Camera-phone ghost mystery explained

INQ cracks conundrum of spectral image

By Martin Veitch: Friday, 25 January 2008, 4:51 PM

CRUMBS, what a load of old codswallop, rolled in tripe and then wrapped in rubbish and tosh. The London Evening Standard must be desperate for news today as it is running a piece suggesting that “an extraordinary, ghostly presence” has been detected in an image grabbed by a camera-phone.

“Peeping out between the knees of two of the girls is the face of a child,” it declares breathlessly. “The eerie image [is] clear enough to show a pair of eyes, a nose, a mouth and hair.”

Being from the green and pleasant land that gave the world Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey we can help out here though. It’s just a reflection.

This is a story the National Enquirer would have laughed out of court and the Sunday Sport would have been insulted by. Even the Standard couldn’t find any source to give it credence, despite approaching the bottom-feeding piece of tat that is Living TV’s Most Haunted show.

Ciaran O'Keeffe, “a parapsychologist” on the programme, can’t help the anonymous reporter at all.

"As human beings we're very good at finding a pattern in randomness and related to that we're good at finding faces in randomness. The term for this is pareidolia,” says our expert.

Really? We can think of a shorter word.

Still, with stories on the same page including “Thanks a bunch: Queen presented with bananas by the little girl the Queen Mother gave bananas to 60 years ago”, the Standard needs all the help you can provide.

So don’t let our view of the bog Standard’s thin take on the vagaries of digital imaging put you off. The Society of Barrel-Scraping Friday-Afternoon Journalism needs all the help you can provide. Give the story a click right now. µ