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My wife took the photo at the gravesite, and when we got down to the car, I got in the car, she said, wait a minute, she said, I’ll finish this film off.
And she took my photo, and that was the finish of that.
When I looked through the viewfinder, all I saw was Jimmy in the car and snapped it, and that was that.
Didn’t think no more about it.
But there in the photograph was this unmistakable figure.
Well, I took it and showed it to somebody and they said, it’s your mother in the back.
And I said, don’t be so stupid.
But she was there.
Well, I could see it was my mother, of course.
I could see it was her.
The most extraordinary thing about this is that she always used to sit on that side of the car when she was out with me so that she could talk to me and see me as I was driving.
Jim remembers his mother-in-law’s last words.
She said, Jim, she said, you’ll never come to any harm.
She said, I shall still be with you.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
That clip in our intro was from Episode 7 of the 1985 TV series Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers.
We’ve mentioned this episode before because it covers the Cottingley Fairies as well as the Newby Church ghost, and the subject of today’s episode, the backseat ghost photo taken by Mrs. Mabel Chinnery in 1959.
The following discussion…
is a distillation from our recent Monster Talk Live coverage on this topic.
Discussing ghost photos on a podcast has a bit of a visual challenge to it, but if you check the show notes, I’ve included images that were on screen during the YouTube streaming, so that if you’re able to check those out, they may prove illustrative to the content of our discussion.
As normal for a Monster Talk Live, we’re joined by Karen’s husband, Matt Baxter.
And I have to say, Matt brought up a really interesting idea that I hadn’t considered on this case, but it fits so neatly into the mystery surrounding it, I’ll leave it for him to reveal during the conversation.
The full, original conversation will be available on our YouTube channel, but I’ve tightened this up for podcasting.
Monster Talk
But welcome, everybody.
This is Monster Talk Live, and I am Matthew Baxter.
I’m Blake Smith.
I’m Karen Stollznow.
Welcome.
Get yourselves a drink, and let’s get into talking about the Chinnery backseat ghost.
So, Karen, I know you were talking about, you know when you first heard of this.
Yes.
I don’t know about everybody else.
I believe, Matt, you have a photograph.
So we have talked about this book before.
So another used-born, us-born book, I guess, depending on where you come from.
So this is the one that Blake, we discussed this book in an episode many moons ago.
He’s, I think, frantically looking for the picture here.
Frantic.
I’m frantic.
So first off, this is the image.
Yeah, I think this is the bad guy.
To start with this image, because it is so iconic, it is so famous, it’s now known as the Chinnery ghost or the backseat ghost.
But when I first found out about this, and this is probably around maybe 1980, I didn’t think it had a name.
It was just a ghost photograph.
And to me, it looked like a London cab or something.
Yeah, a little bit, yeah.
I know, Blake, you’ve looked into that.
We’ve all looked into this now, and it’s a, what, a Hillman?
Hillman Minx, yeah.
And, yeah, I believe my brother had a Hillman at one point.
So I don’t know, is that a car that you can find in this country, like that brand?
That’s a British import.
You won’t see many of those here in the States.
Beautiful, beautiful old car.
I had a Ferret, but I never had a Minx.
So, yeah, have you got the picture of the book?
There we go.
So the world of the unknown ghost.
So we spoke about this very lovingly a couple of years ago with one of the authors.
And it’s such an iconic book and this is such an iconic photograph and has been touted as one, I guess, the gold standard evidence for ghost photography.
And it is just brilliant.
very well known.
And even if people don’t know the name of it, they still know that picture.
They’ve seen it before.
And again, like part of our series of things that scared the crack out of us as kids.
So here is the image from the book.
And I just wanted to read.
This little story that’s attached.
Because it’s not readable on the screen.
It’s not, no.
So this is my first encounter with this image.
This picture is one of the most puzzling ghost photographs ever taken.
The woman in the back seat was supposed to be in her grave when the photograph was taken.
The driver’s wife took this picture of her husband sitting in the car.
She claims that there was nobody in the car except her husband.
Yet the photograph clearly shows the figure of a woman, her mother, who had died a week before.
Experts say that the film has not been altered in any way.
Yet if you look closely, you’ll see that the corner of her scarf seems to overlap the side pillar of the car.
This would only be possible if her face was placed in the picture after it was taken.
Yet if the experts are correct and the photograph is genuine, there is no explanation.
That’s astonishing that they included that detail back then.
No explanation for how it could have happened.
That is, unless the woman in the back…
was a ghost.
So there we go.
So that’s the first encounter I had with this case, and they did not mention names or places.
So I think what we find online today is typical of urban legend and folklore.
We find the same story again and again, repeated with the same names and dates.
and places, but it’s all very murky, really.
All we have left is this photograph and just the repetition of folklore.
Well, and oftentimes with these stories, as they start to grow, new details will be added to the story that sound like they’ve been there the whole time.
but when you go back and actually look at the previous versions, they’re not there.
