The best evidence a paranormal investigator can hope for is capturing a full bodied apparition.  This is a rare occurrence during an actual investigation.  Some of the best photos of ghosts ever captured were done by accident.  With the average five year old today being able to photoshop a picture that can fool experts, let’s take a look at some of the best ghost photos history has to offer us.

The Brown Lady

In 1936 Hubert C. Provand was a photographer working for Country Life magazine.  He and his assistant traveled to Norfolk, England to take photos of Raynham Hall for an upcoming issue when he inadvertently captured this shot:


The apparition is believed to be the ghost of Lady Dorothy Walpole, the sister of the first Prime Minister.  She was the second wife of Charles Townshend.  When Charles discovered she had been having an affair he locked her in her room where she remained until she died of smallpox.

Freddy Jackson

This pic shows a squadron of the Royal Air Force. Upon closer examination an extra face was discovered partially hidden behind the fourth man from the left in the top row.  The face bore an uncanny resemblance to Freddy Jackson, a squadron member who had died two days before the photo was taken.  He had been killed in a freak accident by an airplane propeller and his funeral was being held that day.  Perhaps unaware that he was dead, he decided to show up for the scheduled photograph.


Bachelor’s Grove

Bachelor’s Grove Cemetary in Illinois is considered by many to be one of the most haunted sites in the country.  Mari Huff, a member of the Ghost Research Society, snapped this photo in 1991.  According to Mari and others present there was no woman visible at the time the picture was taken. 


The Backseat Ghost

In 1959 Mabel Chinnery spent a day at the cemetery visiting the graves of her relatives.  To finish off a roll of film she snapped a picture of her husband who was waiting in the car.  When she had the film developed it appeared her husband hadn’t been waiting alone.  Mabel said the apparition in the backseat looked just like her deceased mother.


Tulip Staircase Ghost

Retired clergyman Rev. Ralph Hardy visited the National Museum in Greenwich, England in 1966.  In the Queen’s House section of the museum he snapped a shot of the Tulip Staircase.  Prior to the picture being taken footsteps, doors slamming, and disembodied children’s voices chanting could be heard.  Allegedly 300 years ago a maid was thrown from the top of the stairs, falling 50 feet to her death.

Moundsville Shadow Man

On May 7, 2004 Polly Gear was with a group of paranormal investigators at the abandoned West Virginia State Penitentiary
in Moundsville.  While walking down a hallway toward the cafeteria she heard a noise.  She turned on her flashlight and saw the form of a shadow person at the end of the hall.  The beam of the flashlight went through the apparition, which noticed the light and dashed through a nearby door.  Hoping to capture a photo of what she had seen Polly started walking backward and readied her camera.  As soon as the flash was ready she snapped this shot.

Polly goes on to describe being about 10 feet away when she first saw the shadow person.  It was very tall, and the black form appeared to be moving like static on a television, only black.  It seemed to be intelligent, recognizing the light on it and Polly’s presence.  After taking the photo she went to make sure that no one was in the area.  Experts who have analyzed the photo say there is no way it could be Polly’s own shadow casting against the end of the hall. 

Toys ‘R’ Us Ghost

The toy store chain is notorious for its locations being haunted.  Such seems to be the case with the Sunnyvale, CA Toys ‘R’ Us.  This photo was taken during the filming of a television show called “That’s Incredible.” 

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No one was standing where the figure is on the left
Several psychics, including Sylvia Brown, have visited the store and ascertained that the spirit's name is John.  The story goes that John was a preacher and ranch hand in the 1880s on the property where the store now sits.  Most believe he bled to death in an accident while chopping wood.  Store employees tell of John following people into the ladies’ room and turning the water faucets on, throwing dolls off the shelf, and whispering worker’s names in their ears. 

Grandpa’s Ghost

Denise Russell took this picture of her grandmother in 1997.  They had just moved her grandmother into an assisted living facility for the elderly.  One weekend the resident’s families were invited for a picnic.  Denise attended and took this picture.  No one noticed anything for three years.  On Christmas Day, 2000 Denise and her sister were looking through family photos at their parents’ home.  Their grandmother had since passed away, and while looking at the picture they noticed the man who appeared to be standing behind her.  They believe the man in the picture is their grandfather, who had passed away in 1984.

