Case of the day: can you tell what's in the frame?

A lantern slide, rounded at the corners for the projector. Harry Houdini sits at the left with a heavy book open on his knees. At the right, in a carved armchair, sits Abraham Lincoln, dead by then for more than half a century. Look at the curtain behind Lincoln: its folds run through his coat. Houdini is lit and solid. Lincoln is grey and thin, printed in from a second exposure.

The Library of Congress catalog says Houdini had himself photographed with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln to show the company he could keep with the right technique, and dates the slide between 1920 and 1930. Who pressed the shutter, the catalog does not say.

Clearwell Caves, in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, April 5, 2010. Andy Dingley photographed this pool with a Fujifilm FinePix J10, a compact camera whose flash sits close to its lens. The flash lit the water nearest the camera almost white, and it lit something else: specks hanging in the air just in front of the lens, far too close to be in focus. Each one comes out as a flat grey disc you can see the rock through.

Dingley’s own caption puts the discs down to particles of water or dust. Which of the two it was, in a wet cave, the frame cannot settle.

A hotel corridor at night, sconces on both walls, and a woman in a long white nightgown at the far end. Look away from her. The brass plaque beside the door says PLLASE KNOCK, and the line above it is letter-shaped marks that read as nothing. The gilt mirror on the left shows a dim room of its own, a doorway and a picture frame, and none of the lit sconces across from it. The woman is lit evenly, head to hem, in a stretch of corridor no lamp reaches.

We generated this frame ourselves for the game, to show the tells. They say no camera took it. They cannot say which model did.

Viking 1 Orbiter, frame 035A72, taken on July 25, 1976 over Cydonia, Mars, while NASA searched for a landing site for Viking 2. Near the center, one hill has two eyes, a nose and a mouth. NASA’s caption for the frame explains them: shadows in the rock give the illusion of a nose and mouth, the sun stands about 20 degrees above the horizon, and bit errors from transmission make up part of one eye and a nostril.

The hill is about 1.5 kilometers across. Later orbiters photographed it again at higher resolution and found an eroded mesa. NASA now calls it a natural hill whose face depends on the viewing angle and the angle of the light.

The Sainte Claire Hotel, San Jose, California, February 10, 2012. Ed Schipul photographed this corner during a wedding. The lamp, the plant and the frames are sharp, so the camera did not move. The figure in the left armchair did. Someone sat or leaned there for part of a long exposure and then left. The chair was there for all of it, the person for only some, so the chair shows through them.

Schipul’s caption plays along: “Only a long exposure can even capture her.” It is a joke, and it is also the answer. Who sat in the chair, the file does not say.

A carte-de-visite from the Boston studio of William H. Mumler, dated c. 1872. The sitter is Mary Todd Lincoln. Behind her stands a tall pale man with his hands on her shoulders, and the story that travels with the print says it is her husband. Look at his chest: the backdrop shows through it, while her black cloak stops the eye completely. Two images, made at different times, share one print.

Mumler had been tried for fraud in 1869 and acquitted. In a letter to the Boston Record he dated this sitting to late February 1872. Accounts still disagree on whether Mrs. Lincoln came to the studio under an assumed name.

Cam 2 looks down into a nursery through a fisheye lens: a crib, a rocking chair, a shelf of stuffed toys, a bear on the floor. A small child stands at the crib, holding the rail. Everything in the room carries the grey grain of infrared except the child, who is a flat white shape with no folds, no face and no shading. Read the overlay. CAM 2 NURSERY is clean, but around it sit HERDERD, TEP and 1:6.4k, where a monitor prints a date, a time and a temperature.

We generated this frame ourselves for the game, to show the tells. They rule out a camera. They cannot name the model.

The bishops’ burial vault of Paderborn Cathedral, Germany, July 30, 2011. R. Engelhardt photographed the tomb of Archbishop Caspar Klein with an iPhone 4, and a pale haze came out over the left half of the frame. It dulls everything it covers, stone, lettering and flowers alike, and lights none of it.

