Woo Woo Alert

Okay, so if you don't believe in woo woo, then just go ahead and scroll on past. 

Here's a little family history mystery --

This is a page from my mother's family history records. In it she notes that there is an unidentified child on the left edge of the picture, sitting behind a gravestone.

I have checked the records and the birth dates of all the children in the photo, so I could put a date on it. The youngest child, Verlie, is still a baby, and she was born in March of 1921. All of Annie's children and all of Jessie's children born before that date are present in the photo. There are two children who had died before this picture was taken -- Annie's first baby, a son who was stillborn in 1911, and Jessie's first child, Amos, who died at age 7 from typhoid fever. Amos died two years before this picture was taken.  

So... who is the unidentified child? 

Three possibilities --

1. It's pareidolia. (The psychological phenomenon where one perceives a familiar pattern, often a face, in a random or ambiguous stimulus. This can manifest as seeing shapes in clouds, hearing voices in static, or recognizing objects in natural formations. It's a common human experience.)

2. It's a random child from the neighborhood who just sneaked into the picture. (There's no neighborhood around this cemetery. It's way out in the country. But I suppose there could have been other people at the cemetery that day.)

3. It's a ghost.

Well, y'all know me. I'm going to choose to believe it's a ghost. In fact, I'm going to choose to believe that it's the ghost of Aunt Jessie's boy, Amos. He is buried in that cemetery. Or maybe he still hangs around with the family and he would have been with them that day when they went to decorate graves at the cemetery. I don't know who took the picture. Most likely it was my great-grandfather Ulysses Hicks, who was a professional photographer at the time. 

Now, I'm not saying it definitely is a ghost, but...

(It's a ghost)