Ghost Baby

Mrs. Andrews was visiting the grave of her daughter, who had died at 17, in Queensland, Australia and took this picture.  At the time she didn’t notice anything unusual.  When she developed the film she was shocked to see the infant looking directly into the camera. 

There were no children in the cemetery that day.  Some thought the photo could be the result of a double exposure but Mrs. Andrews stated that she didn’t know anyone with a baby and hadn’t taken any pictures like that. She also said it didn’t look like her daughter had at that age.  When a paranormal researcher later visited the site he found the graves of two infant girls near that of Mrs. Andrews’ daughter’s.

Amityville Boy

As you can read about in the previous blog, the house at 112 Ocean Ave. in Amityville, New York has quite a history.  When Ed and Loraine Warren were investigating the house, photographer Gene Campbell took a series of infrared time-lapse photographs.  The camera was set up on the second floor and took photos at regular intervals throughout the night. 


No children were at the house at the time.  The boy in the picture has been described as demonic, with glowing eyes.  When George Lutz asked his children if they knew who the boy was one of his daughters said it was the little boy she used to play with.

San Antonio Railroad Crossing

Legend has it that this railroad crossing in south San Antonio was the site of an accident that involved a school bus and several children were killed.  Although the road goes uphill, the story goes that if you park on the tracks the ghosts of the children will sometimes push the car uphill, leaving tiny hand prints on the back of it.  This picture was taken by the daughter of Andy and Debi Chesney and shows a mysterious transparent figure.

Yorkshire Moors Apparition

Colin Foster, 34, took a backpacking trip through England and took along his new digital camera.  At the Yorkshire Moors he snapped this photo.  He didn’t notice it until he returned home and reviewed his pictures with his girlfriend.  She saw it and had him zoom in (shown below) on the transparent figure.  Foster recalled having a feeling of being watched when he took the picture, but just chalked it up to the remoteness of the location.


Here’s a few more modern ‘ghost photos’ that are circulating on the internet.  Couldn’t find a background story to them, but they were interesting enough to deserve inclusion here:

 
On top of a mountain along the border of Virginia and Kentucky lies a dirt path that shoots off the Appalachian Trail. This isolated stretch was once the only way to get from one state to the other, long before US23 and its four lanes of asphalt.  It is along this path that the Killing Rock is located, the scene of an ambush that left several people dead, others on the run for their life, and possible paranormal activity.

Let’s start with the Killing Rock’s history.

On May 14 1892 this desolate stretch witnessed a horrific massacre that seems to have left a psychic impression on the land.  Ira Mullins was a moonshiner on his way to the coal mining camps of Jenkins to sell a load of unstamped illegal liquor.  His party of seven, including his wife and some children as well as hired hands, had just begun their descent into Kentucky when a shot rang out.  A horse fell dead.  Three men with veils partially hiding their faces emerged from their hiding place upon the rocks where they had camouflaged themselves with branches.  When the smoke cleared, Ira Mullins’ sister-in-law and his 15 year old son were the only survivors of their party.

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Ira Mullins, moonshiner

The massacre is just part of this story that has been handed down from generation to generation.  There was bad blood between a US Marshall, Doc Taylor, known as the “Red Fox,” and Ira Mullins.  Taylor was a former soldier and local doctor who had declared war on moonshiners when he was deputized.  On a previous run Mullins ran into Taylor in Wise, VA.  Over 250 shots were fired.  The wagon driver was killed and Mullins himself was left partially paralyzed.  Soon after Taylor lost his government affiliation, but the hatred between the two intensified.  Out of fear Taylor decided to take action first and went to the Mullins home one night, shooting through the windows. Afterward Taylor fled to Kentucky, fearing a return attack.

