Killer Eyes

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And I promise we won't spam you. And after the episode, we hope you'll stick around because we've got more to the story. Little bonus content, little conversation, some bloodthirsty stuff right after the episode. For centuries, people wondered if it might be possible at the moment of death for the human eye to retain its final vision.

The retina, like a camera capturing and holding the last image that person would ever see. The whole notion began in the 1600s when a Jesuit brother dissecting a frog announced that he'd observed a faint image on the dead amphibians retina. No one argued. Science back then had a lot of room for what sounded to us like outlandish theories.

But then photography was invented and suddenly that long dead Jesuit story about frog retinas sounded a whole lot more promising. If an image taken by a camera could be fixed on a piece of glass or paper, then why should the human retina not work in a similar way? Just as a camera had a lens, so did the eye. It didn't seem all that preposterous to suggest that the human eye might be able to permanently capture an image, too.

And if that was the case, think how many murders might be solved just by looking into the victim's eyes. They called this new forensic technique optography, and the idea really caught fire. Scientists, law enforcement and the general public were all equally fascinated by the possibilities. Plus, it also happened to fit just perfectly with the poetic belief in the eyes as the windows of the soul.

And in at least one case, optography did help solve a brutal and bloody murder. The theory that a murder victim's eyes may sometimes hold the image of his slayer received scientific confirmation from Professor Doehne of Cologne University last night. The professor photographed the retina of two victims of Fritz Angerstein, wealthy Haiger merchant, who killed eight persons.

The retina of one yielded a picture of Angerstein's face. The other showed the same face contorted with rage and the blade of the axe with which the murders were committed. And they got a small beam of light. True. Weird stuff. Franz Christian Boll's 1876 discovery of rhodopsin started it all. Rhodopsin, also known as visual purple, is a light sensitive pigment molecule in the retina. So remember learning about rod and cone cells back in school?

Rhodopsin is in the retina's rod cells. It's what gives us vision in low or dim lighting. It was a big, big find for Boll, who died at age 30, less than a year before his colleague, William Friedrich Kühne, got his hands on the lopped off head of a freshly executed murderer. What? Yup. On November 16th, 1880, Kühne, a professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg, was waiting patiently in his dark room for the dead killer's head to arrive.

Kühne likened human vision to photography, calling the eyes a whole photographic workshop. And it was Dr. Kühne who gave the image captured on the retina of a corpse the name Optogram. Kühne had already experimented on animals, frogs and rabbits. Those experiments were, let's just say, bad news for the animals involved.

Kühne would restrain the rabbits, holding them motionless and forcing them to stare at gas flames or at windows in full daylight for hours. Then he cut off their heads and plucked out their eyes. He was after the section of the eyes containing the retina, believing that he needed to fix the rhodopsin in the rod cells in the same way that a photographer fixes an image onto paper or glass. Kühne applied an alum solution to the tissue and then submerged it in sulfuric acid.

It's giving mad scientist. But Kühne was pleased with the results. Some of the Optograms he collected from these rabbit retinas were so clear that individual window panes could actually be seen. But most were fuzzy and indistinct and ephemeral. The images faded away almost as swiftly as they'd appeared. Even chemically doctored rabbit retinas made a poor medium for any kind of lasting picture.

Not to mention how fragile this tissue was, decomposition set in almost immediately after death, which meant the rabbit eyes had to be harvested and then processed very quickly. That lab must have felt like a Saw movie for bunnies. While you're hating the man for this, go ahead and also throw him the side eye for being a sexist bastard who once said that he'd never allow skirts in his classrooms.

A brilliant woman broke him of that, Dr. Henrietta Hyde. But she got there too late to save even a single rabbit. Anyway, Kühne was hot to get his hands on some freshly deceased human eyeballs, and that day finally came with the execution of a man named Erhard Gustav Reif. Unlike the bunnies who had done nothing wrong, Reif was convicted of drowning his two youngest sons. He was sentenced to be beheaded by guillotine, a perfect opportunity for Kühne. The dead killer's head was scooped up and rushed to the laboratory at the Kühne rapidly dissected the head, removing the left eye.

As with the rabbit retinas, Reif's eye tissue was hardened with alum and immersed in sulfuric acid. And after 10 minutes, Kühne had an image. The problem was it was an image that didn't appear to be related to anything the murderer might have seen in his final moments. Kühne suggested that the image possessed the same line as the guillotine blade.

Spooky, right? Except Reif was blindfolded when the blade dropped and would not have seen anything, which is why some have argued that the shape on Kühne's Reif optogram more closely resembled the steps the condemned man was forced to climb to his execution. Steps he climbed with eyes wide open, no blindfold. Since the original Reif optogram has been lost, it's impossible now to study it any further. One issue with Kühne's work is that human eyeballs are very different from rabbit eyeballs in one critical way, something called the fovea centralis, which is the focal point right there in the dead center of the human retina.

That bullseye is tiny. It's about 1.5 millimeters. In rabbit eyes, there's no fovea centralis at all. A bunny retina instead has a horizontally extended area centralis, blah, blah, blah. Plus, a rabbit retina has a much higher ratio of rod to cone cells than a human retina. And that's just a couple of basic differences.

So very little of what Kühne gleaned from his rabbit experiments was at all meaningful when applied to the human retina. Kühne worked in his lab with another physiologist, an American named Dr. W.C. Ayers. Ayers wrote an article for the New York Medical Journal describing how he had made over a thousand experiments in collecting optograms and had come to the conclusion that it was a waste of time.

It was impossible, even under the most ideal circumstances, to look for any image on the retina of a person who'd met with sudden death. And that was that, right? Wrong. Despite questionable results and skepticism from both the medical establishment and law enforcement, there were plenty of people determined to make the optogram the ultimate crime solving tool, including a British police inspector named Walter Dew.

