The image was taken at North Carolina's Lake Lure Inn and Spa by one of the hotel's managers.
Patrick Bryant said he snapped the pic in the dining room of what he thought was just an ice sculpture.
"I turned off the flash so I could see the light shining through the ice sculpture," Bryant said.
However, after he posted the photo online many people inquired about a boyish apparition is in the background.
"Sure enough, there's a transparent picture of what appears to be a ghost," Bryant said.
According to Bryant, the unusual image is not the first ghost story associated with the hotel.
"We've also heard laughter at nighttime, as well as footsteps," he said.
Most visitors are intrigued by the venue's history of ghost sightings, he said.
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| A close-up of the image of a boy |
Originally owned by a doctor named Lucius Morse, the hotel’s construction came nearly three decades after Morse’s purchase of the nearby Chimney Rock park, which surrounded a huge stone outcropping once used by area natives in their rituals. Morse, a wealthy man from Missouri, grew to love the area, and like many investors of the period bought the property with interest in developing a hotel in the center of the region’s natural beauty. The Lake Lure Inn was opened in 1927, though Morse apparently passed away prior to the grand opening of his beautiful hotel.
Some might argue that Morse’s own spirit could be one of the number of ghosts said to linger on the property. One story related by a supervisor at the hotel might have indicated this. The woman often suffered from nausea, due to a variety of medications she was required to take for health problems she had acquired. On one occasion while she had been feeling sick, she entered the bathroom, and though she was alone, she claimed to hear a voice from somewhere nearby ask, “Are you okay?” Startled, she glanced around to make certain she was indeed alone, and could find no evidence of another nearby. Could the spirit of Dr. Morse have been keeping an eye on the woman?
Though this would do little to explain the presence of the boy in the photograph, it is known that the US Army commissioned the Lake Lure Inn during World War II (much like the nearby Grove Park Inn about an hour’s drive north in Asheville). Servicemen and their families would sometimes stay at the inn, and a number of pictures depicting soldiers and their families are still said to exist. Could the young-looking interloper in Bryant’s photo have belonged to one of these families, perhaps? Who knows… but as is the case with such historic locations, in this day and age it seems there is little that reports of ghosts could do to deter anyone from visiting for a weekend getaway in the lush mountains of Western North Carolina. If anything, curiosity seekers and history buffs alike will only be further compelled to visit, hoping to catch a glimpse of the young boy, or perhaps another of the hotel’s many supposed ghostly residents.