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The Red Fox, Doc Taylor

There he caught wind of Mullins’ next scheduled trip to deliver illegal liquor and enlisted the help of two brothers, Heenan and Cal Fleming.  The trio laid in wait among the rocks as noon approached on the scheduled day.  They fired mercilessly on the travelers. 

Ira’s wife, Louranze, was shot several times in her chest and knees.  She had been wearing a leather pouch tied underneath her clothes containing about $1,000, the family’s entire savings.  Her skirt was tossed up and the pouch had been cut off.  It had been cut to pieces and parts of it were found a few hundred yards away.  The money was never recovered.

When the shooting broke out 15 year old John Harrison Mullins took off running back toward Wise.  The suspenders he was wearing were shot through by passing bullets but he was unharmed and made it back to town. 

Jane Mullins had married Louranza's brother.  He was riding at the front of the procession and was among the first shot.  She was also riding on horseback and was thrown from her horse.  She scrambled to where her husband lay dying.  Louranza yelled out for Jane.  Despite bullets continuing to fly Jane hurried over to Louranza, who was fatally wounded and had propped herself up against the back of the overturned wagon.  She looked Jane in the eyes and uttered her last words, "They have killed me."

The shooting died down. The gap hung thick with smoke from the gunfire.  Jane chanced a look and saw the three men upon the rocks, the bottom half of their faces visible.  She called out to them,” Boys, for the Lord's sake, don't shoot anymore, you have killed them all now. Let me stay here with them till someone finds us." They yelled and cursed at her.  Jane thought she recognized one of the voices as being Cal Fleming’s, and another to be Doc Taylor.  Some accounts hold that Heenan Fleming had been sweet on Jane and convinced the others to spare her life.  He yelled to her,”Goddamn you, take to the road and leave or we will kill you, too."  Jane took them at their word and made haste down the mountain towards Jenkins.  Her clothes were riddled with bullet holes but she herself was not shot. 

Fingered for the murders, Doc Taylor and the Fleming brothers went into hiding. The Fleming brothers made it to a logging camp in Boggs, West Virginia where they found work.  Big Ed Hall and a posse after the reward being offered for them intercepted a piece of mail that told them where they were.  The posse traveled to Boggs and confronted the brothers when they came to the Post Office to check their mail. A gunfight ensued, with Cal killed, several of Hall’s posse members dead, and Hall himself wounded. Heenan was brought back to Wise to stand trial.

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Heenan and Cal Fleming
By this time Jane, who had been kept in the jail as a form of witness protection since she believed she could identify the men, had passed away.  Heenan was set free due to a lack of evidence.  He returned to West Virginia, took a wife, and eventually became a law officer himself.

Taylor hid in the attic of his son’s home.  He was attempting to board a train in Bluefield that would have ensured his escape, but was captured by a railroad company detective.  He was taken to the Wise Jail where his trial and conviction were quickly accomplished.  His appeals failed to help, and he was scheduled to be hanged on October 27, 1893.Taylor was quite the character, subscribing to the Swedenborgianist Christian faith, a movement that followed a Swedish man who claimed God had revealed secret meanings of the scriptures and the second coming of Jesus.  They believed followers needn’t have faith to get into heaven, only do good works in life.     During his years of practicing medicine he would often come in and talk with the ill person.  He would ask them a few questions, then ask them to concentrate on him.  He would lay his hands on them and recite prayers and incantations.  Following this he would go outside and hold his hands up to the sky, continuing his prayers and incantations. He would return and tell the patient the ‘spirits’ had told him what was wrong with them and how to treat them.  

On the day of his hanging Taylor’s request to preach his own funeral was granted.  He spoke to a large crowd that had gathered outside the courthouse for the hanging, speaking for an hour and a half, citing Revelations 3:20 and appeared to be drunk on wine that had been smuggled into him.  He asked the crowd to join him in singing “How Firm a Foundation,” and all but one old widow declined.  

At 2:00 pm he was led up the scaffolding dressed in white as he had requested. He also asked that his body not be buried, because to prove his innocence he would rise from his coffin on the third day and continue to preach the word.  After saying another prayer, he trembled and had to be aided to remain standing.  The noose was placed around his neck, the trapdoor dropped, and he was pronounced dead 18 minutes later.  His body was taken to his home and laid out, but after nothing occurred three days later it was interred at a Wise County cemetery, where it remains unmarked to this day.

