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With all the special effects, makeup, and technology we have today, it’s easy to create an unsettling photo.
But somehow, modern images rarely feel as chilling as the ones from the past. There’s something about the grainy black-and-white film, the stiff poses, and the haunted expressions that makes these old photographs feel darker and more mysterious.
It almost feels like you’ve stumbled onto something you shouldn’t see. But you can’t help yourself.
So don’t—below, you’ll find a glimpse into that past, one that might make you want to keep the lights on while you scroll. Enjoy the spine tingles.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
British Soldiers After Their Release From Japanese Captivity In Singapore, 1945
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#2
Jewish Children Walking Towards The Gas Chambers
Just because Photoshop didn’t exist back then doesn’t mean early photographers couldn’t get creative. In fact, they found plenty of ways to manipulate photos without any tech, relying on chemistry and careful handiwork.
As a result, their efforts produced images that were beautiful, strange, or downright scary, depending on what the photographer was aiming for.
#3
With Her Brother On Her Back A War Weary Korean Girl Tiredly Trudges By A Stalled M-26 Tank, Korea, 1951
#4
Runaway S***e Peter, Exposing His Severely Whipped Back
One popular technique in the mid-19th century was hand-tinting black-and-white daguerreotype and carte de visite photographs.
Daguerreotypes, invented in 1839, used images on silver-plated copper and became widely popular during the Civil War era. If you’ve ever seen old photos with faded color, like the ones here, that’s how they were made.
#5
If You Ever Wondered How The American Buffalo Could Go From 30,000,000 To 300 In 50 Years, Pictures Like This May Give Some Idea (Buffalo Skulls)
#6
Patient Brutally Restrained In A Mental Institution, France Circa 1900
#7
Conrad Veidt In His Role As Gwynplaine In The 1928 Film "The Man Who Laughs"
In time, albumen prints, including cartes de visite and cabinet cards, became a go-to for photographers. The paper base provided a steady surface that made hand-coloring far easier than working with daguerreotypes.
Take, for example, these hand-colored albumen prints from late 19th-century Japan showing sumo wrestlers, women in kimonos, and even a man with a full back tattoo.
#8
Horrifying (And Nearly Fatal) Facial Injuries To A German Soldier In World War I (1914-1918)
#9
Blanche Monnier Was Secretly Kept Locked In A Small Room By Her Aristocratic Mother And Brother For 25 Years. Monnier Had Not Seen Any Sunlight For Her Entire Captivity
#10
A Chinese Woman Whose Feet Were Bound From Childhood, 1911
Photographers also developed techniques to make prints brighter and their subjects look more appealing.
A British photography journal from 1875, for instance, advised using a sharp, fine-pointed pencil to add highlights, and suggested brightening areas like cheeks that printed too dark by “cross-hatching with a rather blunted pencil.”
#11
Nurses Carry Babies During A Gas Drill In A London Hospital In 1940
#12
Shadow Of A Noose Against A Brick Tower During War Crimes Trials. Nuremberg, Germany
Luke Branwen 5 months ago
That was a time where people knew how to handle naz!s. Now it's all "please respect different opinions and agree to disagree 🥺"
#13
Blind Pioneer, Photo By Antanas Sutkus, Kaunas, Lithuania, 1962
Victorians, in general, were quite fond of using the “Photoshop” of their era to look better on camera.
Beyond pencil scratchings that brightened faces, photographers used various tricks to slim waists, adjust necklines, reshape arms, and tweak features like mouths, hair, and eyes.
No Facetune required to look snatched.
#14
Coal Miners Returning From The Depths After A Days Work, Belgium, Circa 1900
#15
Clown On Stilts, The Way They Used To Bring It
#16
The Marriage Of 22-Year-Old Charlie Johns And 9-Year-Old Eunice Winstead Was A Child Marriage That Took Place In The State Of Tennessee, United States, In January 1937
They didn’t stop at beauty edits, either. Different photographers experimented with all sorts of effects to make images more interesting or downright eerie.