Inspector Dew was on the case of the infamous Fiend of Whitechapel, a killer better known to us as Jack the Ripper. Even now, police are uncertain just how many victims died at the Ripper's hands. And it's possible that more than one killer roamed those dark and impoverished streets. But thanks to relentless press coverage, the public came to believe that just one serial killer stalked their streets.

For Inspector Dew, the race to apprehend the murderer before he struck again meant following every lead and using every possible tool. Those were wretched days for me. The hunt became an obsession. I spent long, long hours on duty only to return home worn out but sleepless. Night after night, I tossed about on my bed, seeing again and again no terrible sights I had witnessed.

In this, I was not alone. There were dozens of other police officers whose lives Jack the Ripper had made scarcely worth living. My food sickened me. The sight of a butcher shop nauseated me. All this had to be hidden from the womenfolk. It would never have done to let them see you were worried. My aim always was to minimize the crimes.

On their awfulness, I kept silent. The women were frightened enough without listening to such ghastly tales as I could have given. 1888, the year the Ripper unleashed hell on Whitechapel, was also peak optography time in the public imagination. With the city of London in terror and the police frantic to make an arrest, Inspector Dew was desperate to develop a lead.

Perhaps an optogram might be the answer. So what that it had been loudly debunked by Dr. Ayers. What harm could there be in at least giving it a try? Right. Since by this point, optography had left the dissection of eyeballs behind in favor of photographing them instead, there'd be no need for a fancy laboratory, just a camera. I have told you about the eyes of Marie Kelly, wide open and staring in death to someone. Those eyes suggested a possible clue.

There was at the time a widespread superstition that the retina of a murdered person's eyes would, if photographed, give a picture of the last person upon whom the victim looked. I did not for a moment think that the police ever seriously expected the photograph of a murderer to materialize, but it was decided to try the experiment.

Several photographs of the eyes were taken by expert photographers with the latest type cameras. It was already a pretty wild lead to suggest that the retina of the eye might retain an image of its last sight before death. Pretty crazy to try to pry the retina out of a dissected eye and then soak it in chemicals like a film. But that plan actually sounds reasonable when you compare it to, let's just take a photograph of the corpse's eyeball, because that might also reveal the very last thing the victim ever saw. Inspector Dew was desperate to solve the case, but you heard the man.

He didn't expect any kind of legitimate evidence to come of the photography. The result was negative, but the very fact that this forlorn hope was tried shows that the police, in their eagerness to catch the murderer, were ready to follow any clue and to adopt any suggestion, even at the risk of being made to look absurd.

Even a veteran police officer as seasoned and respected as Walter Dew couldn't persuade people that optography had no value as a forensic tool. This was the Victorian era, and the Victorians were as fascinated by photography as they were by the supernatural ghosts and spirits, telepathic communication, seances, all with the goal of communicating with the dead.

It took an American named William Mumler to bring photography and the realm of the dead together into one craze that swept post-Civil War America and Victorian London, spirit photography. Mumler was a professional jewelry engraver and amateur photographer who found his true calling as a charlatan. It all began with a photograph Mumler published in 1862.

Boston's now legendary, fiery, abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, was all over the story. Mumler, trying some new chemicals and amusing himself by taking a picture of himself, which, when produced to his great astonishment and wonder, there was on the plate not alone a picture of himself as he had supposed, but also a picture of a young woman sitting in a chair that stood by his side.

While looking upon the strange phenomenon, the picture of two persons upon the plate instead of one, the thought and conviction flashed upon his mind. This is the picture of a spirit. And in it, he recognized the likeness of his deceased cousin. When he recognized an opportunity to make bank, Mumler left his engraving business and launched himself into his new career as a spirit photographic medium.

He set up shop in Boston and New York and soon had more customers than he could handle. America, after the Civil War, was a country in deep mourning. The dead numbered somewhere between 620,000 and 700,000 souls. The grieving were desperate for comfort. And what could be more comforting than proof that the lost loved one was ever nearby, invisible in this world, but captured by the eye of the camera lens?

A widow lady who was accompanied to the rooms by her mother and a daughter sat for her picture and that of a spirit also. When it was finished, the daughter first saw it and instantly exclaimed, bursting into tears. Why, mother, this is father. The grandmother looked at it and exclaimed, Yes, this is my daughter's husband.

And the mother looked and said, This is my husband. All were weeping at the truthful likeness of a spirit. Were there doubters? Absolutely. Including one of the most prominent photographers in Boston, Mr. Luther H. Hale. Mr. Hale has, by request, imitated the spirit photographs. But he says he can only imitate them using two negatives and printing twice.

He says he cannot see how they can be produced on the card with only one negative, which is the case with all of Mr. Mumler's spirit pictures. A physician named Ammon Brown sat for Mumler's spirit camera. On one picture, Dr. Brown had the likeness of a beautiful female spirit. On another, he had the picture of two women and one man beside his own.

Dr. Brown, being a scientist himself, couldn't help but be curious about how it all worked. He asked Mumler if he might be allowed to observe the photographer's process. Brown has examined it carefully and patiently, and is fully satisfied that there is no deception in it. If these pictures claim to be the pictures of spirits, be a swindle or a sleight of hand deception, the operation beats the ingenuity of all the necromancers and prestidigitators of the present and the past.

Dude, people back then really knew how to put a sentence together. Anyway, Dr. Brown declared that he had been present at the creation of 20 spirit pictures, said he'd watched the entire process from beginning to end. I have even prepared the plates with my own hands. I am fully satisfied that the pictures are what they are claimed to be.

Real photographs of real spirits. Mumler's most famous portrait subject happened to be the most famous grieving widow in America at the time, Mary Todd Lincoln. In Mumler's photograph, Mary Todd sits facing the camera, shrouded in black widow's weeds, standing behind her, large hands resting gently on her shoulders, is the ghostly image of her deceased husband.

