This photograph may be used to facilitate astral travel to the land of the red sky.  From Southwestern's 1941 yearbook.

Every hall tree has one or more guardians, whether or not they're easily seen.  From Duke's 1973 yearbook.

This photograph of accursed orbs was inverted and entitled "Lent" in the Ridley College's 1973 yearbook.

From Duke's 1973 yearbook.

"Was that a rat?"  From The Pedagogue at Play by G. M. A. Hewett, 1903.

This haunted photograph appears in the Cape Cod Community College yearbook of 1968.  Why are strange glows so ghostly?  Such lights are perhaps manifestations of what Ross Chambers calls "flauntology."  Chambers notes that when a metaphysical subject matter is inexplicable, to demonstrate or manifest that inexplicibility requires abstaining from any attempt to explain it away, with the aim to make hauntedness haunting and not to lay the ghosts; "to demonstrate or display without explanation is ... to flaunt .... [I]t is the flaunting of hauntedness that makes hauntedness haunting.  If it is true that there is no ontology without a hauntology, it seems to be also the case that there can be no hauntology without a flauntology, since flaunting names the apodictic gesture, the act of relay, that, in causing hauntedness to be seen, makes it haunting.  Flaunting is, par excellence, the gesture of visibility" whereby the lacking object can be figurally presented as an interpretive, recognizable object that haunts (Untimely Interventions).

"Shoegaze" was identified as a genre in the late 1980s, but here's a precursor from Swarthmore's 1961 yearbook.

From Elmhurst's 1960 yearbook.

Eighteen years before "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" was invented, there was this unbelievable mystery food (that was prayed to!)  From Swarthmore's 1961 yearbook.  Speaking of which, there's a collection of fake Buddha quotations called I Can't Believe It's Not Buddha!

This cursed photograph appears in Mississippi Delta Community College's 1993 yearbook.

A frightening number of yearbooks describe college as if alien beings are desperately learning to pass as human.  It's an oddly common theme, and it's disconcerting.  This caption reads, "I am amorphous.  I am nerve ends, ganglia, squeezed, compressed.  I must stiffen, yet stay flexible.  I want to be steel, I am afraid of becoming stone."  Yeah, sure.  Whatever you say, Marvin the Martian.  Of course, these aliens grew up and now rule the world -- Representative Jim Himes actually said this on national television: "the lizard brain that I have says I hope bad things happen" (we're not making this up; Google it!)

From Chowan's 1965 yearbook.

Using our Tic-Tac-Toe Story Generator [instructions and template here], we can translate the game on this student's back into a poem:

A wish for experimental kisses,

unknowable              surprises,

the sun mysterious, shadowing.

(Photo from West Georgia's 1941 yearbook.)

Their two favorite albums [links go to Youtube] are the very wacky Romesville by Googie René, and Ahmad Jamal Trio at the Pershing: But Not for Me.

 

From Lasell's 1960 yearbook.

This cabin in the woods may be used for facilitate time travel.  From Lakehead University's 1966 yearbook.

Zarathustra said that this moment will occur infinite times in the future.  From Elmhurst's 1960 yearbook.

Reblog if, due to budget cuts, your art and language classes were combined.  From Washington College's 1959 yearbook.

Today, people will play Space Invaders wearing just anything.  So much has changed since the 1980s.  From Eastern Nazarene's 1981 yearbook.

We want all the lights in all our photos to look like this.  Please send instructions.  From Elmhurst's 1960 yearbook.

This ghost appears in the University Rhode Island yearbook of 1975.  It has been said that "ghosts exist because we determine them as ghosts -- narrate them into 'life'" (Clive Bloom, in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History).

"It's almost impossible to imagine a clock's accuracy being off by such an incredibly tiny figure" (Josepha Sherman, How Do We Know the Nature of Time, 2004).  From Cine-Mundial, 1933.