Make: Volume 86

Pepper’s Ghost

Hologram Flask

I learned about the classic stage illusion

“Pepper’s Ghost” from an episode of M r.

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. ...