December 3, 2025 • 23 mins
A routine photo at an ancient cemetery in the driest place on Earth captured something the workers never expected to see.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
A routine photo at an ancient cemetery in the driest
place on earth captured something the workers never expected to see.
I'm Darren Marler and this is weird dark News. A
surveying crew showed up for work one day in northern Chile,
took what should have been a completely forgettable photograph of
their team standing together and uploaded it to their company's
(00:33):
website as part of their normal documentation process. Days later,
they were still fielding questions about what it appeared in
the background of that image, something none of them remembered
seeing when the photo was taken, and something that has
since ignited fierce arguments across Chilean social media and caught
the attention of paranormal investigators throughout the country. The image
(00:56):
itself was captured at an old cemetery in Chiagua, Which
which is a small remote settlement tucked into Chile's Antifagasta region.
The topography crew had been out there conducting survey work
at the graveyard, the kind of routine assignment that usually
produces nothing more exciting than measurements and coordinates. The photograph
they took shows three workers posing together for the camera,
(01:18):
standing among the graves in the desert sun. There on
the right side of the frame, physitioned slightly behind the men,
stands what appears to be a small child. The figure
is dressed in clothing that looks distinctly old fashioned, specifically
the kind of garments typically of the Pempinos, which is
what they call the saltpeter mining workers and their families
(01:39):
who lived in northern Chile's desert communities throughout the mid
twentieth century. The child in the photograph appears to be
wearing clothes consistent with that era, a detail that immediately
jumped out to observers who knew anything about the region's history.
This was not modern clothing. It looked like something from
fifty sixty, even seventy years ago. The person who first
(02:01):
spawned the anomaly was an employee named Rodrigo Cononias. He'd
been scrolling through photographs on the company's website, images that
had been uploaded simply to document the workday, when he
noticed something odd in one of them. There was a
small figure in the frame that nobody on the crew
remembered being there during the photo session. The company had
posted the picture without anyone noticing the apparent extra subject.
(02:24):
Standing among them. When Cononias pointed out what he had
found and shared the image more widely, the photograph spread
rapidly across social media, and the debates began almost immediately.
The location of the photograph matters. Kiagua sits within the
Autacoma Desert, an environment so extraordinarily arid, so completely devoid
(02:46):
of moisture that NASA actually uses it to test their
Mars exploration vehicles because it is the closest thing to
Martian conditions they can find on Earth. In two thousand
and two National Geographic catalogued Kiagua specifically is the dryest
point on the entire planet, documenting a mere zero point
two millimeters of rainfall over a span of forty years.
(03:08):
That's essentially no rain at all for four decades. The
only reason Kiagua exists at all, the only reason anyone
ever settled there, is the i Loa River. It's the
sole flowing water source for hundreds of kilometers in any direction,
a riven of life cutting through one of the most
lifeless landscapes on the planet. Until the nineteen eighties, Kiagua
(03:31):
was actually a thriving little agricultural community with several hundred residents.
The townspeople farmed the land along the river, prospered as
the only agricultural center in the entire surrounding region, and
managed to build real lives for themselves in one of
Earth's most unforgiving environments. They made it work, and then
everything changed. Kadalco, a government mining company operating upstream, contaminated
(03:55):
the Lowa River with arsenic According to accounts from people
who lived through it, the company knew about the contamination
but kept it secret because they didn't want to take
responsibility or pay for a cleanup. So the residents of
Kiagua kept drinking the water. They kept using it to
irrigate their crops. They had no idea that poison was
flowing right through their community. People started getting sick, cancer
(04:18):
rates climbed. Deaths followed. By the time the contamination source
was finally discovered and the truth came out, the damage
was done. The government banned agriculture and any use of
water from the river. Today, arsenic levels remain dangerously high
in both the water and the surrounding soil, and the
population is dwindled to approximately sixty people. Walk through Kiagua
(04:43):
now and you'll see abandoned farms, rusting equipment, the remnants
of a community that was thriving just a few decades ago.
