Can the mysterious iPhone 15 photo be attributed to the supernatural or is there a rational explanation?

What would you think if a photo showed someone standing in front of a mirror but the reflection in the mirror didn’t accurately show how the person is standing? Most would be surprised, stunned, and even possibly scared. This is exactly what happened in a photograph posted on Instagram. A woman who was shopping for a wedding dress was standing in front of two mirrors. Look at the position of her arms in both mirrors and the way she was standing in front of the mirrors.

Note that she is standing with her left arm down by her side and her right hand folded across her abdomen. However, the mirror right in front of her shows both arms across her abdomen and it almost looks like her hands were interlocked together! And the mirror on the side shows both of her hands at her sides. Yet, this is not a trick photo. It is not the supernatural; it was not photoshopped and it is real.

Can you see why this photo would seem to be impossible?

The woman in the picture, with an Instagram username of “Wheatpraylove,” wrote “Okay hello! Upgraded from stories to the grid. I went wedding dress shopping and the fabric of reality crumbled. This is a real photo, not photoshopped, not a pano, not a Live Photo. If you can’t see the problem, please keep looking and then you won’t be able to unsee it. Full story in my highlights (THE MIRROR) Please enjoy this glitch in the matrix/photo that [made] me nearly vomit in the street. Also, I’m engaged!”

So what happened here? Engadget’s answer makes sense. Apple’s software didn’t realize that there were mirrors involved in the photo so it figured that there were three different women in the photo. Since she was moving when the photo was snapped, the algorithm spliced the photo together from multiple images. As a result, we get a very odd photograph that some might use to prove the existence of the supernatural.

Ironically, if there were three different people photographed instead of one with two mirrors, each person would have been photographed perfectly. So no, there is nothing supernatural about this impossible picture. It actually makes sense when you consider how the iPhone 15 cameras work.