Staircase Specter

Notes:

The picture was taken on June 19, 1966 by the Reverend Ralph W. Hardy of White Rock, British Columbia. He intended merely to photograph the elegant spiral staircase (known as the "Tulip Staircase") in the Queen's House section of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. However, after he and his wife returned to Canada and had the pictures developed, the Hardy’s saw the figures in the resulting photos. They sent the original negatives to England’s Ghost Club for evaluation.

Each picture on the roll was accounted for by number. The picture immediately prior to the ghost picture is of the colonnade outside the Queen's House and the one immediately following is of a figurehead. Neither bears any resemblance to the shrouded figure(s).

The picture is visually confusing until you realize the strange angle at which it was taken. It was shot from beneath a curving stairway looking up and the bulk of architecture you see to the left is the underside of the staircase. The Hardys were on vacation and Mrs. Hardy wanted a photograph that would duplicate a picture she'd seen in a magazine. When they got to the staircase (a famous architectural feature of the house) they discovered that they couldn't duplicate the picture in the magazine, which was taken from the top of the stairs, because that area was off limits and, in fact, the stairs themselves were blocked to keep everyone off them.

The only shot Rev. Hardy could get of the staircase was the awkward angle from below, with the chandelier overhead, so that is the one he took. At the time there was, of course, no one on the stairs. The Hardy’s didn't discover the figures (if you look closely, there are actually two figures) until they were back in Canada. They turned the original negative over the England's Ghost Club, along with the negatives for the pictures before and after it on the roll. The Ghost Club sent them to Kodak laboratories for analysis and the experts who examined them pronounced them to be not tampered with and said the only explanation for the figures had to be that there was someone or something on the stairs.