Victoria & Albert Museum explores 19th-century ghost photography in Halloween video

For Halloween, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London released a video examining the link between 19th-century spiritualism and early photography. The film draws on the museum's archives to show how long exposure times could create transparent figures resembling ghosts. It features illustrations by Charles Altamont Doyle, newspaper clippings depicting levitating chairs during séances, and early telephone experiments that evoked absent presences. The video also references literary ghost stories by Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll, who practiced spirit photography, including his 1863 work 'The Dream.' Stereographs—double images giving a 3D illusion—popularized the genre among amateur photographers. The video ends with Cecil Beaton's 1930 self-portrait with a skeleton as a memento mori, followed by a hint of strange presences within the museum itself.