A SWINDLING SPIRITUALIST.

Grey River Argus, Volume VIII, Issue 550, 27 July 1869, Page 4

A SWINDLING SPIRITUALIST.

A trial of a very remarkable character has been going on for some days in the police court in this city, in which the knavery and delusion o" modern spiritualism have been manifested in an extraordinary light. One Mumler, a New York photographer, has been driving a very lucrative business for some time past in taking spiritual likenesses. The humbug had been pushed so far that the authorities deemed it worthy of notice, and Mumler was accordingly arrested and charged with obtaining money by trick and fraud. Large numbers of persons have crowded the court-room where the trial is in progress. The device of the charlatan consisted in his executing photographs of living sitters, who paid an extra price for the portrait of some lost relative or friend which should appear plainly recognisable, though in ghostly presence, on the same picture. Many specimens were produced in court. Sorrowing widows, in decorous mourning garb, were taken with the simulacra of their lamented husband's rising over them. Mothers, with the apparitions of departed children in their laps, looked at the court from carte de visites of the customary pattern. Mnmler's defence is bold enough. He insists upon the supernatural character of the photographs. He asserts that the disembodied spirit takes its place by the side of the sitter of flesh and blood, or hovers in dim angelic outline overhead, as represented by his mysterious art. Very many witnesses were examined whose testimony was favorable to the photographer. It was of no importance that believers in spiritualism, like Judge Edmonds, deposed that they believed in the deception, and found in the phantom features the exact lineaments of their lost ones. But it was startling enough when experts in photography, who had no faith whatever in spiritualism, swore that they had themselves prepared the plates and adjusted the camera when Mumler took the living likeness, and that, nevertheless, the spectre came out from the negative, vague and yet palpable to vision. The question was indeed puzzling how the attenuated shadow of a shade, invisible to mortal eye, should chemically affect the collodion on the plate of glass. But the delightful mystery has been cleared up, to the • satisfaction of all but confirmed spiritualists, by the production, on the part of the prosecution, of other photographers, who showed that Mumler's ghosts could be evoked in many ways, by a lens introduced into the camera, by the imposition of a positive plate upon the negative and the transmission of light through it in the bath, &c. Pictures were exhibited in court in all respects as curious as Mumler's which had been produced by these methods. The decision has not as yet been rendered in the trial, but whether the jwlice commissioner shall succeed in putting a stop to this miserable mode of swindling or not, he deserves tho thanks of the community for the exposure he has made of it, and the rational explanation he has given of a trick well calculated io unsettle weak minds. — Standard's £?cw York Corre^Midtnt,