S03E52 – Viral Ghost Photos
Karen and her husband Matt are back from visiting Australia and in this episode we discuss some viral ghost photos. The photos will be in the show notes, and we will cross-post a version of this on our YouTube page with image inserts.
Karen’s new book BITCH is on sale now.
Blake’s recent article about mind viruses seems to be backed up by an even more recent article confirming that clinical evidence doesn’t support a “mind virus” explanation for idea spread.
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Now on to our photos that we talk about in this episode:
Giant “humanoid” over mall in Zambia. (Or over photoshop in Internet)
Party scene with crying girl also hides “ghost face”
2007 – Parma Gas Station “ghost” or “angel”
Ghostly “shadow person” walks through traffic
(original video is gone but version here)
“Cowboy ghost” at abandoned mine
A bird landing can look like a hat in the distance – but we don’t know the scale here.
It could be a lot of things.
This (pretty obvious) long exposure shot shows up on a lot of ghost photo sites.
Irish Flax Workers and the mysterious “extra hand”
Detail shows “ghost hand” but you can also see manipulation has been done to the plate, erasing some of the pleats in the dress behind the woman with the hand on her shoulder.
Announcer (00:07):
Monster House presents. It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
Announcer (00:18):
A giant hairy creature, part inness a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands of Scotland. It’s a creature known as the Lochness Monster.
Blake Smith (00:51):
Monster talk. Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I’m Blake Smith.
Announcer (00:59):
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Blake Smith (01:00):
I really enjoy analyzing Old Ghost photos and so do Karen and her husband, Matt Baxter. Today, they’re back from their trip down under. We’re going to be talking about some modern viral ghost photos. Now. This is lighter fair than our past few episodes and a much appreciated step into the orange and red crunchy leaves of the spooky season. Check the show notes for the photos that we’re going to be discussing, but we will also be cross-posting a version of this on YouTube, which you’ll be able to watch or find at youtube.com/monster talk. All one word,
Karen Stollznow (01:30):
Monster talk.
Blake Smith (01:32):
Congratulations on getting your book bitch out the door. I know that was a complete bitch to work on. It was.
Karen Stollznow (01:41):
Yeah. I’m not sure how much listeners are familiar with the story, but Cambridge University Press, I don’t know. When I released my first book with them back in 2020, we had a global pandemic. So this time around they had to beat that somehow. So they had a cybersecurity attack, which basically shut down Cambridge University press for months. And they couldn’t receive email, they couldn’t issue royalties to people. They couldn’t publish books. So the book was delayed and Amazon was showing one date and they were telling me another date. But I’ve received my author copies now, and as you know, the Cambridge University Press bookstore featured bitch in the window of their bookstore, which is cool because it’s actually the oldest bookstore in the uk.
Blake Smith (02:30):
Wow.
Karen Stollznow (02:30):
So I’m pretty, to use a British word, chuffed about it.
Blake Smith (02:33):
Oh, sure. And I imagine a British publishing company not being able to do royalties is very off brand.
Karen Stollznow (02:41):
Yeah, probably not. But anyway, here today we have Matt joining us again. Matt talk. Its the
Blake Smith (02:49):
Show. Welcome, welcome back.
Matt Baxter (02:50):
Thank you. Thank you, thank
Blake Smith (02:51):
You. Good to be here. Welcome back to you both. My God, you guys were gone for a long time down under, so it’s great to have you back up topside.
Karen Stollznow (02:59):
Yeah, it’s great to be back. Although from our last, we had three flights over the course of about 30 hours, and I still have a little bit of hearing loss in my right ear, so I’m going to try and get into see an ENT. So even now as I’m talking to, everything’s like I’m talking into a tin can.
Matt Baxter (03:17):
It is good to be back in Denver, Colorado. But right after we got back, we embarked on another huge journey to Laramie, Wyoming.
Karen Stollznow (03:26):
Oh, it was a much bigger trip. Yeah.
Matt Baxter (03:28):
Huge, huge trip. As people are telling me that there’s been no trip like this ever taken before. And it’s
Karen Stollznow (03:37):
The best trip.
Matt Baxter (03:38):
Best trip ever is very classy
Karen Stollznow (03:40):
Than any other trip.
Matt Baxter (03:43):
But yeah, it was very interesting trip. And we got to see the Lincoln Memorial. Is it on tour again? But the Wyoming version? The Wyoming version. And it is still cool. It’s still very cool, but it’s not quite the massiveness of the normal Lincoln memorial we think about. But we had a great time there. And of course, we’re always looking for interesting things and kind of ghost stories and things like that at places we go and laramie’s full of them. But we happened upon a man who creates eyeglasses using antique frames like hundreds of years old frames.
Blake Smith (04:28):
Whoa. He makes haunted eyeglasses.
Matt Baxter (04:30):
Haunted eyeglasses.
Karen Stollznow (04:31):
Yes, they
Matt Baxter (04:32):
Would be. So it gives you a completely new perspective on hauntings. It really does,
Karen Stollznow (04:37):
Quite literally. Which has nothing to do whatsoever with our topic for today.
Blake Smith (04:44):
Well, I mean, you do need eyes to see ghost photos, so there is that
Matt Baxter (04:48):
Sometimes glasses,
(04:48)
but sometimes that mightn’t help though.
Blake Smith (04:51):
Yeah, maybe spectacles deceased. Ah, there you go.
