With the development of photographic technology, more and more images have appeared with enigmatic figures depicted on them - ghosts in the frame, as some believe. The BBC Future correspondent found out that they even meet in photos from smartphones.
February 2015, Hampton Court Palace in London. 12-year-old Holly Hampshair grabs her iPhone to take a photo of her cousin Brooke as she walks alone through the stately royal apartments. Click. Done.
But the next day, the cousins discover that Brooke is not alone in the photo. A gray image follows her - a tall woman in a cape. This anomaly is gone in the next picture.
What was it? A unique documentary photo of a tormented soul, unable to find peace? Or something that lends itself to a completely rational explanation?
The answer, as we shall see, must not be sought in the other world. This ghost is just one of the newest characters in the history of haunted photography. Such mysterious shadows have appeared in photographs since the invention of the first cameras. With each new breakthrough in photographic technology, new types of "ghosts" have emerged - and sometimes they have been added to pictures on purpose.
“I am skeptical about this and speak from the perspective of a photographer and a person who does not believe in ghosts. I don’t think these 'ghosts' are anything that cannot be achieved with different photography techniques,”says Michael Pritchard, CEO of the Royal Photographic Society of Britain.
Mind and sixth sense
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The Ghost Photo dates back to the 19th century. During the 1850s and 60s, many photographers experimented with special effects such as stereoscopic imaging and double exposure. But some unscrupulous photographers soon realized that these techniques could be used for enrichment.
American amateur photographer William Mumler is believed to have become the first person to photograph a "spirit" in the 1860s.
That famous photograph could make out the ghost of his late cousin. Whether he really came to him or not remains a mystery, but Mamler's ability to capture the ghosts of deceased people (usually relatives) in photographs soon led to a clientele.
At first, experts could not find signs of a fake in the Mamler ghost photos. And the amateur gradually became a professional: more and more people came to him, wanting to get an otherworldly picture with relatives who died in the American Civil War.
It seems that Mumler achieved this effect by inserting a glass plate into the camera with a ready-made positive picture of the glass photosensitive plate, which had been killed in front, on which the client's photograph was taken. Due to such a double exposure, a snapshot was obtained not only of the customer, but also of the "ghost" image from the additional plate.
In one of Mumler's famous photographs, the "ghost" of Abraham Lincoln appeared in a photograph of his wife Mary Todd Lincoln. The list of the photographer's clients grew, but so did the number of his critics.
One of the most furious was the American showman P. T. Barnum, who argued that these ghost photos were simply exploiting the gullibility of grieving families and individuals. There were also accusations that Mumler allegedly broke into houses to steal photographs of dead relatives, and that some "spirits" in his photographs, and in general, were said to continue to live and flourish successfully.
Mumler appeared in court on fraud charges and Barnum testified against him. The highlight of the trial was when a deliberately falsified photograph was shown in the boardroom to demonstrate how easy it was to take a Mumler-style photograph. In the photo, Barnum himself was shown along with Abraham Lincoln. It looked like the ghostbusters had finally made their way to the photographer.
Despite the evidence, Mumler was cleared of the fraud charge, but the damage to his reputation had already been done, and his career as a "perfume" photographer came to an end. The techniques he used were refined by his followers at the end of the 19th century, when the demand for ghost photography increased, but these negativity wizards also could not get rid of criticism.
The English priest and medium William Stainton Moses was one of the earliest explorers of this topic. Here is what Alan Murdy, chairman of the Ghost Club (founded in 1862 and considered the world's oldest paranormal research and investigation organization), says about him: “By 1875, he had studied over 600 photographs of alleged ghosts. In his opinion, among them there were no more than a dozen of those who, at a stretch, could be considered an example of something supernatural. And he added: "There are people who, even in a mop and a rag, are ready to recognize their untimely departed relative."
But more and more people started their own cameras, and more and more, accordingly, became a "ghost-photo". “By the 1880s, anyone could pick up a camera and shoot, and that opened the way for charlatans who willingly deceived people and played on their emotions,” says Pritchard.
