15 Unexplained Historical Photographs in Old Photo Albums - Mystery Hunter

 

The Mysterious Odd Historical Photographs 

History contains epic tales of romance or courage, even grief. Many of these we know by word of mouth on paper, parchment, or word of mouth. The invention of the camera, however, changed the way we tell our stories. Today, we tell the past through photos, and it is known that a picture tells a thousand words.

But not all stories are epic, full of heroes and maidens, gods and gods. The past is also filled with stories of the ordinary, the strange, the mysterious, and the downright funny. Many pictures capture these moments, telling stories we didn't witness.

In this Article, we will show you the most mysterious strange historical photos found in old photo albums. from now on, you will be in the future, so leave mementos for the past.

15 Unexplained Historical Photographs in Old Photo Albums

15. The Devil Fish

On August 26, 1933, it was another ordinary fishing day for New York silk merchant A.L. Khan. Happening his fishing boat off the coast of Deal, New Jersey, he had his anchor aligned in the water, and would have been content with a good catch.

Bait was not going to go easy on him. His anchor line caught something, and Khan's boat was ready to pull it in. It pulled them instead. A simple fishing trip would turn into a grueling exercise as they struggled for the next three hours to reel in their catch.

Unable to handle it alone, the U.S. Coast Guard was called in to assist. With the help of the Coast Guard and a dozen bullets, they made the catch and aptly nicknamed it the Devil Fish. What Khan had reeled in was a 20-foot-wide, 5,000-pound manta ray. This is the weight of a Tesla Model X.

Khan had the enormous ray taxidermy when he got ashore, then displayed hanging from a crane. He charged 10 cents to see the beast, and an ever-growing crowd of spectators gave him a huge profit.

14. The Phantom Dog

According to physics, you can make an object become invisible if you can bend light appropriately around it. In metaphysics, you would have to be a ghost. This family featured on Eric Kessel's photo album.

All you have to do is put a black dog on a black chair, then click the camera. Volume 9: How Not to Photograph Your Black Dog is a found photography photo album by Kessels, co-publisher at Amsterdam-based Kessel Kramer Publishing.

It shows a family's hilarious attempt to photograph their black dog, which sat on a black chair. The result is a phantom that is only revealed through a photo overexposure. The photographs are stereotypical examples of how interesting mundane life could be and how persistent we can be at making mistakes with a camera.

13. Babushka Lady

The 1963 assassination of J.F. Kennedy rocked the nation, and investigations began immediately to find the culprit. While checking film recordings of the Daily Plaza, Dallas, where JFK was shot, the FBI found that a woman wearing a headscarf appears multiple times, holding a camera which might have recorded the assassination and the culprit.

She was nicknamed the Babushka Lady.

After the shooting, while everyone around her dove and crouched, the Babushka Lady remained standing and had her camera in her hand. The search for her began, which would prove to be in vain. Beverly Oliver claimed to be the Babushka Lady and said she handed over her camera to unknown FBI agents, but investigators have disproven her claims to date, and her filming was lost along with the possible identity of JFK's assassin.

12. South Forks Bridge Time Traveler

In 2010, Braylorn Pioneer Museum held an online exhibition, and among its photographs was one showing a hipster in 1941.

The image quickly went viral, with people sharing it on Reddit, dig.com, and other social media platforms. From photo historians to conspiracy theorists, everyone was interested. Was this evidence of time travel? The image was taken at the South Forks Bridge reopening event in November 1941, several years before the hipster trend started.

The time traveler was among the crowd, wearing a printed t-shirt and dark sunglasses, too modern for that era. Even more puzzling was the compact camera he was holding. In 1941, such a gadget was almost non-existent. Was the image photoshopped? Why would it be? Was he a time traveler, or could he have been a fashion-forward individual? It is extremely difficult to tamper with old photographs, so photoshopping is out of the question.

Then, he was merely a local fashion outcast. Sunglasses have been sold since the 1920s but were not cool in 1941. His modern t-shirt could be a sweater with a stitched-on logo. Cameras were rare in the 1940s but available. He could have owned an early Kodak 35, or he could have time-traveled to the event to take some photographs for Instagram.

11. Hessdalen Lights

Has Stalin Lights: Alien Origins or Natural Phenomenon? This question has marked the sightings of the Hessdalen Lights since it was first observed in the 1930s. The unidentified lights appear in the 12-kilometer-long Hessdalen Valley in Norway. It appears both day and night in varying colors: bright white, red, or yellow.

The Hessdalen Lights have quite unpredictable behaviors. It appears above and below the horizon, could pass in a few seconds or last an hour, move swiftly, slowly, or hover above the valley. Between December 1981 and mid-1984, the lights were observed as much as 20 times per week.

