I was in the neighbours’ dwelling, checking equipment and making sure that batteries were charged for the coming night’s session, when the father of the haunted family came to show me something. His 10 years old daughter (who looked much younger than her actual age) was going to appear in a school play; it was some sort of woodland fairytale and she’d been cast as an owl. The girl had a costume and a beaked mask; she wanted to have her picture taken as a keepsake, so her Dad snapped off a couple of shots on his new Polaroid camera.

As they developed, he could hardly believe his eyes. There was something on both pictures - a small cloud-like shape which (strange as it may sound) seemed to have blurred spots that looked like (in the father’s words) ‘runny eyes’. The shape hovered over the girl’s head and it appeared to have moved between the two exposures. On the screen of the TV set next to her were several human faces - he (and the rest of the family) were adamant that these weren’t part of any broadcast.

He gave us the Polaroids; we examined them very carefully for signs of tampering - the glossy surface of each image was undisturbed and we could detect no evidence of any tool marks or changes in the materials which might suggest physical manipulation.

Next we asked the father to take more pictures - using the same film cartridge - the resulting images did not have any unexpected flaws or anomalies. We minutely checked the camera itself and again found nothing wrong. As stated, it was a brand new camera - fresh from its packaging and in mint condition.

We moved on to the room where the pictures were taken. I asked who was there, where they were sitting and ascertained that nobody was smoking as the Polaroids were taken.

The TV set had been switched on at that time, but the children’s show seen on the screen simply featured a single actor in a vividly-coloured animal costume. The human faces which shared the screen with him were not other entertainers. They are plainly reflections of people in the room itself.

At first we thought that one of the sons (who was sitting on a chair to the girl’s left) was the source of the male head most clearly visible. But examination of the angle between his seat and the screen ruled that solution out. In addition, the brother did not wear glasses; the face we thought might be his wore a pair of thick-framed spectacles. As we pondered these points, we realised (with something approaching a collective shudder) that the unidentified face was on completely the wrong side of his sister. It was a reflection made by somebody - or some thing - who had to be on her right-hand side - in other words, BETWEEN HER AND THE TV SET. The space between the girl and the screen is completely visible in both Polaroids - there isn’t anybody there.

The gap in time between each exposure was just a few seconds - long enough for the daughter to pull the mask over her face and adjust/arrange the costume’s cloth cowl. We checked the windows and glazed doors in the room and everything that was close to the glass surfaces (inside and outside) which might be responsible for the weird ‘smoke’ formation. In the end, though it seemed incredible, we had to accept that the smoke (or vapour) was ‘solid’, in the room and close to her - even though nobody had seen anything out of the ordinary whilst the Polaroids were being taken. Since the anomaly was unmistakably a form of smoke or vapour, we had to rule out exotic explanations like irregular patches of illumination (light) invisible to the human eye, but registered by the film emulsion. We can’t pretend to offer a scientific explanation for the ‘runny eyes’. They remained consistently present in both shots - an observation which goes a long way towards ruling out the notion that they are random patterns in the film itself.

As serious investigators should, we regarded every member of the family as a potential hoaxer and employed a healthy dose of suspicion in each phase of the case. The family made no attempt to gain notoriety or to enrich themselves through the events that they reported (and which, to a great extent, we witnessed). They came across as simple people who just wanted their home to be undisturbed by inexplicable and frightening phenomena.

Having ruled out falsifications and hidden motives and having seen (and heard) for ourselves so many things which confirmed the family’s stories, we could only conclude that their dwelling (and other homes on the trailer park) were genuinely haunted. We started the investigation with gags about mobile homes being a change of pace from the historic buildings and old houses we generally examine. As we packed away our equipment, we resolved to return at a later date to see if anything could be done to bring peace of mind to the confused and sometimes scared human residents. Not surprisingly, jokes about the slim chances of finding ghosts in modern caravans had given way to questions: Why was that trailer park such an exception to the ‘rules’ of ghost hunting? What made that place a ‘hot spot’ for the dead? Had the location been used for another purpose before the mobile homes were sited there?

We did go back. The answers we found were enough to give us sleepless nights.

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