No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had - Samuel Johnson
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Camera-phone ghost mystery explained
CRUMBS, what a load of old codswallop, rolled in tripe and then wrapped
in rubbish and tosh. The London Evening Standard must be desperate for
news today as it is running a
piece
suggesting that “an extraordinary, ghostly presence” has been detected in an
image grabbed by a
camera-phone.
“Peeping out between the knees of two of the girls is the face of a child,” it declares breathlessly. “The eerie image [is] clear enough to show a pair of eyes, a nose, a mouth and hair.”
Being from the green and pleasant land that gave the world Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey we can help out here though. It’s just a reflection.
This is a story the National Enquirer would have laughed out of court and the Sunday Sport would have been insulted by. Even the Standard couldn’t find any source to give it credence, despite approaching the bottom-feeding piece of tat that is Living TV’s Most Haunted show.
Ciaran O'Keeffe, “a parapsychologist” on the programme, can’t help the anonymous reporter at all.
"As human beings we're very good at finding a pattern in randomness and related to that we're good at finding faces in randomness. The term for this is pareidolia,” says our expert.
Really? We can think of a shorter word.
Still, with stories on the same page including “Thanks a bunch: Queen presented with bananas by the little girl the Queen Mother gave bananas to 60 years ago”, the Standard needs all the help you can provide.
So don’t let our view of the bog Standard’s thin take on the vagaries of digital imaging put you off. The Society of Barrel-Scraping Friday-Afternoon Journalism needs all the help you can provide. Give the story a click right now. µ
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... of whom, in what?

Obviously it's some trick of the light or whatever appealing to anthropocentric sensibilities (like the humanoid recently spotted on Mars), but yours is no "explanation".
There is a word commonly used in place of pareidolia, it's matrixing. Also as someone who studies the paranormal from a scientific point of view i find this pretty funny. 

I'd say you're wrong about it being a reflection though, particially because there is nothing there to reflect off of and even if there was it wouldn't produce that sort of image but mainly because it's obviously a poorly done edit job. Given how it doesn't match the lighting in the area by any stretch of the imagination and part of the pasted section actually appears over the pants leg of the girl to the left of it i don't see how or why anyone would buy that shot as real. Seriously it looks like they tried to paste a face on the family dog given how black it is below it in comparson to all the other space inbetween the people.
Safe to file this in the cherub bin.
Meanwhile, a warm welcome is available at Molly Moggs;
And Woodman will continue to impress;
It is worth a visit to the Cutty Sark;
Beware! Morgan Arms attracts bright young things;
The Prospect of Whitby remains a pretty good prospect;
Williamson's Tavern still has the magic;

London is full of good haunts!
Any wonder why ES is the paper of choice clogging up commuter trains, and tube carriages on Friday evenings?

Stories like this make it happen.
Scary!

(I'm talking about the bingo wings on those youngsters!)