I’m always very suspicious of photographs of ghosts, especially in this day and age of apps and computer software that can let you manipulate photos in any way you want. Perhaps one of the easiest things to do is take an image of a person, make it transparent, and superimpose it onto another photograph. Bam. Instant ghost photo. Or, if your PhotoShop skills aren’t up to snuff, just download an app. I’m not saying this woman altered this photo, but if her teenage daughter is like most teenagers, she’s got some cell phone savvy and I wouldn’t put it past her to put one over on dear old mum. Maybe she should have come clean before it went into the paper, though.
“There’s ways of killing yourself without killing yourself.”
A Cleveland-area woman who found a couple of ghostly figures in a photo taken with her cell phone said she’s not freaked out about it.
“To me, it was awesome,” said Marcella Davis. “It’s not scary to me.”
David took the photo about 4 p.m. April 15 at Cleveland High School, where she was trying to get a shot of her nephew, who attends the school.
“He spun around so I couldn’t take his picture, so I got the back of his head,” she said. “I didn’t try to take no more because he didn’t let me.”
Davis, the mother of two teenagers, said she doesn’t understand much about the smart phone she used to take the photos, so that evening, her daughter was showing her how she could zoom in and out.
As her daughter zoomed in on the photo of her nephew, she could see more detail.
“She goes, ‘Mom, look at this.’ I was like, ‘What?’ and she showed me the picture of the ghost,” Davis said. “You could see straight through it.”
A man in a light-colored suit with bell-bottom pants and a dark shirt is standing near the chain-link fence, and a woman, who is less distinct, can be seen behind him.
Because of the man’s clothing and hair style, he appears to be from the 1970s, Davis said.
A life-long resident of the Cleveland area, Davis said she has never had any other encounters with ghosts, but believes it could be possible.
“To me, it’s not something that’s not normal,” she said. “People pass away all the time. Until you’re the one who passes away, you don’t honestly know what happens to you.”
While it’s possible to alter photos with cellphone apps, such as GhostCam Spirit Photography for Android phones or Ghost Cam for iPhones, Davis said she wouldn’t begin to know how to use them.
“I can promise you I did not make that picture up,” she said.
Again, I’m not calling this woman a liar. Maybe there was an error with her camera. Maybe her daughter is messing with her. Maybe the woman did in fact, make these photos up. But just because someone says they didn’t do something doesn’t mean they didn’t do it.