Karen Stollznow (04:55):
Yeah. But the reason we’re wanting to talk today about viral ghost photos, that’s our topic. I guess all the time, these images are coming up, so we’re not talking about the classics like the brown lady or
Blake Smith (05:09):
The Gray Lady or the
Karen Stollznow (05:10):
Squadron or the White Lady, the tulip staircase. So these ghost photos are so famous that they have names like that and their backstories and everything. So yeah, we’re not going to talk about those because we have previously talked about them. We thought we’d talk about, well, Matt specifically is going to talk about some viral ghost photographs that are doing the round at the moment on TikTok and YouTube and the news as well. It’s just surprising to see a lot of these stories get onto the news. They’re that unskeptical about these pictures.
Blake Smith (05:40):
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of that unskeptical reporting going around these days. I just was talking about it in the intro to last week’s episode. Some of the political texts going around is pretty clearly an urban legend, and it’s an urban legend that’s been around since the eighties. It really is really, really, really disappointing to me that the media doesn’t just call it for what it is. Look, this is an urban legend look, here’s an example from 19 85, 86, 83, instead of
Karen Stollznow (06:08):
Acting like don’t do their research.
Blake Smith (06:09):
No, they don’t. And it’s really disappointing. But quickly before we get into this, I just want to say, this is kind of weirdly on topic for my article that just came out in the British Skeptic Magazine where I’m talking about
Karen Stollznow (06:20):
Congratulations on that.
Blake Smith (06:21):
Thank you very much. 10 years of work in a one page doc. I don’t know. Still it’s hard work to get all those ideas distilled, but the main thing is we’re talking about virality in terms of it exponential growth online, not in the terms of mind virus. And I was really surprised they ran another article this week, which is an academic response to the idea that mind viruses even exist and they don’t. And there’s some beautiful evidence to support that. That’s not how that works. So I was really excited and it was kind of coincidental, but my timely, very timely. So I appreciate Michael Marshall putting that out. So I’ll put that in the show notes as a link. But we’re talking about virality in the sense of going exponentially spreading on the internet. So Matt, what you got for us?
Matt Baxter (07:10):
Well, I wanted to say in terms of that urban legend you were talking about, we’re hoping sometime this week Karen will have an article about that coming out on Cambridge Cambridge’s University Press. Yes,
Karen Stollznow (07:25):
Their blog. That’s right, yes. Their blog. It always takes some time to go through the production process. So yeah, hopefully next week. But I will share that around on social media and hope it goes viral like these photographs.
Matt Baxter (07:39):
Well, here’s the funniest thing about a lot of these photos is, other than some stuff that comes up on TikTok, there really aren’t as many viral ghost photos as there used to be, and I find that to be really interesting. Now, there’s two main categories for these photos, and one is fraud. They’re just out and out people trying to fool other people kind of photos. And then there’s what we would call paraia or a misunderstanding because our eyes see things sometimes that aren’t there. So we have a lot of misunderstandings when we look at photos often, and we think we see what’s not a ghost.
Karen Stollznow (08:29):
Well, we want to aid this episode too, because obviously this is a visual conversation talking about this topic. It’s visual. So we want to include these pictures in the show notes so that listeners can look at these as we’re discussing them if they’re not commuting or something.
Matt Baxter (08:45):
Right, right. So if you’re commuting, when you get home, look at the show notes.
Blake Smith (08:49):
There you go.
Matt Baxter (08:50):
And it’ll make so much more sense. So right off the bat, I want to talk about this one photo that appears to be like a large human being or an angel or a
Karen Stollznow (09:08):
Alien.
Matt Baxter (09:09):
Yeah, an alien or something floating over what appears to be a strip mall
Karen Stollznow (09:15):
As they do.
Matt Baxter (09:17):
Yes. Which death, it’s very
Blake Smith (09:20):
Ominous death. If I saw this, I would also pull over and take a photo. Yeah, for
Matt Baxter (09:24):
Sure. Yes, yes, yes. The only problem with this particular photo is when we look at it, we don’t get multiple pictures of this. We get one picture. Now, if you did see this, like you said, Blake, you would pull over and take a picture of it. There are a lot of cars driving in this picture and a lot of cars parked. So a lot of people should have seen this, and we should have a lot of pictures of this from different angles.
Karen Stollznow (09:50):
Good point.
Matt Baxter (09:50):
We have one photo. So this particular picture you look at and you can kind of tell that there’s some Photoshop going on in this or a photo
Karen Stollznow (10:03):
Editing can. For someone like me, I really can’t. I mean, I don’t immediately look at it and think this is a ghost. I look for natural explanations, but on the surface of things, I can’t spot it.
Matt Baxter (10:16):
Okay. Well, and that’s fine. That’s fine. Because what you can do is try to see if there’s anything that resembles out there already. This human-like form.
Karen Stollznow (10:28):
And
Matt Baxter (10:29):
There is because there’s a kite. I’ve
Karen Stollznow (10:36):
Seen the sicken photograph
Matt Baxter (10:37):
In the show notes. If you go down a little bit, you can see the kite and that’s it. The kite was photoshopped into it. There’s right underneath that I have a link. So if you want to go purchase this kite, you can as extra proof that it’s the kite that’s real and not photoshopped and not the picture of the strange human floating over the mall. I want you to know that the picture of the kite that I have there is not fake news that is actually real. That’s a real kite. You can go and buy it.