The people who remain are mostly members of the Imara
indigenous community, whose ancestors have inhabited this territory since before
the Inca Empire. They have endured not just the brutal climate,
but successive waves of colonialism and resource extraction that have
(05:05):
repeatedly threatened to wipe them out entirely. The old fashioned
clothes on the figure in the photograph point to a
very specific chapter in Chilean history. The Pampinos were the
workers who populated the saltpeter mining towns that dotted the
Atacama Desert from the mid eighteen hundreds all the way
through the mid twentieth century. These communities, known as nitrate
(05:26):
towns or solterreras, produced sodium nitrate, which was a crucial
component in both fertilizers and explosives. The substance transformed agricultural
lands across North and South America and Europe. It was
incredibly valuable, and mining it made Chile wealthy. Workers came
from Chile, Peru, and Bolivia to labor in these remote
desert communities, drawn by the promise of wages, even though
(05:49):
the conditions were brutal. Over time, they developed their own
distinctive culture out there in the desert, their own slang,
their own traditions, a fierce sense of solidarity born from
shared hardship. At their peak, some of these towns housed
thousands of people. Humberstone, one of the largest nitrate towns,
had a population exceeding thirty seven hundred residents. They built
(06:12):
theaters and schools and swimming pools out there in the
middle of nowhere, But the work itself was punishing. The
sun was relentless, the labor was backbreaking, and the isolation
was complete. When a man got a job at the mines,
his whole family had to come with him and pitch in,
including his children. The living and working conditions in these
(06:33):
mining towns have been compared to slavery, the characterization that
comes from historical accounts of the era itself, not modern
observations looking back with hindsight. Many workers in their families
faced sudden, horrible deaths. Disease swept through the camps. Accidents
were common. The sheer brutality of trying to survive in
(06:54):
such an unforgiving environment claimed lives constantly. The cemeteries scattered
across the Atacama are filled with the graves of those
who didn't make it, men, women, and a heartbreaking number
of children. The Saltpeter boom came to an end when
German scientists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how
to synthesize nitrogen artificially, a process they developed around nineteen
(07:18):
oh nine. Once you could make the stuff in a laboratory,
you didn't need to dig it out of the Chilean
desert anymore. The industry went in to decline, and by
the nineteen sixties the nitrate towns had been completely abandoned.
The workers and their families simply left, and the desert
began reclaiming what they had built. Some of these abandoned
(07:38):
towns still stand today, preserved by the same arid conditions
that made life there so difficult. The lack of moisture
means things don't decay the way they would elsewhere. Omberstone
and Santa Laura were declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites in
two thousand and five. Lenoria found it all the way
back in eighteen twenty six as the oldest Saltpeter mine
(07:58):
in Chile lies in ruins, with its cemetery exposed to
the elements. Coffins pride opened by looters over the years,
human bones scattered among tilted wooden crosses. These places have
become destinations for a certain kind of tourists, people drawn
to abandoned spaces and dark history. They've also become known
(08:18):
as some of the most haunted locations in South America.
At Lenoria, people from surrounding towns like Ikike flatly refuse
to go anywhere near the place after the sun goes down.
When asked what they're afraid of, they have a specific answer,
the zombies. Local legend holds that the dead rise from
their disturbed graves at sunset and walk across the desert
(08:41):
toward Humperstone. Whether anyone actually believes this literally or whether
it's become a kind of regional folklore is hard to say,
but the stories persist and the reluctance to visit after
dark is real. Once the Chiagua photograph started spreading across
social media, Chilean radio station FMDOS decided to consult someone
(09:02):
who studies this kind of thing professionally. They brought in
a paranormal investigator named Carlos Martinez to examine the viral
image and offer his assessment. What he found was a
mix of elements that seemed credible and elements that raised
serious red flags on the side of credibility. Martinez noted
that the lighting in the image appears consistent throughout. The
(09:24):
illumination falling on the child figure looks natural rather than artificial,
which is what you'd expect if the figure were actually
present when the photo was taken. He also examined the
shadows cast by the three workers in the foreground and
found that they aligned properly with the apparent light source.
The figure of the child even casts its own faint shadow,
which is consistent with how a real three dimensional object
(09:46):
would appear in the scene. The resolution and focus seem
reasonable across the image, without the obvious telltale signs of
a crude digital insertion. Martinez also pointed out that the
setting itself lends a certain credibility to claims of something paranormal.
Kiagua's cemetery already had a reputation among locals as a
place with high levels of unusual activity, and residents of
(10:09):
the area have reported seeing apparitions of children there before
this reputation, he noted existed well before the viral photograph appeared.
The location has history. He also took the time to
address a theory that's been circulating online. Maybe the figure
in the photograph is simply a living child who happened
to be there that day some whe the workers just
(10:31):
didn't notice or forgot about. Martinez dismissed this explanation based
on something he observed in the image itself. The child's
face appears significantly more diffused, more blurry than the rest
of the body. That kind of inconsistency wouldn't occur with
a living subject standing at that distance from the camera.
