From Bizarre to Chilling: 20 Unsettling Photos That Are Hard To Shake
There’s something about old photographs that can turn the ordinary into the downright unsettling. Maybe it’s the stiff, awkward poses, the ghostly blur of long exposures, or the strange customs that made perfect sense at the time but look bizarre or straight-up creepy today. Heck, some photographers would even hide a child’s caretaker in plain sight by draping them in head-to-toe fabric so the focus stayed on the little ones.
This collection of vintage oddities runs the gamut, from masked figures and unblinking doll-eyed children to headless portraits and terrifying Halloween costumes that we just can’t unsee.
1. Long Before Photoshop, This Is How Children’s Portraits Were Done in the Victorian Era
2. ‘An Old Photograph of a Creepy-Looking Boy From the 1870s’
3. Victorian-Era Siblings Pose for a Portrait With a Touch of Rapunzel
4. ‘Creepy Mickey and Minnie Mouse Costumes From the 1930s’
5. ‘My Mom’s Creepy Chatty Cathy Doll on My Grandma’s Porch’
6. A Disheveled Santa Poses With Two Kids on a Donkey, 1910
7. A Circus Clown Looking Like the Stuff of Nightmares, 1920s
8. The Staring Doll? Absolutely Not
9. Another Creepy Doll Photobomb From the 1930s
10. ‘My Mom’s Childhood Halloween Costume in the 1960s. She Also Insists It Isn’t Creepy.’ It Was Most Definitely Creepy
11. Imagine Going Trick or Treating With This … Clown?
12. Early 20th-Century Clowns Pose for a Group Shot Outside the Big Top
13. ‘Just a Creepy Photo of My Grandmother Holding a Knife and Smiling Oddly in Seattle, 1930s.’ But Why Was She Doing That?!
14. ‘Lon Chaney as the Creepy Clown, 1924’
15. ‘Ejnar Mikkelsen, a Danish Explorer, Photographed in 1912 After Surviving Two and a Half Years Stranded in Greenland’
16. A Young Christopher Walken Giving People the Heebie Jeebies, 1953
17. ‘My Mom & Aunt With the Creepiest Flintstone Costumes Ever Created.’ You Don’t Say!
18. First Philadelphia Phillies Mascots: The Dancing Dutchman, His Giant Rat Chauncey, and a Creepy Kid in a Mask, 1883
19. ‘My Mom Holding a Creepy Clown Baby Prop on the Set of ‘Killer Clowns From Outerspace,’ Circa 1988′
20. Halloween Back in the Day Was Basically ‘The Purge’
Not creepy enough for you?
Fair enough. You might find 15 Eerie Photos of Abandoned Coal Mines or 20 Haunting Images That Capture America’s Forgotten Prisons a little more unsettling. And if you really want to feel shivers down your spine, don’t miss out on 17 Photos of Old Dentist Offices That Will Give You the Heebie-Jeebies.