The photographer filed the picture under lens flares: light from the candle bouncing inside the lens. A smudged lens would lay down the same veil, and from one frame we cannot tell the two apart. Either way the haze formed in the camera, not in the crypt. Which of the two it was stays open.

The gallery of the Church of St Leonard, Old Warden, Bedfordshire, January 21, 2017. The photographer, Jack1956, described what came out as orbs. There is one, small, hanging against the graffiti on the dark panel at left. It is flat and evenly filled, with a soft rim and no shadow. That is how a speck of dust close to the lens looks when the flash lights it far out of focus.

Against the pale floor it would vanish. Against the dark wood it shows. Whether other specks hung in front of the floor, unseen, the frame cannot say.

A tree limb photographed by Peter Trimming on October 22, 2012, and filed under Muncaster, Cumbria. He titled it “The Scream.” The mouth is a hollow where a branch broke away and the wood rotted out; dead leaves lie in the bottom. The eye above it is a knot, the bark rolled round its rim where the tree grew over the wound. A smaller hollow at the left edge can pass for a second eye.

Two dark shapes above a larger one are all a face needs, and the brain supplies the rest. Where on the estate the tree stands, the record does not say.

A sepia studio portrait on a card mount. A mother and father sit in front, three children stand and sit around them, and an elderly bearded man stands behind the mother. He is the one people point at. He is paler and softer than the family, but solid: the painted backdrop never shows through his dark suit, as it would through a figure printed over a second exposure. The tell is on the card. The studio name reads Photogr:aphr Studio, and the date line starts at 196, runs into a malformed glyph and ends at 1996.

We generated this portrait ourselves for the game. The card says no studio made it. It does not say which model did.

A glass plate by Robert French, from the Lawrence Photograph Collection at the National Library of Ireland, dated between about 1865 and 1914. The caption scratched into the emulsion ends in “Co. Cork”; the town’s name before it can no longer be read. The shops, the kerb and the mud are sharp. The people on the left pavement are legs and bodies you can see the paving through.

The shutter stayed open long enough for anyone who walked past to be recorded only for the part of it they were there. The horse and cart stood still and came out solid. Which street this is, the library has not identified.

An albumen print on a card mount, made in Boston by William H. Mumler between 1869 and 1878 and now at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The back is printed JOHN J. GLOVER, with Mumler’s address on West Springfield Street. Glover sits looking off to the left. Above him floats an old woman in a white cap, her robe thin enough to show the backdrop, her body ending where his head begins.

Two exposures, lit two ways, on one print. The Getty catalog calls her only a faint image of an old woman. Who she was meant to be, the record does not say.

Munich, April 9, 2022, going by the file’s location data. The Commons user XoMEoX pointed a phone up at a ring of cross-shaped lamps, and a second, fainter set came out on the dark panels below, green-white, around a pale bulb of light. Draw a line from any green shape through the middle of the frame and it lands on a lamp.

Bright light bouncing between the lens elements and off the sensor makes these mirrored copies, and the lens coatings tint them. The photographer made the picture on purpose, describing its lens flare, reflections and ghosting as a photographic style. Nothing hangs in front of those panels.

The door stands open on a neglected nave: stained glass on the left, shafts of light, rows of dark pews, and a hooded figure sitting with its hands folded. Start with the notice pinned to the door. It reads SERVICES SUSPENDED UNTIL FU FURTHER NOTICE, the word begun twice and never crossed out. The same light that picks out the figure’s hands shows nothing inside the hood, only flat black. Toward the altar the pews lose their ends and run into one another.

We generated this frame ourselves for the game, to show the tells. The notice says a camera did not take it. Nothing in the frame says which model did.

A small window at night, January 14, 2013. The Commons user Earth100 photographed it and was plain about what happened: the file is described as house dust orbs, caused by the photographer. Dust hung in the air between the camera and the window, the flash lit it, and every speck too close to focus became a translucent disc.

That is why the circles cover the painted frame as easily as the glass, and why none of them is behind anything. The purple and green rims come from the lens, not from the dust. This one was a demonstration. Most photographs like it are not labeled.

