Halloween!

An elderly ghost taps the shoulder of a man wearing a blue jacket. The man screams in terror.

Trick or treat.

This digital exhibition summons ghastly visions of witches, vampires, and monstrous creatures from museum collections across the US. Created over centuries, these nightmarish visuals reveal humanity's darkest imaginings. Gather your courage and explore this gallery of the grotesque. But be warned: some images may haunt you long after you've looked away.

The terrors of copyright restrictions do not lurk here, as every unsettling image we exhumed is Open Access or Open Content.

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trick_or_treat.mp3

Featured Object: Caturday Scaries

A black, one-eyed cat sits ominously on top of a deceased woman's head. Her eyes are closed. — Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, *The Black Cat*, 1894. For Edgar Allan Poe’s *Tales of Mystery and the Imagination* (Chicago, 1895–96). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Jacqueline Loewe Fowler, 2020

The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Black Cat"

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black_cat.mp3