So it’s an accretion of information.
But yeah, I do love this story.
And I have to say, it falls into the bucket, the basket of stories where, look, I don’t think this is a ghost, but it’s creepy, but I cannot explain it.
So I’m really relying on the good research of my two friends here.
And Matt has done some really wonderful work
research for this and discovered some things that I never knew.
I’ve done a little bit of digging here and there, but he really has done some great work here.
So I’m excited for him to share the things that he’s found.
Well, I want to start off by saying I cannot remember where I first saw this picture.
My memory is like, oh, it was in one of those time-life books.
Yeah.
But I don’t have any of those anymore, so I would have to rely on you, Blake, because I know you do.
What’s kind of the story here?
How did this happen?
The photo, as it’s usually presented, there’s a few different versions, I should clarify.
But the important thing is that this is Mabel Chinnery’s husband and mother.
Mabel is at the cemetery with her husband to visit the grave of the mother who just died a week ago or so.
This is what drives me crazy.
There’s more than one version of this story.
But the most frequent one is that…
She had one or two more shots on the roll and went ahead and shot a photo of her husband sitting in the car.
And that’s problematic, if true, because of stuff that we shouldn’t spoil right yet.
But that’s the story.
So her mother is definitely dead.
They’re at the cemetery.
And then her mom shows up in the backseat of the car.
That’s the main story.
Well, I think that’s what makes the story so compelling is because of the recent demise of her mother.
And it just seems like it’s a very earnest story.
This looks like an older couple themselves.
Why would this be a hoax?
Why would they make this up?
So, yeah, there’s the picture.
It’s so creepy.
It looks like…
I will admit the first time I saw the picture, I thought it was a fellow in the back seat.
I thought it was a man.
That’s not your mother.
It’s a man, baby.
Now, often this is shown next to an image of Mabel’s mother, which does lead you to, and here we go.
So sometimes she is unnamed, sometimes she’s Mabel’s mother, and sometimes Mrs. Ellen Hamill.
So we have that name to kind of, we had that name to look into.
But, yeah, so if you look at them side by side, I think there’s a little bit of priming there, a little bit of, oh, I can see that face mapping onto that image, the initial image.
But it’s…
It’s a little tricky to really see any kind of detail.
Absolutely.
One of the things is they say that it could be a reflection on the window, but it looks like he’s got his window down.
He does, yeah.
And so I don’t think it’s a reflection.
They often say that, oh, you can see on the left there that the collar is overlapping the edge of the window frame.
I don’t think it is.
It always looks like a cravat to me, that it was a fellow wearing a cravat.
Yeah, yeah.
Again, I don’t know when we want to get into this, but part of this, this was like one of the subject matters of Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers episodes.
And I love that episode because they’re using, I think, a PDP-11 to do digital analysis in 1980.
four something like that uh so it’s it’s some early days for digital analysis but uh um maybe i’ll hold off on what they found but uh shouldn’t we add here that that was the same episode uh that looked at the newbie
church ghost and also the Cottingley fairies.
But we’ve kind of been hitting on a bunch of these ghost photos and this is such a chilling one in some ways.
And the people involved in the photo seem pretty earnest.
Like they don’t seem like…
you know, like glamorous or attention grabbing or anything like that.
So I think they come in all the interviews I’ve seen with them, they’ve come across as like, wow, this crazy thing happened, you know?
So, yeah.
Yeah.
It is, it’s a spooky situation to say the very least, but you know, there are some, there’s a, there’s a lot of unknowns in this whole thing, but there’s a lot of things aren’t,
backed up, you know, immediately, such as, let me see here if I can share this real quick again.
So let’s go back to them.
And we’ve got…
where was the cemetery exactly?
Which cemetery was it?
And all these stories, they don’t specify.
And did Mrs. Hamill actually die the week before?
Is there proof that she died a week before?
And that now they’ve had a funeral and they’re taking pictures.
So I’ve seen a number of articles too where Jim, the husband, had talked about Mrs Chinnery’s mother, his mother-in-law, and how close they had been and said that she had uttered final words to him.
And those final words were, Jim, you’ll never come to any harm.
I shall always be with you.
So I think that that’s the kind of backstory, whether she’d actually said that or words to that effect.
Or not.
That’s the back story to say, well, she was still being chauffeur-driven around like he was Jeeves.
And there she is in the back seat.
And also part of the story is that she liked to sit in the back seat.
She liked to be chauffeur-driven.
So that is where she would sit.
So it’s only logical that her ghost, her spirit would still be in the back seat there.
Makes sense.
It does.
I did some digging around.
and looked far and wide trying to find some of this mystery information.
And I did find this old newspaper, the Suffolk Chronicle in Mercury.
And as you can see, a man was fatally attacked by a prized bull.
Hit in the face by a pellet.