In recent times, beginning in 2010, sightings have lessened to 10 to 20 sightings yearly. There have been both scientific and pseudo-scientific projects which have tried to explain the Hessdalen Lights, such as Project Hessdalen, Project EMBLEM. The Hessdalen Automatic Measurement Station was also constructed to record the lights. None have found a satisfactory explanation so far.

10. Egyptian Giant Finger

"When the sons of God, Ben-Elohim, came into the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renowned." These are the words written in the sixth chapter of the Book of Genesis, which tells of a time when giants walked amongst men.

Images released on Bild.e, a German newspaper in March 2012, confirmed this. The images show a giant mummified finger, which is nearly 14 inches longer than a dollar placed beside it for size comparison. The pictures were taken in Egypt in 1988 by a Swiss man named Gregor Spori, who found them in the home of a retired grave robber named Naheeb based in the Burhooker district near Sadat City, 100 kilometers north of Cairo.

Naheeb told Spori that the finger was found 150 years ago and showed him an x-ray photograph that showed its authenticity. The robber refused to sell the finger or tell where it was found, but he let Gregor take pictures of the finger for three hundred dollars. The images taken leave viewers astounded. If the finger is truly genuine, then it belongs to a person who is at least 15 feet tall.

9. Solway Firth Spaceman

In another story of a viral photograph, the world is still talking about the Solway Spaceman, 58 years after it became a global story on May 23, 1964. Carlisle fireman and local historian Jim Templeton took three photographs of his five-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, and a white astronaut figure appeared in the middle photo.

The photographs were taken during a trip to Berg Marsh overlooking Solway Firth, Cumbria, England. Insanely, Templeton insists there was no one behind his daughter when he took the picture, so where did the spaceman figure in the background come from? Journalists and UFO book author David Clark said in a 2014 BBC interview that the odd occurrence was due to overexposure.

He believes Templeton's wife had walked into the shot, but the fireman was unaware of it because of the 70-degree viewing angle of his Kodak camera. Due to overexposure, his wife's blue dress appears white.

If that were the case, it does not explain the two unidentified government agents that visited Templeton after the incident, nor does it explain how the men seen at the Blue Streak missile launch in Woomera, South Australia, were canceled because men similar to the Solway Spacemen were observed in the firing range.

8. Disembodied Ghost Hand

On an online website called Belfast Live, a woman uploaded a picture of her grandmother who worked at a linen mill in Northern Ireland in the 1900s. At first glance, it looks like an ordinary picture of 15 young women seated in rows.

Zoom in a bit, and on one of the woman's shoulders is a claw-like hand belonging to no one in the photo. All 15 women are seated with arms crossed over their chest, with their hands tucked underneath their arms.

It is unlikely that any of them would be touching another, which is why the disembodied hand immediately holds our attention when seen. It rests on a girl at the farthest end of the row with no one seated after her. So, who owns the hand?

7. Duchesne's Experiments

Each time you genuinely smile at someone, crow's feet form around your eyes. This is called a Duchenne smile, named after the scientist who showed how our face works to produce facial expressions.

Guillaume Benjamin Armand Duchenne de Boulogne was a French neurologist who was obsessed with the human face. Between 1854 and 1856, Duchenne de Boulogne performed research to revolutionize our thinking about the human face using electrical shock. He manipulated the facial muscles of his test subjects to produce varying emotions such as fear, terror, joy, sorrow, and excitement.

His work was truly pioneering, but photographs taken of his subjects for experiments are odd. Poking his subjects with electrical probes, he induced different facial expressions, even grotesque ones. So, while Duchenne may have given a Duchenne smile to the world, his horrific pictures will always remain part of his legacy.

6. SS Watertown Ghosts

We thought the days of ghosts on ships ended in the Medieval Era, but we thought wrong, or at least that is what these photographs taken by sailors aboard the tanker SS Watertown suggest.

In December 1924, while voyaging across the Pacific Ocean, two seamen in the tanker's crew named James Courtney and Michael Meehan were tasked with cleaning the cargo tank. Both men died from gas fume inhalation before their crew members could save them, thus beginning our ghost story. As sea tradition goes, their bodies were given to the sea on the 4th of December.

Then, the following day, their faces were seen on board the ship and in the sea waves, much to the horror of the other sailors. After their faces kept reoccurring, a snapshot was taken and developed when the ship made port in New Orleans. Incredibly, the developed photograph clearly shows their faces in the sea.