Techniques included distorted images, pinhole photography, mirror portraits, “magic vignettes,” artificial mirages, ghostly double exposures, silhouettes, and even staged “decapitated” headshots.
#17
Misses Fannie Mills Aka “The Ohio Big Foot Girl”
#18
A Trapper Boy, One Mile Inside A Mine In West Virginia, 1908
#19
Glasgow School Of Art Student Performance - Early 1900s
Of course, the next question is: how did they pull it off?
Take spirit photography.
In the early 20th century, a British man named William Hope gained fame in Spiritualist circles for allegedly capturing images of ghosts in his photos.
He formed a group called the Crewe Circle, taking advantage of grieving families who had lost loved ones in World War I and wanted proof their relatives were still near.
By 1922, Hope was making good money in London as a spirit photographer and medium, with supporters like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
#20
Ella Harper, Known As The "Camel Girl", Was Born With A Very Rare Orthopedic Condition That Caused Her Knees To Bend Backwards, Called Congenital Genu Recurvatum
KC Lancaster 5 months ago
She was a happy person, could get around fine, made lots of money as the star in the W. H. Harris's Nickel Plate Circus, and was married later to a school teacher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Harper
#21
Melted And Damaged Mannequins After A Fire At Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum In London, 1925
AtMostAFabulist 5 months ago (edited)
That head on the left side on the floor, is looking up the butt of that mannequin 😲
#22
Operation Doorstep Was A Civil Defense Test. In Operation Doorstep, Blast And Thermal Effects Were Evaluated On Mannequins
Tucker Cahooter 5 months ago
The guy in the jacket seems to be coping well, the others not so much
But how did he actually create these ghostly images?
According to Nathaniel Stein, a photography fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the main trick was double exposure on photosensitized glass plates.
Photographers would first capture the “spirit” (often a person draped in fabric) and then use the same plate to photograph the sitter, resulting in a ghostly overlay that looked convincingly supernatural.
Alternatively, multiple negatives could be printed onto a single piece of photographic paper.
Eventually, skeptics exposed Hope’s photos as fakes, but for a time, people truly believed they were seeing the afterlife.
#23
Wrapped Medical Cadavers At University Of Pennsylvania Circa 1915
Sara Frazer 5 months ago
"Gaze my friends perhaps with glee, as you are now- so once were we, and if you do not give a cuss, just grab a hook- and follow us"
#24
Portrait Of German Architect Carl Weber And His Wife, Emily Of Stratford In 1850, Just Hours After She Died
#25
Josephine Myrtle Corbin, The Four Legged Woman (1890's)
Multa Nocte 5 months ago
Is there a reason some people feel compelled to come here to make ugly comments about people who were born with abnormalities?
Then there were the headless portraits, first achieved around 1856 by Oscar Rejlander, a Swedish-born Victorian photographer known for pioneering photomontage and combination printing.
To create these eerie images, multiple negatives were layered and combined to make it appear as though the subject had been cleanly separated from their head.
#26
"Hells Cafe" In Paris 1920s
#27
A British Merchant Being Carried By A Sikkimese Lady On Her Back. West Bengal Circa 1903
#28
Disney Technicians Repairing An Animatronic Figure
So the next time you come across an old photo with a ghostly figure, a floating head, or an unsettling aura, you’ll know what was really happening behind the lens. The mystery might be solved, but the wonder and the chill remain. And maybe, that’s what makes them so unforgettable.
