Wild Theories Swirl as Man Finds Footprints Leading to His House at 6 A.M.

A spine-chilling photograph has left the internet spooked after a man shared what he saw when leaving his house at 6 a.m.

In a Reddit post on the r/oddlyterrifying subreddit, user u/NastyPotatoes posted a picture of his front porch steps with footprints trailed on them.

With more than 28,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments, the picture has sparked a whole host of theories.

"Perfectly fine, just your average wet ghost," said Reddit user Toishi69, while NewestAccount2023 said it was "time for some cameras."

"NO the scary part is there are no prints going down the stairs," said srgbski.

Others dubbed the unusual picture "creepy" and "straight terrifying."

Alongside theories of ghostly goings on, other Redditors shared slightly more rational ideas.

"Depending on the humidity level where you live, walking up your stairs barefoot the night before can leave enough of an oily residue to prevent dew," said ShakeTheEyesHands.

While bumblingneanderthal wrote: "What you are seeing I think is the absence of water from the hydrophobic oils left by someone's skin."

Rob Thompson, a meteorologist at the University of Reading in the U.K,, told Newsweek that there was likely a reasonable explanation for the footprints.

"Condensation—hence dew—will form when the air at the ground reaches 100 percent relative humidity, that normally occurs because of overnight cooling, and I shall assume that's what's happened here," he said.

This is where the science comes in.

"How efficiently dew forms on a surface depends on the surface. Bare feet leaving sweat and oils behind are also enough to change the properties of that bit of the surface," explained Thompson.

For example, when you write a message on the bathroom mirror, it will disappear when condensation from your shower has dissipated, but may reappear again the next time you take a steamy shower.

This is because your skin has left a layer of grease on the glass—thin enough that you don't see it with the naked eye. But when the window gets colder than the dew point, the thin layer of grease provides a tiny bit of isolation, meaning that condensation will form on the other parts of the window first.

But in this case, Thompson had a different working theory for the mysterious footprints.

"I think more likely there is a small change in the heat capacity of the surface of 'stepped wood' compared to 'unstepped wood,"' said Thompson.

"Heat capacity is the amount of energy needed to warm a substance up a set amount. We don't see this effect all the time, so I suspect it was a very marginal case, where a small change happens to have mattered enough to make a difference," he added.

While rare, Thompson explained that it was possible that the footprints in the Reddit post were caused by a slight difference in dew formation.

"As the surfaces lost heat to radiation overnight, the footsteps lost very lightly differently to the rest—so ended a slightly different temperature," he said. "I suspect the situation shortly before the observation had held the small temperature, and hence humidity, difference for long enough that the tiny difference in dew formation lasted long enough to be faintly visible."

As well as these unusual conditions, he added that it was likely a very still morning with little to no wind.

"For dew to fall at all there's rarely much wind, so as not to smear out the differences," he explained.

This isn't the first time the internet has been captivated by a mystery. A "ghost truck" in a photo of a home in West Virginia that Newsweek reported on last year attracted much attention, as did an eerie effigy found in a cave in Norway.

Newsweek reached out to u/NastyPotatoes via Reddit for comment.