(10:52):
A real child photographed under those conditions would have uniform
sharpness across both face and body. The fact the face
is notably less defined than everything else is strange. The
photograph may have been taken with a zoom lens or
cropped afterward, which might explain some of its generally poor quality,
but Martinez identified specific elements that concerned him beyond image
(11:16):
quality issues. What troubled him most were the proportions. The
child figure appears unusually small compared to the adult workers
standing in the foreground. The distance between the child's position
and the men's position. Isn't that extreme. Certainly not enough
to explain such a dramatic difference in apparent size. Perspective
(11:36):
alone doesn't seem to account for it. The most damning detail,
according to Martinez, was something subtle that you'd only catch
if you were looking carefully. Close examination of the image
reveals a faint, darker contour running around the child's outline,
a thin heelo of slightly darker pixels surrounding the figure.
(11:58):
This is a tell tale indicator of possible image manipulation,
when someone cuts an element from one photograph and pastes
it into another. This kind of artifact often appears because
the edges of the inserted object don't blend perfectly with
the new background. It's the digital equivalent of seeing the
seams in a costume. After weighing everything he observed, Martinez
(12:19):
reached his conclusion the photograph is not of a living child,
but it's also probably not a ghost. In his professional opinion,
the image is most likely a fabrication, a well executed
montage created by someone who knew what they were doing
and designed it to fool viewers. Digital image forensics have
become increasingly sophisticated over the past decade or so, largely
(12:42):
because photo manipulation has become so easy and so common.
Anyone with a smartphone and a few apps can alter
images now, which means researchers and investigators have had to
develop reliable methods for detecting when photographs have been tampered with.
The kinds of artifacts that Martinez described in his analysis
are well documented in the forensic literature, and there are
(13:04):
established techniques for finding them. One common method involves analyzing
JPEG compression levels across different proportions of an image. When
a photo was edited and a new element is inserted,
that inserted portion often has a different compression quality than
the rest of the original image. When the manipulated image
gets saved, these inconsistencies become baked into the file. Forensic
(13:27):
software can identify what analysts call JPEG ghosts, regions within
the image that were compressed at different quality levels than
the surrounding areas, which indicates where edits were made. It's
like being able to see fingerprints left behind by an
editing process. Shadow analysis provides another tool for verification. Investigators
(13:49):
can actually map the geometric relationships between shadows, the objects
casting them, and the light sources that create them. If
these relationships don't match up, if a shadow is appearing
on the wrong side of a subject, or if different
shadows in the same image are pointing in directions that
couldn't come from the same light source, that's evidence of manipulation.
(14:10):
Someone spliced elements together that weren't originally photographed under the
same conditions. In the case of the Chiagua photograph, Martinez
noted that the shadows do appear consistent, which counts in
the image's favor, but doesn't prove its authentic edge. Inconsistencies
like the dark outline Martinez identified around the child figure
(14:31):
are among the most common giveaways when images have been doctored.
When an element is cut from one photograph and spliced
into another, the transition between the pasted object and its
new background rarely blends perfectly, even when the person doing
the editing is skilled. Photo editing software has gotten much
better at hiding these seams over the years, but trained
observers can still often spot them if they know what
(14:54):
to look for. There's also something called error level analysis,
or ELA, which is another technique that can expose manipulation.
It works by resaving an image and then calculating the
mathematical difference between the original file and the resaved version.
If a portion of the image has been added or modified,
that portion will often show a different error level than
(15:16):
the content that was there originally. The altered section stands
out from everything around it when you run the analysis.
As of now, the Chiagua photograph has not undergone rigorous
forensic analysis by independent experts using these techniques. Without access
to the original image file and its metadata, the technical
information embedded in the file that records details about how
(15:38):
and when it was created, it's difficult to reach definitive conclusions,
but the indicators Martinez identified in his visual examination do
align with known markers of digital manipulation. Whether a deeper
forensic dive would confirm it suspicions, or reveal something unexpected
remains to be seen. Whether the Chiagua photograph turns out
to be authentic or fabricated. The broader reputation of the
(16:01):
Atacama Desert for paranormal activity is well established and documented
by numerous witnesses over many decades. People have been reporting
strange experiences out there for as long as anyone can remember,
and the accounts come from locals and visitors alike. The
abandoned Salpeter towns have drawn paranormal investigators from around the world,
(16:21):
people who show up with cameras, audio recorders, electromagnetic field detectors,
and all the other equipment that ghost hunters use. Atllnoria, specifically,
investigation teams have reported capturing unexplained phenomena electronic voice recordings
that seem to contain Spanish speaking voices when no one
was talking, mysterious shadows that appear and disappear in photographs,
(16:44):
orbs of light that drift through the ruins. Visitors who
aren't investigators, just curious tourists have recounted seeing what they
describe as spectral apparitions, figures that look like miners and
children walking through the abandoned streets before vanishing. A Lnorious
cemetery is a particularly unsettling place to visit. Decades of
(17:04):
looting have left coffins exposed and broken open, and humid
remains are scattered across the ground in plain view. The
extraordinarily dry desert air has preserved much of what's there,
which means the bones and sometimes more than bones, are
still recognizable. Visitors have to watch where they step to
avoid treading on human remains. Deep mine shafts punctuate the area,
(17:26):
some of them unmarked and easy to stumble into if
you're not careful. The wooden crosses that mark the graves
stand and random angles not to skew over the years
by wind time and the grave robbers who have picked
through the sites looking for anything valuable. In two thousand
and three, a discovery in the Lenorea area made international headlines.