(11:09)
So… Pretty Cool.
Blake Smith (11:11):
(11:11)
So again, check the show notes for the images, but for our listeners who can’t do that, right now we’re talking about a vaguely humanoid shape with wispy feet. The feet ended like points and the hands are very, I don’t know, suggestive of hands without really being hands. And in this photo, the ghost photo or image photo or whatever this is, it’s all grayed out. So it’s like a gray, dark shape hovering above the shop, which would make it, I don’t know what, several hundred feet in length. If it were real, it’d be really, really big or close to you, or really super close, which that would also be creepy. But parts of it look like it’s floating in the clouds in an angelic, demonic way or something,
Karen Stollznow (11:59):
But it has the same arms and legs.
Blake Smith (12:01):
Oh, it’s a really close match to the cloud or to the kite. To the kite,
Karen Stollznow (12:05):
Yeah.
Matt Baxter (12:07):
And there’s lots of different variations of this kite that you can get. This particular one is called a spirit,
Karen Stollznow (12:16):
This
Matt Baxter (12:16):
Particular kite.
Karen Stollznow (12:17):
Very telling.
Matt Baxter (12:18):
Yeah. Gives it away.
Karen Stollznow (12:21):
Well, we’ve got lots of pictures, so we should probably move on to the next one.
Matt Baxter (12:24):
Yes, yes. This next one here is, it’s kind of a popular one wine. It’s of six ladies. They look to be anywhere from teenage to early twenties. And there is a young girl in the photo, probably three years old, I’m guessing that is, they’re all posing for the picture. But the little girl is crying her eyes out, and supposedly the reason she’s crying is because an unseen hand pushed her in the back. And then you can see between the legs of two of the girls, a very disturbing face looking out.
Karen Stollznow (13:09):
I see it
Blake Smith (13:11):
Among my favorite kind of photo, the face or the hand or the body. That shouldn’t be able to be where it’s shown. I love that.
Matt Baxter (13:21):
Exactly. Exactly. Now the thing is, here’s the problem with photos like this. It could be a multitude of things. You can’t say one solution to go solved. We solved it because there are many different solutions. Now, when you have a photo that has many different solutions, it suddenly makes the ghost solution that much less likely. It’s unlikely to begin with, but it’s that much less likely as soon as you have several solutions. Now, when I was a little kid, about three years old, I was sort of in this position of this little girl in the sense that I always wanted to be around my older siblings, and I was often mysteriously pushed in the back to get out of their way in which I would
Karen Stollznow (14:15):
Cry by ghost.
Matt Baxter (14:16):
I would cry my eyes out. So they didn’t want her in this photo, is what I’m guessing. And they pushed her and she’s crying. So I think it has nothing to do with an unseen hand other than the fact that the little girl probably wasn’t looking when the hand pushed her. But the thing is, is I’m able to, if I look hard enough to see eyes looking from practically between all of these silhouettes of legs, if I want to look
Karen Stollznow (14:45):
Hard enough distressing in their jeans.
Matt Baxter (14:47):
So the thing that bothers me is this face that is between these legs is kind of too good
Karen Stollznow (14:55):
Compared to the other marks.
Matt Baxter (14:57):
Either there’s another young sibling that was in the picture and playing around, or this was put in there, but it’s hard to say which, or it’s a ghost or a ghost, or it could be potentially a case of paraia where we are looking and we’re seeing a face because we are naturally wired to do so. When we’re born, the first thing we see is kind of our mother’s face, and we bond with that. When we look at clouds, we see faces. When we see any kind of just random
Announcer (15:35):
Pattern,
Matt Baxter (15:36):
Jesus on a, we see Jesus, we see Mary, we see Bernadette Peters on toast. We see all kinds of things. The bottom line is, the bottom line is that we don’t know. We’ve got one picture there. Were probably more than one picture taken. There was probably more one picture taken in this little setting here, but we only see this one. So we don’t see what’s before missing, what’s after it. So we have a real deficit of information. So all we can say is there’s a lot of solutions to this. It’s probably not a ghost.
Blake Smith (16:12):
I would add that there are people who are super inclined to see patterns. If you see patterns everywhere, they call that epithelia. And I don’t think it’s a binary. I think Abini is sort of a spectrum, and some people are more inclined to make connections than others. But on the far end of that spectrum is sort of the syncro mysticism world where literally everything is connected and it feels like madness. But a lot of people find comfort in finding all these connections. And this is everything from ghost photos to the Bible code, just seeing patterns everywhere,
Karen Stollznow (16:52):
Trying to make sense of our environments. Well,
Matt Baxter (16:54):
I often get comfort from madness. I thought they were a pretty good group. I like our house
Karen Stollznow (16:59):
In the middle of our
Matt Baxter (17:00):
Street beyond. I get a lot of comfort from madness often. But one of the interesting things here
Blake Smith (17:06):
Is welcome to the House of Fun, by the way. Yes, absolutely. Now you’ve come of age.
Matt Baxter (17:11):
Absolutely. But Athenia applies as well to sound, and we need to think about, we’re just here looking about at pictures, but when we talk about EVPs and things like that, people hear things that maybe aren’t necessarily what they think they’re hearing.
Karen Stollznow (17:32):
And that just makes me think of as soon as our son was born, suddenly I’m hearing a child crying or talking, God, every time I get into the shower,
Blake Smith (17:41):
My Yes.
