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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Wait Till the Midnight Hour

"How would you like to walk through the cemetery with me at midnight tonight?

Your Name Here by Teece Aronin. Available at
RedBubble.com/people/phylliswalter.

This to me from my college gal-pal, Margie. I was barely out of my teens and Laurie was a few years older. 

"Are you kidding? Yes!"

"This'll be fun! I'll knock on your door at 11:30."

I thought about the upcoming adventure all afternoon. Would I be scared? No way. Margie was such a sweet girl; kind, funny, smart and reliable. If she said tonight would be fun, then tonight would be fun. 

But by that evening I was getting nervous and at 11:30 when Margie knocked, I jumped out of my skin. I opened the door and there she stood: five feet tall, glasses, a brunette with a pageboy haircut. She held a flashlight that was as big as she and she'd nearly buried herself in a black wool coat. It was October and nippy so I slipped my coat on, too. We arrived at the cemetery at 11:55 and waited until midnight to walk in. 

The darkness was near total. Branches trimmed out in decaying leaves were faintly silhouetted against the sky. Margie was in front of me fumbling with that steel pillar she called a flashlight and I was praying for her batteries to have more life than what was buried in the cemetery. And I was frustrated because I couldn't see her.

"Did you have to wear black?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. Hang on - I'm trying to switch on this flashlight."

Blessedly it finally lit and we walked farther in. 

"Margie?" I asked. "Are you scared?"

"No! This is fun!" she bubbled, making me want to forget her adorable pluck and just knock her right down. "You?" she asked.

"Oh, you have no idea," I whined. I grabbed the back of her coat, the toes of my shoes just inches from the heels of her boots. 

Margie shined the flashlight in my face to read my expression, unintentionally blinding me. "You poor thing, You're fine. Really you are. But you want to know the real reason I wanted to do this?"

This was the part of the horror movie where the heroine finds out that the best friend is a homicidal maniac. In the morning, some grieving widow bearing flowers would stumble upon a corpse with a flashlight-shaped indentation in her scalp.

"No - I mean yes - I mean I guess," I answered, looking at her in a whole new horrifying light.

"Because someone told me they saw a gravestone in here with my name on it. I thought it would be fun to come find it."

"You mean there's a gravestone in this cemetery that says IDIOT?" 

"No, my last name," she said.

That was when Margie turned around, took one step and tripped. She fell forward and it didn't occur to me to let go of her coat, so I went with her. The momentum of the fall caused her arm to fling up - the arm that was attached to the hand that held the flashlight. The light swung up and flashed full onto a granite monument. The name engraved there: BYRNES. Margie's last name: Byrnes. 

We screamed, but Margie was the one who named names, mentioning a few you've seen in the bible. Then we scrambled to our feet and ran faster than two chunky little girls ever dreamed possible. We didn't stop until we skidded to a halt at the steps of Saint Gabriel Hall. 

"Wanna do that again tomorrow?" I gasped.

"#%!@ you!" she cursed - just not as sweetly as usual.