Doubly Exposing Spirit Photography

In the 19th century, some enterprising and unscrupulous photographers convinced vulnerable people that they had developed (pun intended) a way to photograph the spirits of the dearly departed. But what was really going on?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to this spooky episode of tech Stuff. I'm
your ghost host Jonathan Strickland, executive producer with iHeart Podcasts
and today, Well, first, I want to give a shout out.

(00:27):
I was pondering what to cover on today's episode of
tech Stuff, and I idly asked my best friend Shaye
Lee what she thought I should do. Now. Shye is
a podcaster herself, but she's also a guide on ghost tours.
I've gone on her ghost tour before in Marietta, Georgia,
and it was quite entertaining. She's also a tarot reader,

(00:50):
she's an astrologer, and she's an all around witchy person.
And the fact that we can be such good friends
speaks very highly of her patients as well. Because I
am notoriously not a believer in any of those things.
But when I asked Shaye her opinion as to what
I should talk about, her response was seasonally appropriate that

(01:13):
I should do an episode about tech that folks have
used in order to pull the wool over other people's
eyes when it comes to stuff like ghosts and spirits. Now,
in past episodes of tech Stuff, I have done episodes
about ghost hunting equipment. I did a recent rerun of
ghost hunting equipment episodes. So the short version of those episodes,

(01:36):
if you haven't heard them, is that I do not
believe in ghosts, and in my mind, the equipment falls
between two extremes. And on one end you have tech
that actually does do something, but it's completely unrelated to
ghost hunting, like an EMF reader for example. These devices
measure electromagnetic fields and they're important for folks like say, electricians.

(02:00):
If a house has faulty wiring, an EMF meter can
point an electrician in the right direction so that they
can address the issue. Now, on the other end of
the spectrum are tools that, as far as I can determine,
have no real purpose, but they've been adopted and promoted
by ghost hunter types. So an example of this category
would be spirit boxes, which just scan through radio frequencies.

(02:23):
So the idea is that spirits are somehow capable of
sending messages by manipulating radio waves in an inexplicable way,
and not just manipulating radio waves, right, It's not just
that you tune a radio to a frequency that's unused,
so you're just getting static. That's not what you're doing. Instead,
the ghost is somehow able to communicate across different frequencies.

(02:47):
So this would be like having a pair of walkie talkies,
but in order to hear what your best friend is saying,
you would have to change the frequency channel at just
the right time and in sync with your friend. Otherwise
you would just get a blip of what your friend
was saying as they went through the different channels, and
that's it. Now. Some spirit boxes flip through frequencies relatively slowly,

(03:09):
and that means the occasional word or sound from an
actual radio station will make its way through and that
you'll hear it and you'll understand it. But obviously, if
it's going that slowly, that means you could just hear
a local radio program and you might just use some
creative thinking to make whatever you heard fit whatever narrative

(03:31):
you are searching for in your quest to support the
existence of ghosts. Other spirit boxes are designed to rapidly
scan through frequencies so that you're not likely to hear
anything clearly. But how a ghost is supposed to communicate
through that kind of method beats the heck out of me.
Like a ghost has to be really determined to talk

(03:52):
to you if they are going to manipulate radio waves
in a cascade of frequencies. Unless the idea is that
when you hit upon something, you stop and then you
try to listen in, because that would be just like
hitting the scanner button on a digital radio, where it's
just going to seeking out, you know, strong radio frequencies

(04:14):
one after the other, and that doesn't really seem like
a useful tool to be either. Now, this is a
really good point to drive home. So much of ghost
hunting technology is based upon a very faulty premise, which
is the presumption that ghosts can manipulate phenomena ranging from
electromagnetic waves in general to radio waves specifically. Because here's

(04:35):
the thing, y'all, ghosts haven't been proven to be a
thing yet in the first place. So to me, that's
like you're putting the cart before the horse. You know,
if you say, if this meter goes beep, there's ghosts,
that's a problem. If you haven't yet proven that ghosts
are even a thing. You have to do that first.
Then you have to establish that these ghosts, which are

(04:57):
definitely a thing, can do whatever it is you're cl
they can do. In short, the argument the ghosts can
manipulate phenomena at all presupposes that ghosts exist. That's not
the way science works. This is where I have to
again hammer home the fact I am a skeptic. Do
I think it's outside the realm of possibility that ghosts exist? Well,

