The picture is small, square and badly reproduced, which is part of its appeal. Two women, perhaps a mother and grandmother, sit at a dining table with a young boy on each lap. There are three lit candles, a cloth, cups and curtains behind. Above the candles hangs a pale human figure, head down, as if dropping from the ceiling into the room. Nobody at the table reacts. For well over a decade it has appeared on lists of “photographs that cannot be explained” under the name of the Cooper family.
What happened
The story attached to it runs like this: sometime in the 1950s the Coopers bought an old house in Texas; on their first evening the father photographed his wife, his mother and the children at the table; nothing seemed wrong until the film came back with the body in it. Retellings add details, including whether the house was bought or inherited, years of nightmares for the boys and a family that eventually fled. None of the versions gives a town, a date or a first name, and no newspaper, record or relative has ever been found to match.
The image itself has a traceable history, and it is a short one. Alex Boese of the Museum of Hoaxes, writing in October 2014, found its earliest online appearance on November 14, 2009, when a member of the forum at ligotti.net, a site devoted to the horror writer Thomas Ligotti, posted it in the art section under the title “Family Gathering”. The poster later said he had copied it from a Something Awful thread in which members shared creepy pictures and had no hand in making it. In April 2010 the paranormal blog Ghost Theory put it in a gallery of vintage oddities, and from there it spread. The Texas family and their new house, Boese concluded, were bolted on around 2013.
The investigation
Boese pointed to the too-even darkening of the corners, which looks like a software vignette, and to the figure’s shadow, which falls against the direction of the main light. In January 2015 Mick West opened a thread on the Metabunk forum and argued that the image was a composite of a real family photo and a second picture, possibly of a dancer, noting that the candles and the figure cast shadows while the people do not. In May 2015 a man calling himself Robert Copper joined the thread to say that he and his brother were the two boys, that the photo dated from 1959, that the family name was Copper rather than Cooper, and that the original contained no falling figure. West verified this privately against a color slide of the same table and curtains, and renamed the thread.
A fuller account arrived later. The artist Richard G. Ramsdell has said that he is the younger of the two boys and that he produced the image in 1981 for his master’s thesis show. He loaded the old family slide into a projector upside down, stood in the beam in pale clothing so that the scene fell across his body, and photographed projection and body together in a single exposure; turned the right way up, the family sat normally and he hung inverted beside them. The idea, he says, came from a dream a few days after John Lennon was shot in December 1980, about danger present in a room before anyone notices. He believes the picture was lifted from an early website of his in the late 1990s, and he lists it in his catalog as work 1981-24.
The explanations
Ramsdell’s method accounts for what puzzled the first investigators: a projected scene photographed in a studio produces real shadows and distortion rather than the clean edges of a cut-and-paste, which is why the body never looked quite like a digital insertion. Boese’s guess that the piece was made with software was wrong in detail but right in substance. Whether or not every element of the artist’s account can be checked, the two independent claims from people in the photograph agree on the essentials: the family picture is real, it dates from 1959, and the falling figure was added long afterward.
Where it stands
The photograph still circulates with the Cooper story, usually without the correction. There was no Cooper family, no Texas house and no night of terror. There was a family snapshot, a graduate student with a slide projector, a horror forum, and an internet that prefers a ghost to an artist.