Fantasma. Francia

A teenage boy claims he has managed to capture a ‘guardian ghost’ on his phone at a Great War cemetery in France.

Mitch Glover, 14, from Leamington Spa, was visiting the Neuville-St Vaast German war cemetery near Arras, in northern France, during a school trip when he took a photograph of the ‘ghost’.

Not until after the school boy came home, did he notice the eerie figure in one of his pictures, which he says looks like a man wearing the uniform of a Scottish regiment.

Mitch was visiting France on a school trip when he snapped several iPhone pictures in quick succession of the war cemetery near Arras, scene of bloody battles of World War I, nearly a hundred years ago.

Number three in the series of black-and-white images sees a ghostly white figure watching over the grave markers in the left of the frame.

After looking into the history of the region, Mitch's family discovered that the shape of the apparition could resemble that of the kilt and Tam o'Shanter uniform of the historic Seaforth Highlander regiment.

Neuville-St Vaast is the largest German cemetery in France, containing 44,833 burials, and is located a few hundred metres away from Nine Elms military cemetery.

Buried at Nine Elms are twelve N.C.O'S. and men of the 114th Seaforth Highlanders who fell on the 9th April, 1917.

‘Our school tour was to look at war graves as we are studying poetry of the First World War in literature and I am doing history,’ Mitch said.

‘I didn't feel anything at the time, I just took it. I took it in a rush. I snapped four as I knew I could just choose the best afterwards.

‘It was when I got home, I was sat on the sofa flicking through pictures when I saw it and immediately ran upstairs to show my mum. She was kinda freaked out. It caught my eye and I saw it and went “wow”.

‘It looks like there is someone stood there, I thought it was like a ghost from World War One. A soldier.’

Mitch's mother Sue, 50, an antiques dealer, says: ‘He came upstairs, he said “I got something on my picture, I think I got a ghost” and I didn't believe him at first and asked him to show me.

'My reaction was "oh my". It was immediate to me, you could see there was something in that one place.

‘We checked his other pictures, and it was just on that one, just one. It's stood at ground level. Because it is the middle one of the sequence, it takes away the idea that there must have been a splodge on there.

‘It didn't look like a German soldier. I thought it just looked out of place. And then a friend of mine said, do you realise that looks a bit Scottish, like World War outfits from the Seaforth Highlanders. 

'I could see what they meant. It looks like they are holding something in one arm. Whether it's a rifle or something one friend said it looks like he's stood on guard over them. ‘

The Seaforth Highlanders was a historic regiment of the British Army associated with large areas of the northern Highlands of Scotland. 

During the Great War they took part in the retreat from Le Cateau, the Battle of the Marne and the subsequent chase of the German forces to the River Aisne. In mid-September 1914, the battalion was heavily involved in the Battle of the Aisne, suffering heavy casualties including the CO.