Found in the Jewellery Quarter cemeteries in Birmingham, England, and photographed by Lukas Large on October 26, 2024. It is a puffball fungus. The surface is covered in fine granular warts, nothing like bone, and the two sockets are shallow and pale inside, with crumbled edges. Roots and soil hang where a jaw would be.

Two hollows side by side above a narrower base are enough for the eye to build a skull, and a cemetery does the rest of the work. The species has not been identified, and what opened the two hollows, the record does not say.

A carte-de-visite from the Paris studio of Édouard Buguet, undated, 1870s or 1880s. A white-haired woman sits at a carved table. Behind her rises a draped figure, and the ink below names him Napoléon III. His head is a sharp portrait; his body is gauze, and the table’s twisted leg shows through it.

In June 1875 a police sting found pre-exposed plates in Buguet’s studio, and he admitted in court that his photographs were fraudulent. The Missouri History Museum dates this print to around the 1880s, so it may be an older plate printed later. Who the woman was, the card does not say.

A trail camera in a pine wood at night, the infrared flash turning the nearest trunks white. A stag stands on the right. On the left stands a tall pale figure with long arms and no face. Read the info bar before the figure. It carries two different clock times, 10:14 and 03:12:47, a °C sign stuck to the first of them, and a brand name, Nigmano. Then look at the figure: smooth grey shading from head to heel, no hair, no skin texture, the finish of a 3D mannequin.

We generated this frame ourselves for the game, to show the tells. They rule out a camera, not a particular model.

Liverpool Lime Street station, dated January 11, 2006 on Commons. The photographer, SPDP on Flickr, chose the busiest set of steps they could photograph and fitted a new ND64 filter, dark enough to keep the shutter open in daylight. Commons lists the exposure at one second.

In that second the lamp posts, the signs and the grit bin stayed put and came out sharp. The people did not. They crossed the steps as grey smoke, the stone showing through them. The photographer named the work of Alexey Titarenko as the inspiration. Not one of the people on those steps can be recognized.

An albumen card photograph by William H. Mumler, Boston, 1869 to 1878, now at the J. Paul Getty Museum. A young woman sits with her arms crossed. Above her head three pale arms reach down out of nowhere, with faint sprays of flowers around them. None of them joins a body. They are as flat and thin as a second, weaker exposure, and the backdrop shows through them while the sitter stays solid.

The Getty’s current title names her as Fanny Conant; an older catalog title calls her unidentified. Whose arms were photographed for the spirit, no record says.

November 29, 2011, at 23:03 by the camera’s clock. Bill Larkins fired his flash at a garden in the fog, and the air in front of the lawn filled with hundreds of grey rings, overlapping like a wall of bubbles. They sit in front of the grass, the tree and the street lights alike, each one a flat disc with a slightly brighter rim.

They are water particles in the fog, close to the lens, lit by the flash and far out of focus. Larkins says so in his caption, and he tested it: with a telephoto, the rings disappeared and the garden looked like an ordinary blanket of fog. Where the garden was, the record does not say.

A tintype from about 1865, by a maker nobody has identified, now in the George Eastman Museum. A woman in a dark dress sits with her elbow on a fringed chair arm and her cheek on her hand. To her right, at head height, a bearded man’s face hangs in the grey backdrop, with nothing below the neck.

The mottling of the backdrop and the scratches on the plate run straight through him. A tintype is a one-off positive on a thin iron plate. There is no negative to print a second picture from later, so the man was exposed onto the same plate, in the camera. Who he was, and who she was, the museum’s record does not say.

June 9, 2020, 20:49. A phone points up at a ceiling fan, and the fan comes out wrong: three dark blades, each curving the same way as if made of rubber, one longer and thinner than the rest. A poltergeist would make an easy story. The hub and the white ceiling around it are perfectly straight.

The phone, a Xiaomi Redmi 5, reads its sensor line by line from top to bottom, and the blades kept turning while it did, so each line caught them a little further round. The exposure was 1/520 s, too short for ordinary motion blur. The uploader, Arjot, named the effect in the description: rolling shutter.

