Spectral scams

Voila! A spooky pic to scare your mates

When a little girl in Victorian dress appeared beside a gumball machine in a photo taken in a Texas restaurant, it sure spooked some folks. Until it was found to be fauxtography. Psuedo-ghosts have popped up in photos since the mid1800s – they were usually revealed to be double exposures or dust in the lens. Often scenes with costumes and props were staged and then deliberately lit to look convincingly ghostly. As photography evolved, so did the scams. Negatives from multiple photos could be used to create ghoulish images – and this technique became even simpler in the digital age with Photoshop. And now, of course, there’s an app – Ghostcapture. Download it to your mobile, take a photo, overlay it with a stock pic from the app’s spiritual repertoire, and voila, a spooky pic to scare your mates! However, users complain it is littered with pop-up ads, and every button tapped promotes switching to a paid version. Click on the free support link on the Ghostcapture site, and you’re taken to a Ghosts promo website for a film called – wait for it – Don’t Exist. It seems the fake-ghost app is itself a fake.