Ghosting Up Against the Sensitive Plate - A history of London Spirit Photography

Ghosting Up Against the Sensitive Plate is on at Abney Park Cemetery on Wednesday 21 October, from 19:00 to 20:45. It's a talk about Victorian London's obsession with photographing the dead, and it's held in the cemetery's chapel, so the setting does a fair bit of the heavy lifting.

The story starts in 1872, when British Spiritualism was on the rise. Back then, the collodion process used in early photography seemed to hold the key to ghost manifestation, and for the movement, it offered a potential upgrade from faith to science. The talk looks at how that worked in practice, and it also unpicks the deceptions of the UK's first spirit photographer, who was eventually unmasked in the 1870s by the Psychic and Spiritualistic societies themselves.

Abney Park is a fitting place for it. Charles Dickens once told a ghost story at the graveside of his friend William Hone, whose funeral he attended here in 1842. Edgar Allan Poe, who spent time as a schoolboy on neighbouring Church Street, is said to haunt the grounds. Daniel Defoe, credited with writing the first modern ghost story, lived within sight of the gates. And among the graves lies Georgiana Eagle, a clairvoyant medium who promoted herself as a spiritualist before the movement had properly begun. The talk is part of the 'Gates of the Abode' season, a series of talks and workshops on death, departure and the unseen.

It runs from 19:00 to 20:45 in the chapel, and a standard ticket is £16.