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Falling Body Photograph

It looks as if the head obscures the very top of the flame on the middle candle, which would indicate that it has been added?

There is no reaction from the sitters and I would have thought that it would have been in the peripheral vision of at least one of them.

The way the clothing hangs looks right, rather than an upright person added upside down, but what is the white shape on the chest?

Of course it could be the sort of house where men in black hoods are regularly suspended from the ceiling. :)

Mrs T once swore she's seen something "Large and dark, which was gone too quickly to identify" drop from the ceiling of a shop. The assistant saw her reaction and just said "Oh you've seen the ghost."

It's definitely odd, if someone wanted to fake something why someone upside down?

Good find Father Ted
 
Good one! Looks like a trick of a curtain, though.
 
I think it's a multiple-exposure, possibly the result of a darkroom foul-up.

If you open the image in a graphics program, then flip it vertically and play with the contrast / brightness settings (or simply invert the black / white ...) the mystery figure appears to be (e.g.) a woman in a bathrobe with her arms extended overhead and tossing her head to one side (as if mugging for the camera).

Tweaking the parameters will also show that the figure's arms and hands are multiply exposed and their apparent shadows don't seen to correlate with the primary photo's lighting (flash + candles).

Because the mystery figure seems inverted from the primary scene, I suspect a negative got exposed onto the main photo in the darkroom.
 
Bit more information on the photograph. It's of the Cooper family from Texas and was apparently the first phot taken in their new house. Googling 'Cooper falling body' will retun a few hits but not that much actual information.
 
This pic is about as old as the internet! It's done the rounds enough times.

I always assumed it was a photoshop because it's a cliche spooky-old-photo. Or maybe it's an early 20th century version of You've Been Framed :lol:
 
:roll:

It's clearly the ghost of someone who was murdered in the house, lynched maybe, back to remind the new inhabitants of the sins of previous tenants...

Seriously, double exposure, curtain simulacra, Photoshop...!?

Standards are slipping here... 8)
 
I am the only one who does not see a 'falling body'?

I just see some kind of background image (perhaps curtains , ect) that happen to have a gap in them.

I dont see a face, body, or arms. Nothing even resembling a person.
 
AnacondaEq said:
I am the only one who does not see a 'falling body'?

I just see some kind of background image (perhaps curtains , ect) that happen to have a gap in them.

I dont see a face, body, or arms. Nothing even resembling a person.
Click to expand...

You must be. No way it can be anything other than a body. Turn your laptop upside down and have a look. In fact it is even more disturbing that way as it really does look like a dead body hung upside down. Plus whatever it is is clearly between the back wall/curtains and the camera, it seems to obviously be above the table - although perspective can be misleading.

The only editing I can imagine is the face having been purposely smudged/painted out.

It is for me one of the most disturbingly unsettling images I've seen in a long while and I really wish I hadn't started to look at it again at this hour when my wife is away on business for a week and I am home alone... :oops:
 
I agree!

I wish I hadn't looked at it at all; it's one of those pictures that I'm going to be prone to seeing on the back of my eyelids at night for a long time :shock:

Just something very, very creepy about it.
 
Imagine, if you will...

Someone standing in front of a projected slide image, which is upside down. The person dances around a bit, waving his arms in the air. A photo is taken. The background image seems slightly flatter than the 'hanging man', who appears to be casting a slight shadow behind him, particularly the arm on the left of the picture. The new photo is turned upside down.

No Photoshop required, but a disturbing image, nonetheless.
 
1157415_10152267224236352_1453653801_n.jpg


Lightened it up a bit and the two red arrows signify, the higher one, the line I drew in Photoshop to square off the head area when altering the levels and, the lower one, a straight line that shows up which seems to indicate something being placed over the head either in Photoshop or with an olden days method.

Looks like the image of the body has been added later and then to avoid identifying the face it has been blurred or blackened over. Lightening that area does not seem to indicate any features or anything discernible as a face.

The body does appear to be casting a shadow but I think that is just where the arms have been moving and blurring. It also appears to be behind the candles. There is something white on the chest that appears to be a necklace which would obviously not be sat like that if the body was upside down - although it could be a button or clip.

Personally I think it is a pre-Photoshop Photoshop. I actually think that IS a dead body taken from another photo and placed into this innocuous family scene. Certainly being strung up upside down was a means of displaying executed folks in the early/middle of the last century - see Mussolini for starters. I would assume if this was in the early 1950s pictures of those kind of incidents from WWII would be circulating. Also the hands seem very dark, coud just be the contrast with the light sleeves but would that be a symptom of a body having been hung upside down - blood collecting at the lowest point?
 
Any thoughts about the small light object in the mid-chest area? It looks to me like a zipper toggle, but you could argue for hours as to whether it is hanging "up" or "down".
 
Am I the only person to think that, in McAvennie's lightened version, it looks like ET in a dressing gown?
 
Looking at it upside down it seems to be a ballerina, wearing a cardigan wrap around leotard thingy. The "zipper" may be a pin or a brooch.
 
I find the composition of the picture interesting. If it was intended simply as a picture of four people sitting at a table then they would've been centered in the picture. They are not. That suggests the photographer deliberately left room on the left to insert the ghostly looking image. I'm raising the hoax flag.
 
The placement of the (apparent) mothers with their kids looks like a fairly ordinary family gettogether/sitting randomly and gabbing scene. No need for them or the photographer to move really to snap a bit of family life -- unless they have one of those camera-bug relatives who want everything to be perfect. Still -- unlikely that a spectre appeared in the snap just where there was room for it.

The silver thing on the "body's" chest looked at first like dog-tags to me, but obviously hanging against gravity if they were. Looking close at the top (to us) of the silver thing, there's just a hint of a black loop of thread or wire running up not quite to the waistline -- indicating it may indeed be the image of an upside-down body!

