Post‑mortem photography, or photographing the dead, gave rise to some truly gruesome accounts that still send shivers down our spines today. Back in the 19th century, when mortality rates were sky‑high, people turned to the camera to remember loved ones—or to make a quick buck. Below we dive into ten of the most unsettling stories behind those dead‑pan portraits.
Gruesome Accounts of Early Post‑Mortem Photography
10 Profiting From The Dead
A 1900 newspaper article recounted a daring photographer who set up shop on the Antietam battlefield three days after the infamous Civil War clash that left over 22,000 casualties. While navigating the grisly scene, he accidentally planted a camera leg on the chest of a dead Union drummer boy whose shallow burial left only his blouse buttons and a foot visible. He confessed, “It would be useless to go over the scene of that carnage again… I was nervous and excited… when I unwittingly planted one leg of the camera stand on the chest of a dead union drummer boy.” He snapped the picture, printed it, and sold each copy for 50 cents to a dollar, raking in nearly $2,000 in just two weeks.
9 Posing Dead Bodies
In the late 1800s a Chicago photographer, desperate for work, turned to the death columns of local newspapers. He visited grieving families and offered to photograph their recently deceased loved ones. One chilling anecdote describes him waiting until a dying father took his final breath, then arranging the corpse in a chair, holding the eyes open with stiff mucilage, and crossing the legs. In another case he retrieved a body from an icebox, propped it up, and snapped a picture that, despite its ghastliness, pleased the family. To make the subjects look livelier, he stuffed their cheeks with cotton, used pins or mucilage to keep eyes open, and sometimes hired artists to paint over blemishes and add eyes to the final image.
8 Photographing The Eyes Of The Murdered
A 1904 newspaper piece highlighted a popular belief that a murder victim’s eyes might retain the image of the assailant. The theory prompted Kansas City police in 1885 to photograph the eyes of murder victim Katie Conway, hoping that microscopic examination would reveal the killer’s face. The experiment, however, yielded no such revelation.
7 The New York Morgue
By the late 1800s, Bellevue Hospital superintendent invented a system to photograph unidentified bodies before they entered the “dead house.” By autumn 1885, a gallery of over 600 such photographs existed. Negatives were meticulously filed, allowing relatives to potentially recognize a lost loved one and keep a keepsake. In cases where bodies were too mutilated for visual identification, clothing and personal effects were cataloged for up to three months to aid families in their search.
6 One Last Picture
After a woman died on February 8, 1887, her husband became obsessed with capturing a final image of her. Ignoring pleas from her mother, he, along with the sexton and assistants, exhumed the freshly sealed grave in early March. A crowd gathered, the mother wept, and townsfolk threatened the man, yet he persisted. The coffin was opened, the lid lifted, and a photograph was taken before the body was re‑buried. Locals in Avon, Michigan, deemed the husband mad, with one onlooker proclaiming, “We’ll yet make a black bird of him that’ll smell of tar.”
5 Ghouls And Camera Fiends
When the September 8, 1900 Galveston hurricane claimed between 6,000 and 12,000 lives, the military was tasked with eliminating anyone looting the dead. Soldiers shot 125 self‑styled “ghouls.” Even worse were the “camera fiends” who roamed the disaster zone snapping pictures of nude corpses for profit. Two such photographers were caught, shot, and had their cameras smashed, with all negatives destroyed. Survivors later burned the bodies on funeral pyres to stave off disease.
4 Pinning On Clothing
By 1885, the surge in post‑mortem photography turned the trade into a lucrative yet controversial business. A newspaper reported a photographer so accustomed to his craft that when a drapery slipped on a posed corpse, he simply ripped a pin from his waistcoat and nailed the fabric to the flesh, arguing the dead felt nothing. Public discomfort grew, prompting many photographers to advertise compassion for the deceased or to conduct sessions in private.
3 Photographing Death Itself
In 1897, a professor claimed to have captured “death” itself using mysterious “Kritik rays” emitted from a vacuum tube. He asserted that these rays penetrated the body instantly, producing distinct images on photographic plates that differed between living and dead tissue. He imagined a future where hospitals could definitively determine life or death with this technique, a notion that fed contemporary fears of premature burial.
2 Diagnosed With Necrophilism
In 1911, the notorious poisoner Louise Vermilya sparked a media frenzy, prompting doctors to search for a medical explanation for her murders. They posited “necrophilism” (now known as necrophilia) as a possible diagnosis, which, if confirmed, could have spared her criminal responsibility and placed her in an asylum. Prior to her capture, neighbors noted her fascination with the dead: she helped with embalming and kept a “Death Chamber” where walls were plastered with photographs of corpses and cemeteries. The coroner declared her ghoulish delight in death could only be explained by necrophilism.
1 The Innocence Of Babies
Infant mortality in 1900 was a heartbreaking 165 per 1,000 births, starkly contrasting today’s seven per 1,000. One grieving mother, clutching her newborn wrapped in a blue shawl, begged a photographer for a portrait of her child. When the photographer finally saw the tiny, lifeless face, he exclaimed, “Why, good heavens, woman, the child is dead!” Yet the mother persisted, insisting on a photograph to forever remember her baby. Such images became a solemn keepsake for families mourning the loss of their youngest members.