Karen Stollznow (17:41):
And then on the other side of things, you’ve got someone like Frank Sump, the
Blake Smith (17:46):
Frank Franks,
Karen Stollznow (17:48):
Oh, Frank’s Frame fame. What was he, I think had a tap running one day and thought he could hear his son’s voice through the water, or could hear his wife calling him through water. So it’s interesting how different people will hear different things.
Blake Smith (18:03):
Well, yeah. And you get Richard, Richard prone to Richard Shaver using his welding machine and hearing voices from beneath the Earth. I mean, yeah. Yeah.
Karen Stollznow (18:11):
Although
Blake Smith (18:12):
We’ve talked before about when you see too many patterns, I call it crap athenia, where you’re making connections that are pretty obvious to most people are not really there, but I like that. Yeah, yeah,
Matt Baxter (18:23):
Yeah. Well, it happens a lot with blow dryers, Blake, when you’re drying your hair with blow
Blake Smith (18:28):
Dryer. Exactly. Frequent thing I do, for sure.
Matt Baxter (18:34):
My phone ring, you hear the phone ringing and you turn off the dryer, the phone ringing stops, you turn it back on, the phone rings again, but it’s not Not there. It’s not happening. Or you hear a police siren.
Karen Stollznow (18:46):
Well, moving on. We’ve got lots of pictures still.
Matt Baxter (18:47):
Yeah, yeah. So this next one is called the Blue Angel at the gas station.
Blake Smith (18:55):
Oh my God, this takes me back. Yeah. A lot of us are going to remember this.
Karen Stollznow (19:00):
Early two thousands,
Blake Smith (19:02):
I’m guessing 2008. This is just a guess.
Matt Baxter (19:05):
Yep. Right around then.
Blake Smith (19:06):
It predates Monster talk. But one of my first YouTube videos was a response to this. Yeah. Yeah.
Karen Stollznow (19:14):
Oh, yes. Yeah. Oh, this is going back a little.
Blake Smith (19:17):
Yeah, quite. It feels a little silly to look at it now. But anyway. Yeah. I
Matt Baxter (19:21):
Love this. And I’m curious, Blake, on some of the details of what you think about this, because I only partially agree with, say, captain Disillusion on this one, because he’s saying it’s blue because of the reflection off a blue wall.
Blake Smith (19:40):
I never really looked at the color issue. I just basically recreated, I basically did a video where I showed how that if the camera is focused on the distant, and you put something in the foreground really close, it becomes super blurry. It’s blur. Yeah.
Matt Baxter (19:55):
Yes. And yeah, I actually made a recreation of this as well, but in terms of the color, it’s a blue angel because the color on the camera itself is sort of calibrated more to the blue. And the reason you can see that is the reporter that did the story on this stands in front of the camera at one point, and her outfit is purple when she walks in the store and the regular news cameras are on her outfit is red.
Karen Stollznow (20:24):
Ah, that’s interesting.
Matt Baxter (20:25):
Pretty
Blake Smith (20:25):
Clear indicator of a color shift. Yeah. Yeah,
Matt Baxter (20:28):
Exactly. So yeah, I disagree that there’s reflection off a blue wall. It’s the camera problem itself, but this is absolutely a bug on the lens or on the glass or the casing of the camera. And it happens all time on these security cameras. We see it so much. I remember. And the bottom line is, you’re absolutely right that something close to the camera, when the camera is focused for a distance, something close to the camera will always be blurry. It’s not ghostly, it’s blurry.
Karen Stollznow (21:04):
Well, this is reminding me, Matt, of another video that you’ve recreated of a gym that had a
Matt Baxter (21:11):
Spider,
Karen Stollznow (21:12):
And that was a bug. And Blake has done that with the train. Was it the train video?
Matt Baxter (21:18):
Lots of, yeah, the phantom train with the spider web. Yeah. Yeah. We all remember that one. Go back through our YouTube channel if you want to see that.
Karen Stollznow (21:26):
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Matt Baxter (21:28):
But that was factor faked that that was on. And I was doing an investigation at a local restaurant called Yak Yeti, and on one of our cameras
Karen Stollznow (21:39):
That is eating dinner,
Matt Baxter (21:41):
I caught a spider swinging across the lens, and it looked like a ghost walking across in front of the camera. But it was definitely a spider swinging on a web. And the reason I know that is because the camera picked up mic on the camera picked up it screaming as it went by. So that’s all
Blake Smith (22:06):
I would say. Next time in Colorado, we need to go do some further investigation over Curry, for sure.
Matt Baxter (22:13):
Yes, absolutely. But this next one is, I thought initially looking at this picture that it was another case of something on the camera lens,
Karen Stollznow (22:26):
But it’s a shadow person that
Matt Baxter (22:27):
Just happened to look like a shadow person walking out into the street. But I was wrong. I was absolutely wrong. It is, if you watch the YouTube video that will be in the show notes, you will see a shadow person literally walking out into the street in
Announcer (22:44):
Front of cars and buses in
Matt Baxter (22:45):
Front of cars and being completely unaffected, bypass passing by cars. And that makes me feel, not know, but feel that this is a complete hoax.
Blake Smith (22:57):
Yeah, it looks like a hoax to me. I’m watching the same thing.
