Why people 100 years ago were ‘losing their heads’ over this Halloween prank

Screenshot 2024-10-16 125706.png — In the 1920s, people like these two girls had fun pulling a prank called "horsemaning," where they pretended to be one person in a precarious position.

By Tracy Briggs

October 23, 2024 at 9:30 AM

As always, this Halloween, we’ll be inundated with photos on social media of cute kids dressed like minions, princesses and superheroes showing off vast quantities of trick-or-treat candy.

One hundred years ago, you were likelier to see photos around Halloween of people “horsemaning.”

What is horsemaning?

According to the Ohio Historical Society, “horsemaning (or horsemanning) is the act of posing for a photograph in such a way that the subject appears to have been beheaded.”

Yikes.

That’s much darker than shooting a photo of your kid eating a Milky Way in a Marvel costume.

Well, of course, no one has lost their head. It was just an illusion that became a fad in the early 1920s.

Basically, one person lies on a table with their head hanging behind the table, while another person kneels on the ground, resting just their head on the table.

Horsemaning, or headless posing, became one of the hottest photography trends of the decade. But what was it about the roaring ‘20s that inspired it?

‘The Headless Horseman’

It’s hard to find one definitive reason horsemaning became as popular in the ‘20s as flappers and speakeasies. But one theory suggests that Will Rogers had something to do with it.

In 1922, the popular actor starred in the silent film “The Headless Horseman,” based on Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” By today’s standards, the movie is hardly a blockbuster, garnering only 5 out of 10 stars on IMDb, with reviewers calling it “boring” and “unwatchable.”

Will Rogers and Lois Meredith starred in "The Headless Horseman" in 1922.

However, other reviewers applauded Rogers, who starred as Ichabod Crane, for his horsemanship and credited the movie as “groundbreaking.”

According to author Richard Koszarski, “ ‘The Headless Horseman’ was the first feature photographed on panchromatic negative film, which was equally sensitive to all colors of the spectrum, unlike the earlier orthochromatic film, which rendered blue skies and blue eyes as pale white.”

Perhaps moviegoers were motivated to stage the headless photos after seeing the film.

Or maybe they were just repeating what they saw their parents and grandparents do years earlier.

Losing your head in the Victorian era

Headless photos first reached popularity during the Victorian era in the late 1800s.

While these versions of “headless portraiture” involved photo editing with somewhat crude results, it became all the rage in England.

Unlike the two-person staging of headless photos in the 1920s, the Victorian era made headless images through photo editing.

The demand for such photographs was so high that many Victorian photographers openly advertised this particular type of photography in newspapers and periodicals.

According to a photo history of Sussex County, “the most prolific photographer in this genre was British photographer Samuel Kay Balbirnie, who ran advertisements in the Brighton Daily News offering ‘HEADLESS PHOTOGRAPHS’ with accompanying photos of men and women with their heads in their laps or floating in the air.”

A third wave of headlessness

Headless photography had yet another resurgence in the 21st century. It started in 2010 with two other fads: planking and owling.

This type of planking isn’t the kind you’d see in the gym.

Instead, you lie face down with your arms at your sides and your feet together, pointing toward the ground. You can earn extra “plank-cred” by planking in unusual locations or involving more spectators and participants.

People in 2011 planked in groups and in unsual places.

In May 2011, The Guardian described planking as “a global participatory art project, the lazy man’s free-running, a pointless internet craze, the new flash-mobbing and, in the words of one incensed online commenter, ‘a sick, pagan pastime.’ ”

Facebook feeds were full of plankers that year and later, “owlers” — people who perched in place while looking off into the distance, mimicking the posture of an owl. After people tired of planking and owling, they dug way back into the fad machine and pulled out horsemaning again.

It’s hard to say why horsemaning became a viral sensation in 2011 after 90 years of silence.

Kopfloser_Böhringer_2.jpg — This image of two boys at the beach shows one buried in the sand and the other bending forward while holding the other's head. This photo was a finalist for Wikipedia's Photo of the Year of 2011.

Hollywood had seen several remakes of “The Headless Horseman” over the years, including the popular Johnny Depp film “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in 1999. But that was 12 years before the headless photography trend reemerged. So, Depp hardly seems to be the instigator.

Maybe we’re just dark and twisted people.

Washington Irving's 1820 short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was believed to have been an inspiration for the 'horsemaning' fad of the 1920s.

And really, when it comes to fads, who knows why anything goes viral and reaches legendary status? Can anyone explain pet rocks or streaking?

Will horsemaning make another comeback in 2024 or in the near future? Who knows?

Watch your Instagram and Facebook feeds this Halloween and let me know.

Next week, “Back Then” takes a closer look at the frostbitten, plastic mask, joy of Halloween’s past.

Watch the 1922 version of “The Headless Horseman“

STEP BACK IN TIME WITH TRACY BRIGGS

Tracy Briggs Back Then with Tracy Briggs online column sig.jpg — Tracy Briggs, "Back Then with Tracy Briggs" columnist.

Hi, I'm Tracy Briggs. Thanks for reading my column! I love going "Back Then" every week with stories about interesting people, places and things from our past. Check out a few below. If you have an idea for a story, email me at [email protected].