CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
We've all seen "spirit photography," but here's an actual spirit photographer. Indeed, it takes a ghost photographer to take a ghostly photograph. From Goshen College's 1968 yearbook.
The blurred figure on the right had a lion cub-like spirit animal on his shoulder (see the enlargement, and a non-blurred photo of the man showing his shoulder without spirit animal present). From Virginia Commonwealth University's 1973 yearbook.
Note the signature at the top of this spirit photograph from 1920 -- the image is upside down and backwards. "A face appears over the man's image on the left of the photograph, covered in a cloak. Although indistinct, the man apparently identified the 'spirit' as an ex-work colleague who had died thirty two years earlier." Courtesy of the National Media Museum Collection, via The Odd Side of Me.
From the University of North Carolina at Asheville's 1971 yearbook. For an explanation of how this scanned page captures a genuine spirit, see that remarkable book The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine, which makes good on its promises of real ghosts, actual hauntings, and necromancy by proxy.