The photograph appears simple at first glance: A proud mother sits in a studio chair, her back straight, her black dress pressed to perfection. Behind her, a painted backdrop of a countryside scene — trees, clouds, and sunlight that no longer exist.

In her lap rest two swaddled infants, four-month-old twins Ana Lucía and José Miguel, their eyes closed, their faces soft and peaceful. The studio’s logo, stamped in faded gold ink, reads “Fotografía Jiménez, Puebla, 1892.”

To anyone else, it looks like a tender portrait — a mother and her beloved children captured in the stillness of love and light.

But that stillness was the first clue something was deeply wrong.

Decades later, when the photograph resurfaced in a collection of 19th-century Mexican portraits, archivists noticed unsettling details that others had missed.

The babies’ hands hung limply, unnaturally stiff at the wrists. Their fingers were curled in a way that didn’t suggest sleep — but rigidity.

Under magnification, photo historians noted a faint blur around the infants’ faces — an indication of post-mortem movement, likely caused by the photographer adjusting their heads during a long exposure.

The mother, identified as Catalina Ruiz, sat impossibly still, her eyes vacant. Her expression wasn’t grief, exactly — it was absence.

Even her shadow seemed wrong.

The Chilling Discovery

According to municipal records, the twins — Ana Lucía and José Miguel Ruiz — had died three days before the photograph was taken, both of them victims of a fever outbreak that swept through Puebla that winter.

What Catalina did next was not unheard of for the time — but it shocked even the most seasoned researchers.

Grief-stricken and alone after her husband’s death the previous year, Catalina reportedly begged the local photographer, Don Rafael Jiménez, to help her “preserve” her children in one final portrait — a practice known then as “mourning photography” or “memento mori.”

These photographs were meant to capture the dead as if they were alive — eyes painted open on negatives, color tinted onto cold skin, infants posed as if sleeping peacefully in their mother’s arms.

Catalina, however, went further. She reportedly instructed the photographer to depict the twins as living children, not in repose. She requested he retouch their eyes, color their lips, and make their cheeks appear flushed.

For hours, she sat motionless as the exposure dragged on, whispering lullabies to the silent bundles in her lap.

When the image developed, she wept — not from horror, but from relief.

In her mind, for a brief moment, her babies had come back.

The Photograph’s Haunting Legacy

Three months later, neighbors reported a strange odor coming from Catalina’s home. When authorities entered, they found her sitting in the same chair from the photograph — the now-faded portrait propped in her lap, the room filled with wilting flowers. Catalina herself had succumbed to illness and starvation.

The photograph was retrieved by police, logged as evidence, and eventually passed into the archives of a local church, where it remained forgotten for nearly a century.

It resurfaced in 1974 during a restoration of colonial-era photographs, mislabeled simply as “Mother with Twins, Puebla, 1892.”

It wasn’t until researchers cross-referenced death certificates from that same year that they realized the truth: The infants in the image had been dead for three days when the shutter clicked.

To modern eyes, the image is horrifying — a mother cradling her deceased children, pretending they still breathed. But in the 19th century, it was a ritual of remembrance.

In a world before affordable photography, death portraits were often the only images families ever had of their loved ones. For grieving parents, it was an act of defiance against mortality — proof that love could hold time still, even if only for a moment.

In Mexico, where traditions of death and remembrance intertwine — from pre-Columbian ancestor rituals to Día de los Muertos — Catalina’s act wasn’t madness. It was devotion.

But devotion can be terrifying.

A Photograph That Stares Back

Today, the restored print of “La Madre con los Gemelos” sits behind glass in the Museo de la Fotografía Antigua in Puebla. Visitors describe an uneasy feeling when they stand before it — as if the babies’ faint smiles shift when viewed from different angles, or their mother’s eyes glisten under the gallery lights.

Experts call it an optical illusion.

Locals call it Catalina’s curse — a love so deep, it blurred the line between life and death.

To this day, the photograph remains one of the most unsettling examples of 19th-century post-mortem imagery — not because of ghosts or legends, but because it captures something even more haunting:
A mother’s refusal to let go.

What once seemed a portrait of life became a portrait of denial.

A whisper from the past, reminding us that even in stillness, grief moves.

And in every pixel of that old photograph, you can almost hear Catalina’s voice — softly, endlessly — “Duérmanse, mis niños… mamá está aquí.” “Sleep, my children… mama is here.”