Hacker News

Sounds like a typical investigation to me. You go down a few rabbit holes which turn out to be dead ends, and eventually realize the solution was right under your nose this whole time (this may sound familiar if you've done enough debugging as well). I also suspect the solution wasn't as obvious as the article makes it seem. For sure it should be framed more as a group effort, but that's just the writing style being weird.

Not quite as it was reported. First, the photo was said to be in the Warner Bros archive - repeatedly, including by Lee Unkrich, the doyen of Shining research - and my multiple attempts to find it failed. That was because it never existed... It had been said by the woman who did the retouching, so you'd expect her to know, but in fact, she didn't. Murray Close didn't take the photo, he took the photo of Jack Nicholson, so no reason at first to assume he knew. It's also difficult to contact such people - he's now a very successful photographer - and it took emails, messages to his instagram, his website, to get a reply to something I'm sure he thought was 45 year old trivia.

Depending on how work was divided up, it doesn’t seem like the photographer of Jack Nicholson would necessarily know where the image Nicholson was superimposed on came from, so I don’t blame them for not checking with him first.

I wonder if the "investigators" were subconsciously not that interested in actually solving the mystery, but were just enjoying the process. Can't remember what it was I was reading recently, but there was a character who deliberately did things the hard way, or in a convoluted way, because it satisfied something inside of him.

Edit: It was this article about an orchid collector: https://www.susanorlean.com/articles/orchid_fever.html

Actually no. In the audio file they discuss this. The redditor thought it was a misidentification and did not believe it, while the person researching it further did believe that was a good identification.

Which should be the default mode of operation with anything you read on Reddit these days.

I mean, discounting what Reddit has become in 2025, would you trust any anonymous post that said “I ran it through my facial recognition database and got a match from over 100 years ago”

It’s not true until it’s verified

Linking to the lite version of an article about an image is an odd choice as the lite version doesn't include images by default. Thanks for linking to the full page.

Sorry it was confusing - it was worse doing it!

I'm glad I wasn't the only one experiencing some struggle comprehending this article.

The BBC is a weird corporation created by royal charter. But it's not a part of the UK government, and nor are works created by the BBC copyright-free (as is the case in the US for something like NASA).

UK government publications aren't copyright-free either. In fact they manage to be worse than copyrighted, at least for works created before 1988 (some of which are perpetually copyrighted, others until 2040, others for 125 years, it's a big mess). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#United_Kingdom

Thanks, I thought the whole investigation was really interesting. Unfortunately discussion on HN tends to stop once the article is off the front page, but your responses here will be valuable for anyone who finds this while searching.

It was originally a private archive. The BBC acquired it in 1958 and then sold it the '80s. Getty Images acquired it in the '90s.

You can read more about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_George_Warris_Hulton

It was taken on a wet plate camera (capturing images on sensitised glass pates), which has remarkable resolution, typically far beyond most smaller cameras even today.

The photo was artificially lit, most likely with flash powder or magnesium ribbon. Those create incredible amounts of light - obnoxiously so, which is why they were replaced by safer flash bulbs and later on electronic flash in subsequent decades.

The light would have been more than enough to illuminate the people standing and posing for the photograph in that enclosed room.

I wonder how different things would have been if we were not able to capture the past 100-150 years so well on monochrome film. What a remarkable time to be alive, and to have been able to look back on the past using a mostly-reliable and truthful medium - now long since lost with the advent of digital imaging.

Flash photography was a thing then, this photograph looks like a Flash is illuminating it.

> through the 1920s, flash photography normally meant a professional photographer sprinkling powder into the trough of a T-shaped flash lamp, holding it aloft, then triggering a brief and (usually) harmless bit of pyrotechnics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_(photography)

Maybe they used one of those big chemical flashes bounced against a wall to soften it.

It is a "lite" version of the full website, that uses a minimum of data and computer resources.

I'm sorry to differ with you, sir, but I quite liked the ending.

If I may be so bold, sir.

If you don't mind my saying so, sir.

It's been a while since I've seen it, but isn't it just that he has been swallowed up by the house and now he's "at" the eternal party where he saw all the ghosts during that one scene?

You’ve always been the caretaker, sir.

I should know. I’ve always been here.

I don't pretend to understand it, but I do like it. It's spooky!

What was hard to understand about it?

In a world of 8 billion people you will surely find someone interested in almost anything you can think up.