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This house is home for oddities
Posted on Wednesday, January 02, 2008 (CST) by Thoth
 An alleged tuft of Elvis' hair. Spooky recordings made by ghost hunters. A lipstick-stained cigarette -- but was it really the last one ever rolled by Marilyn Monroe?
Welcome to the Museum of Ephemerata, a collection of bizarre and troubling artifacts in a private home just east of the state Capitol. For suggested donations of a dime up to $4, visitors can witness a working model of a 19th-century Pepper's Ghost illusion or can decide for themselves whether the display of human horns is real.
The Museum of Ephemerata is a tribute to early 20th-century dime museums and sideshows made famous by P.T. Barnum and his ilk. Like the spectacles offered at roaming tent carnivals, the museum bridges the gap between science and pop culture. "This taps into the history of museums in the broadest sense," said curator Scott Webel, 31. "It's both educational and entertainment. And everything we present, we can back up with history."
Located in
two small front rooms in the tiny home that Webel shares with his wife
and fellow curator Jen Hirt, the Museum of Ephemerata is more Sanford
& Son than Smithsonian.
Patrons can thrill to gooey
Ghostbusters-style ectoplasm and marvel at a stuffed pygmy kangaroo.
There's a "hair wreath," which was supposedly woven from the hair of a
dead person. Webel said he found it on eBay.
Is this stuff real or not? Who knows?
"These were called dime
museums because they cost a dime to get in," Webel says of the heritage
from which his museum draws. "It was like a mix between a scientific
museum and Disneyland. It could be a natural history museum, or have
[exhibits about] industrial history with machines like automatons, but
there was also a question of quackery in the whole way it was
presented."
Webel and Hirt started
their museum in 1999, while they lived in Tucson, Ariz. They based it
on a collection of artifacts Webel inherited from his
great-great-uncle, who operated an Arizona dime museum during the 1920s.
Now it's like an intimate
version of a Ripley's Believe It or Not museum (itself an inheritor of
the sideshow tradition) albeit one with more of a personal,
counterculture feel. The permanent exhibit includes the Marilyn Monroe
cigarette butt, an antique porcelain souvenir commemorating conjoined
twins, and other oddities. Webel and Hirt call the fixed display the
impermanent exhibit, in reference to the fleeting nature of many of the
fads the museum celebrates.
This month, the museum also
features a temporary exhibit devoted to ghosts and ghost hunters. The
display includes a small ghost road diorama that makes use of Victorian
stagecraft technology to illustrate weird sightings in East Texas.
Webel and Hirt also included creepy recordings that ghost hunters claim
come from haunted houses.
"They're like disembodied,
fragmented voices that are indistinct and unclear," Webel said. "They
were recorded in an empty room or in a haunted house. The person who
did the recording couldn't hear it at the moment of the recording, but
when they played back the tape and amplified it, they could hear the
voices."
Webel said many ghost
hunters will attempt to detect fluctuations in electromagnetic fields
as evidence of supernatural forces. Skeptics, say Webel, insist such
electromagnetic fluctuations are just that and nothing more -- and may
even explain ghostly sensations one sometimes gets in empty rooms.
Like attempting to judge
the authenticity and scientific basis for many of the exhibits, Webel
says the question is almost beside the point.
"Our intent is not to prove
or disprove, but rather to display all of the phenomena around the
debate. It's the debate itself that's interesting."
Online: www.mnae.org
Copyright: Star-Telegram.com
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