Paranormal Photography

In the dead of night, as people sleep, that is when the spirits creep. As the bell tolls three dark things take power, we like to call it the supernatural hour and now. Hey, welcome to the Supernatural Hour Podcast. I'm your host, Raven.

This is Emmet. And I'm Chad. We are missing a few of our folk. They just had some last minute stuff come up and we're going to have to just podcast about them.

That's how life works sometimes. For the business, it's brought to you by Castle PhotoArt. Go out to our website and you can link to his website and contact him about your photo needs. And it's super easy.

I actually contacted him just today for my own photo needs. My kids are starting to complain about their old pictures on the living room wall. And so I texted him and I said, hey, I need a appointment. He said, when I'm flexible and I told him, he says, that's good.

And he sent me an email and got some forms you got to fill out and boom, boom. It was the whole process literally took five minutes to get a book. I remember getting my driver's license and my mom's still having my baby pictures prominently displayed in the house. It was embarrassing.

Doc's wife, if you're listening, I still need your family photo. Okay. Talk to Castle. They have a new one.

They got one taken. She won't send it to us. She's busy. She's got lots of stuff going on.

Just a reminder. We just had an investigation at the Quannas Park at Battle Creek and it was great. It was a good event. We're looking forward to getting back there again in the future.

And we will actually tell you more about that at a later time. Cool. I was waiting for Roam to introduce the residential. She is not here.

So we had a residential in Payson. It was an awesome presidential. It was awesome. And they've asked us not to disclose the location.

But I will say that was one of the old buildings in Old Downtown Main Street. And I had to miss that one and I'm just still torqued about that. But she did say the owner did say we could come back. So we will take you in it.

Cool, cool. And it was phenomenal. So some of the things that they said were happening, they've had water problems. They've had leaking that they can't explain why it's leaking.

They've heard voices. They just had the creepy feels. What else did they say, Jen? The water one was there and then they could kind of hear things.

Oh, the owner would hear spirits yelling at her. And in this building, there's downstairs is a business and upstairs is a living area. And they had some activity going on upstairs in the living room area. Bad dreams.

Shadow people seeing shadows. It's like an active business area or a storage area or... It's active business. Yeah, this was the basement.

Yeah, so then there's a basement and the basement, it's kind of interesting. There's where you go down the stairs and you can see where there's an archway where there was tunnels to go under the city. But it's been ripped over. And at this point, let me just tell you, I have just the biggest desire to get a big old sledgehammer and just bust my way through there.

But I won't. And right now the basement is pretty much ripped apart from end to end. And all the walls are out there putting their framing in new walls or getting it ready for a new tenant down there. But they've got the original foundation and they're going to leave that original foundation.

The stone walls and brick walls down there exposed. So we went in and we chatted with the owner and then we went downstairs. We started down there and there was, and I guess they've had several mediums come in as customers. And mediums have told them things that were there and all the mediums had roughly the same information.

And so they didn't tell us anything. They said, we want to see if your, what you get is, you know, the same as what these mediums have told us. So we went downstairs and it was an angry young man, teenager. And he had issues.

He didn't like women because his mother worked in that building, you know, a hundred plus years before and had locked him in down there when he was a young child. And you know, bathroom down there and it's dark and it's scary and there's bugs and nothing to do. We've encountered several angry teenagers over time. And they don't even have to be dead.

I know kidding. I live with one. There just aren't teenagers at peace. So that's the way it is.

Teenage angst is that's what it's called, right? Anyway, go on. Yeah, so we chatted with him a little bit. You know, we explained that the owner and the workers there who are all women, you know, weren't there to be mean.

We told him to watch them and listen to them and they're going to talk to him and acknowledge him. You know, not all women are like his mother. And he's going to say he's going to quit pestering them. We're going to set some boundaries.

So if you've listened to this podcast on a regular basis, you know that I used to use flashlights. And the flashlights, I have a green lens in one and a red light in the other and they're mag lights. And you turn them just barely so they're just barely off. And the idea is when a spirit touches it, the spirit has enough mass to make the connection and the light comes on.

