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“Definitely Terrified Me”: These 49 Photos Seemed Normal, Until Someone Took A Closer Look
We're often so caught up in the moment that we fail to see the bigger picture. Quite literally. Mobile phones have made it easier, faster and cheaper to take photos. Some of us snap away without paying too much attention to the smaller details. It's only afterwards that we realize there's a hair out of place, the horizon is a bit skew, or a lamp pole is sticking out of someone's head. But sometimes, it's something a lot more creepy or sinister that reveals itself only after the photo has been captured...
Someone asked, "What’s the scariest thing you’ve found in a photo after taking it?" and the responses spoke a thousand words. There was someone who had no idea three mountain lions had been following them, and another person who accidentally captured an attempted child abduction on camera. Bored Panda has put together the best answers for you to scroll through while you contemplate whether you should take a closer look at your own photo gallery.
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#1
A mate of mine is an urban explorer. He was in an abandoned building one night and took a flash photo of a pitch dark room.
He took a quick look at the picture on his camera and noticed a woman crouched under a table in the corner of the room.
All sorts of thoughts ran through his head. Was she a ghost?!
He called out "Hello?" and she switched on her flashlight and responded.
She was homeless and squatting in the building and had hidden because she was afraid he might be a cop or someone who might do her harm.
He ended up buying her some food and it all turned out pretty wholesome in the end.
Spotting something unexpected in a photo can be creepy but it can also be the very miracle that's needed in certain high-stakes situations.
For example, in 1984, a 14-year-old named Tina Faelz lost her life while on her way home from school in Pleasanton, California. She had been stabbed 44 times. Despite combing the crime scene, and Faelz’s route home, police couldn't find any clues to lead to an arrest. There was no weapon, and no fingerprints were left at the scene.
The case went cold and remained unsolved for decades. Until a tiny detail in a photograph changed everything decades later...
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#2
My mom, who was separated from her wildly toxic husband, decided to throw a party for a family friend. Our little family was on edge because she had just filed for divorce and she decided we needed a night to relax and have fun. Lots of food, friends and laughter. At one point she snapped a picture of the birthday boy goofing around. Later that night my dad took me back to his home for the weekend.
The next morning my aunt called him to say mom was in the hospital and he'd need to keep me for a week or so. Dad told me mom had gotten sick again but would be better soon. I didn't see her again for maybe two or three weeks. During that time the birthday boy came by to hang out and show us the party pictures. 30 years later I can still see the photo of him goofing around, all covered in ribbons and playing with balloons, this huge grin on his face. And there behind him, looking through the window where we were missing a blind, was my stepdad.
He had been waiting for the party to end.
My dad told me she was sick so that I wouldn't know what had really happened. Once I saw him in the photo, even as a kid, I knew why she was actually in the hospital.
#3
Not me but my aunt. TLDR at the end.
She was scuba diving in Mexico somewhere with a new gear. She is super trained and has decades of experience in diving.
She was diving with a video camera too.
Into this dive with her new gear she got caught in a current and was separated from her dive partner. Because of this she decided it was safer to go to the surface. As she was ascending from around 180 feet she saw a dolphin.
She loves dolphins and swam up to it and did the whole holding on to the dorsal fin thing. She swam with it for about 5 minutes before continuing her ascent. Gets to the surface and she says something felt wrong during the ascent.
Well she had done her mixtures wrong on her tank ratios. Around 160ft of depth right after she was separated she later realized that she had had nitrogen narcosis. Pretty benign case of it but still. She had it. Thankfully the effects go away at the surface.
Once she got home and was looking at the videos she took of her trip and during her dives she realized, that was not a dolphin. It was a shark.
She had been telling anyone who would listen about how she had this beautiful encounter with a dolphin.
She's done shark dives before. So have I. They're my favorite dives but you go into them with a different mindset. More safety and planning and avoid unnecessary encounters if the situation isn't ideal.
TLDR: Aunt got high underwater. Filmed herself with a dolphin. Later realized that she was swimming with a shark when she watched the video at home.
