The photo was found in a collection of old photos donated by little Shannon. Coming from her old grandfather’s own, more extensive collection, this one seems out of place and perhaps that is because it is. While most of the photos in her collection depict bright and sunny places, parks, trees, animals at play and a host of cousins, aunts and uncles, this one shows a very moody, dark room.
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| Image by Artflow.ai |
The grainy photo almost seems double-exposed, with hazy lines around some of the primary fixtures in the image. An ordinary table is the centrepiece, heavily shaded by something out of frame and stained darkly with layer upon layer of casually splashed pigment, all showing as varying shades of grey in the monochromatic photo.
Most notable is a mirror to the left of the frame that seems to display a much-obscured form, mostly in shadow except for a curious pair of leering female lips. The photo is too small to reveal too much detail, no bigger than a snapshot.
Possibilities
1 The photo is nothing more than a snap-shot cast aside by the girl’s grandfather and mistakenly included in her collection. The woman in the mirror is actually the photographer and her expression is nothing but amusement and frustration combined as she tries to get the shot right.
2 The picture is the last photo taken in a very macabre series kept in a lock box by the grandfather. The grandfather, a form psychiatrist, had taken them as a part of an ongoing study of a very lascivious and twisted woman, a woman with a dark history of violence, murder and of all things cannibalism.
3 The picture is a stray shot of an old room found in the basement crime scene during the grandfather’s days as a city crime photographer. Strangely, the woman is not in any of the reports or recollections of the men who were there that night (few of which survive). The phantom lady only seems to exist in the photograph.
© Eli Arndt
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