(05:19):
if I'm being honest, yeah, I do think that. I mean,
I don't know everything though, right I do not know
for sure, but I don't believe it, and I'm pretty
I feel pretty confident it's not a thing. What I
do know is that no one so far has produced
evidence that satisfies me to suggest otherwise that I can

(05:39):
say for sure, even if ultimately, if you put all
the truth into a sieve, you would come up with
I don't know for sure. I have, however, plenty of
evidence of people using technology to fake the existence of ghosts.
Hoaxsters and hucksters, snake oil salesmen and con artists. These

(06:01):
folks have made use of technology to fool wishful thinkers
and those saddened by the passing of loved ones that
communication beyond the veil is indeed possible, and that spirits
persist after earthly life. Has been extinguished. We don't have
satisfactory evidence showing that ghosts are a thing, but we've
got lots showing how unscrupulous people have tried to fool

(06:25):
naive marks. Now, to be clear, you don't need technology
to fool people. You know, some folks are just predisposed
to believing in spirits for one reason or another. They've
done most of the work for you, and a charismatic
medium might convince an audience that the medium can converse
with spirits simply through some routines that make little use

(06:47):
of technology at all, from an audience plant, which could
be very effective, to cold reading practices, which are a
variable effectiveness. It all depends upon the skill of the
medium doing the cold reading, but technology we certainly can
help out. Now, in this episode, we're mainly going to
focus pun intended on photography. Now, to do a full

(07:08):
history of photography would take multiple episodes of tech stuff,
So we're gonna hit some major highlights, and we're starting
in the early nineteenth century because there was a French
Smarty Pants who had the temerity to have the very
French name of nisseephor Nips, and he came up with
this mad idea of finding a means to make permanent

(07:32):
the images that could be projected by a camera obscura. Now,
my drugies. The camera obscura was typically a darkened room
where you have no source of light other than a
tiny pinhole cut through one wall. Light enters through the
pinhole and then projects on the opposite wall from where

(07:55):
the pinhole is. Right, that's how light works. It travels
in a straight line. The remarkable thing thing is this
light would actually project an image of the scene that
was outside the darkened room on the opposite wall. So
if you set one of these up and it was
across from let's say a mountainscape, Like you're in a
nice field and there's a mountain in the background, and

(08:16):
you set up a camera obscura. So you've set up
a room, a dark room that has just a pinhole
in it on the opposite wall. You could see the
scene of the mountain. It would be gorgeous, it'd be dim. Oh,
also it would be upside down and reversed. Now how
is that possible, Well, it's physics. It's a property known
as the rectilinear propagation of light. But the phenomena opened

(08:40):
up artistic opportunities. You could have a sketch artist or
painter set up inside a camera obscura and they have
a canvas on the wall where the image will be projected.
They could then use the projected light to guide their
hand as they painted a copy of the scene, and
then you would just turn the canvas over and you
could look at it side up, though it was still

(09:01):
reversed right, so that was an issue. Plus, the light
coming through the pinhole was not really that intense. It
wasn't a very strong projection, so it's still pretty dim. However,
through the use of things like optics like lenses and mirrors,
it was possible to one gather more light so you
get a brighter image projected. But you could also with

(09:23):
the mirrors re reverse the image so that it was
right side up and not reverse left or right. Even so,
the effect was ephemeral, right, The image wasn't permanent. You
could go into the room and see the image projected
on the wall, which is pretty, but you could also
just go outside and look at the landscape directly without

(09:43):
looking at the projection. So the best you could hope
for was to sketch and paint a copy of the image.
Nipps wanted to find a way to really capture an
image and then have it stay put. Now, about a
century earlier, a German professor of a natic demonstrated that
a solution of silver salts would darken when it was

(10:05):
exposed to light. It was photoreactive, and further, he proved
that it was light that caused the darkening process and
not heat. That was something that some other people had
put forward as a possible reason for this silver solution
to turn dark. Nips decided he would coat a sheet

(10:25):
of paper with silver salts and project an image with
a camera obscura onto that sheet of paper, and he
produced his first image this way in May of eighteen sixteen. However,
the image was not permanent because once you brought this
image out into the light, well, that light would cause