That unmistakable lankiness of figure, the distinctive cragginess of face, faint and ghostly and undeniably Abraham Lincoln, the recently assassinated 16th president of the United States. Mumler raked in money and piled up accolades, but the party ended in 1869 when he was charged with fraud. One of Mumler's loudest critics was none other than P.T. Barnum, who testified against him in court.

Listen, when even P.T. Barnum finds your fraud disgusting and says you've crossed the line. Mumler exploits the sorrow of the grieving, Barnum declared. It's appalling and it needs to stop. It was proven in court that Mumler's trade secret was his use and reuse of improperly cleaned photographic plates. That was it. He was found guilty of perpetuating fraud.

Mumler was forced to abandon his work with the spirit world and earn his living on plain old earthly photography instead. And P.T. Barnum, having done his civic duty, returned to selling the public tickets to see his wild men of Borneo and Jojo, the dog face boy. You just know Mumler had to be furious at being brought down by one of the most famous hucksters to ever live.

Weirdly, Mumler's disgrace hardly even mattered in the world of spirit photography. Just three years later, photographer Frederick Hudson was selling spirit pictures in London. And three years after that, in 1875, a French spirit photographer named Édouard Buguet was arrested and charged with fraud. Buguet confessed and his method was pretty creepy.

He used dolls to simulate ghosts and spirits, dolls he wrapped in gauze and then glued photographs of faces onto their little china heads. OK, thanks for that nightmarish image. Buguet's confession was published all over the world in both French and English, and that was probably the end of spirit photography. Right? Right?

Wrong. As former witness for the prosecution, P.T. Barnum is credited with saying there's a sucker born every minute. People wanted the spirit world to be real so desperately that they were willing to overlook just about anything if it meant that the ghosts of their lost loved ones might actually be glimpsed, which is how in 1891, photographer Sybil Corbet managed to pull off what became the most famous stunt in spirit pictures.

She published a photo of the library at Combermere Abbey in Cheshire, England, and it's about what you'd expect for the times. Heavy wooden table with ornately carved feet, pair of equally overwrought chairs, a profusion of knickknacks and candlesticks and lamps and the fronds of large ferns. Very much your Victorian maximalism.

But look, hovering in that throne like chair is the ghostly upper torso of a finely dressed gentleman. Uproar! Clearly Corbet had captured the image of Lord Combermere himself, who was, wait for it, being lowered into the grave at the very moment the photograph was taken. Proof! Proof at last! Or not, because Corbet had made the image in the library using a one hour exposure.

A servant, not realizing what was afoot, wandered briefly into the frame just long enough to accidentally play the part of the spirit of Lord Combermere. And that still wasn't enough to kill the craze because, you know, people. So this is the part where even knowing that spirit photography was a hoax and optography not much better, a few crimes still managed to be solved using the idea that the lens, human or machine, could somehow pierce the veil, dividing this world from the next.

Fritz Angerstein, that's where this story began. Angerstein slaughtered eight people over the course of one terrible night that began on November 30th and ended on December 1st, 1924, in the village of Hager in Germany. Angerstein was found by the police lying wounded on the threshold of his house, which was on fire. Inside were found no fewer than eight bodies.

Those were the owner's wife, her mother, her sister, two clerks, two gardeners and a maidservant. All had been killed with axes and a hunting knife. Frau Angerstein, having been dragged from a sick bed, a little girl of five is missing. Was Fritz Angerstein a family annihilator, or as the neighbors described him, a quiet and modest man, model husband, father, Those of us whose partners are wacky wildcards need to take a moment to be grateful for that, since no one in the history of ever has described a mass murderer as a wacky wildcard.

You can keep your quiet model citizen, thank you very much. Anyway, Angerstein now lies in a local hospital in a state of delirium, real or assumed. It was while he was raving about the frightful doings of the robber band of whose alleged invasion of his home, he is the sole witness that Angerstein's prints were taken.

Fingerprints that were an exact match to those lifted from the murder weapons, an axe and a dagger. Angerstein's wounds, once treated in hospital, turned out to be not just minor, but self-inflicted, according to police. It was also immediately clear to police that Angerstein was in some kind of financial trouble, which didn't necessarily qualify as a motive for the murders.

But it was evidence that all was not as it seemed in Fritz Angerstein's tidy and prosperous life. And equally troubling was Angerstein's behavior on the day of December 1st, 1924. Angerstein sauntered down into the village and posted letters, also buying a box of chocolates for his wife, whose illness he discussed with tears in his eyes.

While that charming scene was playing out, Angerstein's wife was lying on her blood soaked mattress, rigor mortis stiffening her limbs. She'd been stabbed 18 times. Angerstein talked with a half a dozen acquaintances. To all of them, he voiced the premonition that something was wrong at his home and his anxiety was so pronounced that the village constable offered to accompany him back to the villa.

This service, Angerstein emphatically declined. He bet he did. Angerstein's plans for his homecoming included a barrel of kerosene and a match, not an inquisitive constable. He poured kerosene over the bodies in furniture and set the house ablaze. Then he went out into the yard and stabbed himself twice in the side and began yelling for help.

Fritz Angerstein made the kind of unforced errors that would have the whole team at Dateline to shake in their heads. There was the lock strongbox packed with money, an odd thing for that gang of bandits to have left behind. Forensic and medical tools were definitely less sophisticated in the 1920s than they are today, but not so primitive that law enforcement couldn't establish time of death, which was long before six o'clock in the evening.

On December 1st, and Angerstein insisted that was the time the bandits assault and the size of that marauding crowd, 20 bandits. That's a whole lot of bandits to be prowling around a village of maybe a thousand people. Not one of Angerstein's neighbors reported seeing even a single unknown individual in the neighborhood.

