From man-made disasters to evil science experiments to macabre stuffs, these creepy historical pictures and their equally disturbing backstories plumb the depths of human history’s dark side.
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Since the first camera was invented, they’ve given us the power to document everything that we see. Stunning landscapes, special moments, and the ones that we love are frozen in time with the click of a button.
What camera capture isn’t always happy and beautiful, though. Sometimes they capture dark, twisted, and horrifying images that etch themselves into our brains. Here are 10 creepy historical pictures that will give you the chills.
10. Shell-shocked Man
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The man in this photo may be smiling, but look closely and it’s clear that it’s not a happy grin. The look on his face is more of a hollow grimace, caused by the horrors of war.
The photo, from 1916, shows a soldier suffering from shell shock. The term was used to describe the state of hysterical paralysis, confusion, and dazed stares that were often seen on the battlefields.
The men fighting in WWI experienced unspeakable horrors that left their minds unable to cope with what they’d seen and done.
Men who had bayoneted others in the face developed uncontrollable facial twitches, and those who had shot soldiers in the stomach experienced cramps that would leave them writhing around in pain.
So often, the trauma of war would be too much for their psyches to handle, and they would descend into madness. This photo is even more haunting when you think about the fact that people didn’t pose for photos with a smile in those days.
9. Two-headed Dog
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Our first picture is straight out of a sci-fi novel. Soviet scientist Dr. Vladimir Demikhov created a two-headed dog, and these pictures prove it. They attached the head and forelegs of a small dog to the neck of a fully grown German shepherd, and both heads could hear, see, smell, and swallow.
This 1959 attempt was the 24th time he and his team had performed the surgery, and it was his most successful effort. The dogs died just four days later though, which was probably a good thing for the poor animals.
Although he may sound like a total mad scientist, Dr. Demikhov was an important figure in the surgical field and even coined the term transplantology.
His progress in organ transplantation helped move medical science forward, but his two-headed dog didn’t have any real-life application, so was widely condemned as being cruel and twisted.
8. Shadows of Hiroshima Victims
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These images might just look like strange shadows on walls and steps, and you might think at first glance that they’re nothing more than dirty marks on aging streets.
But they’re something much more sinister than that. What you’re seeing here are the carbon imprints of people and objects that were burned into the concrete the moment that the nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
The bomb, which was the first atomic weapon to be deployed in warfare, was dropped by the United States in 1945. Instantly, an estimated 140,000 Japanese civilians were killed.
It had the same effect as 15,000 tonnes of TNT, and entire families were scorched into the earth in a split second. Around 70% of buildings were burned to the ground and increased cancer rates continued to affect the island for decades. For those who survived, their mental and physical scars from that day will forever remain.
7. Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum
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Madame Tussaud’s wax museum opened in London in 1835 and has always been a little creepy, but never more so than after a fire that devastated the museum in 1925.
News footage shows the world-famous attraction almost completely gutted by the fire, and one witness described red and golden flames leaping 50 feet from the roof of the building.
When wax comes into contact with fire it melts, and this horrifying lineup was the result of the accident. A whole host of world leaders, sports stars, and historical characters succumbed to the fire, and the aftermath was horrifying.
As firefighters tackled the blaze, they came across the disturbing sight of charred limbs and scorched torsos that must have been enough to give them nightmares for weeks. It was even reported that the waxworks could be heard sizzling as they succumbed to their fiery tomb.
6. Paris Catacombs
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This guy is a worker in the Paris Catacombs in the mid-1800s, and it’s his job to transport bones through the tunnels running under the French capital.
Suddenly your office job doesn’t sound so terrible, right? Parisians began moving bones under the city in the 1700s, to resolve the city’s issues of overflowing graveyards.
It took around 12 years to complete the job, and by the time they’d finished, the remains of almost 6 million people had been transported to the deep dark depths of the city.
Men like the one in the picture would be responsible for gathering up the bones that were dropped down a mine shaft each night, and moving them further into the tunnels. Even though he has a legitimate reason for carting around barrows of bones, it doesn’t make it any less creepy.
5. Mummified Vampire Heart
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Whether you believe in vampires or not, this next image is pretty macabre. The story goes like this. There’s a mummified heart of Auguste Delagrange, a supposed vampire who was reported to have killed several people in the state of Louisiana.
