Who doesn’t like a good mystery? Even better, what about a good mystery that is solved with a generous dose of pseudoscience, an eyeball, and just enough late-Victorian creepiness to make Edgar Allan Poe look like a children’s author? Welcome to the world of optograms, spirit photography, and a German murder trial that ties all of this together in a nice psychopathic bow.

The Snapshot of the Soul

Let’s start with the delightfully bonkers notion of optography—the idea that the last thing a person sees before dying is burned onto their retina like a tragic Snapchat story. This 19th-century fad came courtesy of a physiologist named Wilhelm Kühne, who wasn’t necessarily trying to invent ghost-hunting CSI tools, but sure did lay the groundwork for them.

Kühne discovered that the retina contained a substance called rhodopsin or “visual purple,” which responds to light. With just the right conditions—say, death by decapitation and some quick lab work—he found that he could sometimes develop crude images from animal eyes. And when we say “crude,” we mean “if you squint at it and tilt your head just right, it kind of looks like there’s something there.”

Although Kühne had some success with rabbit retinas (and trust us when we say that you owe us a debt of gratitude for not going into detail about the animal cruelty involved in those experiments), he had less than stellar results with human eyes.

Where did he get human eyes for his experiments, you may be wondering? Kühne found an unwilling donor November 16th, 1880, when a young man was executed by guillotine. As scientist George Wald wrote in Scientific American, “He had prepared a dimly lighted room screened with red and yellow glass to keep any rhodopsin [pigment] left in the eyes from bleaching further… Ten minutes after the knife had fallen he obtained the whole retina from the left eye, and had the satisfaction of seeing and showing to several colleagues a sharply demarcated optogram printed upon its surface.”

What was this final image? He thought it vaguely resembled a guillotine’s blade. The only problem was that the executed man had been blindfolded just before death. Some thought the image was that of the final stair step to the guillotine platform.

Or perhaps it was nothing at all.

As it turns out, our eyes are built differently than our rabbit cousins. It also seems that humans are better able to resist countless inhumane experiments more effectively than our hoppity little counterparts. For whatever reason, Kühne’s experiments with optography failed to turn the scientific world on its head.

Unproven in the Lab; Embraced By Popular Culture

Optography may have flopped in the lab, but it found a second life where all good (and bad) science goes to be immortalized: fiction. Just as Jack the Ripper was haunting the alleys of Victorian London, writers were busy turning pseudoscience into plot devices. In 1891, Rudyard Kipling gave us At the End of the Passage, a short story featuring a Kodak-wielding attempt to snap an optogram from a corpse’s eye.

Jules Verne got in on the act too. His 1902 novel Les Frères Kip ended with two murderers being unmasked thanks to an optogram of their victim’s face.

Even literary titan James Joyce took a stab at optography—figuratively, thankfully. In Ulysses (1922), a character walks past the scene of a murder and muses: “The murderer’s image in the eye of the murdered. They love reading about it.” And they really did. If science couldn’t deliver courtroom results, fiction was more than happy to develop a plot twist in its place.

Because life often imitates art in the messiest possible way, some murderers reportedly began destroying their victims’ eyes—just in case the corneas were secretly harboring an incriminating headshot.

One especially eerie case happened in 1927. Constable P.C. Gutteridge of Essex was found shot to death on the roadside—with two of the bullets going straight through his eyes. That’s either a brutal coincidence or a criminal who’d been reading too much Jules Verne and not enough scientific journals.

CSI: Victorian Edition

The idea of optography became a darling of the dime novel crowd and occasionally even real investigators. In 1877, after the murder of Frau Reimer in Germany, her eyes were removed and examined for images of the killer. Unsurprisingly, they revealed nothing.

Even the notorious Jack the Ripper’s story intersects with optography. After the murder of the Ripper’s second victim, Annie Chapman, newspapers reported that her eyes had been photographed. Walter Dew, one of the first officers to attend the scene of the murder of Mary Kelly, stated in his memoirs that optography had been used in the “forlorn hope” of identifying the perpetrator of the crime.

By this point, the public was in love with the idea. Imagine: no need for fingerprints, or messy confessions, or physical evidence—just scoop out the eye, toss it in a darkroom, and wait for the killer’s face to emerge like a photo developing in a haunted scrapbook. The only thing missing was a catchy slogan. (“If looks could kill, they’d also testify.”)

Say Cheese… from Beyond the Grave

This Victorian Era fascination with connecting photography with the dead did not end with optography. It also gave birth to another phenomenon: spirit photography.

While some people were trying to photograph the last thing the dead had seen, others were trying to photograph the dead themselves. Spirit photograph was the original Photoshop scam run on wet glass plates and wishful thinking.