While investigating the cold case, Detective Dana Savage looked back at crime scene photographs and spotted Tina’s purse in a tree. Wondering how it got up there, the detective strongly believed it was the work of whoever had hurt Faelz.
Upon inspecting the purse in 2011, FBI analysts found four drops of blood. They matched it to one of Faelz's classmates. Steve Carlson was finally arrested and was sentenced to 26 years in prison.
After years of denial, he wrote a confession to the Faelz's family in 2020–36 years after they lost her.
#4
I had a project for my high school photography class and, like everyone else, I thought a cemetery would be a great place to shoot in black and white. I went right after a storm and caught some great shots of mist rising from the ponds and streams, overflow racing through debris stuck in storm drains, wet mausoleums, all the hits. I developed and submitted four prints to my teacher who immediately picked out the last photo I took, saying the figures in the background added a lot of atmosphere and drama.
I had no idea what he was talking about. When he pointed out the two people, something immediately seemed off. It looked like a man just starting to turn and run, while grabbing an older child or young teenager by the arm so violently that they were flying sideways off of a bicycle. They were framed in the center background between two headstones, facing away from the camera. To the left and almost out of frame was a fuzzy black car. I hadn't even seen them in person while taking the shot. I showed my parents that night and they flipped out. On the day I took the photos, a week before, there was an attempted abduction of a girl taking a shortcut home by riding her bike through the cemetery. The abductor dropped her and fled when he saw a car approaching and was later arrested after the drivers called 911.
Apart from accidentally capturing an attempted child abduction on film, the fact that this stuff happens in plain sight was probably scarier.
#5
Absolute nothing. I was in my backyard semi-late at night and this small owl, like 6 inches tall and so poofy it was almost round landed on the ground about 10 feet from me out of nowhere, almost silent. So I snap a picture real quick, because an owl just landed near me and it's a cute little round thing. Long story short, I have schizophrenia.
#6
One evening back in college, I was getting ready for a night out with two friends but the friend’s apartment was supposedly haunted and we managed to take the scariest selfie of all time.
The friend who lived in the apartment would tell us all the time about her bathroom door randomly opening/closing and her dog barking at things she couldn’t see.
So, here we are, in this girl’s haunted af bedroom taking selfies before we leave for a party. It wasn’t until we were looking at the photos later that evening that we saw **the face**.
Behind the three heads, there is an unmistakable fourth face, grinning into the camera. It had a weird cat-like nose and was oddly round. No hair, and pale.
Unfortunately everyone I show the photo to believes that we made it in photoshop, but I swear that we didn’t. If anyone finds this interesting I’ll upload it...
Edit: here’s the image
In another case, it was a simple yellow sock, spotted in a photo, that became the key to solving a crime.
Authorities had called on Byron Wolfe, head of photography at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, to help solve the case of a woman whose body was found in Delaware County, Pennsylvania in 1991. 27-year-old Denise Sharon Kulb was wearing just a sweater, while the rest of her clothes were piled on top of her. Wolfe was tasked with restoring crime scene photos that were nearly 30 years old.
#7
I did wildlife and nature photography for awhile when I was in high school and just out of. I was on the School Newspaper all 4 years of high school, so I had connections at the Printers, and would often get calls from them saying, "Hey, we have someone for this magazine or this newsletter" etc. I'd take on the odd jobs and go get pictures. Sometimes it was of Houses for a "Parade of Homes" kinda thing, sometimes it was pictures from little nature parks for stories. It was all really, really random stuff, usually.
One time, they asked me to go get a picture of a local "Park" around a lake in the foothills, since they were going to be having some sort of 4th of July Celebration in a few weeks.
I went out and got several amazing pictures. Lagoon, Walking Trails, Picnic area, etc. I spent about 3 hours out there hiking around cause it's actually one of my favorite places to hike anyway.
I got home and went to do edits on the picture to send off to the people who requested it. What I wound up seeing... was 3 Mountain Lions. Following me. For probably about an hour.
