The story goes that sometime in the 1950s the Cooper family of Texas bought an old house and moved into it. On their first night there, the father took a photo of Mom and Grandma posing with the two kids at the dining room table. Everyone was happy and smiling. They were living the American dream.
But when the photo was subsequently developed, they saw, to their horror, that what looked like a body falling or hanging from the ceiling had materialized behind them. It hadn't been there when the father took the photo. So where had it come from? Was it an apparition of a deceased former tenant of the house? No one knew.
Is any part of this story true? No. It's pure fiction, but it's recently become attached to this creepy photo, which has circulated widely online. The story appears to have been invented sometime in 2013. At least, I can't find references to it earlier than that.
But what about the image itself? It's definitely older than the story. So what's the real story behind it?
That's a bit of a mystery. Its original source is unknown. The family looks like they're from the 1950s, but that's just a guess. And various details of the photo suggest that it's been digitally altered, which would indicate a more modern origin.
For instance, there's dark "vignetting" in the corners of the photo.
Wikipedia notes that vignetting can be a result of "camera settings or lens limitations," but in this case the vignetting looks too symmetrical, so it's probably an effect created by Photoshop (or some other image-manipulation software).
Also, the shadow of the falling body falls the wrong way in relationship to the main light source in the photo. This suggests either that the body has been digitally inserted into the photo, or that it got there as a result of a double exposure. (Of course, if the falling body is a ghost I suppose the shadow argument wouldn't apply — because do the shadows of ghosts follow the laws of physics?)
But what can Google tell us about the origin of the photo?
After some searching,
the earliest appearance of the photo online that I could find dates back to Nov 14, 2009, when Sam Cowan posted it to ligotti.net (a fan site for the horror writer Thomas Ligotti). Sam titled it "Family Gathering" and categorized it as "Art".
If it's art, that implies someone created it. I'm not sure if Sam himself created it (or even if his was the first posting of it online). I've tried to contact Sam via Facebook to see if he has any more info about it. Hopefully he will. [Note: This turned out to be a total false lead. The guy had nothing to do with creating the photo.]
As for the image's subsequent career online, a few months after Sam posted it to ligotti.net, Xavier Ortega posted it to the site Ghost Theory, including it in a gallery of
"Retro Creeps: scary portraits from the past." Xavier denied any knowledge of its origin, but his post seems to have been what introduced it to a wider audience, launching it into viral circulation. As I noted earlier, the story about it showing the Cooper family from Texas appears to have been invented in 2013.
So, in summary, my best guess is that the photo was created around 2009 as a piece of horror art. But it soon was mistaken for an actual vintage photo, and eventually a fake story involving the "Cooper family of Texas" was invented to provide some creepy contextual details.
Comments
http://labottegadelmistero.altervista.org/il-cadavere-dei-cooper-falling-body/
It was prolly just a double exposure from the snapshots her husband joebob took at the lynching and bbc
;D
One - I'd not discount the photo being original on the vignetting alone. On square format cameras of the 50's & 60's, it was much more common and the process that produces vignetting would produce a fairly consistent feature around a square photo.
Two - what I WOULD discount the photo's origin and the vignette on is the framing - again, square format cameras were more common back in the era when this photo was allegedly taken. Note how far to the right the family is, leaving a large void above the table. There's no real reason to include the table at all, so it would have made more sense for the photographer to move the camera to his right and take a step closer to his family to capture the moment. Leaving that void space (which is now filled with the supposed body) makes me question the origin of the photo OR of the intent of the photographer (see next point).
Three - A few people have pointed out it could be a double exposure, but the "ghost figure" appears to be in a very odd posture for this. It's possible that it is a double exposure, and that the father was attempting to play a prank on his family by intentionally taking a photo with an earlier (or later) photo. It's a long shot, but I've seen stranger ways of spending time...
Theory: either the photo was recently made by someone who stumbled upon a different photo and compiled the photo digitally, or it was a prank photo that is originally from around the 50's and the original poster of the photo stumbled onto it and decided to share it with the internet - with or without knowledge of its origin.
1) If I dropped a camera, I would not have my hands in the air like that.
2) Let's look at what's on the table. A teapot, candles, spoons, is that a camera? Is that another camera behind the teapot?
3) I think I'm concerned about the huge black void between the legs of the woman on the far right. The way the kid is sitting would have left the blackness of a skirt pixelated. The blackness there is smooth without pixel.
4) The "falling man" appears to actually be upside-down when paying attention to what looks like a zipper on the shirt. The zipper appears to be lifted upwards toward the head making is seem like someone was actually upside-down.
5) I would also like to concur about the placement of the photo. If it were a family photo, they would have been the center of the photo. Someone would probably not photograph the "messy" table as well.
I also wouldn't discount the original photo as being genuine on account of the family being off centre. We may have enough sense to do that, but common sense tends not to be all that common. Prior to digital cameras with screens on the back to show exactly what is being photographed, off-centre groupings and heads being cut off was very commonplace. Hell, hand an SLR without a live view screen to someone not used to it and you'll more often than not get a lopsided snap.
It would seem the falling man is what is real and the women and children are the ghosts!!!
It's blurry because the monkey is not standing still.
I don't think a money would be hanging upside down in some family's house in the 1950s and i don't think it would have the body of a person
Re: the 'gap' between the thighs of the woman to the right of the photograph, looks to me to be the back of a chair.
Re: the odd farming of the photograph is completely believable if the original photograph was taken in the comparatively early days of the easily carried film camera, as the women's clothing and hairstyle would suggest. Some/many of the cheaper cameras had badly placed sights, which would aid and abet an already poor and inexperienced photographer by giving them more visual range than the lens actually had. And seriously, many people are just bad photographers. With digital you can keep snapping and deleting until you get one you like, but with film cameras, multiple shots of the same thing usually just take up room on the film and cost a fortune to process. Usually people just made a couple of snaps and hoped one would turn out.
First thing you will say is hey the falling body is just cropped out BUT the falling body is still in the photo..I did replicate the little boys face since I did not have one to put in place..My editing is not perfect but maybe that is what the original photo look like?
This was just for fun..