Spirit photography took off during the American Civil War, when grieving families were desperate for closure—or at least a spooky photobomb. The most infamous perpetrator was William H. Mumler, a Boston engraver who accidentally discovered double exposures.

Mumler realized that if he reused photographic plates without fully cleaning them from their last use, the previous image would appear, along with the new image.

He decided to monetize this discovery by capitalizing on society’s desire to reconnect with their dearly departed. Enter: spirit photography.

Mumler’s portraits featured “spirits” of deceased loved ones lurking hazily behind the living subjects. In one photo, a seated man might be gazing solemnly forward while a translucent figure of his dead wife hovered behind him like an angelic stalker. Even Mary Todd Lincoln fell for it, posing with what she believed was the ghost of Abraham Lincoln giving her an awkward shoulder rub.

Now, of course, not everyone was buying what William Mumler was selling—least of all P.T. Barnum, who knew a good con when he saw one. And in Mumler, he saw a huckster elbowing into his sideshow territory with a camera instead of a dancing bear. Barnum accused Mumler of exploiting grief-stricken families, their judgment fogged by loss and a desperate longing for closure. That was rich, coming from the man who once exhibited a fake mermaid sewn together from a monkey and a fish—but hey, even the pot gets to call the kettle fraudulent once in a while.

Rumors flew. Mumler was accused of staging ghosts using still-living people, sneaking into homes to swipe photos of the dearly departed, and being just generally shady with his shutter. Skeptics like Joe Nickell pointed out that some of Mumler’s “spirits” were alive and well—making appearances in both the photos and their local grocery stores.

In April 1869, Mumler found himself on trial for fraud. The courtroom was packed, the press was salivating, and Barnum himself showed up to testify—bringing along a doctored photo of himself posing with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Created by photographer Abraham Bogardus, the image was meant to prove just how easy it was to fake a phantom if you had a darkroom, a double exposure, and a flair for the dramatic.

To be fair, not everyone thought Mumler was a fraud. He had his defenders, including Moses A. Dow, a respected journalist who swore that the ghostly images in his own photo were the real deal. But in the end, it didn’t matter much. The prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mumler was deliberately faking his images. The verdict? Not guilty.

Depending on which historical gossip column you believe, Mumler either faded into disgrace and poverty, or saw his business boom thanks to all the free publicity. Either way, he moved on from ghosts to something less spooky and more practical—developing the “Mumler Process,” a technique for creating photo-electrotype plates that could be printed as easily as woodcuts. He died in 1884, and his obituary gave a polite nod to his spectral past with a single, hilariously understated line: “The deceased at one time gained considerable notoriety in connection with spirit photographs.”

From Camera Lens to Courtroom: The Angerstein Case

This brings us to the first quarter of the twentieth century. You’re probably thinking, “By this point, no one is gullible enough to think that there is any way images can be conjured up through any of this pseudoscience, right? After all, that kind of gullibility is a bygone relic of the Victorian Era, isn’t it?”

The Night Fritz Snapped (And Took Eight People With Him)

Allow us to introduce you to Fritz Angerstein, wealthy industrialist and psychopathic time bomb.

On the night of November 30, 1924, decided to kick off his career in horror by disabling his house’s phone line and sabotaging the water pipes. Because nothing sets the mood for mass murder like light plumbing mischief.

According to Angerstein’s own account his wife had awakened around midnight, gripped with chest pains. He wanted to call a doctor, but she said no and instead summoned her mother. What followed was a domestic scene that included reading letters in bed, vomiting on pillows, and a heart-to-heart about death pacts. Just your average midnight marriage moment, really.

Things took a darker turn when Angerstein overheard a conversation between his wife and mother-in-law about a family member who had syphilis. Apparently, this struck a nerve. Angerstein claimed that his wife had once said she wanted to die at the same hour as him, which—unfortunately—he took not as a poetic sentiment, but as a green light for mayhem.

First, he fetched his revolver. His wife snatched it away but unfortunately fainted. Angerstein retrieved a hunting dagger and stabbed her 18 times. He later said it was because she’d fainted and he thought, “Well, may as well.” Love, as they say, is dead. He then went downstairs and attempted to shoot himself—twice—but both guns jammed. (Apparently, karma and firearm malfunctions were in cahoots.)

Unable to off himself efficiently, he grabbed a hand axe and returned upstairs. Hearing his mother-in-law scream, he pivoted from self-harm to murder again and killed her, claiming she’d treated his wife poorly. Apparently, the irony that he had just murdered his wife was lost on him.

