49 Photos That Captured Chilling Things Only Seen After The Picture Was Taken

I guess this could be scary for some people but my husband and I were on a group expedition in california, we were in the middle of the desert, it was honestly pitch black except for flash lights that we had. We all were sitting in chairs in a circle and we decided to shut off all lights and just sit back and enjoy the darkness.
While this was happening i decided to turn off my flash on my phone camera and snap a few pics. What showed up surprised me. In only one picture(of about 20 i took rapidly back to back) a huge redish orange fire orb showed up. It literally took up almost the whole picture. It was the only thing in the pic, and the rest was pitch black. I never saw it with my naked eye. We tried to debunk it but we had nothing in our possession that could make that sort of light. It was pretty cool.

One evening back in college, I was getting ready for a night out with two friends but the friend’s apartment was supposedly haunted and we managed to take the scariest selfie of all time.

The friend who lived in the apartment would tell us all the time about her bathroom door randomly opening/closing and her dog barking at things she couldn’t see.

So, here we are, in this girl’s haunted af bedroom taking selfies before we leave for a party. It wasn’t until we were looking at the photos later that evening that we saw **the face**.

Behind the three heads, there is an unmistakable fourth face, grinning into the camera. It had a weird cat-like nose and was oddly round. No hair, and pale.

Unfortunately everyone I show the photo to believes that we made it in photoshop, but I swear that we didn’t. If anyone finds this interesting I’ll upload it...

Edit: here’s the image

I did wildlife and nature photography for awhile when I was in high school and just out of. I was on the School Newspaper all 4 years of high school, so I had connections at the Printers, and would often get calls from them saying, "Hey, we have someone for this magazine or this newsletter" etc. I'd take on the odd jobs and go get pictures. Sometimes it was of Houses for a "Parade of Homes" kinda thing, sometimes it was pictures from little nature parks for stories. It was all really, really random stuff, usually.

One time, they asked me to go get a picture of a local "Park" around a lake in the foothills, since they were going to be having some sort of 4th of July Celebration in a few weeks.

I went out and got several amazing pictures. Lagoon, Walking Trails, Picnic area, etc. I spent about 3 hours out there hiking around cause it's actually one of my favorite places to hike anyway.

I got home and went to do edits on the picture to send off to the people who requested it. What I wound up seeing... was 3 Mountain Lions. Following me. For probably about an hour.

I had a project for my high school photography class and, like everyone else, I thought a cemetery would be a great place to shoot in black and white. I went right after a storm and caught some great shots of mist rising from the ponds and streams, overflow racing through debris stuck in storm drains, wet mausoleums, all the hits. I developed and submitted four prints to my teacher who immediately picked out the last photo I took, saying the figures in the background added a lot of atmosphere and drama.

I had no idea what he was talking about. When he pointed out the two people, something immediately seemed off. It looked like a man just starting to turn and run, while grabbing an older child or young teenager by the arm so violently that they were flying sideways off of a bicycle. They were framed in the center background between two headstones, facing away from the camera. To the left and almost out of frame was a fuzzy black car. I hadn't even seen them in person while taking the shot. I showed my parents that night and they flipped out. On the day I took the photos, a week before, there was an attempted abduction of a girl taking a shortcut home by riding her bike through the cemetery. The abductor dropped her and fled when he saw a car approaching and was later arrested after the drivers called 911.

Apart from accidentally capturing an attempted child abduction on film, the fact that this stuff happens in plain sight was probably scarier.

My mom, who was separated from her wildly toxic husband, decided to throw a party for a family friend. Our little family was on edge because she had just filed for divorce and she decided we needed a night to relax and have fun. Lots of food, friends and laughter. At one point she snapped a picture of the birthday boy goofing around. Later that night my dad took me back to his home for the weekend.

The next morning my aunt called him to say mom was in the hospital and he'd need to keep me for a week or so. Dad told me mom had gotten sick again but would be better soon. I didn't see her again for maybe two or three weeks. During that time the birthday boy came by to hang out and show us the party pictures. 30 years later I can still see the photo of him goofing around, all covered in ribbons and playing with balloons, this huge grin on his face. And there behind him, looking through the window where we were missing a blind, was my stepdad.

He had been waiting for the party to end.

My dad told me she was sick so that I wouldn't know what had really happened. Once I saw him in the photo, even as a kid, I knew why she was actually in the hospital.

So went to school camp up in the Australian bush way back in the 90s. I brought a disposable camera for photos. I was about 9

Dropped it off to get it developed. Never got the pictures. Turns out I'd accidently taken some pictures of a corpse in the bush. My parents turned the photos over to the police.

It was a big drama at the school as several kids photos "disappeared* eg parents gave them over to the police.

Yep. Not a single student or teacher had noticed the apparently obvious corpse while bush walking. They didn't run a rural school camp for two years after that.

When my brothers and I were kids, my uncle gave each of us a camera (1965). We would take black and white pictures of all kinds of boring stuff. One of my brothers kept all of his pictures in a drawer and ignored them for many years.

He came across them 15 years later and showed them to our good friend who grew up a few houses down from us. The friend was going through the stack of pics and they were reminiscing about the old days. The friend held up a picture of my oldest brother holding our kitten next to my dad's old truck. He asked who's dog is in the truck?