And when I first started using these, I had fantastic results. But I haven't used them really regularly for probably three or four or five years because I have a story about the flashlights. I have a story about the flashlight trick. Just as an aside, that is the very first experiment I ever did in the paranormal field.

Actually, serious experiment was the flashlight trick of the mag light. You know, you know how to exactly. You said it so it's barely on or off. And I said it on the coffee table.

And I said, okay, if you're here, touch that light and it went on. So of course, my heart stopped. I sat there for a few seconds and I said, all right, touch it again and turn it off. And it went off right on cue.

So of course, I grabbed that thing, turned it off, ran upstairs to my wife and said, I'm never doing this again. And here we are. Anyway, that's amazing. It does work.

It really does work. Go ahead. No, it really does. And I think the very first time that we investigated as WISPS was in a basement somewhere.

I don't even remember what building it was. But the very first thing we did was pull out the flashlights. So, you know, if you're just starting or you want to know what some basic equipment to get, those are perfect starter equipment. Anyway.

Oh, yeah. High return rate with those. But I haven't used them for like four or five years because I just have not gotten good results with them. And I actually got new mag lights about that time.

Well, maybe there's something wrong with these are too stiff for I can't quite get it. That's what I noticed in brand new ones. You got to get them broken in and loosen them up a little bit. Yeah, you're right.

But the last couple of investigations we've done, they've actually worked. And so this fellow downstairs, I can't remember what we named him. I don't remember. I don't remember.

I think we actually figured out what his name was. It was like Jared or... Yeah, because the woman used the wrong name with him. It was a J-name.

It was J-ram. Jared or... I think she was calling him Jared or Jason. Anyway, it was a J-name.

And she was calling him the wrong name and he kept yelling at her. And she's sensitive enough that she could actually hear him correct her. So we got the right name, Jacob. That's right.

I think she was calling him Jared and he was yelling at her saying, no, my name is Jacob. But so we kind of got Jacob and the employees at this business to have an accord. So they had an accord. And then we went upstairs.

And when we got upstairs... Well, no, this is the very upstairs. I was just going to say we went up to the apartment because we didn't even want to last. So we went to the apartment.

And we discovered there was a woman there. And she wanted to cross. So we crossed her over. And then there was the person who lived there.

She just had bad dreams, couldn't sleep. Never really had any problems sleeping until she moved there. But just nightmares and not only nightmares, but sleep paralysis. And she is familiar with the paranormal.

And she said, I realize that sometimes sleep paralysis is just that or it's a dream or something. But she goes, no, she says this is happening six, seven, eight, nine, ten times a night. And she says, I'm awake. She says, this isn't this.

I do this. I'm awake. And I get this paralysis. She says, it's different than...

Well, because we've discussed sleep paralysis before. Yeah, there was an episode we did a little bit back. So she says, it's not that. She says, I'm awake when this happens.

So during the course of the investigation we found out that there was a portal right under her bed. And it was probably three quarters of the way over. And she sleeps right in the middle. So she was sleeping on top of a portal.

And it was a negative portal? No, it was a negative portal. So we got that left. Wow.

And I haven't reached out to her to see if it helped, but she hasn't said anything to me. So, no news is good news. I've just been busy. I'll reach out and see how everything's going.

So then we went down to the main level. And on the main level, one of the things I forgot, but some of the people say they see a woman in white and several people have seen her. So we went back to the very, very back of the building. And back there's an old pew.

Because it's an old historic building and they've decorated it to kind of keep that old look and old feel. And there's an old church pew back there by the back door. And... Christy was with us on this investigation.

And so Christy and I walked back there and we both felt the same thing. We could feel that there was a spirit there that was... My first impression was angry and then the more I stood there it kind of mellowed into anxious, you know, more anxiety. And Christy felt the anxiety right off.

But she didn't want to talk to us. And she sat there right on the bench. She sat right by her. And she would talk to Charles through the dowsing rods, but she wouldn't speak with us directly.

And what? She... I can't remember why she was nervous. I don't know.

