Ghosts Having Sex

Of all the things I'm thankful for this holiday season, one of them has to be the recent discovery that in the afterlife ghosts can still get it on. At least, that is, according to Diana Carlisle, an Ohio woman who claims that her grand-daughter took a photograph of two spirits frolicking in her living room. The photograph in question is shown above with the circle around the supposed ghosts added by Metro, and you can click to enlarge it.

'It looked like... like ghosts having sex,' she told the Fox affiliate TV channel in Cleveland. 'You can see the lady's high-heeled shoes.'

Ms Carlisle claims the phantoms have been having a scream of a time for a while but she was unable to document it until her four-year-old grand-daughter took this picture. The snap supposedly shows the outline of a shoulder and arm, which are above a white ghostly figure.

If true, these spooky shenanigans will be a landmark in the study of paranormal activity, with experts previously unaware that spirit sex was possible. Investigator David Jones told the Huffington Post it was highly unlikely that ghosts were engaged in intercourse, but did admit he was curious about the house.

One of the most intriguing things about this and other ghost photographs is that they rarely look much like what eyewitnesses report seeing. I have to admit, my first thought when examining the Carlisle photo was not one of amazement at being exposed to ghost porn. Like most spirit photographs, it just looks like a blurry mist or vapor. While skeptics contend this is the result of the mosaic effect, in which our brains fill in whatever we expect to see, most ghost photographs are so much less detailed than the corresponding eyewitness reports that I wonder if some other mechanism might be at work.

A possibility I've considered is that what a person experiences when encountering a ghost might be in part a sort of psychic projection, in which non-physical details are perceived along with the physical aspects of the manifestation. The latter could therefore be photographed, while the former could not. Of course, if I'm wrong and this is simply a case of mosaic in action, the next question that needs to be asked is why Diana Carlisle would expect to see ghosts having sex in her living room. So either explanation could make for an interesting story.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!