(17:47):
A six inch humanoid skeleton was found, and its strange
proportions immediately sparked wild speculation. People started calling it the
Atacama alien because it looked so unusual, so unlike a
normal human skeleton, but DNA analysis eventually confirmed that it
was in fact the remains of a human child, one
who had suffered from an extreme and previously undiagnosed form
(18:09):
of dwarfism. Whether the harsh conditions of life in the
saltpeter mining communities contributed to such severe developmental anomalies is
something researchers still don't know. Over at Humberstone, the old
schoolhouse remains furnished with desks and chairs and chalkboards as
if classes had ended just yesterday, and the children might
come filing back in at any moment. No one has
(18:32):
lived in Humberstone for over sixty years, but visitors report
seeing young faces watching from the schoolhouse windows and hearing
what sounds like footsteps in the empty corridors. The town's
theater has been restored and is occasionally used for events now,
but even so it's developed a reputation as a location
where strange things happen. Multiple people over the years have
(18:54):
reported seeing a fast moving shadow figure inside the building,
something that darts across their field the vision, and then disappears.
Skeptics have explanations for all of this. They point out
that the psychological effect of the environment itself can account
for a lot of what people report experiencing. The isolation,
the stark and alien beauty of the Atagama landscape, the
(19:17):
visible human remains, the knowledge of all the suffering that
occurred in these places. All of it combines to put
visitors in a heightened emotional state where they're primed to
perceive things that aren't really there. Whend, moving through abandoned
buildings creates sounds that the mind can easily interpret as
voices or footsteps. The harsh desert light and the deep
(19:38):
shadows it creates can play tricks on perception. The brain,
looking for patterns, fills in what it expects to find.
These are reasonable explanations, but the accounts keep coming year
after year from visitor after visitor. Many of the people
who report these experiences had no prior knowledge of the
(19:58):
location's reputations before they came as tourists or researchers, and
left with stories they couldn't explain. Whether this proves anything
supernatural is happening or simply demonstrates how powerfully these places
affect the human psyche is a question everyone has to
answer for themselves. The Chiagua Cemetery photograph remains contested with
(20:21):
believers and skeptics, both firmly entrenched in their positions. Carlos
Martinez concluded that it was most likely a well executed hoax,
pointing specifically to the size and consistencies between the child
figure and the adult workers, and to that telltale dark
outline visible around the figure when you examine the image closely.
According to his analysis, the viral image is probably nothing
(20:43):
more than a clever bit of digital manipulation, perhaps created
by someone looking to generate attention, or perhaps by someone
playing on the locations already established reputation for unusual activity.
The debates continue across social media, with some peoples defending
the photograph's authenticity and others dismissing it as an obvious fake.
(21:05):
Without comprehensive forensic analysis of the original image file the
actual digital file as it came off the camera, complete
with all its embedded metadata, neither side can really claim
a definitive victory. The truth is probably knowable, but knowing
it would require access and analysis that hasn't happened yet.
The workers who took the photograph have not made any
(21:27):
public comments about whether they noticed anything unusual at the
cemetery that day, whether they felt anything strange, whether there
was any moment when they thought someone else might be present.
They went out to Kiagua to do a surveying job,
standard work at a remote location, and they came away
with an image that has now been viewed and argued
over by countless people around the world. The cemetery at
(21:50):
Kiagua holds the remains of generations of people who lived
and died in one of the harshest, most demanding environments
on Earth. Or not, any of them made an appearance
and a photograph taken in November twenty twenty five. Their
history is undeniably real. The children of the Pampinos, the
kids who worked alongside their parents under conditions that observers
(22:13):
have compared to slavery, who died young in a brutal desert,
whose small bodies were laid to rest in graves scattered
across the Auto Kama. Those children existed. They had names
and faces and short lives full of hardship. Their stories
persist in the historical record, in the accounts passed down
through families, in the physical remains that still lie in
(22:37):
those desert cemeteries. If you'd like to read this story
for yourself or share the article with a friend, you
can read it on the Weird Darkness website. I've placed
a link to it in the episode description, and you
can find more stories of the paranormal, true crime, strange,
and more, including numerous stories that never make it to
the podcast in my Weird Darknews blog at Weirddarkness dot
com slash news
A routine photo at an ancient cemetery in the driest
place on earth captured something the workers never expected to see.