5. Geophone Rock Anomaly

The last time a man went to the moon was in 1972 when NASA sent the Apollo 17 Mission with the LRV Rover, which contained a camera for taking photographs during the mission. One of the images has sparked a lot of attention since NASA released it. The image taken near the Geophone Rock area was originally thought to be blank.

However, when noise reduction and contrast were applied, structures resembling a pyramid and a bar were revealed. Neither is a NASA construction and is unidentified. There has been no clear explanation by scientists, and NASA never gave a credible version of the photograph. Only conspiracy theorists come up with an explanation: aliens.

 4. California Alligator Farm

In today's world, it is highly unlikely that an average person would want to be around an alligator or be around one without any injuries sustained. But in the 20th century, a park made a profit from letting people get up close with 15-feet gators, and no injuries were recorded.

Owned by Frank Ernest and Joe Campbell, the Los Angeles California Alligator Farm was a park that had a thousand alligators in it, separated into 20 ponds. It had both baby alligators that could fit in your palm and adult alligators capable of cutting off your feet. People were allowed to touch them, ride them, and even wrestle them.

The park, which began operations in 1907, seems too skeptical to ever have existed, but photographs prove that it is not a piece of fiction. Visitors were charged 25 cents a piece to get to see the creatures, and there were no barriers between man and the beast. There are photographs of people picnicking in shallow waters with the alligators all around them, children playing with baby alligators, and people riding adult alligators using special saddles.

All these were encouraged by the park owners, who had also taught the alligators tricks like sliding down tubes to eat live chickens and wrestling with people without hurting them.

The park eventually closed in 1953, but only because of dwindling profit rather than closure by the U.S. government.

3. Hook Island Sea Monster

The Hook Island Sea Monster is a tadpole-like creature photographed by Robert Lasarock in 1964. The beast was sighted by Robert and his family while cruising on Stonehaven Bay, Hook Island. According to them, the creature was at least 30 feet long, which is the length of two adult giraffes.

Robert went underwater to take photos but was scared off by the creature, which swiftly departed soon after. Skeptics believe it was merely plastic sheeting held down by sand, although the family had reported seeing its eyes. Whether true or not, people have refused to swim in the bay since the sighting.

2. Cooper's Falling Body

The scene is an old house in Texas that just became the new home of the Coopers, a family of four with Mr. Cooper's mother present. Mrs. Cooper and her mother-in-law sit at the dining table with her two sons, smiling happily as her husband takes a picture of them. It is their first night in the house, and the photo was taken to commemorate the event.

Weeks later, Mr. Cooper picks up the developed photograph from the pharmacy and takes it home. His wife, sons, and mother are all in the picture, along with a body hanging upside down from the ceiling right next to them. It had not been there when the picture was taken.

The photograph was posted online in 2009 and soon went viral, with everybody trying to explain. Some called it fake, while others blamed the apparition for double exposure. Whether true or false, we cannot say, but we do know that it is an odd mysterious photograph.

1. Goddess Squadron

In a photo published by Sir Victor Goddard, a retired RAF officer, in 1975, a squadron of both the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy is seen wearing a quite moody look. The squadron, in which Sir Victor himself served in World War I at the HMS Daedalius training facility, was taken in 1919.

The squadron had posed for a group portrait at the funeral of Freddie Jackson, who had died two days earlier. The airman had accidentally walked into a propeller and died on the spot.

Days later, the portrait was put up for all to see, and who is found among the squadron? Smiling like he alone got the joke, Freddie Jackson.

The photograph is one of the most famous ghost photos on the internet, partly because its authenticity cannot be doubted. Everyone in the squadron recognized the ghostly face of Freddie, and the training officers themselves confirmed that it was genuine.

Sir Victor speculated that the ghost must not have known he was dead and decided to come for the snapshot. "Jokes on you," his smile seems to say.

 

From the bizarre devil fish to airy Hest Allen lights to the scary Cooper falling body, we have run down a few out of hundreds of mysterious photos that have popped up throughout history.

The internet has brought these photographs out of photo albums, and we can only wonder what it will tell us about this era in the future.

These historical photographs provide a glimpse into the intriguing and mysterious aspects of the past.

They capture moments that defy explanation and leave us questioning the boundaries of what we know. From extraordinary catches during fishing trips to puzzling anomalies in everyday life, these photographs tell stories that continue to fascinate and spark curiosity.

As we delve into the past through these captivating images, we are reminded that history is not merely a collection of facts, but a tapestry woven with enigmatic tales and unexplained phenomena.

Through the lens of a camera, we can uncover glimpses of the extraordinary, the ordinary, and the bizarre, shedding light on the depths of human experience and the mysteries that surround us.

Thank you for sticking with me till the end, and bye for now.