Matt Baxter (23:00):
Yeah. Because it doesn’t move like a human or anything like that. But the bottom line is if a camera could pick up a ghost, there are more dead people on this earth than there are live people. That’s true. And they would be picking up this everywhere. The streets would be covered with ghosts, with all these cameras everywhere, but they’re
Karen Stollznow (23:23):
Not, why this one?
Matt Baxter (23:24):
Why this one? To me, it says broad hoax, but I could be wrong. So now this next one, we have a picture of someone standing in front of a mine, a mine shaft, and in the background, it seems to be a cowboy in a long trench coat, maybe from the spaghetti Westerns C cleaned
Blake Smith (23:54):
Eastwood, for sure. Yeah. Got a duster and a cowboy hat. Yep.
Matt Baxter (23:57):
Yeah, yeah. And you totally see it because you’re primed to see it. That’s what you see.
Blake Smith (24:02):
Although we don’t know how tall that bush is. That’s exactly, is this cowboy six feet tall or six inches tall? I can’t tell
Matt Baxter (24:09):
Exactly, exactly. You’d really have a good frame of reference for it. But the bottom line is we’ve been primed to see a cowboy. We’ve been told there was a cowboy overlooking on the hill. So we completely ignored the fact that there’s a lot of rocks everywhere around here. That could be a rock sitting there. But how do I explain the cowboy hat? Well, I’ll get to that in a moment. But one thing about these mineshafts is there’s always a lot of junk around any mineshaft. There’s a lot of junk around. If you scroll down, you can see it at a mineshaft that’s not that far away. You see a old metal barrel with a sign that says, thieves will be prosecuted.
Karen Stollznow (24:54):
Very threatening sign
Matt Baxter (24:55):
The barrel has lots of bullet holes through it and everything
(24:59)
It comes to show that there are things that if sitting up on a hill, if there’s things leaning up against it or whatever, you may not be able to recognize exactly what it is, because you don’t have the depth perception. You can’t tell. Now, as for the cowboy hat, if you kind of zoom in on that cowboy hat, it also kind of looks a little bit like a bird landing. Well, gee, how lucky would you have to get, get a shot of a bird landing? Well, I looked up bird landing on Google, and there’s a ton of pictures of birds landing because birds land multiple times a day, and there’s a lot of birds out there. And a bird landing looks a little bit like a cowboy hat.
Karen Stollznow (25:42):
It does.
Matt Baxter (25:42):
If you had a
Karen Stollznow (25:43):
Bird, it’s still plausible than a ghost.
Matt Baxter (25:44):
Yeah. I’m not saying that’s what it is, but it is more plausible than a ghost. So a bird landing on a rock, a stump, a piece of junk or whatever, could look a little bit like this.
Karen Stollznow (25:59):
Well, as you were saying before, with the other photograph, we don’t have anything that precedes this or follows this. So perhaps in a following picture or a preceding picture, it’s not there.
Blake Smith (26:09):
That is always annoying. In fact, Richard Wiseman years ago, ran a ghost hunting website where basically people posted ghost photos and people tried to explain them, and oh my God, I had so much fun on that site. There was so many. And one of the main
Karen Stollznow (26:28):
Great idea,
Blake Smith (26:29):
One of the main tactics was to try to find other photos of the same site from different angles. And some really easy explanations came from just realizing that, oh, that’s a rock. Oh, that’s a painting inside the building. That sort of thing that you couldn’t tell from the alleged ghost photo, but you could easily tell from a different perspective at a different time. So yeah, I’d love to see some different photos of this site. That would be one of the first things I’d want to find.
Matt Baxter (26:57):
And I dug and I couldn’t find anything, but I know both you and I have done that. We’ve solved things by doing just that. Then people don’t think about it. They only look at the one picture.
Blake Smith (27:08):
They
Matt Baxter (27:08):
Don’t think about, well, would a different picture show what that is better?
Blake Smith (27:14):
Exactly.
Matt Baxter (27:15):
Or it’s those kind of
Karen Stollznow (27:16):
Things. You’ve talked about the Brook Forest in before. Do you want to try to quickly tell us that anecdote about the photograph and the group that came through that you were educating?
Matt Baxter (27:30):
Oh, sure. Sure. So there was a ghost hunting group that wanted to go into the Brook Forest Inn, which is in the mountain town of Evergreen here in Colorado. And it’s got lots of ghost stories associated with it. The owner said, you cannot come in unless you take a ghost hunting course. We don’t care how experienced you are. You have to take a ghost hunting course from Matthew Baxter. So I thought, that’s really cool that they said that. So it’s like, okay, set it up and explained how to do things. And they ignored everything we said. So they went through just snapping shots of everything
Karen Stollznow (28:12):
In the dark.
Matt Baxter (28:13):
In the dark. And they sent us one photo, and it was one photo only, and I can send this photo to you so you’ll have it for the show notes, but it looked like a very mysterious lion was there in the hotel, and it was really kind of scary looking or some kind of weird distorted dog or something. But there was this vicious looking animal that was in the dark coming out at you, kind of, and they couldn’t explain it. And we’re like, well, send us pictures from before and after of this picture. Yeah,
Blake Smith (28:56):
Threw obvious. So we threw all those away because they didn’t have a lion in them, you see? Exactly. So they threw away all the other
Matt Baxter (29:04):
Pictures,
Karen Stollznow (29:04):
Or maybe they did then that’s the problem.
