Did I Really Catch a Ghost on Film? Reexamining the Vale End Orb One Year Later

Orbs are believed to be the physical manifestations of ghosts and ghostly energy.  The small balls of light typically appear on film and are used by ghost hunters and paranormal investigators as evidence that ghostly apparitions are in fact real.  Watch any broadcast on the subject and you’ll see orbs.  Lots of them.  The problem is I never really believed in orbs, despite having a deep-seated passion for the subject.  They always seemed like easy evidence to me.  They’re not visible to the human eye.  They also don’t look terribly ghostly.  They’re fuzzy balls of light.  Could they not be dust motes instead?

I admit, however, that when I ventured out to a handful of remote cemeteries last year as part of our First Annual ‘I Ain’t ‘Fraid O’ No Ghosts’ Ghost Hunt, I did want to capture some orbs despite my feelings on the subject.  Why?  Well, I wanted something to come back with.  Anything!  I didn’t think it’d be too likely but as luck would have it, I got lots.  They were exactly as I expected too:  small, fuzzy, random, and probably just light from my flash reflecting off of airborne particles.  They were fun, but certainly not anything to convince me otherwise.

That is until one picture changed everything.

Not so fuzzy is it?  No, that’s one big bright ball of light.  Unmistakable.  And I swear nothing was there save the headstones when I snapped that pic.  After noticing it on the camera’s display that night I went back to snap another picture for comparison:

As you can see, while the angle and distance aren’t exactly right, there are no light sources in the background.  This was Vale End Cemetery in Wilton, NH, and there’s nothing but woods in the distance.  No cars, no houses, no stars, just trees.  And none of my cohorts were in frame either.  Immediately I was extremely excited.  An orb!  And it’s huge!  Two of my friends were also enthusiastic about my results, my wife…not so much.  She kept looking for alternative explanations, other reasons for why that bright ball of light could be there. 

There were none.

Armed with what I was sure was one of the very best orb pictures you could possibly have, I ran this by my mad scientist father who is fairly well-skilled with a camera.  If an outside source wasn’t the cause of the orb, then the next thing to check was the camera itself.  Here was his reply:

Hmmmmmmmm!  This is most interesting.  Orbs are usually refuted by identifying them as very out of focus dust motes that are reflecting light in some way.  The other explanation is that they are simply lens flare – light reflecting off the interior elements of a camera lens.  This is certainly not lens flare.  Lens flare can be identified in most case by blowing it up (magnifying it in Photoshop, etc.) until it shows the leaves of the iris diaphragm – orb takes on a multi-sided shape.  Nothing like that happens here.

 You said you did not see the orb when you took the picture?  What kind of camera were you using?  I gather you used flash.  When flash is used, the shutter speed is usually like 1/60 of a second.  That is long enough for a small, very small, dot sized point of light in the background to register on the camera sensor and accumulate – i.e., the spot gets larger as more and more light falls on the same place.  The tombstones are lit by the very short duration of the flash <1/5000th of a second.  But the shutter is open for 1/60 and things NOT lit by the flash will grow in size and appear much brighter than they really are.  In other words, if there was a tiny pin point source of light in the distance shining through the trees, it could appear much larger due to accumulation.

The accumulation theory is really the only rational explanation I could give for this.  It is one of the best orb shots I have seen.  And, orbs outside are much harder to explain than those inside houses.  What was in the background behind the trees – very distant street lights, etc.?

I explained to him what I’ve already told you:  there were no distant light sources.

And that was that.  I didn’t take it to the Syfy Channel.  I didn’t call a psychic.  I simply let it be.  A year later I am no closer to discovering the cause of the Vale End Orb.  Like all other so-called ghostly evidence, this seems destined to never be solved and not get us any closer to the answer of whether ghosts really do exist and what orbs truly are.  But it stays with me.  It lingers.  I want to know.  You may not believe what I say about the circumstances surrounding the picture’s origin, but I do.  And I’ll never forget the moment I looked down at the camera and saw the bright white dot between the tombstones.  A ghost!  A ghost!  Maybe it’s a ghost!

I’ll probably never know.

–The Dead Cap’n Blackjack