Victorian England was a time and place where creepiness ruled pretty much all aspects of everyday life. …
POST MORTEM PHOTOS
One creepy part of Victorian times was the subject of death. Yes, death is pretty creepy… but Victorians somehow managed to make it just a bit weirder and creepier….
Post Mortem photos or memento mori (Latin for “remember that you will die”) were often the only time a person was photographed. Over the years we have seemingly grown to respect the dead enough not to dress them up and take pictures of them. But this wasn’t always the case.
It was common to have the deceased made up to look ‘alive’, that involved dressing them up, propping them up and even surrounding them with objects that they used to like or have in life. Sometimes the families may have chosen for their love one to look asleep but the popular trend at the time was to make them look alive, and even though it seems creepy to us, the victorians only acted like this for a good intention so that families got one last picture together and in remberence for them.
PART OF THE FURNITURE!
Have you ever had difficulties trying to get a baby/child to sit down and pose for a picture? Hard Right? Well during the victorian era it was even harder, when camera technology made posing for photographs difficult. The photo above is a class example how these mothers got their kids to calm down to get their pictures taken, they decided to scare the hell out of them!
Early pioneering photographers in the late 1820s had to wait hours for camera exposures. Even though exposure times had been drastically cut down to about 30 seconds by Victorian times, mothers still had to go to very strange and creepy-looking measures to get their children to sit still for a photo. Babies had to be held by their mothers who, with the best of intentions, hid themselves in quite peculiar and creepy ways so they could calm their child and also stay out of the shot.
HALLOWEEN COSTUMES
Around the early 1900’s people had to painstakingly craft their own DIY (Do It Yourself) vintage Halloween costumes, and boy are we glad we weren’t alive back then. These creepy handmade vintage Halloween costumes are absolutely horrifying.
Yikes…..
Even Christmas was creepy….
SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY
Spirit photography was first used by William H. Mumler in the 1860s. Mumler discovered the technique by accident, after he saw a second person in a photograph he took of himself, which he found was actually a double exposure. Seeing there was a market for it, Mumler started working as a medium, taking people’s pictures and doctoring the negatives to add lost loved ones into them (mostly using other photographs as basis). Mumler’s fraud was discovered after he put identifiable living Boston residents in the photos as spirits.