Not one person could be found to even loosely corroborate Angerstein's story. And then there was this. It was ascertained that Angerstein was not the real owner of the quarry he operated and that he had misappropriated money entrusted to him by the company by which he was employed. Whether the slayer expected to inherit money from his mother-in-law and this expectation was the motive for this dreadful massacre or whether the man is insane are questions now being probed by the authorities.

How does this make sense as a motive for slaughtering eight human beings? But then what motive could explain that kind of violence? With Angerstein's neighbors insisting that the man was the model citizen, devoted husband and pious churchgoer, it was suggested that, well, maybe the man was the victim of a sudden burst of homicidal mania.

Police officials were sent from Berlin to Haiger, and thanks to the abundance of evidence at the scene, including those fingerprints, Angerstein was arrested and charged with embezzlement and eight counts of murder. Angerstein vigorously denied stealing money from his employers, but he had no explanation for the rest of it.

His fingerprints on the murder weapons, the fact that no money was stolen by the alleged bandit gang, the bloodstains on his clothing that didn't line up with his own injuries. With every statement he gave police, he contradicted himself. Even the announcement by famous German chemist Dr. Georg Popp that a microscopic examination of bloody fingerprints found on the axe and dagger was an exact match for Angerstein's own blood didn't push the man into a confession.

But another kind of science did a pseudoscience optography. December 7th, 1924. The theory that a murder victim's eye may sometimes hold the image of the slayer received scientific confirmation from Professor Doehne of Cologne University tonight. The professor photographed the retina of two of the victims of Fritz Angerstein, wealthy Haiger merchant who killed eight persons the other day, all members of his family or employees.

You'd think by 1924, the whole idea of this would have been completely debunked because, you know, it had. But what are the odds that a businessman living in a small German village would know that in the days before the Internet, people just didn't have access to news and information like we do now. But no matter what else is true, you should never, ever, ever bet against human gullibility.

And in this case, the murderer himself was the most gullible of all. The retina of one yielded the picture of Angerstein's face. The other showed the same face contorted with rage and the blade of the axe with which the murders were committed. It's a good thing I did it. I killed them all. I confess. And this is how the whole goofy idea of the retina capturing the last image a person sees before death actually managed to bring one murder to justice.

It's the only case in the history of the law where an optogram had any value at all. Your retina might be useless as a crime solving tool, but listen, it's such an amazing thing. It works like the tiniest computer processing all the visual information that hits those rods and cones before transmitting it to the rest of your brain.

I mean, think about what's really happening here. That layer of cells lining the back of your eyeball, constantly converting light into nerve signals. Come on, that is wow. And the retina has so many different kinds of cells all working together. Scientists are learning that some of those cell types can be traced back more than 400 million years to the one common ancestor shared by all of Earth's vertebrates.

Think about that. Pretty amazing stuff. Fish, reptiles, birds, mammals, you all sharing this most miraculous of senses. And humans have always believed that the eyes hold special, even mystical power. The ancient Egyptians worshipped a god they called Horus, who took the form of a falcon. The right eye of Horus was the sun, a symbol of power.

The left eye was the moon, representing healing. The eye of Horus has been a powerful symbol of protection for millennia, painted on coffins and papyrus, crafted into amulets and other jewelry. And then there's the evil eye. People have been trying to protect themselves from its malevolent power for more than 5000 years.

The ancient Greeks and ancient Indians believed that vision was the result of a beam of light flowing from the human eye and interacting with objects in the world. And it's not that far a leap to imagine that the eye had the power to also transmit energy, harmful energy. Belief in the evil eye may date all the way back to Mesopotamia, but it's still very much alive and well today.

The symbol is everywhere, from jewelry and tattoos to posters and toss pillows. Old Celtic lore is full of tales of the second sight, the ability to see into the future. It was thought to be as much a curse as it was a gift. With the Dark Ages came a whole new superstition about eyes and eye color. Light green or blue eyes might be highly desirable today, but in medieval times, having that eye color could get you branded as a witch.

Even now, a simple twitch of the eye can mean good or bad fortune, depending on what culture you grew up in and which eye is twitching. And have you ever heard that a single eyelash falling out means that someone is thinking about you? Go ahead and grab that fallen lash, close your eyes and make a wish, and then blow on the lash.

You never know, right? The human eye is a miraculous and powerful thing, but it's not a camera. The retina is an absolute marvel, but it's not a piece of film. Spirit photography, as the Victorians practiced it, was a hoax. But plenty of people have claimed to capture something inexplicable on film. Ghost photos. They're a little bit like UFO sightings.

The majority have a perfectly natural explanation. Some are deliberate hoaxes, and a few, a small percentage to be sure, but still significant, simply can't be explained. There's just something there, something unknown. And at least for now, unknowable. Murderer Fritz Angerstein might ultimately have confessed without being told that his victim's eyes had captured his monstrous crime.

We'll never be certain. But let's join him now in his cell at the Limburg Underlawn Prison, where he sits alone and ponders his fate. He had thought he might kill himself that December afternoon in 1924 with the same dagger that he used to slash and carve and hack the eight people whose bodies were strewn throughout his home.

But Angerstein was as much a coward as he was a killer and in the end spared himself in the hopes of selling a lie. Little did he know that it was another lie, the lie of the octogram that would bring him down. In July 1925, Angerstein was found guilty and sentenced to death, not once, but eight times, eight death sentences, one for each of his victims.

He had four months to sit in that cell awaiting the call of the executioner. Who knows what filled his thoughts in the days that remained to him? Was he tormented by what he had done? Was he wracked by nightmares of the blood and screams by the memory of his victim's eyes, first wide with terror and then slowly clouding in death?

