Cooney's Commentary

Taking a break from the paper writing, I found a site with older images, some of them pre film. Of course, I focused on the ghost one. The way the site is built, I can’t provide a link to exactly what I am looking at, I think you’ll have to click the “Pre-Cinema” heading on the left nav bar, hopefully you’ll find a section with the title The Ghost in the Theatre: Pepper’s Ghost effect.

http://www.visual-media.be/

Anyway, this page describes how this Pepper fellow created a convincing visual effect that made it look like an apparition had appeared. Interestingly enough, the TV show the Mentalist actually just featured this contraption in one of its shows this year. A murder occurred in an old house and it was equipped with the apparatus to create this illusion. An image of a (live) person is projected upon a sheet of glass, but the glass is positioned in a way that you can see the reflection of the person, but you don’t notice the glass itself. The movie the Illuisionist used a similar gimick, but I don’t believe they ever showed how that effect was created… now we know!

This must have been a great scam to run in the 19th century, when folks were holding seances, etc. I bet Elkins would have a field day with this!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.