“Ghost boy” appeared in a widely-publicized photo in late February 2010.
The story was: A British builder took the photo at a school in England that was being demolished. When he reviewed the pictures he took of the demolotion process, he saw the image of a little boy in one photo, and the builder claimed that the hairs on the back of his neck went up.
The school was Anlaby Primary School, near Hull, East Yorkshire, in the U.K. Part of the original 1936 building was being demolished. (The rest of the school is still in use.) The site has long had a reputation for being haunted.
At least two major UK newspapers considered the picture newsworthy, The Sun and the Daily Mail. (Click on the Daily Mail screenshot, below, to see the full-sized image and article.)
However, this photo was a fake… one of many hoaxes we’re seeing online.
This particular photo was created with a 99-cent iPod/iPhone app called Ghost Capture. The image of the little boy is at the center of the app screenshot below, in the second photo row from the bottom.
iTunes sells this app for 99 cents
This kind of nonsense is among the reasons why we don’t analyze or critique “ghost photos” for readers.
People send us photos all the time; reporters and journalists are especially eager to get us to say that a “ghost picture” is real, when they know it isn’t. (They want us to look gullible or stupid.)
While we want to assure readers when their genuine photo shows an image that they find comforting, we can’t confirm that ghostly images in pictures are really ghosts.
Any photo can be made to look like it has an anomaly. From 99-cent iPhone apps to Adobe Photoshop, these pictures can look utterly fake or convincing. Anyone can be fooled.
We’ve said it before: A ghost photo is only as reliable as the expertise and integrity of the person who took it. (See my article, False Anomalies in Ghost Photos.)
If you want to learn how to evaluate ghost photographs, browse Hollow Hill’s section, Ghost Photography 101.
Also, I’m currently finishing my book of that same name (Ghost Photography 101) and it should be available at Amazon.com by the middle of 2010.
Generally, ghost photos don’t show crisp images of people. At best, the ghostly images are blurry, indistinct, and sometimes difficult to identify unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. (The same can be said for many EVP recordings.)
Though I’m delighted when I see an eerie image in my own ghost photos, at least 80% of “ghost photographs” can be explained as tricks of the light or something natural, rather than an actual haunting.
It’s smart to rule out the normal explanations, before placing ghost photos online.
Um… what about, if a 12 year-old took a picture of her self in a rent cabin and when she looked at, there was something in the air behind her with a raincoat on and buckets for hands?? Also it was right next to a window that was like 10 feet in the air