I'm Darren Marler and this is weird dark News. A
surveying crew showed up for work one day in northern Chile,
took what should have been a completely forgettable photograph of
their team standing together and uploaded it to their company's
(00:33):
website as part of their normal documentation process. Days later,
they were still fielding questions about what it appeared in
the background of that image, something none of them remembered
seeing when the photo was taken, and something that has
since ignited fierce arguments across Chilean social media and caught
the attention of paranormal investigators throughout the country. The image
(00:56):
itself was captured at an old cemetery in Chiagua, Which
which is a small remote settlement tucked into Chile's Antifagasta region.
The topography crew had been out there conducting survey work
at the graveyard, the kind of routine assignment that usually
produces nothing more exciting than measurements and coordinates. The photograph
they took shows three workers posing together for the camera,
(01:18):
standing among the graves in the desert sun. There on
the right side of the frame, physitioned slightly behind the men,
stands what appears to be a small child. The figure
is dressed in clothing that looks distinctly old fashioned, specifically
the kind of garments typically of the Pempinos, which is
what they call the saltpeter mining workers and their families
(01:39):
who lived in northern Chile's desert communities throughout the mid
twentieth century. The child in the photograph appears to be
wearing clothes consistent with that era, a detail that immediately
jumped out to observers who knew anything about the region's history.
This was not modern clothing. It looked like something from
fifty sixty, even seventy years ago. The person who first
(02:01):
spawned the anomaly was an employee named Rodrigo Cononias. He'd
been scrolling through photographs on the company's website, images that
had been uploaded simply to document the workday, when he
noticed something odd in one of them. There was a
small figure in the frame that nobody on the crew
remembered being there during the photo session. The company had
posted the picture without anyone noticing the apparent extra subject.
(02:24):
Standing among them. When Cononias pointed out what he had
found and shared the image more widely, the photograph spread
rapidly across social media, and the debates began almost immediately.
The location of the photograph matters. Kiagua sits within the
Autacoma Desert, an environment so extraordinarily arid, so completely devoid
(02:46):
of moisture that NASA actually uses it to test their
Mars exploration vehicles because it is the closest thing to
Martian conditions they can find on Earth. In two thousand
and two National Geographic catalogued Kiagua specifically is the dryest
point on the entire planet, documenting a mere zero point
two millimeters of rainfall over a span of forty years.
(03:08):
That's essentially no rain at all for four decades. The
only reason Kiagua exists at all, the only reason anyone
ever settled there, is the i Loa River. It's the
sole flowing water source for hundreds of kilometers in any direction,
a riven of life cutting through one of the most
lifeless landscapes on the planet. Until the nineteen eighties, Kiagua
(03:31):
was actually a thriving little agricultural community with several hundred residents.
The townspeople farmed the land along the river, prospered as
the only agricultural center in the entire surrounding region, and
managed to build real lives for themselves in one of
Earth's most unforgiving environments. They made it work, and then
everything changed. Kadalco, a government mining company operating upstream, contaminated
(03:55):
the Lowa River with arsenic According to accounts from people
who lived through it, the company knew about the contamination
but kept it secret because they didn't want to take
responsibility or pay for a cleanup. So the residents of
Kiagua kept drinking the water. They kept using it to
irrigate their crops. They had no idea that poison was
flowing right through their community. People started getting sick, cancer
(04:18):
rates climbed. Deaths followed. By the time the contamination source
was finally discovered and the truth came out, the damage
was done. The government banned agriculture and any use of
water from the river. Today, arsenic levels remain dangerously high
in both the water and the surrounding soil, and the
population is dwindled to approximately sixty people. Walk through Kiagua
(04:43):
now and you'll see abandoned farms, rusting equipment, the remnants
of a community that was thriving just a few decades ago.
