The Back Seat Ghost: Mabel Chinnery's Photograph, Ipswich

Ellen Hammell died in March 1959. A local burial list gave her age as 78. She was buried in Old Ipswich Cemetery, in Suffolk, in plot C1233. The grave had no headstone then. It still has none.

Her daughter was Mabel Chinnery. A week after the burial, Mabel and her husband went to visit the grave.

Sunday, 22 March 1959. Mabel photographed her mother's grave. Then, by her own account in the press, she decided to use up the rest of her film. Her husband, Jim, sat alone in the driver's seat of their car, a Hillman Minx.

Through the viewfinder she saw only her husband and the car. Nobody reported a chill, a sound or a movement at the graveside.

When the print came back, there was a passenger. An elderly woman sat in the back seat, behind the driver, framed by the rear side window. She wore glasses that caught the light. She had a white collar. The door pillar seemed to cover part of her face. Mabel recognised her at once. It was her mother. As one later account put it, "The snapshot proved to the Chinnerys that a piece of us must still exist after the death of the body."

The Sunday Pictorial ran the story on 19 April 1959. The paper said it had examined the negative and found no sign of tampering, and a local photographic expert judged the picture genuine. On 28 June, the American Sunday supplement Parade printed it beside an earlier portrait of Mrs. Hammell. Its expert was blunt: "The lady in back can't be the result of a double exposure. If it were, the door's upright wouldn't block off part of her face. And she can't be a reflection in the window, either." Decades later, a Time-Life book quoted another unnamed expert: "I stake my reputation on the fact that the picture is genuine."

In 1985, Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers put the image through early computer analysis. Dr. Steve Gull and Tim Newton found "at least two really strong indicators that the photo is an accidental double-exposure." The sharpest was the white collar, which appears to show through the solid metal pillar between the doors. Melvyn Willin, in Ghost Photos (2009), agreed that "the possibility of a double exposure must be considered."

In 2015, Blake Smith of Skeptic suggested Mabel had once photographed her mother in an armchair, then shot her husband on the same frame without advancing the film. A Brownie camera expert, Chuck Baker, said many such cameras had no lock against it. Smith admitted a problem. If the grave was photographed earlier on the same roll, an accident becomes less likely, "though the image still looks like a composite."

On the MonsterTalk podcast, Matt Baxter went further. There was no headstone to photograph. The background, with another vehicle, a high wall and distant buildings, does not clearly match the cemetery. Perhaps, he suggested, this was an older snapshot of Jim with his mother-in-law, who "liked riding in the back so she could talk to him while he drove." Nobody has accused the Chinnerys of a deliberate hoax.

The Chinnery picture shared Clarke's programme with the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall and the Cottingley Fairies. The negative's whereabouts are unknown. MonsterTalk left one question hanging: "With no headstone in 1959 (or now), what exactly was Mabel photographing at the graveside, if anything?"