PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ AUGUST 28, 2017 96
writes in The Apparitionists, extending “from the hinterlands to
urban centers, redrawing the map of the nation as a topography
of ghosts.”
Looking for a way to tell the story of that cultural moment,
Manseau stumbled, fortuitously, onto the Mumler affair. “My
kids were interested in history, and we were doing a lot of Civil
War traveling,” he recalls on the phone from his home in
Annapolis, Md., “so I was thinking about these Civil War pho-
tographers, some of whom were moving bodies around on the
battlefield, creating these images that were shaping the nation’s
impressions of the war”—the original fake news.
Fakery loves credulity—a disbeliever’s name for belief—and
the two dance a pas de deux in The Apparitionists. Manseau’s cast
of characters includes the Fox sisters, whose girlhood poltergeist
pranks begat the religion of Spiritualism and who later
admitted it was all a hoax that got out of hand; the Civil War
photographers Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, who, as
Manseau notes, were not above posing corpses for dramatic
effect; and, fabulously, P. T. Barnum, the self-styled Prince of
Humbugs, who testified against Mumler because even he
thought the ghost photographer’s chicanery was beyond the pale.
In ways Manseau couldn’t have foreseen, The Apparitionists
holds up a mirror to our times. In Mumler’s day, photography
offered a new standard for irrefutable proof even as it played
GHOST
STORY
The Apparitionists by Peter Manseau
is a lyrical, multithreaded work of
historical storytelling
BY MARK DERY
The 1869 trial, for fraud, of William Mumler, a Spiritualist photographer whose uncanny images of ghosts watching over his portrait sitters con- vinced many that science had opened a door to the afterworld, is the narrative engine of Peter
Manseau’s The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud,
Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, Oct.). The book has belief at its heart;
Manseau plays variations on that theme, exploring America’s
faith in technological marvels such as photography and telegraphy, as well as the religious ferment of the late 19th century,
when Spiritualist mediums promising a “spiritual telegraph” to
the hereafter offered a balm for the psychic wounds inflicted on
the nation by the Civil War.
“Spiritualism is one of these significant moments in American
history we have entirely forgotten, at least in terms of popular
memory, or it has been reduced only to parlors and séances,” says
Manseau, a scholar of religion and curator of American religious
history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American
History. He notes that digging into the historical record, he
realized “just how many people identified as Spiritualists,
whether they were also Christians or not.” He adds, “There was
a real overlap.” In an America traumatized by the loss of some
850,000 of its sons, the newborn religion spread quickly, he
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