Bewitched One 13 hours ago
Would be nice if BP posted the entire comment. It ended with “ 3 days later, someone hiking the area had their dog with them, and the dog was attacked and k****d, by a mountain lion. Uh. Yeah. S**t. EDITED: Make it clear the the dog was attacked and k****d, not the owner.”
#8
I had a friend take a picture of me while we were working outside. Looked back at it a couple of hours later and to my horror realized that there was a giant tick climbing up my neck in the picture. Found the tick itself in my hair a little while later haha.
#9
So went to school camp up in the Australian bush way back in the 90s. I brought a disposable camera for photos. I was about 9
Dropped it off to get it developed. Never got the pictures. Turns out I'd accidently taken some pictures of a corpse in the bush. My parents turned the photos over to the police.
It was a big drama at the school as several kids photos "disappeared* eg parents gave them over to the police.
Yep. Not a single student or teacher had noticed the apparently obvious corpse while bush walking. They didn't run a rural school camp for two years after that.
Bartlet for world domination 9 hours ago
Cue a picture of a deciduous tree, definitely in the northern hemisphere. Not as bad as the owl when the clue was that there was no owl, of course. A bit weird to illustrate stories about pictures with Not the actual photos.
"Wolfe was able to look at some of the 35mm negatives authorities had from the crime scene and restore them enough to note a yellow sock on Kulb’s body that matched one found in the apartment of the suspect, Kulb’s then boyfriend, Theodore Dill Donahue," reports Watchmojo.com.
Wolfe’s restoration of the photos proved to be an imperative component in solving the case, said Anthony Voci, chief of the homicide unit at the District Attorney’s Office of Philadelphia. Donahue was finally arrested in 2019. He passed away while in custody the following year.
#10
I took a picture of my new coffee table, sent it to my mom, and realized there was lube in the background.
#11
When my brothers and I were kids, my uncle gave each of us a camera (1965). We would take black and white pictures of all kinds of boring stuff. One of my brothers kept all of his pictures in a drawer and ignored them for many years.
He came across them 15 years later and showed them to our good friend who grew up a few houses down from us. The friend was going through the stack of pics and they were reminiscing about the old days. The friend held up a picture of my oldest brother holding our kitten next to my dad's old truck. He asked who's dog is in the truck?
My brother looked at the picture and inside the cab of the truck was a dog looking at my brother and the cat. It was a large white furry dog that looked to be happy with it's tongue hanging out of its mouth.
We were between dogs at that time. Our first boxer passed away almost a year earlier. We didn't have another boxer until the cat was a year old. The dog is not a boxer. No one in the neighborhood had a dog like that, nor any family friends. The truck was always locked, and we would never have let a strange dog into the truck.
We asked my mother about where dad bought the truck, she said it was owned by a man who raised chickens for a living. She said he had a friendly, big white sheepdog. We think the good boy liked to ride in the truck and still liked to hang out in it.
#12
Oh I know this one!
I too, a photo of my Dad and Brother in a Thornton’s cafe (don’t think they have Thornton’s in America, it’s basically a cafe owned by a chocolate company), and I took the photo, and in the background is the most cursed photo of this woman who was there spitting out her hot chocolate, it was such perfect timing it’s beautiful!
(Also want to note I no longer have the photo, it was on my old phone).
Another criminal was caught thanks to a pill bottle in the background of a photograph.
Stephen Keating was arrested in November 2012 for producing illicit material of minors. He’d shared a photo of one of his victims, and upon thorough inspection, investigators spotted the one clue they needed to crack the case.
"Special agents removed motion blur to decipher Keating’s first name and the first three letters of his last name on a prescription pill bottle in the background, along with part of the prescription number," reported Watchmojo.com. "After contacting the pharmacy, they identified Keating and arrested him."
#13
A shark. And I was photographing surfers and waves from the water at the time. Luckily for me it was just a juvenile but looking at the images later was a shock.
#14
A crocodile about 10m away from my (now ex) boyfriend. In hindsight it would have been better if he'd been eaten that day...
#15
I guess this could be scary for some people but my husband and I were on a group expedition in california, we were in the middle of the desert, it was honestly pitch black except for flash lights that we had. We all were sitting in chairs in a circle and we decided to shut off all lights and just sit back and enjoy the darkness.
