there is a light and it never goes out

Photography is particularly conducive to a certain kind of fraud. These days, of course, there's photoshop, but photographs have long been the medium (as it were) of choice to capture ghosts, in part because it's so easy, though reflections or double exposures or blurred focus, to appear to raise the dead. The paradox is that photography, which seems to promise a representation of the world as it actually is, can be just as unreliable as memory or imagination. That tension gives an extra frisson to photos like Duane Michals' spooky little vignette The Bogeyman, in which a too-curious little girl is about to fall victim to the forces of darkness.

Looking through my own photos, I found that one that, if you squint your eyes and suspend your disbelief, opens a window into the spirit world. In the picture, it's broad daylight, but two beams of light emanate from two headstones, looking for all the world like ghosts escaping from the grave.