The people who remain are mostly members of the Imara
indigenous community, whose ancestors have inhabited this territory since before
the Inca Empire. They have endured not just the brutal climate,
but successive waves of colonialism and resource extraction that have
(05:05):
repeatedly threatened to wipe them out entirely. The old fashioned
clothes on the figure in the photograph point to a
very specific chapter in Chilean history. The Pampinos were the
workers who populated the saltpeter mining towns that dotted the
Atacama Desert from the mid eighteen hundreds all the way
through the mid twentieth century. These communities, known as nitrate
(05:26):
towns or solterreras, produced sodium nitrate, which was a crucial
component in both fertilizers and explosives. The substance transformed agricultural
lands across North and South America and Europe. It was
incredibly valuable, and mining it made Chile wealthy. Workers came
from Chile, Peru, and Bolivia to labor in these remote
desert communities, drawn by the promise of wages, even though
(05:49):
the conditions were brutal. Over time, they developed their own
distinctive culture out there in the desert, their own slang,
their own traditions, a fierce sense of solidarity born from
shared hardship. At their peak, some of these towns housed
thousands of people. Humberstone, one of the largest nitrate towns,
had a population exceeding thirty seven hundred residents. They built
(06:12):
theaters and schools and swimming pools out there in the
middle of nowhere, But the work itself was punishing. The
sun was relentless, the labor was backbreaking, and the isolation
was complete. When a man got a job at the mines,
his whole family had to come with him and pitch in,
including his children. The living and working conditions in these
(06:33):
mining towns have been compared to slavery, the characterization that
comes from historical accounts of the era itself, not modern
observations looking back with hindsight. Many workers in their families
faced sudden, horrible deaths. Disease swept through the camps. Accidents
were common. The sheer brutality of trying to survive in
(06:54):
such an unforgiving environment claimed lives constantly. The cemeteries scattered
across the Atacama are filled with the graves of those
who didn't make it, men, women, and a heartbreaking number
of children. The Saltpeter boom came to an end when
German scientists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how
to synthesize nitrogen artificially, a process they developed around nineteen
(07:18):
oh nine. Once you could make the stuff in a laboratory,
you didn't need to dig it out of the Chilean
desert anymore. The industry went in to decline, and by
the nineteen sixties the nitrate towns had been completely abandoned.
The workers and their families simply left, and the desert
began reclaiming what they had built. Some of these abandoned
(07:38):
towns still stand today, preserved by the same arid conditions
that made life there so difficult. The lack of moisture
means things don't decay the way they would elsewhere. Omberstone
and Santa Laura were declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites in
two thousand and five. Lenoria found it all the way
back in eighteen twenty six as the oldest Saltpeter mine
(07:58):
in Chile lies in ruins, with its cemetery exposed to
the elements. Coffins pride opened by looters over the years,
human bones scattered among tilted wooden crosses. These places have
become destinations for a certain kind of tourists, people drawn
to abandoned spaces and dark history. They've also become known
(08:18):
as some of the most haunted locations in South America.
At Lenoria, people from surrounding towns like Ikike flatly refuse
to go anywhere near the place after the sun goes down.
When asked what they're afraid of, they have a specific answer,
the zombies. Local legend holds that the dead rise from
their disturbed graves at sunset and walk across the desert
(08:41):
toward Humperstone. Whether anyone actually believes this literally or whether
it's become a kind of regional folklore is hard to say,
but the stories persist and the reluctance to visit after
dark is real. Once the Chiagua photograph started spreading across
social media, Chilean radio station FMDOS decided to consult someone
(09:02):
who studies this kind of thing professionally. They brought in
a paranormal investigator named Carlos Martinez to examine the viral
image and offer his assessment. What he found was a
mix of elements that seemed credible and elements that raised
serious red flags on the side of credibility. Martinez noted
that the lighting in the image appears consistent throughout. The
(09:24):
illumination falling on the child figure looks natural rather than artificial,
which is what you'd expect if the figure were actually
present when the photo was taken. He also examined the
shadows cast by the three workers in the foreground and
found that they aligned properly with the apparent light source.
The figure of the child even casts its own faint shadow,
which is consistent with how a real three dimensional object
(09:46):
would appear in the scene. The resolution and focus seem
reasonable across the image, without the obvious telltale signs of
a crude digital insertion. Martinez also pointed out that the
setting itself lends a certain credibility to claims of something paranormal.
Kiagua's cemetery already had a reputation among locals as a
place with high levels of unusual activity, and residents of
(10:09):
the area have reported seeing apparitions of children there before
this reputation, he noted existed well before the viral photograph appeared.
The location has history. He also took the time to
address a theory that's been circulating online. Maybe the figure
in the photograph is simply a living child who happened
to be there that day some whe the workers just
(10:31):
didn't notice or forgot about. Martinez dismissed this explanation based
on something he observed in the image itself. The child's
face appears significantly more diffused, more blurry than the rest
of the body. That kind of inconsistency wouldn't occur with
a living subject standing at that distance from the camera.
(10:52):
A real child photographed under those conditions would have uniform
sharpness across both face and body. The fact the face
is notably less defined than everything else is strange. The
photograph may have been taken with a zoom lens or
cropped afterward, which might explain some of its generally poor quality,
but Martinez identified specific elements that concerned him beyond image
(11:16):
quality issues. What troubled him most were the proportions. The
child figure appears unusually small compared to the adult workers
standing in the foreground. The distance between the child's position
and the men's position. Isn't that extreme. Certainly not enough
to explain such a dramatic difference in apparent size. Perspective
(11:36):
alone doesn't seem to account for it. The most damning detail,
according to Martinez, was something subtle that you'd only catch
if you were looking carefully. Close examination of the image
reveals a faint, darker contour running around the child's outline,
a thin heelo of slightly darker pixels surrounding the figure.