Oh, I think just with everything going on, you know, with grumpy Jacob in the basement. And there's another grumpy guy upstairs. And then there's an... Anyway, she was just a little concerned with everything going on, which we'll get into the other stuff here.

And so we just chatted with her and told her, hey, this is a new business that's here. And the people that are here are just trying to earn a living. And they're aware of you and they're respectful of you. And she seemed to calm down.

So back in one of the other rooms, kind of a story-driven for right now, there's two old cash registers. And those cash registers. And a chair. Old cash registers.

If you've never picked one up, they weigh about 85,000 pounds. They're the heaviest things on the planet. And we have one in our basement. They're heavy.

So the owners of the business had, you know, talked to them a little bit on their cell by themselves. And I don't remember exactly what went on, but they were able to determine which one of these cash registers, the certain male spirit that hung out there was attached to. And there was a chair back in there. And they have an employee that, because of some physical limitations, is unable to lift a whole lot of heavy things.

But there was a chair back there that she was able to lift. And the only way she could have done that was by helping the spirit. The assistance? Mm-hmm.

Wow. And because she was back there by herself and she had to move it for some reason. Sorry. There's a lot going on there.

So some of the stuff is a little bit. I still wish I could have been there. That sounds exciting. That was amazing.

So we chatted with him for a little bit. And, you know, verified, we asked which cash register he wanted. And he said the same thing that he told the business owner previously. Yeah, previously.

So then when we first went to the main level and I was heading back towards the pew where the white lady was, there was a room that just really caught my attention. And so I told Chris, I said, you go ahead and go back there. And I'm just going to pop in this room for a second and see what's in here. So I opened the door and went in.

The room was empty. As far as what you could see. There was walls. There was carpet.

There was a light switch. A door. An overhead light. That was it.

But I tell you what, there were 30 plus spirits in there. It was bumper to bumper people. And you could just tell that they were type one spirits just your typical. They were once alive and then they died.

And for whatever reason, now they're here spirits. But they were all kind of hiding in that room. And the reason they were hiding is because we did find a type three in demonic spirit upstairs in the bedroom as well. Forgot that.

That was the scariest thing in the whole building. This place was packed. It was packed. And Payson is famously haunted.

Every place is haunted. Every place is old. It's one of the most haunted places in Utah County. So back to the back to this empty room full of people.

So almost all of them wanted to cross. An empty room full of people. So almost. So almost empty people.

Invisible people. Yep. So almost all of them wanted to cross. And so after we talked to everybody else, we went back into this room and I said, okay, we're going to cross people over.

I said, if you don't want to cross, you know, go into another room, you don't have to cross. But if you want to. So we we helped them cross. And there were about 30 people in there.

About 14 wanted to stay. And one of the ones that wanted to stay was a teenage girl. And we chatted with her. And the reason she didn't want to cross is because she had a thing for Jacob's in basement.

So little romance going on there. Wow. And we've seen this before, haven't we? In other places.

Yeah. That's cool. Wow. So then the last thing we did is we went into the, you know, when you very first come into the building, you know, the main room, we did the investigation.

They had some mirrors that were facing each other and just the nature of the mirrors, you know, the, some are very antique and they don't want to take them out. So they're just going to figure out a way to cover them. And so there was definitely some energy going on there. But then we discovered a water elemental.

And so, you know, it's hard to chit chat with them. They don't like to chit chat. But we did tell the elemental that he needed to stop messing with the water. And he agreed that he would, he, I don't know what the elementals have.

So was that the elementals ground before people ever settled there and build on the ground? You know, that is not a question I asked, to be honest. But that may very well be the case. Could be.

Because where, where that business is, is, place in City Park, you know, like the original main old park is just like a half a block away. And it has a lot of water going on over there. So it's very possible that it could just be water. That's what it sounds like to me.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a stream. There's a pond across the street from the pond used to be an old school, which is where I went to school and we were threatened with our lives if we hung out of the pond during recess.