Angerstein was led from his cell on the morning of November 17th, 1925, and beheaded by the Royal Prussian executioner Franz Friedrich Carl Gröpler. Gröpler, the most famous executioner in all of Germany, only needed the one drop of the blade to take Angerstein's life. The remaining seven were strictly symbolic. The killer died on his knees, hooded, his eyes, if they were the windows to his soul, taking in nothing but darkness, his eyes capturing only an infinite, impenetrable night.

Next time on True Weird Stuff, you've heard of the Freemasons. It's one of the oldest organizations in the whole world, a fraternal society, just oozing rituals and secrets and mysteries. There's one specific group of people who are forbidden to join a band that's been in place for centuries. Some of these people rebelled and they formed their own secret society.

And as their mascot, they chose a tiny dog with a smushed in face. You are invited to the secret order of the pug on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Kary "Doc" Bowser and Don Morgan. Sherry, yet again, in another True Weird Stuff episode, a science fair project of mine has come to four.

When I was in eighth grade, I won first place in a science fair with with a thing about photography, and it sort of launched me into a hobby for a period of time. And to the point that before we had digital photography, you had to have your own darkroom. So I had my own darkroom at home. And so when I was in high school, I was the photo editor of the yearbook and the school newspaper.

So a lot of the pictures that were in the yearbook were pictures that I've taken. And my and my joke was, would you like to come into my darkroom and see what develops? Oh, my God. It's awful. You know, what's interesting about this, though, on the face of it, you'd say, you know, this the idea that whatever images on your eyeball last would stay.

Because when you think about stuff that happens with light, sometimes if it's really bright light that stays for a while. So you can see where the theory came from. Oh, totally. And, you know, if you think about like what happens when a person dies, everything is kind of frozen in time. The expression on their face, everything.

And, you know, then what people didn't really understand, you know, in detail, the process of decomposition and rigor mortis and all that. So it seemed like a reasonable idea that the retina would capture that image. And when you consider that photography was so new and so magical and it made sense to people like I hate when people make fun of the olden days because they had they were working with what they knew.

And, you know, kind of like, yeah, the process of photography did seem a little bit like human vision. I think that was the 1840s when photography first came around. And what they would do is and this was true, especially during the Civil War. If you see a lot of the Civil War pictures that Matthew Brady did, they had a plate.

So they had the camera and then they had a plate and whatever image they had, the plate, it would be captured on the plate. But they had to in order to get the light and everything, they had to keep the aperture on the camera open for a long period of time, which is why those Civil War pictures. A lot of times what they did is they posed the bodies, they pose them.

And there's very obvious tells as to the fact that that happened. What was interesting was after the war, they took a lot of those plates and they built greenhouses with them. And we lost those plates and those images forever. Yet people didn't people didn't understand like we don't necessarily I think the average person is, you know, so consumed with just living their life that you never stop to think, oh, I'm living in history.

I'm experiencing and witnessing things and maybe have the opportunity to curate things for the people of the future. But that plate, that idea of having long exposures on specially treated glass plates, that technology was what made spirit photography possible, because Mumler, what he was doing was he just was not thoroughly cleaning plates.

And, you know, so even like Dr. Brown, who said, I personally witnessed and there was no trickery. You you didn't see the trickery. You saw him put a single plate in the camera and capture an image of a living person with a spirit. You didn't see him not cleaning the plate or preparing the plate prior to your arrival.

Right. So that the technology of the day, and that's one of the great things about human beings, as our technology evolves, so do our methods of fraud, trickery and hoaxing. They evolve with our technology. So photography was new and the vibe, the mood was definitely contemplative and and people were very much focused on what happens after you die.

Where are my lost loved ones? So there was the vibe. The moment was just right for something as crazy as optography. And one of the worst things in this story, and there's a lot of bad things. I mean, we have, you know, a family annihilator and for its anger sign. We have the German Reif who drowned his two little boys, whose freshly beheaded head was given to the laboratory at Heidelberg.

We have all those bunny rabbits that never did anything to anybody, just being tormented. And for what? Right. For basically like this crazy notion that you could in any way capture an image off of a retina. Although in the case of at least one of those rabbit experiments, it seems like they did. But in order to get that image, what those rabbits were subjected to was insane.

Like that rabbit was forced to look unblinking at the brightly illuminated window for hours and then, you know, had its eyes pulled out. Oh, my God, I can't even stand to think about it. So with that one flimsy shred of something, you know, an entire craze was born. And long after this was debunked, like they were still talking about it because news didn't travel very far or very fast.

How would you know any of this without the Internet or mass media? Think about that for a second. How possible it was to be blissfully unaware of all sorts of things back in the day. And as for the police working on the Jack the Ripper case, I mean, they were desperate. They were they would have followed any lead. You heard Inspector do.

He wrote a pretty famous if you're into this sort of thing. So Inspector Do wrote a famous autobiography about his life in policing. And the Jack the Ripper case is one of many cases that he talks about. And it's a real it's a real look at police work in in the Victorian era. And what's interesting is they didn't have the same techniques and technologies we have now.

But good police work is good police work, right? That's what makes the Sherlock Holmes novel so fascinating, that deductive reasoning and that, you know, that following a piece of evidence or a clue down as far as it'll lead you. So Inspector Do's book is really good. So for as good as the book is and as great as the story is of using optograms to try to find Jack the Ripper, you heard what Inspector Do said.

He didn't believe it. They were just desperate. Yeah, so desperate. This business of spirit photography is is fascinating and it has fascinated people for a long time. And if I'm not mistaken, they have done exhibits of this bogus photography. That from this era, because this was something that I was indeed familiar with, because you can know that these image that this was this was all manufactured.

But still, the images are still haunting when you see them and the way that this was put together. So even if you know that, even if you know it's a hoax, it still looks haunting. And I totally understand why people were touched by this, because it does kind of send chills up your spine a little bit. The photographs that you're describing, a lot of them are really beautiful.

