Retired army officer, Major John Tulloch, had revisited the muddy track in Borneo where thousands of World War Two PoWs trudged to their deaths, only to be given a shocking surprise when he looked back at photographs he had taken.
Major Tulloch studied his pictures and found what appeared to be hunched, skeletal ghostly figures marching across his photograph, almost exactly in line with the path they took seven decades ago.
The haunting image evokes strong memories of the desperate ‘death march’ made by Allied prisoners of war.
Some 2,400 World War II PoWs died in the horrific Sandakan Death Marches in 1945 to avoid them being liberated as Japan was forced on the retreat.
Severely malnourished and barefoot, they were forced by brutal Japanese captors to walk 160 miles in sweltering heat for a month.
Maj Tulloch took the picture from the window of a 4×4 vehicle while driving along the ‘death march’ route in 2010.
It is thought the astonishing photographic illusion was caused by a the reflection of a patterned towel which was on the dashboard of the vehicle as he took the image.
Major Tulloch said he took the picture in 2010 when he did a recce of the route ahead of a
March of Remembrance and the unveiling of a memorial to the 400 members of the Royal Artillery who died.
Men who collapsed through exhaustion were left to die or were killed by being shot, bayoneted or beheaded.
Conditions were so appalling that some of the servicemen are said to have resorted to cannibalism to stay alive.
Only six men survived the three marches from Sandakan to Ranau and that was because they managed to escape.
It was the single greatest atrocity against Australian troops.
Major Tulloch, 66, said: ‘We were driving along the same track as that taken by the death march and I was clicking away on my camera, I took about 200-odd digital photographs.
‘I went through the pictures on a computer screen later and didn’t see it the first time round. I went back over them again and I just suddenly thought “what the hell…?”
‘I looked at the photo again and went very cold indeed. What I saw were the shapes of 17 or 18 ghostly figures coming out of the jungle and walking down the track going to Ranau which you can see in the far distance.
‘It took me a few moments to work out how it had occurred but it was too weird for words. I showed it to several people and they said it is quite extraordinary, some even refused to look at it because it was so haunting.
‘While my guide drove along he put a towel on the dashboard. The towel had a pattern on it and that reflected through the windscreen. I have called it reflections of a death march.’
Maj Tulloch is now an instructor in jungle warfare for the Royal Artillery.
by Mike Hansom
