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On 12 July 2016, a Facebook user posted a photograph of a traffic accident in Kentucky with the following description: The accident turned out to be a fatal crash, and the motorcyclist involved died at the hospital. Local, and then national media quickly picked up the story of the spiritual photograph: The photograph shows the scene of a crash with law enforcement and paramedics huddled around the motorcyclist. Just above them, and between two ambulances, an indistinct grey shape appears to be rising above the scene. Television anchors (and social media commenters) speculated that it might be a spirit ascending to the next plane, or perhaps an angel, snapped by a lucky trucker as he drove by. It's absolutely possible, even probable, that the photo was not altered. However, this photograph doesn't show a spirit or an angel, but what's most likely an irregularly-shaped piece of dirt that has stuck to either the lens or the camera's internal sensor. Dirt or dust on the sensor of a camera assumes a greyish and fuzzy appearance in a photograph (and sometimes shows up as luminescent balls in night or high-contrast photography, to which the paranormally-minded sometimes refer as spirit orbs): If the photograph is taken with a mobile phone's camera, the effect can be even more pronounced (and difficult to clean, if the dust is on an internal sensor): We're not certain what Vazquez used to take the photograph, but judging by the large depth of field (the bushes closest to the photographer are only slightly blurrier than the ambulances, for example), it's clear that the lens is stopped down to a smaller aperture. That makes the issue of dust on the lens or the sensor even more pronounced: A graph explains the concept for the more visually-minded: Even if the photograph were proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be of a ghost or a spirit, it's unclear whose it would be or why it would be there, as the motorcyclist died later at the hospital, not on the scene.
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