Five Creepy-Ass Ways We Used to Entertain Ourselves
You could say our modern culture is pretty morbid, with our fascination with true crime and shockingly gory horror movies, but we’re nowhere near as ghoulish as our great-great-grandparents were. They weren’t just reading about murder or looking at fake innards — they were getting up close and personal with it.
Mummy Unwrapping Parties
Mummies were all the rage in 19th-century Europe. Looting them, stealing them, even eating them — there was nothing they didn’t love doing to some dead Egyptians. One man named Thomas Pettigrew truly capitalized on the trend by holding mummy unwrapping parties, the Victorian upper-class version of asking “Wanna see a dead body?”
Cemetery Picnics
In the 1800s, there weren’t a lot of nice public parks in America. In fact, there was really only one kind of place you could go for soothing open spaces and beautiful landscaping, so when it was time for a family reunion or the kids wanted to run around outside, people headed to the local cemetery. They’d pack a lunch to eat on top of the dead, children would play amongst the headstones and nobody thought it was even a little weird. Your goth friends still do this, but at least they know.
Asylum Tourism
Say what you will about the current state of mental-health treatment, but at least facilities are no longer charging people to gaze upon you in amusement at the lowest point of your life. That was standard practice in the more infamous asylums of the 18th and 19th centuries, where patients were treated as zoo animals and spectators witnessed their hilariously cruel treatment with amusement. Later, when institutions became more compassionate, they were just such nice buildings and grounds that people paid to see them. It was the industrial era. Everything else was made of concrete and covered in a fine layer of soot.
Phantasmagoria
The “magic lantern,” a “series of lenses and mirrors to project the image from a painted glass slide with candlelight,” was invented in the 17th century and pretty much immediately used for seeing scary stuff like skeletons, demons and ghosts. This “phantasmagoria” wasn’t your typical horror movie: Viewers were often asked to fast, stay up late or consume drugs to enhance the experience, and one of the most prominent practitioners held his show in a convent’s crypt. It sure beats AMC.
Public Executions
The beheadings and hangings in period movies are always depicted as somber events, but in reality, they were more like Coachella. As late as the 19th century, thousands of people (as many as 100,000 if the condemned was famous) came from miles around to be romanced by vendors and buskers in a block party atmosphere — oh, and to watch someone die. If you didn’t care for the crowds and had the cash, you could secure an “overlooking room.” Yep, box seats for death. The practice only ended not because it was disrespectful but because it was tacky. The upper classes soured on mixing with the lower and their loud, sweaty celebrations. Maybe we’re not so different after all.