WHEN Angela Gill takes a photograph, chances are the image will contain something that cannot be explained. She visited the North-East Aircraft Museum, at Washington, Wearside, late last summer and her photographs of one of the aircraft contained wispy outlines of a naked blonde.

She did not know who it was, but research on the internet led her to identify it as Marilyn Monroe The 37-year-old from Coxhoe, County Durham, is a psychic, or spirit, photographer and combines her interest in cameras with her long-standing psychic abilities.

As well as Marilyn Monroe, her portfolio includes photographs of one of Durham’s bestknown ghosts, Jimmy Allen, and she says she has spoken to the spirit of a daughter of infamous Victorian serial poisoner Mary Ann Cotton.

Spirit photography began as a fraud in the early days of photography and has attracted other fakers through the years.

The technique was invented in the US in the 1860s by William H Humler, who accidentally made a double exposure on a photograph of himself that created a faint second face in the resulting picture.

He set himself up as a medium and doctored the negatives of the photographs he took of people to add images of his customers’ deceased loved ones.

Angela, who discovered her spiritual gift at the age of ten and is a member of Durham Spiritualist Church, is used to scepticism and outright disbelief, but says she is the real thing.

She says: “In the 1800s and early 1900s, a lot of people used to fake their spirit photographs and it got a bad name. I just keep on going because I want better and better results.”

A lot of the spirit images she has recorded are faint and somewhat indistinct, and only noticeable after careful scrutiny.

“Nobody realises there is a connection between Marilyn Monroe and the North-East Aircraft Museum,’’ she says.

“I got a picture of a nude. I looked at the photograph and I connected with Elton John’s song Candle in the Wind.”

She identified Monroe from a You Tube video of Candle in the Wind – originally written about the actress.

When she returned to the museum she discovered the connection lay in one of the exhibits, a Lockheed training aircraft, and Monroe’s pre-film worklife.

“I didn’t know there was a connection. The plane she shows herself in was from the Burbank factory in America, where she actually worked in the 1940s.

“She was photographed there and that was where she was first noticed. An Army photographer took her picture and said she should join a modelling agency.”

Angela says she communicated with the star.

“She said she was happy now, in her own voice.

Normally it comes through to me in a man’s voice, that of my spirit guide, but it was a sweet, timid voice she had,’’ she says.

ANGELA also photographed the spirit of a dead airman she calls Shaw, who walks through the museum, which houses the wreckage of his aircraft.

Jimmy Allen’s is a popular bar by Elvet Bridge, in Durham City, which is named after the legendary Gypsy piper who died aged 77 in dungeons below the nightspot in 1810.

Allen had been sentenced to death for stealing horses. He was given a royal pardon, but died in the jail 48 hours after it had been granted.

Angela says: “He had handcuffs on and came and stood in the middle of the tunnel.

“I asked him to pose for a photograph for me and that’s how I got it. I recognised him from an article in The Northern Echo.”

Five years ago, Angela had a miscarriage and says the spirit of the baby first appeared in a photograph her mother took of Angela and her dog. It shows a little girl in the window holding a toy rabbit. Angela has seen the girl several times and believes it is her dead baby, who in the spirit world is growing.

During a ghost hunt at Hallgarth Manor House, in West Auckland, she says she spoke to one of the daughters of Victorian serial poisoner Mary Ann Cotton.

“She said her mum was horrible to her and to her dad. She said if her mother hadn’t been found guilty, she would have gone to the authorities herself because her mum’s an evil woman.”

Angela says that in the physical world we are surrounded by spirits, but only some people have the gift to communicate with them.

She is grateful to her mother, Pat, a clairvoyant, and her partner, Kevin, for their support and to the Spiritualist Church for helping her develop her gift to communicate safely with the other side and keep bad spirits at bay.

“It is nothing to do with Ouija boards; it is doing it in a safe environment and knowing what you are doing and that you have protection around you.

“You put a ball of light around you and ask spirit guides to come in so there are no bad spirits that can come in and harm you.

“You do get naughty spirits as well, but your guides are there to stop them getting close to you. If they have been bad on the earth plane and they are passing over, they don’t always change, they might actually keep the same character.”