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A grisly old photograph has long been circulated online with accompanying text claiming that it pictures Susan and John Buckley, children who decided one Halloween to abandon a planned neighborhood prank of pretending to chop the head off a dummy and instead beheaded their own mother with an axe. For unexplained reasons, the Buckley children then decided to pose for a photograph with their decapitated mother's corpse before disappearing to unknown parts to escape the consequences of their crime: All of this seems too fantastically ghastly to be genuine, but not completely impossible, so what's the real story behind this image? Is it one of those too bizarre to be true tales that really is true? Has someone taken a genuine old photograph of unknown origin and created a fictitious backstory to explain its spooky appearance? Did someone merge a real account of a gruesome Halloween murder with an unrelated image? Are the picture and its explanation both fakes? The correct answer is Phony story, mostly fake photograph. The image shown here started out as a genuine, if somewhat mundane, family portrait: Then the photograph fell into the hands of Halloween artist Edward Allen from Haunted Memories, who transformed it into an image he called Midwestern Matricide by altering the original to remove the mother's head and place an axe into the hands of the daughter: Edward also created an animated GIF highlighting the differences between the original photograph and his creative rearrangement of it:
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