Our first ghost tour was chilly—Asheville, North Carolina, still digging out from a heavy snow, nighttime, a few days before Christmas 2010. The tour was also predictable—tall (and short) tales, strange happenings with a “ghost meter” and a pair of divining rods, and digital photos containing orbs of various colors and sizes. When the tour was over, we thanked our guide and headed back to the hotel to thaw our frozen and dubious smiles and to click through the photos.

Still unsure what to believe, the next day we printed the photos of the orbs, which caused a stir with friends and family when we got home to Virginia: “Those are camera artifacts”…“I see a face in that one”…“You know you’re crazy, right?”

I didn’t give much thought to the other photos until after the holidays, when, studying the pics on my laptop, I found something, well, extraordinary. What it is was a matter of debate when the photo made the rounds on the Internet nearly six years ago, but several facts are indisputable: (1) my wife took two photos of the spot (and nearly every spot, at the suggestion of the tour guide) for comparison, and the “ghost dog” appears in only one of them; (2) there was no living, breathing dog at the location; (3) we did not alter, enhance, etc., the photos in any way; and (4) the spot was memorable to us as “dog people” because the tour guide believed that a pet was buried under the nearby tree.

Here are the two photos. You decide.