Anne Boleyn's Ghost (4 page)

This was no ordinary photograph;
this was a photograph of
a
Ghost
.

I brought the photograph over to my mother, who was in the kitchen, and showed her what I could see in it. ‘Remember the photos I took inside Hever Castle?’ I said, holding it up. ‘There’s a Ghost in it
:
a
hand.
Look!’

At that point she took the photograph from me and gazed fixedly at it. She appeared flummoxed by it, and I had to point out the Ghost as she struggled, as I did, to ascertain the image before her.

I still had the whole set to go through, and many
more photographs that I had taken inside the castle I hadn’t yet seen. With this thought, I demanded to have the picture back from my mother, who, looking over her spectacles, was holding it barely an inch in front of her, and had been staring intensely at it for what must have been an ice age.

Having retrieved it from her grasp, I went back into the living-room so I could explore the rest of the photographs. I looked for more signs of ghosts specifically, like the apparent hand in the first image, wondering if the other photographs had something similar in them that could be as easily distinguished. And to my surprise, I wasn’t disappointed.

The bed-head that belonged to Anne Boleyn was almost entirely unrecognizable; and the portrait of Anne Boleyn appeared to have two heads
,
side by side … other portraits looked as though they had melted out of their frames ... and a strange fuzziness pervaded practically every photograph taken inside the castle. I held the negatives up to an overhead light and inspected the ones of the castle’s rooms; surely enough, they looked no different to the pictures strewn out in front of me.

Hours passed. And when I had finally grown tired and felt like I had taken it all in, everything seemed to point in only one direction.
It was Anne Boleyn’s Ghost.

The Photographs

Having had the very rare opportunity to photograph within Hever Castle’s historic walls, I had captured its spaces with the upmost care and diligence. But, despite all that, what my camera saw that day, and what I had
actually seen, were worlds apart.

Now, take a look at the photographs taken inside Hever Castle. These are the original photographs; and besides some cropping and enlarging to show significant parts of the images, they have not been altered or manipulated in any way. They were all taken with my Canon Rebel Ti 35mm SLR film camera with a 28-90mm lens, on the automatic setting.
Note: only the photographs that appear to have Anne Boleyn’s Ghost in them are being shown in this book.

This is the first photograph I took inside Hever Castle:

To the far left of the frame, a little more than halfway up, is a distinctive hand with an unmistakably feminine appearance. Whoever she is, she seems to be pointing at the wall, and perhaps the fireplace in the middle of the room. Does this ghostly hand belong to Anne Boleyn? How is it possible that someone who died nearly five hundred years ago can appear on film in the twenty-first century?

The lamp light to either side of the fireplace appears to have been pulled, or ‘stretched’, as if by magnetism, towards the Ghost. Oddly enough, this would explain why my cameras flash activated during the first shot, and not the one taken immediately after, where the lamp light appears to have been significantly less affected and no apparent Ghost can be seen. The blue streaks of light below the lamp at the far end of the room have no visible light source; and the white streak to the top right of the nearest lamp also has no light source, but is similar in shape to the smaller slivers of blue light in the distance.
 Are these random anomalies that accompany apparitions? Or could they hold greater significance?  

If you look closely, the most remarkable thing about the photograph (apart from the fact that there is a ghost in it) is that part of her dress can be seen clearly. And astonishingly, we can see its form, creases, and, most impressively, its
colour
: a dark blue. The hand is so well defined that individual fingers can be made out, and the one that is pointing curves significantly upwards at its tip.

Anne Boleyn spent much of her fairly short life at Hever Castle. Is her Ghost haunting the castle today? And if she is, why has she sent us this image of her? Could there be something behind that wall that has been lost for nearly five hundred years …

The next photograph is of Anne Boleyn’s bedchamber:

Of the three photographs taken in this room, two show strong signs of ghostly phenomena. However, only one shows signs of Anne Boleyn’s Ghost, shown above. The photograph that doesn’t is backlit and is shown at the beginning of the book
(Anne Boleyn’s Bedchamber, Hever Castle).

In this frame there is Anne’s bed-head, a small side-table, and a portrait of Anne Boleyn. Where her portrait is, two faces can be clearly seen. This is highly unusual as this distinct splitting of the image has occurred only around the portrait. If this had been caused by camera-shake, there would be a uniform distortion and splitting of the image. You would expect to see, not only two distinct faces, side by side, as is the case with the portrait; but also two tables, two plants, and two bed-heads. And take a look at the adjacent blank picture hanging on the wall. Why would there be a blank picture hanging on a wall in a regularly visited place, like Hever Castle? Well, that’s because it is not blank, but inscribed with some of the history on Anne Boleyn, if I recall correctly. For some reason, this light never made it into my camera’s lens. And when considering that this photograph was taken with a good camera, a fast shutter, no movement, and in a well lit room, it makes this outcome all the harder to explain logically.

Is this Anne Boleyn’s Ghost showing herself in this portrait of her? If it was indeed
her
Ghost that had appeared, just a short while before, in the first image
–
then perhaps she felt that that was the day
Anne Boleyn’s Ghost
would materialize for the lens, by appearing once more, only this time showing us who she really
is
…

The Difference between the Camera and the Eye

Why couldn’t I see what my camera could at Hever Castle, that day in 2009? That might be partially explained by the difference between the camera and the eye. The cameras you and I are familiar with allow light to hit a light-sensitive, chemical-based surface that it then imprints the light on to and can be physically held as a tangible object. Digital cameras are slightly different as they use sensitive sensors and rely on computer chips to determine the colour and resolution of the image. This capacity to record light accurately is what makes photography so powerful; and it is this that has caused photography to become a worldwide phenomenon, as people now capture and share their images of the world around them, either digitally over the internet, or traditionally with prints and a few interested eyes.

However, as lenses have become larger and more complex, computers have been built to assist camera operation, and shutter speeds have become mindboggling fast on consumer models, modern cameras can also see things our eyes cannot.

The human eye is very complex and works much differently to how a camera works. For the human eye, light continually floods in until we blink or close the eyelid, which acts a bit like a camera’s shutter. The brain essentially
records the light that passes through our eyes organically, and much is still unknown about how the human eye works, while cameras are better understood, because we can study all their various components in great detail, and because we created them.

Cameras, as well as video cameras, are defined in part by what is technically known as frames per second (FPS). This is the speed at which a single image has been captured. For video cameras, it’s when a single image is immediately followed by another, combining them, and the speed at which it is happening
–
it’s a bit like a flick-book: if each page of the book represents a frame, the faster you flick through the pages, the faster the illustration appears to move and as if it was actually moving.

Modern cameras, and the camera I was using at Hever Castle that day, are capable of seeing greater detail than what you or I are capable of seeing. And the level of detail between them can be, quite literally, universes apart. If you have ever seen a video of a real bullet moving in slow motion, it is not because you or I are capable of seeing a bullet move at walking pace
–
it’s because of
high speed imaging
. The cameras that are used to do this capture at speeds that are 1/1000 FPS (that’s one thousandth of a second) or faster. The fastest cameras in the world today are used for scientific research, and are capable of capturing light anywhere between two hundred million and one trillion frames per second. The camera I had with me at Hever Castle that day has a maximum of 1/2000 FPS; and although it is not to be compared with the cameras just mentioned it is, however, far superior to my eye when capturing and recording a scene in milliseconds.

That’s not to say how the eye works is fundamentally inferior to how a camera works
–
as many cameras are quite basic instruments
–
so much as cameras are a tool to expand upon our own sight. But without the technological advancements in photography over the past two centuries, many myths would not have been settled, and our knowledge of the universe would be a fraction of what it is today.