Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Spirit Photos or Bad Camera Settings?

Memorial Day Weekend 2000, my friend Andrija and I took photographs of memorials in some cemeteries near the Central Pennsylvania town where I lived. We went to three or four different cemeteries and in only one of them, the photographs appear to be taken through a gray mist. This happens to be a cemetery I had always felt a bit uneasy about and therefore didn't visit often, even though I like to visit cemeteries and often go to them to read the names off the tombstones and to enjoy the quiet.

The day when these photographs were taken was bright and sunny, which was why we thought it would be perfect day for photos. Ordinarily, one might assume that I had simply misjudged the F-stop settings, except that in the photos of one of the crypts, the gray mist is not uniform, as one would expect for a lighting problem alone.

The following photos are in sequence they way they were taken; they were all on the same role and were taken the same afternoon. I have done nothing to them in PhotoShop except to resize them to fit this page. The camera used was a Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic from the '70s; the film was Kodak color 400 speed.

Clicking on the photo takes you to a larger version of the photo.

This picture of my dog was taken in the Milton Cemetery.

This photo of a crypt was taken in the Watsontown Cemetery.

This is a photo of the same crypt.

My friend, at my request, photographed me in front of the crypt.
I'm not certain, without checking the site, whether the light mark at the
bottom of the bars was a natural discoloration of the metal.

Another photo of the same crypt.

This photo has a slight gray cast, as well, concentrated towards the edges of the photo. Perhaps a camera flaw? But if so, why on only the photos taken in this cemetery?

In this photo I was deliberately focusing on the statue of Mary, so the "ghostly" tombstones behind her are simply out of focus. It does, however, have the same gray, misty cast as the other photos in the cemetery.

This was the result when I attempted to take a picture of my dog,
in the same cemetery, drinking water from a tap. I can't explain it; can you?

This is the very next photo on the roll, taken of my friend Andrija
next to the door of a shed in the next cemetery
we visited, approximately 15-20 minutes later.

I'm perfectly willing to consider other explanations for the gray mist that appears in the photos of the Watsontown Cemetery, including the possibility that I inadvertently bumped some sort of setting on my camera on arrival there and then somehow fixed it before taking photos at the next cemetery. But as far as what was done intentionally, I was only adjusting the F-stop and the focus.

If you have any thoughts about what might have caused these results, e-mail me or post it on my message board. Was this evidence of a ghost, or simply bad camera settings?

I hope to return to the cemetery, possibly this summer, and see if the results are repeated.

Copyright 2000-2003 by Alyce Wilson

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