Part 3 - New York City

By early 1869, he was the best-known practitioner of spirit photography in New York. He had taken roughly 500 photographs and bought a studio at 630 Broadway. It was there that he photographed a Wall Street financier named Charles Livermore.

Livermore, himself a spiritualist, had been sent by the New York Sun as part of a team of investigators preparing a report on the photographer. Looking for the trick, he sat as still as a statue before the camera lens while Mumler counted off the seconds on his watch. With a flourish, Mumler replaced the lens cap and delicately retrieved the glass negative. In his dark closet, he floated the negative in a toxic bath to develop and fix the image.

Livermore observed as his features slivered in black traces through the white collodion that waxed the negative. Then, wondrously, another form etched into the glass, this one behind him, embracing him. He had been skeptical at first, but now, as he watched Mumler's every move, he believed. Out of the emptiness, his dead wife returned to him. Her spirit seized him. Here, for all the critics and the skeptics, was the picture, here was the proof.