Before he invented telegraphic code, Samuel Morse was a portrait painter. In the winter of 1825, he left his family in Connecticut and traveled to Washington, D.C., for a sitting with the Marquis de Lafayette. On February 9 he sent a letter to his beloved wife, Lucretia. Three days later he received word that Lucretia was dead. She had been dead when he wrote to her. “What had it meant that he had thought he was communicating with her?” asks Peter Manseau in THE APPARITIONISTS: A TALE OF PHANTOMS, FRAUD, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND THE MAN…