This sign marks the spot along the trail where the massacre occurred.  With so much emotional energy being expelled in one spot, it’s no wonder that for decades visitors to the Killing Rock have reported paranormal activity.  Phantom horses can be heard trotting along the path both in the daylight and in the dark. Dark or black shadowy apparitions have been reported.  

I was part of a local ghost hunting team and after learning the hard way that private property wasn’t always a good place to go hunting.  On Halloween night I came up with the idea to go hunt at the Killing Rock.  We split up and did some EVP recordings and took hundreds of pictures.  Some strange orbs and flashes of light were showing up in some of our pictures.  I sat my flashlight on one of the rocks.  I asked the spirits if they were hanging around to turn my flashlight off.  After a few seconds of nothing I went back to taking pictures.  About a minute later I looked back to see that my flashlight was now indeed off.  Thanking who or whatever had manipulated the flashlight, I asked them to do it again. We all watched for the next 20 minutes as the flashlight came on, went off, dimmed, and grew brighter.  After a few minutes with no more activity I retrieved the flashlight to find that the batteries, brand new when I put them in that night, were dead as a doornail.

A lot of pictures I got that night had strange light anomalies in them. The following pictures are a few examples:

The strangest photo evidence from that night came while I was standing on the path. I randomly snapped this shot:
Wondering if i had some kind of lens flare going on or something paranormal in nature I asked it to come closer if it was a spirit.  This is what i got:
A camera malfunction?  In case it was paranormal in nature I said, “That’s good, keep coming,” and got this photo. 
Almost looks as if the main concentration of energy is passing to the left.  In the next one it’s completely gone.  Did something come toward and past me?

With its history of a lot of bloodshed, mass murder, and killers claiming to come back from the dead the Killing Rock is a relatively undiscovered paranormal treasure. I'm excited about returned and seeing what we capture next.  I highly recommend the Killing Rock if you're in the area.
For more on the Killing Rock Massacre check out these links:
From the Kentucky Explorer
The Pound Gap Massacre
The Hanging of the Red Fox
 
The David Rocks used to be a local gathering place to build a bonfire, bring a cooler full of the beverage of your choice, and hang out with friends.  Strip mining and companies sucking the natural gas out of the mountains have changed the landscape of the area.  They have literally moved mountains, but were nice enough to leave the David Rocks and an area of a hundred yards or so around them untouched.

A friend a fellow paranormal enthusiast recently sent me a picture her brother had taken. He had went up to the David Rocks to take some shots of the scenery and didn't realize what he had captured until he was sharing the photos with some family members. 

That was when they noticed what appeared to be a man peeping out from behind a tree.  Those who have viewed the photo (the original is below) have theorized that it is an apparition of a civil war soldier, others saying he's a coal miner.  Even the most hardened mountain skeptics agree there seems to be something here.



Often with supposed photos of apparitions, something we call matrixing occurs, in which the brain automatically tries to make connections with the information it is given, such as seeing faces in tree branches.  I do not think this is the case with this photo, as matrixing is usually just a face or single body part, and what we have here seems to be a ghost hunters dream, a complete full bodied apparition.  

Who is the man looking out from behind the tree?  To some he appears to be holding something. Some say it looks like a gun, a knife, a various other objects.  Restless civil war soldier, coal miner with unfinished business, or perhaps a moonshiner shot down by the revenuers?  I'm hoping to get back to the David Rocks soon and do some further investigating.  For now, just had to share this photo.
 
With the GOP and Democratic national conventions over and the November election coming up, I thought it would be fun to explore the ghostly goings on in the most famous address in the country.  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is reportedly home to a host of spirits, with one of the most famous presidents in our history topping the list.

