Tombstone Silver

Are the Ghost Photos Fake?

I am frequently asked if Tombstone photographs with paranormal activity are fake. This short article answers that question.


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I have led ghost tours since October 2009, and guests have sent me just over 450 photographs showing some amount of paranormal activity. For example, the photo on the right shows several orbs at Boothill Graveyard, but I have photos of orbs, plasmas, vortexes, and even apparitions in my collection. These photos were taken all over Tombstone in every season and type of weather. There are so many of them that it is difficult not to imagine that there is something paranormal in Tombstone.

Of course, I cannot verify the veracity of any photographs sent to me by a stranger who visited Tombstone; however, I would point out the following.

There is no incentive for a guest to send me a fake photograph. I only use a few photographs on my tour and display a few more on this website, so most of the photographs guests send me are stored in my archive and never see the light of day (so to speak). Moreover, I do not pay anyone for the photos they send. Thus, there is no fame, money, or other incentives to spend a lot of time "doctoring" a photograph to send to me.

It would certainly be possible for a guest to create a fantastic photograph of the Angel of Death hovering above Tombstone (in fact, that would be pretty awesome!). However, the photographs that I publicly display are similar to dozens that many different guests have sent. For example, I have 47 different photographs sent by more than 15 different guests of orbs in Boothill Graveyard. While some of those may be faked, it would not be reasonable to assume that all those guests somehow colluded to send me faked photographs of orbs. I have a few "one-off" photographs showing paranormal activity around Tombstone, but I will not display those unless I receive other similar photographs from that location. By enforcing my policy of only displaying photographs like others taken by different guests at different times, I hope to avoid accidentally displaying a fake.

So, while I cannot definitively state that there are no faked photos on this site, I can say that I have taken as much care as possible to avoid posting fakes.