But on this page, you don’t see anything about any death notices or anything like that.
But if you look over on the adjoining page that was not scanned fully, you see that there’s a little bit of a list there.
And when you look at that list, you can find March 18th, Hamel, Ellen, E, 78 years.
That’s internments in Ipswich Cemetery.
So she existed.
So that was accurate.
That was her name.
So we found the cemetery.
We found the fact that she did die when they stated she died.
So all this is true.
So you can read that even better there.
Which, of course, doesn’t prove that that is a photograph of a ghost.
Yes, it does.
But it certainly is interesting to be able to look into this and to see what’s fact, what’s fiction.
But, yeah, so old Ipswich Cemetery, Suffolk, England, and, yeah, to even find her plot.
the exact location and it’s rather sad for me because she’s one year younger than my mother was when she passed last year so
Yeah, this hits me personally.
Hearing this story, I want to believe, and it almost feels like they were looking for some kind of evidence of life after death and some kind of grief hallucination.
Incredibly emotionally charged.
I have a lot of empathy for this couple and for this case and can see why this does appeal to so many people.
So the big story is that she was there taking pictures of the headstone and stuff like that.
Now, when she was there, it would have basically been a week after she died.
And the odds are there wouldn’t have been a headstone.
That’s a good point.
There would have been a burial mound.
And at that time, there were a lot of graves that didn’t ever get headstones.
But you can see right there the plot.
It’s C-12-33.
So if we look, you can see C next to WW2.
And if you zoom in on that, you can see 12 right in the center of the screen.
You zoom in on that a little closer, you can see 33.
There’s no headstone.
Mm-hmm.
Right in the middle there.
Yeah.
So that’s to this day.
So even back then, you know, as you’re saying.
That kind of masonry, they wouldn’t necessarily have that ready at that point.
But here it is today.
They still don’t have a marker, which, you know, is very sad.
But that is an intrinsic part of the story, that she was there to take photographs of the head, the gravestone.
Well, yeah, but so maybe this actually works.
Don’t cuss.
Well, just here’s the thing.
So…
We should go ahead and, I guess, bring it up that one of the most common skeptical analysis is that this is a double exposure that an accidental, if we’re being generous here, an accidental double exposure.
So the way that would work is they would have taken a picture of the mother-in-law sitting in a chair or whatever.
And then they take a second photo.
without advancing the film.
And I know in modern cameras that would never happen, but it was possible to do that here.
Yes.
Okay, so then you get two photos, one of her in the chair and one of those, I guess a much brighter lit photo of her son-in-law sitting in front of the car.
Now…
If that’s true, that accounts for the bleed over on the collar.
And it accounts for her, you know, being in the photo when she’s dead.
Other than her being a ghost.
Right, right, right.
Now, the problem is…
If those things are true, then the previous photo to this one cannot be of headstones in the cemetery.
Yes, exactly.
We have none of those photos.
Right, right.
And as you’ve just demonstrated, there should never be an ability to do those photos, even if they wanted to, because a headstone never materialized.
I don’t mean that metaphysically.
Well, and when you look at find a grave.
Yeah.
There’s no headstone.
There you go.
So that sounds like a feature that was added on later.
Maybe honestly, maybe that’s how they recalled it.
But it’s part of the embellishment.
But in part of the embellishment and the best.
And we’d like to talk about presumption of sincerity with these cases.
The sincere case would be they accidentally do a double exposure.
They take this developed exposure like, holy crap.
And then they start walking the circuit talking about the photo with people.
And as they do that, the story slowly gets embellished with new features.
Maybe.
I think that would be pretty creepy to have a picture of a headstone in the backseat, in the back of the car.
Well, I mean…
That would have been better.
But you’re right.
That would be creepy if that had happened.
But, I mean, I guess there’s no evidence that that whole story of taking photos…
that’s the thing, right?
If, if not that, did they just go to the cemetery?
She looks around and she’s like, well, I’ve got the camera.
There’s no headstone.
I guess I’ll take a picture of my husband, you know?
Right.
Maybe, maybe that happened.
I don’t know.
I mean, well, I think we should go back to whether this was taken at the cemetery at all.
Let’s look in the background because I see another car and a wall.
Exactly.
So when you look at this at first and you look beyond, because we’re so used to looking at the foreground, the front, what’s happening right in front of us and not looking at the back.
And so Matt and I were taking a look at the background and thinking, well, what is that?
It’s a vehicle.
There is some kind of wall.
Is that a building or is it just a wall?
So we don’t have a definitive answer on this, but Matt did look into it a little bit further.
Yeah, let’s try a different share here real quick.
because it does get interesting.
So if I go and I look at this on Apple Maps, you can see the cemetery there, Old Cemetery.
So as I zoom in, it’s funny because where it says Old Cemetery is pretty much exactly where the grave is.
The spot, yeah.
Nice.