(10:47):
the rest of the sheet to darken as well. It
would cause the reaction on all the untouched silver salts
that were coated on this piece of paper to also
turn dark, so your image would fade and just turn
dark across the entire canvas. Plus, the image he created
was also a negative. The areas that were hit with

(11:07):
the most light were the darkest, and the ones that
were hit with the least light were the brightest, so
that meant that the brightest lit parts of your image
would end up being the darkest parts in what you
would get a negative image. Now, Nips experimented with photochemical
compounds that would bleach rather than darken when exposed to light.
But still there was the issue of this resulting image

(11:29):
disappearing once the whole thing got exposed. But yeah, you
could bleach parts and then you don't have a negative
image anymore. But once you take it out of the
camera obscura and sunlight starts hitting it, the whole image
begins to have this photochemical reaction. He also began to
work with some chemical compounds that react to light, but
they don't produce visible changes on their own unless they're

(11:52):
later treated to a separate chemical process. He eventually lit
upon using bitumen of judea, which is a kind of
naturally occurring asphalt. It's a tar like substance, and when
it is exposed to sunlight it becomes non soluble with
certain chemicals like nitric acid also known as aquafortis. He

(12:16):
would coat a plate, typically a copper or ten plate,
with a varnish of this bitumen of Judea. Then he
would take some translucent paper he would have like an
etching on a piece of paper, treat that paper so
that the paper would become translucent, and then lay that
on top of one of these plates. Then he would
expose the whole thing to sunlight for several hours, and

(12:38):
enough light would pass through the translucent parts of the
paper to cause a photochemical reaction to the exposed bitumen.
The stuff that was shaded by etching would not react
to sunlight, right because it's not getting hit. Then once
he was finished, once he had done this for a
while and had developed or exposed, I guess I should say,

(13:01):
exposed the plate to sunlight for a few hours, he
would give the plate a rent in a pretty darn
aggressive solution, and it would dissolve the bittermen that wasn't
exposed to the light, and it left the stuff that was.
The stuff that wasn't exposed to the light would remain
soluble and would dissolve. The stuff that had been exposed

(13:22):
to light was insoluble and would stay on the plate.
So what you would end up with is a negative
image where the exposed plate would be the stuff that
was the original etching, and then the stuff that still
had Bittmen on it would be the parts where light
was able to pass through. He took a similar approach
to make this work with a camera obscura, using lithographic

(13:45):
stones originally that were coded in bittermen of Judea. To
capture a scene. It would take days of exposure to
have enough of the photochemical reaction take place to a
point where the exposed bittermen would not wash away when
treated with these very abrasive chemicals. He would take that
negative image, typically used on a plate of silver, and

(14:05):
he would put that in a box that had crystals
of iodine in it, and the crystals would evaporate, exposing
the plate to iodine fumes, and this would cause the
exposed silver, the bits that were not covered with the
bitumen coating, to oxidize, and this oxidized silver would be
a coating of silver iodide. He then would clear the

(14:28):
varnish of bittermen off the rest of the image, so
he'd take off the stuff that had been reactive with
the sunlight and he would expose it to light, which
would then cause the silver iodide sections to darken, while
the stuff that had been exposed to bitumen or had
been covered by bittermen doesn't. So essentially he used two

(14:50):
separate instances of photochemical reactions to create a positive image,
and photography, the early science of photography was born. We're
going to take a quick when we come back, we'll
talk about how developments to use another pun would change
photography and open up the opportunity for the spirits to

(15:11):
commune with us, or so we were told. All right,
so we talked about nips and the invention of photography. Now, obviously,
over the following years a lot of people would advance

(15:34):
this technique, but the basic idea would remain the same.
You would take a photoreactive surface, you would expose that
surface to light under controlled conditions for an appropriate amount
of time. Then you would process the negative image in
order to create a positive image. But there was another
intriguing possibility. You could expose a photoreactive surface more than once,

(15:58):
and you could create really interesting effects that way. Whether
it was a glass plate that had been coded in
photoreactive chemicals or a film with a suspension of similar
chemicals that are coding it, you could capture two images
on a single surface and combine the two actually you
could do it more than twice, although the more you did,

