P.T. Barnum took the stand against a Boston engraver who sold grieving mothers $10 photographs of their dead sons standing behind them.

William Mumler charged Civil-War widows ten dollars a portrait and threw in a smudgy son, husband, or brother thrown in over their shoulder for free. The Tombs courtroom got Barnum testifying for the prosecution and a former New York Supreme Court justice swearing the ghosts were real, before Justice Dowling discharged Mumler on insufficient evidence May 3, 1869. A country that had just buried 750,000 boys was not in the mood to hear that the blur behind grandma was a double-exposure trick. The Herald that spring nicknamed Dowling 'Judge Rhadamanthus' and could not decide whether to laugh.

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The Footnote runs on cold coffee, old newspapers, and an unreasonable amount of time spent in archives nobody else visits. None of which pays. If the show is worth a few dollars a month to you, this is where you say so — and you’ll be personally funding a man’s refusal to get a normal hobby. Either way, thank you for listening. — Wendell

Some stories don’t fit the main show. A fraud too small for a full episode. A second swindle by the same con artist. A tangent about a forger I couldn’t stop reading about at two in the morning. That’s what the subscription is — bonus episodes, footnotes to the footnotes, and the occasional longer dig into a story that deserved more room than I gave it. Five dollars a month. It pays for the archive subscriptions that make the whole thing possible. You’re not buying content. You’re keeping a small, strange operation running. — Wendell

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