Really strange photo

Last Monday I attended an auction where I bought a stand-up, life sized, Elvira. Remember her? She was hostess on a TV series that specialized in horror and weird shows. I brought her home and cleaned the dust off. Then I removed the, now useless, badly torn, cardboard back and replaced it with a stiff sheet of foamboard so the old gal would stand up straight. While I was finishing it up I got the bright idea that it would make a good gag picture if I stood it at the head of our front stairs to the second floor. So I took the figure and positioned it in the turn in the stairs near the top. I then went to the bottom of the stairs and using my digitale camera I snapped a picture. I could tell by the monitor that the picture looked weird, even apart from Elvira. Well, I noticed the battery warning light was on so I went where we keep fresh batteries and put new ones into the camera. Then I went back to the foot of the stairs and shot another picture up the steps at Elvira. Again, when I checked the camera monitor I saw the same smokey abboration that was in the first one. Thinking my camera must be going bad, I stepped into the Livingroom and shot a picture of the fireplace, then one of my little black schnauzer and another of our grey Schnauzer. All of those three shots were clear as a bell; much to my relief. So ,"I again went to the foot of the stairs and shot a third time up the steps. The anomalie was still there, not as pronounced as before; but still there. So I got my film camera and shot a couple pictures to see if it shows up on film. It will be awhile before I can get the film processed. Then roughly half an hour later I tried again to shoot up the front stairs. This time the shot was clear. But this isn't the end of it. My wife was on Auction Zip.com looking up local auctions when she came to an ad by an auctioneer we know quite well. My wife got excited and startted montioning me out of my comfortable chair in the den to come over and see something she had brought up in that ad on line. Reluctantly I got up and went to see what was so interesting. In the pictures this fellow had on line was an old antique foot pedal organ. The picture showed the same anomalie that my stairs shot had. All of his other pictures were bright and clear. In checking with the auctioneer I was informed that he couldn't get a clear picture of that d**n organ. He'd have thought his camera was at fault but all of his other pictures both before and after were just fine. So he put the bum picture of the organ on site becauase you could see what it was in spite of the "smoke". So I guess it wasn't Elvira that caused this anomalie. My stairs pictures are simply faded out by what looks like swirls of smoke. Really weird. Anybody out there have any kind of explaination?