Right ...
I dug deep into this particular rabbit hole years ago, but apparently I never posted about it here. That's not surprising given all the chaos I was enduring around the time this thread went dormant on FTMB.
Here's what I recall ...
The only thing that's definite in all this is that the photo is a PhotoShopped composite that was passed around until somehow it became an Internet "hit".
The hunt for explanation of a hanging / falling phantom body dissolved into a hunt for the digital image that was the only evidence. This evidence turned out to be so obviously fabricated when closely examined that the photo's fame became the mystery rather than the image itself.
One of the reasons the somethingawful.com thread was widely believed to be the photo's origin is that it contained tips on juking the contrast and adding visual "noise" to make a photo so "dirty" it could portray almost anything in a convincing manner. The procedures mentioned there matched the characteristics of the famous digital image.
The hanging figure was convincingly demonstrated to be a second image that was overlaid onto the table scene image.
The table scene image contains distortions when closely examined - distortions that are consistent with PhotoShop manipulation of one or another sub-area of the image. One example I recall is that the candles on the table show clear signs of being digitally stretched vertically.
Somewhere along the way an online poster surfaced who claimed to be one of the children in the photo (the younger kid on the right) and the only surviving person shown at the table. He claimed the family name was Copper rather than Cooper, and the table scene was a family snapshot from 1959. He was greatly upset that someone had somehow found his family's snapshot and used it for a photo manipulation project.
Things got even stranger when a self-published e-book appeared in 2016. E-book?!? (Let me pause to find the details ... ) Here's the Amazon listing:
Urban Legend: The True Story of the Cooper Family Falling Body Photo Kindle Edition
by Richard Ramsdell
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HDZFMFM/
This Ramsdell claimed to have been in touch with the sole surviving person from the photo, even though he referred to the survivor by a name different from the one given by the alleged survivor who'd posted online himself.
Ramsdell turned out to be (among other things) an instructor teaching digital media and digital photography techniques.
This set off another round of questions and speculation as to whether the e-book was as much a hoax as the photo, whether Ramsdell was the original creator of the photo years earlier, etc., etc.
I don't know what conclusions the book offers, and I've never bothered to hunt for further details on its contents. I'd already waved off the case before I was aware of the e-book.
This case is even more of a frustrating mess than the Patterson-Gimlin film affair.