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Would You Believe….?

by Bill Dusty

Last year I wrote a piece in my personal blog, Earth to Bill, about how unreasonable people can be when it comes to their own little personal belief systems. Perfectly normal, logical folks, it seems, can sometimes suspend their rationalism as they ponder the world around them.

Whether it’s UFOs or ghostly ghouls, by the time folks reach their 30s and 40s, their minds are made up on matters such as hauntings, bigfoot, or whether or not we actually landed on the moon (we did).

Unfortunately, matters such as these are debates that can never really be won – by either side – because true believers are simply set in their ways, and will not be moved.

Whatever.

So I’m trekking through the woods one day with my trusty Kodak camera slung by my side, when a large mushroom nestled on the forest floor comes into my view. ‘I think I’ll snap a photo of that,’ I said to myself.

So I whipped out my camera, de-coupled the lens cap, aimed my shot, and fired away.

But after I took the photo, I looked at the preview screen to see that the photo I snapped (above) had a misty aura covering the image of the mushroom.

Now, I immediately understood that there was something a-miss with the camera lens. Quickly turning the camera around, I saw that, sure enough, a slight fog had settled on the face of the lens. (It had been raining all day that day, so pretty much everything had moisture issues.)

As I wiped away the mist, a memory popped into my mind of a story I had seen on Masslive a few months back. Local historian Jim Boone had snapped a photo while inside the doomed former York Street Jail, just prior to its demolition. The image appeared to show a large mist overwhelming the enclosed area he stood in – and, even more hauntingly, there appeared to be a ghostly face floating in there, too.

I remembered that the story had made the news not only on Masslive, but also on our local CBS 3 news. And I remember thinking dismissively to myself back then, ‘It’s just an image artifact,’ and marveling at how so many other people actually believed that the “face” they saw could very well have been of paranormal origin.

I took a second photo of the mushroom in the forest, mere seconds after taking the first photo, after I had wiped away the mist from the camera lens (above).

Now, my image artifact is noticeably dissimilar to the mist that haunted Boone’s photo. I tend to think Boone’s image was the result of either a tiny residue of smoke close to the camera lens, or a much larger bank of dust or smoke farther away. In either case, I’m thinking a combination of direction of shot, camera flash, and or incoming sunlight (no matter how little) had roles to play in the photograph.

As for the face in the mist? Hey, I see elephants and giraffes in the clouds overhead. That doesn’t mean they’re actually up there. But they can be, if I want to believe they are.

Below is an image I snapped while stumbling around the basement of a historic (and probably doomed) house on Maple Street last year. The smoke in this image looks more similar to what Boone encountered. But is there a face in the mist? I suppose there could be one if I look at it just right. (Yes! – There it is! A large face, with mouth wide open. It’s there! Can’t you see it?)

Other photos I took in the house that day had other image issues, due to the poor lighting and decidedly dirty environment.

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Posted by Bill Dusty on Aug 15th, 2008 and filed under Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.