When Your Sister Goes Viral
On Thursday 18th January 2018, I got a WhatsApp message on my family group chat. It was a link to a Daily Mail article sent by my sister.
The article was about a hen party that spotted something strange in one of their photos – a mysterious boy had appeared out of nowhere. This may not seem too out of the ordinary, but the article was about my sister and her friends, who believed the boy in the photo was in fact a ghost.
(Daily Mail’s photos)
The photos had been taken in bursts and only one of them had the boy in it, which you can see from the above photos. This then led the group to think the boy was a ghost, as they had no other explanation for somebody else being in the photo.
I remember after the hen party my sister showed me the photos and told me about the supposed ghost boy. I didn’t really believe it at first and asked that surely there would have been families around and the boy just ran into the photo. But my sister told me there hadn’t been anybody around that could have got into the photo, especially not in and out of the photos so fast.
Our family was finding it quite amusing that this story had made it into The Daily Mail but whilst reading the article I noticed there had been some things reported that weren’t correct.
The Daily Mail said that, “The group were so shocked by the images that they googled the property and discovered a story about a young boy who lived there years ago and slept-walked into the lake and drowned. When they discovered the tale, they fled the property because they were so spooked.” However, I confirmed with my sister that this wasn’t true. They didn’t google the property and definitely didn’t flee from it. Actually, they didn’t even notice the boy in the photo till the next day. My sister said she did eventually end up searching for ghostly information to do with the property a few weeks later, reading that places in the area were supposedly haunted.
My sister sent the below photo to our family group chat the day after she sent us the article. So not only did The Daily Mail report about the story online, they decided to also put it in their newspaper the following day. The story is rather funny, or perhaps quite scary to some people, but it is pretty crazy how much coverage it got!
It didn’t end with The Daily Mail though, the next day my sister sent us a screenshot from Buzzfeed’s Snapchat. The story was also on The Lad Bible and The Sun. Another error I noticed was in The Sun, as they reported that the hen party happened last summer but it was actually in 2016.
As unbelievable as it was that their photos went viral, I think the bridal party are all quite relieved that their 15 minutes of fame are now over and they want to try and forget about this boy who they’re sure is a ghost. My sister even said she deleted the photos off her phone as she was too freaked out to keep them.
Some of the information that was reported didn’t happen, acting as a good reminder to us all not believe absolutely everything we read.
Something we could perhaps consider though is that ghosts are real. After all, I know for a fact the boy wasn’t photoshopped in to create a fake, creepy story as some people have thought.