Paranormal Investigator Photographs 'Ghost' in Front Yard
An image of the ghostly figure posted to Quest for the Unknown. (Image credit: Tia Wilson)
Paranormal investigator and historian Tia Wilson posted a photograph to her Facebook page on July 9th that appears to show a mysterious individual walking across her front yard in Durham, Maine.
The page, called Quest for the Unknown, has over 20,000 followers and documents Wilson as she investigates oddities, historical mysteries, murders, asylums, haunts, and other strange subjects.
"So take a close look at this photo," Wilson wrote in an accompanying caption. "Before we left for our camping trip, we set the game cam up...This photo was taken Saturday night at 8:58pm (July 8th). There was nothing on the film before or after this shot. Our first thought was someone was in our yard in the evening and we started to freak out."
"But then we got to thinking, if this was a person, it would have snapped the photo a lot sooner than it did, and it would have also snapped a photo of them leaving," she continued. "It did neither of those things. Now look closer... it looks like is a man dressed in military fatigues and flat brimmed hat carrying a rucksack."
In an interview with the Sun Journal, Wilson said a neighbor told her that a World War II veteran named John had once lived in the 1820s farmhouse.
“He came back and proposed to the love of his life. On their wedding day, he showed up, but she didn’t,” Wilson said. “He ended up living in the house and never married. I’m starting to call (the figure) John, because I haven’t gone back any further (in history) than that. It looks like something within the 1900s, so WWII kind of makes sense.”
Wilson went on to speculate that perhaps a green light bulb outside of her house might have attracted his spirit, since green bulbs were a traditional way to welcome veterans home.
The game camera is triggered by motion, and takes pictures in 10-second intervals. Wilson said that the shot prior to the ghostly figure showed only bugs, and the one just after showed nothing out of the ordinary.
At least one skeptic noted that it's not impossible the shot could be of a living person.
"Bugs set the camera off, so it was already cycling when he walked up," replied a commenter to the Sun Journal article. "That's why he didn't set it off and have a photo taken earlier, at the edge of the driveway, for example."
"Then, the next slide was 10 seconds later - taking a photo of him halfway across the frame. Then he kept walking, and was out of frame. Ten seconds before, then ten seconds after, that's twenty seconds to walk from out of frame, to half way across it, to again out of frame," he explained.
"Seems pretty reasonable to me," he continued. "Or....you know....ghosts. Oh and this convenient story that your neighbor says gives you knowledge of the intimate details of someone's life from eighty years ago."
But Wilson told the journal that she'd experienced other paranormal activity at the house--such as doors opening, phantom footsteps, and a shower curtain moving seemingly on its own.
“I’ve been upstairs in the bathroom and the cats were raising hell on the stairs and I heard a man say, ‘Be good!’ like he was yelling at the cats,” Wilson said. “I’m in the bathroom, ‘Hello?'”
She does have a theory regarding the haunting, and will reportedly prepare to gather more evidence in the future.
“We’ve put the camera back up in hopes that maybe we’ll catch it again,” Wilson said. “My thought is that it’s sort of like a residual haunt and maybe every year on July 7 at 8:58 it happens, so I’ve put a reminder in my phone to put the camera out for next year.”