Just imagine, dear visitor, such a situation. You and your family celebrate a housewarming, take photographs for memory … and suddenly on one of them, already during the development of the film, a terrible ghost hanging from the ceiling materializes. Isn't it true that even the thought of an unwelcome “roommate” makes your hair stand on end? We will tell you about such a photo, which caused a lot of noise in the West and is included in the USA in the top 10 most mysterious pictures with ghosts. For all the "hype" of this photo, the story of its origin is no less ghostly than the mysterious subject captured on it.
The background of the sensational photo
Sometime in the 1950s, the Cooper family from Texas bought an old house and moved into it. Celebrating a housewarming, the father decided to photograph his children, wife, and also the boys' grandmother on the camera. Everyone was happy and smiled - their dream had come true. And only when the film was developed by the father of the family, everyone, to their horror, saw on it the ghost of a man hanging from the ceiling.
Noting that this story has been “viral” on the World Wide Web since 2013, we emphasize that there are two opposite points of view regarding “photography with a ghost”. According to one, we are dealing with an image that has been manipulated in a photo editor. According to another - and it is adhered to by most Western publications specializing in phenomena - the photo of the ghost of the Cooper family is so mysterious that it is worthy to take first place in the top ten "portraits" of ghosts.
Let us emphasize two important points. First, what a strange thing! - in our age of the total spread of the Internet, almost no one has yet carried out a intelligible OSINT investigation of this photograph. Secondly, in the spelling of the family's name, in our opinion, there is no typo, no disagreement with how it is indicated in various Western publications. The reason allowing us to assert this will be revealed to the attentive reader a little later.
In the footsteps of the discoverers
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The first appearance of the photo with the ghost of the Cooper family dates from November 14, 2009. On that day, it was published on the official site of fans of the writer Thomas Ligotti, who worked in the genre of horror literature.
Analysis of this image, posted on the specified site, suggests that the name Cooper is not mentioned in it at all. The file itself, sent to the site by a certain Sam Cowen, is called "Family with a hanging man (hanged)."
Further research shows that the image acquired its current name only in 2013. We search by date and see that in the same year, but several months earlier, the photo appears on the ghosttheory.com website. We find out: the specified photo was sent to the gallery of the site, called "Retro ghosts: portraits from the past, inspiring horror", by a certain Javier Ortega.
More or less clever fake
Most skeptics, who consider the photo of interest to us as an unconditional fake, cite the following considerations in support of this conclusion. The discrepancy between the shadows from the flash and light sources in a room with shadows from the "ghost", as well as the transparent hand of the "ghost" covering the left candle, can serve as a sign of using multiple exposure, i.e. reuse of film when photographing. This statement is contained in an investigation conducted on the website fern-flower.ru by the author under the pseudonym F3.
Some Western journalists are of the same opinion. Moreover, they go even further, pointing out that an unknown forger "superimposed" on the original photo a secondary one, "cut" from a portrait of a certain dancing girl, and then "turned upside down" by it.
There is a completely radical statement on the Internet: the primary photo itself is already a fake. It depicts "modern actors dressed in 1950s clothes."
However, now is the time to take a look at the accounts on social networks and find out if we received mail from Sam Cowen and Javier Ortega. There are few questions for them. How did they get the pictures sent to the Internet? How can they prove that they did not fake the original photo? What goals did they pursue by making this sensation widely publicized?
Virtual Interrogation: Sam Cowan
Let's move on to an analysis of our short virtual "interrogation" of Sam Cowen and Javier Ortega.
Communication with Mr. Cowen was disappointing at first. Our respondent could not (or did not want) to clearly explain where he got this picture from. However, there is no complete lack of information if you can read between the lines. Apparently, you can trust Sam's assertions when he writes that he has no idea about Photoshop. Indirect arguments in favor of the sincerity of the first "interrogated" are as follows. First, in the course of the virtual conversation, he, a seasonal worker, showed ignorance in computer programs. Secondly, he said that "Cooper's last name does not say anything to him personally," and he sent the picture to the site of the writer's fans, Ligotti, since he himself is.
You can believe in the sincerity of our respondent. As in the selflessness of Sam Cowan: if the "fake" wanted to become famous - it is for this purpose, as a rule, images of imaginary "unknown artifacts" are manipulated - he would most likely send the corresponding photo to one of the magazines devoted to the problems of the paranormal, and become rich would, based on current prices, in the amount of $ 150 to $ 500.
Virtual Interrogation: Javier Ortega
Communication with Javier Ortega turned out to be much more interesting. At first, having delighted us that he allegedly "is the owner of the original picture, printed on photographic paper," then disappointed with the fact that "he had lost it long ago, having previously scanned it," our interlocutor gave the main sensation.
We read: “The picture was inherited by me from my father who died 9 years ago. He bought it at a local flea market for one dollar. I never claimed to be a photograph of a certain Cooper family. Most likely, this is a mistake made by the press in connection with the name of the file I scanned. I meant only the place of purchase of the photo - the city of Cooper."
When communicating with any interlocutor on the Internet, it is not difficult to establish his unique computer address (IP), relatively speaking, analogous to the address of an ordinary house. The responses from Mr. Ortega came from an IP address given by an ISP to an end user in Cooper, Texas, USA. And this is a powerful argument in favor of the reality of Ortega's story.
J. Copper from Cooper Town?
Having set the approximate age limits, we were able to find on the Internet a Texas resident, a certain J. Copper, who claims that it was he who was captured (on the left) in childhood in a photo taken by his father. J. Copper said that "my father sold the family photo to a buyer from a flea market, not wanting to endure anything mystical in the house."
We may have managed to expose the version of "artificial aging of the photograph, which depicts contemporary actors." Victoria Johnson, a graduate in fashion history and a Dallas resident with whom we managed to get in touch, is confident: “The clothes of all four people in the picture are authentic not only temporally, but also locally, in relation to the State of the Lone Star (ie. e. to Texas. - Approx. ed.) ".
Finally, a former employee (now retired) of Cooper Real Estate & Homes, Charles L. Simmons, to whom we forwarded the photograph of interest to us, commented on it: “Indeed, in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Cooper, founded back in 1870, there was an oversupply of houses in the secondary real estate market … And this allowed people of average income, like those in the photo, to acquire such real estate in those years”.
Sometimes, while investigating a mysterious artifact, you come across a “matryoshka effect”. As soon as you answer some questions, a dozen new ones immediately arise. The backstory of the sensational photo with the ghost of the Cooper family is fraught with too many documentary details that do not allow dismissing this artifact as a fake. Maybe new researchers will move further in studying the mysterious ghost shot.
Alexey DYMKA