My experiences, the elementals just won't mess with you unless you really disrespect their little piece of land. Right. And that's what we told, you know, these business owners. We said, elementals are very playful.

They're fun. As long as you don't piss them off. Because then they can turn very, very ugly. So we said, and they're like, oh, what are we doing?

And they said, just, you know, don't, just be nice to it. You know, just come in and say hi. But the interesting thing is we told it, we said, you know, water damages stuff. Water damages water damages paper causes a lot of problem.

It causes a lot of expense to fix. We said, you know, you need to not do the water things anymore, you know, at least in here. And it was very agreeable. But since that was kind of the last thing we did, we were kind of wrapping up and chatting with the people there.

It started making one of the lights flicker. Just. Yeah. Only went back into the thing.

And it was a chandelier that had like eight lights in it. And only one of the eight was flickering. And it would flicker for a while, you know, like it's going to burn out. These were incandescent bulbs.

Incandescent bulbs in a hanging chandelier. And there was three or four hanging chandelier. And so it wasn't a problem with the connection in the chandelier. You know what I mean?

The other seven bulbs were all just fine. And it hadn't, and they weren't dimming. They weren't even dimming. It was just like on or off or on or off.

Right. And it hadn't done that. I mean, we stood there in that four year and talked for probably 20 minutes before we investigated. Yeah.

When we first got there and it didn't do anything. I mean, it just was the light was just on. Right. And then some of the people were still out kind of in the front part while we were in the back part and it didn't do that.

I can't imagine how you get that kind of behavior out of incandescent bulbs. That's wild. And then we asked them, we said, does that, you know, does it do that? Because you can tell it was kind of an antique chandelier.

And it's an old building that they said it's never done that before. Yeah. And they actually found these chandeliers in the basement of this building. I mean, and they put them up.

So the chandeliers are older chandeliers. My grandfather had a couple of them that were very, very similar. And I had one for years. You know, I even commented to her.

I said I've got one that looks almost like that. Yeah. I mean, a little bit different. Were they originally like candles or kerosene that had been converted to electric?

No, they originally did. They were very early electric. They were very, they were they were electric. They were never the kerosene or the.

Okay, so 20th century. I mean, to me, they look like and I'm not like a professional antique, either anything. But if you just wanted my rough layman armchair opinion, I would have said 1920s. Yeah, 20s.

Okay. Yeah, that's that'd be early electric. But yeah, that's cool. Like the Tiffany era.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, cool. So yeah, she's invited us back again.

So we'll definitely get get more of our team in there. I will definitely be there. It's a little too small to do anything wildly public with, but don't look good. Cool.

So for the main topic, it's brought to you by Otaos. They have very good Mexican food, great Mexican food. If you're watching the YouTube on this, you'll see a really delicious looking steak and avocado picture with some information about Otaos. But yeah, they're great Mexican food.

Oh, you're making me hungry. Oh, no, except for the avocado card. It's amazing. The avocados are delicious.

I love avocados. Okay. So our main topic today is paranormal photography. And that is really a broad topic.

And that's kind of our favorite thing to do is take a really broad topic and talk about it. But what's beautiful is that allows us to down the road, have another podcast where we focus really a lot more deeply on different aspects of it. So you want to start at the very beginning or you want to jump in there is a song. That's from Sound of Music.

I won't sing it for you. But do you want to start at the very beginning? That is from Sound of Music. There's my movie reference for you for the day.

We'll get Harry Potter in somewhere. You just did. But it wasn't a clever way. That's okay.

Depending on who you are who's listening, you could probably segment out paranormal photography in different ways. But these are the four ways that I came up with. And it's not a list. It's just four ways.

They're four ways. It's not a list. Are there bullet points? No, there's numbers.

There's numbers. That's not a list. And if they're numbers, they're sequential. As long as there are 13 or 14 of them, that's okay.

There's only four. Four is good. Okay, read your list. It's not a list.

Okay. So one aspect of paranormal photography is when we go on a ghost tent, we purposely take pictures hoping to get a picture of the orb that we just fly across the room. We're hoping to see some weird shadow that wasn't there in the previous picture. So we're purposely trying to find stuff.

