Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

The Ghost Conductor: Étienne-Gaspard Robert and the Dark Art of Light

Somewhere in the catacombs beneath post-Revolution Paris — amid the bones of kings and plague-dead commoners — a curtain twitched, a candle flickered, and the dead walked.

Or so it seemed.

A skeletal monk floated toward the audience, eyes aflame. A decaying child sobbed into a mother’s spectral arms. Death itself, hooded and immense, emerged from the mist, its scythe glinting in the lamplight like a whispered curse. The crowd screamed, fainted, wept. Some tried to flee. Others dropped to their knees in confession.

And behind it all, Étienne-Gaspard Robert — better known to the trembling as “Robertson” — stood at the helm of a contraption he called the fantasmagorie. A conjurer of light. A puppeteer of fear. An inventor who turned shadows into theater, and terror into art.

It was the 1790s, and the world had fallen apart. France was bleeding through its bandages, reeling from revolution, execution, and the death of God (or at least of the divine right to rule). Reason was the new deity. Science the new gospel. But even rationalists need ghosts.

Enter Robertson.

He wasn’t born in a crypt, though he might have preferred that version. Étienne-Gaspard Robert came into the world in Liège, Belgium, in 1763 — a city of church bells and ironworks, of smoke and saints. From an early age, he seemed half-devoted to both. A child obsessed with optics, perspective, and magic, he spent his boyhood peering through lenses, drawing architectural illusions, and pulling pranks with mirrors that bent light like poetry.

He studied at Leuven, then dabbled in art, astronomy, and hot air ballooning, because apparently being a Belgian Da Vinci was just something he decided to do. But it was his obsession with light — its manipulation, its drama — that would define him. Optics was his religion. Projection his gospel. If there was a way to bend perception, Robertson wanted it in his hands.

And then came the French Revolution. Heads rolled. Temples fell. Churches emptied. The veil between life and death thinned in public squares.

Robertson, ever the opportunist with a poetic streak, slipped through that veil.

His innovation was the phantasmagoria — a form of horror theater that used magic lanterns, smoke, hidden projectors, shifting lenses, and live actors to stage elaborate ghost shows. But this wasn’t your average puppet theater. Robertson took the nascent 18th-century concept of projected images — often used for educational or ecclesiastical purposes — and injected it with gasoline and grave dust.

He developed a mobile projection device he dubbed the “fantascope”, an ancestor of the modern film projector. He painted phantoms on glass slides, placed them in front of powerful light sources, then moved them along tracks or rotated lenses to make the images grow, shrink, or lurch forward. With layers of gauze and smoke, he gave them depth. With organ music, screams, and theatrical lighting, he gave them soul.

In 1798, under the shadow of the Terror, Robertson began staging his shows in a repurposed Capuchin convent in Paris — because where else would one conjure ghosts but in a ruined church?

Tickets sold out. Audiences lined up. Napoleon’s spies watched from the back rows, unsure whether this man was a genius or a threat.

What set Robertson apart wasn’t just the spectacle. It was the tension — the maddening tightrope he walked between science and superstition. He never fully claimed to believe in ghosts, nor did he deny them. Like a good magician, he left just enough mystery hanging in the rafters to keep people breathless.

At the start of every performance, he’d emerge in black robes, surrounded by skulls and arcane equipment, invoking the names of demons and declaring his intention to summon the dead. It was part theater, part séance, part high-concept satire on the Enlightenment’s obsession with knowledge.

Then came the show. The phantoms. The whispers. The weeping. And finally, the reveal.

Robertson would pull back the curtain, roll out the lanterns, and show the audience how the trick was done. Look, he seemed to say, even your fears have mechanics.

But by then, it was too late. They’d already seen their own mortality reflected in flickering silhouettes.

It’s tempting to call him the father of modern horror, or a proto-cinematographer. (He’d be flattered. Probably correct you. And then ask for royalties.) He anticipated the haunted house, the jump scare, the immersive theatrical experience — and all without CGI, just sweat and lenses and candlelight.

And unlike the spiritualists and mediums who came after him, Robertson didn’t seek to deceive as much as to unsettle. He didn’t promise answers. He offered a performance of dread — a way to rehearse our fears, to sit in the velvet dark and let death come close, then vanish with the click of a shutter.

This wasn’t nihilism. It was catharsis.

And if it happened to make him rich and notorious? Well, even ghosts need to eat.

But like any man who dances with death for applause, the spotlight began to fade.

Robertson eventually left the crypts and took to the skies. He turned his attention to hot air ballooning, conducting daring ascents across Europe and recording meteorological data like a 19th-century Bill Nye with a death wish. He even published a scientific treatise — Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques — chronicling his obsessions with projection, flight, and the impossible.

Still, the phantasmagoria never quite left him. Nor us.

You can trace his ghost-trail through the work of Méliès, through early cinema, through Hitchcock, through haunted houses and horror podcasts. Every time a face looms on a screen, larger than life, making your heart trip in the dark — that’s Robertson, whispering from the catacombs.

He died in 1837, mostly forgotten, as men often are when their inventions become the wallpaper of culture. The world moved on to daguerreotypes, then motion pictures, then jump scares and AI-generated nightmare fuel. But every October, when fog curls over sidewalks and someone projects a horror movie onto a bedsheet, a little of Robertson’s candlelight flickers back.

He didn’t believe in ghosts. Not really.

But he believed in the human need to see them.

And he gave us a way.