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Slender Man is one scary, creepy dude…but remember, he is not real! He was created for a contest on the internet in 2008. Click the link for proof of this:
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/slender-man
Fairies (faeries) - Even though the most popular fairy photographs have been admitted as fakes by their creators, there are many people who refuse to believe fairies, including these photos, aren’t real.
Photographs (photo 1) of a mummified fairy supposedly found in Derbyshire have been revealed as an April Fool’s prank. Former Derbyshire resident Dan Baines, 31, who designs illusions for magicians, made the fairy as a prank. The fairy was reportedly found by a dog walker at Firestone Hill near Duffield and pictures of it posted on a website. “Although I’ve said it’s a hoax, people still believe that it’s real,” said Mr Baines. “I’ve had all sorts of comments including people who say they’ve seen exactly the same things and one person who told me to return the remains to the grave site as soon as possible or face the consequences,” he said.
The Cottingley Fairies (photos 2, 3, and 4) : Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed the photographs to be real. The photos were not admitted to be fakes until decades later when the girls who took them finally confessed. They were all proven to be cardboard cut-outs held up by hat pins. At the time of their release, people refused to believe that teenage girls had the “ability” to fake photographs.
The (Not So) Modern History of the Fairy Movement:
In 1846, William John Thomas, who contributed the term folklore to the English language, commented in The Athenaeum that the “belief of fairies is by no means extinct in England”. Antiquarians of the romantic era had begun the quest for fairies, and throughout Victoria’s reign advocates of fairy existence and investigators of elfin origins included numerous scientists, social scientists, historians, theologians, artists, and writers.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, eminent authors, among them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Machen, swelled the ranks of those who held the fairy faith and publicized their findings. A surprisingly large number of educated Victorians and Edwardians speculated at length on whether fairies did exist or had at least once existed.
(Source: BBC)
Slender Man is an internet hoax - he is the result of a contest to create a paranormal creature using photoshop:
On June 8th, 2009, a “paranormal pictures” photoshop contest was launched on the Something Awful (SA) forums. The idea was to turn ordinary photographs into creepy-looking images through digital manipulation and then pass them on as authentic photographs on a number of paranormal forums. Something Awful users soon began sharing their faux-paranormal creations with layered images of ghosts and other anomalies, usually accompanied by a fabricated witness account to make them more convincing. On June 10th, SA user Victor Surge posted two black and white photographs of unnamed children with a short description of “Slender Man” as a mysterious creature who stalked children.
The moral of the story: do not believe everything you read. The more gullible we are, the easier we are to control.
(Source: Know Your Meme)
How to Spot Some Common Fake Ghost Photos
Look at this photo
You see the little girl right?
This is one of the most common ghosts. It is in tons of pictures. You want to know why? It is from a app called Ghost Capture.
Here are some more “Ghosts” You can pick:
So don’t fall for fakes!
Vintage ghost photography
(Source: flickr.com)
The implanted “ghost” faces look very similar to the other fake ghost faces in prior pictures.
As soon as photography was invented, people started faking ghost photographs. Some look more realistic than others. Both of the above are obvious fakes.
One of the Most Famous Ghost Photos a Hoax?
One of Shropshire’s most sensational mysteries – the spooky riddle of “The Wem ghost” – may at last have been solved by eagle-eyed Shropshire Star reader Brian Lear. Brian spotted an eerie similarity between a girl standing in the street in a 1922 photo of Wem and the young girl whose fuzzy image was famously captured amid the flames as Wem Town Hall burned down in 1995. That photograph taken by local amateur photographer Tony O’Rahilly created international headlines and sparked the legend of “The Wem Ghost”. There was speculation that the girl was 14-year-old Jane Churm, who accidentally started the disastrous great fire of Wem in 1677 and was reputed to be haunting the town hall.
So is this proof the picture is a hoax? What about the supposed photo expert who examined the negative? Look at the girl. She is identical to the ghost photo!
Why the Story Started:
On November 19, 1995, Wem Town Hall in Shropshire, England burned to the ground. Many spectators gathered to watch the old building, built in 1905, as it was being consumed by the flames. Tony O’Rahilly, a local resident, was one of those onlookers and took photos of the spectacle with a 200mm telephoto lens from across the street. One of those photos shows what looks like a small, partially transparent girl standing in the doorway. Nether O’Rahilly nor any of the other onlookers or firefighters recalled seeing the girl there.
O’Rahilly submitted the photo to the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena which, in turn, presented it for analysis to Dr. Vernon Harrison, a photographic expert and former president of the Royal Photographic Society. Harrison carefully examined both the print and the original negative, and concluded that it was genuine. “The negative is a straightforward piece of black-and-white work and shows no sign of having been tamered with,” Harrison said.
