Everyone in my Grandparents’ generation followed one unspoken rule. Subscribe to National Geographic for over fifty years and never ever throw any of them out or dare to give them away. My Grandparents had every copy since the 1930s, the one exception was the 1964 copy featuring Disneyland. I “borrowed” that one as a kid and accidentally lost it somewhere down the line. Ironic since that is the copy I now still actually want.
Anyway my family inherited all of these magazines and we probably should have given them away ages ago but we didn’t. No one will take them and it seems like such a waste to recycle them when they have such cool pictures and Mad Men era ads. So they ended up in the Garage.
Last weekend we were try to clean out the Garage and sort stuff. Every other box or bin was filled with National Geographics. Acres and acres of ancient magazines all sharing that yellow border. You would think we would have thrown them away after moving a couple of times but the thing about National Geographics are they tend to suck you in. Who knows when I might want to read a 52 year old article about bird migration and I have to keep this because it features Sacramento in 1947 and I have totally been there, and Oh My God!, look at this ad is that the first copier ever?
For once my resolve didn’t crumble. The boxes with the magazines are heavy and it’s not like we ever read them so I decided to go through them and at least get rid of some. Of course getting rid means trying to sneak them in to the bags for Goodwill under stuff they want like clothes. I don’t know if this plan will work. I have a sneaking suspicion there is going to be a pile of yellow magazines left on our driveway featuring a note attached that says Do Not Want!, but oh well at least I tried.
Which brings me to the subject of the National Geographic Ghost. Last night I was having trouble getting to sleep so I grabbed a pile of National Geographics to look at. One of them was the February 1953 issue featuring an article about New Orleans. New Orleans has of course been in the news a lot because of the Anniversary of Katrina so I decided to see what it looked like back in good ole 1953. I was too tired to actually read the articles (does anyone ever actually read the whole article anyway?) so I was lazily flopping through the pictures.
That’s when I saw this.
Take a look at the guy eating a donut. At first glance it seems like there is just a cup of steamy coffee nearby but look closer.
Doesn’t that look like a face in the smoke or at least a nose and eye and part of a furrowed brow?
Also how come the mirror isn’t at all fogged up?
Look closer he doesn’t have a cup in his hand only a donut. The steam could be from that cup on the table but how come it’s the only one that steamy? The guy under him might have a cup that’s obscured by someone’s head but again how come only that one is steamy?
It also occurred to me that maybe the guy who’s hand is hidden was having a smoke because it was the 50’s and according to shows like Mad Men everyone smoked approximately 90 packs of day back then, but still wouldn’t it be a little bit rude to blow smoke in the face of guy who is just trying to mind his own beeswax and eat a donut all while being photographed for National Geographic? Also nobody else seems to be smoking in this picture.
Finally I thought it could simply be a photographic error like a double exposure or something, but isn’t working for National Geographic every professional photographers dream? I find it hard to believe an obvious mistake would slip through and end up in the magazine unless it somehow didn’t show up in the negatives because it was paranormal.
Or it could be photographic trickery but I don’t quite get what the motive for that would be. Plus they didn’t have Photoshop back then so trickery was a lot harder, and again I fail to see a motive since it wasn’t presented as a ghost just people drinking coffee. Also I did nothing to this picture other than scanning it and cropping it.
So is there an accidental ghost photo in the February 1953 issue of National Geographic? I am mostly a skeptic so I think it’s just a coincidence but still this picture intrigued me enough to post it here. Is it a ghost or just a coincidence? You decide.
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