When I was four or five, my grandparents moved into a new house in Joshua Tree, California. Shortly after they moved in, they discovered that the previous owner, who had built the house, had died at home just a year before.

Needless to say, as soon as they found that out, all kinds of weird shit started happening. I should have mentioned at the beginning of this story that everyone in my family is completely mental.

Guests would remark on the strange noises they heard during the night. Someone insisted that they had seen the reflection of a face in the china cabinet in the dining room. Of course, this being the seventies, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all high as a kite on goofballs, but still, it was enough to put a chill into my four-year-old heart. And then, the weirdest thing of all happened; something that is still a complete mystery to me to this day.

My grandparents had a big group of people over for Thanksgiving dinner. Just as the meal was about to be served, my grandmother pulled out her Polaroid camera. Everyone leaned in and she snapped a picture of us at the table, and then, as the photograph developed, she gasped. There was a glowing white face, with bright red eyes, reflected in the glass of the china cabinet behind us.

I am getting goosebumps on my arms as I type this. My grandparents still have the picture, somewhere in storage. I don’t believe much in “paranormal phenomena”, but that picture gives me the heebie-jeebies to this day.

Truth is a funny thing. At this point, most of us are sophisticated enough to know that even a straight photograph doesn’t do much more than resemble the truth of the event it portrays. By the time an image has been filtered through the photographer’s eye, the camera’s lens, onto the film and back out into the world, even the simplest subjects have been filled with an awful lot of meaning. And yet, that unsophisticated family photograph—surely it must have been some strange kind of glare from the flash? or a practical joke played on us all by my grandfather?—has a tremendously deep meaning to me. It captures an important time in my childhood. It tells me something very specific about my family. So, whether or not that photograph holds any universal truth about the existence of ghosts, it certainly holds a great deal of personal truth for me.