Pareidolia

Pareidolia is the brain's face-finding reflex firing at random patterns: faces in wallpaper, figures in foliage, a man on Mars. It is not a flaw — spotting faces fast kept ancestors alive — but it is the engine of most ghost photos, and this archive says so plainly. Juries here invoke it constantly and correctly. The interesting residue is everything pareidolia does not cover: the figure seen by three people at three angles, the face that appears across different photographs, the shape that moved between frames. That is where voting gets hard.

Related on this site: /tag/hidden-camera/ /ghost-stories/ /video-stories/