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Faces in a Bottle - Ninurta - 05-03-2025
I've mentioned now and then some of the "spooky" activity that occurs around my house. Houses, really, because it's been with me as long as I can recall. Not necessarily the same spooks, of course, but it does seem to find me wherever I go.
Anyhow, this house is no different.
So, you've all, at one time or another, heard one of my spook tales. This is just another one of those, anecdotal, because it's not subject to scientific rigor or scrutiny. It's not like it's a repeatable experiment or anything. Spooks, like deities, don't generally jump through hoops on command for experimentation.
However, for this particular ghost tale, I bring some evidence. You can take it for what it's worth, and do with it as you will. I'm not here to convince anyone, just to tell another ghost story.
Some history on the house. It was built in the early 1960's by my grandparents. I recall it being built, and the way it sat up on stilts at the front end before the basement was put in. They built the house first, basement second. So, it's not really that old, as mountain houses go. Maybe 60-63 years old, max. I'm older than the house is. By way of contrast, the cabin I was raised in would be, if some miscreants hadn't burned it down, about 120 years old or so.
People have died in this house, and dead people have "lain in state", for wakes and such, usually about 4 feet from where I sit, in front of the living room window. My grandparents, a great aunt, and my great grand mother died here, and they, as well as some of their brothers and sisters, were brought in afterwards for the wakes. They call it "keeping watch with the dead" around here.
So, "spooks" around here have never bothered me. I figure maybe some folks are just occasionally checking in.
Now to the bottle. There is a little brown jug, glass with a metal cap, that is filled with water to give it a little extra weight. The purpose of it is to keep a door propped open that insists on closing itself, It's, basically, a doorstop. The water in it is about as old as the house is - it came out of the original well for the house. It has been used to prop that door open for as long as the house has stood. I think the little brown jug was originally a vinegar jug.
Now some years ago, Grace got a hankering to tinker with Photoshop, so I got her a copy of it, and she went wild with it. She used to take pictures apart and recompose them and stuff like that, cutting out this or that and adding in somewhat or t'other. She composed photo art works at Deviant Art, and I reckon some of her stuff can probably still be found there.
For one of those art works, she photographed the little brown jug and removed the background so it could be composited into some of her art, and kept it for "stock". I don't recall when she took the photo, but it could have been as long ago as 10 years, or as recently as 2 or 3 years ago. We moved back here from Kansas City in July 2015, then moved out again late the following summer in 2015 for my work, and then moved back to this house again in July-August 2020. So it could have been taken during any of those intervals.
Recently, I've taken to trying to compose photo art myself. Not with Photoshop, which is far too complicated for me to control for what it does, but with an older program called "Paint Shop Pro". I use the last version of it released by JASC, the last version before Corel bought the software out so they could cripple it and thus cut the competition's throat.
Looking through some of that older stock for ideas to compose with, I ran across that old photo pf the Little Brown Jug. Didn't think much about it, really, as no one had noticed the reflections in it before. I was just concerned with them to try to lighting-match objects in images, make sure the light was all coming from the same direction to add a layer of realism. But, when I got to examining it closely, I found... faces... in those reflections.
Faces of people who were not there, at least not visibly, when the image was taken all those years ago.
The image of the jug (you can get to the full sized version of the picture by right-clicking on the image and selecting "open image in new tab", or by clicking on the thumbnail at the bottom of the post) :
That's the only version of it I've found, the one with the background removed. Grace took the photo on a sunny summer day, out on the balcony where she could get more sunlight into the image. On the left side of the jug you can see the reflection of the handrail on the balcony, to the west. On the right side of the jug, you can see the reflections of the house siding, to the east. In the center, lower, there is a reflection of Grace while she was taking the picture. Just above that, there is a blackish hexagonal shape, which is where Grace's face would have reflected if the hexagon hadn't been there, and above the hexagon... the faces.
A little closer look:
It's a peculiar property of light and reflections that the light reflected will bounce off the reflective surface at the exact same angle it enters the surface from the real thing. try it some time with a flashlight and a mirror, and you will see that whatever angle the light beam enters the mirror, it will reflect back out of that mirror at the same angle, but in the opposite direction. I've actually used that property of reflective surfaces during surveillance and recon missions. You can watch folks while they don't know you're watching, and think you're just "window shopping".
Anyhow, that is why the balcony hand rail appears to turn upside down as it goes towards the top of the jug. At the bottom, it's right side up, near the hexagon it develops a fairly sharp bend, and above that it is upside down. That is due to the changing curvature of the reflective surface of the bottle.
Now here is a weird thing. The main face, the one on the right, appears to be oozing out a window on the wall of the house... but it's right side up. This means that person had to be hanging upside down, as it is above the jug curve where the handrail goes upside down. All the other faces, however many there may be, also are right side up, meaning THEY are upside down as well.