While this was happening i decided to turn off my flash on my phone camera and snap a few pics. What showed up surprised me. In only one picture(of about 20 i took rapidly back to back) a huge redish orange fire orb showed up. It literally took up almost the whole picture. It was the only thing in the pic, and the rest was pitch black. I never saw it with my naked eye. We tried to debunk it but we had nothing in our possession that could make that sort of light. It was pretty cool.
"After Danish police first discovered the photos, and less than 24 hours after we identified Keating as the perpetrator, HSI and a host of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies were searching his residence, putting him in handcuffs and rescuing his victims," said Brock D. Nicholson, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Atlanta.
Keating was sentenced to 110 years in prison in 2013. "Hopefully his victims can find some comfort in the fact that he will never again be a free man," Nicholson added.
All thanks to what some may deem as a minuscule detail in a photo…
#16
Took a tour of the region's "most haunted house" and in one of the bedrooms a random doll appears in one picture but not another. Both pictures were taken from the same perspective and one has the ghostly doll but the other there is no sign of it anywhere.
What's even spookier was that the doll was looking straight at the camera, with no reflection in the mirror on the wardrobe it was sitting right next to.
#17
A relative and I were in an old graveyard (people there were buried mostly around the mid 1800s). Relative took a photo of a beautiful grave stone. When we later looked at the photo, there was an odd white aura floating above the stone in the photo. The photo was taken with an iPhone camera and being viewed on the phone, so it wasn't some kind of developing oddity. Nothing was there around the grave when the photo was taken that we could see.
#18
Took a picture of my friend when we were scuba diving. A tiger shark!
#19
My parents and my sister and I were all shooting fireworks when we took a photo of my dad lighting them there clearly a woman standing in the frame of the photo looking at us. Not a reflection, a shadow but a fully formed woman in the edge of the frame who was clearly larger than my mother and did not look nice at all. It morbidly freaked all of us out.
#20
My brothers wife was going to look at apartments while he was stuck at work so she brought her camera so he had an idea of what they looked like. She got the pictures developed and when my brother was going through them later that night there’s clearly a little girl standing in one of them. You could see through her but could clearly make everything out. She had on a dress with knee high ruffle sock and dress shoes.
#21
I took a picture in the attic of my sister with her guitar. It had a face behind her, just slightly distorted. I brought it to my science teacher at the time and he was like, "Mnnn, that's freaky. No thanks." It also felt haunted in that apartment so :shrugs: Definitely terrified me at the time.
I also took a photo at South Street Cemetery in Portsmouth, NH that has a ghost cow. I found out a year later that it used to be a pasture! I also had one other photo where I asked if anyone wanted to show me anything while I took the photo and I got something weird in the corner that looks like a school picture. Wish I could post the pics!
#22
Guy took a Polaroid of me in front of the La Laurie mansion in New Orleans. It took a long time to develop because it was pretty dark, but when it did, there was a pretty ghostly image of a woman over my shoulder.
#23
A few years back, I took a selfie in my dimly lit living room and immediately started to fiddle with the brightness. In the corner of the photo, clear as day, was a toddler aged child who was not at our house. There was a distinct face and torso, standing next to the dining table at the proper height of a child that age. He only appeared when I turned up the brightness. Scared the living soul out of me.
#24
I have a picture of me and my ex gf in a pumpkin patch. In the photo theres a tiny, doll sized hand placed on her shoulder. To this day it creeps me out.
#25
Took a picture of me my sister at summer camp. I loved the picture and added to my scrapbook and had a copy framed. I would take it out over the years show family.
15 years later I'm looking at the picture and right behind us is a girl who looks absolutely terrified. She is mid scream and sprinting toward something off camera.
I guess someone had fallen in the fire and everyone was rushing to put her out while me and my sisters were posing for pictures!
How narcissistic and vain were we that not only at the time we were too busy trying to look cute but it took 15 years to stop staring at ourselves and look in the background?! 😂😭😂😭😂😭.