I mean, there are some famous hoax photographs. There's the one of the little girls with the fairies that has been debunked. Whether those fairies are real or not, we know they're not. Those those images are haunting and beautiful and just evocative. But but what Mumler was doing and I have to tell you, when P.T. Barnum blows the whistle on you, you don't know you're scamming.

He was takes a scammer to know a scammer, right? Buddy, I mean, P.T. Barnum shows up. You'd be surprised at how many times in ways the name P.T. Barnum shows up in history and in doings in the United States during his lifetime. He was a very, very energetic and busy person. But when P.T. Barnum is like, son, you're bullshit.

You're done. You have got to know you're done because he didn't know what he was. He didn't know what he was looking at. Go ahead. And he was just he was just picking people's he was picking the pockets of the grieving. And and it worked. He really, really enriched himself. I hope he invested the money well, because he kind of disappears off the face of the earth after they force him to shut down.

Yeah, he probably ended up doing infomercials in the middle of the night. So can we talk about this Angerstein guy? Oh, my God, Fritz. So so the thing that's interesting about him is it is it's always it's true today. The serial killer, he was kind of a quiet guy, kept to himself. I'm always reminded of the George Carlo line.

He goes, if I go into a bar and some noisy guy has a machete and he's banging it on the bar, I'm not looking for the quiet ones. I'm looking for that guy. You know, do you know what this reminds me of? And you to think about a current case that involved murder and a guy going to prison where he embezzled money from his company and the clients and then murdered members of his family and then on top of that, tried to fake injuries for himself.

This is Alex Murdoch, that guy that was down in South Carolina that killed him. When I went and I said, hey, Alex, you should have watched what happened with Angerstein because you weren't going to get away with it. They they it's amazing to me. I mean, I'm sure that in the course of time, plenty of people have done this and have managed somehow to either skate on it or disappear.

We had an episode, a true or it's not this episode while back where there was an entire family slaughtered on a farm and they never really solved it. Remember in Germany as it happened? Yes. So, you know, you there was a time when you you could do this sort of thing and get away with it. But Fritz made he made really bad, like, oh, no, you did not mistakes.

And one of the things that he did that you see over and over again with these guys, they want to give themselves some injuries so that their story is convincing. But I don't know what kind of person you have to be to really take a knife to yourself and do the kind of damage that needs to be done. But people have done this sort of thing.

We see it a lot in in the world of true crime. You see, like the family has been hacked to smithereens and dad's got kind of a paper cut on his left forearm. Yeah, well, it it takes something to really like to do to do to yourself what you would have to do to yourself in order to be even plausible that you were also attacked, because what are the odds?

Eight people died for it and you alone survived mostly unscathed. Eight people died and they didn't just they were they were butchered. They were butch. They were. I left a lot of those specific details out because it's gruesome. But here's the thing. The man said 20 bandits came and savagely attacked the people in this house and yet no money or valuables were stolen.

I mean, how obvious is that as a mistake? Right. If your story is this was a robbery, why weren't you robbed? And and in all of this, you alone escaped with like a nick or a paper, the equivalent of a paper cut. And everyone else was hacked to the point of being unrecognizable. They didn't have Dateline back then. He didn't have a blueprint.

Yeah. Like he didn't. Dateline has taught a lot of us like, oh, it's just not worth it. Don't even try. Right. You're not going to do it. The question that I had at the at the end of this episode is even more zoomed out to guillotine. It sure did seem like a fast and efficient and relatively clean manner of execution.

And it's gone now. Like when you think about like lethal injection, there's some horror stories about lethal injection. Oh, yeah. And you and I have recently and you and I both know that a hanging is a complicated little bit of math and physics. And when you get it wrong, that's brutal. Yeah. My husband was telling me that they recently had they're bringing back execution by firing squad in a couple of places in the United States.

And the most recent one, all of the sharpshooters missed. So which I know when he told me that, I was like, wait, what? Even I can hit a shooting target. What are you talking about? They all missed. And that seems like a pretty violent and aggressive way to go. Now, I'm not suggesting that being beheaded is a good time, but doesn't it seem swift, clean and efficient?

Yes. But here is the reason why they why guillotine was not used. People don't have the stomach for the blood. And when you have hanging, you have electrocution, when you have lethal injection, those there's it's bloodless. So I think that's why, even though you would think this is the most effective way to do it, why those, you know, I mean, it's why those weren't used fast.

And you would think I'm not a capital punishment person. I'm just too soft. But you would think that would at least be a clean and perhaps swift and merciful way. So I did a little bit of digging. Everybody associates the guillotine with France and the French Revolution. Right. Although it was clearly used in other countries, including Germany.

Right. Because Erhard Reif was executed by guillotine. So between 1965 and 1977, there were eight people executed by guillotine in France. And the last one was 1977. And then in the fall of 1981, they outlawed it for good. But that's pretty recent. Like in your lifetime, people were being beheaded by the guillotine, which is something to think about, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. It's it is very gruesome to think that the doctor was waiting, going, hey, can I have the head when you're done? Can I have the head? And then we can we can put the chemicals. And I can tell you that you did have three chemicals when you made a print. So you would burn the negative image into the print paper and then you would put it in developer for a certain period of time.

And then you put it in something called a stop bath, which is where you would, you know, stop the development and then you would put it in the fixer. And that was the last very last thing that you would put that that picture. Now, now imagine doing that with a piece of rabbit or human eyeball, all of those same steps.

I can't. No, no, I can't imagine that anybody would do that. My Kevin, my husband was like, woman, y'all do. Y'all do a lot of murder. And I was like, well, that's because this podcast is not called My Little Pony. Like it's true or fun with potatoes like this. You know, when we're talking about like this episode is really about optography and spirit photography.