So you’ve got…
I don’t know what I mean.
But it makes us want to go there and to take some pictures of the location.
I really want to go there, yeah.
Right.
Like, is there actually a wall around it, right?
So, yeah, what you’re not seeing is a parking lot of any kind.
You know, it could be down here.
barnsby gardens or cemetery road road yes probably but you’re not seeing a bunch of trees you’re seeing maybe one of these houses back there but you see it somewhere where people can park on both sides of the road um to be able to uh i wish i could flip that back and forth quickly um to kind of fit now it is possible that he could have been parked over here and she had to walk
you know, through here to get to the…
But we do have roads in the cemetery too, don’t we?
And I don’t know if those are new or if those…
But there’s no parking places where one car could be on one side and another car could be on the other, like… Like in the photo.
Like in the photo.
So, and that does make it…
difficult yeah so i don’t know it’s i have a theory uh and i think it closely aligns with with yours blake but previous to this i always thought this was a hoax you know it wasn’t until i really started digging into it that i started feeling like this is not a hoax
Absolutely not.
There’s no trickery here because we can look at hoaxes.
We have our version of the brown lady.
That’s actually Karen coming down the stairs there.
But here’s the real brown lady.
And this is a hoax, regardless of what anybody says.
All the conditions that were claimed to have taken place when they took this photo don’t match up with reality.
this is a hoax.
We do have to tackle this in a future episode, too.
We will definitely talk about this in the future.
Now, we have the Lord Cumbermere photo, and this one I don’t believe is a hoax.
It could be, but I think this is…
They put this camera up and left the shutter open for an hour.
They let it expose for an hour.
Hour.
So, over here to the lower left…
Yeah, this is definitely a long exposure.
Someone comes in and sits in this chair and doesn’t realize the photo’s being taken.
Maybe looks at a book for a few minutes or whatever and gets up and walks out.
And this is exactly what you would get.
That’s the kind of photo you would get.
So it’s pretty explainable.
Can I ask for people like myself who don’t really understand double exposures and long exposures, what’s the difference between the two and why is that not at play in the Chinnery photograph?
I’m sorry you didn’t read the rules beforehand, but all questions must be submitted in writing in triplicate three weeks before the show for you to get an answer.
No, this is a situation where if the room was maybe a little dark, you know, you can see they have these big drapes and everything.
It looks like sun is shining in.
Oh, wonderful photograph.
This deserves an episode, too.
But you can see where it’s white, you know, it’s blasted out.
It’s overexposed.
Right, it got overexposed, yep.
So if you put your camera, your smartphone, in night portrait mode, it’s going to basically leave the shutter open longer so more light can get in.
And that means you have to hold very still so you don’t blur.
And this was a situation where it was open for an hour.
A long period of time.
Yeah, came in, sat down, and didn’t know he had his picture taken.
But this is still exactly the kind of place that you would expect to see a ghost.
Exactly.
And the blur fits the description of what they think the blur of Lord Cumbermere would look like.
So now we have this fun one, and I know Blake has done some looking into on this one.
Focus through this one, Blake.
The girl in the fire.
This is the Wim Town Hall photo.
Classic.
This town hall in the city of Wim burned and Tony Arahele, a local photographer, took photos.
And when he produced them, they show up with this face here.
And for a while…
People were concerned, is this pareidolia?
Is this like the end of a log that’s rested on the rail?
You know, what is this?
And for a long time, from the 90s until the, I guess, right around 2010, it was thought maybe it was maybe pareidolia or maybe a ghost.
But, you know, it’s more likely pareidolia.
That was the, again, assuming Mr. Overhealy didn’t fake anything until…
2010, when it turns out that this photograph, this old postcard got reprinted in the local newspaper and the Shropshire Star ran this as like, hey, you know, look at this cool old photo of our local community.
And one of the readers, one of the readers, not listeners, named Brian Lear.
spotted the girl in the bottom left corner.
And it’s like, that girl looks a lot like that ghost in that ghost photo.
Holy crap.
It’s her like it, like it’s a 100%.
It’s not clear here, but it is a 100% match to her.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so over healing, what he did was he had his own photography studio in his backyard.
And he basically took the photo at the fire, a series of photos at the fire.
And then he manually created this photo and reshot it on a new roll so that it appeared in sequence, right?
So he went to a lot of effort to accidentally get a ghost photo.
And I think that’s important because people forget that you don’t need to make a bunch of money on these things if you’re getting one over.
Each person has their own threshold for what they think is worth bothering with.
And Mr. O’Reilly went to a lot of work for this ghost hoax, right?
So was it for the laughs?
Was it because he knew he’d get a few bucks from media?
I don’t know.
In the UK, tabloid media will pay substantially for a good ghost photo.
Oh, yes, they will.
This is not hundreds.
It’s more like low thousands, right?
All right.
Good to know.
It’s good to know, right?
