McVicar was born in Sheboygan Falls in 1903, and moved to Madison with his family in 1917. He started his photo business in the basement of his family’s flower shop at 723 University Avenue and did contract work for the Capital Times for many years. He primarily used 4x5” and 8x10” large format cameras, and was the first photographer in Madison to use a flash for supplemental lighting. He worked in the University of Wisconsin Photography department from 1957 until his death in 1964. He is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery.

Large format 8x10” cameras are able to capture exceptional detail, as you can see in this photographs and many of the others McVicar created. With this image being taken in a dark theatre, McVicar may have used a flash to help illuminate the scene. Even with all the lights on, McVicar would have had to have used artificial lighting or a long exposure in order to capture this photograph in the manner that he did. Now, if the photographer had taken a long exposure, it is possible that if he were to stand in front of the camera with a shutter release cable, it would be possible for the camera to capture his figure as a double exposure. That would definitely be a rookie mistake, and there would be no good reason for McVicar to move away from the back of the camera in the first place. If he had done so, the scale and perspective from where his distance would have been in front of the camera is seemingly off. In addition, the light is noticeably hard to me, which makes me suspect that McVicar did indeed illuminate the auditorium with a flash. The frontmost chairs in the orchestra section reflect a very harsh shine and the theatre gets darker farther back towards the balcony as the flash could have only reached so far and isn’t able to light everything in such a deep space very evenly. Had this image been captured through a longer exposure, the lighting would be much more even, and the lights from the chandeliers and sconces in the auditorium would be blown out and brighter from being exposed longer. If you look at the chandeliers, they also cast very harsh shadows directly behind which is a dead giveaway that they were hit with a flash. Flash also freezes motion keeping everything in focus, and everything in this scene is extremely sharp and crisp. I can pretty much rule out that this “ghost gentleman” was caused by a long exposure, which is easily the most common explanation for appearances of ghosts in photographs.

I ruled out our gentleman ghost as a lens reflection before anything else--the lens ghosts are clearly spherical & circular shaped like an aperture. Apertures aren’t humanoid shaped, last I checked….

For the sake of being thorough, and being the nerd that I am, I knew I had to go down to the Wisconsin Historical Society and examine the emulsion of the original photographic print in case this might be an imperfection from film processing. Lisa and I arrived on the 4th floor where the Archives are kept, and were handed a white envelope and white cotton gloves. To our delight, we received not the print, but the actual, original photographic negative. We set the negative on a light table and admired the crisp detail that was captured by McVicar and his camera. We peered through the magnifier and obsessed over the fact that we could see every facet of every crystal in the chandeliers and that we could very clearly make out the statue in the hallway near the back where you entered the theatre. In the bottom right-hand corner, we could make out the shapes of our ghost in question. The figure above the music stand isn’t able to be seen as well in the negative, since the negative is an inverse of the image in the print, and the figure fades into the background because of the range of values present in the chairs--as a translucent object it presents a weaker outline due to already somewhat blending with its surroundings. Everything that is black is white and everything that is white is black so the details of the figure gets lost in the negative. The fact is that the figure exists in the negative and was not hoaxed and did not simply appear in prints. In fact, we noticed another imperfection in the image that we did not notice in the print. To the right of our ghost, we notice a hunched figure that looks as though it is wearing a jacket--you can clearly see details of wrinkles in fabric.