A séance in black and white, styled after the 1920s. Five sitters round a white cloth, one candle in a brass stick, and above the man at the back a pale face in a cloud of smoke, sharp dark eye sockets inside soft vapor. Read the card on the cloth first. SITTING No, then NO. 7, then a word that is not a word, then NOT BREAK THE CIRCLE. Nobody keeps the rule: every hand lies flat and apart.

The candle is the only light in the room and lights nothing near it, while all five faces are lit evenly from the front. We generated this frame ourselves for the game. There was no circle to break.

The Crypte des Gros Piliers under Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey, Normandy, photographed by Henry Marion on August 3, 2011. Massive round pillars bow outward in the fisheye lens. Between them, pale figures with patches of red and pink drift sideways, and the stonework shows through each one.

The pillars, the vault ribs and the lamps are sharp, and the lamps throw star-shaped rays, the mark of a small aperture and a slow shutter on a camera that did not move. Only what moved is smeared. These are visitors walking through a long exposure, and Marion tagged the picture that way. He called it Ghost in the Castle # 34. Who walked through it, nobody wrote down.

Rolf Dietrich Brecher photographed it on September 23, 2017, and titled it Dead Giant. Two round black eyes, a bar across each. Pipes and two red valves for brows. A half-moon of iron hanging below like a slack jaw. The face fills a brick vault, and ash lies on the floor beneath it.

It is a boiler in a disused factory in eastern Germany. The eyes are its two flue openings, with ash inside; the brows are gauges and valves. Everything is sharp and lit by the same dim light as the bricks. The face is there only because the parts are symmetrical. Which factory it was, and when the fire went out, the source does not say.

A dusty attic in Germany, August 25, 2002. The German Wikipedia user Membeth aimed an Olympus compact up at the underside of the roof, and about a dozen pale circles came out hanging over the rafters and the red tiles. The file has its own name for them: Geisterflecke, ghost spots.

The flash fired. It lit the roof head-on, and it lit the dust floating just in front of the lens, far too close to focus, so every speck became a flat, see-through disc. The tile rows run through each one. The photographer raised the contrast before uploading, which makes the circles easier to see here than they were in the attic.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, October 8, 2014. The Sun glows orange on black, and bright patches across it make two slanted eyes, a nose and a jagged grin. NASA’s own caption compares it to a jack-o’-lantern.

The features are active regions: areas that give off more light and energy, markers of intense and complex magnetic fields in the corona. Up close they are tangles of glowing loops, not shapes. NASA blended two ultraviolet wavelengths, 171 and 193 angstroms, colored gold and yellow, and both show the same regions, so the blend did not make the face. On that one day the regions happened to sit where a face would be.

A doorbell camera at night, fisheye, looking out onto the porch. A figure in a long black coat and hood stands on the mat with street lamps behind it, and where the face should be there is a smooth pale blank. Not a shadow, not a mask: no features at all, while the buttons on the coat are crisp.

Read the overlay. FRONT D025 10/47:13 AM. The word DOOR and the year have run together, the date and the time are fused, and it says morning in the dark. There is a door at both edges of the frame, which leaves the camera hanging in mid-air. We generated this frame ourselves for the game. Nobody stood on any mat.

A wood-panelled hallway, a carved newel post on each side, a plant in the window. On the bottom stairs stands a tall figure covered head to foot in a white sheet, and the stair carpet and the lit doorway show through it. Its folds are crisp. Everything else in the hall is sharp and single.

The National Archives in the UK holds it under COPY 1/439, a bundle of copyright registration forms from January to March 1899, and the description is plain: an image of a ghost, produced by double exposure. Someone registered it the way any commercial photograph was registered. The online record does not name the photographer, or the house.

Main Cave, Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky, between Giant’s Coffin and the Gothic Avenue intersection. The passage is black, and far down it a small pale woman stands in a long dress. Guides named her on the early cave tours: Martha Washington’s Ghost. For other visitors she was George Washington, the Duke of Wellington or Bismarck, depending on where the tour came from.

The geologist James St. John filmed her on August 14, 2012. A distant room is lit, the passage between is dark, and its bends let through only a thin, irregular sliver of light. Her edges are broken rock, and grey stone shows inside her. The shape never changed. Only her name did.

