It is the impossible that first seizes the eye: a woman lies draped across a table, her face calm or perhaps lifeless, while before her, three infants—eerily identical—rest side by side. Below, a procession of animals, reptilian and alert, crowd the floor. The men nearby recoil in disbelief, hands splayed in gestures of shock and fear.

The stark lines and heavy shadows of the print pull the viewer into a world where the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural have collapsed, and the ordinary room becomes a stage for a spectacle both grotesque and mesmerizing. This print belongs to the fevered imagination of José Guadalupe Posada, whose work at the turn of the twentieth century thrived on the sensational and the uncanny. In Mexico’s bustling print culture of that era, such images were not merely for decoration—they were vehicles for news, rumor, and popular legend, sold cheaply to a public hungry for marvels and scandal. The date of this print is uncertain, but its presence in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection speaks to the lasting fascination with Posada’s vision.

History has kept few traces of the real events behind such prints, but the image itself, with its mingling of horror and curiosity, invites us to linger and wonder: what story did the first viewers invent when they saw these creatures crawling from beneath the table?