#26
This picture always creeped me out. My gf (wife now) took this picture of the dog. That "face" in the background was certainly not there when the pic was taken.
#27
One time me and my friend was dating, while meeting her parents we took a picture together. But while looking at the picture we realised that a guy was staring at us during the picture. Until that day, I won't go to Smithfield's again.
#28
So I took a picture with an old digital camera that I got when I was younger but I was supposed to be in bed. So it’s about midnight and I tried to take a picture of myself to see if I could get it on a good angle. After looking at it I saw glowing yellow eyes in a small crack in my closet. I freaked out but it ended up being my cat who knew how to open my closet and liked sleeping in there but apparently woke up when I was moving around and was watching me!
#29
Back when I was a kid, I had one of those disposable cameras to take pictures of my pet bird. An old bald man's head showed up in one of them. Big ears. Thick glasses. Just his head hanging out around the tv.
#30
I remember as a kid, years ago, I was at a Halloween party. I was hanging out in the garage with a bunch of other people. It was a family Halloween party so it’s not like it was crazy or anything. I remember talking to my mom and our family friend when some guy dressed as Ghostface from Scream kinda walked by. I don’t really remember the details of how it played out but my family friend looked at the guy right in the eye and asked “...who are you?”. He walked away without answering. She shrugged it off, figuring it was one of her nephews trying to scare her. It freaked me out as a little kid but when I grew older I figured she was probably right. Until years later. I was looking through photo albums and found a photo from that party. Everyone was standing together for the group photo. In it I could see everyone I know who’s usually at these parties. Including the two suspected nephews. Neither of them dressed for Halloween. But there was ghostface standing in front of them. To this day, I still don’t know who that was.
#31
I was once at an abandoned brothel in Belgium. It had an indoor swimming pool, a terrace, a watchtower and the main building. Me and my mom went to the watchtower. She told me to go up and take pictures. When i came back down i didn't realise that it was dark outside.
I went up the tower and at the 4th floor there was the viewing area. It was all glass and also a glass door so you could look around. For some reason in was forced to sit down on the bench directly in front of the door and take multiple pictures of the open glass door. I wanted to go see from the balcony so i walked through the door and looked down at the ground over the railing. I got frightened because my mom was screaming at me to come down, that there was another person up here with me.
After running down and rushing to the car, we checked the pictures. Mom quickly moved the camera so i couldn't see what happened. When we got home my brother(he does witchcraft)cleansed my whole body and made me bathe in lavender. I was really confused as to what happened and also scared. Really scared.
Weeks later mom decided to finally tell me what happened. She showed me the pictures i took of the opened glass door. There was a dark silhouette of a very tall man standing right there. Mom told me i was up in the watchtower for an hour before she got really worried. I was up there was an hour and a half but it felt like 2 minutes.
This was very difficult for me to write, i hope some of you enjoyed it though.
UPDATE: I still feel like this thing is with me. There are times that i still just 'blackout' and don't remember doing anything, but having done regular every day things anyway.
#32
Was home alone aged 14. About 10pm I was in the living room sending streaks to people on snapchat. One of the pictures I took had a man in the window. Except this man was completely see-through. It looked like they were walking. I didn't realise anything was there until my friend told me.
#33
One time, I took a picture of my dog while her her head was only slightly turned away from the camera, and for some reason, the flash caused only her right eye to appear as a bright blue color like Sans from Undertale. It freaked me out until I figured out it was indeed just the flash a few seconds later.
#34
Took a photo in a cemetery that upon viewing later on saw someone peering out from behind a tombstone, in the reflection behind me. At the time the only other people in the cemetery were up on a hill way in front of me/on the otherside of the monument my/its reflection is in. no one else was nearby.
#35
When I graduated high school my family and my best friends family hung around the football field after everybody left the ceremony. My Dad snapped a pic of my best friend and me standing on the bleachers in our cap and gown. After we got the film developed we noticed that there were two eyes peeking out of the crack right below us on the bleachers and you could just make out a man's head. We never saw this man while we were there and he was staring directly at the camera below us.
