FT261

For as long as there has been photography, people have been finding ghosts wandering into their pictures. During the 1860s, there was quite a craze for spirit photographs (FT205:38–43, 219:36–42), and the digital age has seen a new wave of paranormal pictures. The camera cannot lie, but sometimes it can be very misleading. Exactly how it misleads depends on the technology involved. Early cameras required a very long exposure. In the 1850s, optical pioneer Sir David Brewster noticed that a picture of a boy sitting on a step had been spoiled when the boy got up and left. The rest of the image was clear enough, but the boy’s image was translucent.

“I saw that such transparent pictures might be used for the various purposes of entertainment,” Brewster noted. [1] This technique of partial exposure to produce a ghost image was a mainstay of the Victor­ian spirit photograph industry. Professionals like Brewster used it deliberately to create entertaining or morally uplifting images. Sometimes the exposure was accidental; a passer-by who stopped moment­arily could leave a phantom image in the frame that might be mistaken for a ghost.

In the modern era, we have our own spirit photographs. The dead no longer manifest themselves as fully formed humans, but more often as mysterious “orbs” – glowing balls of light floating in the air (FT144:30–32, 227:72–73 and passim). These are not noticed at the time but are only seen afterwards on the photograph, and their appearance has coincided with the rise of flash photography with digital cameras. Ghost-hunters interpret orbs as spirit forms. Camera makers Canon have a more prosaic explanation involving the depth of field of digital cameras, and sent this response to an enquiry by investigator Dr Paul Lee about what was causing the orbs:

“Small dust particles, droplets of water, etc., drifting in the air close to the camera and not within depth of field for normal 35mm cameras, are within depth of field for digital cameras. Under normal circumstances this is not too big a problem, as these are very small. When flash is used, its light illuminates these dust particles or water droplets, and these therefore show up and are extremely obvious on pictures taken.”

Impressive orbs appear when there is a lot of dust in the air, such as that disturbed by investigators walking through spooky old houses or caves. Any mist can have the same effect. When the flash is offset from the camera, by using a separate flash rather than a built-in one, orbs disappear. Ghost-hunters tend to accept that most orb pict­ures are artefacts, and even have gall­eries of the “fake” orbs, but insist that there are also a proportion of real spirit orbs.

Sometimes photographs reveal a “vortex”, a tall grey shape which is blurred and twisted. These vortices are sometimes interpreted as ghosts, but the real explan­ation is usually more mundane. A stray camera wrist-strap will easily produce such an image, being out of focus and hard to identify because it is so close. [2]

It’s often been observed that ubiquit­ous CCTV cameras ought to pick up any strange phenomena out there. Sometimes they do, like the mysterious white shape captured by security cameras moving across a gym in Overland Park, Kansas, in 2008. The footage was shown on local news and there was much speculation about ghosts. Benjamin Radford of Live­Science was quick to note that the object was only picked up by one camera and was blurred and out of focus. An insect crawling across the lens housing would produce exactly this sort of effect. A very similar CCTV “ghost” seen by CCTV at a courthouse in Santa Fe in 2007 investigated by Radford was shown almost certainly to be an insect (FT229:42–44). In spite of this, 47 per cent of the 20,000 respondents to an online poll believed that the gym video showed a ghost.

In 1994, Jose Escamilla discovered what he called “Roswell Rods” which appear on some photographs and video images. These are “thin, unidentified organic life forms” ranging in length from a few centimetres to tens of metres. They are invisible to the naked eye, but photographers found that under the right conditions they could be found almost everywhere. Excitement quickly faded, however, when the right conditions turned out to have a lot to do with lighting.

The first rods were spotted when the camera was pointed at a cave mouth, with a long exposure setting. With a 1/60 second exposure, an insect moving at 20mph becomes a narrow, 15cm blur – sometimes a knobbly blur depending on the position of the wings.

There’s a nice display of insect rod pict­ures in the ASSAP Rods page. Meanwhile, after 16 years, Jose Escamilla is still using his own Roswell Rods page to argue that while most of them are photographic artefacts, some rods are real entities. Until a live rod-creature is captured, the sceptics are unlikely to be convinced.

Escamilla’s reaction follows a familiar pattern. He accepts that an effect can be a photographic artefact, while being cert­ain that in his particular case it isn’t. As often happens in forteana, it’s this belief that keeps the phenomenon alive among enthusiasts long after the rest of the world has moved to refining the art of deliberate fakes for entertainment. And ghost pictures are much easier to make than crop circles.



Notes
1 “Death & Mourning in the 19th century”, cedarhillcemetery.org.
2 'Ghost Photography 101', hollowhill.com.