When Grace took the photo, she was alone on the balcony. No one else was there, not even me. You'll just have to take my word for that, as i can offer no "proof" However, my word has been my bond for well over 60 years, and I see no reason i should change that now.
I first saw one face, the one on the right, as clear as day. I have no doubt that is a face. Then the others started appearing to me, and so I am less sure of them. Might be paradolia working on me.
A closer look at just the faces:
To the right of center, you can see what appears to me to be a male face. To the left of center, almost cheek to cheek, I see another face, and possibly two more above those two and angling upwards towards the right. it's almost like they posed for a group shot.
I do not recognize any of the faces. One of the ones that may be paradolia appears to me to be a child. I will note here that my mother had a brother who died young, as a child, but I think he was an infant, not old enough to be the child I see there. maybe other folks won't see anything at all, and it's just my imagination working on me. I have no idea who or what those faces may be. I don't recognize any of them.
So, there it is. Another ghost story from me. take it or leave it, believe or don't. subject the images to analysis, whatever you want to do. I'm just leaving it here as a conversation piece.
Ninurta
ETA: I will also add that all of the faces appear to be illuminated by sunlight coming from the hand rail (left) side of the image, where the sunlight was coming from, as if they were real, solid people... just hanging upside down for a group photo. In a jug reflection. Also to add, I have no idea what caused that black hexagon shape that hides Grace's face and serves as the focal point where the handrail bends. I mean, I understand it has something to do with the curvature of the jug, but what cause it to be a black blot mystifies me.
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RE: Faces in a Bottle - Michigan Swamp Buck - 05-03-2025
Wow, Corel "Paint Shop". I remember that one, was that Windows 3.0?. Geeze Ninurta, you must be a DOS guy.
I have a lot of experience with early Photoshop, even had a few graphic design jobs where I got pretty good at making realistic-looking, completely artificial background rooms to place such cutouts into. I even incorporated tricks of perspective and hidden things as a personal signature for the commercial art I was creating. My bosses, even a senior designer, never caught on!
ETA: As good as I got, never used it too much to try and reveal details like you were. In fact, I find it a distraction when I see it used to enhance UFOs and monsters like Bigfoot.
RE: Faces in a Bottle - Ninurta - 05-03-2025
(05-03-2025, 11:22 AM)Michigan Swamp Buck Wrote: Wow, Corel "Paint Shop". I remember that one, was that Windows 3.0?. Geeze Ninurta, you must be a DOS guy.
I have a lot of experience with early Photoshop, even had a few graphic design jobs where I got pretty good at making realistic-looking, completely artificial background rooms to place such cutouts into. I even incorporated tricks of perspective and hidden things as a personal signature for the commercial art I was creating. My bosses, even a senior designer, never caught on!
ETA: As good as I got, never used it too much to try and reveal details like you were. In fact, I find it a distraction when I see it used to enhance UFOs and monsters like Bigfoot.
The one I use is JASC ("Just Another Software Company") Paint Shop Pro. I started using it around version 7.04, and the last JASC version, before Corel bought it out and crippled it, was 9.01, circa 2004 I think. Sure, it's old, BUT it has all the features I need, is much more user-friendly than Photoshop, and above all it works with WINE in Linux, which is an important point to consider since I abandoned Windows due to their turning an operating system into built-in spyware for all versions after Windows 7.
And yeah, I was a DOS guy, and I wrote programming in BASIC all the way back in the days when programming languages had line numbers to direct the program flow, which to my mind is a far better system than trying to keep up with tab stops to nest programming modules. I also did some programming in FORTRAN, which no one has used for a thousand years other than physicists, I think.
I had to use FORTRAN for one reason, and one reason only - it has a built in inverse tangent trig function (ATAN command), and I was doing complex astronomical coordinate transformations (transforming equatorial coordinates to galactic coordinates in all 3 dimensions) using spherical geometry, which is another thing hardly anyone knows how to use. Spherical trig is a little different - instead of all 3 corners of a triangle adding up to 180 degrees, they add up to 270 degrees, because following the triangle along the surface of a sphere opens the corners up somewhat.
I say this not to toot any horns, since I don't do any of that stuff any more, and have forgotten how to do a fair bit of it, but to show that I'm not the average run of the mill loon who sees ghost faces in old bottles.
Oddly, I didn't use Paint Shop Pro for any of the detail images. I used a rinky-dink Linux image viewer that has nearly no capabilities other than displaying images, and a zoom function via the mouse wheel to "blow up" images just for viewing. I then simply screenshotted the blown up images with another rinlky-dink little Linux program that does nothing but take screen shots. I've not manipulated the images in any way at all other than zooming with the image viewer, and Grace only removed the background and probably resized the image downward. The original image was probably in the 12 to 18 megapixel range.
Mostly all I use Paint Shop for is to paste stuff together onto different background and create new compositions.
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