While I am usually pretty skeptical about security camera “ghosts,” I must admit that this story has me a bit intrigued. An Atlanta mother who lost her son to a drug overdose in 2016 is claiming that her security system alerted her to a “person” that was spotted in her kitchen via security camera, and she says she believes it’s the ghost of her deceased son. And while I can’t offhandedly debunk it outright, there are still lots of things to consider before we accept this as an actual ghost. My thoughts after the article…
An Atlanta woman, still grieving the drug-related death of her son in 2016, said a ghostly figure in her kitchen triggered an alert on her phone and was clearly visible in video from the home’s Nest security camera.
Jennifer Hodge, 57, said in a post on social media that she was watching TV in her bedroom with her 21-year-old daughter last week when an intruder alert sounded on her phone.
When the pair looked at the video, they said they saw a male figure dressed in what appeared to be pajamas that looked just like Hodge’s 23-year-old son, who died two years ago of a drug overdose.
“For everyone who knows what my son looks like, they know that this looks just like him beard and all!” Hodge said in the post.
Hodge said, while she was shocked at seeing the eerie image, she was also comforted by the thought that her son is at peace.
“We have no clue what to think about all of this, but so happy to be able to know my beautiful boy is always with us!” she said.
Hodge told at least one news organization that she has never seen a ghost before and has not seen one since.
As I said, the photo is impressive, and there’s no immediate explanation for what this is. But there are a few considerations to be made here. First and foremost, as with most paranormal photographs, it is blurry and grainy, and making out any actual detail is tricky. It’s hard to tell where the actual image ends and
matrixing begins. The photo is also in black and white, which just further confuses the issue. It
looks like a human figure, but it doesn’t mean that it actually is one. The figure itself seems a bit more fuzzy than the surroundings, so that is interesting to me, at least.
Aside from the clarity (or lack thereof), we need to take into account the technology. This is a pretty low-resolution digital camera, and digital cameras are notorious for bizarre-looking anomalies (e.g., orbs). Sometimes when digital cameras receive sensory input that they can’t focus on or properly render, it will just do the best it can, with some weird results. Again, add in some
pareidolia, and suddenly there’s a ghost on camera. Another technological possibility is that it’s a latent afterimage of someone who was in the kitchen shortly before the alert was sent. The mother or her daughter could have walked by quickly, the camera could have had a delay in processing, and sent a blurry partial image of someone who was there previously. A long shot perhaps, but more reasonable than the “ghost” explanation.
There is also the possibility that this is a hoax. I doubt any mother would hoax something like this involving her own son who had tragically passed away, but it’s something we also need to consider as a possibility.
All that being said, I still don’t know what this is. The figure looks very thin, whereas her son looked to be a bigger guy. It also looks to be wearing a dress or maybe a hospital gown. And the “beard” is only really visible with lots of tweaking in a photo editor, so that gives me pause as well. Overall a very interesting find, but like most paranormal evidence, it’s just too ambiguous to get all that excited about.
