I learned about the classic stage illusion “Pepper’s Ghost” from an episode of Mr. Wizard’s World on Nickelodeon, sometime in the late 1980s. Many of his household science experiments were small and easy to replicate at home but occasionally Mr. Wizard would show off something really spectacular to his adolescent co-stars. In this particular segment, he produced an apparition of a skeleton onto a chair in a room that definitely did not have a skeleton in it before he cut the lights. He explained how the reflection illusion worked, with a large angled sheet of glass between the empty chair and the opened door. It was amazing, but I knew there was no hope of trying to create that effect at home. Also, where was I going to get a skeleton?
Thirty years later, in 2019, I was watching The Imagineers, a documentary on Disney+ about the history of Disney’s Imagineering department and the development of the theme parks. The early episodes discuss Pepper’s Ghost multiple times, especially in reference to the amazing usage of the effect in the Haunted Mansion attraction. It rekindled an old curiosity and now, as an adult, I realized that I probably had all the supplies needed to make my own Pepper’s Ghost illusion.
So, I slid a piece of framing plexiglass at an angle into an aquarium, plopped an old LCD display on top of the tank facing down, and fired up a video of a goldfish on a black background. It worked great! I was amazed at how easy it was to make a convincing illusion of a swimming fish, so I continued with it. Eventually I tried out the effect with a bell jar on top of my iPad, with a rounded piece of polycarbonate as a reflector. This was the beginning of a whole new journey that led me through the worlds of photography, plastics, synthesizers, and real-time motion graphics.
Suddenly, after twenty-something years as a commercial artist, I was now a budding audio-visual installation artist? I had dabbled with video art but my previous experiments with black-and-white TVs now seemed to make more sense alongside the exploration of Pepper’s Ghost.
It all felt like one big discovery and it all happened right before the pandemic hit. It turned out that I would soon end up having plenty of alone time to experiment.
My thing for televisions
Just about any sort of display can pair well with a Pepper’s Ghost, but I like cathode ray tubes the best. There’s something mesmerizing about the glow of a CRT, especially black-and-white sets from the 1960s and 70s. They have an almost neon intensity that is impossible to reproduce with LCD and other more modern technologies. I have a growing collection of vintage televisions of various sizes, shapes, and ages. There’s everything from a built-like-a-Buick 1958 RCA Sportable to a minuscule 1969 Symphonic Minni portable. I’ve got non-TV CRTs too, like a monitor that was originally used with a black-and-white video camera for microscopy. Mainly, though, I collect 1970s solid-state TVs from brands like Zenith and General Electric; their picture is often very strong, nearly 50 years on, and sometimes they’re fashionable too. Case in point, I have a Zenith Sidekick that’s covered completely in denim to match the blue jean craze of 1974.
I try to avoid opening the back of my TVs whenever possible, so I send video from my computer through a series of adapters that transform the digital signal to an analog format that’s agreeable to my television’s VHF antenna connection. HDMI-to-VHF all-in-one devices do exist but I haven’t tried them out. They seem to be more expensive than a simple HDMI-to-composite adapter/scaler paired with an RF modulator. Remember RF modulators? Well, these days they seem to appear at every thrift store’s electronics section for cheap.
Beyond the adapters, you need cables such as HDMI, composite video (RCA yellow plug), and copper coaxial, and if your TV only has screw terminal connectors you’ll need a matching transformer with coaxial-to-spade connectors. If you’re of a certain age, this can bring back memories of hooking up an Atari 2600. When everything is connected and working, it feels like magic to drag windows from the desktop over to the tube of the television.
Synthesizers, sound, and video
Originally, I was posting my live-video experiments online using sounds from my record collection but I quickly realized I probably shouldn’t be leaning too hard on other people’s music for my own content. I started making original audio with a toy Stylophone, a handheld plastic thing that you control by touching or dragging a metal-tipped pen across a bed of metal keys. It sounds like a drunk chicken. Eventually, I graduated to an updated Stylophone with built-in reverb and some filter controls. Those simple controls were my introduction to the concepts of subtractive synthesis, and I needed to learn more.
There are many options for beginner synthesizers and my first instrument ended up being the Moog Mother-32. I bought it because it seemed well organized and legible, even though I had no idea what anything meant yet. It has vintage looks, absolutely no screen, woodgrain sides, and red blinky lights. Part of my rationale was that even if I couldn’t make it sound good, at least it would look great on camera. Over time, I acquired a Moog Subharmonicon and a DFAM (Drummer From Another Mother) to finish off the three-tier “Sound Studio” set. They each have their own focus and each opens up new possibilities in the others.
As it turns out, synthesizers are sort of addicting and it’s easy to spend loads of time and money on this highly entertaining game of audio logic puzzles (see “Modular Synthesizers,” Make: Volume 85). If you’re interested in trying out the concepts of synthesizers without breaking the bank, I recommend VCV Rack. It’s a sort of analog synthesizer emulation software that has a huge community of developers and users. VCV Rack can receive MIDI from hardware controllers and I use it all the time to output MIDI for controlling other things like video software, such as VDMX.
