Mysterious Photos That Reveal Something Disturbing in the Background

A long-dead grandfather appears sitting behind his widowed wife in a sunny picnic photo. Shadowy figures, pale faces, and ghostly entities stare from windows and empty aisles and people pose for their last pictures, unaware that the person soon to end their life lurks in the background. Pictured here is of course John Lennon signing a book for a fan, Mark Chapman, who's standing in the background. That same man would end John Lennon's life just hours later. The photo was snapped on December 8, 1980, outside the Dakota apartment in New York, where Lennon and Yoko Ono lived. Chapman had a firearm in his pocket when the photo was taken, but he couldn't go through with it right away. He'd been waiting outside the Dakota all afternoon, watching, getting his nerves up. After the signing, he spent the next several hours on the sidewalk reading The Catcher in the Rye, the book he was obsessed with, preparing himself for what he called his statement. Chapman's obsession with Lennon had been building for months. He idolized him. But he'd turned on Lennon after becoming a born-again Christian. Suddenly, he was convinced Lennon was a phony, preaching peace while being rich and out of touch. And that meant, in his eyes, that John Lennon had to die. For some reason, he thought killing Lennon would give his life meaning. At 10.49 pm, Lennon and Ono returned to the Dakota, where Chapman was waiting. He fired five rounds, hitting Lennon four times in the back and shoulder. This next photo was taken by a woman named Denise Russell. Pictured here is her grandmother, who lived on her own until she was 94, when her health started to decline and she had to move into an assisted living home. At the end of her first week there, the facility held a picnic for residents and their families. Denise's mother and sister were there, and her sister took a couple pictures that day. One of those photos, taken on Sunday, August 17, 1997, shows her grandmother sitting at the picnic. It looks like a pretty ordinary family photo. Nobody noticed anything unusual at the time. It wasn't until Christmas Day in 2000, after her grandmother had passed away, that someone spotted something. While browsing through loose family photos at her parents' house, Denise's sister handed her the picture and asked who she thought the man behind her looked like. It took a few seconds for it to sink in. The man standing behind her grandmother appeared to be her grandfather, who died back in 1984, 13 years before this photo was taken. A now-deleted Reddit user posted this next image with a caption reading, A few years ago, an older family member of mine went on one of her regular hikes. The trail she takes runs through a fairly remote area on the side of a mountain, with no buildings nearby and very few people ever around. She took some photos and later posted a few of them on Facebook, as older people tend to do. Everything seemed normal at first, but then people started commenting on one of the images, asking who she was walking with, but she insisted that she'd been entirely alone. She looked at the photo again, and that's when she noticed it, a figure in the distance. Now, looking at this image, you do see what looks like a figure standing in the bottom right corner, but it's so far away and hard to make out, there's nothing all that unsettling about it. But zooming in, and that hazy-looking figure turns out to be a lot more ghoulish. Pale grey skin, its eyes and mouth pure black. Just who or what exactly is that thing? This image was shared by TheZomBehindYou on Reddit. He'd been finishing up his shift at Target when he snapped this picture. Being dark and empty, the store had a bit of a liminal space kind of vibe. I guess that's why he wanted to capture it on camera. After taking the photo, the Redditor and his manager started walking out of the store, and they heard a sound they'd never heard before. At first, he thought it might be an alarm, but it didn't really sound like one. It was closer to the sound of a phone ringing. Around the same time, the self-checkout light turned on by itself. Both of them were pretty shaken up at that point, and they left right away. When they looked at the photo later, they also spotted the shadowy figure standing in the middle of the aisle there. They hadn't seen anything there initially. Another deleted Reddit user posted these two images. One zoomed into the china cabinet in the background. That reflection in the glass isn't the person who took the picture. The Reddit user said that during the pandemic, she stayed at her aunt's house along with her brother, his girlfriend, and the girlfriend's daughter. She said she'd never experienced anything clearly paranormal in that house or anywhere else in her