The Face at the Apartment Window in Every Photo: Beckett House, 1982

By September 1982, tenants of Beckett House in Newark started to realize a blurred white face was peering from the third-floor window in every photo they took-birthday parties in the yard, holiday shots from the street, even Polaroids snapped by kids playing hopscotch. It didn’t matter if the window was open, shut, or covered by curtains-always the same hollow eyes and a gash of a mouth, half-obscured by the grime. One neighbor, Harold Ellis, swore the face stared straight into his lens from twelve floors below. Even visiting relatives who didn’t know the stories caught it in their snapshots. By New Year’s, the whole block was sharing tales-hadn’t anyone checked on unit 3C? Management denied anyone lived there, but the rent records told otherwise. It wasn’t until renovations in spring that workers pried open the bolted window and found, inside the wall behind it, the forgotten photograph of a missing woman taped to the glass, her image slowly bleeding through with every passing year.