A woman was enjoying a day out with her boyfriend when she decided to capture their jaunt on film. But when she looked back at one image, she spotted a creepy figure loitering behind her beloved.

Image: imgur/daddysprinkle / imgur/daddysprinkle

When one woman took a picture of her boyfriend, she may have thought that it would make a lovely keepsake of a special memory that they had shared together. But when she looked at the image back home, it might not have filled her with the warm, fuzzy feeling that she had expected. Instead, the picture may have sent shivers down her spine.

At the time the photo was taken, a man and his girlfriend were enjoying a stroll in the open countryside somewhere in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. It may have been an enjoyable day out, and, perhaps as a result, the woman decided to snap a photo on her iPhone to commemorate the occasion.

The photo she captured that day featured her other half; in the image, the man is seemingly unaware as his girlfriend snaps away. The initially idyllic scene sees him standing in a grassy field, surrounded by a series of towering trees. Later, though, the woman noticed something very unsettling about the shot.

And it was only when the girlfriend had got back home that she spotted the unnerving detail. What’s more, that detail was very strange indeed: behind her boyfriend was a creepy figure in the background.

The couple searched their memories, but neither of them could remember seeing anyone with them in the field. Furthermore, the man had just moved from the area in which the figure had appeared when the image had been captured, and not a soul had been in sight. And, even more disturbingly, his girlfriend had seen no one else approaching when she took the photograph.

Confused and slightly spooked by the photograph, the man’s son decided to share it with the community on Reddit. And the user – who goes by the name Daddysprinkle – had a further revelation. His dad’s girlfriend hadn’t just taken a still image: it was a “live” photo, meaning that she’d also captured movement.

What the footage showed was simply chilling: the figure now seemed to resemble a young man or woman stalking through the grass. And, worryingly, it looked as though the form was moving towards the couple. “It looks like it’s walking with intent,” one Reddit user pointed out. “Which makes this ten times creepier.”

Perhaps as a way of resolving the mystery, then, Daddysprinkle’s father decided to do some investigating. So, he went back to the spine-tingling site to take some comparison photos. However, when he returned to the field, there was nothing eerie to be seen.

“This is the photo of the same spot where the figure is,” Daddysprinkle wrote alongside the second, empty shot on Reddit. “This is a little better of a resolution. You can see that the grass there is not tall. The figure looks like it is walking in taller grass, hence why it seems like half of a person.”

As the plot behind the mysterious figure in the photograph thickened, imgur and Reddit users got their thinking caps on. Eventually, people flooded the online platforms with theories on the form’s origin. And some of the suggestions as to what it was ranged from the mundane to the extraordinary.

“That’s really interesting,” wrote one Reddit user. “Like a lot of other people say, looks like a kid stalking through the grass. He kind of looks like he’s sitting on his heels (like when kids imitate dogs) and crawling forward with his hands and knees.”

“I wonder if it’s a wild turkey,” another person added. “A male turkey could be roughly the same size and shape.” Meanwhile, over on imgur, someone suggested that the figure was just a humble canine. “Looks like a dog to me moving away from the man rather than moving towards him,” they said. “It’s the angle, I suppose.”

However, other people looked to the supernatural to explain the apparition: one individual on Reddit, for instance, suggested that it may have been a “skin-walker.” In Navajo culture, skin-walkers are witch-like creatures that take the form of animals in order to carry out harmful acts. Legend says that they walk on all fours – which may explain the figure in the photo’s crouched appearance.

Another unconventional theory behind the presence claimed that its appearance was due to a malfunction in the fabric of space and time. “I can’t help but think it’s like a glitch in time,” one person wrote on Reddit. “Maybe someone walked that spot 100 years ago – maybe the grass was taller then – and the photo captured that moment when the veil came down in a wrinkle in time.”

Of course, this wasn’t the first time that the internet had gone wild for a strange figure in a photograph. In fact, in February 2015, one girl hit headlines when she allegedly captured a famous ghost on camera. Youngster Holly Hampsheir had been enjoying a day out at the historic Hampton Court Palace in England when she snapped what may have been the famous Grey Lady.

The Grey Lady is said to be the ghost of Dame Sybil Penn, who passed away in 1562. She had worked as a servant for Prince Edward VI at the palace prior to her death. Since 1829, moreover, she has been believed to stalk the halls of the former royal home. And Hampsheir had been taking a photograph of her cousin, Brook McGee, when she became the latest person to spot the apparition.

In one picture, she noticed that a tall, cloaked woman appeared to be following McGee as she made her way through the palace. However, while she was clearly present in one image, in the very next photo the figure was nowhere to be seen. But could there be a simple explanation behind this occurrence and other strange forms that appear in modern photographs?

Well, it turns out that there could be. Unlike cameras of yesteryear, phones usually capture photos in stages, similar to the way in which a scanner travels across a piece of paper. This can take time, so that objects entering the shot as it is being taken may affect the final image.

And some of those who work with cameras on a regular basis believe that apparitions are more likely to be caused by photographic anomalies than the supernatural. “I am a sceptic from the perspective of a photographer and as someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts,” Michael Pritchard, director-general of the Royal Photographic Society, told the BBC in 2015. “There’s not a lot out there that can’t be attributed to some sort of photographic technique.”

But technical glitches can’t explain why Daddysprinkle’s father, his father’s girlfriend, Hampsheir and McGee saw nothing around them when they took their photos. So, it seems that there are some things that are still a mystery in our modern world. And the figure in the couple’s photograph appears to be one of them.