with
Peter Manseau
When the early photographer William Mumler developed his glass plates, he sometimes found a ghost had slipped into the picture. Was he a fraud? A medium? A grief counselor?
We talk to author and curator Peter Manseau about how an emerging technology combined with a wave of grief during the Civil War, to make spirit photography possible. And we explore how photography, seen by many as a truth-teller, might also be described as 'God’s pencil.’

Peter Manseau / photo by Liam James Doyle/NPR