But both of those things involve the dead spirit photography. We're looking for ghosts and optography. We're trying to catch murderers. And, you know, it's it's really hard to escape human violence. I mean, it's kind of it's a part of human history. I mean, it's absolutely a part of human history, both both of the violence of the, you know, the criminals and then the punishment that's meted out afterwards.

I mean, it is it's all violent. And and do not do not think for one second that I am like being a complete 100 percent skeptic on the ghost photography or all of that, because I think that there are there are things that we have captured that we can't explain. I mean, I had a personal experience. It's so silly. Right.

So when my youngest was younger, we had a dance national dance competition over the Fourth of July in Charleston, South Carolina, which is a pretty haunted and fabulous, fabulously haunted old city with some pretty intense history. Right. For funsies, the kids wanted to go on, you know, let's can we do a ghost tour? Oh, sure. Yeah, we can do a ghost tour.

So we went on a ghost tour of the old historic city jail. And, you know, it was that I enjoyed the history part of it. I love all the stories and being inside the old building and imagining what it would be like to live out your days, you know, in this damp cell with bugs and spiders and very little daylight. And you were allowed to take photos, just no flash photography.

So I took a couple of photos and in one of them is an enormous blue orb that looks it it looks so three dimensional. It looks like there was somehow a balloon in the room. And I'm like, would you look at this? And of course, my husband, who was like, that's just a speck of dust on your legs. OK, well, I've had this iPhone since they were invented and I've never before or since taken a photo that had a weird blue like glowing from within freaking orb in a haunted old city jail.

But, you know, maybe it's nothing. So I do believe that the camera can because it's capturing light, it's capturing light, right? And not everything in the light spectrum is visible to the human eye, like your dog and cat can see things you can't. Yeah. So why why why shouldn't the camera be able to capture some stuff that your particular set of rods and cones can't?

I don't know. So I'm not debunking that. I think there's I think a lot is possible. I think we just know that open to it. Yeah. Yeah. We just know that in this story, Mumler was a complete fraud, just a complete fraud. And even, you know, when they told Fritz Angerstein that they had taken photographs of his two of his victims eyes and they could see him in it, they didn't really have that.

They didn't really do that. They just you know, you've watched Dateline. They slid the cup of shitty coffee across the desk and just lied. Yeah. And that provoked a full confession, which in that case, you have to say, oh, optograms are good. They did the job. We have your DNA. We have your image on their eyeballs. And he confessed.

Yeah. I mean, they had him dead to rights. They had his fingerprints. You know, they they had him. But isn't it so much easier if the killer would just confess and we don't have to drag it through a circus of a trial? Right. And so that that's how an optogram convicted a murderer. And I'm always unclear about our cops allowed to do that or they just allowed to lie like that.

But it seems like there's a there's a gray area there where they can sort of just tell you some stuff. Right. Yeah. Not your impression. Yeah, there is a gray area there. And the only problem is you get people that are like, well, when can I go home? And they'll give you a false confession just because they're they're tired, they're worn down, you know, that sort of thing.

So I I suppose you can do some of those kinds of things. But it does it, you know, it's it's it's a weird line. It really it's black ice. Yeah. You've got to really navigate that carefully. And I think the laws now are such that police and prosecutors really have to stay buttoned up because defense can get that kind of evidence thrown out of court.

But in the case of Fritz, I mean, they had him there. They're in there in the interrogation room. Right. They brought down these specialists. So Hager's just a little tiny community, like a little village. And they brought down police and detectives from Berlin. Now is the big time. And these these guys are like, you know, we have days of making you talk.

We have your fingerprints. It's your blood. Like we we know that you did it. And we have the images of you captured in the victim's eyes. Right. And so. You know, justice was done. I think it's interesting that as recently as 100 years ago, people were still buying that. It's really scary, isn't it? Yeah. It's just really scary.

You're talking about. Go ahead. Little has changed how little we've grown. You were talking about the eyes transmitting energy. My mother's could do that in church. She could transmit all kinds of energy. Oh, I believe that church. No trouble. If you had made any noise or anything else. Yes. My mother had that possibility.

The other thing I want to ask you is Dr. Georg Popp. Hey, had you thought about dermatology? I mean, can you imagine how popular he would have been? Can you imagine how you would get Dr. Popp? What do you say? You're going to see Dr. Johns, Dr. Watson or Dr. Popp. Oh, I'm going to Dr. Popp. He's got he's got the name. There there are just there are so many aspects of this story that you go, oh, I don't think I could do that.

I couldn't work in the bunny eyeball slaughtering lab at the University of Heidelberg. I just could not. I could not do that. And to be like a superstar celebrity executioner. Can you even imagine what that life was like? You know, what are the groupies called? I wonder. I mean, we think of like, oh, we you know, we don't know the name of the person who is, you know, putting the chemicals in the lethal injection or pulling the switch for the electric chair like that's shielded.

This guy, this guy was getting the best tables at restaurants because he was the executioner to the stars. Like there's a lot. And this wasn't that long ago. There's just a lot in here. No, it really wasn't all that long ago. And poor Mary Todd Lincoln, they did this to her. You know, if you know anything about poor Mary Todd Lincoln, she was not the most stable of people to begin with.

And then then she had the trauma of her husband being assassinated and they lost a young son, Willie, Willie. Was it Willie? Wasn't it Willie? Yeah, I think it was Willie, wasn't it? I thought it was Tad, but I'm doing this off the top of my head, so I haven't done any research on that. So anyhow, it's it's really sad that they took advantage of her in this way to somebody famous, you know, and I guess you're thinking they're using that as so, you know, should I should I get this spirit photography?

Well, you know, I just did it for the for the president's first lady, for the first lady, for the former first lady. And she saw her husband on it. And you're going, oh, wow, then this must be legit, you know. When you when you add that, so they lost their son and then President Lincoln was assassinated and and then his body was sent on tour.