I mean, they’re not joking around if they can get exclusive rights, right?
And all you have to do is kind of have the photo and be willing to say that it was honestly created, right?
So Mr. O’Reilly went to a lot of frigging work to honestly not create this honestly.
So he…
it’s a very dishonest amount of effort to pretend like what i mean what do i know i’m just a photographer well very different to the chinnery ghost then yes yeah right mr chinnery is not a photographer like he’s not a he doesn’t have a lab in his backyard right he’s sitting he’s off to what is it sending it off to the chemist to be developed all right
So, yeah, well, have you ever seen this one?
No, I don’t think I have.
But it does look like, yeah.
Well, this is supposed to be a farm in Scotland where they kept seeing this, the ghost of this child who they believe was from medieval times.
And he would show up and they captured him on photo one time.
And a giant turkey leg and a margarita.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, Little Surf.
And yeah, I thought the same thing.
I thought this kid looks familiar.
And so did some poking around and I’ll be darned.
Oh, it is.
It literally is Anakin.
Okay.
It literally is.
Cut to the core.
No, I did not know that.
I was just like, it looks like Anakin Skywalker.
Okay.
Well, wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
What about, I don’t think you’ve got an image of this one, but what about the one that you used to talk about in workshops and things like that?
We had an image of these, what, alien women, female aliens.
You had me at alien women.
But who did it turn out to be?
Yeah, I can tell you what it was.
It was Billy Meyer, and these were two plagiarian women, and they were all blurry and everything.
And if you looked at it long enough, you could think that, you know, wow, this could have been taken off an old TV set, you know, a TV picture, you know, because they never come out very good with the moray pattern and everything.
But no, no, Billy wouldn’t do that.
He wouldn’t hoax anything.
But if you happen to have a VHS copy of the Dean Martin Variety Hour, you could actually freeze frame on two of the smiling backup dancers that looked almost identical.
And yeah, so it’s…
You know, when you do these hoaxes, you have to be careful where you pull your material from.
Well, it might take some time, but at some point, someone is going to come across the original image if it’s out there.
But, well, we’re going to look at another picture or… Well, can we hop over to…
There was a photo as a close-up of the Chinry photo that shows the overlap between the collar and the strut in the support around the window.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
People in the chat are asking… Well, they’re making the really good point is if this is an accidental double exposure, it is an astonishingly well-framed one.
Right.
I mean, because everything is centered perfectly.
Right.
So.
Yeah.
So we’re talking about this, this sort of line right here.
Yeah.
I went into our text chat.
I don’t know if you can get that one out easily.
Well, the thing thing is about this is I’m not 100 percent sure about the.
if there was any motion at all with this, how long of an exposure it was.
But I just don’t think that this one tiny little overlap right there, when we’re talking about the degradation of…
you know, reproduction, reproduction, reproduction, if that’s really good evidence of a double exposure.
The reason I’m inclined to believe it is because in that Arthur C. Clarke episode, what they’re doing is they’re taking original photos and scanning them.
It’s really cool because as you may have recalled, I’m a nerd for old tech, right?
Right.
So they’re using a PDP-11 and a drum scanner.
So they had to like wrap…
the image around the cylinder and then rotate it through the scanning apparatus.
And so they’re using technology that they are, would use to like enhance license plates and that sort of thing.
And this is, again, this is like 1984, 1985.
So this stuff is super rudimentary, right?
I mean, you’re looking at 1984 is also the year that Macintosh becomes available.
So most computers are using strictly command line interfaces, you know, not not GUI.
Right.
So these computers were able to do on-screen video analysis, enhancing the crispness, trying to remove the contrast, that sort of thing.
And they were also using the same technology for examining the Cottingley Fairies, looking to see if they could spot any lines or threads holding up the images.
In this home office laboratory is the world’s most advanced equipment for the examination of photographs.
Using a computer, forensic experts help the police to snare criminals by enhancing photographic images to bring out hidden detail.
Today, the computer is focused on the phantoms.
The photographs are optically scanned and fed into the computer for analysis.
Tim Newton and Dr. Steve Gull begin with Gordon Cowell’s photograph.
But what about Mrs. Chinnery’s photograph?
There are some very strange things here.
This scarf definitely does pass this line here.
But further down the picture, the line is definitely in front of her.
There’s also this feature on the other side of the barrier between the two windows.
It does seem to be, as if it might be a shoulder, then that does make her a very wide person.
Perhaps the best explanation is if some mistake has happened here, some very short exposure sometime before has been superimposed upon the picture.
in that analysis, they’re taking the best copy they can get and they see that overlap.
So I think it’s probably really there in the original where that’s happening.
But you’re right.
It’s like, if this is a double exposure, why is the rest of the image not also crossing over, bleeding over?
It’s a really good question.
And for it to be accidental, again, presumption of sincerity, if it’s accidental and nobody’s pulling shenanigans, why is that the only part that overlaps?
