The ghost photograph. The earliest Japanese case on this site was reported in a Sendai newspaper and reprinted in a serial column of the 1890s: a group portrait taken in Aomori prefecture, with a figure among the sitters whom the family identified as someone who had died years before. The photographer explained it on the spot — a glass plate exposed once and not properly cleaned keeps the earlier image faintly when it is used again — and a second photographer, asked independently elsewhere, gave the same account. The columnist’s own objection was different in kind: a ghost with a body would not be a ghost.