Then came the maid, Minna Stoll, who had the bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—and also, according to Angerstein, of overcooking meals and generally being bad at housework. He chased her to the attic, struck her down with the axe, and later burned her body.

Still not finished, Angerstein hacked again at the bodies of his wife and mother-in-law, apparently worried they might “get back up.” Then he washed his hands and the axe—because hygiene matters—and took a nap. That’s right. He took. A. Nap.

When his 18-year-old sister-in-law Ella returned home around dawn, she went upstairs to wash up. He followed her into the bathroom and killed her too. Why? Because he couldn’t stand to see her body afterward, which is about as coherent as anything else he did that night.

By 7 a.m., the house was a slaughterhouse. But wait—more people arrived. A bookkeeper and a clerk showed up for work and were promptly called one by one into the study and killed with the axe. Later, a gardener’s son and another laborer met the same fate, just in case they had caught a glimpse of the carnage. Even the family’s German Shepherd wasn’t spared—found later in the cellar with its skull crushed. John Wick fans everywhere know that this was the final, unforgivable affront.

In a final twist of theatrical madness, Angerstein gave a letter to a man named Ebert to deliver to his brother. Then, in a move that only makes sense in the twisted logic of this story, he went shopping. He bought chocolate bars—for his “dear wife”—and a flashlight, as if the day hadn’t already been illuminating enough.

After sunset, he returned home, doused the house in gasoline, and set it ablaze. Or at least tried to—most of it didn’t catch. So instead, he stabbed himself several times (not fatally), then called for help and claimed he’d been attacked by a roving gang of 15 to 25 bandits. Because that’s exactly the kind of detail you throw in when your story is totally, definitely real.

Panic erupted in the town of Haiger. Extra police were dispatched. Local militias were formed. Everyone locked their doors against imaginary bandits, while Angerstein was wheeled off to the hospital for surgery—and scrutiny.

Enter forensic expert Georg Popp, who pointed out that rigor mortis had already set in long before the supposed “bandit raid.” Fingerprints on the dagger and bodies? Yep. No sign of forced entry? Naturally. Angerstein’s shifting alibis and narrative gaffes didn’t help his case either. Ultimately, the evidence stacked up—literally and figuratively—and he was arrested while still in the hospital. Even the best liars eventually run out of rewrites.

The crime was brutal, and the nation was scandalized. The police had motive and opportunity, but the public wanted something more. They wanted a smoking gun. Or, failing that, a spooky eyeball or ghost in a photograph.

The Eyes Have It

This brings us back to optograms. Authorities removed the eyes of the victims and attempted to develop images from the retinas. The hope was that Angerstein’s face would appear, caught in the final, horrified gaze of his victims. What they got was… wait for it…. nothing. Not even a blurry suggestion. The retinas were silent.

You say, “Well, of course they got nothing. You already told us that optography is pseudoscience!” True… But remember that a lot of people still thought it was legit. What if Angerstein was one of those gullible dupes?

Not to be deterred by science being difficult and uncooperative, they also hired a spirit photographer to try and capture ghostly evidence. The result were a couple of “optograms” from the victims, revealing the last sight they ever saw.

One of the images showed Angerstein’s face. The second bore a ghostly image of Angerstein attacking his gardener with a hatchet.

When confronted with this “evidence” from beyond the grave, Angerstein dropped his elaborate story and confessed to all of the murders. He was sentenced to death by guillotine (a method of execution that was used until 1977), thus closing the case on what might be the world’s only documented attempt to solve a murder with both optograms and ghost photography.

Why We Believe (Even When We Shouldn’t)

So why did people believe in optograms and spirit photography for so long? The answer is equal parts desperation, scientific illiteracy, and good old-fashioned hope. In a world before DNA testing and security cameras, anything that could provide clarity—even blurry, corpse-eye clarity—was better than nothing.

These methods offered comfort. They suggested that murder victims could bear witness, that loved ones never truly left, that justice could be seen (or at least vaguely developed) if you just believed hard enough. And if it helped sell newspapers or photographs at a premium? All the better.

The (Not-So) Final Image

Today, optography is relegated to the shelves of forensic folklore, right next to phrenology and lie detection by mustache twitch. Spirit photography has migrated to Instagram filters and blurry Bigfoot sightings. But the Fritz Angerstein case remains a perfect snapshot—see what we did there?—of what happens when science, superstition, and sensationalism all cram into the same darkroom.

And while you may not be able to develop murderers from eyeballs or catch a ghost on Kodak film, rest assured: history has already done it for you. Badly. With flair. And just enough shadowy nonsense to make it fun.

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