How Bizarre...

While doing a Google search for something this morning, I came across something most bizarre...

Take a good look at this Victorian era photo of the gentleman standing next to the chair...
Are you thinking, "Gee, he looks a bit disheveled for a man from that era"? Or maybe you're thinking his stance is a bit off, like perhaps he has some sort of muscular or skeletal issue... Maybe you're thinking he was three sheets to the wind at the time and that's why he's standing a bit cock-eyed...
Or maybe you're thinking that he was one hell of an unattractive man...
Well, I should hope you find him unattractive...

After all.... he was dead when this photo was taken...

Now, this has got to be the most bizarre and disturbing thing I've ever inadvertently come across while doing a Google search. And what's, quite possibly, even more bizarre and disturbing is that there seem to be a large number of people who are strangely fascinated with this macabre practice of post-mortem  photography.

The big question is... WHY?!? What in God's name were these people thinking?!?
Well... Wikipedia actually has an article on this bizarre practice that can be read here. I'm not sure it sheds any light on the subject as to why they did something so... ghoulish... It's said that these photos (called daguerreotype, which I myself own a few of these as well as the following process photos called tintypes) served as memorial pieces to remember the deceased... They would pose the corpse accordingly, prop their eyes open, then take the photo. Afterward, they would sometimes paint on rosey cheeks and pupils (due to the eyes clouding over after death, which you can see in the photos that were not touched up after the fact). Really...? Eww... I mean... just... eww...

Honestly, I don't understand this at all. Why the hell would you want a photo of a dead person?! Granted, I'm sure some of the people weren't able to get photos taken while they were alive due to cost or the time frame when photography became popular... but I personally don't want my last memory of a person to be of them as a corpse. Not to mention that I think it's a bit disrespectful to stand a body up and prop its eyes open for a photo. They even had a device just for the occasion of propping up the body (see diagram on the right)... Really...?!? That kind of went above and beyond the realm of macabre, folks...
And if you need evidence that they really did use such a thing, take another look at the photograph above. You can see the base of the device by his feet.
On the other hand, I can understand better the reason why they took such photos of infants and small children. As the Wikipedia article stated, the post-mortem photos were probably the only ones they had ever gotten taken of them. Understandable you would want at least one picture of your child to remember them by (which are the most disturbing to be viewing, in my opinion). As the article states, this was common with infants and young children because the mortality rate of them during this era was extremely high...
Well of course it was! The mind set during the Victorian era was that children should be seen and not heard and parents often doped their children up with Laudanum to keep them quiet. You had to expect a few... thousand... deaths with practices like that.

Moral of the story is this... people in the Victorian era may have build large, beautiful, ornate houses and made beautiful furniture and clothing, but, for all intents and purposes, they were, as a whole, a helluva lot more than just a few fries short of a Happy Meal...

Could there be a more apt true tale for the Halloween season...?