Photo Story

I don't get how someone could not believe in the paranormal, I really don't.

Okay, I get not believing in vampires, zombies, Bigfoot, whatever. But simple ghost and hauntings, to me the evidence for such is overwhelming. There's no reason for a rational person to not believe in a spirit world of some kind.

Maybe I'm biased because I grew up with direct experience with the paranormal and so it's always been something I've just accepted to some degree. It all started when I got a Kodak analogue camera for Christmas.

My kid brother and I shared a room, and we were goofing around with it, snapping random pictures. At one point I guess we took a photo of the closet doors, where we had posters, a keyboard that we never used, and various other items.

After these worthless photos were developed at the Walgreens lab, my brother and I looked through them. When we got to the one of the closet door area, the aberration was immediately apparent. It wasn't like in typical ghost photos where the spectre is faint and barely noticeable without close inspection. Here, the figure was very pronounced.

It was some blonde kid with moppy hair, about our age, in a Spider-Man costume. He appeared to be jumping down from something, arms angled out, feet braced, like he was goofing off and doing an action pose I guess.

His eyes lacked the red tinge one would expect given the dark lighting situation of the bedroom. You could say the picture might have gotten crossed with some other family's picture at the lab, but we knew that wasn't it. The kid looked "Photoshopped", a term which wouldn't exist until decades later. He was only barely transparent and would have to have been specifically doctored in, and such a thing would seem awfully advanced for a minimum wage drug store photo tech.

We showed it to our Dad, who just laughed it off. He had grown up in a haunted house himself, so he said we had nothing to fear from a kid ghost unless it started doing specifically malevolent things. He did think it was odd though considering he was the original owner of our house and so there weren't any previous families from which such a haunting could have come.

We had no idea who the boy in the photo could have been. He didn't specifically look like any kid we knew. We joked about it that night as we went to bed, saying how maybe he got killed for being a Spider-Man dork or whatever.

I held onto the photo for years into adulthood, showing it off every once in a while as a conversation piece. Most of them thought I was just bullshitting, as it didn't look like a "typical" ghost photo.

I got rid of it a few years ago. I had lost it for a while, and found it buried in one of my many junk bins.

It took me a moment to recognize it because the picture was different now. The mysterious person in front of the closet was now a 40-50 year old man, no Spiderman costume, just a green striped shirt and khakis.

His body was still in the exact same jumping pose though, which made it about ten times more disturbing somehow. Like the kid from before, he was facing the camera as if expecting the picture to be taken. Unlike the kid, I recognized the man who was now in the frame.

It was a guy I'd had the misfortune of coming to know as an adult, a really shitty individual. Not too long before, he'd gotten himself killed due to his personal shittiness.