This summer, I went on a tour of Seattle’s underground streets. These old streets have been abandoned for over a century. The tour took us through dimly lit underground alleys, where we could see what was left of historic shops and homes, covered in cobweb. It was the perfect setting for ghost spotting, and indeed the guide told us quite a few people have reported “seeing something” either during the tour or in pictures taken there.
My 8 year old son was fascinated. He spent most of the tour taking pictures and checking them on the digital camera’s miniature screen. It didn’t take long before he spotted something. Indeed, there on the screen was a distinct human shape glowing in an shimmering whitish glare. The tour guide was pretty impressed and said this was one of the best “ghost pictures” he’s seen. Everyone else in the group came to see the picture, and it generated a lot of excitement. My son was torn between joy over “proving” to me that there really were ghosts and fear over the very same reason.
When we got back to the hotel room that evening and downloaded the images to the laptop, we had a closer look. On the larger screen it was easy to see that our ghost had in face been the white teeshirt of one of the people on the group, caught on the image as he was walking between a couple of structural elements, which created the illusion of a full human shape hovering above the ground.
I am certain that most, and perhaps all, ghost pictures can be explained like that. In the collection of ghost pictures I’m sharing here today, some are very obviously blurred images of people, taken at an age where the static surroundings would come out sharp while a slightly-moving person would come out blurry. Others are like the “face on Mars “- just our brain’s tendency to look for human facial features in random “visual noise”. And of course, some would just be hoaxes. Which is which, and are there any “real” ghostly images? You tell me!