#29
Photographs Of An Unwrapped Mummy Illustrating The Processes Of Mummification, 1941
#30
Les Diableries, A Series Of Stereoscopic Photographs Published In Paris During The 1860s
#31
Two Wax Department Store Mannequins Melt During A Heat Wave In London, 1929, Allegedly. They Also Live In Your Closet And Spy On You When You're Asleep
#32
Everyone Keeps Smiling And Most Ignore What Happens After Miss New Zealand Passed Out During The Photo Shoot Before The Miss Universe And Miss USA Pageants In Long Beach, Ca, Us In 1954
#33
Twins In Homemade Costumes In 1930
#34
A Girl Brushes Her Hair In 1920s
#35
A Us Navy L-8 Blimp That Continued To Fly After Its Crew Allegedly Disappeared, 1942
Multa Nocte 5 months ago
"A United States Navy blimp whose two-man crew vanished under mysterious circumstances, floats unmanned over San Francisco, California, on August 16, 1942."
#36
Old Clown Picture I Found Among Old Family Photos
#37
The Michelin Men In The 1920s
#38
A Creepy Costume
#39
Old Picture Hanging In The Basement Hallway Of A Hospital
AtMostAFabulist 5 months ago
What is going on with the second nun on the right? She looks possessed.
#40
Couple At A Fair In Mexico 1940
#41
Newly Formed Doll Heads Drying At A Doll Factory 1947
#42
A Young Girl Stands Near Live Alligators On An Alligator Farm In Florida, Us In 1948
#43
Treatment For Headaches In 1895
#44
Gas Mask Parade, Tokyo, 1930s
#45
Full Face Swimming Mask From 1928
#46
Disturbing Photo From Grandmother's Photo Album. Early 1900s. Context Unknown
#47
Art And Camera Magazine, 1952
#48
A Young Boy Gets His Teeth Examined At London's Friern Hospital 1890/1910
#49
A Whale's Remains In Alaska, 1910
#50
Stephan Bibrowski (1890–1932), Better Known As Lionel The Lion-Faced Man, Was A Famous Sideshow Performer. His Whole Body Was Covered With Long Hair That Gave Him The Appearance Of A Lion
#51
To Appear Headless While Taking A Photo, Known As "Horsemaning", Was A Popular Way To Pose In The 1920's
#52
1934 Max Factor Demonstrates His Scientific Device” The Beauty Micrometer Which Detects Defects In Feminine Beauty
I’ve Seen Things 5 months ago
🤦♀️ Can you imagine if this was the other way around and some old lady was detecting a man’s failure to uphold her opinion of beauty standards.
#53
This Is Francesco Lentini, The 3 Legged Man. He Spent His Years Working For The Circus And Lived Until The Age Of 77
#54
Devil's Mask Representing Leprosy, 14th Century
LakotaWolf (she/her) 5 months ago
Happily, it's treatable and curable today! And vaccines to prevent it are being researched/in clinical trials :D
#55
Vintage Photo Of A Ventriloquist And His Dummy, 1929
#57
Injuries Suffered From The 1892 Princeton Freshmen/Sophomore Snowball Fight
#58
From British Movie "First Men On The Moon" In 1919
TotallyNOTAFox 5 months ago
And it only took another 50 years to actually bring two men up there for the first time
#59
Group Of Creepy Cat Ladies
#60
Ruth Snyder's Mid-E*******n Photo Taken By Tom Howard And Published The Next Day In The New York Daily News
Multa Nocte 5 months ago
Jesus H. Christ, Bored Panda, you censor every other fucking word these days yet you show a picture of a person mid-electrocution? What the fuck?
#61
Young Child Born As A Result Of Human-Ape Mating Experiments (1950)
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persephone134 5 months ago
The discrepancy between publishing such pictures and censoring words and names in Orwellian proportions is beyond me.
Shaun Coleman 5 months ago
Meh. I found the random censoring of words by Bored Panda more disturbing.
Forrest Hobbs 5 months ago (edited)
Shaun Coleman: so, people getting killed, children walking towards death by genocide, and you're fine with that - but words being redacted disturbs you? Shaun, seriously, you need some psychotherapy to deal with what are clearly some serious problems in your mind. 😬
Load More Replies...
Forrest Hobbs 5 months ago (edited)
Get rid of the photo of Ruth Snyder being killed. That's just sick. We can't type "twérp" in comments without getting censored, and you think it's okay to show a human being getting killed? Shame on you!