No one has yet mentioned that sugar bowl or pitcher in the lower left corner with an unhappy clownish face on it!
 
Is there not something decidedly-wrong about the woman's hands, on our right as viewed? Displaced/wrong fingers??

And I think that looks like a camera sitting on the busy table: the non-TLR viewfinder type which was almost a plastic art deco Box Brownie, with a disposable flash cartridge sticking out of the top (possibly 35mm or some 50s era square-aspect film type, and much bigger/older than 110 format)
 
Father_Ted said:
Bit more information on the photograph. It's of the Cooper family from Texas and was apparently the first phot taken in their new house. Googling 'Cooper falling body' will retun a few hits but not that much actual information.
Click to expand...

Interesting it's in Texas - the Deep South - where some local sentiment regrets coming second in the Civil War. And the hanging body has, seemingly, darker skin. Hmmm. Strange Fruit?

(First thought: a user of the camera, in the former Confederate States in the early 20th Century, was prone to riding out at night dressed in bedsheets and warming his hands on a burning cross. A double exposure from nocturnal activity of a sinister sort? KKK-minded people are not known for intellect or being able to organise things so incriminating evidence is hidden - ie, wind the camera on after participating in a lynching! Or else it's a memory of darker events in the South intruding on a family photo... )
 
Nothing to add other than I love this picture - fake or real its classic creepy. Good stuff! :D:D
 
McAvennie said:
You must be. No way it can be anything other than a body. Turn your laptop upside down and have a look. In fact it is even more disturbing that way as it really does look like a dead body hung upside down. Plus whatever it is is clearly between the back wall/curtains and the camera, it seems to obviously be above the table - although perspective can be misleading.

The only editing I can imagine is the face having been purposely smudged/painted out.

It is for me one of the most disturbingly unsettling images I've seen in a long while and I really wish I hadn't started to look at it again at this hour when my wife is away on business for a week and I am home alone... :oops:
Click to expand...

Thanks cherrybomb for liking that post...

I have now read it, remembered what the picture it refers to was and find myself thinking about it, home alone, at after 1am and once again my wife is away for a week on business... :/
 
Hopefully @McAvennie your wife isn't away on business this week as I type this reply :)

I've seen this photo on-and-off over the years and have never been able to make up my mind about it. I just did a quick google to see if there were any nice shiny new explanations about it, and... nope, there really isn't.

I did find this site analysing the photo, which is worth a read:
https://shortoncontent.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/the-cooper-falling-body-photograph/

What immediately sprung to mind when I saw the 'right-side-up' version of the falling body, was how much it resembled (and Mr Zebra said the same thing without prompting) - a ballerina. In that sort of 'tippy-toes' pose, hands gracefully draped skywards, head tilted slightly back.

Whether that means anything or not is another matter, but I thought I'd mention it.

A couple of other things:

1. The blog makes mention of a blackish shape bottom-right, which I'd never seen before - has anyone else noticed this? Or have they been so focused, as I was, on the 'falling body' that it went completely unnoticed? (I'm trying to work out if it is just the crossed-legs of the woman, somehow obscuring the right leg of the boy she's holding, but I can't quite settle for that yet, not especially given the odd gradient of the shading of the 'blob'.

2. The table, I think we'd all agree, seems to be a round (circular) one, right? So why then, behind the candelabra, does the back edge of the table drop downwards instead of continuing in the expected 'arc' (if that is the right word)? Circled here:
1563467127576.png


Perhaps it is the tablecloth, slightly ruffled upwards, but again I thought I'd throw it out there just in case!



Ermintruder said:
Is there not something decidedly-wrong about the woman's hands, on our right as viewed? Displaced/wrong fingers??

And I think that looks like a camera sitting on the busy table: the non-TLR viewfinder type which was almost a plastic art deco Box Brownie, with a disposable flash cartridge sticking out of the top (possibly 35mm or some 50s era square-aspect film type, and much bigger/older than 110 format)
Click to expand...

Yes the fingers on the right-hand erm... hand! Do look like they kind of fade or taper off in an odd way. And good catch re: the camera - I thought at first (and second, and subsequent) glance that it was a sugar bowl, but now I see what you mean about the sticky-up bit sort of off-centre to it - that being the flash of which you speak?
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
The table, I think we'd all agree, seems to be a round (circular) one, right? So why then, behind the candelabra, does the back edge of the table drop downwards instead of continuing in the expected 'arc' (if that is the right word)? Circled here:
Click to expand...
My parent's long-serving dining table had a rectangular central section, to which were attached two semi-circular sections, one on each of the two longer sides. These could be folded down to save space, and indeed, for about 360 days out of each year, our table would have one of the two semi-circles folded down so that it could be pushed flush against the wall, and we didn't have to breathe in quite so much on our way past to the kitchen. I suspect something similar may be the explanation here.
 
Krepostnoi said:
My parent's long-serving dining table had a rectangular central section, to which were attached two semi-circular sections, one on each of the two longer sides. These could be folded down to save space, and indeed, for about 360 days out of each year, our table would have one of the two semi-circles folded down so that it could be pushed flush against the wall, and we didn't have to breathe in quite so much on our way past to the kitchen. I suspect something similar may be the explanation here.
Click to expand...

Ah, I know the sort of table of which you speak. I didn't think of that! :)

Wouldn't it then look more flat at the front side as well though? Or could it just be the angle we're viewing it at?
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
Wouldn't it then look more flat at the front side as well though?
Click to expand...
Well, at our house, the side away from the wall would still be up - you could fit four people round it that way, which was all we usually needed to cater for. So it ended up looking like a misshapen semicircle.

BTW, apologies for the apostrophe catastrophe in my previous. I had - and indeed still have - two parents.
 
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