#36
A reflection in my bedroom window that looked like a skull.
#37
Around ‘03 or ‘04. Had a Polaroid camera. Got drunk with some folks and played with a ouija board. Two cartridges of film, every picture looked exposed oddly as if there was fire. Never happened before or after. Probably just bad film but it was super freaky at the time.
#38
I was in my room and I had this app on my phone that let me use a thermal camera I took a selfie with it and it picks up thermal heat and my room was purple and I was glowing yellow and something else was glowing in the corner of my room and well I deleted the app and never visited it again.
#39
My mom has a framed photo sitting on her mantle of an 11 year old me standing with the World Trade Center towers in the background. It was taken on September 10th, 2001 on our way to the airport for the flight home.
#40
Took a video once playing basketball and noticed a very strange almost invisible - translucent spider walking on the ground. We found it afterwards and just watched it, it was cool but also kinda spooky. Me and my friend are terrified of spiders but in this instance we were fascinated.
#41
Nothing.Let me be precise.
I was taking pictures of the park next to my house,and one photo was supposed to be of an old abandoned bathroom near the woods.When I checked the camera's data,the picture was gone.
#42
Camera flash on phone went off on its own, thinking it was odd because I didn't even have the camera app open, I looked to see what the picture looked like. In the picture was ectoplasma surrounded by faces. Left the room promptly.
#43
I looked In my preschool picture frame and saw some creepy face through the window because of how the mountains are arranged.
#44
When my brother was a teenager he took a photo of a barn, when we got the pictures back you could see a large bear in front of the barn but there wasn't a bear there when the photo was taken.
#45
Not really scary, but ok. One of my friends has a photo of a group of our friends, and it’s one of those cameras that instantly processed photos. Everything in it is normal except for this one arm that is sticking up above the head of one of our friends, making a “V” with its fingers. We have no clue who’s arm it is, or how far away they are.
#46
I went to a wedding and a friend took a panoramic photo of our table so that we’d all be in the shot. Unfortunately, the groom walked by the table at that moment, and in the resulting photo, he looked like an eldritch being warping between dimensions and about to spirit us away. His broad grin, customary for a man on the happiest day of his life, took on an oddly sinister aspect when the rest of him looked totally mutated.
To this day, my friends and I repost pictures of the trans-dimensional groom monster when it’s his birthday or whatever.
Oh, also all of the photos I took in front of a reportedly super haunted house in Philadelphia had weird white blurs over them, like they were taken through a sheet of medical gauze. I’m a major skeptic about ghosts, but it was a cool story!
#47
When my daughter was just a baby, we had a a layover in Frankfurt so we decided to stroll around the town center for a few hours and take some pictures. My husband took several pictures of us in a large square and when the pictures were developed there was a woman seated on a bench directly behind us crying her eyes out. Her companion, a man, was busy consoling her. I felt so bad for her for many years, until it dawned on me that they were probably pranking us. German sense of humor? If it was a prank, kind of a scary sense of humor imo.
#48
It was a Valentine's Day dance at school and we decided to take a picture with the coolest principal ever. My friend snapped the picture and we looked back on it.
THE PRINCIPAL DID NOT HAVE A FACE.
#49
I was convinced for years of a photo I took of 2 of my friends on bunk beds when we stayed at Disneyland Paris on a school trip had some spookiness to it.
When I got the photo developed, one of my friends was not there....he'd disappeared.
For years I was convinced it was something spooky going on, but after a while I just decided he was probably just not there when I took the photo.
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What do you think ?
tracy black 1 hour ago
most of these didnt even show what was being detailed like the pumpkin one with the hand of the gfs shoulder theres no one in the picture
blue_molly 7 hours ago
Alright G A, give us your scary story then. You weren't convinced by most of these, surely you have something better?
Load More Replies... tracy black 1 hour ago
most of these didnt even show what was being detailed like the pumpkin one with the hand of the gfs shoulder theres no one in the picture
blue_molly 7 hours ago
Alright G A, give us your scary story then. You weren't convinced by most of these, surely you have something better?
Load More Replies...
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