A true believer in Mumler’s ability to use photographic plates to capture images of spiritual beings had brought a ghostly picture to Black’s studio and asked if Black could create a similar one using either his usual implements or any “mechanical contrivance.” After scrutinizing the photograph, Black admitted that he could not.
But a man who would go up in a balloon for his art was not the sort who would leave further investigations to others. Black began his inquiry by sending his assistant, Horace Weston, to Mumler’s studio on Washington Street—conveniently just a few blocks from his own. There the assistant was to request a sitting, giving no indication that his true motive was to take notes and report back to Black.
It had only been a short time since Mumler’s reputation as a man who could photograph the dead had begun to spread. Yet he seated Black’s assistant for a portrait as if his request was no surprise at all. Posing the young man by a window, he took a picture, developed it, and then supplied a photograph that seemed to show not only Weston’s own likeness, but that of Weston’s deceased father.
Weston had been taught photography by the best. If something was amiss in Mumler’s process, surely he would have spotted it. And yet he had not.
“All I can say to Mr. Black,” he said to Mumler, admitting he had been sent there on a mission, “is that I have seen nothing different from taking an ordinary picture.”
He left, but then returned a short time later, likely red in the face both from rushing up and down the street on this unusual errand, and from embarrassment.
“When I went back, they all came around me to hear my report,” he said of his coworkers at Black’s studio. “And when I told them that I had got a second form on the negative, but had seen nothing different in the manipulation from taking an ordinary picture, they shouted with laughter.”
Weston asked if Black himself might pay a visit. “If you will allow him the same privilege of witnessing the operation that you did me,” he said to Mumler, “and he gets a spirit form on the negative, he will give you fifty dollars.”
“Tell Mr. Black to come,” Mumler said