We're seeing the orb we didn't see fly across the room. Yeah. Yeah, those are questionable. But yes.

Then the second one would be, you know, grandma and grandpa went to Portugal for their summer vacation, took some pictures and they get home. And their kids are looking through it and they say, Mom, what is that? So strange things should just pop up unexpectedly. All right.

Serendipitous catches. Right. Where someone looks at it later and goes, umm, what is this? There's a Bigfoot about to grab you.

Yeah. Right. And as I was looking at this, there was some on the internet. There's one almost just like that.

There was some forest. I don't remember where it is, Romania or Japan or somewhere, that people don't go into because if you go into it, you don't come out. But these four kids, I want to say kids, teens early 20s, went and they stood just inside this forest just enough to get a picture and then they were going to run back out. And they did.

They went in and then it was misty and dark and creepy and just kind of a quintessential creepy haunted forest picture. And you know, they're showing their friends, look at us in the picture, look at us in the picture, we stood in the forest, which I would do. But they were showing people this picture for months. And it took like three or four months for someone to say, what is that?

And if you look off to the right, probably a hundred feet behind them is this humanoid. You can tell it's not a human. It's kind of Bigfoot looking. And these kids never noticed that for months.

Not a clue. Wow. Wow. So the third one is fakes.

There are fakes? People fake this stuff? Right. I can't believe that.

I know, weird. So they want to show some paranormal photography, but they can't. They try to get one and they want to be really cool. So they fake it.

And there's nothing wrong with being artistic, as long as you call it out as an artistic photograph, you know, that you're doing things and making it look spooky, but it's, you know, you're not purporting it as to be a paranormal photograph. It's an artistic work. Right. And this is kind of the vein that I focus on for the rest of this podcast.

But number four, and I didn't know about this one. I knew about the other three. But the fourth one is called, and I don't know if I'm saying this right. That's my life on this podcast is mispronouncing everything.

Is Curlian K-I-R-L-I-A-N. That's correct. Curlian photography. Yeah.

So Curlian photography is photography where they take your picture and you're able to see your aura. And there's actually, if you're in Utah County at the Crystal Ray, I don't know if they still do it, but for a long time they had an aura camera there. I just, I was, that was an aura camera. I didn't know I had an actual name.

So the pictures of you and can capture your aura? Yeah. That's cool. So those are the four kinds that I kind of looked up and ran across in my research.

So if you've got some other things to add to my not list, let me know. Send me an email. And we can add it. But based on that, Emmet, what did you discover in your research for paranormal photography?

Well, it's weird because besides the technique, you know, how you're doing it, I've noticed that some people just have a knack for it. Okay. And you are a good example of this because I can go through an area and just take some still pictures or some flash pictures in the dark and get nothing. And you know exactly when to pull the trigger.

And sure enough, there it is on your picture. So I'm just so impressed because you know when to push that shutter button. You want me to, you want me to teach in my ways? Yes, definitely.

You just wildly push the shutter button. Just take a lot of pictures. You point and you go, and I hope something shows up. Oh, wow.

I got a new phone and I'm not impressed with the camera on my new phone. I didn't take any pictures. The last two investigations we did because they're just every single one of them is milky. So I need to remember to take my old phone with me.

You know, I think I noticed that too. Like this latest phone I've got, the pictures just seem better on the last one. Yeah. So that's weird.

And it's supposed to have better resolution, but it just doesn't have a snap that the old one did. Right. You know, and everyone's got their strong points. There's two or three people on our team that are really, really good at EVPs.

I could take hours of EVPs. Satan himself could be there yelling into my recorder. And I'm like, yeah, I don't hear. I thought I had an EVP once.

I was so excited. I sent it to Castle because he's one of these people. And I'm like, listen to this EVP at 13 and a half seconds. And he actually came over to my house a couple days later for another reason.

I said, did you listen to those? And he goes, yeah, that wasn't an EVP. But did you hear the two that were behind it like half a second later? Yeah, apparently not.

