On September 19, 1936, two photographers from Country Life magazine were shooting the grand oak staircase at Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England. One of them, Indre Shira, suddenly saw a veiled form drifting down the steps toward them. He shouted. His partner, Captain Hubert Provand, pulled the cap off the lens while Shira fired the flash.
When the plate was developed, there she was. A tall, glowing figure in what looks like a gown and veil, descending the stairs, with the steps visible right through her. Country Life published it that December. It remains perhaps the most famous ghost photograph ever taken, and experts who examined the original negative at the time said they could find no sign of tampering.
The photographers had not invented her. The Brown Lady had been seen at Raynham for a hundred years. She is said to be Lady Dorothy Walpole, sister of Britain’s first prime minister, who died in the house in 1726 after her husband reportedly locked her away from her children. Witnesses describe a woman in a brown brocade dress with a glowing face and dark, empty sockets where her eyes should be.
In 1836 the novelist Captain Frederick Marryat, a hardened Royal Navy officer, asked to sleep in the haunted room to prove it was nonsense. He met her in the corridor carrying a lamp. He said she grinned at him. He fired his pistol straight at her, and the bullet passed through and lodged in a door.
Skeptics say double exposure, or grease on the lens. Maybe so.
Makes you wonder why she has barely been seen since that photograph was taken.
Camera trick, or the best evidence of a ghost ever captured?
What do you think about this? On May 20, 1967, a prospector in Manitoba walked up to a landed craft near Falcon Lake. It blasted him with hot gas and left a grid of burns on his chest matching its vents. Three governments investigated. Canada put it on a coin. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? Serpent Mound in Ohio is a 1,348 foot snake of earth, its head aimed at the summer solstice sunset, its body built on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. One dating puts it right after Halley’s Comet in 1066. Sacred art, or a message for the sky?
What do you think about this? Since the early 1990s about two percent of people in Taos, New Mexico, hear a low hum like a distant diesel that never shuts off. In 1993 Los Alamos and Sandia scientists came to find it. Their instruments found nothing. Trick of the ear, or a hidden signal?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a retired air traffic controller cast footprints in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp: three webbed toes, a foot long. He had reported a seven foot gray haired creature with yellow eyes standing over a dead boar in 1963. Hoax, or the Letiche?
What do you think about this? For nearly three years beginning April 2, 1968, a glowing figure of a woman appeared on the roof of a church in Cairo, seen by crowds of tens of thousands, Christians and Muslims together, and caught in press photographs. Mass illusion, or a visitation?
What do you think about this? A 2,200 year old wooden bird dug up at Saqqara in 1898 has no legs, no feathers, straight wings and a tail that stands upright like the fin of an airplane. Some replicas glide. A child’s toy that looks like a plane, or a memory of something that flew?
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