26 Archived Photographs Featuring Something Unexplainable

Typically, when somebody gets scared or finds themselves in a dangerous or stressful situation, we talk about their fight or flight response activating. However, your body can also go into freeze or fawn mode, two lesser-discussed stress responses.

Broadly speaking, these stress responses are your body’s way to survive and return to a calm, relaxed state by decreasing, ending, or evading danger.

The fight response activates if your body perceives that you can realistically outfight the danger you’re in. Similarly, your flight response is your body signaling that you have a chance of outrunning the source of the danger, WebMD states.

A freeze response is exactly what it sounds like: you freeze up and feel stuck in place because your body doesn’t believe that you can either outfight or outrun the danger.

Meanwhile, a fawn response is typically used after an unsuccessful attempt to fight, flee, or freeze up, and involves you becoming highly agreeable and helpful to the source of the danger to try to soothe them.

The ‘Old School Creepy’ subreddit’s roots stretch all the way back to 2014, when it was first created. Originally, it was meant to be a place for “eerie nostalgia, vintage horror, and creepy things from the past,” and the group has stuck to this ever since.

For more than a decade, the members of this online community have been gently scaring each other, as well as casual visitors from other groups, with photos that they’ve dug up from the past.

According to the moderators, you shouldn’t post anything modern or off-topic in the group. “If it doesn’t feel like it crawled out of the past, it doesn’t belong here,” they stress. What’s more, everyone is encouraged to avoid reposting photos that have already been shared before.

Previously, during an in-depth interview, Bored Panda spoke with two of the moderators of the subreddit, Seryan_Klythe and TheOddityCollector. They shared their thoughts about both the online community they’ve built and the unsettling vintage photos that the members of the group focus on.

"The subreddit was created for people who enjoy the eerie feeling of old photos. Unlike modern horror, old pictures can be creepy in a more subtle way—through strange expressions, outdated fashion, or imperfections in the photo itself," moderator TheOddityCollector told us earlier.

Moderator Seryan_Klythe told Bored Panda that the thing about disturbing vintage photos that truly fascinates them is that they were taken using much simpler technologies.

“The world was different and saw things differently, too. The fascination is part of understanding what was creepy to someone then was simplistic and played more with their blunt fascination to take things at face value or without the use of high-sophistication gimmickry,” they said.

Meanwhile, moderator TheOddityCollector stressed the fact that looking at unsettling photos shows us a world that is at the same time familiar and very different.

“The way people dressed, the way photos were taken, and the way time has changed them all add to the mystery. Some images weren’t meant to be scary, but they feel that way now, which makes them even more interesting,” they told us earlier.

There are a whole bunch of factors that help create the creepy atmosphere in these images. These include things like the subject, the focus, the color and mood, the original intent, strange expressions, as well as outdated medical or funerary practices, according to the moderators of ‘Old School Creepy.’

“Some photos have mistakes, like double exposures, that make them look ghostly without meaning to," TheOddityCollector said.

According to moderator Seryan_Klythe, some of the reasons why the community is so popular online include people being “drawn to a life that existed without Photoshop, film effects, and blunt macabre.”

Moderator TheOddityCollector added: “People love a good mystery, and these photos make us ask questions. Who are these people? What happened to them? Why does this image feel so unsettling? It’s a mix of history, curiosity, and a little bit of fear that keeps people coming back.”