Unraveling the Urban Legend: The Mysterious Origins of the Headless Jesus Photo

you know that this lady has photographic proof that Jesus is real she does not whilst on board of an Arab okay I’m not gonna bore you with the story with the creepy music in the background basic narrative is this on a plane storm storm storm pray things calm down Holy Spirit tells her to take a picture out the window and you get this photo which is obviously the headless Jesus so this is an urban legend that precedes the invention of the internet in his version it’s this lady despite the fact that she’s obviously holding up pictures of herself on a couch but on the internet you can find all sorts of versions of it like this 2007 version where it was actually taken by a guy named Phil in like 1985 this 2,011 account where the picture was taken by Marilyn Manson’s grandma this one where some guy named Rodney claims his mother took it while taking pictures of the sky from the ground according to that one the picture was apparently taken in 1962 and then there’s this 2001 account in an otherwise apparently reliable news source where Jules Massey claims that his grandmother took it in 1973 in the 1990s the picture appears to have been reproduced multiple times at a Walmart and circulated around North Carolina called the Hugo Christ because the claim was that it was a picture taken during Hurricane Hugo but none of this appears to have anything to do with where the photo actually came from see before its life as a picture of headless Jesus this was apparently passed off as a photo of a ghost it’s under this description that the photo shows up in Hans Holder’s book America’s Restless Ghost and in Peter Haning’s work in 1974 ghost and illustrated history unfortunately those two works give to yet further accounts of where the photo is from both however do located as surfacing in the early 1970s now in 1990 when there was a craze around the photo around Hurricane Hugo there was a photographic analysis of the print done and the people who analysed it said it did not look like it was an actual picture of clouds it was probably an effect that had been created in a dark room so the most plausible reconstruction here is that sometime in the late 1960s early 1970s somebody made this as a forgery to claim that they had a picture of a ghost that gained some traction in the ghost picture world but as often happens with memes it only took one further change to make it really go viral and that was changing it from a ghost you’re seeing to Jesus after that there just appeared to have been lots of versions of the print circulating and everybody wanted to claim that they or their grandmother originally took the picture eventually the urban myth that it was taken on a plane with turbulence develops miracle miracle miracle it’s all good so no this isn’t proof of Jesus it’s proof that people have always been gullible Jesus is disappointed do better