The Mysterious Graveyard

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In August 1983 a friend and I took a trip to Upstate New York.  We spent the night at a motel in Albany and took little notice of our surroundings, since we had checked in late that night.  The next morning I was up early and went outside. To my surprise, it turned out the motel was next to a large convent.  I peered through some tall shrubs and saw an unusual looking cemetery.

I returned to the room, picked up my camera, a Leica R3, and wandered into the cemetery.  I took a few photographs of the uniform iron crosses that marked the resting place of many nuns who'd been associated with the convent.  I then took a picture of the crosses in the foreground and children playing soccer in the background.  I thought this might be a good one.

I went back to the motel and suggested to my friend that she should come and have a look at the cemetery. I was pretty sure she'd never seen anything like it.  She did, but at one point she leaned against one of the iron crosses, then she balanced on one of the others.  her actions are evident in the pictures I took as she was doing her balancing act.

In those years most of my films was developed at a professional lab uptown.  I was shocked to see what had happened inside my camera as I was taking the pictures of my friend on the crosses.  No one has ever been able to offer an explanation as to what happened to the film.  I'd used the camera for at least a year before this incident and for two or three after and nothing similar ever happened.