So I suck at hearing EVPs. Anyway, I catch more on the audio track of my videos than I do on dedicated voice recorders. So I don't know. But that's why we have so many people on our team.

Nate's really good at it on our team. Nate's good. Heather's good. Castle's good.

There's someone I'm missing. Anyway, if you're listening to this, I miss Jim, sorry. You're all good. We love y'all.

I'm going to touch upon that in my segment later. But as far as, you know, just general spirit photography. It's amazing. You can even set your cell phone camera to.

I figured out by playing with the settings, you could get it to sort of emulate a night vision camera just with the settings that are on it. Oh, awesome. You know, but you really, it's really grainy and you push the, you mess with the gamma and you stretch it and it gets grainy. But you can actually use it as a low resolution night vision camera.

Cool. I had an app on my phone and we did some video that way years ago. It was really good. Wasn't it?

Oh, this bit. You've got to find that. I know you've got it somewhere. You don't have anything.

There were, there was a male spirit and two female spirits in this house and he was taking video and in the video, you can see a man and two women walking around. You can see legs. You can see skirt swishing. It's fantastic.

Yeah. We're talking about photography in like the visual range, mostly, right? Or, or we can do infrared. I mean, anything where you're at.

I was thinking, if you want to put thermal imaging on there, there's another type right there. You know, that's and. And say, I would kind of put that in my four general ones as purposely seeking to find evidence. But it's definitely.

It's definitely. I mean, there are so many ways to take, you know, all the different spectrums of light and heat. I had to chuckle about this one investigation we went on where I was using the thermal camera and how to say this delicately. The thermal camera shows you that you have definitely two separate sides to your buttocks.

Apparently, at least I do. Yeah, there are, it can reveal secrets. That's true. That's true.

Alrighty. So then, as I was researching for this, there's one thing I wasn't sure what aspect I was going to go down. I thought, let's just do kind of a broad subject and then we can go more in depth. But kind of the thing that really caught my interest.

And I thought, I got to share this is a fellow named William H. Mumbler. Have you heard of him? Oh, yeah.

Is he the one that got Lincoln's ghost? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I've heard of this.

This is cool. Hang on. I'll read my notes, but I need my glasses because I'm all down. I need glasses.

Yeah, I read about this guy even before I got into the paranormal just because it was so interesting and cool. Well, I knew about his pictures. I just didn't know his name. So his name is William H.

Mumbler. I just said that. He was born in 1832. He died in 1884.

And he took a self portrait of himself. Well, that was like super redundant. That's because that would be a self portrait. Okay.

It's been a long day. So in this picture that he took was in 1860. And in this photo, he sees an apparition of his dead cousin. And this cousin had been dead for 12 years.

And so he was really fascinated by this. And he thought, I'm going to try to get this again. And he took a picture of Mary Todd Lincoln, the one that you're talking about, the famous one. I'm sure everyone has seen this.

There's one where there's Lincoln with her and there's one where there's Lincoln and her son that passed in the same photo. They're so cool. It sucks that it isn't what the consensus is. But it was cool.

Very cool. And he says that he didn't know it was her. He says that he was given a false name and he just went in and took a picture. And this picture he took in 1869.

And it shows her sitting down with Lincoln is standing there kind of looking over her with his hand on her shoulder. Ghost Lincoln? Now, this first came about, the very first person that they think took a picture of the spirit. And we're going to come back to Mumbler.

But I just want to throw this out before I get too far away from it. It was a fellow named W Campbell in 1860, so a year before Mumbler's first photo. He was taking a photo of an empty chair. So this is when photography was first coming out and they're experimenting with it and trying to see what kind of things they can come up with and do with their photography.

And he was just taking a picture of a chair in a room. Because as you know, anyone who's listening to this knows that back then exposures would sometimes take half hour to 45 minutes. You'd have to sit there, which is why everyone looks grumpy in all pictures. But when he developed this picture, there was an image of a small boy.

And I have never seen this photo. I am going to call it legit though, just based on the knowledge that he tried to reproduce this and he couldn't. He could not replicate. And he never left the room.