A covered wooden footbridge in Nuremberg at night, posted to 500px on August 26, 2016, by a photographer called Tommy, under the title Ghost. Heavy trusses and iron straps run away into the dark under one small lamp. Between the beams, smoky figures drift: one whitish, one reddish.

Look at the reddish one. It carries a checked pattern, smeared and repeated, a shirt on someone walking while the shutter stayed open. The beams and floorboards are razor-sharp, so the camera stood still. The dark sweep at top left is someone passing close to the lens. What the whitish wisps are, a person in pale clothes or real smoke, the source does not say.

A television on a wooden desk, cables hanging, a doorway to the right, and the whole room sunk in purple and striped with fine horizontal lines, like a still from a ruined tape. The screen glows faintly, as if the set were broadcasting into the room.

Follow the lines off the screen. They cross the walls, the desk and the doorway at the same spacing, which a misbehaving television could not do. The camera drew them. It was a Canon PowerShot SD790 IS, on November 26, 2010 by its clock, and the uploader, Ks0stm, describes the picture as taken with a severe camera malfunction. Which part failed, the description does not say.

A back garden at night, a child’s purple swing set, a house behind, and dozens of glowing discs over all of it, white and pinkish, large and small. The biggest are the faintest. That is the first clue: the size of each disc follows its distance from the lens.

The English Wikipedia user Llamnuds made this on purpose, early in the 2000s, with a Canon PowerShot G1 and the flash on. The file is titled Rain orbs with camera zoomed out, and a sister frame was shot zoomed in. Raindrops nearest the lens became large, dim circles; drops further out stayed small and bright. The garden is in California, going by its categories, and no more is recorded.

A card photograph by William H. Mumler of Boston, from his earliest spirit period, 1861 to 1868, now at the J. Paul Getty Museum. There is no living sitter. A small round table, a lace doily, a little propped-up photograph of a man. Behind it, five pale figures stand in a row, one tall and four small, which the Getty describes as a man and four children.

The blotches of the backdrop run straight through their faces. None of them has feet; they fade out below the waist, while the table stands on its own. They throw no shadow on the tabletop. Who the man in the little photograph was, the record does not say.

August 10, 2011, the dome of the Rotunda in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. Victor Grigas looks straight up. The skylight at the top blazes white, and lower down a turquoise disc hangs among the gold ribs, crossed by faint rays.

Compare the two. The disc has the skylight’s ring of ribs and its dark center, and it sits on the opposite side of the frame’s center: a reflection of the skylight bouncing between the lens elements, tinted by their coatings. The ribs of the dome run through it, and it lights none of them. Grigas titled the picture “Perception of Christ Ascending to Heaven,” quotation marks his own. His description names only the dome.

A gilt mirror in a hallway, a lamp, a woman taking a selfie. In the glass, an old woman in a black dress stands in the dark doorway behind her, the face everyone looks at first.

Look at the phone instead. We can see its lit screen in her real hand, so the screen faces the mirror, the wrong way round for a selfie. In the reflection she holds it in the other hand, somewhere else entirely. And the frame is taken from behind her shoulder: not by her phone, and not by anyone in the mirror. Nobody could have stood where this camera stands. We generated this image ourselves for the game, and there is no hallway behind it.

A glass plate from the Clonbrock Collection at the National Library of Ireland, made by the Dillon family between 1860 and 1930. A young woman in a boater stands smiling under a station canopy on a very wet day. Beside her, a man in a long buttoned coat and cap is faint enough to see the platform through.

Nothing else on the plate is doubled. Canopy, gates, lamp and milk churns each have one clean edge. Under a dim canopy the plate needed a slow exposure, and anyone who moved, or left before it ended, came out thin. The library calls him a ghost. Which station, and who they were, it does not record.

León, Guanajuato, Mexico, June 13, 2010. Tomás Castelazo photographs a crumbling concrete wall, and the wall looks back: two dark square eyes in pale rings, a flat, glum mouth, a rusty nail raised like an eyebrow. The picture is now a Featured Picture on Wikimedia Commons.

