Ghost of a girl

A long writeup I'm afraid, but please bear with me.

When I left the house this morning I was pretty confident about what I was going to blip today. An afternoon site visit at a lovely old Federation Queen Anne residence - lovely leadlight windows, gorgeous painted and decorated ceilings - sorted!

This is not that blip.

The new owner of the house found a trunk full of old newspapers, documents, etc up in the attic. Truffling through old paperwork is my specialty, so I brought everything down to the kitchen and was left there alone to work through everything, to see what I could learn about the first owner of the house.

The original owner (let's call him John) had well-used passports authorising travel through some politically unstable parts of Europe, and in addition to being a seasoned traveller and sailor, also had a keen interest in photography. I found old camera parts in the pile, as well as miraculously intact, old, single-use glass plate negatives. Some were used, some were pristine and still wrapped neatly in paper in their original boxes. By holding the used ones up to the kitchen window I could see that John had seen elephants in India, and flamingoes (god knows where) on his travels. I took photos of many of the negatives, in case they were of use for my work.

This blip is looking through one of the old glass plate negatives and out of the kitchen window (you can see the window frame, as well as -regrettably- the reflection of my 10x compact camera off the discoloured glass plate). I have inverted the negative and fiddled with the saturation and light levels to play up the chemical discolourations on the glass plate, and I think the afternoon light coming through the window helped a bit.

The original photograph would have been lovely. While I have no firm evidence right this second, I think this was John's daughter. By having a quick search through online databases for births in the appropriate date range, the one name that matches up with the information known about her parents is: Lily. And I think it suits her perfectly. I love the idea of my photo capturing the image of the long-dead daughter within the context of the house that she once called home.

What intruiges me just a teensy bit is this:
a) if glass plate negatives were single-use (and they were),
b) if I can see my camera and by extension know where I was standing when I took the photo (in the middle); and
c) if I know I was alone in the kitchen...

then what's with the shapes in the top right quadrant, just adjacent to the girl's elbow and oxter/armpit? Can anybody else see two faces, or have I been sniffing antiquated photographic chemicals for too long today? Logic says it's probably just corrosion of the chemicals on the glass, but sadly I know too little about glass plate negatives to say one way or the other.

And before you ask, yes, I checked the other glass plates to see if the chemicals had been transferred from another photograph, but I couldn't find an image that was in any way similar. However it happened, I found it an interesting addition.

And no, I didn't ask the current owner if his house had ghosts. The last thing I need is for my boss to be looking at me and thinking I've lost the plot completely!