You know, while the picture was exposing, he was just sitting there taking notes and making potions or whatever. I don't know what you do in 1860 while you're waiting. But he said he didn't leave the room. So it's not like a little boy could have sat in the chair for two minutes and then left.

And you know, little boy isn't just going to sit in a chair for two minutes and then leave. They're going to climb on the chair and climb over the chair and climb under the chair and hang off the chair. So the thing about Mumbler is Mumbler had a lot of spirit photos. It wasn't just, oh he happened to catch Ableton with Mary in a photo.

He had photo after photo after photo after photo after photo. Didn't they prove that one of them wasn't even dead yet? I think so. Did the photos, yeah.

Yeah. And you get two schools of thought on Mumbler. One school of thought is, you know, was during the Spiritualist Movement and they were supposed to be novelty photos. He was very popular too.

Yeah, very popular. And you know, some people say no, he tried to push them off his reel. And to me, it's like you get too many of them that this qualifies it as real in my mouth. Yeah, you know, they're all perfectly posed.

So Chad and I actually watched a really interesting YouTube video on this. And there was a couple and they tried to recreate the Mary Todd Lincoln photo. I mean, not actually, like with Abraham Lincoln or anything, because he's dead. But techniques that would be able to do something like that.

So they had the, it was a man and a woman. And the man sat in a chair with like a black hat on, kind of like Mary Todd Lincoln's and had kind of a black cape on, you know, to kind of, they tried to reproduce it as close as they could to her. And then they had the woman standing behind him, you know, with her hand on his shoulder. And they found a man who, for a hobby, does that old fashioned photography like they would have done in the 18th.

And they discovered that if they exposed the film, you know, and had the main subject in the picture the whole time, but then had the other person go in for just a portion of that, a fraction of the time. Yeah, maybe 10 minutes of the half hour. It was enough to put the shadow of that person there and look like a ghost picture. So they were able to recreate it.

What I don't understand is how they got Abraham Lincoln in the photo, unless they, unless he did some double exposure kinds of things with different things. You know, a different actor will call it a different actor with the other and then you have the two different negatives, lay them over each other and then do your... That's going to be a little bit of negative work going on there. Yeah, because they were on the last slides.

And you could lay the two glass slides over each other and have the one in position them. You'd be kind of like Photoshop. Yeah, and they did have on that video, they did show where people did some sleight of hand with slides. And I don't think it was mumbler.

It was a different photographer who was passing off these photographs as real, the same kind of photographs. And they said the way they actually went to court and the way they did it through sleight of hand, they could say, no, no, look at this negative, there's nothing in it, but the sleight of hand they could put it in. It was really interesting. The same thing was going on in Europe too, wasn't it?

I think so. Quite a bit. Yeah, the spiritualist movement was popular in both North America and Europe during the 1860s, 70s, 80s, because of a lot of the death, especially in America. With the Civil War and a lot of the things that went on, people were wanting to connect with their family.

And spiritualists, some of them took advantage of that and some of them may have been, you know, had gifts, but kind of that idea of people didn't want to let people go, that they didn't have a final time to be able to have a funeral with. Sure. So there was a lot of that kind of... Oh, that whole spiritualist thing, that was even popular well into the first third of the 20th century.

Yeah, Houdini was big on debunking things and working with that. And he and his wife actually kind of had a code because a little bit of attention, but there was a lot of... After he had died, he and his wife had... Before he died, he and his wife had had a code together to be able to verify if he could come back and speak with her.

And they went to different mediums every year for like 10 years. She went to him and nobody was ever able to convince her. And after the 10 years, they said no, you know, he couldn't. But that was an interesting one with Houdini and his wife.

And the arts of Conan Doyle was a supporter too. Oh yeah, now they were... it was very, very popular with the, you know, the seances and everything. It was something that was very important to them at that time.

I mean, it still is now, but... That was all emulsion photography. They didn't have Photoshop. Right.

