A picture is embedded onto a piece of film or a digital sensor when a shutter opens up to let light in. It’s not any more complicated than that. Shutter opens, light comes in, sensor or film records the exposure for as long as the shutter’s open.

The darker the area being recorded, the longer one must leave the shutter open to properly expose the photograph or they need to use a flash. If the shutter open for a relatively short period of time (say 1/5 of a second), all this does is create a motion blur. In flash photography or really bright situations however, the shutter does not need to be open as long. But if the camera thinks the flash is off, or there’s a mis-communication between the flash and the shutter, or the camera has been manually set for a long exposure, you get this ghosting effect. The item that was exposed has since moved out of the frame (such as a freshly dead dear falling to the ground out of the viewing range of the camera), but there initial presence was still recorded. This is actually how con-men and flim-flams created ’spirit’ photographs in the old days when cameras were young and the only exposure time available was a long one.

Judging from the overall brightness and flatness of this image, especially when compared to the darkness of the first picture in the sequence, and the fact that the sky through the trees is really blown-out… I’m going to guess either the shutter fired too long(maybe as much as two seconds), and/or a flash was used when it was not necessary.

This picture has my vote of authenticity.

Anyways it’s not fake.