The Face In The Window - Windowpane Ghosts And Lightning Daguerreotypes

One of the most fortean of lightning phenomena is the “lightning daguerreotype,” where a face or figure, often recognised as a particular deceased person, is mysteriously etched upon a windowpane. Chris Woodyard traces some of the fenestral flaps of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

- Chris Woodyard

In 1871, something peculiar was happening in Sandusky, Ohio. Faces mystic, photographic portraits – began to appear on windows. They had a vague, shadowy quality, as if a ghost had pressed its face against the glass. Some windows had only one, others a dozen or more.

While it was the age of progress in industry and science, it was also the heyday of Spiritualism. All over America, people were earnestly receiving messages rapped out by the dead, and watching ghostly figures emerge from mediums’ cabinets. There was optimism among scientists and Spiritualists alike that soon the mysteries of the World Beyond would be revealed. It was into this fevered atmosphere that the miraculous images of Sandusky came.

OHIO’S FENESTRAL FLAP

Charles Fort in his book Wild Talents discusses historic tales of crosses and death’s heads appearing in 1872 on European windows during the Franco-Prussian War and mentions reports of faces from Massachusetts and Ohio. Fort suggested that the origin of these stories lay in the rise of spirit photography and wondered if the human imagination could affect a photographic plate. 

The daguerreotype photographic process was invented in 1839. It must be remembered that until about 1860, other than drawings and paintings, images printed on or preserved behind glass plates – ambro types and daguerreotypes – offered the only way to create portraits. Pictures on glass were etched, as it were, into the public consciousness.

The opening salvo in this fenestral flap came in January of 1871. An image appeared in a window in the third storey of the Lake House hotel in Sandusky.