Hidden Mothers: Spooky Photographs of Victorian Babies Held by Their Mothers

Have you ever had difficulties trying to get a baby to sit down and pose for a picture? It’s a massive headache now, but it was even harder for mothers in the Victorian era when vintage photography technology made posing very difficult. These creepy photos will show you how these mothers got their kids to calm down to get their pictures taken.

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 baby photos. 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 babies and also stay out of their children pictures. What‘s even more spine-chilling is the fact that mothers sometimes also did this to hold up their dead children for final creepy pictures before being buried.

Check out the scary pictures below! Just how these creepy and sometimes horrified children look when held by their Boogeyman ancestors is beyond us.

Source: The Hidden Mothers (via: Retronaut, The Hidden Mother Flickr group, 22words)

Hidden Mothers: Spooky Photographs of Victorian Babies Held by Their Mothers