03: REMASTERED: Ghostly Exposure: Postmortem & Spirit Photography

A grieving widow develops a roll of film and finds her dead mother in the back seat. A WWI airman steps into a squadron portrait two days after his funeral. A Boston photographer swears he can capture the dead — and P. T. Barnum takes the stand to prove him wrong. Tonight, the photographs that came back heavier than they went in.

Before the smartphone, before the camera roll — before there was a way to carry your dead in your pocket — people wanted to keep the faces of the ones they loved. Some of them tried very hard. Some of them, it seems, succeeded a little too well.

In this remastered episode, we’re climbing back into the strange, tender, deeply uncanny history of postmortem and spirit photography — from Victorian iron posing stands and painted-on eyes, to

William Mumler’s scandalous Boston studio, to the back seat of a quiet Ipswich car on a Tuesday afternoon in 1959.

Featuring the Mabel Chinnery photograph, the ghost of Freddy Jackson, the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, the haunted faces in the wake of the S.S. Watertown, Mary Todd Lincoln’s most famous portrait, and three modern firsthand-style accounts that have been quietly circulating online — the kind of photograph you delete six times, and it keeps coming back.

Postmortem Photography & Victorian Death Culture

• Stanley, Liz, and Sue Wise. “The Domestication of Death: The Sequestration Thesis and Domestic Figuration.”

Sociology, vol. 45, no. 6, 2011, pp. 947–62. JSTOR. (jstor.org/stable/42857592)

• Slate Magazine: “The Eerie History of Spirit Photography and Child Mortality in the 19th Century.” October 2017.

(slate.com/human-interest/2017/10/spirit-photography-and-child-mortality-in-the-19th-century.html)

• Victorian Visual Culture blog: “Photos of the Dead.” December 2020.

(victorianvisualculture.blog/2020/12/14/photos-of-the-dead/)

William Mumler & Spirit Photography

• Cao, Maggie M. “Spirit Photographs and the Civil War.” American Art, vol. 31, no. 2.

• Kaplan, Louis. The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

• Court records of The People v. William H. Mumler, New York, 1869.

Freddy Jackson

• Goddard, Sir Victor. Flight Towards Reality. London: Turnstone Books, 1975.

• The Black Vault Case Files: “The Ghost of Freddy Jackson.”

(theblackvault.com/casefiles/the-ghost-of-freddy-jackson/)

Mabel Chinnery

• Sunday Pictorial, April 19, 1959 — original publication and expert analysis.

• Anomalies database (Garth Haslam): “1959, March 22 — Mabel Chinnery’s Strange Photograph.” (anomalyinfo.com/Stories/1959-mabel-chinnerys-strange-photograph)

The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

• Country Life magazine, December 1936 — original publication of the photograph by Captain Hubert Provand and Indre Shira.

• BBC News: coverage of Raynham Hall and the Brown Lady. (bbc.com/news/uk-england-36389581) S.S. Watertown

• Service News, Cities Service Company company newsletter, 1924–1925 — primary publication of the photographs and crew accounts.

• Hervey, Hal. “Ghosts of the Watertown.” True Strange Stories, 1929.

• Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Ynkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. University of California

Press, 2015 — for context on shinrei shashin in Japanese popular tradition.

• Behrend, Heike, et al., eds. Spirits in Politics: Uncertainties of Power and Healing in African Societies. Campus Verlag, 2015 — for a broader cross-cultural context on photography and the spirit world.

• Instagram: @letstalkspookypodcast

• Email: letstalkspookypodcast@gmail.com

• Subscribe/follow wherever you listen, and please leave a review — it helps more spooky souls find the firelight.

Stay spooky 👻