Around the same period, one of the most famous "ghost" photographs was taken. In 1891, Cybell Corbet photographed in the library of Combermere Abbey in the English county of Cheshire. In the chair, in the foreground of the frame, there was a man, or rather, the light outlines of his head, collar and right hand. It was argued that this is the spirit of the late Lord Combermere - he died shortly before the picture was riding a horse, and at the time when the photo was taken, his funeral was taking place. The exposure for the photo took a whole hour, and therefore the skeptics considered that during such a long exposure, a servant simply entered the room and sat down for a while in a chair. However, most of the servants stated that they were at that time at the funeral of their lord.
After the war
By the outbreak of World War I, Spiritualism and Ghost Photography had a number of notable supporters, including the writer Arthur Conan Doyle, a member of the Ghost Club. The feeling of loss that gripped the population of many countries after the war led to the desire to somehow reunite with the lost relatives and friends. The Englishman William Hope, who already has an appropriate reputation, willingly offered his services in this area.
Like Mumler, Hope was plagued by charges of fraud. In 1922, he was investigated by a commission of the Society for Supernatural Research, headed by a well-known expert on such issues, Harry Price. He looked into the case and found out that Hope had indeed cheated by using two glass plates - one with a ghostly silhouette, the other light-sensitive, on which images of the "ghost" and the subject appeared simultaneously. But, unlike Mumler, after this revelation, Hope still continued to work as a medium and “photographer of spirits”, supported by his many zealous supporters.
More than a decade later, Price was investigating a case that was far less clear. In 1936, two Country Life magazine employees took pictures at the foot of a staircase in Rainham Hall in Norfolk, England. Photographer Captain Hubert Proven and his assistant Indre Shira were just about to take a photo of this staircase when Shira suddenly saw “a vaporous form gradually taking the shape of a woman” and descending the stairs towards them. A few seconds later, the photographers hastily snapped a picture. It was published in Country Life magazine and dubbed The Brown Lady. Some believed it was the figure of Lady Dorothy Townshend, who was said to have visited the estate as a ghost after her mysterious death in 1726.
Price believed that no attempt had been made in this case to falsify the photograph. “I must say right away that I was impressed. I was told a very simple story: Mr. Indre Shira saw a ghost descending the stairs just as Captain Proven's head was under a black veil. Just one cry of warning - and the cap was removed from the lens, the flash went off, and now we all see the results. I cannot discard their story and I have no right not to believe them. If it is a fake, then it can only be the result of collusion between the two men. And negativity itself cannot lie, said Price.
But there were also people who were more skeptical. In 1937, the Society for Supernatural Research determined that an accidental camera movement during a six-second exposure caused the "spirit" to appear in the picture. “I thought there was something about the Brown Lady of Rainham Hall until I read the original report of the Society,” Murdy admits.
Like many other researchers on the topic, Murdy himself has seen countless photographs of alleged ghosts. “It seems to me that very few photographs can really be considered illustrations of some kind of paranormal activity,” he says.
Ghost in numbers
Modern digital cameras can just as easily create a fake “spirit”. The appearance of the “gray lady” from Hampton Court, with which this article began, is almost certainly due to the technological features of the camera with which the photo was taken.
Unlike film cameras, cameras in phones usually take a picture gradually - in much the same way as a scanner scans a page of text. This is a slightly longer process - especially in low light, when the phone camera takes longer to remember enough visual information to produce an acceptable photo. This process, known as “image smoothing”, can cause moving objects in the frame to appear distorted.
"Ghost Photo" is now undergoing a renaissance, giving birth to Internet memes such as The Skinny Man (Slenderman), a supernatural character who is sometimes added to pictures for dramatic effect.
Despite the fact that we are well aware of computer image manipulation techniques, there are still many people who believe that spirits can be photographed. According to a 2013 poll, 42% of Americans believe in ghosts. A similar British poll in 2014 showed that 39% of UK citizens are confident that haunted houses do exist.
Our interest in the afterlife seems to be immortal - it is only constantly adapting to new technologies and scientific knowledge of our time.