I'm Laura Norton, and this is One Strange Thing, the show where we search the nation's

news archives for stories that can't quite be explained. Strangers, if you're a fan of real-life ghost stories, and since you're here, we imagine that you are,

you have probably come across examples of spirit photography in your late-night scrolling.

Nowadays, anyone with a phone can contribute a picture of a floating orb for the masses

to examine.

In fact, we even now have AI ghosts to reckon with, which honestly confuses things further.

And by that, we mean the presence of AI-generated spirits have entered the conversation,

not that dead AI have come back to haunt us,

although that is a concept that we need to think about.

Anyway, back to spirit photography.

Surprising no one, as soon as cameras were invented,

people began to try and photograph the unseen,

which sounds illogical, but when have humans been anything but?

The invention of photography and its accessibility, they dovetailed nicely with the spiritualist

movement. According to the British Science and Media Museum, quote,

the earliest known spirit photographs were taken in America in 1861,

some years after the spiritualist craze began sweeping the world.

Now, of course, Britain had its own very widespread spiritualist movement.

Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, he was a noted spiritualist,

and Queen Victoria, she held a number of seances.

Though the British spiritualist movement was at its height in the Victorian era,

there was a resurgence after World War I, you can imagine why, and the popularity of

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