October, 1861
I sit here before you unjustly accused. I sit here at your mercy, reader.
We three sit before you, a congress of rogues, and all our fates are intertwined.
There is I, William Mumler, the spirit photographer. There is Hannah, my wife, who can reckon the dead. There is William Guay, our Poughkeepsian friend, who has up to this juncture protected our interests. And these are just the tattered souls who sit here left and right of me in the Year of Our Spirit 1861, bearing credible witness, in Suffolk Court’s dock.
Publically we are accused of fraud and larceny most foul.
Privately we are accused of a murder that cannot be publically proven on account of the fact that the man it concerns cannot be verified as dead.
Put forward uniquely, such charges might crush us. Taken together, they cancel each other.
For now we sit here in our cells—mute, incoordinate, fearing the worst. The jail is a piece of well-meant legislature, the new human way to prohibit and punish—four long wings of Quincy granite branching from an octagon with enormous arched windows admitting Charles Street where people, in their freedom, go. Not so William Mumler, confined behind bars, impotent and indisposed, his head inclined into a storm of rapists, pickpockets, cardsharps and abusers in a ten by four space where the sunlight itself, shining raggedly into the arms of the cross, has not the slightest character, the slightest touch of heaven in it. While forever the knocking of implements, scratching, the grunting of a hundred apes, those sad and headstrong bouts of sound that men fallen into the sere will enact.
And though I am not one of them, I am neither, however, completely not guilty.
But I didn’t bamboozle American mourners, and I didn’t murder the man that they say.
It is these crimes and these alone for which I am brought here to answer today.