Victorian Postmortem Photography | The Internet's Been Lying to Us

Postmortem Photography | The Internet's Been Lying to Us

In 1867, a photographer walked into a Philadelphia parlor, set up a tripod next to the sofa, and photographed a woman who had died the day before. Her husband had brushed her hair and put her wedding ring back on her finger. He paid three dollars, about a week's wages, and kept that photo on the mantle for the rest of his life.

That is Victorian postmortem photography. And you have it completely wrong in your head, because the internet got there first.

No corpse kickstands. No eyeballs painted on eyelids. No dead uncles propped up in the family portrait. Half the photos going viral as postmortem are not even dead people. What is actually left is quieter, sadder, and somehow funnier.

This week we cover what 1868 actually smelled like, why a life expectancy of 32 does not mean what you think it means, and what really happened when someone died in your house. Amanda drags JoLynne through all five myths, including the metal stand that would have tipped over instantly under a body and the rule of thumb that ruins every viral TikTok: if the person looks alive, they are alive.

Plus Queen Victoria laying out her dead husband's clothes every morning for forty years, sleeping next to a plaster cast of his hand, and getting buried with a photo of her Scottish attendant hidden under a bouquet so her son would not see. An entire department store dedicated to sadness, including mourning underwear. A Boston photographer selling ghost portraits with a complimentary Benjamin Franklin. And the deeply uncomfortable realization that we still do all of this. We just use Canva now.

Two games this episode: Mourning Etiquette or Cult Onboarding, and Spirit Photography Scam or Modern Wellness Grift.

Content note: this one deals with grief, infant loss, and death in the home. We handle it the way we handle everything, which is badly and with jokes, but the jokes