(16:18):
the messier things would typically turn out, until you would
just get a big blur. But we're going to skip
ahead a little bit. You could also, by the way,
combine two different negatives together. You didn't have to actually
physically take a photograph with the same negative. You could
take two different negatives and combine them through superposition and
develop a single image from the combination. But let's talk

(16:41):
about how modern film cameras work to kind of understand
the science of double images on photography. Now, keep in
mind the principles I'm talking about applied throughout the history
of the development of this art. But let's kind of
talk about the basic elements of a modern care camera.
So with a modern camera, you've got your optics. You've

(17:02):
got a lens. This lens focuses light onto the surface
of photoreactive film or maybe an image sensor. If you're
talking about a digital camera, you've got a shutter. The
shutter's job is to block light from coming through the
lens and hitting your film or sensor until the photographer
actually wants to take a photo. And you typically have

(17:24):
a mechanism in film cameras to advance and rewind the
film so that you can take distinct images. So when
a photographer pushes the button on a camera, the shutter
opens for a precise amount of time. Now, professional cameras
let photographers adjust how long the shutter exposes the film,
also how much the shutter opens in order to expose

(17:46):
the film. So faster shutter speeds are used to capture
fast moving subjects because if the shutter's open longer, it's
gathering more light. If something's moving, it's going to be
a blurry image. Sometimes you might want that, that might
be the effect you want. But in other cases, let's
say you want to take a very precise photo of
something that's moving very very fast, you need to have

(18:06):
the shutter open and close in a fraction of a second.
So this is why cameras that are used to film
extremely high speed subjects in very slow motion, they need
a whole lot of light to do it. Because that
shutter is open for just the tiniest fraction of a second.
It has to be able to gather as much light
as possible in order to form an image. So you

(18:27):
need more light to light these kinds of scenes. Now,
if something isn't moving at all, then you can use
a longer shutter speed and much less light. In the
early days of photography, you often had people sitting still
for minutes at a time in order for a camera
to gather enough light so that you could get a
decent photograph. This is one of the reasons you hear

(18:49):
people in old pictures aren't smiling. It's not because they
were all dour all the time. It's because they would
have to sit for a photograph for minutes at a time,
and holding a rictus grin for like five minutes is
not the most fun experience. So instead you would sit
still and patient, and you would wait until the photographer said,

(19:11):
all right, that's enough time, and then you could go
about your day. So you would have a more neutral
expression on your face, and that would mean that you
would be able to gather enough light, even in a
dim interior setting, to be able to develop a decent photograph. Well. Typically,
cameras advance the film after you take an image. Essentially,
it pulls the film so that the next section of

(19:34):
unexposed film is in place in order for you to
take your next photo. To create a double exposure, you
would need to either prevent the film from advancing, or
you would need to rewind it back to its original
frame that you had already exposed with your original photograph.
Then you would take a second photograph, so you are
shooting over your previous frame. When you develop the film

(19:57):
to produce negatives and then ultimately insper these to create
positive images, you end up with a combined photograph of
those two shots, the second one on top of the
first one. So for your standard photography, the second photo
typically ends up being a background shot. For most uses
of double images here like you might take a landscape

(20:19):
shot as your second photograph that lets you place your
first photographic subject pretty much wherever you would like them
to be, or have them interact with some sort of
environment that otherwise they aren't present for now. For it
to work really well, you typically want your first image
to have a lot of dark areas in it, because

(20:40):
those dark areas are under exposed to light, meaning that
you haven't created this photochemical reaction for that part of
the film, and your second photograph, the under exposed part
of the film from the first one, are going to
receive more exposure to light, and the images you capture
will show up in those areas that were dark in

(21:01):
the first photograph. Let me explain by giving an example.
Let's say you take a picture. You have a model,
and your model is standing close to you, and you
have your model in silhouette. You've got a source of
light behind the model, so you've set your camera so
that you're focusing on this model, but they are in silhouette.