(11:58):
This is a tell tale indicator of possible image manipulation,
when someone cuts an element from one photograph and pastes
it into another. This kind of artifact often appears because
the edges of the inserted object don't blend perfectly with
the new background. It's the digital equivalent of seeing the
seams in a costume. After weighing everything he observed, Martinez
(12:19):
reached his conclusion the photograph is not of a living child,
but it's also probably not a ghost. In his professional opinion,
the image is most likely a fabrication, a well executed
montage created by someone who knew what they were doing
and designed it to fool viewers. Digital image forensics have
become increasingly sophisticated over the past decade or so, largely
(12:42):
because photo manipulation has become so easy and so common.
Anyone with a smartphone and a few apps can alter
images now, which means researchers and investigators have had to
develop reliable methods for detecting when photographs have been tampered with.
The kinds of artifacts that Martinez described in his analysis
are well documented in the forensic literature, and there are
(13:04):
established techniques for finding them. One common method involves analyzing
JPEG compression levels across different proportions of an image. When
a photo was edited and a new element is inserted,
that inserted portion often has a different compression quality than
the rest of the original image. When the manipulated image
gets saved, these inconsistencies become baked into the file. Forensic
(13:27):
software can identify what analysts call JPEG ghosts, regions within
the image that were compressed at different quality levels than
the surrounding areas, which indicates where edits were made. It's
like being able to see fingerprints left behind by an
editing process. Shadow analysis provides another tool for verification. Investigators
(13:49):
can actually map the geometric relationships between shadows, the objects
casting them, and the light sources that create them. If
these relationships don't match up, if a shadow is appearing
on the wrong side of a subject, or if different
shadows in the same image are pointing in directions that
couldn't come from the same light source, that's evidence of manipulation.
(14:10):
Someone spliced elements together that weren't originally photographed under the
same conditions. In the case of the Chiagua photograph, Martinez
noted that the shadows do appear consistent, which counts in
the image's favor, but doesn't prove its authentic edge. Inconsistencies
like the dark outline Martinez identified around the child figure
(14:31):
are among the most common giveaways when images have been doctored.
When an element is cut from one photograph and spliced
into another, the transition between the pasted object and its
new background rarely blends perfectly, even when the person doing
the editing is skilled. Photo editing software has gotten much
better at hiding these seams over the years, but trained
observers can still often spot them if they know what
(14:54):
to look for. There's also something called error level analysis,
or ELA, which is another technique that can expose manipulation.
It works by resaving an image and then calculating the
mathematical difference between the original file and the resaved version.
If a portion of the image has been added or modified,
that portion will often show a different error level than
(15:16):
the content that was there originally. The altered section stands
out from everything around it when you run the analysis.
As of now, the Chiagua photograph has not undergone rigorous
forensic analysis by independent experts using these techniques. Without access
to the original image file and its metadata, the technical
information embedded in the file that records details about how
(15:38):
and when it was created, it's difficult to reach definitive conclusions,
but the indicators Martinez identified in his visual examination do
align with known markers of digital manipulation. Whether a deeper
forensic dive would confirm it suspicions, or reveal something unexpected
remains to be seen. Whether the Chiagua photograph turns out
to be authentic or fabricated. The broader reputation of the
(16:01):
Atacama Desert for paranormal activity is well established and documented
by numerous witnesses over many decades. People have been reporting
strange experiences out there for as long as anyone can remember,
and the accounts come from locals and visitors alike. The
abandoned Salpeter towns have drawn paranormal investigators from around the world,
(16:21):
people who show up with cameras, audio recorders, electromagnetic field detectors,
and all the other equipment that ghost hunters use. Atllnoria, specifically,
investigation teams have reported capturing unexplained phenomena electronic voice recordings
that seem to contain Spanish speaking voices when no one
was talking, mysterious shadows that appear and disappear in photographs,
(16:44):
orbs of light that drift through the ruins. Visitors who
aren't investigators, just curious tourists have recounted seeing what they
describe as spectral apparitions, figures that look like miners and
children walking through the abandoned streets before vanishing. A Lnorious
cemetery is a particularly unsettling place to visit. Decades of
(17:04):
looting have left coffins exposed and broken open, and humid
remains are scattered across the ground in plain view. The
extraordinarily dry desert air has preserved much of what's there,
which means the bones and sometimes more than bones, are
still recognizable. Visitors have to watch where they step to
avoid treading on human remains. Deep mine shafts punctuate the area,
(17:26):
some of them unmarked and easy to stumble into if
you're not careful. The wooden crosses that mark the graves
stand and random angles not to skew over the years
by wind time and the grave robbers who have picked
through the sites looking for anything valuable. In two thousand
and three, a discovery in the Lenorea area made international headlines.
