We always encourage guests to take photographs of the haunted locations we visit during our tours. You never know what unexpected things will turn up in them! That was the case this July on our Original Haunted Walk of Kingston, Ontario, as one of our guests caught something very out of the ordinary.
We received the following email from photographer, Paul Dobbs, who joined us on July 21st:
“One photo at the first Bed n’ Breakfast, has something in the front doorway I can’t explain. A tall, narrow, bright white light. As you zoom in you can see…it is behind the shrubs of the porch, but in front of the doorway as the top of this white ‘thing’ extends above the top of the front door itself. It isn’t a window or a porch light…you can see the porch lights on the two sides of the doorway and this thing has the appearance of width and depth.”
Here is the photo:
What is so intriguing about the photo, as Mr. Dobbs mentions, is that the unusual white light is clearly behind the shrubs in the foreground. Typically, if light is being reflected by another source back to the camera, or if the anomaly is being caused by the photographer (dust or moisture in the air), the distortion would appear on top of everything else in the photo.
Here are a couple of examples from our Original Haunted Walk of Toronto and Haunted Walk Experience at Fort Henry:
After examining the photo with no obvious explanation, we were at a bit of a loss. We decided to send one of our tour guides out to try to replicate the shot during the day. They checked to see if there were any clues (pot lights, reflective surface, etc.) hidden in the darkness of the original image.
Here are the photos:
The daylight images did not offer any obvious explanations that would explain what Mr. Dobbs had photographed. We decided to up the ante and return in the evening to see if we could recreate the exact photo with the anomaly. If we could easily recreate it, we knew there had to be a non-paranormal explanation.
As it turned out…..we could!
Have you figured it out? The strange white light is actually caused by accent lights on the ground pointing up and reflecting off the main sign for the establishment, which makes the text appear to vanish.
Here is the original photo, with the sign outlined:
While we were able to discover a non-paranormal explanation for this photo, we receive many others that we have yet to explain. You can watch our investigation into one of our most baffling examples before. Make sure to keep your cameras handy when you are on our tours as you never know what chilling photos you will capture! Be sure to send us your ghostly tour photos.
Haunted Walk photographers: Louis Zatzman and Jackie Harripersad