2008: The Gathering

On November 29, 2018, the Slapped Ham website posted the following photo in an article titled "These Creepy Photos Cannot Be Explained," where it was labeled as 'The Gathering.'

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Slapped Ham presents paranormal and weird stories as a form of entertainment, and sometimes has interesting finds... but also sometimes just has something strange with no back story.

        While the collection of 'creepy photos that cannot be explained' included some images that were actually intriguing, this particular photo wasn't one of them. Why? The description given for the photo started as "One of the creepiest things about this photo is that there is very little information available about it;" which is to say, the website gives us none. The rest of the description is just about what can be seen in the picture.

        Following the Pinterest link that Slapped Ham gives for the photo, I found it originally came from a very similar page at a different website, this one called "25 Creepy Photos: Welcome to Your Nightmare," where the image is just one of twenty-five displayed with no information whatsoever... which, at least, is better than a claim that the photo "cannot be explained."

        So I went digging.

        As it turns out, the image is one in a series of 'found photo' artworks by Scottish artist Rowen Corkill. Created by Corkill in 2008, the series was called "An Image May Last A Lifetime But Eyes Will Surely Fade," and consisted of over one hundred found photos in which Corkill had punched the eyes out of all the figures to let light shine through. The image Slapped Ham picked up was a cut-down version of one of the images...

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A check with the Internet Archives showed that Corkill added a page about this series to his website in 2014... and that's the same year that the cropped image appeared on the '25 Creepy Photos' list.

        So, nothing particularly unexplained or unexplanable... but still creepy!