The NY Post is reporting that the disturbing photos of deceased Anna that were run in the National Enquirer were real and not “photo re-creations” as the tabloid claimed. There was a story that Anna’s mother Virgie Arthur went to the morgue to visit Anna and brought a reporter for paparazzi photo agency Splash News with her, so this is entirely plausible.

March 3, 2007 — DESPITE the National Enquirer’s claim that the eerie post-mortem images of Anna Nicole Smith it published were “photo re-creations based on eyewitness accounts,” a source close to the magazine says they were the actual photos of the Playboy playmate’s corpse lying in a Florida mortuary. “We didn’t want to get anyone fired,” an Enquirer operative told The Post’s Braden Keil. Someone with access to the refrigerated drawers scored a big payday after pulling out Smith’s pre-embalmed body and unzipping the body bag for an Enquirer photographer to hurriedly snap her bluish face.

I remember reading on the Splash News website that they had actual photos of Anna’s corpse, which they received a lot of heat for at the time. I wouldn’t doubt that one of the pictures is real, but my take is that the large photo the magazine used for the header image was the photo recreation, and that a less pretty small inset picture (warning: link leads to maybe-real picture) of Anna was real. The header image looks too cosmetic and like Anna is sleeping while the smaller picture seems a little more realistic. I would bet they did it that way so as not to feel guilty about running the actual photo. Either way, it’s despicable.