The Electric Chair Ghost

Happy Weird Wednesday! Today, we'll be looking at an alleged ghost photo with a REALLY WEIRD story behind it. I mean, all alleged ghost photos are inherently weird, but there's just something rather intriguing about this one and the potential explanations behind it. Without further ado...

In the autumn of 1983, Watford, UK resident, Karen Collett, took a daytrip to London with her family. While traveling the Bakerloo Line of the London Underground, her young nephew asked her to snap a photo of him. She complied, and thought nothing more of it, until several months later. When she finally got that roll of film developed, she didn't even take a look at them before handing them off to her father and her sister's boyfriend to peruse. As the two men were going through the photos, Karen says she heard her dad say something along the lines of, 'well, that isn't very nice.' She asked what he meant, and he showed her the photo in question. 

Behind her nephew was the VERY clear image of a man in an electric chair, complete with little blue lightning bolts flying from his fingers. Obviously, Karen nor her family remember seeing the image in or outside of the moving subway train while the photo was being taken, and could not explain how the image got there. In an effort to uncover the mystery, the photo and negatives were sent to a couple of different people for analysis. 

Maurice Grosse of the Society for Psychical Research examined the photo and made a rather...shocking...discovery (see what I did there?).  The image in the photo was an exact replica of an exhibit in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, located in the wax museum's London location. The man portrayed in the exhibit is Bruno Hauptmann. Hauptmann was found guilty in the kidnapping and death of the Lindberg baby. Hauptmann was sentenced to death for these alleged crimes, and was electrocuted by electric chair on April 3, 1936 in Trenton, New Jersey. 

The question then arises as to WHY would a man executed nearly 50 years before in another country show himself to a young family on the London Underground? Robert Cox believes he has the answer. Cox, who worked for the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television, examined the photo and the negatives and concluded that the amateur camera was so cheap and so simple that any sort of photo manipulation or trickery could be ruled out.  However, Cox believes the answer behind the 'ghost' in the photo is a simple misidentification. He believes that the image is a poster or advertisement of some kind!

Hauptmann Wax Figure

Mystery solved, right? Maybe, but maybe not. When Maurice Grosse investigated the matter further, he found that advertisements would have only been located in various stations, not in the trains themselves, nor along the line. Also, when Madame Tussaud's was contacted, they claimed that they never had any advertising campaigns featuring that particular image. To me, that doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility of a poster/advertisement. My first thought was that a local band used the altered image as a flyer to advertise an upcoming show. If something like that was the case, Madame Tussaud's wouldn't know about it and it could have been put up in the train or outside of it without the permission/knowledge of the Underground. 

There's an interesting postscript to this story that may offer further insight. Karen states later on, she accompanied a friend to a psychic reading. After the friend's reading, the psychic came out and said that he had a message for Karen. She was flabbergasted, since she wasn't there for a reading, and didn't know of anyone on the other side that may have a message for her. The psychic stated that the message concerned her photo and that there was a man who wanted to say, "I'm accused of something I didn't do." Interestingly, recent investigation into the Lindberg kidnapping case suggests that Hauptmann might actually be innocent. 

This isn't your typical photo with a 'ghost' in it. It's a photo seemingly with the ghost of a wax figure in it, or perhaps even the ghost of a poster of a wax figure??  And further, what's more mysterious than HOW the image got into the photo is WHY. If the spirit of Bruno Hauptmann wanted to clear his name, why use an image of his wax likeness to communicate to a seemingly random woman in another country? Why not manifest as himself...his non-wax self? Anyway, if you have any insights on this weird photo, let me know in the comments below, or join us over on Theresa's Haunted History Facebook.  Stay spooky, ya'll! 

Want MORE ghost stories from the London Underground? Check out the awesome 2005 documentary, Ghosts on the Underground, available to view free at YouTube. Most of the information for this post came from this documentary!