Apparition on the Stairs

[PPI Brian]

I saw this photo on Ghoststudy.com and thought it was interesting. What do you think? Is it real or is it fake?

Here's the caption that accompanied these images:

APPARITION ON THE STAIRS!
Here is a pic taken in my ex-girlfriends house. The boy in the bottom is her son. The girl on the stairs and the other 25 or so faces aren't supposed to be there. I spent 5 years there and that was all I could take, the place was too active!
Submitted by: Peter / a.anitoli@verizon.net

[PPI Glenn]

I can't really say it's real or fake since I wasn't there and we don't know what's sitting on the landing.  For all I know they could have put a mannequin on the staircase, took a picture and said "look! it's a ghost!"  I would also think that if it were an apparition clear enough to see skin tones that I would also see at least some facial features - but hey, you never know, eh? 

So what is the dark, large object sitting on the landing?  Is that a piece of luggage?  Could the 'ghost' actually be some kind of clothing draped over the luggage handle?  And where are the 'other 25 faces?'

I saw this photo on Ghoststudy.com and thought it was interesting. What do you think? Is it real or is it fake?

Here's the caption that accompanied these images:

APPARITION ON THE STAIRS!
Here is a pic taken in my ex-girlfriends house. The boy in the bottom is her son. The girl on the stairs and the other 25 or so faces aren't supposed to be there. I spent 5 years there and that was all I could take, the place was too active!
Submitted by: Peter / a.anitoli@verizon.net

[PPI Karl]

The creepy kid's face in the foreground is smudgy and blurred, making me think that this is just a badly taken photo.  However, the real culprit is that it's a scan of a photo (as evidenced by the central horizontal crease and the bends and crimps elsewhere), so the blurry and diaphanous "veil" on the "apparition" is probably just something spilled on the original photo.  The same spots and scratches appear just below and just above the figure that people are calling a woman seated.

Personally, I don't think its a figure of a person at all.  Rather, it's a piece of furniture, perhaps even two (just as Glenn said).  A painting is leaning up against the foot of the staircase, and a chair and couch have been pushed together into a very tight space; all this suggests that people were either moving out or moving in, so it wouldn't be unusual to see furniture on the landing of the staircase during such a time.  My guess is that it's a chair with some coats or dresses thrown onto it:  it's boxy like a chair, and it has a very straight back.  Also, what people are mistaking for an arm or right shoulder of the woman is in fact one separate object in front of another, and it has some strangely pointed feature that in no way resembles a human shoulder (unless it was designed by H.R. Giger).

Given all these factors, I feel it's not paranormal; just a misunderstood, poorly taken, old photo found in a shoe box of forgotten memories.  (Sorry. I'm gearing up for a new batch of bad creative writing starting in a few weeks. )

By the way, the "twenty-five or so faces that aren't supposed to be there" are surely nothing more than hardcore parodelia.  Even wasting my time scrutinizing an enlarged version of the photo, I could identify only seven candidates for faces, mostly in the brown chair, the edge of the steps, and the dark wood molding.  (Chubby-Cheek's countenance is thrown in here to give you a sense of how much I blew up the photo to find these.)

[PPI Karl]

Another possibility is that these folks were professional tailors and that this an ironing board with sleeve presser, positioned behind a storage trunk:

[PPI Brian]

Excellent observations, guys.

I wish this photo was a higher resolution image so I could really play around with it in photoshop. So far, all my little tricks have proven inconclusive, so the authenticity of this image is questionable. The attached photo has been embossed and the lighting was altered to attempt to bring out the three dimensional quality of the face of the "apparition" on the stairs. I think there is an artifact left over from pasting the "appartion" onto the scanned photo... a slight glow radiates around the head that shouldn't be there. It's obviously a scanned image of a photo was improperly stored, which makes it more difficult to determine if it was manipulated in any way.

[bellalaghoste]

I think everyone is right may not be a ghost