The auction house called it lot 247, a Victorian era photograph of minor historical interest.
Estimated value between $2 and $400.
The catalog description was brief and dismissive.
Four young women in formal dress circa 1887.
Photographer unknown.
Provenence unclear.
It had been consigned by the estate of a collector who had accumulated thousands of such images over a lifetime of obsessive acquisition.
Photographs purchased from antique shops and flea markets and the basement of old houses.
Most of them anonymous, most of them unremarkable, most of them destined to be sold to other collectors who would store them in their own basement until they too died and the cycle began again.
I purchased it for $350, not because I was a collector, but because of what I saw when the auction house sent me the highresolution scan I had requested.
The four sisters stood in a parlor, arranged before a painted backdrop depicting a pastoral scene that was popular in portrait studios of that era.
They wore matching dresses of dark silk, their hair elaborately styled, their hands positioned in attitudes of refined elegance.
The eldest appeared to be in her early 20s, the youngest perhaps 12 or 13.
They did not smile as was customary for photographs of that period, but there was something in their faces that suggested more than the usual discomfort of holding a pose for the long exposure times required by the cameras of the day.
It was not their faces that had caught my attention, nor their dresses, nor the painted backdrop with its improbable sheep grazing in an improbable meadow.
It was the shadow cast by the youngest girl.
Shadows in Victorian photographs are notoriously unreliable.
The long exposure times, the limitations of the equipment, the vagaries of lighting, all contributed to images in which shadows appeared where they should not, disappeared where they should, stretched and distorted in ways that defied the laws of physics as we understand them.
Experts have spent decades analyzing the shadows in old photographs, trying to determine what was real and what was artifact, what was captured by the camera and what was created by the process of development and preservation.
But this shadow was different.
The youngest girl stood at the right edge of the frame, her body angled slightly toward her sisters, her left hand resting on the back of a velvet chair.
The light source based on the shadows cast by the other three sisters came from the upper left, creating shadows that fell to the lower right, consistent and predictable.
But the shadow cast by the youngest girl fell in the wrong direction.
It stretched to the left toward the light source rather than away from it, as though she were being illuminated by a different sun than the one that shone on her sisters.
And there was something else, something that became visible only when I enlarged the image to examine the shadow more closely.
The shadow had five fingers on each hand.
The youngest girl, whose left hand was clearly visible resting on the chair, had only four.
I am a historian by training, specializing in the social history of the Victorian era, with a particular interest in the lives of women and children.
I have spent my career studying the ways in which the past was documented and preserved, the choices that photographers and archavists and families made about what to keep and what to discard, what to remember and what to forget.
I have seen thousands of photographs from this period, have learned to read them like texts, to extract information from the positioning of bodies and the expressions on faces and the objects that surround the subjects.
I have never seen anything like lot 247.
My first thought was that it was a fake, a modern creation designed to deceive collectors and generate interest.
Photographic manipulation is as old as photography itself, and the digital age has made it trivially easy to create images that appear to be authentic historical documents.
I contacted the auction house and asked for provenence information for any documentation that might establish the photograph’s history.
The response was disappointing but not surprising.
The photograph had been part of a large collection acquired by the deceased collector Harold Weston in 1973 from the estate of a woman named Edith Blackwood who had died in a nursing home in Providence, Rhode Island at the age of 94.
Edith had been a recluse for most of her adult life, living alone in a house that had been in her family for generations, refusing visitors, communicating with the outside world only through letters that she mailed from a post office box in the center of town.
When she died, the house had been found to contain thousands of photographs, documents, and personal effects dating back to the early 19th century.
All of it meticulously organized and labeled, as though Edith had been preparing for someone to come and study the archive she had spent her life assembling.
The photograph of the four sisters had been labeled in Edith’s handwriting.
The Blackwood sisters, 1887, Charlotte, Beatatrice, Louisa, and Adelaide.
The last photograph before the incident.
The incident.
I spent three months trying to discover what had happened to the Blackwood family in 1887.
What incident had prompted Edith to label the photograph so cryptically? What secret had been hidden in the shadow that fell in the wrong direction? The trail led me through archives and libraries, through census records and church registers, through newspaper accounts and private correspondents, through the memories of people whose grandparents had known the Blackwoods and who had heard stories that they had never quite believed.
What I discovered was a tragedy that had been deliberately erased.
A family that had been carefully forgotten, a truth that had been buried so deeply that even the people who remembered it did not fully understand what they were remembering.
The Blackwood family had been prominent in Providence society for three generations.
They had made their fortune in textiles, building mills along the rivers of Rhode Island that employed hundreds of workers and generated wealth that allowed them to construct a grand house on the east side of the city to educate their children at the finest schools to occupy a position of respect and influence that seemed to outside observers entirely secure.
Edmund Blackwood, the patriarch, had married a woman named Harriet Winslow in 1860, and together they had produced four daughters in rapid succession.
Charlotte in 1863, Beatatrice in 1865, Louisa in 1869, and Adelaide in 1874.
There were no sons, a fact that was noted in the society pages with the particular mixture of sympathy and satisfaction that attended such failures of dynastic planning.
Edmund’s business interests would pass eventually to his sons-in-law, assuming he could find men willing to marry into a family that had produced only daughters.
The daughters themselves were, by all accounts, remarkable.
Charlotte was described as brilliant, a voracious reader who had mastered Latin and Greek by the age of 16, and who had expressed a desire to attend university, a desire that her father had dismissed as unsuitable for a woman of her station.
Beatatrice was musical, a pianist of considerable talent, who had performed at charity events and private gatherings throughout the city.
Louisa was artistic, filling sketchbooks with drawings of plants and animals that she studied in the gardens surrounding the family home.
And Adelaide, the youngest, was described simply as strange.
The word appeared again and again in the documents I uncovered, applied to Adelaide with a consistency that suggested it was not merely a casual observation, but a defining characteristic recognized by everyone who encountered her.
She was strange.
She was peculiar.
She was not like other children.
The specifics of her strangeness varied depending on the source.
Some described her as unnervingly silent, others as prone to speaking in ways that made no sense, others as possessing knowledge that she should not have been able to possess.
One letter written by a neighbor to a relative in Boston described Adelaide as having eyes that seemed to look through you rather than at you, as though she was seeing something behind your face that you yourself could not see.
And there was the matter of her hand.
Adelaide Blackwood had been born with only four fingers on her left hand, the smallest finger absent, the hand otherwise normal in appearance and function.
This was not in itself particularly unusual.
Congenital abnormalities of the hand were common enough in that era, and families of means typically concealed such imperfections with gloves or careful positioning in photographs.
What was unusual was the way Adelaide’s family spoke about her hand, or rather the way they did not speak about it, as though the missing finger were not merely a physical characteristic, but a mark of something else, something that could not be named or acknowledged.
The photograph I had purchased showed Adelaide with her left hand clearly visible, the four fingers resting on the velvet chair, uncloded and unconcealed.
This was itself remarkable, a violation of the conventions that governed how such imperfections were presented in formal portraits.
But it was the shadow that made the image truly disturbing.
The shadow that showed five fingers where only four existed, the shadow that suggested Adelaide was casting the image of a hand that was not her own.
I became obsessed with understanding what I was seeing.
I consulted experts in Victorian photography, specialists in the chemistry of development and preservation, historians of optical illusions and visual perception.
Most of them dismissed the anomaly as an artifact, a trick of light and exposure and the degradation of the photographic materials over time.
One suggested that the shadow might have been created by a double exposure, a second image accidentally superimposed on the first during the development process.
Another proposed that someone had manipulated the photograph after it was taken, adding or altering the shadow for reasons that could only be guessed at.
None of these explanations satisfied me.
The shadow was too precise, too clearly defined, too obviously intentional to be an accident.
Someone had created this image, had positioned Adelaide so that her shadow would fall in the wrong direction, had ensured that the shadow’s hand would show five fingers instead of four.
The question was why? The answer, when I finally found it, was hidden in a collection of letters that had been donated to the Rhode Island Historical Society by a descendant of the Blackwood family’s physician, Dr.
Samuel Hartley.
The letters spanned a period from 1880 to 1892, and they documented Dr.
Hartley’s involvement with the Blackwood family during a series of events that he described in increasingly agitated handwriting as beyond the scope of medical science to explain.
The first letter dated March 1880 described Dr.
Hartley’s initial examination of Adelaide, then 6 years old.
He had been summoned by Harriet Blackwood, who was concerned about her youngest daughter’s behavior, which had become increasingly erratic in the weeks following the death of the family’s housekeeper, a woman named Mrs.
Crane, who had worked for the Blackwoods for 20 years.
Adelaide had begun speaking in a voice that was not her own, a low, rasping voice that belonged, according to the child herself, to Mrs.
Crane.
She had begun describing events that had occurred before her birth, conversations that had taken place in rooms she had never entered, secrets that she could not possibly have known.
Doctor Hartley’s initial assessment was that Adelaide was suffering from a nervous condition perhaps brought on by grief over the loss of a beloved servant.
He prescribed rest and quiet and a reduction in stimulation, and he assured Harriet that the symptoms would likely pass on their own.
They did not pass.
The letters that followed, spanning the next seven years, documented Adelaide’s continuing deterioration and the increasingly desperate measures the family took to address it.
She was examined by specialists from Boston and New York, subjected to treatments that ranged from the conventional to the experimental, confined to her room for weeks at a time in the hope that isolation might calm whatever was disturbing her mind.
Nothing worked.
The episodes became more frequent and more intense, the voices more numerous, the knowledge she displayed more inexplicable.
And then there was the matter of the shadow.
Dr.
Hartley first mentioned it in a letter dated June 1885 describing a visit to the Blackwood House during which he had observed Adelaide standing in the garden, her shadow stretching across the lawn in the afternoon sun.
The shadow, he wrote, did not match the girl who cast it.
It was taller, broader, shaped differently in ways he could not quite articulate.
And when Adelaide moved, the shadow did not move with her, but remained fixed for a moment, as though it belonged to someone else, someone who was standing in the same place, but who was not the same person.
He dismissed this observation as a trick of light, the kind of optical illusion that can occur on a bright day when the eyes are tired and the mind is preoccupied.
But the observation returned again and again in the letters that followed.
Other members of the household began to notice it as well.
the servants who refused to be in a room alone with Adelaide.
Her sisters who had grown up with her and who now looked at her with a mixture of fear and pity.
Her mother who had stopped trying to explain what was happening and had begun instead to pray.
The photograph was taken in September 1887, according to Dr.
Hartley’s records at the insistence of Edmund Blackwood who believed that a formal portrait of his daughters might help to restore a sense of normaly to a household that had become increasingly chaotic.
The photographer was a man named Jerome Ashton who operated a studio in downtown Providence and who had photographed the Blackwood family on several previous occasions.
He was known for his technical skill and his discretion, qualities that made him the preferred choice for families who had things they preferred not to discuss.
What happened during the portrait session is described in a letter that Dr.
Hartley wrote to a colleague in Philadelphia, a physician named William James, who had recently published a book about the psychological phenomena he had observed in his own practice.
The letter is remarkable for its length and detail, as though Dr.
Hartley was struggling to make sense of what he had witnessed, and believed that the act of writing it down might somehow impose order on events that defied understanding.
The session began normally, Dr.
Hartley wrote.
The four sisters were positioned in front of the painted backdrop, their dresses arranged, their hair adjusted, their faces composed into the expressions of serene dignity that the occasion demanded.
Adelaide was placed at the right edge of the frame, her left hand resting on a velvet chair, her body angled toward her sisters.
The photographer spent nearly an hour preparing the shot, adjusting the lights, positioning the reflectors that were used to soften shadows and illuminate faces.
And then something changed.
Dr.
Hartley, who was present at the session at Harriet Blackwood’s request, described a shift in the atmosphere of the room, a sudden coldness that seemed to emanate from Adelaide herself.
The girl’s face, which had been blank and compliant throughout the preparations, suddenly became animated, her eyes widening, her mouth opening as though she were about to speak.
But the voice that emerged was not Adelaide’s voice.
It was deeper, rougher, speaking words that Dr.
Hartley could not understand in a language that sounded like English, but was somehow wrong.
The syllables twisted and elongated in ways that made them impossible to pass.
The photographer, Jerome Ashton, later reported that he had seen Adelaide’s shadow move independently of her body during this episode, rising from the floor and stretching toward the camera as though reaching for something.
He had been so startled that he had triggered the shutter accidentally, capturing the image that I now held in my hands, the image that showed Adelaide’s shadow falling in the wrong direction with five fingers instead of four.
The session was abandoned.
Adelaide was carried to her room in a state of near Catatonia, her body rigid, her eyes staring at nothing.
The photographer packed his equipment and left, refusing to return, despite the substantial fee that Edmund Blackwood offered him.
And the photograph, the single image that had been captured during the session, was developed and delivered to the family, who looked at it once and then locked it away, unwilling to destroy it, but equally unwilling to display it.
What happened next is where the historical record becomes fragmentaryary.
Where the carefully preserved documentation gives way to rumor and speculation and the kind of stories that are passed down through generations without ever being written down.
The incident that Edith Blackwood had referenced in her label occurred 6 weeks after the photograph was taken on a night in late October 1887.
The details vary depending on the source, but the essential facts are consistent.
Something happened in the Blackwood house that night.
Something that resulted in Adelaide’s permanent removal from the family home.
Something that was so disturbing to those who witnessed it that they refused to speak of it directly for the rest of their lives.
Dr.
Hartley’s final letter about the Blackwoods, written in November 1887 and never sent, provides the most complete account.
It is also the most disturbing.
He had been summoned to the house at in the morning by a servant who was nearly incoherent with fear.
When he arrived, he found the family gathered in the parlor, all of them pale and trembling, none of them willing to explain what had happened.
Adelaide was not present.
When Dr.
Hartley asked where she was, Edmund Blackwood simply pointed toward the stairs that led to the upper floors.
What Dr.
Hartley found in Adelaide’s room defied his ability to describe it.
The walls were covered with writing, scratched into the wallpaper and the plaster beneath, words in languages that Dr.
Hartley did not recognize, and symbols that seemed to shift and change when he tried to look at them directly.
The furniture had been moved, or rather had moved itself, arranged in patterns that suggested intention, but communicated nothing that Dr.
Hartley could understand.
And Adelaide herself was standing in the center of the room.
Her body casting not one shadow but several.
Each one different in size and shape.
Each one moving independently of the others as though she were surrounded by invisible figures who were pressing close to her, trying to share the space she occupied.
She turned to face Dr.
Hartley when he entered the room, and he wrote that her eyes were not her eyes, that they were older and darker and filled with a knowledge that no 13-year-old child should possess.
She spoke to him, but the words made no sense.
or rather they made a kind of sense that he did not want to understand.
A sense that suggested that what he thought of as reality was merely a thin membrane stretched over something vast and incomprehensible, and that Adelaide had somehow torn a hole in that membrane through which other things were beginning to emerge.
He did not record what happened next.
The letter breaks off mid-sentence as though he could not bring himself to continue, and the pages that follow are blank.
Adelaide Blackwood was removed from her family’s home within a week of that night.
She was placed in an institution in upstate New York, a private facility that specialized in the treatment of nervous disorders, and that promised discretion above all else.
She remained there for the rest of her life, dying in 1942 at the age of 68, having spent 55 years in a room from which she was rarely permitted to leave.
Her sisters never spoke of her publicly.
Charlotte married a businessman from Hartford and moved away, dying in 1918 without children.
Beatrice remained in Providence, continuing to perform at charity events, her music growing increasingly dark and dissonant as the years passed.
She died in 1923, a recluse who had not left her house in a decade.
Louisa, the artist, produced a series of paintings in the years following Adelaide’s institutionalization that were described by critics as disturbing and unh wholesome.
She destroyed them all in 1901 and never painted again, dying in 1935.
Only Edith survived long enough to become the keeper of the family’s secrets.
