How to Summon a Mirror Ghost

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Greetings children, Captain D here, tonight I would like to talk to you about how creepy you all are. Ever since humanity invented and then convinced itself of the existence of phantoms and spirits, the whole world and its hot easy sister, the internet, have been inundated with granny photos and videos of would-be ghosts. And, for some reason, the scariest of these are always appearing as either scraggy, wrinkly old people or creepy little children. Such as the case with this You Tube favorite floating around

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Kids, I know that there are times when not believing in something you see feels really, really wrong, but do not worry that is just your brain adjusting to the nice cold bubble bath of healthy disillusion. Hey, it is better than staying in the hot muggy gazebo of gullibility. Just relax, let the bubbles do their work. Let us break this one down.

Your first clue that it is fake should be the fact that it is from a Japanese entertainment show and we all know how factual Japanese T.V. is.

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And, think about what exactly happens here, the girl glances at her self and her reflection remain still as she turns back around. But, then what happened? Why did the mother taping the video stop shooting and if she did not? Why were we not shown the rest of it? Did the ghost ever turned away? Is it not much more likely that the creator of the video simply froze the footage of the girl?s reflection? Isolating it from the rest of the image with a simple mat? Notice how the shaky hand held shot becomes perfectly stable just before the apparition appears. It is our old friend Mr. Motion tracking. If you look carefully you can even see a slight wiggle and misalignment between the ghost and the edge of the mirror at the very end of the shot. This is because the hoaxter did not bother stabilizing the cameras rotational movement. As stakes go, this is not even a very imaginative one.

But, it does take a special imagination to look at a home video of your daughter?s cute antiques in front of the make up mirror and then decide to doctor it up in a creepy and disturbing way and then sell it to be shown on national T.V. Oh well. But, now I am afraid it is time for me to go kids, a baby in Tacoma is about to develop serious fear of abandonment issues from a two well executed game of pick-a-boo, but not if I can help it. Love with your heart; use your head for everything else. Captain Disillusion.