The Lord Combermere Photograph

This photograph is a famous one.

Here’s the story. The photo is reported to have been taken using a one hour exposure. It was taken by Sybell Corbett in December 1891. Corbett, who was staying with her sister at the Combermere Abbey, kept a detailed journal. At the time of the photo, the claim is, Lord Combermere was being buried a few miles away, having died in an accident.

1. Prolonged exposure explains the photo, Ms. Corbett even stated that the photo was a 1 hour exposure...case closed...

2. The photographer claims that there was no one in the house when the photograph was taken. Everyone was attending the funeral. This begs a few questions…a) Why did Ms. Corbett, a guest at Combermere Abbey, decide that during the Lord’s funeral would be a good time to set up a photo? b)Why would everyone in the household, including servants, be gone at the funeral? Would the grieving family not need people to prepare for the post funeral gathering? Perhaps a servant sat in the chair.

3. The simplest explanation is the correct one. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck…Your best bet is that it’s a duck. This is an obvious long exposure photo of a person who sat in a chair during the exposure. On purpose or accident…it doesn’t matter, because even though there was a logical explanation, the photographer and her contemporaries decided that it would be more lucrative to call it a ghost photo.

4. Through all the searches I’ve made, I’ve come up with this much about the good Lord Combermere: His name was Sir Wellington Henry Stapleton-Cotton. He was born in 1818 and died in 1891, which made him the ripe old age of 73. There is limited info about him on the WWW. There is some death announcement in the Fitchburg Sentinel on December 4, 1891, but since I do not have, nor want, an expensive NewspaperArchives.com subscription, I cannot see the nature of the death. The little bit I saw said “Sir Wellington Henry Stapleton Cotton is Dead” Seems the headline would say “Sir Wellington Henry Stapleton Cotton dead in accident” if an accident were involved, don’t you think? I would think that it would be worthy of note. But I have limited information.