Includes bibliographical references.

Part I: The black art -- Procure the remedy at once and be well -- Love and painting are quarrelsome companions -- Ties which death itself could not loose -- A palace for the Sun -- I thought nobody would be damaged much -- A lounging, listless madhouse -- My God! Is it possible? -- She really is a wonderful whistler -- No shadow of trickery -- A craving for light -- Part II: Philosophical instruments -- The message department -- A big head full of ideas -- Chair and all -- Did you ever dream of some lost friend? -- War against wrong -- Whose bones lie bleaching -- Part III: Humbugged -- All is gone and nothing saved -- A favorite haunt of apparitions -- The spirits do not like a throng -- The tenderest sympathies of human nature -- Weep, weep, my eyes -- Are you a spiritualist in any degree? -- An old, moth-eaten cloak -- By supernatural means -- Figura vaporosa -- They paid their money, and they had their choice -- Those mortals gifted with the power of seeing -- Part IV: Image and afterlife -- Calm assurance of a happy future -- The Mumler process.

In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized Americas imagination. A "spirit photographer," William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation: The affluent and influential came calling. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons.