William Mumler

William Mumler, the inventor of spirit photography, began his career right here in Boston in the early 1860s. Though the camera is an indispensable tool of Paranormal Investigators today, Mumler's results were, erm, different. 

He made a career for himself by capturing images of deceased loved ones, often standing behind seated patrons with a hand resting lovingly on their shoulders. Like many of the Spiritualists, his main patrons were survivors of American soldiers who longed to see the deceased a final time. Mumler’s most famous customer was a widowed Mary Todd Lincoln for whom he produced a photograph of the ghost of Abraham Lincoln..

Mumler had his skeptics. He was accused of fraud and took part in a high profile trial. No less than the famous American circus-man PT Barnum offered evidence against him. Despite the accusations, he managed to earn an acquittal but his reputation never rebounded and his business as a spiritualist was over. 

It should be noted that his photo-manipulation predates Photoshop and Instagram by centuries! He achieved his results through a clever use of double exposures, film manipulation and the desperation of people who longed to reach passed loved ones. We can say with a fair amount of certainty that Mumler was a fraud. However, he managed to discover something genuine by pure accident. Modern Paranormal Investigators have compelling evidence that anomalies can be captured by cameras, but sadly we cannot produce full manifestations on-demand for cash!

The First Spiritual Temple

Amid the endless cafes, restaurants, and brownstone townhouses of the Back Bay stands this building, a structure you might mistake for a church. This large, Richardsonian Romanesque building was financed by Marcellus Ayer, a Boston businessman, and was completed and dedicated in 1885. This is the First Spiritualist Temple. 

Marcellus Ayer

Mr. Ayer, a businessman of the self-made variety, was a devout Spiritualist as well as a Christian. He constructed the temple as a place where he and like-minded individuals could gather for services, moral lectures and trance medium sessions. It was the blending of Christian and Spiritualist ideas that set his temple apart from the more mainstream Spiritualist groups.

The First Spiritualist Temple served as a meeting place for Boston’s Spiritualists in the late nineteenth century. Ayer’s congregation, The Spiritual Fraternity (originally The Working Union of Progressive Spiritualists) met in the Temple into the twentieth century. 

The building was re-purposed as a theater in 1914 and later became a cinema, but Ayer’s church continued to exist and lives on to this day.

One last note of interest, in relation to Boston's recent succession of time-capsule openings, is that a time capsule from the original construction was opened in 1985, 100 years after it's installation.

The Birth of the Spiritualist Movement

My Dad always used to say, "If you do not know where you've come from, then you don't know where you are." Modern Paranormal Investigators have their roots in the Spiritualist Movement. This will be the first of many posts I hope to make on the subject.

The Spiritualist Movement was prefigured in the writings of trance-healers like Emmanuel Swedenborg and Andrew Jackson Davis. These individuals helped establish the theoretical and practical basis of Spiritualism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. However, the Spiritualists truly came into their own on March 31, 1848. That was the day the Fox Sisters, in rural New York state, publicly claimed that they were able to communicate with a spirit in their house. In countless demonstrations, they asked the spirit questions and were answered with ghostly knocking of a seemingly unknown origin. Later, one of the Fox sisters claimed it was all a parlor trick, but the celebrity they enjoyed seems to have catalysed a movement that swept across the United States.

Spiritualism grew rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially among middle and upper middle class. Numerous charlatans took advantage of the burgeoning movement. These so-called mediums entertained theatergoers through spectacle. Many (though not all!) were later exposed as frauds, but no amount of debunking could extinguish the enthusiasm. Spiritualism sought to connect the living with the dead and in the aftermath of the American Civil War, when so many people lost sons, it is easy to see how this movement found fertile soil.

Today, armed with a more scientific outlook, Paranormal Investigators do not rely on theatricality or wishful thinking. But, we should remember that this desire to communicate with "the other side" has it's roots in centuries past.

Quantum Echoes?

"Quantum Echo" may sound like a bit of new-agey rubbish, but I hope that reading this post will help you understand what I mean when I talk about Quantum Echoes of the Past.

Imagine I tossed a coin and covered it as it landed.

"Heads or tails?"

You might be able to guess, but until the coin is uncovered the correct answer is heads and tails because the coin exists in a quantum superposition. It's not till the moment you look at the coin that the superposition collapses into a single result; heads or tails. This is a simple example of what is called the "Uncertainty Principle" and it is one of the core principles of quantum physics.

But what happens to the other possible states when they collapse into a single outcome? Some scientists think the alternate outcomes continue to exist in alternate dimensions. However, I have reason to believe that they collapse, releasing Quantum Echoes as a result.

Allow me to explain the basic idea. When the superimposed states collapse, there is a sort of implosion followed by a "supernova" of virtual particles ejected at extremely high speeds. The virtual particles dissipate into the ether, except when they collide with the environment. In such a case, they bounce off, like an echo bouncing off a wall. This is what causes Quantum Echoes. Just like a sonic echo, a Quantum echo is a diminished, or faded impression of the original, sometimes only a fragment. Because of the high speeds involved, the quantum echo could appear very far in the future (due to a relativistic time diliation).

What does all of this have to do with Ghosts?

If my theory is correct, we might expect to see faded impressions of past events replaying themselves at temporal intervals. What would you think if you saw a translucent soldier from the American Civil War running across a historic battlefield? A logical person would probably conclude that they'd seen a ghost.

The implications of this theory could upend everything we think we know about ghosts. However, until I can conduct more experiments, it remains an unproven theory... for now.

With such a mountain of evidence, stretching across all cultures and all continents, only a person with a closed mind can continue believe that ghosts do not exist. The reality of ghosts is self-evident.

But what are ghosts? People often assume this is known. Even some who style themselves “Paranormal Scientists” operate on a cocktail of silly superstitions and Hollywood clichés rather than hard science.

There is no proof that ghosts are the “souls” of the dead trying to “cross over.” After all, ghosts of still-living people, while rare, are not unheard of. This would rather seem to suggest that ghosts are either a phenomenon caused by the emotions of living people or a sort of experiential reverberation of past events.

So, paranormalists of the world, please, leave your crystal balls and divining rods at home with Halloween candy. Paranormal science, real science that produces verifiable results, is our best hope for ever understanding the paranormal.

About Me

I came to the States 8 years ago to pursue my studies and found myself in Boston where I have been ever since. As a Paranormal Scientist I have a great interest in Boston as both a centre of science and a historical hub of paranormal study. In this blog I hope to discuss both the state of Paranormal Science as well as the history of spiritualists and mediums in Boston.

If, for some reason, you want to hear more of what I have to say, I tweet at a_lapine I am also a member of the Back Bay Paranormal Society, who are definitely worth a look!