(21:21):
You know, it's a dark shape and the light is
coming from behind them. You take that image, so now
you've got a picture of someone. Where that someone is
you can't really see them very well, they're a silhouette.
But then you take a second picture. Let's say you know,
you've rewound the film so that you're using the same
frame again, and you go and take a photo of

(21:42):
a city scape at night. So it's this brightly lit
city scape. Well, the under exposed parts of film from
the first picture are going to bring in that light
from the second one. That's what's going to show up
in the silhouette. So when you develop your photograph, you're
going to have this silhouette of a but instead of
it just being a dark silhouette, it's a city scape

(22:04):
in the shape of a person. Silhouette. It's really a
cool effect, and there's lots of different ways of playing
with this. This is just a very basic example, but
photographers have been using this double exposure technique for years
to produce all sorts of interesting compositions. You can do
similar things, by the way, with digital cameras. In fact,
you can do things with digital cameras where they have

(22:26):
apps that allow you to do this and they'll just
handle the whole all the processing and give you the effect.
But in the old days, you could achieve this effect
in camera. You didn't have to do any special processing
after the fact to get it. Now you could by
taking two separate images and then just combining negatives together.

(22:47):
You could do that as well with the superimposing one
negative on top of another, but this method, you did
it all in camera. Then you would go and develop
your film and see the result. So the medium of
choice in the old days of photography wasn't film because
we weren't really into plastics yet. Instead, what was being
used in say the mid to late nineteenth century were

(23:11):
glass plates that had been coated with photoreactive chemicals, and
you would slide the glass plate into a camera. Then
you would take a photograph with the camera. This would
expose the areas of the glass plate to light. You
could then remove the glass plate, use some chemicals to
develop the image, then transfer that image to a sheet

(23:33):
of paper where you get your positive photograph. Then, best
of all, if you're a photographer, you could clean the
glass plate thoroughly and then use that same glass plate again.
You would coat the glass plate with new photoreactive chemicals
and use it again to take another image. Now, clearly
doing that would destroy your negative in the process, like

(23:54):
the negative that you took with the first picture, but
it meant that you didn't have to throw away a
glass plate and go buy a new one. Now, generally,
double exposures were something that photographers wanted to avoid. If
it happened, it was often due to carelessness, and typically
it resulted in an unusable image. But then we get
a forward thinker, William H. Mumler, who was a true opportunist.

(24:19):
Mumbler would take a photographic accident and turn it into
a lucrative, though brief occupation. As he became a spirit photographer,
some call him the first spirit photographer. Whether or not
he really was the first, I can't say, but he's
often credited as such. Well, he had a pretty decent

(24:41):
career until he got arrested for fraud. That put a
small hiccup in his plans, but ultimately he would be acquitted.
I'll talk more about that in just a bit. Now,
here's how the original story typically is told. In the
early eighteen sixties, Mumler sat for a self portrait photograp
He was an enthusiast. That was not his job. He

(25:04):
was not a photographer, but he was interested in the
art and technology of photography. So while he was taking
a self portrait, he unknowingly did so while using a
glass plate that had not been properly cleaned since the
last time it was used to take a photograph, so
the negative image of an old photograph was already on

(25:25):
the plate when he used it. Now, this old image
was of his cousin, who tragically had died more than
a decade earlier. When Mumbler developed this self portrait, he
was surprised to see a faded image of his deceased
cousin apparently posing with him for this picture, and he
appeared solid, but his cousin appeared transparent. Mumbler then allegedly

(25:49):
got the idea to create a whole business around this phenomena,
manufacturing images of spirits to cater to a nation that
at the time was stricken with grief. In the wake
of the Civil War. Countless families were mourning the loss
of people who had died in that conflict, and it
had given rise to a general interest in spiritualism and

(26:09):
in ghosts. After all, families wanted the comfort of knowing
that their loved ones were still out there somewhere, comforted
in an afterlife, with the knowledge that those back on
earth still thought of them and loved them. Now, maybe
the whole accidental photograph thing is true, or maybe Mummler
had a goal in mind and kept working until he

(26:32):
was able to achieve it. You know, maybe he did
double exposures to do it, just in camera double exposures,
but he also could have used the technique of superimposing
negatives before developing a final image, and that actually would
give him more options to that if he just held
on to negatives and then combined negatives together in the
post processing part of photography. Now, the actual method he

(26:56):
used wasn't really that important. What was important is that
Mumler got to work providing images to grieving families for
a fee. Of course, Mumbler maintained that he was just
as surprised as anybody else that his seemingly normal camera
had somehow attained the remarkable ability to capture images of

