Everyone who has ever looked at photos from the past century has noticed that they have a certain eerie quality to them, especially the faded or discolored black-and-white ones. It’s like traveling to an alternative world and seeing how people lived in those strange times. Spoiler alert: things sucked back then.
Just as there are cute family pics, some old photographs just scream bizarre or even scary. One look at these images would make a regular person fear for their sanity. The most horrifying thing about these photos is that they are actually real. No photoshop. No CGI. Just brutally raw snippets of the past.
Let’s dig in!
1. Let’s start with an appetizer. The year is 1937, and these are very bizarre Department Store mannequins dressed up as Mickey, Donald, and the cow nobody remembers.
2. The art of contortion has never been normal, but this pic from London, 1894, blows any horror movie out of the water.
3. Unbelievable Halloween costumes from the 1930s.
4. In 1916, these flame-retardant suits helped Austro-Hungarian sailors fight flash fires and heat. Now they’re here to haunt your dreams.
5. Old-school Disney cosplay has never looked this creepy.
6. Is that a cartoony witch posing in front of an a-bomb?
7. Disney’s enforces back in the day did not mess around.
8. There’s nothing like a refreshing shower after a long nap.
9. No context here, just pure nightmare fuel.
10. One of the Chornobyl disaster liquidators pushing a baby carriage. You can only guess what’s inside.
11. Here’s what a doll manufacturing factory looked like on the inside.
12. Have you heard of Rasputin? Now you know what that Russian psycho looked like.
13. Halloweens used to be much scarier back in the 1980s.
14. Someone found this cursed photo inside a wall of an old mansion.
15. Oh, what’s that? It’s just a regular old baby cage. No big deal.
16. Devoted Mickey Mouse fans at a theater in Ocean Park, California.
17. A few wax figures were miraculously saved after the fire at Madame Tussauds.
18. And lastly, here’s something that feels like a great character concept for a TTRPG featuring vampires in a Wild West setting.