(17:47):
A six inch humanoid skeleton was found, and its strange
proportions immediately sparked wild speculation. People started calling it the
Atacama alien because it looked so unusual, so unlike a
normal human skeleton, but DNA analysis eventually confirmed that it
was in fact the remains of a human child, one
who had suffered from an extreme and previously undiagnosed form
(18:09):
of dwarfism. Whether the harsh conditions of life in the
saltpeter mining communities contributed to such severe developmental anomalies is
something researchers still don't know. Over at Humberstone, the old
schoolhouse remains furnished with desks and chairs and chalkboards as
if classes had ended just yesterday, and the children might
come filing back in at any moment. No one has
(18:32):
lived in Humberstone for over sixty years, but visitors report
seeing young faces watching from the schoolhouse windows and hearing
what sounds like footsteps in the empty corridors. The town's
theater has been restored and is occasionally used for events now,
but even so it's developed a reputation as a location
where strange things happen. Multiple people over the years have
(18:54):
reported seeing a fast moving shadow figure inside the building,
something that darts across their field the vision, and then disappears.
Skeptics have explanations for all of this. They point out
that the psychological effect of the environment itself can account
for a lot of what people report experiencing. The isolation,
the stark and alien beauty of the Atagama landscape, the
(19:17):
visible human remains, the knowledge of all the suffering that
occurred in these places. All of it combines to put
visitors in a heightened emotional state where they're primed to
perceive things that aren't really there. Whend, moving through abandoned
buildings creates sounds that the mind can easily interpret as
voices or footsteps. The harsh desert light and the deep
(19:38):
shadows it creates can play tricks on perception. The brain,
looking for patterns, fills in what it expects to find.
These are reasonable explanations, but the accounts keep coming year
after year from visitor after visitor. Many of the people
who report these experiences had no prior knowledge of the
(19:58):
location's reputations before they came as tourists or researchers, and
left with stories they couldn't explain. Whether this proves anything
supernatural is happening or simply demonstrates how powerfully these places
affect the human psyche is a question everyone has to
answer for themselves. The Chiagua Cemetery photograph remains contested with
(20:21):
believers and skeptics, both firmly entrenched in their positions. Carlos
Martinez concluded that it was most likely a well executed hoax,
pointing specifically to the size and consistencies between the child
figure and the adult workers, and to that telltale dark
outline visible around the figure when you examine the image closely.
According to his analysis, the viral image is probably nothing
(20:43):
more than a clever bit of digital manipulation, perhaps created
by someone looking to generate attention, or perhaps by someone
playing on the locations already established reputation for unusual activity.
The debates continue across social media, with some peoples defending
the photograph's authenticity and others dismissing it as an obvious fake.
(21:05):
Without comprehensive forensic analysis of the original image file the
actual digital file as it came off the camera, complete
with all its embedded metadata, neither side can really claim
a definitive victory. The truth is probably knowable, but knowing
it would require access and analysis that hasn't happened yet.
The workers who took the photograph have not made any
(21:27):
public comments about whether they noticed anything unusual at the
cemetery that day, whether they felt anything strange, whether there
was any moment when they thought someone else might be present.
They went out to Kiagua to do a surveying job,
standard work at a remote location, and they came away
with an image that has now been viewed and argued
over by countless people around the world. The cemetery at
(21:50):
Kiagua holds the remains of generations of people who lived
and died in one of the harshest, most demanding environments
on Earth. Or not, any of them made an appearance
and a photograph taken in November twenty twenty five. Their
history is undeniably real. The children of the Pampinos, the
kids who worked alongside their parents under conditions that observers
(22:13):
have compared to slavery, who died young in a brutal desert,
whose small bodies were laid to rest in graves scattered
across the Auto Kama. Those children existed. They had names
and faces and short lives full of hardship. Their stories
persist in the historical record, in the accounts passed down
through families, in the physical remains that still lie in
(22:37):
those desert cemeteries. If you'd like to read this story
for yourself or share the article with a friend, you
can read it on the Weird Darkness website. I've placed
a link to it in the episode description, and you
can find more stories of the paranormal, true crime, strange,
and more, including numerous stories that never make it to
the podcast in my Weird Darknews blog at Weirddarkness dot
com slash news
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