Pepper's ghost

thumb|upright=1.3|Stage setup for Pepper's Ghost. A brightly lit figure out of the audience's sight below the stage is reflected in a pane of glass placed between the performer and the audience. To the audience, it appears as if the ghost is on stage.

Pepper's ghost is an illusion technique, used in theatre, cinema, amusement parks, museums, television, and concerts, in which an image of an object offstage is projected so that it appears to be in front of the audience.

The technique is named after the English scientist John Henry Pepper, who popularised the effect during an 1862 Christmas Eve theatrical production of the Charles Dickens novella The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, which caused a sensation among those in attendance at the Regent Street theatre in London.

In the 2010s, the technique was used to make virtual artists appear onstage in apparent "live" concerts, with examples including Tupac Shakur and Michael Jackson. This system is often used for retail environments and exhibitions.

Amusement parks

The world's largest implementation of this illusion can be found at The Haunted Mansion and Phantom Manor attractions at several Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. There, a -long scene features multiple Pepper's ghost effects, brought together in one scene. Guests travel along an elevated mezzanine, looking through a -tall pane of glass into an empty ballroom. Animatronic ghosts move in hidden black rooms beneath and above the mezzanine. A more advanced variation of the Pepper's Ghost effect is also used at The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.

The walk-through attraction Turbidite Manor in Nashville, Tennessee, employs variations of the classic technique, enabling guests to see various spirits that also interact with the physical environment, viewable at a much closer proximity. The House at Haunted Hill, a Halloween attraction in Woodland Hills, California, employs a similar variation in its front window to display characters from its storyline.

thumb|Projecting an image on the floor and reflecting it in a pane of glass allows a live actor (left) to interact with a projected "ghost"

An example that combines the Pepper's ghost effect with a live actor and film projection can be seen in the Mystery Lodge exhibit at the Knott's Berry Farm theme park in Buena Park, California, and the Ghosts of the Library exhibit at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, as well as the depiction of Maori legends called A Millennium Ago at the Museum of Wellington City & Sea in New Zealand.

The Hogwarts Express attraction at Universal Studios Florida uses the Pepper's ghost effect, such that guests entering "Platform " seem to disappear into a brick wall when viewed from those further behind in the queue.

The Curse at Alton Manor, an attraction at the Alton Towers theme park in Staffordshire, England, uses multiple Pepper's ghost effects. These include the ride's preshow, where characters are projected inside an empty dollhouse before disappearing as the room is bathed in ultraviolet light, and a scene where Emily Alton, the attraction's central antagonist, appears in a corporeal form before vanishing, in a similar fashion to effects used at the Disney parks. The effect was also used in the ride's previous iterations, The Haunted House and Duel: The Haunted House Strikes Back; where Emily Alton and her cat Snowy could be seen as small corporeal ghosts inside a doll's house in the attraction's queue, similar to the preshow in the current iteration of the attraction.

Museums

Museums increasingly use Pepper's ghost exhibits to create attractions that appeal to visitors. In the mid-1970s James Gardener designed the Changing Office installation in the London Science Museum, consisting of a 1970s-style office that transforms into an 1870s-style office as the audience watches. It was designed and built by Will Wilson and Simon Beer of Integrated Circles. Another particularly intricate Pepper's ghost display is the Eight Stage Ghost built for the British Telecom Showcase Exhibition in London in 1978. This display follows the history of electronics in a number of discrete transitions.

More modern examples of Pepper's ghost effects can be found in various museums in the United Kingdom and Europe. Examples of these in the United Kingdom are the ghost of Annie McLeod at the New Lanark World Heritage Site, the ghost of John McEnroe at the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum, which reopened in new premises in 2006, and one of Sir Alex Ferguson, which opened at the Manchester United Museum in 2007.

On 1 June 2013, ITV broadcast Les Dawson: An Audience With That Never Was. The program featured a Pepper's ghost projection of Les Dawson, presenting content for a 1993 edition of An Audience with... to be hosted by Dawson but unused due to his death two weeks before recording. in Stern's Ghostbusters, and more extensively in Jersey Jack's Dialed In!.

In “…Gets a Bright Idea,” the fifth episode of the third season of The Magic School Bus, Arnold’s conniving cousin Janet uses the Pepper’s Ghost technique on Arnold to try to convince the rest of Ms. Frizzle’s class that a theater is haunted. During the “Producer Says” segment at the end of episode, a method of producing the effect on a small scale is explained and demonstrated.

Concerts

An illusion based on Pepper's ghost involving projected images has been featured at music concerts (often erroneously marketed as "holographic").

On 18 May 2014, during the Billboard Music Awards, an illusion of deceased pop star Michael Jackson, other dancers, and the entire stage set was projected onto the stage for a performance of the song "Slave to the Rhythm" from the posthumous Xscape album.

Political speeches and protest

NChant 3D telecast, live, a 55-minute speech by Narendra Modi, then-Chief Minister of Gujarat, to 53 locations across Gujarat on 10 December 2012 during the assembly elections. no actual holography was involved – it was yet another technologically updated variant of the Pepper's ghost illusion.

Fashion

In 2011, in Beijing, apparel company Burberry produced the "Burberry Prorsum Autumn/Winter 2011 Hologram Runway Show", which included life size 2-D projections of models. The company's own video shows several centered and off-center shots of the main 2-dimensional projection screen, the latter revealing the flatness of the virtual models. The claim that holography was used was reported as fact in the trade media.

References

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