Get close to the eyes. They are the end grain of two wooden plugs set into the concrete, with growth rings and a nail hole in each. The mouth is a weathered strip of wood with two screw holes. Something was once fixed to this wall, and the plaster fell away around the fixings in the shape of a face. What hung there, the source does not say.

Einsiedeln Abbey, in the Swiss canton of Schwyz, in December 2012, going by the file page. A tall Christmas tree strung with warm lights stands before the twin towers. A few white discs hang in the air: one in front of the facade, one high at upper left, fainter ones above.

The photographer, the Commons user Chris.urs-o, left the explanation in the description: evening, some snowing, with flash. Flakes drifting close to the lens caught the flash and were drawn as large, flat discs, as white as the snow on the ground. A light in front of the church would light the stone. This one lights nothing. The colors were corrected in Picasa before upload.

A print by G. S. Smallwood of Chicago, 1905, registered with the U.S. Copyright Office and now in the Library of Congress. A little girl in a white dress and a big bow stands on a wooden stoop with a bouquet of roses. Around her are three more people who do not fit the stoop: a woman’s face larger than the girl’s whole head, a baby’s face low by the gatepost, a man in a striped shirt.

The railings and brickwork run through all three. Two images share one sheet, and the Library catalogs the print as a double exposure spirit photograph. Who the girl was, and who the faces were meant to be, the record does not say.

Venice Beach Skate Park, Los Angeles, November 12, 2016. The frame is very wide and the railings bend into curves. That is an iPhone 6 panorama, which the phone builds from a sweep of thin strips taken one after another. Near the right-hand rail stands a figure far too tall, headless and pale, its legs out of line with its body, its board hanging below.

It was moving while the sweep passed, so each strip caught it at a different moment. Nothing that stood still broke. The photographer, Jukka, titled it “Ghosts in a panorama of a pool.” The strips kept the skater a slice at a time. What happened between the slices, none of them caught.

Karlova Street, in Prague’s Old Town, at night. Martin Hricko published the frame on 500px on April 27, 2012, titled it “Ghosts” and tagged it long exposure. A crowd flows up the cobbles as gray vapor, the shop doors showing through their bodies.

In the right foreground one young woman sits on a stone step, sharp to the edge. She held still for the length of the shutter. The walkers did not. Every sign, every lamp and the house number 183 are crisp, so the camera was fixed and only the people moved. How long the shutter stayed open, the page does not say.

A school photograph in black and white: about thirty children in three rows against clapboard, a teacher at the back, a chalkboard propped in front. Two of the children have no faces, only pale smears. Read the board before you look at them. It says GRADE 4, then ST. AGNE’S, then ST. AGNES, then 1953: the school named twice, once with a stray apostrophe.

Nobody holds the board up. It stands on the grass between two pairs of feet. And one of the blank children sits in the front row, where no one could have been half-hidden. We generated this frame for the game. The children in it never existed, and nothing in the frame says which model made them.

A white switch, a white socket, a cream wall. Peter Lindberg photographed it on July 17, 2004 with a Nikon Coolpix 3100 and called it “Danish Wall Socket.” The face arrives before the title does.

Two round holes for the live and neutral pins make the eyes. The arched hole for the ground pin, which the Danish design places below the other two, makes a small surprised smile. Nothing in the frame is blurred, doubled or see-through. It is one molded plastic plate, and anyone near a Danish wall can check it for themselves. Three holes, placed for electrical reasons, and the eye supplies the rest.

A carte-de-visite stamped “Specialty/ By/ Mumler.” on the back, from William H. Mumler’s Boston studio, dated by the Getty Museum to 1861–1878. An unidentified man with a long beard reads in an armchair beside a small table. Behind him the Getty catalogue counts three children: one in a light dress at his shoulder, one face at the right, one inside a picture frame on the wall.

Look at the dress where it crosses his beard. You can see both at once. The frame’s dark edge runs through the face inside it, and the faces are lit flat from the front while he is lit from behind. Whether that framed face covers a real portrait, the print does not tell.

