I’d like to share a photo that I've been thinking a lot about recently. When I first shot this photo, I thought it contained the true image of a ghost. While on a trip to Plymouth, my mother booked us a ghost tour of the town’s local haunts. If I recall correctly, it was just us and the spectral tour guide. I seem to vaguely remember going to some ship that was parked near the rock, but I know that we encountered no spirits at that point. At the end of the tour, however, we walked through a cemetery that was appropriately full of old New England tombstones. I snapped photos furiously while walking through the cemetery - with every intention of examining them further when we had retired to the hotel room for the evening. Our tour ended with little ceremony, and we returned to the hotel.
In the room, I took some time examining the photos made with the family’s Nikon Coolpix. Somewhere in the mix was the photo that is included in this blog post. This photo, with the spectral presence in the dead center, struck me to my core. I zoomed in and saw - under an apparent shock of hair - something that could only be the face of some sort of spirit. The orb was in line with everything I knew about spirit photography, and the form bore a passing resemblance to a character in a block breaking game that I would often play on my mother’s flip phone. My mother agreed with my spectral conclusion. I made a zoomed in copy of the photo and laid the matter to rest.
As these things went in the pre-social media era, I soon forgot about the photograph. The camera became dated, the SD card found itself in some strange place, and I was only left with the vague memory of having once photographed a ghost.
While clipping my nails last year, however, I happened upon the SD card - tucked deep inside the ornate glass which contains the family nail clippers. Plugging it into my computer, I was surprised to see a year’s worth of images that I assumed lost to time. Tucked between them was the spirit evidence I was at one time so convinced was true. The ghost, however, had become the dust orb - with its hair made of a grainy American flag - that it had always been. I felt embarrassed on behalf of my 12 year old self for having so clearly misjudged this situation.
Taking a quick look around the modern ghost photographs that are bandied around in the television and internet of the early digital camera era, my young self may be forgiven for the misreading of this situation. The relative ease of nighttime photography brought about by digital cameras led to a revolutionary moment in which amateur ghost hunters could make hundreds of images with the hopes that one would contain an unexplainable anomaly. When these images are made with flash photography in haunted (dusty) locations, these anomalies can quickly become a phenomenon that few people care to debunk.
I will take a moment to do just that. Orbs are a common anomaly that occur when camera flash reflects off of either bugs, condensation, or dust particles. This is most common on point-and-shoot cameras due to the proximity between the camera’s lens and the built-in flash (as opposed to the elevated off-camera flash common to (D)SLR cameras). The angle is more conducive for the type of reflective light process that creates orbs. As alluded to earlier, the under populated locations that many people consider to be haunted tend to be dustier than locations where people are normally taking photographs. The orbs are not as common in the places where people are usually taking photographs because people don’t tend to be taking photos in dusty, bug riddled, or rainy locations. They can then maintain a seemingly rare and mysterious condition by being a seemingly difficult to reproduce feature of a haunted location.
Next time someone cares to show you an image of an orb, please have more wherewithal than my fourteen year-old self. Does it really make more sense for the image to be of a ghost than a piece of dust?
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