Who is the Strangest of them All?

This is the most recent - and perhaps the most telling – photograph featuring the man dubbed by Police as “The Phantom Selfie Snapper”, Selfies have been appearing on the net over a few years of an unidentifiable man in different locations, different bathrooms, and it took a while for people to start to recognise these bathrooms as their own. While not recognising the Snapper! So far as is known, nothing is ever removed, occasionally something is added, and it was only when people began recognising their own bathrooms that they made the connection between the Snapper and an item – a toothbrush that no-one claimed, a shampoo no-one used, a rubber duck – which appeared as a 'prop' in the Selfie and which he left behind. For a long time, the Snapper appeared alone in the Selfies, then things got sinister, he began to be glimpsed in other people's Selfies. A shadow behind a door, the side of a head or an eye peeping round the door-frame, unnoticed at the time, on thesmall phone screen, but beginning to emerge when the shot was enlarged on a monitor. And then there came a series in which he actually can be felt as a presence behind the person taking the Selfie, but unknown to them at the time. He was taking his own shots of them, usually showing the back of their head and the face looking out from the mirror. That was the really spooky phase. To have the nerve to loom over or around but always behind someone taking a Selfie in their own bathroom who, at the time, believed herself to be absolutely alone. Because it was always a woman behind whom the phantom loomed. As if he had been lurking in the bathroom, waiting for someone to come in and prepare to take her own Selfie, but he never drew attention to himself, never touched the woman who stood between him and the mirror. Until now! Something has changed. And it will never again feel safe, to go into your bathroom late at night, or when you are alone in the house – or even if you are not alone, but everyone else is asleep. For the Snapper is now making his hosts complicit. There is no longer a space between them and him. He has moved in and contact has been made. Do you know this woman? Are YOU this woman? Or will You be Next?