The home of the Commander in Chief is no stranger to the paranormal.  Jimmy Carter once reported seeing a UFO.  Nancy Reagan regularly cosulted astrologists.  The ghost of Abigail Adams has been seen more than once, hanging wash out to dry.  Most commonly reported, and by some quite notable witnesses, is the ghost of Abraham Lincoln.  It has been seen so often, it has came to be referred to as simply the White House Ghost.

While in office, Lincoln and his wife Mary dabbled in Spiritualism.  They routinely held séances to try and contact their son Willie, who had passed away in the White House.  President Lincoln also received advice from spirit visitors, such as the specter of the deceased Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, who urged him to continue his fight to free the slaves.  

Just prior to his assassination, Lincoln encountered a doppleganger-like figure in a mirror.  Seeing one's doppleganger is in some cultures an omen of impending death.  While lying on a couch Lincoln saw his reflection as having two distinct faces.  He rose and went to the mirror, finding his reflection normal.  Returning to the couch, he saw the strange reflection a second time.  He said this time, one of the faces were noticeably paler than the other.  A few days later he attempted to recreate the event.  Sure enough, it came back.  After several more attempts, however, Lincoln was never able to make the doppleganger image reappear.  He tried unsuccessfully to have it appear before his wife.  Mary was very concerned.  She saw the doppleganger as a sign that Lincoln would be re-elected to a second term, but would not live to see the end of it.

On the day of his assassination, John Kennedy remarked to his wife and friends, "If someone is going to kill me, they're going to kill me."  Several eerie coincidences connect the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations. See the video below for more on that.  Days before his own assassination, Lincoln told of a dream he had, in which he found himself wandering about the White House.  He could hear sobbing.  Following the noise, he entered the East Room to find a body laid out before mourners.  Soldiers stood guard around it.  Upon asking who was dead, a soldier replied, "The president, he was killed by an assassin."  A full account of the dream can be found here: Lincoln's Dream
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865 by John Wilkes Booth.  He suffered a gunshot to the head and died hours later.  Since then, apparitions of his spirit have been haunting the executive mansion.  Calvin Coolidge's wife reported on several occasions seeing the ghost of Lincoln standing at the window of the Oval Office, hands clasped behind his back, staring out across the Potomic where the bloody battlefields of the Civil War once were.  

Paranormal events linked to Lincoln were reported frequently during FDR's administration.  It's been theorized this is related to both presidents being in office during times of great war.  Eleanor Roosevelt used the Lincoln Bedroom as a study and although she never saw an apparition, said she often felt as though she was bring watched and believed it to be Lincoln's presence.  A clerk for the Roosevelt administration saw Lincoln's ghost sitting on the edge of a bed pulling his boots off. 

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Abe Lincoln: Ghostbuster
Ronald  Reagan's spaniel, Rex, often barked at the door to The Lincoln Bedroom and refused to enter it.  Being at the height of the Cold War, he had his staff check into it when he began to wonder if the Ruskie's might be sending some kind of high-frequency signal into the White House.  He dismissed this notion when no evidence was found, and decided it was paranormal in nature after his daughter Maureen along with her husband saw Lincoln's ghost several times while spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was spending the night in the White House when she was awakened by a knocking on her door.  She answered the door to find the specter of Abraham Lincoln standing before her.  She was so frightened she fainted.  When she awoke the ghost was gone.

During WWII Winston Churchill was spending the night at the White House.  He liked to take a bath and have a cigar before retiring to bed.  Retuning to the adjoining bedroom in his birthday suit, Churchill discovered Lincoln's ghost standing by the fireplace.  “Good evening, Mr. President. You seem to have me at disadvantage,” he said, as Lincoln was fully dressed.  

Several other Presidents, First Ladies, and White House visitors have seen or felt the presence of Abraham Lincoln.  His ghost is also said to be spotted at Ford's Theater where he was shot, and in Springfield, Illinois at his gravesite.  A ghost train, identical to the one that carried Lincoln's body across much of the country following his death, is said to be seen in several places along it's original route, sometimes carrying a skeletal band playing music that cannot be heard.
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Mary Todd after Lincoln's death. Taken by spiritualist photographer later proven to be a fraud.