Matt Baxter (29:09):
So it’s like I’m really face palming myself at this point. So I went through the inn and looked for what it could have been. And you know what I found? Found a picture hanging on the wall of a statue of a lion.
Karen Stollznow (29:31):
They took a picture of a picture,
Matt Baxter (29:33):
They took a picture in the dark, and then were shocked to find that this was actually a picture hanging on the wall of a lion.
Karen Stollznow (29:40):
Did they You though? That’s what I wonder.
Matt Baxter (29:43):
What did they, oh, I made it so they couldn’t deny it, and they felt really smart after I showed it to ’em. But it’s just people get so excited about finding a ghost and how special that would be that they find it that more important than paying attention to the facts.
Karen Stollznow (30:08):
Sure. Yeah.
Blake Smith (30:09):
Well, I mean, think about how many times, I mean, we’re talking about ghosts, but another category of this kind of photo is religious photos of Virgin Mary or saints appearing in
Announcer (30:21):
Photos, Mary and apparitions.
Blake Smith (30:23):
Boy. Oh my gosh. People want that to be true, and they’re very motivated for that to be true. And when you post even a pretty obvious fake, you’ll find a lot of people who find it a wonderful confirmation of their preexisting belief. And it’s like you can’t remove bias from the explanations. It is part of the story. Did you ever see,
Matt Baxter (30:46):
I took a picture of a pancake years ago, and it had Osama bin Laden in it, and I can send you that picture. It’s so convincing,
Announcer (30:56):
Terrorist,
Matt Baxter (30:57):
And if you look, you can see like a skull elsewhere. But Osama, Osama bin Laden is the most important thing in the picture. And I’m positive that that’s real.
Blake Smith (31:08):
This waffle was an inside job. That’s what I’ve,
Karen Stollznow (31:12):
But yeah, there are lots of pictures that I think we’ve spoken about before when we did the show for YouTube on Marion Apparitions. Do you guys remember we talked about the Sydney Mary, Virgin Mary? Yeah. She was a fence post or something, somewhere in Waverley. I can’t remember exactly where it was Bondi Beach around that area. But at certain times of the day, you would see her, and then the rest of the time you wouldn’t. And it was basically a fence post, but it was a fantastic angle. And you’ve got lots of those images. There was one on the Chicago, some underpass
Blake Smith (31:44):
Chicago,
Karen Stollznow (31:46):
Lots of them
Blake Smith (31:47):
On the fence about Mary. Right.
Karen Stollznow (31:51):
That would’ve been a great title. Okay. Well, moving on. We’ve still got a few more to look at. We
Matt Baxter (31:57):
Do. We do. So this next one is interesting because it’s a couple that they’re sitting. It is at night, and they’re sitting kind of up against this sort of retaining wall kind of thing.
Blake Smith (32:12):
Yeah. It looks like a really old place that they’re at. It looks like made of Old Stone,
Karen Stollznow (32:16):
The castle, or
Matt Baxter (32:18):
Yeah, there were steps going up on side, and they had someone take a picture of them. And this is obviously not the only photo from this, because she’s not ready. She’s looking at her fingernails and so is he. And they’re completely not ready. And there’s a ghost standing next to him. So they were not ready for the shot, and the ghost was ready. But
Karen Stollznow (32:43):
The ghost is always ready.
Matt Baxter (32:44):
This cannot be the only photo from this series here. But what it is, when you look at it, if you know anything about photography, this was a slow shutter speed and somebody was walking by, or somebody was also supposed to be in the picture, and
Blake Smith (33:01):
They just moved a little bit. But Matt, I don’t remember anyone else being there when the photos were developed. This is what I saw.
Matt Baxter (33:07):
Yeah.
Blake Smith (33:08):
How do you explain that? So
Matt Baxter (33:08):
Should we talk about that because Yes, I absolutely agree with that. The power of the backstory, the power of those kind of things. If you have things like that going on, that kind of backstory, it paints a picture that’s away from skepticism, and you have this assumed honesty of these people.
Announcer (33:37):
Sure.
Matt Baxter (33:37):
So they’re filling in the blanks for the more sensational possibility here. Well, I don’t want to say possibility, but story, and that people assume honesty when they’re hearing these very earnest backstories, but it’s just not good enough for them to say, oh, well, I don’t remember anyone in the picture. If that person was a little bit behind you, you might not have seen it. Or if it’s like multiple pictures were taken, it’s like, oh, wait, there’s people walking by. Whatever. You don’t tend to always remember those things.
Karen Stollznow (34:15):
Of course.
Matt Baxter (34:16):
So it can be honesty in some cases that they literally didn’t remember someone being there.
Blake Smith (34:24):
True.
Matt Baxter (34:24):
But this is obviously some sort of landmark where people are going to be walking by, so maybe they didn’t remember anybody that they knew personally. Just a strange, that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of human activity. And of course, even the quality of this picture is terrible, but you can tell that that is a slow shutter speed of someone walking by, and it’s pretty simple.
Karen Stollznow (34:53):
Makes sense.
Matt Baxter (34:53):
Our final picture here that I want to talk about is a much older picture. It is claimed to be 1900, and it is of linen workers in Belfast.
Blake Smith (35:06):
So the Collectivists got it. Okay.
Matt Baxter (35:08):
Yeah, exactly. Now, the thing is, on one of the young lady that submitted this to an Irish website said that this woman on the right was her grandmother, and she had never noticed before this mysterious hand on her shoulder.
