Day31AboutDay31

In the late 19th century the practice of memento
mori, or post-mortem photography, reached the
height of its popularity as families who were unable
to afford the expense of being photographed during
their lives often took advantage of their one last
opportunity to immortalize the images of their loved
ones after they had passed away.

In the Temecula Valley Silas Day and his wife, Eleanor, saw to such needs.
The Days had immigrated to the valley from Illinois during Temecula's short
railroad boom in the mid 1880's. Little is known about Day before this time
except that he had an extensive background in photography and art and soon
after settling in the Valley went into the Funeral Home business.

It was not long before Eleanor
began to notice a certain oddness
come over her husband. He
became obsessed with the corpses
that were the subject of his
photographs. He would often stay
up through the night arranging the
bodies just so, applying cosmetics
to their faces and posing them in a
deranged attempt to recapture a
spark of life that was gone forever.

Eleanor would try her best to ignore the muffled conversations she could hear
her husband having with the corpses through the walls. Her success in turning
a blind eye to her husband's decent into madness, however, would prove fatal
for her.

For Silas his inability to recapture the life
essence of his corpses with his camera is
what is thought to have driven him insane.
On one fateful evening Silas Day snapped
while working in his funeral home. His
obsession with photographing the dead
could no longer be satiated by the supply of
corpses that came to him by means of
"natural causes" in the relatively rural
Temecula Valley.

He began his grizzly masterpiece by bludgeoning Eleanor to death with a
rolling pin. He suffocated his own son and daughter while they slept and posed
them all together in one final, gruesome family portrait. The train that traveled
between San Diego and San Bernardino brought Silas a fresh supply of
victims, and for seven days his ghastly work went undiscovered. It was
eventually the smell that wafted from his mortuary into the streets that exposed
Silas's deeds. The bodies were discovered posed like a child's play things
throughout the home in various demented representations of daily living.

In the last room was Silas
Day himself, dead by his
own hand, the 31st and final
victim of the momento mori
murderer. He was dressed in
a fine suit, his face made up
with the same cosmetics he
used to prepare the corpses
for their final photographs.
Before him was his camera,
the scene arranged so that
he himself could become the

That final photograph was never taken, and it is said to be the reason Silas
Day still walks the long, narrow passages of his mortuary home along with the
tortured souls of his thirty victims.

If your sense of adventure and curiosity are strong, and you are unafraid of
ghosts and tolerant of rot's sweet scent, you are invited to visit the very site in
which Silas Day orchestrated his masterwork. He'll be waiting for you on
Halloween night.