Ectoplasm

I thought I’d talk a little about ectoplasm today. Somewhere early on, people got the idea that spirits might give off some sort of physical substance. Early mediums started capitalizing on this idea by creating photographs of people who had mysterious white substance coming out of their bodies. Though the images were fake, the mediums would claim that these photos were signs of the presence of a spirit inside of someone. They called this white substance ectoplasm and the term sort of stuck around.

In ghost hunting today, people have pretty much accepted that ghosts aren’t likely to leak any sort of physical goo, but people still take photographs with white mists and swirling lines that seem to appear out of nowhere. These stuff in these photos is often referred to as ectoplasm, with the idea that a ghost may have left some sort of spiritual residue captured by the photo.

I’m pretty skeptical of these pictures in general, and I can usually pin point a number of solid scientific reasons for the creation of these types of photographic anomalies, but it’s still interesting to see how photos are still being used to try and capture evidence of the afterlife years after people first started doing it.