Karen Stollznow (35:31):
Okay. Is spooky.
Matt Baxter (35:33):
That is spooky. But for those of us that know anything about Photoshop, there was a heyday of being able to pirate Photoshop between pretty much 2000 and 2010. And the kind of photo trickery that many of us would do becomes very obvious in this photo. If you look in the upper right hand corner, you can see the repetition of copy and paste trying to make it look like there’s nothing behind
Blake Smith (36:09):
This using the rubber stamp tool circa 1996.
Matt Baxter (36:15):
But if you take it a little bit farther, like I said, this really became a thing in the early two thousands. Now, what’s stunning about this, this picture was submitted to this website, 2005, so the timing works out, but so we have this picture, and in this picture there’s 10 women, but if you look a little harder, you suddenly see that it’s not the original picture. There are 15 women in this other picture.
Karen Stollznow (36:48):
Yeah. That is so strange because I, I’ve only ever seen the one, the first one that you have here with the 10 women. Yeah. Wow. That’s missing.
Matt Baxter (36:59):
Let’s go back to this one. With the 10 women, you get a little cleaner picture. Now you’ve got the woman that has the hand on her shoulder, right to her left. It looks like Kathleen. And it looks like she time traveled.
Karen Stollznow (37:18):
It does. Blake’s wife.
Blake Smith (37:22):
Yeah. You’re not wrong.
Matt Baxter (37:23):
She time traveled and she just heard, she time traveled right after she heard Blake say a pun.
Blake Smith (37:30):
I’ll have to say she even looks even more like Kathleen’s grandmother. Oh my God. She looks like
Karen Stollznow (37:35):
Kathleen’s grandmother.
Blake Smith (37:35):
Really? Wow. I mean, she’s an absolute ringer. An absolute ringer for my wife’s the
Karen Stollznow (37:42):
Latian.
Blake Smith (37:43):
Yeah, it’s the Lian face. She’s got that whole, yeah.
Matt Baxter (37:46):
So if you could do me a favor, Blake, and see if Kathleen has any old pictures of her grandmother as a linen worker.
Blake Smith (37:53):
Yes. Because then
Matt Baxter (37:56):
If we could get a better picture of this, that would be great. Okay. But here’s another problem with this picture with the 15 girls. Okay. So you still have the mysterious hand on the shoulder, but the girl on the top row, on the far right looks wrong in the picture skirt.
Announcer (38:14):
The skirt tall.
Matt Baxter (38:15):
The skirt is different from everyone, and it looks like it can be photoshopped a bit. There’s some things kind of missing there.
Karen Stollznow (38:22):
She’s standing aside from everyone. The rest of the are all kind of huddled together, and she’s off the side. And even
Matt Baxter (38:28):
Her face and everything, it doesn’t look right. And even the background behind her is different from everyone else.
Blake Smith (38:34):
Oh, yeah, I see what’s going on here. Yeah, exactly.
Matt Baxter (38:37):
There could be some chemical problems in the developing that can have that happen,
Blake Smith (38:41):
But it is worth, I think this is super important, especially for things like this. And for Goddard Squadron photo, it’s important to remember that the modern software of Photoshop is named that because of the techniques that they’re making digitally that recreate the things that people used to do mechanically in the photo studio. And that included literally painting or drawing or taking pieces from one the negative and pasting them into another negative,
Karen Stollznow (39:13):
And
Blake Smith (39:13):
Then reshooting. So I mean, yeah, I could see where this could be the literal result of old timey Photoshop in the analog sense.
Matt Baxter (39:23):
Yes. Yes. Because here’s another thing that I think is kind of strange, and that is if we’re talking about a linen factory, I don’t think these are the only women that worked there. And the aspect ratio kind of looks wrong to me, a little too square. And on shots like this, they tended to be a little more landscape. So I feel like we are missing more. And the fact that this only came out in 2005, I find to be superior, suspicious.
Blake Smith (40:00):
Yeah. Well, it’s also worth remembering that in this age, they would often take multiple photos and then use scissors and other tools to put together the best version.
Matt Baxter (40:11):
That’s where cut and paste came from.
Blake Smith (40:13):
Literally, cut and paste came from. Exactly. And if you don’t know that, you might think, well, this is impervious to manipulation because it predates digital photography. No, that’s not how that works at all. In fact, if we go back to looking at Mumbler work and other sort of early photographic manipulation, I mean, these techniques were within 30 years of photography being invented,
Karen Stollznow (40:38):
Widespread,
Matt Baxter (40:39):
Right? So the thing is, is I’m not saying that what we’re implying here is the solution because there’s a lot of different possibilities on this, but it kind of points to the fact that that’s not a ghost. That hand is not from a ghost.
Blake Smith (40:58):
Big picture question. So we’ve talked before, and actually I guess over the course of the show, lots of times about the question of whether or not photography or video is ever going to be useful for proving the existence of the paranormal or persistence of life after death or any of these things. And I think with the advent of these digital tools and artificial intelligence making photos out of composite information, I just wonder, have we lost completely the idea that photographs can be evidentiary?
Matt Baxter (41:41):
Yeah. I think that there’s got to be a lot of constraints around that kind of evidence. If you’ve got a very secure sort of security camera that can’t be tampered with, and you’re getting it from the original source, you see things like that. There was one, the T stealing ghost in Great Britain, when you see this tea box of tea float in this grocery store, in this drug store that was taken off security camera footage with an iPhone.
