A charlatan is haunted by sinister secrets and spirits from his past in this Gothic novel of the Reconstruction Era. Boston, 1870. Photographer Edward Moody has gained fame and fortune capturing the images of spirits in his photo portraits. He lures grieving widows and mourning mothers into his studio with promises of catching the ghosts of their deceased loved ones with his camera. But his elaborate hoax is about to yield shocking results . . . While attempting to capture the spirit of an abolitionist senator’s young son, a different spectral figure develops before Moody’s eyes. The camera has seemingly captured the spirit of a beautiful young woman from Moody’s past—the daughter of an escaped slave he knew long ago. He immediately sets out for the Louisiana bayou to resolve their unfinished business?and perhaps save his soul . . .

Told with uncensored Southern wit and guidance, this inspirational memoir “is a good primer on getting into the psychic realm” (Booklist) and recounts the story of a Hollywood film executive who journeys through the cosmic wilderness and, against all odds, discovers psychic superpowers that radically transformed her life. As a senior executive at one of the world’s largest movie studios, Julie Rieger spent her days marketing the imaginary stories of ghosts, faeries, superheroes, aliens, and more fantastical creatures. But after the devastating loss of her mother, the world of make-believe became reality when Julie captured her first ghost in a photograph and blew open a door to the Other Side. The Ghost Photographer chronicles Julie’s wild ride down the spiritual rabbit hole. After a series of unexpected, mind-blowing, and sometimes frightening encounters with the spirit realm, Julie was forced to face this strange awakening, flying in the face of scientific dogma and her own die-hard skepticism. Ultimately, she discovered that what she thought she had lost with the death of her mother—unconditional love—was in fact the greatest superpower one can wield. “A hugely entertaining must-read for anyone who’s ever struggled with loss or wondered what might be beyond the veil of our five senses” (Anita Moorjani, author of Dying To Be Me), The Ghost Photographer offers insights into our relationship with the spirit world, prayers and rituals for cleansing and protecting our homes from unwanted ghosts, and guidance on how to develop our intuition and sixth sense.

The publicity given to the recent attacks on Psychic Photography has been out of all proportion to their scientific value as evidence. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle returned to Great Britain, after his successful tour in America, the controversy was in full swing. With characteristic promptitude he immediately decided to meet these negative attacks by a positive counter-attack, and this volume is the outcome of that decision. We have used the term Spirit Photography on the title-page as being the popular name by which these phenomena are known. This does not imply that either Sir Arthur or I imagine that everything supernormal must be of spirit origin. There is, undoubtedly, a broad borderland where these photographic effects may be produced from forces contained within ourselves. This merges into those higher phenomena of which many cases are here described. Those desiring fuller information on this subject are referred to Photo graphing the Invisible, by James Coates.

In the 1860s, William Mumler photographed ghostsa or so he claimed. Faint images of the dearly departed lurked in the background with the living, like his well-known photo of the recently assassinated Abraham Lincoln comforting Mary Todd. The practice came to be known as spirit photography, and some believed Mumler was channeling the dead. Skeptics, however, called it a fraudulent trick on the gullible, taking advantage of the grieving at a time of suffering and loss. Mumlera s insistence that his work brought back the dead led to a sensational trial in 1869 that was the talk of the nation.

A story of faith and fraud in post–Civil War America, told through the lens of a photographer who claimed he could capture images of the dead. In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America’s imagination. A “spirit photographer,” William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation: The affluent and influential came calling, including Mary Todd Lincoln, who arrived at his studio in disguise amidst rumors of séances in the White House. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges, starring P. T. Barnum for the prosecution, to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation. And even then, the judge sided with the defense, suggesting no one would ever solve the mystery of his spirit photography. This forgotten puzzle offers a vivid snapshot of America at a crossroads in its history, a nation in thrall to new technology while clinging desperately to belief. An NPR Best Book of 2017 “A rare work of historical nonfiction that is both studious and just plain entertaining.”—Publishers Weekly, Top Ten Books of 2017 “An exceptional story.”—Errol Morris, New York Times Book Review “Manseau has become the foremost chronicler of the deep American desire to believe in the weird, the strange, and the oddly wonderful.”—Jeff Sharlet, New York Times–bestselling author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

Preface by Roberto Tejada. Epilogue by Alfredo Lopez Austin.

Photography and spirit examines images of phantoms, psychical emanations, and religious apparitions.