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Falling Body Photograph

Pietro_Mercurios said:
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.
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i think this makes a lot of sense, the hanging body has more depth, the pose also makes sense ...


untitled (3).png
 
henry said:
since rescinded as a canard
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Well, no ...

The fact that the posting to ligotti.net was the earliest demonstrable appearance of the photo online still stands.

The only thing "rescinded" at the cited webpage is any suggestion that the person who posted it to ligotti.net was the creator of the photo. That's the extent of the correction ...

This turned out to be a total false lead. The guy had nothing to do with creating the photo.
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Even though the "guy" in question (see below) had nothing to do with creating the photo, he had everything to do with posting it to ligotti.net, the launch pad from which it subsequently rocketed into Internet fame.

In the circa 4.5 years since this story was last discussed on our former FTMB, there have been two additional clarifications regarding the dates cited.

The person who posted the photo to ligotti.net had the username "Sam Cowan". Someone from MetaBunk tracked down this Sam Cowan, and he provided the following points:

- He was indeed the person who posted the photo to ligotti.net in response to a late 2009 call for submission of creepy pics.

- The actual date of his submission / upload to ligotti.net was January 2010.

- He did not create the photo himself, but took it from an existing thread elsewhere - almost certainly at somethingawful.com.

- The most likely source thread from which the pic was taken was Something Awful's "Create Paranormal Images" thread (mid-2009 to early 2010), which coincidentally is widely credited as the original source for Slenderman (yes - That Slenderman).

- This somethingawful.com thread was a combination of a tutorial on creating hoax images from found photos and a place to post examples and member creations.

- The attributions associated with the photo (location; timeframe; family name) did not originate with this Sam Cowan. All that was added later by others.
 
EnolaGaia said:
Well, no ...
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the ligotti link doesnt seem to work for me ?

so can the photo be found @ somethingawful.com, its certainly their kind of material, but wouldnt it still be on a thread somewhere ?
 
henry said:
the ligotti link doesnt seem to work for me ?
so can the photo be found @ somethingawful.com, its certainly their kind of material, but wouldnt it still be on a thread somewhere ?
Click to expand...

The ligotti.net site has been operational as recently as last month, but it seems to be offline or hidden (requiring login to even access it) as of this month. I don't know what's going on there.

Searches for the specific photo on somethingawful.com were done years ago, but the posted pics were long gone. Attempts to locate the MIA pics by trawling archives preserved at the Wayback Machine were similarly fruitless, and similarly done years ago.
 
henry said:
so nothing definitive at SA
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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.
 
EnolaGaia said:
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.
Click to expand...

Thank you very much for your detailed look into this, much appreciated.

It is though, as you say, a frustrating mess.
 
EnolaGaia said:
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.
Click to expand...

Thank you @EnolaGaia :oldm:
 
Fascinating, thank you!
It prompts me to resurrect a comment made earlier; that is, the original photo was very oddly framed to give enough space on the left which provided room for the "extra" years later. Of course, it could be that the original photo had a lot of space to the right, with the family crammed into a tiny space centred in the middle: this extra space to the right being cropped out. Or it could be that the original photo really was that badly framed!

Let's face it, we've all seen crappily framed images and we've taken our fair share too!
 
DrPaulLee said:
Fascinating, thank you!
It prompts me to resurrect a comment made earlier; that is, the original photo was very oddly framed to give enough space on the left which provided room for the "extra" years later. Of course, it could be that the original photo had a lot of space to the right, with the family crammed into a tiny space centred in the middle: this extra space to the right being cropped out. Or it could be that the original photo really was that badly framed!

Let's face it, we've all seen crappily framed images and we've taken our fair share too!
Click to expand...

That is one of the things I often look for when looking at supposed 'anomalous' photographs, but in this case I did consider that perhaps they wanted to include the table and more specifically the candelabra, within the photograph, for special reasons unknown to us. Plus with the way it has been composed, the window is pleasingly almost centralised.

Or, as you say, it could just be badly framed :)
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
... 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. ...
Click to expand...

You're not alone. The 'ballerina' hypothesis surfaced years ago, and some folks went off looking for the original (ballerina) photo to prove it. To the best of my knowledge no one ever found an exact match.

As I recall, there were one or more other hypotheses concerning a scene or situation in which a woman might have her hands outstretched over her head like that. To the best of my recollection the ballerina interpretation remained the most commonly cited / accepted one.


Schrodinger's Zebra said:
... 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'. ...
Click to expand...

It's the mother's crossed legs with the younger boy's lower half perched atop them. Undoing the artificially over-contrasted photo to lighten things up reveals this.
 
EnolaGaia said:
You're not alone. The 'ballerina' hypothesis surfaced years ago, and some folks went off looking for the original (ballerina) photo to prove it. To the best of my knowledge no one ever found an exact match.

As I recall, there were one or more other hypotheses concerning a scene or situation in which a woman might have her hands outstretched over her head like that. To the best of my recollection the ballerina interpretation remained the most commonly cited / accepted one.




It's the mother's crossed legs with the younger boy's lower half perched atop them. Undoing the artificially over-contrasted photo to lighten things up reveals this.
Click to expand...

Ah thank you, very interesting on both points.