(27:16):
the dearly departed. His shtick was that he was just
a simple man who, through reasons unexplained, could take photographs
of ghosts. He would make sure those customers knew there
was never a guarantee that a ghost was going to
show up, or if a ghost did show up, that
that ghost would definitively be the person that the subject

(27:37):
was hoping for, and that would mean at times that
he didn't have access to a negative or a previous
image that really fit a family's story, So it would
leave him scrambling to work with the customer in order
to figure out who a ghostly figure might actually be, like, well,
that's clearly not Aunt Midge, but maybe it's someone else,

(28:00):
So you know, now, this is a lot like cold reading.
That's a practice where a supposed psychic fishes for information
with a mark and relies almost entirely upon the subject
to provide all the details, and later folks will often
say the medium somehow came up with all these details
on their own, when in fact it was the subject
who supplied everything. It's an old con and it still

(28:23):
works today. Mumbler did get tapped for fraud, but that
took a while. I'll explain after we come back from
this break. Just before the break, I mentioned that Mummler,

(28:43):
our spirit photographer, got tagged for fraud, but it didn't
happen right away. He even dodged some metaphorical bullets that
theoretically should have brought things to an end much sooner
than it happened. So. For example, according to an article
by David Russ inistory dot com, Mummler once took a
photograph of a woman whose brother had died in the

(29:05):
Civil War, and so he produces this image that has
this ghostly figure posing next to this woman, and she
goes home thinking, I now have a portrait that proves
my brother still persists after his untimely death in this
terrible war. Except for one thing. Her brother later returned home,

(29:25):
having miraculously not having died at all during the Civil War.
Reports of his death, as they say, were greatly exaggerated.
Now you would think that this would lead to Mummler
being exposed as a fraud because here he was producing
a photograph of this woman's ghostly dead brother. But he's
not dead. He comes back. The woman, however, became convinced,

(29:47):
either through Mumbler or otherwise, that the ghostly image in
her photograph was actually some sort of vengeful, malevolent entity
that was intent on leading her astray. So it wasn't
Mummler's fault, it was just a malevolent spirit. Now. What
was harder to explain away was a case in which
a customer recognized that one of the ghosts appearing in

(30:08):
a photograph was actually his very much not dead spouse,
which indicated that Mummler was in fact holding on to
old negatives that he produced in his photography business and
then made use of those negatives to manufacture his spirits
for his more gullible clients. So what did Momler do
in that case, Well, he followed the early advice that

(30:30):
you would hear in McElroy brother episodes of My Brother,
My Brother, and Me, and he packed up and moved
out of town. He left his operation in Boston, Massachusetts,
and he set off for the greener pastures of New York. However,
it was in New York that he got picked up
for fraud in eighteen sixty nine. The trial had some

(30:51):
notable expert witnesses, including the infamous P. T. Barnum, the
ringleader of Circus, and Barnum brought along with him a
portrait he had made that had himself in it, along
with the ghostly figure of the very much dead ex

(31:11):
President Abraham Lincoln in it. Barnum used the photo to
show how Mummler's photographs could be produced through earthly means
when no ghosts required, and apparently other experts gave similar
examples and showed how different photographic processes could create the
very same effects that Mummler had produced. So while they

(31:33):
could not necessarily identify the specific method used by Mummler,
they showed that there were lots of different approaches that
could do it. So the jury hears about nearly a
dozen different methods photographers could potentially use to produce photographs
just like Mummler's, and they acquitted him. What. Well, Yeah,

(31:54):
the jury understood that there were ways you could fake
the photographs, but they said that no one had actually
caught Mummler doing any of those. So since Mumler wasn't
caught in the act, And since photography was such a
new and, at least to the layman, largely unknown art form,
it stood to reason that, hey, maybe photographs can also

(32:15):
be capable of capturing images of the dearly departed. So
this is like the opposite of Akham's razor is the
Okham's raiser says that the simplest explanation is usually the
best one. So what is simpler that photography could prove
that ghosts exist something that has never once been proven ever,

(32:37):
that it could be the one technology that cements forever
the proof of spirits, or that humans, using documented, proven,
replicable techniques created the effect. Well, Aukham's razor tells us
that the thing we know for a fact can happen

