Stories like this always bother me. Not because some group captured something interesting and used it as a means of getting onto local TV, but because they are claiming it to be a photograph of a ghost. And then when other teams call them out on this, they get angry and defensive. You can’t call something a “ghost” or “proof of a ghost” when it’s just a grainy photo, or a muffled EVP. It may be interesting, it may be spooky, but it’s not proof of anything. Interestingly enough, one of the comments on the original article claims that this effect is easily created using a picture app, though I haven’t been able to verify that yet.
(Springfield, MO) — The Ozark Mountain Paranormal Investigation Team has explored some of the areas most haunted homes.
Their skeptical team members always take hundreds of pictures in the dark.
But their most recent trip brought back a shocking image that is making believers out of the biggest of skeptics.
“The first thing I want to do is disprove it.” says Robert McCall, skeptic and co-founder of the Ozark Mountain Paranormal Investigation Team.*
Robert spends a lot of time disproving apparent haunting in the region. “A lot of times people think there is a presence in the room and it turns out the room is where the breaker box is. Or your meters on the outside of the wall and there is a lot of energy there. Sometimes people think they are hearing things and it turns out they are just hearing things.”
But something that happened during his latest ghost hunt left Robert with no explanation. A family in north Springfield contacted the group because of some odd things that were happening.
“All the lights were shut off and the doors were locked,” says Robert. ” I came around to lock up the front door and as soon as I turned the corner I heard a growling disturbance on my EVP and seen something darker then dark move around in the hallway so I just started taking pictures of a completely dark hallway with nobody there.”
There was no one in the hallway but something else showed up on camera.
“When I first seen the picture, I saw a reaper,” says McCall. “Typical of what you would think.” Now it almost looks like a mother and child.”
“First I thought that maybe he took a picture of himself in the mirror,” says Courtney Cunningham, co-founder of the Ozark Mountain Paranormal Investigation Team. “But when we switched it to black and white and filtered out some of the contrast I was terrified. And I was a huge disbeliever at first that picture changed my mind.”
And now this team of skeptical ghost hunters has a few less skeptics.
“Ghosts are real – ghosts are very real,” says Courtney. “You just got to believe in something bigger then yourself.”
Robert says the photo has been sent off to a paranormal investigative organization in the St. Louis area for authentication.
In the meantime, if you are interested in the Ozark Mountain Paranormal Investigation Team, check out their Facebook page.
(*Note – The Ozark Mountain Paranormal Investigation Team is not affiliated with another local group called Ozark Mountain Paranormal Investigations. This story includes a corrected web link to the Team’s Facebook page)
(After this story originally ran it was discovered another ghost hunting team operated under the same name. Subsequently, the Ozark Mountain Paranormal Investigation Team changed their name to the Panther Creek Paranormal Investigations.)
If they were truly as skeptical as they claim to be, they wouldn’t be touting this image as being that of a ghost. It’s a spooky photograph, but they need to look for other explanations before jumping to the paranormal one. This may be a simple case of some IR lights causing a shadow. Or it could be a forgery, created using a photo app. And the reason I hate modifying pictures too much (messing around with the brightness, contrast, etc.) is because sometimes it can make an anomaly look even spookier, when it’s really not. The human brain is designed to see order in chaos, a face in a bunch of randomly arranged pixels. And sometimes ghost hunters look too hard and can only see what they want to see.
