This 19th-Century ‘Toy Book’ Used Science to Prove That Ghosts Were Simply an Illusion

In 1864, a book called Spectropia set out to expose how the brain can trick people into believing they’ve seen a ghost. Across 27 pages, author J.H. Brown laid out how readers could summon spooky images by staring at one of the book’s 16 illustrations of “specters” and then immediately looking at a blank wall. The resulting optical illusion wasn’t a supernatural apparition: Instead, it was the product of a scientific phenomenon known as afterimages.

Brown wanted Spectropia to act as a bulwark against the rising tide of Spiritualism, a religious movement that suggested the living could commune with the dead, typically through mediums and séances. Brown’s background, including how he came to be so well versed in the science of the time, has been lost to history. But his writings make it clear that he was ardently anti-Spiritualist. As Brown argued in Spectropia:

It is a curious fact that, in this age of scientific research, the absurd follies of Spiritualism should find an increase of supporters; but mental epidemics seem at certain seasons to affect our minds, and one of the oldest of these moral afflictions—witchcraft—is once more prevalent in this 19th century, under the contemptible forms of spirit-rapping and table-turning.

Despite Brown’s serious intentions, Spectropia’s publisher marketed the book as a fun parlor game, a way for folks to stave off boredom for an evening. “Ghosts everywhere,” one contemporary ad stated. The notice promised that buyers would conjure up “ghosts of all sizes, all styles, all colors, at 60-second notice.”

The “toy book,” as Spectropia was also described, proved popular, first in London and Sydney and then in the United States, where it sold for $1 (around $20 today). While one reviewer heralded the work as an “elegant volume [that] may familiarize even the thoughtless with optical laws, and thus abate the tendency to superstitious impressions,” Spectropia’s success as an anti-Spiritualist tool is difficult to measure. Indeed, another critic dismissed the publication as a “philosophical plaything intended to amuse children and youth.”

The science behind the “specters”

Brown implicitly acknowledged that many readers would open Spectropia and skip all text besides the directions for creating afterimages, as the illusions are now known. But for “those who may wish to know more,” he included a “brief and popular, as well as a scientific, description of the manner in which the specters are produced.”