T'would be good if the original ballerina photograph could ever be found, but if people have been searching for it for years, then chances will be slim.
 
What I find oddest of all about this image is that certain people have no idea what everyone else is talking about, as they cant see anything remotely resembling a falling body. I mean, really?! How can anybody not see it?!
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
T'would be good if the original ballerina photograph could ever be found
Click to expand...

The strange body looks more like the negative image of a man in a traditional embroidered shirt holding his arm up. Maybe the image is from someone's private photo album, or a found image that some art student tinkered with. Anyway, not everything that ever existed is on the Internet. It just feels that way sometimes, because of how many virtual farts and belches there are online . . .
 
I’ve been thinking about this photo recently, because it came up in some YouTube video I was watching. They concluded that it was ‘shopped, and didn’t exist before 2009, same as this thread.

Except I could swear I’d seen this picture before that. I’m convinced that I first saw it in one of the many unexplained books of my youth, most likely in the 90s, alongside that old lady in the back seat of a car, and the large blurry head in the middle group of people sat around a table in a restaurant.

I remember it because it was really creepy, but even credulous young me could see that the framing made it obviously fake. Why leave all that empty space to the side of the picture if there’s nothing there? But I can’t find any sources for this picture, or any like it, prior to 2009. And it’s not in any of my books.

I’m having a proper Mandela Effect moment with it (in that it’s almost certainly my memory that’s at fault). Anyone aware of another picture I might be thinking of?
 
I might be totally wrong here so apologies now but the thing that strikes me the most is that the figure appears to be a black person so perhaps it was some unfortunate soul that suffered a terrible death.
 
While I love a spooky photo as much as anyone, it must be said that from the very invention of photography, an aspect of fraud was possible. People who didn't know how photography works were fooled by what we'd now call laughable mock-ups, helped along by grief and wishful thinking.
Entire careers and businesses were founded on it and even Arthur Conan Doyle was a fan.

So I've read what @EnolaGaia posted about this one a while back and agree that it's bunk.
I'll add 'like all the others' which is my own view on it.
Dunno how Enola feels about 'ghost photography', or whatever you'd call it, generally.
 
I have no doubt that this is an altered image, we were creating stuff like this in our college darkrooms in 1997 as art. And of course, darkroom editing has been going on since the early days of photography itself. I also don't think the imposter in this image was photographed upside down. I would imagine the original image was of a person/woman stood up straight with arms held aloft. This at least puts the lynching theory to sleep. I don't really see a ballerina though!

What I can't reconcile, personally, is the solid black blob in front of the woman/boy's legs at the right hand side.
Even if I lighten it. The edges are too defined to be accidental, and the levels of opacity don't suggest natural shadow. I think this element was added deliberately, but for what reason I have no idea!

As for the weird hands, I believe this is the result of the woman and boy's hands meeting in a similar, joined up pose (his below hers) which creates a sort of deformed, and quite disturbing effect.

And also! The hanging figure is much closer to the camera than anything else in the scene, and slightly oversized. And by this I mean it 'feels' closer than anything else. It simply doesn't belong there, and this might bring up the question of whether a spirit would or should obey the laws of perspective and proportion relevant to a scene it intrudes upon (fairly mind-boggling this, at half past 3 in the morn).

The subject was probably moving when the original shot was taken, blurring the movement of the hand. The white part on the chest strikes me as an artefact, due to it being so much brighter than the rest of the clothing. Maybe?
This image was probably never intended to fool anyone.
 
Apart from a very vague resemblance in the pose, I don't get the ballerina thing at all.
A traditional ballerina's outfit features a skimpy bodice, with bare arms and shoulders:

ballet.png


The inverted figure in the photo seems to be wearing some sort of long sleeved undershirt - rather like in the photo below.
The button hem running vertically down the centre of the chest is clearly visible.

shirt.png


In the original photo, it looks like the figure's right sleeve has ridden down slightly, revealing a strip of pale flesh just above the wrist, but the hands and face have been shaded out, presumably to thwart any attempts at identification.

figure.png


I'm going along with the evidence and analysis of @EnolaGaia above and that this was a carefully crafted hoax picture submitted in response to a challenge to create a spooky image.
Case (almost) closed I reckon.
 
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blessmycottonsocks said:
Apart from a very vague resemblance in the pose, I don't get the ballerina thing at all.
A traditional ballerina's outfit features a skimpy bodice, with bare arms and shoulders:

View attachment 56883

The inverted figure in the photo seems to be wearing some sort of long sleeved undershirt - rather like in the photo below.
The button hem running vertically down the centre of the chest is clearly visible.

View attachment 56884

In the original photo, it looks like the figure's right sleeve has ridden down slightly, revealing a strip of pale flesh just above the wrist, but the hands and face have been shaded out, presumably to thwart any attempts at identification.

View attachment 56885

I'm going along with the evidence and analysis of @EnolaGaia above and that this was a carefully crafted hoax picture submitted in response to a challenge to create a spooky image.
Case (almost) closed I reckon.
Click to expand...
Look up images of Ballet wrap top and you'll see what they're getting at.
 
There are other photos, of said "falling body" where someone has added facial features & white dots for eyes.
 
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If they had no idea the falling body was there they would not have left room for him in the photo and the people on the right would be in the middle.
 
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