The effect was first used in an 1862 dramatization of Charles Dickens' novella "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, " staged at the Royal Polytechnic Institute in London, according to Jim Steinmeyer, an illusion designer who has written extensively about the history of his craft, including Pepper's Ghost.
Newcomer Jacqueline (Charlotte Rampling) is also something of an angry ghost: once married to a gay man, she brusquely asks whether Bill is straight before letting him pick her up.