Oh, really, Mr. O’Rahilly?
The Wem Town Hall Ghost photo - courtesy Fortean Picture Library
In September of 2009 I started an investigation into the Wem Town Hall ghost photo. This famous photo shows a ghostly girl in the burning wreckage of a fire that took place in the Town Hall of the British town of Wem on November 19, 1995. The photographer was a man named Tony O’Rahilly and he took several photos of the fire that night. The last photo on the reel showed a girls face in the doorway of the blazing fire and the photo caught the imagination of many. Was this girl really in the building? Fire fighter footage of the same fire showed no such girl. No body was found, and many speculated that this was a ghost. Paranormal researchers even came up with a name for the girl, calling her Jane Churm after a little girl who started a fire in Wem back in 1677.
For fifteen years the photo was a mystery which made many top-10 ghost lists. But now an elderly man in England has identified the source of the ghost girl’s image and brought closure to this case. Read on past the break to get a history of the case and see the solution.
A paranormal investigation group called the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP) investigated the photo and found that it was likely a simulacrum caused by burning debris. Soon after, a BBC television show called Out of this World investigated the case and came to the conclusion that the photo was a hoax using a digital image as the basis of the ghostly subject.
If you’re interested, the episode is available on YouTube in two parts:
When I decided to look into the case, despite the fairly compelling information in Out of this World, I started by trying to get a copy of the original image. The Fortean Picture Library gave me two very nice pieces of evidence. One was a scan of Mr. O’Rahilly’s negatives, and the other was a high definition scan of the original photo. Unlike the photo in in the documentary, the girls face had no horizontal scan lines. This was important because the photography expert in the episode said that they were easily detectable in the copy he received.
I contacted several people involved with the television episode, including the ASSAP team. My ASSAP contact stated that they felt the lines the photography expert saw were probably an artifact of the reproduction process they’d used to make their copy of the photo for analysis. This may well be true.
I’d been trying for weeks to contact the photography expert in question when the story containing the solution broke in a UK newspaper, The Shropshire Star. A previous issue of the paper had run an old postcard from 1922 and one of their readers, a 77 year old man named Brian Lear noticed that the girl in the postcard bore an uncanny resemblance to the girl in the Wem Town Hall photo. And lets be clear here – it’s not just that she looked similar, but that she’s wearing the same clothes and features match up perfectly to the girl in the ghost photo. It seems clear that Out of this World was closer to the truth than I’d thought.
Below you’ll see the famous ghost photo, the postcard that the girl’s image was swiped from, and a couple of animated photos to show how perfectly the two images line up.
The Post Card Girl - Detail from 1922 postcard
The postcard which contains the "ghost" girl's image.
An animated overlay to show how the "ghost" and the postcard girl line up perfectly.
It’s not often that such a beautiful and obvious solution arises in these kinds of case, but I’m certainly happy that Mr. Lear was paying attention. A pity that Mr. O’Rahilly didn’t live to see the very specific solution to his hoax be made public, but at least the answer is now out in the public. It’ll be up to skeptics and honest folk to make the solution widely known to the rest of the paranormalist community.