The Brañas de Laíño wetland at Tallós, in Galicia, Spain, just after seven on the evening of November 4, 2014. A small Olympus compact, and its flash fired. Above a black pool floats one blue-white disc.

Look at the water under it first. A light out over the pool would put a second disc on that still surface, and there is none. Then look at the ferns, lit bright and flat, while the trees a few meters back fall away into dark. The flash reached that far and no farther. The disc is a speck in the air near the lens, too close to focus. Whether it was moisture, a seed or an insect, nothing in the frame decides.

A man stands against a white wall, head out of frame, and he is split down the middle. One half is bleached pale, its shorts gray. The other is in ordinary color, its shorts black. Follow the line where they meet. It is perfectly straight, and it cuts the wall and the floor exactly where it cuts him. At the bottom edge, a strip repeats the top of the picture.

The uploader, El aprendelenguas, posted it to Commons in May 2009 “to demonstrate a problem I’ve been having with transferring photos from my digital camera to CDs.” That diagnosis is theirs, and it is the only evidence. Where in the transfer the data went astray, the file does not say.

A pub in Bamberg, in Franconia. Bernhard Hanakam published the frame on 500px on September 23, 2016, under the title “Ghosts,” with one line of explanation: “Motion blur due to long exposures can be really nice.”

The counter is sharp: the brass tap, a dark beer in a big mug, a wine glass, the stacked glasses. The people are orange smoke. The two drinkers at the left let the drawing on the back wall show through their heads. At the right, the bartender’s hand appears several times along one arc, each copy a moment of the same pour. The page does not name the pub, or say how long the shutter stayed open.

A pale shape with two round dark eyes peers out from between two strips of bark. Usien photographed it on November 6, 2010 and called it “Holz Geist Gesicht,” wood ghost face. The description says what it is: a roughly cut pine board, whose knots make a face or a ghost’s body.

The eyes are knots, where branches once grew out of the trunk. A third knot sits lower down and belongs to no face at all. The pale body is where the saw went through below the bark, the grain running down its length. Two knots at the right distance apart, and the board looks back.

A round tower, a cast-iron staircase coiling down, a tall window, and a man in a long dark coat at the rail of the top landing. He is as sharp and solid as the iron next to him, so do not wait for him to fade. Read the enamel sign instead: NO ADMITTANCE, BEYOND TMS POINT, and under that a line of shapes that are almost letters.

Then count the turns. The railing spirals more times than the stairs it guards, and the inner rail runs down into a second spiral of its own. We generated this frame ourselves for the game. The stairs say no one built them. They do not say which model drew them.

A woman in a dark dress smiles at the camera, and a ruined concrete redoubt shows straight through her: brick, rubble, tangled wire. Her white stockings stand halfway up the rubble heap. Two scenes at two different scales share one frame, and neither is smeared. The film was not wound on between two shots.

The photographer was Cyril Hampden Isaac. The Australian War Memorial holds the print as P00687.287 and captions it: “The outline of a battered concrete redoubt is just visible over the scene of an unidentified woman standing outside a brick building.” The Memorial filed it in a Flickr set called “Seeing Double.” Who she was, and where either picture was taken, the record does not say.

A red-orange sunset over low hills, trees and roofs, and a red beam dropping straight through the sun. A real sun pillar stays in the sky above the sun. This one keeps going, past the horizon and in front of the trees, to the bottom edge of the frame. It is perfectly vertical and the same width all the way down.

That is a whole column of the sensor overflowing, called smear. The sun itself, a white blob spilled into the pixels around it, is blooming. The uploader, kriplozoik, posted it in May 2011 as an “example of blooming and/or smear in digital photography.” The file carries no camera data, so the camera that made it stays unnamed.

Calheta, Madeira, at dusk, from a rooftop: orange tiles, a solar panel, a white chimney, a dark hillside strung with village lights, the sea. In the blue-gray sky float several pale discs. They are faint, so look for them against the cloud.

