For over 100 years Spiritualists and others in the field of psychic research have tried scientifically to prove that people have souls that live on after death. Spiritualists have often used spirit photography as proof of survival-after-death. Photography itself dates back to the 1840's and has progressed from daguerreotypes to the highly evolved photography that we know today. Amazingly, spirit photography which first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century also continues to evolve and is alive and well in this twenty-first century.

Spirit photography began with one man, a Boston engraver named William H. Mumler, who discovered ghostly images of individuals on a photograph he had taken of a colleague in 1862. Mumler, who had been casually experimenting with his camera at the time, claimed to have had little or no interest in spiritualism. The news of Mumler's discovery quickly spread around the world and shortly after Mumler started a business as a medium/photographer claiming he could call up deceased celebrities, strangers and family and friends of well-paying clients. He charged ten dollars per photograph at a time when an average portrait cost merely pennies. Mumler's portrait sittings were like any other, a person would sit for their own picture expecting their deceased friend or relative, a spirit "extra," to appear not in the studio but in the negative and prints.

A brief history by Anne Harney & Leigh McCuen