; Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal

Saturday, October 14, 2023

Are You Ready For Halloween? Vintage Odd, Macabre Photos & Their Disturbing Backstories


Anatoly Moskvin is a Russian former journalist, college professor, and self-dubbed "necropolyst" with expert knowledge of cemeteries. For years, his hobby of collecting dolls hid a macabre obsession that drew upon his particular interests: digging up the dead and making dolls out of their corpses.

After making his human dolls, he kept them in his home as his companions and lovers. "I kissed her once, then again, then again," Moskvin wrote about one of his dolls, made from the body of an 11-year-old girl.

Police finally caught Moskvin in 2011, after years of increasing suspicion at the growing number of desecrated graves in his home city of Nizhny Novgorod. When they searched his home, they found 26 life-sized dolls, or rather, mummified corpses, scattered throughout.

Actual recovered photo of P.T. Barnum's "The Real Mermaid" before the evidence was destroyed by a fire that took place before the public appearance. This is the only known photo to exist. This is the mermaid in the tank.

The owner of the photo found it while digging through family heirlooms

Vera Renczi, a stunningly beautiful woman, was also one of the most prolific female serial killers in history. Born in 1903 in Bucharest, Romania into wealth and privilege, by the age of 15 she had engaged in numerous affairs. If she suspected they were being unfaithful, the men were given a dose of arsenic. Vera confessed to killing both husband and her son. Lorenzo discovered her secret and attempted to blackmail her. Vera Renczi was convicted on 35 counts of murder.

The Primwaddle Twins, Mort, and Harvey, circa 1929. Their mother, Discordia's husband left after seeing the homely pair. Embittered to men, left alone to raise boys, she insisted they were girls, and got away with it home-schooling them for 17 years; until Mort learned otherwise. The teenagers murdered her in her sleep, strangled in chiffon, her eyes gouged out and replaced with doll eyes.

This is the Buckley Family. The children’s names were Susan and John. As a Halloween joke, all the kids in the neighborhood were going to get a dummy and pretend to chop its head off. The Buckley children thought it would be hilarious to actually murder their mother, so when the kids walked up the the door, they got an axe and slaughtered her. Once everyone figured out what they had really done, they called the police, but the kids were long gone. The only picture of them was this photo.

On the morning of July 2, 1951, in St. Petersburg, Florida, Mary Reeser's landlady went to the old woman's apartment to deliver a telegram and noticed that her door was warm to the touch. Upon opening the door, she found Reeser almost completely reduced to a pile of ashes lying on the scorched remnants of her chair. A part of her left leg and her skull, shrunken far beyond its normal size, were all that remained.

Local authorities were unable to determine any cause of the blaze and the rest of the apartment was largely devoid of fire damage. When they sent the case to the FBI, they determined that Reeser had gone up in flames like the wick of a candle, with her own body fat steadily feeding the fire, but they too were baffled as to how the blaze started in the first place. To this day, it's widely believed that this was a case of spontaneous human combustion.


From doll masks and bags over heads to this terrifyingly enlarged skull getup, children's Halloween costumes of decades past made for some intensely creepy pictures that remain disturbing even today.



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