life. She wasn't a hardcore skeptic, but she didn't really have any reason to believe in the paranormal either. But she said her mother, sister, and her brother's girlfriend all claimed to have strange experiences over the years, both in that house and in her parents' old home. While she hadn't seen apparitions herself, she did say she'd experienced things that were hard to explain. This photo was taken in a room near the main stairwell. Her brother's girlfriend and her daughter snapped it before leaving the house. When they took a look at the photo later, they noticed what looked like a person's reflection in the glass of the china cabinet. Nobody recognized who it was, and nobody had been standing where their reflection would show up in the glass like that. Up next, we have the Blackpool Beach Entity. This has become a pretty notorious image online, shared by TinyProfessor9680 on Reddit. It shows two brothers hanging out at Blackpool Beach in Lancashire, England. TinyProfessor posted the picture about nine months back, but his friend had shown them the photo, which was taken in 2016. Now, you may be wondering, what's so special about this picture? It looks pretty mundane. Well, look between their legs. A ghastly-looking face looks to be poking out between them. It has a sickly greenish complexion with yellow eyes, not what you'd ever want to see crawling around the boardwalk at the beach. The picture was taken by the boy's mother, and they were all adamant that there was nobody else with them at the time. By the way, am I the only one who thinks this looks like a zombified version of Miley Cyrus? Rajiv Gandhi had been Prime Minister of India from 1984 to 1989, and on the night of May 21, 1991, he was campaigning ahead of the general election. The picture you're looking at here was taken at his last public appearance. At 10.10pm, a press photographer named Haribabu took what would become the final photographs of Gandhi. In the images, Gandhi appeared relaxed, smiling, greeting people, not knowing what happened seconds later. You wouldn't think much of these images. But standing amongst the crowd, captured on camera, was the woman who was about to take his life, as well as several others in the crowd. The woman was later identified as 22-year-old Kalivani Rajaratnam, a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the Tamil Tigers, a militant group from Sri Lanka known for the type of attacks that were about to be carried out on this day. Rajaratnam approached Gandhi, bending down to touch his feet, a traditional gesture of respect. But, unbeknownst to everyone in the crowd, hidden under her dress were explosives. When she detonated the device, the blast killed Rajiv Gandhi, the photographer, and at least 14 others instantly. Here we see a group of friends lying on some grass, waving drinks, just enjoying themselves. But when you look closer, some people notice something strange. In the window of the house directly behind them, there appears to be a ghostly figure, possibly holding a baby, leering out at them. The picture was taken in a small town called Wem, and that abandoned house is pretty famous, or rather infamous, for its ghostly activity. The photo was taken by Natasha Oliver in 2010. It was after a World Cup match. Someone realized there was a weird figure in one of the photos, and we thought it was kind of freaky, Natasha said. She later posted the image to Facebook, and then it started circulating online. But this is not the only ghostly image taken in the town of Wem. This is one of the most infamous pieces of ghost photography in history. In 1995, amateur photographer Tony O'Reilly was documenting a fire that had broken out at Wem Town Hall. When he developed the pictures, one of them appeared to show a young girl in an old-timey dress lurking in the doorway of the burning building, staring straight into the camera. O'Reilly insisted he hadn't doctored the photo, and a lot of people became convinced that the figure was the ghost of a girl named Jane Cherm. The story goes that Jane had accidentally started a fire in 1677 by dropping a candle, which nearly destroyed the entire town. The photograph got a lot of attention, and it boosted tourism too. Suddenly, people were flocking to town. Bakeries started selling ghost-shaped cakes, and the town even added a note to the road sign, calling it Ghost Town. But in 2010, a local Wem man noticed that the ghostly girl had an uncanny resemblance to a girl in a 1922 postcard. So had O'Reilly actually tampered with the photo after all? Maybe. Maybe not, though. The legend hasn't completely gone away. Tony O'Reilly passed away suddenly in 2005, never having admitted that his ghost photo was a hoax. With all that said, I've been your host James, and I'll catch you, yes you specifically, in the next video.