We covered that in a different episode. Oh, yes. His body was sent on tour where it became the stuff of absolute nightmares. And they kept having to fumigate it and put powder on him. I mean, it was terrible. It was abuse of a corpse. It was a disgrace. And Mary Todd is getting her picture taken with her husband's ghost, like how the woman and the woman, to your point, she was not well, she was how she didn't completely lose it.

I don't know. The way that we take people who are in the public eye and strip them of their humanity. Is something, isn't it? Yes, it's sickening is what it is. But guess what? It's still going on. We have not evolved in this way. We are no better than we were one hundred, one hundred and fifty years ago. And and in some ways we the pattern, the human pattern is a couple of steps forward, a couple of few steps backward, a little bit forward, a little bit backward. And and in this way we make progress.

But it's in such fits and starts. And we're in a period of regression right now. I will tell you only tangentially connected, but it's interesting. So I don't know what we we had finished the Pee Wee Herman documentary. And I don't know whether like somebody put their paw on the remote or whatever. But suddenly it's season one, episode one of the TV show All in the Family, which I had never I'd never seen season one, episode one.

I've only ever seen All in the Family and reruns. It was on TV at a time when I lived without TV as a kid without television. And it wouldn't have appealed to me anyway. It was such a grown up show. Anyway, here's season one, episode one. It's the very first All in the Family. And it could have been filmed today. The things that Meathead and Archie were arguing about, it was absolutely like ripped from the headlines.

We have gone so far backward. I don't even know that most of us realize how far backward we have gone so fast. Socially, I mean, culturally. Well, we we keep on going faster and faster with technology, but we don't seem to be evolving as people. Yeah, we're technology's faster than we are. We're losing that race. And there were things I mean, there were things in the episode that were like you wouldn't see today, like, you know, maybe you remember that TV show with fondness.

You know, oh, he called Edith, his wife, Dingbat or whatever. But it was mean spirited. It wasn't an affectionate Dingbat. Like he was just stop talking, you Dingbat. I mean, it was nasty and it was unpleasant. But I could see watching that episode, I could see that I could see what the writers and the creators of the show were doing.

It was absolute social, biting social commentary. It was just kind of depressing to realize that we're still here. By the way, I've got the 411 on Lincoln's children. You're right. Willie died. Willie died as a child. Typhoid fever. Edward died as a child as well. Tad died at the age of 18. And the only one of his children that lived into adulthood till 1926 was Robert.

Robert Lincoln, who was saved on a train platform when he fell into the tracks by a guy named Edwin Booth, whose brother was John Wilkes Booth. Boy, that is some, that is some kind of interwoven destiny, isn't it? It sounds like it's not true, but it is. It sounds like, oh, that's an urban legend. No, that absolutely did happen.

Now, now imagine that you're Mary Todd Lincoln and imagine, imagine you've lost your children and then your husband in this violent way. And your country is torn apart. What are we doing taking ghost pictures and exploiting that woman like that? What the hell is wrong with Edward Mumbler that he would anyway, just greed, just want to get paid?

As we say, special place in hell. So there you go. That's the story of optography and optograms. And it's it's really a shame that the few surviving, the few optograms that they were able to create got lost somehow. But, you know, then again, people back then didn't think that stuff was worth preserving. It's a wonder that we have anything sometimes looks like people were like, oh, it's just the original Declaration of Independence.

Let's put that in the outhouse and use it. People were just like, oh, whatever, whatever, whatever. So next week on True Weird Stuff, I have a absolute lifelong obsessive fascination with the Freemasons. Absolute obsession. Would not even know where to begin to do a Freemasons episode. Never even dreamed of going deep into the world of Freemasonry because it's so mysterious.

And I think that I've known people, they're all men, I've known people over the course of my life that were in Masonic lodges and they seem to be doing like an awful lot of good. And they wouldn't tell me any of their secrets or show me any of their secret handshakes or whatever. So I'm fascinated by it. And it turns out and you already know this, Max, because you were brought up in an intensely Catholic family.

If you're Catholic, you're not allowed to be a Freemason. Right. And it's not the Freemasons that tell you that. It's the church. The Vatican has forbidden Catholics from becoming Freemasons since the Middle Ages, when Freemasonry began. And it really did begin as a guild of stonemasons in the medieval period. And the Catholic Church just thought that the Masons were not, they were not Catholic in the way that the church wanted them to be.

The Freemasons had a different idea about God, who they called the great architect, a different idea about what it meant to be a man of faith. And the Catholic Church back in the day was like, that's going to be a no from us. And they were so adamant about Catholics not becoming Masons that one of the popes issued what they call a papal bull, which is basically a big proclamation telling you absolutely no way.

So not only were Catholics not allowed to be Freemasons, but women, of course, were not allowed to be anything. And so an archbishop in Germany, and what you have to love about this is that it was a Catholic archbishop in Germany was like, Oh, Holy Father, is that right? We can't be Freemasons. Well, then maybe we need to start our own secret society that Catholics can join, only Catholics.

And you know what? While we're doing it, let's let women in. We think about that. And let's choose as our symbol, a little dog that had only just come to Europe a couple hundred years earlier. And this little dog was the beloved pet of royalty, the pampered little smoochy head of the nobility in the aristocracy. And that dog was a pug.

And so the archbishop in Germany created the fraternal order of the pug. Sounds like you're making this up. And when you hear what was involved in becoming a pug, you're going to be convinced we're making it up because it's too good to be true. It's too good to be real. All rise for this meeting of the order of the pug on the next True Weird Stuff.

And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff, hit our website, True Weird Stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it.

And bonus content, everything True Weird is waiting for you at True Weird Stuff dot com and follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sutton. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

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