Café Phantom

These are four pictures I took in quick succession at a café near my house. I'm a photographer and was taking pictures for artistic purposes when I captured these. I remember taking these photos, but do not remember anyone or anything walking or otherwise passing past the lens. I was left with the impression, in fact, that they would be unimpressive and that they'd be deleted (though I waited, as usual, until later to assess my work).

They were taken without a flash with a Canon Rebel XTi (fps 5), a shutter speed of ¼ of a second, and without a tripod (though I was sitting still in a chair). After consulting a couple of other photographers about the photo, I have yet to come up with an explanation. It was noted that the motion blur on the figure suggests movement to the right though the figure went left. There also appear to be features suggesting a face in the third frame, though there are clearly no such markings in the first or second. It's also noteworthy that everything else in the photo (including the two girls behind the figure, one of whom was talking and – between the second and third pictures – had moved her hand) is in perfect focus.

Taking all this into consideration, we concluded that the figure, whatever it is, seems to be twisting – fast and continuously - in a counter-clockwise direction and that it covered about 8 or 9 feet of space doing this in 1.8 seconds (given the shutter speed and fps speed of the camera). This without I, nor the two girls at the table, nor my friend (whose elbow is in the bottom left hand corner) noticing.

I have all four of the originals. They were taken in RAW format on a digital SLR and thus have saved the most information possible to have a record of for each of these four photographs (including the color information).

Please let me know what you think. It looks like a ghost, smells like a ghost…does it sound like a ghost to you?