A mysterious photograph revealing two ghostly heads floating in the middle of a street in Bradford has baffled experts.

The picture was taken on a dusky autumn evening in a wooded dell, close to a row of Victorian houses in Mount Royd in Manningham, by photographer Joanne Crowther.

When she developed the picture there was an intense bright light in the centre of the photograph.

After she blew up the image, she discovered two disembodied human heads.

"I was shocked by the picture at first. It was completely unexpected," said Miss Crowther, 35, a personal assistant in Bradford University's civil engineering department.

"I didn't really expect the picture to turn out because the camera was hand-held and it was quite dark. But I was surprised how much detail there was."

The negatives were developed at Bradford and Ilkley Community College, where she attends a photography workshop.

Miss Crowther said everyone in the darkroom was amazed. She was advised to seek expert advice from the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television and a leading university expert. The museum contacted the Fortean Photographic Library, which specialises in pictures of unexplained phenomena, and they confirmed it was not a fake.

Dr Roger Green, an expert at Bradford University's electronic imaging and media communications department, was unable to explain the photograph but was convinced that it was not counterfeit. Camera or film defects have been completely ruled out as a cause.

Miss Crowther said: "I have been taking pictures seriously for about 12 years and have never had anything like this before.

"I live in that street and I was quite spooked by the picture. I did not want to believe that there might be something floating around out there."

But the mystery deepened when Miss Crowther's landlord told her that a young boy had been murdered in a house in the street back in the 1890s.

A further bizarre twist emerged when she took another picture in the street of tyre tracks in the snow. After developing the photograph, she discovered two large, perfectly-shaped hearts entwined in the shot which she had not noticed at the time.

Miss Crowther's photographic work has been on exhibition. Her first solo exhibition entitled Faces of Bradford was displayed in Bradford Central Library in 1989.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.