Photos From The Past That Are Incredibly Unsettling

The Old School Creepy subreddit has been around since 2014, which means that it has invited people to share disturbing vintage pictures for more than a decade now! In this time, it managed to gather a community of 81K members—all fans of the creepy and spooky.

Bored Panda was lucky enough to get in touch with its moderators, who kindly agreed to tell us more about it.

"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 Unlike modern horror, old pictures can be creepy in a more subtle way—through strange expressions, outdated fashion, or imperfections in the photo itself," told us moderator TheOddityCollector.

Its other moderator, nicknamed Seryan_Klythe, said that what fascinates them about disturbing vintage images the most is the fact that they were taken in the time of pre-technological standards and bare-bones inventions. "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."

Indeed, when people were taking postmortem photos with their loved ones, they weren't thinking that they were doing something morbid—they were just trying to capture a simple photo they could remember them by in the future.

When postmortem photography was popular, passings were a frequent occurrence, which meant that many people, especially children, didn't have a photo taken of them while they were alive. So their relatives would usually take one after their passing.

Having a trinket of a deceased loved one definitely wasn't a new thing by then. People would cut locks of hair from the deceased and put them into lockets and rings or create [end] masks from wax. However, attitudes towards them and post-mortem photography have changed as our view of passing has evolved.

Our comfort with corpses decreased as the funeral industry appeared, the government removed post-mortem care from family members, and hygiene and modern medicine helped people live longer.

What fascinates moderator Oddity Collector the most about old unsettling pictures is that they are able to show us a world that’s familiar but 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."

When asked what makes these pictures creepy in particular, moderators mention a mix of things: its focus, the subject, the color/mood, the original intent, strange expressions, and outdated medical or funeral practices. "Some photos have mistakes, like double exposures, that make them look ghostly without meaning to," said TheOddityCollector.

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