My brother looked at the picture and inside the cab of the truck was a dog looking at my brother and the cat. It was a large white furry dog that looked to be happy with it's tongue hanging out of its mouth.

We were between dogs at that time. Our first boxer passed away almost a year earlier. We didn't have another boxer until the cat was a year old. The dog is not a boxer. No one in the neighborhood had a dog like that, nor any family friends. The truck was always locked, and we would never have let a strange dog into the truck.

We asked my mother about where dad bought the truck, she said it was owned by a man who raised chickens for a living. She said he had a friendly, big white sheepdog. We think the good boy liked to ride in the truck and still liked to hang out in it.

When I graduated high school my family and my best friends family hung around the football field after everybody left the ceremony. My Dad snapped a pic of my best friend and me standing on the bleachers in our cap and gown. After we got the film developed we noticed that there were two eyes peeking out of the crack right below us on the bleachers and you could just make out a man's head. We never saw this man while we were there and he was staring directly at the camera below us.

Absolute nothing. I was in my backyard semi-late at night and this small owl, like 6 inches tall and so poofy it was almost round landed on the ground about 10 feet from me out of nowhere, almost silent. So I snap a picture real quick, because an owl just landed near me and it's a cute little round thing. Long story short, I have schizophrenia.

Oh I know this one!

I too, a photo of my Dad and Brother in a Thornton’s cafe (don’t think they have Thornton’s in America, it’s basically a cafe owned by a chocolate company), and I took the photo, and in the background is the most cursed photo of this woman who was there spitting out her hot chocolate, it was such perfect timing it’s beautiful!

(Also want to note I no longer have the photo, it was on my old phone).

Back when I was a kid, I had one of those disposable cameras to take pictures of my pet bird. An old bald man's head showed up in one of them. Big ears. Thick glasses. Just his head hanging out around the tv.

I had a friend take a picture of me while we were working outside. Looked back at it a couple of hours later and to my horror realized that there was a giant tick climbing up my neck in the picture. Found the tick itself in my hair a little while later haha.

My parents and my sister and I were all shooting fireworks when we took a photo of my dad lighting them there clearly a woman standing in the frame of the photo looking at us. Not a reflection, a shadow but a fully formed woman in the edge of the frame who was clearly larger than my mother and did not look nice at all. It morbidly freaked all of us out.

My brothers wife was going to look at apartments while he was stuck at work so she brought her camera so he had an idea of what they looked like. She got the pictures developed and when my brother was going through them later that night there’s clearly a little girl standing in one of them. You could see through her but could clearly make everything out. She had on a dress with knee high ruffle sock and dress shoes.

I took a picture in the attic of my sister with her guitar. It had a face behind her, just slightly distorted. I brought it to my science teacher at the time and he was like, "Mnnn, that's freaky. No thanks." It also felt haunted in that apartment so :shrugs: Definitely terrified me at the time.


I also took a photo at South Street Cemetery in Portsmouth, NH that has a ghost cow. I found out a year later that it used to be a pasture! I also had one other photo where I asked if anyone wanted to show me anything while I took the photo and I got something weird in the corner that looks like a school picture. Wish I could post the pics!

Guy took a Polaroid of me in front of the La Laurie mansion in New Orleans. It took a long time to develop because it was pretty dark, but when it did, there was a pretty ghostly image of a woman over my shoulder.

A few years back, I took a selfie in my dimly lit living room and immediately started to fiddle with the brightness. In the corner of the photo, clear as day, was a toddler aged child who was not at our house. There was a distinct face and torso, standing next to the dining table at the proper height of a child that age. He only appeared when I turned up the brightness. Scared the living soul out of me.

One time me and my friend was dating, while meeting her parents we took a picture together. But while looking at the picture we realised that a guy was staring at us during the picture. Until that day, I won't go to Smithfield's again.

A relative and I were in an old graveyard (people there were buried mostly around the mid 1800s). Relative took a photo of a beautiful grave stone. When we later looked at the photo, there was an odd white aura floating above the stone in the photo. The photo was taken with an iPhone camera and being viewed on the phone, so it wasn't some kind of developing oddity. Nothing was there around the grave when the photo was taken that we could see.

Not me but my aunt. TLDR at the end.

She was scuba diving in Mexico somewhere with a new gear. She is super trained and has decades of experience in diving.

She was diving with a video camera too.

Into this dive with her new gear she got caught in a current and was separated from her dive partner. Because of this she decided it was safer to go to the surface. As she was ascending from around 180 feet she saw a dolphin.

She loves dolphins and swam up to it and did the whole holding on to the dorsal fin thing. She swam with it for about 5 minutes before continuing her ascent. Gets to the surface and she says something felt wrong during the ascent.

Well she had done her mixtures wrong on her tank ratios. Around 160ft of depth right after she was separated she later realized that she had had nitrogen narcosis. Pretty benign case of it but still. She had it. Thankfully the effects go away at the surface.

Once she got home and was looking at the videos she took of her trip and during her dives she realized, that was not a dolphin. It was a shark.

She had been telling anyone who would listen about how she had this beautiful encounter with a dolphin.

She's done shark dives before. So have I. They're my favorite dives but you go into them with a different mindset. More safety and planning and avoid unnecessary encounters if the situation isn't ideal.

TLDR: Aunt got high underwater. Filmed herself with a dolphin. Later realized that she was swimming with a shark when she watched the video at home.