This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

On a cold afternoon in February of 1872, a middle-aged woman walked into a photographer's studio in Boston.

She was wearing the traditional morning clothes of a widow, a black dress and bonnet, and a black veil over her face,

even though it had been almost seven years since her husband passed away.

The woman had experienced a shocking amount of grief in the past couple decades.

Along with her husband, she had lost three sons and three of her brothers.

But in her darkest days, she found comfort in the belief that the dead aren't really gone. They're just in a different place. And that was

why she had traveled all the way to Boston to visit this particular photo studio. The shop's

owner, William Mumler, had made a name for himself as a spirit

photographer, someone who could capture apparitions of the dead with his camera. He had discovered

his talent a decade prior when he took a self-portrait and, once it had developed, saw the

ghostly figure of his late cousin in the back of the frame,

standing right behind him. Mumler had opened a photography business to share his

spiritual gift with other grieving families, or to take advantage of them, depending on who you

asked. Plenty of people at the time were convinced that Mumler was a fraud, and the supposed ghosts in the photos were fake.

But the woman who walked into his shop that afternoon was a true believer.

She'd been going to seances for years, and she was convinced that she'd spoken to the dead.

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