Grace Sssssss 5 months ago
Good collection of photos. I hadn't seen a lot of these before; I learned so much.
Henk Lafifi 3 months ago
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Robin DJW 5 months ago
Sorry, BP. I don't come to this site to be sickened. It takes very little for me to reach satiety of a prurient appetite in grotesqueries. "Creepy and unsettling" are inadequate terms for most of these. I gave up after just a few.
RamiRudolph 5 months ago
Well I disagree, those were really interesting. A few were of bad taste, like the electric chair one, but most were great.
Load More Replies...
Henk Lafifi 3 months ago
Hello!!! I'd like to introduce myself by providing a little before and after. Left you see me in active a*******n just a year ago. Right you see me in my recovery journey months ago. I do NOT claim to be anywhere close to perfect. But I AM teachable. I recently had a break the chain of a*******n. . .... long story short, I finally admitted what everyone and my Higher Power knew... I AM AN A****T. I'm restarting my steps so I can work them with HONESTY, OPEN-MINDEDNESS, and WILLINGNESS. I'm excited to find some who helped me save my life.. i dont know how he did it for real he is GREAT.. I am happy to find minded people in recovery needs help.. if you help or more information.. write or email 📩📧📩📧 WRITE ME FOR MORE INFORMATION AND HEALING.. https://wa.me/message/7BGDSBL365K2N1
persephone134 5 months ago
The discrepancy between publishing such pictures and censoring words and names in Orwellian proportions is beyond me.
Shaun Coleman 5 months ago
Meh. I found the random censoring of words by Bored Panda more disturbing.
Forrest Hobbs 5 months ago (edited)
Shaun Coleman: so, people getting killed, children walking towards death by genocide, and you're fine with that - but words being redacted disturbs you? Shaun, seriously, you need some psychotherapy to deal with what are clearly some serious problems in your mind. 😬
Load More Replies... Forrest Hobbs 5 months ago (edited)
Get rid of the photo of Ruth Snyder being killed. That's just sick. We can't type "twérp" in comments without getting censored, and you think it's okay to show a human being getting killed? Shame on you!
Grace Sssssss 5 months ago
Good collection of photos. I hadn't seen a lot of these before; I learned so much.
Henk Lafifi 3 months ago
🗣Ready to get your Ex Partner's back🤗?? fill your relationship with love and happiness💖💝💑, are you having issues with you partner every single day..? contact dr ALASHIRA he will help you restore your lost relationship or marriage👰👰 back.. help you bring peace to your home... contact dr ALASHIRA he will help you restore happiness to your home.. email 📧📧 dr.alashirao1@gmail.com WHATSAAP 👉👉+(234)-(9160)-14-(645)-6👈
Robin DJW 5 months ago
Sorry, BP. I don't come to this site to be sickened. It takes very little for me to reach satiety of a prurient appetite in grotesqueries. "Creepy and unsettling" are inadequate terms for most of these. I gave up after just a few.
RamiRudolph 5 months ago
Well I disagree, those were really interesting. A few were of bad taste, like the electric chair one, but most were great.
Load More Replies... Henk Lafifi 3 months ago
Hello!!! I'd like to introduce myself by providing a little before and after. Left you see me in active a*******n just a year ago. Right you see me in my recovery journey months ago. I do NOT claim to be anywhere close to perfect. But I AM teachable. I recently had a break the chain of a*******n. . .... long story short, I finally admitted what everyone and my Higher Power knew... I AM AN A****T. I'm restarting my steps so I can work them with HONESTY, OPEN-MINDEDNESS, and WILLINGNESS. I'm excited to find some who helped me save my life.. i dont know how he did it for real he is GREAT.. I am happy to find minded people in recovery needs help.. if you help or more information.. write or email 📩📧📩📧 WRITE ME FOR MORE INFORMATION AND HEALING.. https://wa.me/message/7BGDSBL365K2N1
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