The Effect
The date is 19th November, 1995. In the quiet market town of Wem in Shropshire, a catastrophe is unfolding. The historic Town Hall, a Victorian red-brick landmark that had stood since 1905, is engulfed by a ferocious blaze. The heat is intense, the roar of the fire deafening. The fire brigade battle to contain the inferno, while police cordon off the area, keeping the gathering onlookers at a safe distance.
Among the crowd is a local farm worker and amateur photographer named Tony O’Rahilly. Armed with a 200mm telephoto lens, he snaps black-and-white photographs of the destruction from across the street. At the time, he sees nothing but smoke, flames, and crumbling masonry. It isn’t until months later, when the film is developed, that a chilling anomaly is revealed.
In one of the photographs, standing calmly in the doorway of the burning building, is a young girl. The fire rages around her, temperatures soaring to nearly 900 degrees Celsius, yet she appears completely unharmed. She stands behind a railing, staring out with a serene, almost sorrowful expression, wearing what appears to be old-fashioned clothing — a long dress and a bonnet.
The image defies explanation. The fire department is adamant that no one was left inside the building. But local folklore quickly provides a name for the face. Legend tells of Jane Churm, a 14-year-old girl who, back in 1677, accidentally dropped a candle and started a fire that burned down most of the town. Was this Jane, returning to witness history repeating itself?
The photograph is sent to the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena. Dr Vernon Harrison, a distinguished expert and former president of the Royal Photographic Society, examines the negative. His conclusion shocks the sceptics: he states the negative is genuine and shows no sign of tampering. The “Wem Ghost” becomes an international sensation, a piece of “proof” that the dead walk among us, and the town of Wem becomes a mecca for ghost hunters. But is this truly a spirit caught on film, or a trick of the light that fooled even the experts?
The Method
For fifteen years, the Wem Ghost photograph stood as one of the most convincing pieces of paranormal evidence in the UK. However, the “method” behind this spectral appearance was finally unravelled not by a scientist, but by a sharp-eyed pensioner reading the local newspaper.
In May 2010, a 77-year-old Wem resident named Brian Lear was leafing through the Shropshire Star. In a nostalgia section titled “Pictures from the Past,” he saw a postcard reprint of Wem High Street dating back to 1922. In the bottom left corner of the postcard, standing in a doorway, was a little girl. Brian froze. The girl in the postcard was identical to the ghost in the fire.
When the two images were overlaid, the match was undeniable. The girl was standing in the exact same pose, wearing the exact same bonnet and dress, with the shadows falling across her face in precisely the same way. The “ghost” was not Jane Churm from 1677, but an anonymous child from a street scene photographed seventy years before the fire.
So, how did she get into the burning building? While Tony O’Rahilly, the photographer, died in 2005 and took his secret to the grave, forensic analysis provides the answer. When experts at the National Media Museum in Bradford analysed the image more closely, they found faint, horizontal scan lines running across the girl’s figure — lines that were absent from the rest of the photo.
This suggests a technique known as “Pepper’s Ghost” for the modern age. It is highly likely that O’Rahilly had the 1922 postcard image — perhaps displayed on a television screen or projected — and used a double exposure technique or a physical overlay to superimpose the girl onto his photo of the burning hall. The horizontal lines were the telltale signature of a digital screen, a technical flaw that went unnoticed in the initial 1995 analysis.
The validation by Dr Vernon Harrison serves as a reminder that even experts can be misled by what they expect to see. The “Wem Ghost” was indeed a fabrication, a cutout from history pasted onto a tragedy. The only spirit present that night was the spirit of invention.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
