A call from the future. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

Jason, I'm going to show you a painting and you tell me what you see.

I see a woman in a field. Maybe walking on a path. She's wearing a red hat. Yeah.

Some kind of headwear. It's one of the time of the time. It looks like 1700s, 1800s, very old timey.

And it looks like, it looks like she's on the iPhone 15. Is this a commercial for the iPhone 15?

Not quite. This piece, this painting, completed in 1860, is called the expected one.

And it is made by Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmühler.

For context, Waldmühler is one of the most famous painters of the Beater Meyer period.

The expected one depicts, like you said, a young woman. She's walking down a dirt path. She's surrounded

by trees and shrubbery with quiet rolling hills in the background. On the right, there's a young man

who's waiting for her with a pink flowers kind of on one knee. But like you said, it's not really

about what's around her that we're going to talk about, but what she is holding. Is it an iPhone?

Whatever it is, it has created an intriguing online conspiracy theory.

The strange thing that the girl's holding was first noted by Peter Russell, a retired local

Glasgow government officer and his partner. When they paid a visit to the new Pina Kotec,

I am sure I'm saying that wrong, a museum of 18th and 19th century art in Munich.

It didn't make sense, but Russell couldn't unsee the painting subject, holding an iPhone,

1512, which to him was painted realistically, a small box, the correct size,

even the light from the object on the girl's clothing. And even the way that she's looking at it,

engaging with it, not watching where she's walking, completely absorbed in whatever she's holding.

Sounds familiar. It sounds like a smartphone.

Quote, what strikes me most is how much a change in technology has changed the interpretation of

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