A hot, sunny July day is an atypical setting for a creepy ghost story, and the thought never occurred to us that we'd been haunted until our work was finished. The 'unexpected' is one of the great attractions of the 'wet plate/collodion' photographic process - we literally can't see the UV end of the light spectrum to which collodion-based photography is sensitive, and therefore, what we see in the camera while setting up a shot is not what we 'get' on the plate (glass or metal - we use black-painted aluminum).
Wet plate photographers concerned with perfect image quality go to great lengths to control all known variables afflicting the final image, like heat, chemical contamination, and even uncontrolled movement while pouring chemistry onto the plate. As a result, some wet-platers are fussy creatures, - control freaks - who disdain the messy images obtained by less-careful photographers, like me. But I was a painter before I ever picked up a camera, and random chemical effects are endlessly fascinating to me, even if my 'failure' rate is as high as 30%. No rational wet plate technician would attempt to photograph in hostile environments like the Bonneville Salt Flats, or when the mercury hits 100degrees...which means about 120deg inside my Sprinter/darkroom, where we must immediately process our images after exposure (the plate must stay 'wet' or the image is ruined - hence the name). It was that hot in Volcano, CA, at the end of the 2013 Velocette Summer Rally, our annual week-long ride. My photo-partner Susan and I had been riding all week, with no chance to take photos, and grabbed the chance to take portraits on the rally's final day.
We chose an abandoned assay office as our backdrop, basically a wooden shack in this Gold Rush town, beside the St.George Hotel, where we stayed. Every photo we took was 'ruined' by chemistry, with strange effects over the hour we shot in that location, until we gave up and moved elsewhere, when our shots were crystal-clear, with no 'fogging'. It wasn't until we were rinsing our plates in the hotel room later that we noticed the strange images in that spot, our headless portraits and peeking ghosts, until we finally washed the portrait of Carl, and the goblin beside him. Yes, it freaked us out too!
We asked at the hotel about the assay office, and showed them our photos. They weren't a bit surprised, saying that spot was well known as haunted, ever since a garrison of troops during the Civil War had died there of exposure in the winter of 1867. Creepy stuff.
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