Stand Still, Bright Eyes - Preserving Memories in Victorian Times

On a crisp October Saturday in Michigan, the kind where thousands of Michiganders wash down hundreds of donuts with gallons upon gallons of apple cider, I stood with my daughter Sydney and my longtime friend Tina on the porch of a Victorian mansion. 

The home had been meticulously restored and opened to the public. Tina suggested we go there after reading that it had been decorated for Halloween. We rang the doorbell and were greeted by a gracious docent who began showing us through the home as she recounted its history. 

The photo shown us by the docent.

The decorations were modest, but charming, giving them an appeal anything more opulent might have lacked. Tiny orange lights wound around the banister in the main hall, and mannequins, wearing harlequin masks and vintage formalwear, appeared to be the ghostly guests at a soiree.  

The docent pointed out a framed photo of three people. I surmised it to be a daughter flanked by her parents. Her posture and facial expression struck me as a little apathetic until the docent said the girl may well have been dead. There were other similar photos around the room of what the docent explained were deceased Victorians, many propped up and seated with loved ones. I struggled to grasp why the Victorians would do this, then heard myself blurting out the words, "Why would the Victorians do this?" Shockingly, it was my daughter who replied.

"It's called Victorian-era postmortem photography," she explained. "Back then, photography was new, and people couldn't always afford to have pictures taken unless there was a good reason. Because the exposure time needed to take a photograph was so long, people looked blurry if someone took their picture walking in the park or something. Even if they moved just a little, they could look blurry. That's why so many of the photos from that period were portraits. And if someone died, a postmortem photo might be a family's only picture of them."

I peered into my daughter's serious brown eyes, searching for something that until that moment I never dreamed might be in there - the possessing spirit of a long-dead Victorian historian. 

“What she said,” grinned the docent. I nodded, dumbfounded, to the woman before returning my attention to Sydney and noticed for the first time, her striking resemblance to Wednesday Addams. 

"You're 19 - how did you know all that?" I asked.

She shrugged, and the braids I was suddenly imagining bounced a bit. 

"I read."  

I needed to get my mind off this new view of my daughter and onto something less unnerving - like propped-up dead Victorians. It wasn't photographing deceased family members - a common practice that continues to this day - that threw me. It was that I couldn't stop thinking about Weekend at Bernie's. But Syd's explanation made perfect sense. Victorians held a unique position in time, when photography was emerging and slowly becoming accessible to everyday people. Suddenly, I saw my reaction for what it was: flippant, judgmental, and based on ignorance.   

Later, I did some googling and found more photos said to be of deceased Victorians. These I found disturbing because the subjects were standing. Then I found a Wikipedia entry that read ". . . it is untrue that metal stands and other devices were used to pose the dead as though they were living." It said that photographers used armrests and devices sometimes called "Brady stands" to steady their living subjects, thus preventing the blurring Sydney had explained. According to Wikipedia, evidence of such a stand meant the subject was a living person. I was so happy to read that Wikipedia entry after seeing ...

If you're thinking about doing your own research on Victorian-era postmortem photography, be warned - it can be unsettling. It can also haunt you in more ways than one when cheerful teasers from Instagram pop up saying it's found more postmortem photography you might like. 

One of my eagle-eyed readers, Mari Collier, commented that the photo of the couple and baby is not of the Victorian era, noting the woman's dress and what appears to be a flash of knee. I'm leaving it here to prove some points. In addition to labeling the photo as Victorian, the caption beneath it said the baby's open eyes were painted on. Postmortem Victorian photography did sometimes have eyes drawn or painted onto prints or negatives. For argument's sake, let's say the photo was Victorian. Isn't it more likely that this was a living baby who had never seen a camera before and that the flash surprised him? 

For generations, parents have secretly harbored feelings of disappointment caused by pictures of their kids - case in point: the school photos my parents paid for year after year.

Victorian parents were simply the first to have that problem. 

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The Hovering Ghost

There are enough seemingly sensible people in the world claiming to have seen a ghost, that I won't worry what will happen to my reputation should I publicly join their ranks. "Oh," you might say, "that's silly. There are no such things as ghosts!" But if I proclaim their existence, you likely won't think less of me, or at least not enough to darken whatever relationship we have.

Image copyright Teece Aronin

So, I once saw a ghost, roughly 50 years ago. There - I've said it. And the way it happened was this:

My brother was engaged to a girl named Mary, and the two sometimes came home from college to spend the weekend at the house where I still lived with my parents and my other brother. I was 10 years younger than one brother and seven years younger than the other, and it was the older of the brothers who had found himself in these happy - or tragic, depending on your view - prenuptial circumstances.

Mary and I shared a room during these visits. The house was built in the 1920's and had, shall we say, quirks, the layout of this room being one of many. As you can see from my poor excuse for a diagram, the beds were placed foot to foot against opposite walls. 

There was an alcove through which one passed upon entering the room. In the far corner, almost diagonal from the door, was a small closet. As one faced the closet, the left side made for a wall against which there was a desk and chair. The desk and chair stood back-to-back with an identical desk set on the opposite wall, and it was in this space that my brothers did homework before the older of them left for college.

It was early morning and I lay awake in bed feeling restless, but guessing it was too early to get up. Something caught my attention at the far end of the room where there was a window between the desks.

Standing there, if you could call it standing, was a ghost. He wasn't a stereotypical-looking ghost as I've represented him in the diagram; instead, he was a small, but full-size man. His feet, clad in work boots, were level with the window sill inches from where he hovered. He was dressed in overalls and a work shirt, looking for all the world as if he'd just swung down from the engine of a ghost train. Hanging there, suspended, he was perfectly still. 

He appeared to be quite old, wore round, wire-rim spectacles, and including his glasses and clothes, was a glowing, snowy white. His eyes, never wavering, were trained on me. Most interesting is that he was smiling at me, a gentle smile, lips closed. Like his gaze, the smile never faltered. I was too perplexed to smile back.

I don't know why, but I wasn't frightened. I suppose it was due to his harmless affect. I also don't know why I didn't wake Mary with an excited shout. Something in my gut said it was alright to speak, but only softly. So I quietly said, "Mary. Mary, wake up." Mary spoke but never opened her eyes.

"What, honey?" she murmured.

"There's a ghost in the window behind your bed."

"Oh, honey, you're dreaming. Now go back to sleep."

"Mary, honest, I'm not dreaming. I'm wide awake."

"Sweetie, you just think you're awake, but I'm sure you're dreaming."

As I tried to convince Mary to open her eyes and look, the ghost never moved, his smile never so much as twitched, and his eyes stayed right on mine. Still though, I wasn't frightened.  

"Mary, please."

"Honey, if I open my eyes, I'll never get back to sleep. Rest now. We'll talk about the ghost later."

So that was it. I watched him, and he watched me. I don't remember how it ended - if he vanished or if I dropped off to sleep. No matter really. 

I never saw him again.

To their credit, my family never mocked my claims of having seen the ghost, in fact it was quite the opposite. Mary said she wished she'd taken me more seriously, and everyone seemed interested in what I had to say. 

The only theory I remember anyone advancing as to the ghost's origins, was that my aunt's neighbor, a Mr. Hill, now deceased, fit my description of the ghost. Mr. Hill had built the garage in our back yard years earlier. It was suggested that he might have returned to spend time near the old structure. My aunt showed me his photo and while the man and the ghost closely resembled one another, I couldn't be sure they were one and the same. 

I feel a bit sad these days thinking how the ghost never reappeared. If he had, and he'd smiled, I would have smiled back.