paris and confessed, describing the double exposures, the assistants and the props. The claim and the mechanism are documented in the same decade, in court, in newspapers that survive.
What the source is
Photographic prints in which a second, fainter figure appears alongside the sitter, produced commercially from the 1860s onward, together with the contemporary legal and journalistic record of how they were made.
The images reproduced here are catalogued as products of the practice rather than as evidence about it.
The report
No passage reproduced - Excerpt not published - edition and page not yet verified
The 1869 trial scrapbook survives as a public-domain scan and is full of quotable newspaper reporting. This project has not read it, and quotes nothing from it until it has.
Why it is in this archive
Because this is the case where the archive gets what it never gets: a physical trace, produced under conditions somebody investigated at the time, with the investigation preserved.
The physical trace is real. A photographic plate is an object, the second figure is genuinely on it, and asking how it got there is a well-posed question with an answer. Both Mumler and Buguet were prosecuted, and Buguet demonstrated his method. That is what an examined claim looks like, and it is worth putting beside a fourth-century account that nobody could examine at all.
It is also the entry that makes the strongest case for the rest of the collection's caution. These images were compelling to grieving people who were not fools, in a period that understood photography perfectly well. Being convinced is not evidence, and it never was.
The words the source uses
Given in the language they were written in, with a plain rendering. None is treated as equivalent to a term from another tradition.
- extra
- the additional figure on a plate
- The trade's own word, and a good one: flatly descriptive, committing to nothing about what the figure was. The photographers were often more careful in their vocabulary than their customers.
How close is the source?
The surviving text presents itself as the words of the person who reports the experience.
01 · Produced by
Commercial photographers, notably William Mumler and Édouard Buguet
02 · Sold to
Sitters, frequently bereaved
Who are the witnesses in this record, and who were rarely asked what they saw as opposed to what they hoped.
03 · Examined by
A New York court in 1869 and a Paris court in 1875
Buguet confessed and demonstrated the technique. Mumler was acquitted for want of proof of method, which is not the same as vindication.
04 · Collected by
The Rijksmuseum and other public collections
Project Nikolaos annotation
Written by this project. Not part of the source, and not a translation of anything in it.
The plate is real, the figure is on it, and the question of how it got there has an answer. Every other entry in this collection would be improved by having that much to work with.
Details, provenance and rights
- Experiencer state
- Awake · Grief
- Reported agency
- Single personal agency · No agency claimed
- Locomotion claim
- None
- Physical trace
- Material trace reported · Independently documented
- Witness or speaker
- Sitters, photographers, and - unusually - the photographers' own confessions
- Recorder / translator
- Newspapers, court records, and the photographic prints themselves
- Edition
- Albumen prints, late 19th century; Rijksmuseum RP-F-2001-7-1101D-31
- Rights
- May be reproduced from a verified public-domain edition
- Cultural sensitivity
- Ordinary historical context
Provenance notes
- The figures in these prints are not identified and this archive does not attempt to identify them.
- Both photographers named here are historically associated with fraud. Nothing on this page presents these images as photographs of anything present in the room.
- The sitters are unknown men. They were customers, not defendants, and they are not the subject of this entry.
The photographs and the trial material are public domain. The image on this page is reproduced from a museum's own CC0 record.
From the same shelf
Grouped by the tradition that produced them. Nothing here claims they share a cause.