So, Emmet, did you have anything else you wanted to chat about before I talk about something a little more recent? No, go right ahead. This is interesting. So one thing that...

I don't know what I want to say we pride ourselves on, but one thing, you know, we try to be professional. And if we can't verify something, you know, if we can't verify an EVP, there's an EVP that is actually really, really good. But I think it sounds like me. And I don't remember saying what the EVP says, but, you know, I don't have this perfect catalog of every word I utter 24-7, you know.

And so... and the person that took it actually sent it to me and said, is this you? Because it sounds like me. And we know that spirits can make themselves sound like other people.

But it's one of these things that's like, I don't know. I don't remember saying that, but I don't remember not saying that. And it does sound like me. So even though it's a fabulous EVP, if it is an EVP, we don't know.

And so we don't use it because it's probably me. Right. And so we've had people send us photos. I know at one point Castle has, he's got a whole video.

You need to put that up on YouTube. He's got a whole video kind of about, you know, fake photography. And it's really interesting. He did a nice job putting this together.

And we had somebody a while ago send us an EVP or not an EVP photo. They took it in their home. It's this female spirit coming out of their bathroom. And it's just clear as a bell.

It's a woman. She's got a long dress. You can see the folds in the dress. You can see facial features.

You can see the patterns. And it took Castle about five minutes to find that picture on Google. And it's like, yeah, no, no folks. This is a fake.

I strive at no thank you. We always tell people. Yeah, they like that image over another one with Photoshop to kind of do it. But it's like, funny how that woman here is in a house.

And here she's standing next to a tree. And this one, she's an identical image. And it's not hard to find images on Google. Like I said, it took Castle like five minutes to find it.

So if you see a picture that's too good to be true, it probably is. Because most spirit photography is going to be very subtle. It's going to be a shadow. It's going to be partial.

And I'm not saying that someone can't get a fantastic picture of a spirit. I'm sure it's happened. I've seen a few here and there that I go, I think that's legit. We have some pretty interesting ones both in the YouTube photos that we run with our reel and also out on the Wisps site where we have a number of those and EVPs where you go to the Wisps site.

Well, there are some really good photos out there that nobody can really debunk yet. So there are good ones, but you're right, they're very rare. Right, there's one I saw. And I found this one years ago and I wish I had saved it.

It's one of those accidental photos that we talked about. There was a couple. They were on vacation someplace in the Caribbean. And they just had someone snap a picture of them sitting at this old bar.

And when they got home and they were showing the pictures, right next to them is a guy that looks like a pirate. And not with a big feathery hat like Jack Sparrow, but just like a bandana around his head. A parrot and an eyepatch and he was going argh. Yeah, you know, no.

But I mean, he had a bandana around his head. He had kind of a blousey shirt and some necklaces on because I saw the picture. And, you know, when you look at this picture and you look at this man, if you're just glad it looks like there's someone sitting next to them at the bar, right? But when you look at it, there is something wrong with his eyes and his facial expression.

It gave me the worst heebie-jeebies. I think that is a legit picture. Because you could see a couple other people in the picture. And you know, so it wasn't like it was bad lighting because the couple, you know, the husband and wife, they looked normal.

You know, nice, happy, bright eyes smiling. You know, of course they're posing for the picture. But you can see off on one side other people sitting and talking, you know, because it's a bar. And everybody else looked fine, but there's just something about the expression on this man's face and his eyes.

They were just black and just vacant. And not like, oh, you know, some drunk, wandered in and he's sitting there, you know, with the eyes high, you know, with the glaze. And it wasn't even that. There was definitely something non-human going on there.

It was creepy. And I have searched the internet trying to find that picture again. I can't run across it. If I run across it, I'm going to say that so fast your head will spin.

But that was a creepy picture. Just the sheer number of security video captures like that. You know, just serendipitous captures there. And a lot of them look really good.

It's hard to debunk them, you know, and trail cams and nature cams. Who would be out in the middle of nowhere trying to fake something on a trail cam? Right. So I actually have a little notation of trail cams and surveillance cams under strange things and everyday photos.