Photo manipulation is nearly as old as photography itself,
and what early photographers lacked in Photoshop, they made up for in
ingenuity. Photographers identified nine different methods that could
aid in the photographic imitation of “spirits”, including techniques
like multiple exposure and combination printing. As David Brewster, in
his 1856 book on the stereoscope, explained:
For the purpose of amusement, the photographer might carry
us even into the regions of the supernatural. His art, as I have
elsewhere shewn, enables him to give a spiritual appearance to one or
more of his figures, and to exhibit them as ‘thin air’ amid the solid
realities of the stereoscopic picture.
William Mumler was the world’s first known
“spirit photographer”. He photographed people who were morning the loss
of a loved one and would superimpose their image on the photograph to
show that they were still with them in spirit.
Mumler got caught with his fraudulent photography because of
P.T. Barnum. He had captured an image of Barnum posed next to a ghost of
an exceptionally notable variety: that of the recently assassinated
Abraham Lincoln.
During Mumler’s 1869 hearing for fraud, Barnum was
called to the witness stand to testify against Mumler. Barnum would
serve as an expert on “humbuggery.”
Spirit photography lived on well into the 20th century,
fueled in part by the Civil War and, later on, by World War I. In the
U.K., in the aftermath of the first Great War, the spirit photographer
William Hope would develop a following for his work that included Arthur
Conan Doyle. The Sherlock Holmes’s creator supported Hope against
claims of Mumlerian fraud and wrote a book called The Case for Spirit Photography in
1922. He would also end his friendship with the famous Harry Houdini
when the magician publicly claimed that spirit photography was
“farcical.”
(Source:
The Atlantic)
Millie and Christine McKoy were born, joined at the base of
the spine, on July 11, 1851, the eighth and ninth child of Monimia and
Jacob McKay, slaves owned by a blacksmith in the small town of Welches
Creek, North Carolina. At only ten months old, they were sold along with
their mother to a showman, who in turn sold them on to two more men in
the same trade, looking to make a quick buck. It seems to have been
around this time that their last name was changed to McKoy.
While still very young, the McKoy twins were kidnapped at an
exhibition in New Orleans by yet another showman, who exhibited them
another year, including at Barnum’s American Museum. Sold yet again in
1855, this time to a professor, they ended up in Canada, and then
Europe, where former owner Joseph Smith reunited them with their mother
and brought them back to the United States.
Joseph Smith and his wife educated the McKoy twins, focusing
on music and languages. The girls had a gift for singing and could soon
also speak in four or five different tongues. Yet, while to some extent
it is true that the sisters enjoyed a successful career in museums and
the circus, it should not be forgotten that they were also exploited
since they were young girls – and, as female slaves, more so even than
the other conjoined twins listed here. Indeed, they are held to have
been overworked, beaten, raped and sexually abused – including, it’s
suggested, during the numerous medical ‘examinations’ they had to
endure.
Free at last following the Emancipation Proclamation, in the
1880s the McKoy sisters retired from show business and went back to
their hometown in North Carolina, where they bought a small farm.
However, after a fire that weakened their health, the twins’ lives were
claimed by tuberculosis, contracted by Millie, and died on October 8,
1912. They lived until the ripe old age of 61, the oldest female
conjoined twins to date.