VDMX is a live-performance video software for Mac, and I use it to manipulate video that I send to my TVs. It’s a peculiar piece of software and also very powerful. The UI seems to have remained in the late 1990s — there’s still no Undo function, and windows float untethered to any sort of overarching framework. To the uninitiated, it might appear outdated, but there are plenty of reasons to push past that impulse, and I’m glad I stuck with it. VDMX can easily integrate system audio and MIDI devices, it has simple options for spanning across multiple displays, and it’s got a modular approach that allows for any slider or button to communicate any other slider or button inside of VDMX. It’s miles to the left from Adobe and I deeply enjoy uncovering its mysteries.
I try to use videos that exist in the public domain for most of my projects. The Prelinger Archive at The Internet Archive has an excellent and extensive collection of videos in the public domain. Originally, I was just trying to find interesting footage that wouldn’t content-match on YouTube but it didn’t take long to become enamored with these time capsules of ephemeral film. There are vintage cigarette advertisements promoting the freshness of one brand over another, cringe-inducing etiquette reels from the 1950s, random cross-country amateur roadtrip films, and corporate promotional films about the latest advances in one technology or another. It’s a deep well of moving images to pull from and also great for sound.
My studio space
Like many people working in San Francisco, my workspace is also my living space. I rent a ground-floor studio apartment with plenty of storage. Admittedly, it’s not the most practical situation for a vintage TV museum / maker space, but I’m working with what I have. There’s a pantry off the kitchen that I’ve repurposed into an art space and it’s currently where I package and ship my enamel pin designs. I use an Intel Mac Mini in the main room to operate VDMX since it seems to be most stable in the pre-Apple silicon world. In the pantry studio, I have a bare-bones M1 Mac Mini for editing and rendering my short social media clips.
I still sometimes draw and paint, so the studio-pantry is also where I leave the mess that I make while doing that.
The living area of the main room is now home to a giant polycarbonate dome atop a 55″ flat-screen TV for Pepper’s Ghost purposes. Originally it was a designer bubble chair that I found among the secondhand couches at Community Thrift. I decided it would be better taking up my space next to my couch instead. My desk is a vintage Steelcase Tanker Desk that was handed down to me from a video editor friend. It had plenty of surface area which I have filled completely with computer and audio gear.
By necessity, the living area is also a photography studio with a few light stands and tripods placed here and there at all times. I shoot with a Canon M6 Mark II sideways on a tripod for capturing vertical video. I use a Ninja V recorder to get the most out of the HDMI feed from the camera. A diffusion filter in combination with an ND filter on the Sigma 16mm lens helps manage the wild brightness from the CRTs and LEDs. Sometimes, I’ll use a vintage Russian lens with an adapter and speed booster to create wider or macro shots.
There is a lot of trial and error with filming Pepper’s Ghost videos. Depending on the screen and the image itself, the environmental lighting needs to be adjusted accordingly. For the effect to be vibrant, it always needs to be a little dark. It’s also important to see the environment around the effect, so it can require a balance of small lighting adjustments. I also use subtle color and lighting post-production adjustments in DaVinci Resolve video editing software to help re-create what the video looks like in-person.
Pepper’s Ghost Illusion — From Dickens to Tupac
Stage Fright: The famed ghost projection technique was invented by English engineer Henry Dircks in 1858 in an effort to debunk spiritualists and to improve upon their “magic lantern” phantasmagoria shows. Debuted in the theater in 1862 by John Henry Pepper — the two men shared a patent — the illusion soon appeared onstage in The Haunted Man by permission of the author, Charles Dickens.
Fatal Attraction: Board your Doom Buggy to be scare-tained by a gazillion ghosts in Disneyland’s 54-year-old Haunted Mansion ride — most of them still created by animatronic puppets and the Dircks/Pepper illusion.
Reanimated: Digital natives rediscovered Pepper’s Ghost when the animated avatars of Gorillaz appeared onstage via 3D projection at music awards shows in 2005 and 2006, and again when the late Tupac Shakur performed “live” with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre at Coachella in 2012, kicking off a freaky fad for “hologram tours” by artists living, dead, and virtual. —Keith Hammond
Make a mad scientist Pepper’s Ghost Flask
You don’t need a giant bubble dome to create your own Pepper’s Ghost illusion. It’s a very scalable effect, requiring only simple materials. that are easy to come by. I’ve even made demo videos about how to make a Pepper’s Ghost with a domed coffee lid, snack packaging, and your phone.
Since Halloween is always just around the corner, let’s make a Pepper’s Ghost Chemistry Flask. It will be right at home in a haunted house, mad scientist’s laboratory, or Halloween party.