She had been born in 1879, the daughter of Charlotte and her businessman husband, and she had grown up hearing whispered references to her aunt Adelaide, the one who had been sent away, the one whose name was never spoken in full.
She had inherited the family archive when Louisa died, and she had spent the remaining four decades of her life organizing it, preserving it, preparing it for the day when someone would come to understand what had happened to her family.
The photograph was part of that archive.
Edith had kept it along with Dr.
Hartley’s letters and dozens of other documents that referenced Adelaide and the events of 1887 in a locked room in the basement of the family house.
She had labeled everything carefully as though she were compiling evidence for a trial that would never be held.
Testimony for a jury that would never convene.
And when she died, she had left instructions that the archive be sold intact to a collector who might appreciate its significance, who might be willing to do what she herself had never been able to do.
Tell the truth about the Blackwood sisters and the youngest girl whose shadow revealed something that should not exist.
I have spent years now studying the materials that Edith preserved, trying to understand what happened to Adelaide Blackwood and whether there is any rational explanation for the phenomena that Dr.
Artley and others witnessed.
I’ve consulted psychologists and physicists, historians of religion, and experts in folklore.
Anyone who might be able to shed light on the events that tore a family apart more than a century ago.
I have not found answers.
What I have found instead is a story, a narrative that resists easy explanation, that refuses to be reduced to the categories of science or superstition or madness.
Adelaide Blackwood was a child who was somehow different from other children, who saw things that others could not see, who cast shadows that did not belong to her.
Whether this was a product of her own mind or evidence of something else, something external and inexplicable, I cannot say.
What I can say is that the photograph does not lie.
The shadow is there falling in the wrong direction, showing five fingers instead of four.
It is visible to anyone who looks closely enough, anyone who is willing to see what the Blackwood family tried so hard to hide.
The auction house has asked me to return the photograph, claiming that it was sold under false pretenses, that the provenence information provided to me was incomplete.
I have refused.
Lot 247 belongs to me now, and I have no intention of letting it disappear into another collector’s basement, another archive storage room, another family’s locked drawer.
I have hung it on the wall of my study, where I can see it every day.
The four Blackwood sisters look out at me from across the distance of more than a century.
Charlotte and Beatatrice and Louisa with their composed faces and their elegant dresses.
Adelaide with her four-fingered hand resting on the velvet chair and her shadow stretching in the wrong direction, reaching toward the light instead of away from it, showing the fingers that she did not possess.
Sometimes late at night when the house is quiet and the only illumination comes from the lamp on my desk, I look at that shadow and I wonder what it would be like to cast an image that did not belong to you.
To move through the world, knowing that something else was moving with you, something that shared your space but not your substance, something that was visible only in the negative space where light could not reach.
I wonder if Adelaide understood what was happening to her.
If she knew what the shadow meant, if she had any control over the forces that seemed to move through her.
I wonder if she welcomed them or feared them.
If she saw them as a gift or a curse, if she ever wished to be simply ordinary, simply herself, simply a girl with four fingers on her left hand and a shadow that behaved as shadows should.
I will never know.
Adelaide Blackwood left no letters, no diary, no record of her thoughts or feelings during the years she spent in the institution in upstate New York.
She was erased as thoroughly as her family could manage, reduced to a name that was not spoken and a photograph that was locked away.
But the photograph survived.
The shadow survived.
And now, more than a century later, someone is finally looking at what the Blackwood family tried so desperately not to see.
The youngest girl stands at the edge of the frame, her hand resting on the velvet chair, her eyes looking directly at the camera, her shadow falls in the wrong direction.
Her shadow has five fingers instead of four.
And if you look closely enough, if you are willing to see what should not exist, you can almost make out the shape of something standing beside her.
Something that shares her space, but not her substance.
Something that was captured by the camera’s unblinking eye, and preserved in silver and salt and light for anyone brave enough to find it.
The sisters pose elegantly.
The photograph is beautiful, and the shadow reveals what the family buried for generations.
That Adelaide Blackwood was never truly alone, and that whatever stood beside her is standing there still, frozen in time, waiting to be seen.
