In an exhibit last year, the Jefferson Historical Society & Museum explored the eerie side of 19th-century life in “Sitting Up with the Dead: A Victorian Mourning Exhibit,” which highlighted the period's funeral customs and touched on the truly bizarre world of Victorian photography. Victorians, for whom death was a constant presence, developed some chilling photographic trends far beyond the familiar post-mortem portraits.
The museum highlighted three spooky photo fads that are perfect for revisiting this Halloween:
Hidden Mother
One of the creepiest trends arose from a practical need: keeping a baby still for the long exposure time of a photograph. The solution? The mother would hold the baby in her lap. She was then covered entirely with a black cloth so she wouldn’t appear in the photo. The resulting image makes the baby appear to be floating or held by an invisible entity – a truly unsettling effect!
Spirit Photography
Want to capture a ghost? Victorians thought they could. Spirit Photography used techniques like double exposures to make an apparition "appear" in a photo. The most famous example is Mary Todd Lincoln’s photo, where her assassinated husband, President Abraham Lincoln, appears as a ghost behind her. The image is widely believed to be a hoax, though the photographer never admitted how the image was created.
Headless Photography
Perhaps the strangest trend of all was “headless photography,” a short-lived but popular fad. These playful, yet gruesome, portraits show the subject's severed head displayed in various unsettling ways. The subject often held the weapon of their "murder" in their other hand. Apparently, with death always close by, some in the Victorian era found comfort in dark humor.
We hope you are as “haunted” by these fascinating images as we were. Happy Halloween!
See photographs from our visit to Jefferson and the Jefferson Historical Museum.