It’s a really good question.
Well, what’s your alternative theory, Matt?
I think we can…
spring it on everyone at this point.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, just working on all this, it just kind of occurred to me that you’ve got, well, like Karen was talking earlier about, you know, how your heart goes out to these people.
This was a very emotionally charged time.
She doesn’t notice anything happening until after.
you know, going through the photos and everything else.
So at this point, she doesn’t actually, or potentially, doesn’t actually know what order the photos were in.
She may have thought, I’ve done this when I was a kid and I had a little manual camera, that I would think I took a picture when actually I didn’t.
And so I would, you know, click and then, you know, I’d try to run it forward and everything and then find out that I would have to click it again before I could run it forward or whatever.
But I thought I’d clicked it, but I didn’t click it all the way down, and therefore I didn’t take a picture.
So she could think, hey, I went out and took a picture of my husband when actually she never did.
But she might have took a picture of her husband and her mother somewhere else in that car.
a week before, and she had all the pictures kind of together in a shoebox or whatever, and she’s going through and she’s like, oh, here’s the picture of my husband.
Who’s that in the back seat?
When actually the picture was never actually taken in the order she remembers.
But it’s so emotionally charged, and she suddenly sees this picture with the ones of her taking a picture of the grave mound, or being at the cemetery.
And now she’s got this completely different narrative in her mind.
And I think there’s a couple of different levels that this answers a lot of questions.
It may seem like, wow, you’re really drawing a long bow there, but oh, it’s a ghost.
That’s a longer bow.
Well, I think this episode is out of order in that we’ve got the
newbie ghost uh newbie church ghost episode coming out in which we talk about the importance of also having the images that came before the the one in question and the images that come after uh and so without that information
it’s really difficult to know exactly what was on that film and do what came before, what came after.
And we do go into that in a lot of depth in this next episode.
So, yeah, our episodes are out in that regard.
Well, I just have to say that if this was like I think it might have been…
then if they had an expert analyze the picture and the negative, it’s going to be as authentic as you can get because it is an actual picture.
But this doesn’t look to me like it’s outside that cemetery.
Yeah.
Maybe it is.
Well, it’s interesting, too, because they’re also—
Yet another case of the photo you see is almost always cropped.
Yes.
I looked far and wide for one that wasn’t.
With the little arrow saying, look here, and the priming.
I know what they’re doing.
They’re trying to bring you into the detail where the weirdness is going on.
But in the process of doing so, they strip out the context that would help you figure out what’s actually going on in the original photo.
Right.
So that’s problematic.
It would be really interesting to do some more digging into finding out what is in the background there, because just from a preliminary search, it does not seem like that is at the cemetery.
It’s not in that area where the grave is.
Yeah.
And it could potentially be that old cemetery road or the nearby one where there are houses.
But that looks like some kind of wall.
It doesn’t really look like houses and other vehicles.
But it is really difficult to determine where that is.
It really is.
It doesn’t seem to, on the surface, completely fit in with the story that that is on the cemetery grounds.
That would be so intriguing and interesting if it turned out that it was taken somewhere different and she was alive in the backseat.
That would be really funny.
Yeah.
And that’s just…
It seems like that does answer a lot of questions without making outrageous assumptions.
Yeah.
Now, one of the things, again, sometimes when we talk about ghost photos, I guess there’s sort of an inherent…
which is that the…
photography photography works through chemistry and physics right so light bounces off of a subject matter and then makes it through the lens where back then it’s hitting a piece of film which is covered with chemicals which are photoreactive and then you have to set those into like a fixed state and then develop them and then eventually you get this image which is pretty freaking amazing um
But they’re always sketchy when it comes to saying these are potentially ghosts or the supernatural.
Right.
Because in order for them to be the supernatural, they have to themselves work with the world of physics.
Right.
So I didn’t see the thing, but the camera did.
Right.
So whatever was there, it was not part of the photo I was taking a part of.
But yet it showed up on film.
OK, well, that’s clearly not how physics works.
Right.
It’s a bit like the whole EVP thing where I recorded this room, I didn’t hear anything, but when I played it back, I heard these voices.
The reason I bring it up, because if this photo is legitimately supposed to be a ghost…
The mother-in-law is wearing a pair of glasses which have reflections of light on them, right?
So… That’s always bothered me.
Now, I know, like, people have come up with the… What do they call it?
Where you have, like, a mental concept of who you are.
Residual self-image.
He stole that from The Matrix.
Is it really so hard to believe?
Your clothes are different.
The plugs in your arms and head are gone.
Your hair has changed.
Your appearance now is what we call residual self-image.
That’s another conversation because the Matrix has bled into more paranormal stuff than it has any right to do, right?
So you’re not wrong.
If this were a ghost, why would she be wearing glasses?
Okay, well, it’s part of her…
psychometric, psychoresidual self.
Okay.