Then look at the chimney. It glows white while everything beyond it is dim, which means a small flash fired and reached only the nearest thing. Martin Haisch’s Lumix recorded that flash in its data. The discs are soft, about the same size, and the cloud shows through them: dust or moisture right in front of the lens. He left no description. Which of the two it was, the frame does not say.

The Steiner Mole, a jetty on the Baltic coast of Schleswig-Holstein, July 21, 2019. A pale walkway runs out to two striped beach huts, and between them stand one or two gray shapes, thin as smoke.

Start with the water. The sea is a flat sheen and the clouds are dragged into streaks, which takes an exposure of many seconds. The flags blur in the wind; the poles that hold them stay sharp. The people kept walking, so they stretch along the jetty with the railing showing through. The photographer, liebeslakritze, titled it “ghosts” and tagged it zwischenlatscher, German slang for people who walk into the shot. How many walked through, the smear will not say.

Piazza della Loggia, in Brescia. Two cyclists cross the square with the paving showing through their wheels, and walkers fade in the middle distance. A slow shutter is the first guess here, so look at the spokes.

They are sharp. So are the frames and the pedals. A long exposure would drag a moving bicycle into a streak. These are frozen and simply pale, like every other figure, each at one even opacity. The photographer, Fangel, explained it on 500px in May 2016: “Image created with multiple exposures on camera. double exposure fusion, 4 shots.” Which of the four shots each figure came from, the frame keeps to itself.

An open white shutter, a blue sky, and on the boards a black profile looking right: a pointed cap with horns, a hooked nose, a jutting chin. Smatu photographed it on June 18, 2019, and the description says it: the shadow of a window catch evokes the silhouette of a horned figure.

The caster is in the frame. The catch at top left has two prongs, and they are the horns and the brow. The hinge plate makes the nose. The shadow has the same hard edge and slant as the shadow of the iron bar beside it, and it crosses the join in the shutter like paint. Where the shutter hangs, the record does not say.

A wooded two-lane road at night, seen through a dashcam, and a barefoot woman in a short white dress standing on the center line, reflected in the hood. Read the road before you read her. The sign on the right says SPEEED LIMIT 11:6. Below it a second sign repeats the dashcam’s own speed, SPEED 52.

The overlay gives two years, a month numbered 111 and a unit of km/hh. And the woman glows evenly from head to feet, while the asphalt in front of her, which the headlights reach first, stays darker. We generated this frame for the game. No car drove this road, and the frame does not say which model drew it.

The Lauttis shopping center in Lauttasaari, Helsinki, January 30, 2021. A flower shop, a pharmacy, rows of ceiling lights, and in the middle a tall dark figure in a long coat, back to us, half dissolved in white.

Look at the haze, not the figure. It is as thick on the sign at lower left as on the far shop, and real mist in a room thins out near the camera. Every light wears a halo. The photographer, JIP, explained it: the lens had fogged with condensed vapor after “a rapid transition from cold outdoor weather to warm indoor weather.” The veil was on the glass, a fault on the camera’s side. The figure is a shopper walking away.

Madeira Beach, Florida, at night. A wooden boardwalk, shop lights, palms, a lit bridge over black water, and in the middle a pale hooded figure bent over a tripod, the railing showing through.

Andrew Petersen published it on 500px on January 13, 2013 as “Ghost Photographer” and told the whole story in one line: “I took a long shot of my friend trying to use their crappy tripod.” His own camera sat still for a slow exposure, so the lamps came out as sharp stars and the water as smooth streaks. His friend kept fiddling, and the outline doubled. Whether the second tripod ever stood level, the picture does not show.

A carte-de-visite from William H. Mumler’s studio at 170 West Springfield Street, Boston, dated by the Getty Museum to 1869–1878. The Getty catalogues the sitter, in brackets, as William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist editor of The Liberator. The brackets mean the cataloguer supplied the name.

Behind and above his chair rises a pale shape, the Getty’s “faint image of a woman.” She is an even patch with a cut-out edge, the backdrop’s tone carrying straight through her, and she casts no shadow. On his dark lapel, pale streaks show where the lighter image spilled over the darker one. Whose spirit she was meant to be, the Getty does not say.