Karen Stollznow (42:21):
That was in Whitby too, I think, wasn’t it?
Matt Baxter (42:23):
Yes.
Blake Smith (42:24):
We
Karen Stollznow (42:24):
Talked a lot about Whitby.
Blake Smith (42:25):
That’s the item floated straight across from one shelf to another. Is that the one you’re talking about?
Matt Baxter (42:30):
Yes. Yeah.
Karen Stollznow (42:31):
Yeah. It was too good.
Matt Baxter (42:32):
Yeah. So the thing is, it was not an original source, and none of these things are original source. And that’s where we get photo degradation, which really adds into the paraia. And that’s like some of these pictures, they are so many generations from the original photo that it’s a bit like the telephone game. You have the original person at the end of the line whispering something into someone’s ear. By the time you get to the end of the line, it’s something completely different than what was originally said. That is the same thing with photo degradation. The more you degrade the photo, the more you’re going to see things that aren’t there. And this goes for window reflections. Oh, there’s a face in that window. Well, no, that was the face of you taking the picture. There’s all kinds of problems in this. The
Karen Stollznow (43:23):
Myrtles plantation photograph as well of Chloe.
Matt Baxter (43:26):
Yes, yes. Absolutely. Yeah. The degradation in that, because that picture was taken, what, in like 1980 something?
Karen Stollznow (43:36):
I think it was in the nineties.
Matt Baxter (43:37):
Nineties. So there’s no reason for it to be like black and white. The picture was in color
Karen Stollznow (43:43):
When it was taken rain. Exactly.
Matt Baxter (43:45):
So they really degraded it and degraded it. So you couldn’t tell that it was a laundry mangler.
Karen Stollznow (43:52):
Well, that’s our theory. Yeah.
Matt Baxter (43:53):
Well, it is our theory and being able to say, I don’t know is very important.
Karen Stollznow (43:58):
Yeah, true. But it’s the best theory I’ve ever come across. But I guess we should close off pretty soon, but I have just one final, another big picture question that our son Blade asked, because here we are. Last night we were looking at ghost photographs on YouTube and talking about people committing fraud and creating these photographs and inserting ghosts and doing all these kinds of things that you’ve been discussing. But why do people do this? I mean, it’s one thing if people think they’re seeing something in an image, and but why do people commit when it comes to photographs?
Blake Smith (44:32):
It’s fun for a lot of us. I think it’s just hilarious. It’s key questions
Karen Stollznow (44:36):
For Matt.
Blake Smith (44:36):
It’s very funny. Yeah.
Matt Baxter (44:40):
Well, and that’s absolutely, I would say the number one reason is it is a very teenage mindset to do it. It’s hilarious. It is fun. How many people can you fool? It’s like a lot of guys when they’re young will flex their bicep and show you how big their bicep is, but behind their bicep, they’re pushing it up with their other hand.
Blake Smith (45:02):
They’ll spoil the trick. I’m trying to make my kids think the workout’s really paying off. So
Matt Baxter (45:07):
Yeah, it’s hilarious to do that. It’s a joke. You’re ready for people to go, oh, wait a minute. And when they don’t, it’s hilarious.
Karen Stollznow (45:17):
But
Matt Baxter (45:17):
On top of that, it is also you’ve got pious fraud where you truly believe in something, but you can’t produce the evidence that, and you truly believe in it. You will produce evidence just to get other people to believe the way you do. And there’s a lot of reasons, and there’s just some bad psychological reasons to do it. And then there’s just having fun. Sometimes there’s no real, unless you’re making money off it. A lot of people do this more for attention than they do for money, but money does come into it as
Blake Smith (45:53):
Well. So in the end, if we’re looking for the question of whether or not ghost photos can prove the existence of ghosts, we have to answer in the negative
Karen Stollznow (46:10):
And cut.
Matt Baxter (46:15):
Cut and paste.
(46:17)
Exactly.
(46:22)
MONSTERTALK!
(46:23)
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about Monsters. I’m Blake Smith.
Karen Stollznow (46:28):
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Blake Smith (46:30):
You just heard a conversation with Matt Baxter and Karen Stollznow and myself about analyzing viral ghost photos. I will always have a special place in my heart for this kind of work, but as technology improves and people get better and better at faking these things digitally, I have to wonder if they will eventually lose all their power to fascinate. I hope not. But in the meantime, remember that when a photo looks too good to be true, it probably is. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of MonsterTalk. Each episode, we strive to bring you the very best in monster related content with a focus on bringing scientific skepticism into the conversation. If you enjoy Monster Talk, we now have a variety of ways to support the show, all with convenient links@monstertalk.org slash support. That’s monstertalk.org/support. We have links there to our Patreon page as well as a donation button.
(47:28)
Another great way to support the show is to buy books from our Amazon monster talk wishlist, which directly helps us with our research. We love used books very much so. Don’t feel compelled to buy new ones. And we love Kindle, so we can share our digital libraries with each other. And finally, without spending any money at all, you can support us by leaving a positive review at iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Positive reviews help keep us visible in iTunes, which is a great way to help us find new listeners. And please share our show on your favorite social media platforms, monster Talks. Theme music is by peach stealing monkeys. Analyzing ghost photos always makes me “shutter to think.”
Announcer (48:57):
This has been a monster house presentation.