But why are they reflecting light?
That makes no sense, right?
So they reflect light because they’re a physical thing.
Whenever that photo is taken, there’s a person with glasses back there that’s reflecting light.
That’s what’s going on.
I don’t think that’s part of that sort of…
psychic resonance or whatever.
I don’t think it is.
I don’t think I’ve always heard that they’re glasses, but I think the standard story I hear is that her eyes are that she’s has demonic eyes or something like that, or, or who, you know, like a lot of the images that you have of these iconic spirit photographs where hollowed out.
So they’re
The ghost doesn’t have eyes anymore.
Like the newbie ghost last week where it’s the, you know, I see a cutout sheet and other people see a haunting skeletal visage.
Suffice to say, this has just always been one of my favorite photographs and really did…
scare the crap out of me as a kid.
And it’s just a very fun image.
I think there’s absolutely a natural explanation behind this.
And perhaps we may not have gotten to the bottom of it, but I think that some of the theories that you guys have come up with are more plausible than this being a ghost.
Unfortunately.
I’m inclined to, again, this sort of the bias of the show, I’m inclined to disbelieve in ghosts.
And if this were supposed to be evidence of such, I would… Not good evidence.
I’d like to know more about what’s up with the glasses and the reflection and all that sort of stuff.
That’s a really good question.
So, yeah.
Well, I still think it’s possible that if it is a previous photograph that’s overlapping or something like that, that it’s not even…
The mother-in-law.
The mother.
It could potentially be someone else.
That could be true, too.
I don’t know.
It’s really interesting, though.
I mean, I guess all those things are technically more plausible in my skeptical world than it’s a ghost, right?
Sure.
But it is interesting.
I want it to be a double exposure.
Like, I want that to be the plausible…
non-exploitative explanation that they just, whoops, got a double exposure.
And then it happened to fit in with this wonderful reassurance that our mother-in-law is still out there watching over us.
That’s lovely.
The backseat of the car.
Right.
Yeah, it’s a sad story.
No matter which way you look at it.
But I think whether it is a double exposure or whether there’s some other natural explanation, I don’t think it’s a hoax.
Yeah, I’d like to continue to believe that because I really, I’d like the idea that they accidentally did this and then it got out of hand.
But it fits with the normal evolution of these stories too, though, you know, where they get out of our control and they become, you know.
Morphic.
Bigger, larger than life.
Yeah.
Do we know, with the newbie church ghost, we talk about the camera and with the Cottingley fairies, we talk about the camera.
Do we have any information on what kind of camera was used?
My understanding is this actually was a Kodak Brownie.
Yeah.
Oh, really?
Cool.
Yeah.
So famous camera.
Yeah, that it is a very famous little camera.
That was what I had read.
That was the Kodak Browning.
And I did some digging in and I found another camera expert talking about.
how it was possible to accidentally get a double exposure.
There’s two, these, these cameras as different models and years came out, they, they remember we’re talking about double exposures as being a whoops, accidentally made a ghost, but what they really are is whoops.
You just ruined your photo.
Right.
So.
for the it’s a very rare circumstance where you ruin your photo and it’s also worth keeping right like so this is the the industry as a whole was trying to push away from circumstances where you could accidentally double expose your film and so these improvements were not ghost reduction technology that was a side effect right they were really about you not wasting your freaking money because it costs you time and effort to make these photos
people didn’t make a hundred photos and then keep the 12 that mattered.
Right.
Like, you know, they had to really put some thought into it because every roll of film costs a bunch of money plus developing it costs money.
Sure.
Well, I have a question just as someone who knows very little about these kinds of things in terms of double exposures, what would be a kind of standard type of double exposure that people would experience?
Yeah.
Usually, some of these older cameras, you would take the photo and your next step is supposed to be advance the film to the next photo, right?
If you forget to do that…
The camera, when it takes that next photo, will be double exposing.
That’s just what happens.
It just re-exposes the film.
Like I had one where I took a close-up of my pet box turtle.
And it was like getting ready to eat something, so it had its mouth open.
And I was just taking pictures of all kinds of little things.
And then I had a picture of a Smurf.
And it looked like this giant monster was eating a Smurf.
And it was very cool, but completely accidental.
And I’ve, I’ve seen a lot of photographs in one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, and I, I tried to take credit for it, but everybody knew that that was an accident, but yeah.
Well, I mean, it was a ghost turtle.
Yeah.
The photographic world has lost this world where accidental double exposures led to these really strange, you know, mystery photos.
The new kinds of things that happen in the digital world, they’re still weird, but they’re not as reliably explainable or as reliably mysterious.
Like, so when you’re doing a…
panorama shot and you get a weird photo of your cat where it’s like the head is here and then it’s got a giant tube body and the tail’s way over here so it looks like your cat’s nine feet long it’s the demon cat whether it’s rods or orbs or double exposure all these different phenomena i’m not finding any of them as compelling as the good old-fashioned double exposure i really i loved them
And I thought they really created a lot of cool mystery photos.
