Do pictures ever hold more significance than words? Over the years, photographers have sometimes captured amazing images on films and videos, some of them difficult to explain.
Recently, a grieving woman from Chicago received the gift of a photo with some inexplicable, profound qualities. Ashley Lang lost her 12-year old Golden Retriever, a beautiful dog and a close friend. A photograph showed Wagner romping in a field, full of vitality.
When the dog’s owner spread his cremains across another green area, one framed by a scenic mountain background, the event appeared quite normal- until someone examined the photo closely. A white misty image in the outline of a leaping dog appeared in the shot, almost as though a supernatural canine visitor chose to grace the scene. The picture can bring Ashley Lang comfort.
Over the years, unexplained images have sometimes appeared on film. For instance, a picnicking family in the United Kingdom visited the Solway Firth on a clear day in 1964 taking along their camera. When they developed a photo of their young daughter, Elizabeth, sitting on a grassy expanse holding a floral bouquet, the couple experienced a shock: the outline of an image resembling a spaceman in a white suit and a visor hovered in the background overhead. The unexplained image intrigued UFO researchers for years.
Other mysterious photographic images continue to generate controversy and speculation, also. For instance, in 1936, Captain Hubert C. Provand and Indre Shira visited a location renowned for paranormal activity, Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England. A magazine wanted the pair to snap photographs of the site for use in an article. They received a shock when they developed a snapshot of a staircase in the building and captured what appeared to be the white silhouette of a woman descending. Later experts determined the “Brown Lady” of Raynham had not resulted from a double exposure, although no one could absolutely rule out smudging.
A photo taken by a minster in 1963 in Newby Church in Yorkshire when developed also revealed a spectral figure wearing a garb vaguely resembling a monk’s cowl. During the 1970s, experts commissioned by the BBC examined the photograph and concluded that tampering or a double exposure did not appear to account for the mysterious image. This photograph at the historic church continues to mystify many people today.
In another famous instance, the members of a Royal Navy squadron assembled for a group photograph. The photographer captured the shot of the members of the squadron posed in several rows. Yet after developing the film, he noticed the face of a man peering out from behind an officer in the back row. When members of the squadron examined the shot in detail, they identified the mysterious individual as a mechanic assigned to the squad named Freddy Jackson. He had passed away just two days previously and so no one had anticipated his presence in the group photo.
Photographers have also in the past taken pictures of ghostly canine images. In April 2011, a man in Fayetteville, Tennessee photographed a baby with his cell phone, and captured in the shot images that he believed appeared to display his late grandmother and her little dog, both deceased. A photo taken of a snoozing household pet in Barrow-in-Furness, England on January 28, 2012 with a BlackBerry captured the strange image of an unknown young girl attempting to touch the dog. Residents of the household reported they had experienced what they regarded as considerable previous paranormal activity in the vicinity.
Perhaps the strange photo retrieved recently during the sprinkling of the cremains of the Golden Retriever, Wagner, will soon join a growing number of remarkable (yet not fully explained) images. Maybe sometimes pictures do provide information about the inter-dimensional qualities of space and time not readily appreciated by most of us during the course of daily life?