The Santa Fe courthouse ghost was a purported ghost sighted on a video captured by a security camera at a courthouse in Santa Fe, New Mexico on June 15, 2007. The "ghost video" was uploaded onto YouTube and quickly attracted widespread attention, especially within the community of ghost believers.
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The mysterious object
On June 15, 2007, a mysterious star-shaped object floating around the First Judicial District courthouse was recorded by a surveillance camera. The image, starting at 7:27:11 a.m., shows a bright spot of light that comes from either the roof or near the courthouse's back door on Catron Street. Quickly thereafter, reports on the event were posted on various news web sites such as courttv.com, abcnews.com, cbsnews.com, foxnews.com and Yahoo!, and promptly became a topic of discussion all over the country. Soon after videos and images were released to public, a large number of e-mail messages were sent to a New Mexico Magazine reporter, proposing various theories on what the object was. Thousands of hits for the video were recorded on The New Mexican site. The video was later uploaded to YouTube and has been viewed more than 80,000 times, drawing hundreds of e-mail comments.
Many predictions were made about the real identity of the mysterious object. Some people supposed that it was the ghost of Andy Lopez, who took nine hostages at the courthouse in February 1985 after killing the wife of his original victim 20 years ago. Other predictions included a person walking, a male's face and a spirit. However, common theories were that it might be just an insect (later found to be true), a spider, or a reflection, as well as some kinds of light phenomenon. Vanessa Pacheco, supervisor of the court security for the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, said people’s opinions on the video depended on whether they believe in ghosts.
Explanation
Benjamin Radford, a managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine, a LiveScience columnist and author of hundreds of articles and several books on science, skepticism, and the paranormal, was invited at the request of The New Mexican to do research on the phenomenon. He believed the undetermined object was a piece of tree fluff or a spider or insect crawling across the camera lens. Having interacted with many similar ghost videos of this type, he said that the blurry video made it difficult to tell exactly what the image captured. The lower the quality of the image, the more likely the object is deemed to be a ghost. To find out what lay behind the mystery, he conducted two sets of experiments, one by scattering cotton from the adjacent cotton tree and one by using insects. The first set appeared to be inconclusive, since the cotton didn’t make a glowing fluffy ball as the one in the ghost image. The second set using a bug, in the end, was more successful: Radford recreated an accurate "ghost" down to its color, size, shape and movement. It was agreed that the mystery had been solved thoroughly and the origin of the ghost was nothing more than a bug. A detailed report on Radford’s experiments was published in Skeptical Inquirer magazine's September/October issue that year, and in 2014 in Radford's book Mysterious New Mexico.