Well, I think it’s a matter, too, of people just not being familiar with that kind of older technology.
And when we talk about chupacabras and just decaying cows and things like that, people by and large aren’t familiar with these processes or old technology.
And so it just seems very magical and mysterious.
True.
It’s true.
Although we’re going to be talking about cattle mutilations real soon.
So I’m excited about that again.
There’s something to look forward to.
There’s lots of things that can cause what would be mysterious to the person not expecting to see these show up on their film or their photos, whatever that, whether it’s digital or film or otherwise, but.
Again, I’m overall skeptical of the idea that film can capture ghosts, especially if you don’t see the ghost.
If you see a ghost and take a photo, that would be the least unexpected thing, right?
Well, I saw it and I took a photo and it showed up.
That’s almost never what happens, though.
It’s the, we didn’t see anything, but when we took the photo and developed it, look what we got.
And that’s a pretty good indicator that what you’re dealing with is something that was in camera, not in real life.
Well, I think even going back to 1959, so right around the time of the newbie church ghost too, and this will all make more sense soon, but I think even going back to that time for people who weren’t really that familiar with technology, the idea that this could capture a ghost I think was more believable.
Yeah.
Not plausible necessarily, but believable.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
I, I, I, again, I’ve become super skeptical.
I still love looking at old ghost photos and trying to figure out what’s going on.
So.
Me too.
Love the photograph is just beautiful.
Classic.
Yep.
So thank you so much, everybody.
And thanks to the audience for participating.
That’s a great chat.
Thank you for joining us.
Good to do this.
Got to do more of these.
All right.
We’ll see all of you very soon.
Okay.
Bye.
Bye.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard a discussion of the Mabel Chinnery backseat ghost photo from 1959 with myself, Karen, and with the help of Karen’s partner, Matt Baxter.
I had not seen this uncropped photo that Matt shared during our talk, but his point’s a strong one that the background of the photo, which includes other vehicles, does not resemble the cemetery or surrounding area claimed to be the source of that photo.
In fact, the high wall and distant tall buildings don’t much favor any of the area immediately around the cemetery.
And as Matt also pointed out, it’s unusual for a headstone to be ready promptly unless it was pre-purchased.
And even now, there appears to be no notable headstone.
So the story that the couple was there taking photos at the graveside and finished the roll with a shot of Mr. Chenery might not be quite accurate.
If we take the presumption of sincerity seriously, could the couple have been misremembering the circumstances of the photo?
Was it possible that the previous shot had been of the pre-deceased mother and then, failing to advance the role, Mrs. Chinnery took a shot of her husband sitting in the car and the result was this beautifully centered view of a hybrid of both dead and living, caught by accidents of mechanics and chemistry to resemble a ghost in the backseat?
Is it a hybrid?
If it’s not at the cemetery, could it be an older photo from before she died and through clerical accident it got mixed up with posthumous slides?
We never see any of the other photos in the series.
In fact, that’s a problem with most ghost photos.
The very act of investigation and looking into the context of the whole roll of film is quite unusual.
Of course, that’s only possible on a little window slice of photography.
That period when film had been improved to the point that a strip of film could be tidily put into rolls and taken to the chemist or mailed off to a developer…
And this was just a little slice of time, just a few decades before digital photography would replace much of the process.
And when someone was in the unusual situation of finding that their packet of developed photos held a mysterious artifact suggestive of the supernatural, showing a ghost, an angel, or monsters,
If they took it around to the tabloids, the editors there were not doing investigation.
They didn’t ask to see the envelope and the full reel and the timestamps.
They didn’t look for diary entries or clues whether the story could be verified.
Did they have a good printable photo and did it tell an interesting story?
Yeah?
Yes?
Oh, okay.
Well, let’s publish yet another greatest ghost photo ever taken and get on with the celebrity gossip.
The people who care about whether this stuff is true or not are the very tail end of the food chain.
We are the worms at the bottom of the sea trying to deduce a fully developed sunlit planet of life and beauty from the gray sludge that rains down on the mud in the darkness.
I’m not saying it’s an impossible task.
Every now and then we do get a definitive answer.
But mystery is a little bit like yard plants.
They’ll take hold and grow in the cracks in a barren sidewalk or a driveway or precariously in the side of a water spout.
And so it is with mystery.
A mystery can take root anywhere it can find purchase in the fecund soil of the human mind.
All of us, and probably most of you, are similarly fascinated by such questions and mysteries, but I hope that we’re doing something more than the sort of, that’s cool bro, online ecosystem where this stuff thrives today.
We certainly try.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
Remember to insert something upbeat and cheerful here.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
Jim remembers his mother-in-law’s last words.
She said, Jim, you’ll never come to any harm.
She said, I shall still be with you.