The victims were all found in their own homes, and there was always little to no blood at the scene. Local people pleaded with a Catholic priest to help them, so he teamed up with a voodoo practitioner to hunt the vampire.
And they did exactly that. They found and killed Delagrande by driving a wooden stake through his heart. That did the job, and the final body count was halted at 40. The heart was, for some reason, mummified and stored in a wooden box along with the murder weapon.
A great story but sadly there’s no truth in it. The heart is a prop made by Propnomicon and the stake is an old World War 1 tent peg turned on a lathe to get the right shape. Created around a decade ago.
4. Brain Experiments
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Medicine hasn’t always been as humane as it is right now, and if you were unlucky enough to be ill a couple of centuries ago, you were in big trouble.
You didn’t even have to be sick, simply being unlucky could result in you being the subject of horrifying experiments. This picture from 1862 was taken of a bizarre experiment by French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne, who believed that facial expressions were the gateway to the soul of a man.
To study his theory, he attached probes to the face of his victim, ahem, I mean subject, and switched on an electric current which would contort his face into a series of scary expressions.
The investigation was also intended to show the difference between a real smile and a false one. How much are you betting that none of the smiles were genuine during this terrifying experiment?
3. Fet-Mats: The Petrified Miner
When a group of Swedish miners got to work in a mine in 1719, they quickly discovered a dead man who was found eerily preserved in a water-filled mine shaft inside a long-unused tunnel.
When the body was pulled out, it began to dry and became hard as wood, or had rather turned into stone, giving rise to the nickname “the petrified miner.”
The find became a sensation because no person was reported as missing. Rather than being buried, the body became a local oddity and was put into a display, where it remained for about 30 years.
The body remained unidentified until an old woman passing by saw his face and recognized the man as Mats Israelsson, her former fiancé, who had disappeared in 1677, 42 years earlier.
It was thought that Mats Israelsson, known as Fet-Mats, had deserted his fiancé in the spring of 1677. To this day, no one knows why he went down the mine shaft alone and met his untimely death or was even murdered by someone.
Fet-Mats was so well preserved because his corpse was immersed inside the shaft with vitriol, a substance now commonly known as the pesticide copper sulfate.
Fet-Mats was put on public display, rather than burying the corpse. However, he was finally buried in 1930 in the church’s graveyard when his body started showing signs of decay.
2. Mademoiselle Blanche Monnier
This is Mademoiselle Blanche Monnier, a French girl who was kept captive under lock and key for an unbelievably long period of 25 years.
The shot was taken in 1901 after she was discovered following an anonymous letter that was sent to the Paris Attorney General.
The Monnier family was known as a normal, middle-class family, and authorities even knew of Blanche’s existence but didn’t question it when she suddenly vanished at the age of 25.
49-year-old Blanche Monnier was found padlocked to a bed in a room filled with rats, pests, and human excrement. The woman was suffering from extreme malnutrition and weighed just 55 pounds.
The reason that she was imprisoned? She refused to give up her relationship with an older attorney. Blanche’s mother thought she would relent, but she refused to give up on true love, no matter how brutal the consequences.
1. Mummies of Guanajuato
The 111 mummies of Guanajuato, Mexico, whose faces are frozen in eternal screams have a tragic backstory that makes their anguished expressions even more haunting.
The mummies were exhumed from a Guanajuato cemetery when a law was passed where families were required to pay a ‘burial tax’ to ensure the perpetual burial of their loved ones.
The bodies were removed if the tax was not paid. The mummies in good condition were stored in the building above the burial site, which was later turned into a museum.
The mummies on display are a collection of well-preserved corpses of people who died from cholera in 1833, in which many were buried alive by mistake. The bodies were immediately buried to control the spread of the disease.
The distorted and horrific facial expressions are believed to be the result of people being buried alive by accident. One of the most famous mummies who was buried alive was Ignacia Aguilar.
She suffered from a strange disease that made her heart stop functioning on several occasions. On one prolonged period, thinking she had died, her relatives decided to bury her.
When her body was exhumed, it was noticed that she was facing down, biting her arm, and her mouth was covered with a lot of blood.
