Sharjah: Call it photo-bombing by the unknown or what you will but a ghostly figure caught on camera by an amateur photographer on a recent desert outing is giving people the chills.

Indian Namit Vyas, 33, had gone on an off-roading trip with his family and friends last Friday, during which he clicked about 50 photos with his DSLR camera.

It was just another fun-filled outing in the desert but when he got home and checked the photos, he saw something in one particular frame he wasn’t prepared for.

Taken around twilight near interchange number 9 on Sharjah’s Al Dhaid Road, the photo was of his wife Anita, also 33, and their three-year old daughter Illisha but in the foreground there was ‘someone’ else too.

Alone in the dark

The image, which has since been shared many times on Facebook and has got people talking about it, shows a blurry figure of what appears to be a woman with outstretched arms and feet bent inwards.

Vyas, who clicked the particular photo in ‘auto mode’, said he has no idea of how the figure appeared in the frame.

“I usually edit all my photos before posting but not this time. The photo you see is completely raw, untouched,” said the man from Shimla who works as a sales manager in Dubai “I still don’t know what was that because I know I had clicked only my wife and daughter in the frame. There was no one else.”

Vyas’s friend Deepanjan Banerjee who was standing by when the picture was taken, said: “The shadow in the picture is clearly visible but what’s baffling is that there was no one else in the frame except the two. The figure too doesn’t resemble any of the women in our group.”

Dubai-based Anjali Sharma who claims to have spent several nights at ‘haunted’ places across the UAE to record paranormal activities, said: “Such images are often produced when certain energies we can’t see are caught on camera. This might have been the case here too.”

XPRESS photographers said the image couldn’t have been photoshopped.