A man sits holding a violin against his heart, the bow resting on his lap. His hair is a little wild—just as you might expect from a musician—but his expression is all seriousness. It could be anyone's great-grandfather. The photograph was probably taken around 1900, and it's a classic example of the style of portraits done at the time. In fact, there is only one thing unusual about it—the ghost. Above the man's head and off to the left is a blurred oval of light. If you turn your head slightly to the side, you can see that the dark markings in the oval form a human face.

Think this sounds creepy? You should see it in person. This is just one example from a collection of "spirit photographs" that are on exhibit at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. Spirit photography began about 1860, when the camera was still a novelty and people were fascinated by its potential uses. It was theorized that, with regard to the spirit world, the camera could see and record what the human eye could not. Hundreds of these pictures were taken between 1860 and 1920—beautiful and ethereal pictures, in which spectral figures of varying clarity appear in close proximity to the subject. In one, a young man sitts in a chair with a shadowy female figure behind him. She is holding an anchor across his chest. In another, a middle-aged woman grimaces for the camera while the shape of a child attends her.

It's incredibly cool.

The notes at the exhibit were pretty coy about the methods used to produce the photographs. They didn't say the specters were real, and they didn't say they weren't. Some of the pictures are clearly just double exposed; some were probably done with long exposures. But with some of them, you just can't figure out how the photographer could have done it. And I don't think I would really want to know, any more than I would want to ask David Copperfield how he made the Statue of Liberty disappear (or how he got that great novel written about him, for that matter). It's more fun to look and imagine that the ghost above the musician's head is his lost sweetheart, dead from cholera, whose love was so powerful that she is bound to him forever. Or maybe he's the one who killed her, and she is haunting him as punishment, disturbing his sleep and driving him to madness.

Some of my favorites were taken by three relatively recent photographers: Francesca Woodman, Mike Kelley, and Ann Hamilton. Francesca Woodman took surreal, largely autobiographical pictures, the most striking of which is "Self-portrait (Talking to Vince)." In this photo, the photographer tilts her head back as a coil of what looks like liquid rises from her mouth and lifts toward the window. It's astonishing—a visual depiction of voice. Ann Hamilton took pictures by placing a canister of film with a tiny hole poked in it into her mouth. When she opened her mouth, the film would be exposed, resulting in eerie, smudged images of people's faces. Mike Kelley demonstrates the notion that poltergeists produce a type of ectoplasm that can only be captured by the photographer's lens. He photographed himself with streams of this ectoplasm coming from his nose, his eyes rolled back into his head as if he were having a seizure. These images are the most visually arresting in the entire exhibit, and the violence Kelley captures fits in with his theory that while ghosts come from outside the body, and are therefore cold, poltergeists are the result of conflicting energy within a person, and are therefore hot and kinetic.

Anyone within driving distance of Kansas City should beat a path to this exhibit before May 23rd, when it disappears back into the ether. Below are my own quick and dirty attempts at spirit photography. Enjoy!

"Self-Portrait with Ghostly Basketball Player"

"Marsh with Hidden Face"