45-year mystery behind eerie photo from The Shining is believed to be solved

Posted by colinprince 4/12/2025

45-year mystery behind eerie photo from The Shining is believed to be solved(www.cbc.ca)

125 points | 54 comments

boulos 4/12/2025|

What a weird investigation though. Sounds like they could have solved it by asking the photographer first, which they eventually did:

> Finally, Spark contacted Murray Close, the photographer who took the picture of Jack Nicholson that was inserted into the original image.

> The photographer revealed that "there was no such thing as the Warner Brothers photo archive [and] that was a complete mistake."

> Instead, Close had sourced the original photo from the BBC Hulton Photo Library in London, now part of Getty Images.

> The photo, it turns out, was taken at a Valentine's Day dance on February 14, 1921, in the Empress Ballroom at the Royal Palace Hotel in London.

pierrec 4/15/2025||

Sounds like a typical investigation to me. You go down a few rabbit holes which turn out to be dead ends, and eventually realize the solution was right under your nose this whole time (this may sound familiar if you've done enough debugging as well). I also suspect the solution wasn't as obvious as the article makes it seem. For sure it should be framed more as a group effort, but that's just the writing style being weird.

actuallyalys 4/15/2025|||

Depending on how work was divided up, it doesn’t seem like the photographer of Jack Nicholson would necessarily know where the image Nicholson was superimposed on came from, so I don’t blame them for not checking with him first.

Al898989 4/18/2025|||

Not quite as it was reported. First, the photo was said to be in the Warner Bros archive - repeatedly, including by Lee Unkrich, the doyen of Shining research - and my multiple attempts to find it failed. That was because it never existed... It had been said by the woman who did the retouching, so you'd expect her to know, but in fact, she didn't. Murray Close didn't take the photo, he took the photo of Jack Nicholson, so no reason at first to assume he knew. It's also difficult to contact such people - he's now a very successful photographer - and it took emails, messages to his instagram, his website, to get a reply to something I'm sure he thought was 45 year old trivia.

boulos 4/26/2025||

Thanks for replying! That's a good reason. Reporting is always hard, and of course, many things appear obvious in hindsight!

frereubu 4/15/2025||

I wonder if the "investigators" were subconsciously not that interested in actually solving the mystery, but were just enjoying the process. Can't remember what it was I was reading recently, but there was a character who deliberately did things the hard way, or in a convoluted way, because it satisfied something inside of him.

Edit: It was this article about an orchid collector: https://www.susanorlean.com/articles/orchid_fever.html

notarobot123 4/15/2025|||

Anyone who falls in love with Haskell can probably relate.

e_y_ 4/15/2025|||

Have you seen Adaptation (2002)? It has a wildly meta, fictionalized/comedic portrayal of Susan Orlean's book and the creative process of screenplay writing

frereubu 4/15/2025||

Yeah, such a great film.

huhkerrf 4/12/2025||

> I do feel a sense of achievement. We knew the photograph with Jack Nicholson in [it]. We knew that there was an unknown man, but we didn't know who he was.

Of course, this skips over the fact that it was actually a reddit poster who discovered the person, and the professor didn't believe him.

zelphirkalt 4/15/2025||

Actually no. In the audio file they discuss this. The redditor thought it was a misidentification and did not believe it, while the person researching it further did believe that was a good identification.

Al898989 4/18/2025||

Yes, Connor discounted it, said it wasn't a match. It took looking at photos of Casani to nail it down and actually it was the injuries reported in his RAF file that confirmed it.

mingus88 4/15/2025||

Which should be the default mode of operation with anything you read on Reddit these days.

I mean, discounting what Reddit has become in 2025, would you trust any anonymous post that said “I ran it through my facial recognition database and got a match from over 100 years ago”

It’s not true until it’s verified

liotier 4/15/2025|||

> Which should be the default mode of operation with anything you read on Reddit these days.

Wide variance depending on subreddit - though, apart from the ferociously moderated exceptions, the large ones are all hopeless.

Aardwolf 4/15/2025|||

Where else can one reliably post and communicate on the internet today then?

compiler-guy 4/15/2025|||

Just because it can't be done or doesn't happen on reddit doesn't mean that it can be done or happens elsewhere.

genewitch 4/15/2025|||

Some place not run by a publisher with huge Chinese backing and millions of eyeballs? Like Fediverse, maybe? Fosstodon would be good for a lot of folks here. Just remember to not use the public timeline unless you're fine with 4chan levels of content, even on moderated stuff like fosstodon.

Good luck in this brave new world

_xerces_ 4/12/2025||

Non lite version: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/the-shining-photo-ident...

jwnin 4/15/2025|

Linking to the lite version of an article about an image is an odd choice as the lite version doesn't include images by default. Thanks for linking to the full page.

frereubu 4/15/2025|||

I really like the lite version - but then I used to work on an early version of the BBC website where pages over 70kb, including images, would make the ops team growl.

zamadatix 4/15/2025|||

Not to mention the image the lite page load is compressed down to 33 kb!

For an even more detailed version https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/patrons-at-a-s... but it's overlayed (and still not full quality) unless you want to buy it there.

netsharc 4/12/2025||

Sheesh, an instance where the "lite" version of the page is more annoying than the full version: an article about an image. Yes I realise I'm moaning about extra clicks to load the images..

kookamamie 4/15/2025||

The whole article reads like a complex mystery itself. Took a while to piece together what was even being investigated.

the_sleaze_ 4/15/2025||

I'm glad I wasn't the only one experiencing some struggle comprehending this article.

Al898989 4/18/2025||

Sorry it was confusing - it was worse doing it!

Lammy 4/15/2025||

> "[There were] lots of discussion about who he is and how strange he looks," said Spark.

It's cool how he's doing a tilted-axis / pulling-apart / creating-reality / as-above-so-below pose. Even if it's just coincidental for the original photo I doubt it's coincidental in why Kubrick chose it.

nottorp 4/15/2025||

> Instead, Close had sourced the original photo from the BBC Hulton Photo Library in London, now part of Getty Images.

So the UK government privatized their photo archives at some point?

rwmj 4/15/2025|

The BBC is a weird corporation created by royal charter. But it's not a part of the UK government, and nor are works created by the BBC copyright-free (as is the case in the US for something like NASA).

UK government publications aren't copyright-free either. In fact they manage to be worse than copyrighted, at least for works created before 1988 (some of which are perpetually copyrighted, others until 2040, others for 125 years, it's a big mess). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#United_Kingdom

Al898989 4/18/2025||

If anyone is interested, I'm the person who identified the man and found the photo.

pierrec 4/19/2025|

Thanks, I thought the whole investigation was really interesting. Unfortunately discussion on HN tends to stop once the article is off the front page, but your responses here will be valuable for anyone who finds this while searching.

soderfoo 4/15/2025||

> Instead, Close had sourced the original photo from the BBC Hulton Photo Library in London, now part of Getty Images.

That's a bit disappointing if I am reading it correctly. A photo library initially funded by the taxpayers, is now locked down by Getty Images?

jonas21 4/15/2025|

It was originally a private archive. The BBC acquired it in 1958 and then sold it the '80s. Getty Images acquired it in the '90s.

You can read more about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_George_Warris_Hulton

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