(32:57):
is far more likely to be the explanation than a
thing we don't know at all. But the jury saw otherwise,
and Mummler walked free. He would later make more contributions
to the world of photography, legitimate contributions. In fact, in
one obituary his connection with spirit photography barely merited a
mention at all, So I would say that he definitely

(33:20):
got off lightly, though I don't know how much business
his spirit photography received after his well publicized trial. The
reports on that are varying. Some people say, oh, no,
he went right back into business and people didn't care.
Others say, yeah, no, the spirit photography gig was pretty
much up at that point. So I don't know what

(33:41):
the truth is. But there are countless examples of similar
photographs that have been submitted to support the existence of ghosts.
And it's baffling in many ways because we know for
a fact there are simple means of producing those effects,
either on purpose or by accident, and yet the reliance
on these images to serve as evidence persists. There are

(34:03):
other photographic anomalies that are often presented as evidence of ghosts.
A big one would be ghost orbs. Those are little
floating balls of light within the frame of an image.
These sometimes show up not just in photographs, but also
in video as well. They are not the product of
the development process or produced by taking multiple images on

(34:25):
the same frame of film or whatever. These are just
due to the nature of light and optics and photography, right. So,
ghost orbs are something you see with photographs that are
taken in dark situations or dark settings, and the orbs
aren't orbs at all. They're just reflections. So in a
dark place, you have to provide your own light, because

(34:46):
that's what a camera is doing. It's capturing light, and
if there is no light, then there can be no image,
whether you're talking about a digital camera that has a
light sensor or traditional film camera, unless you're capturing something else.
It's like infrared light, which we can't see anyway, and
then using a development process to actually make that into

(35:08):
a visible image, you need to provide some light yourself.
So you have a camera that's got a flash on it,
and when you take a photograph, the flash goes off,
the scene is briefly, very brightly lit. It's just long
enough for light to pass through the lens as the
shutter opens and exposes the film or light sensor to light.
But in that flash, any motes of dust or bugs

(35:31):
or droplets of water that are closer to the camera
and the flash bulb also get illuminated, and the reflections
from those tiny things show up as orbs in your
finished photograph. It's called backscatter, and it's not indication that
there are ghosts. They're just reflections of particles that are

(35:51):
reflecting light and showing up very brightly in your camera
because your camera's straining so very hard to collect whatever
available light is there in order to make the image.
And when you know what, a lot of ghost hunting
stuff takes place in dark and dusty environments, and you
need a flash or some other light source to eliminate
the scene. We wouldn't see these orbs in person, but

(36:14):
the camera, which is designed to direct light efficiently to
the film or the sensor does and it's not a ghost.
It's just a mote of dust or droplet of water
or tiny little bug flying around. Dust particles that are
closer to the camera are going to reflect more light
into the lens, and because they're not in focus, you know,
you're focusing on something else, some scene in which a

(36:37):
ghost might appear, you know, like say some old shelves
in a basement, or maybe you're shooting up an old
staircase in an abandoned chateau or whatever. So you're focusing
on a distant scene and a close up mot of
dust is meanwhile reflecting light from the flash, and boom,
you got yourself your ghost orbs. Now I think it

(36:59):
might Next episode, I'm going to tackle some relatively recent
additions to the ghost hunter's toolbox, namely the rim pod. Now,
I imagine my disappointment when I learned that an rim
pod is not some sort of insulated sleeping cabin that
pumps songs like Losing My Religion or the Sidewinder sleeps
Tonight into my ears. Now, rim pod stands for radiating

(37:21):
electromagneticity pod, and I can't wait to dive into that
for our next episode, because golly, it's silly. But that's
gonna wait for Wednesday's episode. It's another Halloween appropriate topic
for tech stuff. In the meantime, I hope all of
you out there are doing well. If you are someone

(37:43):
who has a deep belief in spirits and ghosts, I
am not here to tell you that you are wrong.
I am here to say that based upon my view
of the world and my need for extraordinary evidence to
support extraordinary claims, go hosts and spirits remain in the
realm of fantasy for me. Maybe one day someone will

(38:05):
produce evidence sufficient enough for me to say I was wrong.
They do exist, and here's the proof that shows it.
But it hasn't happened yet. Take care of my friends,
and I'll talk to you again. Really, soon. Tech Stuff

(38:26):
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