If you know anything about me—and I’m sure you know something—you know that the minute I discovered there was a place called The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Unnatural History in London I knew we’d be going. I mean, any place that touts itself as a home to both “curiosities” and “unnatural history” is bound to be several bologna slices short of a full sandwich. It was less a question of desire and more a question of, well, a questionable neighborhood that had us waiting.
Whitechapel, where the museum is, has a “long and rich history,” at least according to the interwebs. Jack the Ripper worked the streets here. It’s the home of countless slaughterhouses, tanneries, breweries, foundries, and factories. So, you know, not the kind of place where a gentleman of breeding would be found.
But it’s been a couple weeks and I *had* to get there. Which is how we found ourselves on a double-decker bus on our way to a place that might as well be called “Ye Olde Tyme Shoppe of Nightmares, Horrors, and Other Oddities.” The Wynd, as I call it now that I’m one of the initiated, is Disneyland for the disturbed, and you can bet your behind I was excited.
Our trip there was like a low-budget travel montage. Picture us on the top deck, surrounded by approximately 459 8-year-olds and their three chaperones. I was pretending to be in a sad, independent film—black and white, naturally—dramatically contemplating life and our current circumstances, but also taking pictures out the window to document the rough area we were traveling through.
Then picture a bunch of bright young children chattering and trying to change seats with one another because Bobby just had to sit next to Anil because they’re best friends, I tell you, best friends or because Jenny’s mom was just so mean to Brittany the other day so they can barely talk to each other without crying.
We barely made it off the bus alive.
The entrance to the museum was in a building called “Victoria Buildings” so decrepit that it needed a cyclone fencing “hairnet” to keep errant pieces of masonry from falling on passersby and killing them. I mean, it looked like a single building to me, but maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, so keen was I to get inside the museum.
We entered a long, narrow space, walking past a bar to get to the “front desk” (really just a hostess stand) to buy our tickets. The young (actually, his age remains undetermined—Goths are hard to peg age-wise, what with all the black and white makeup) man at the bar who looked like he had listened to too many sea shanties suggested that *if* we wanted a drink and that *if* we had that drink before visiting the museum, he could offer us a discount on admission.
Needless to say, there were definitely going to be drinks involved, so we decided to imbibe in advance. I mean, it was a money-saver, right? And, as Rick likes to remind me endlessly, we’re On A Budget.
So we got two $14 Corpse Reviver #2s (seemed appropriate) and a small bowl of “chili crisps.” We had no idea what those were, but they had “chili” and “crisps” in the name, so they sounded tasty. The drinks were amazing! Seriously, among the best we’ve had. The chili crisps were…expensive. $5+ for a bowl thissmall. On the bright side, we did earn ourselves admission discounts. $2 each. So not even enough to pay for the chili crisps. I think it was a Goth scam.
Whatever. I had a little booze in me and I was ready for anything. It turns out I was not, in fact, ready for anything. I should have had two drinks.
The bar itself looked like a set for the Addams Family, chockablock full of animal skeletons and taxidermy trophies. Our bartender/chili-crisp-pusher sent us down a very tight spiral staircase to the museum below. Oh my.
It was like Willy Wonka had an illegitimate love child with Edgar Allan Poe.* The weird and the morbid mated, and their offspring was this fascinating labyrinth of the bizarre and the grotesque. Do you remember that episode of The X-Files, “Home,” with the creepy inbred family that kept their limbless matriarch under the bed?**
The museum is dimly lit, with a musty scent akin to an antique bookstore run by an apathetic shopkeeper. Its cases are filled to the brim with items ranging from the mesmerizing to the macabre. A shelf is crowded with eerily lifelike wax models of human body parts, and another holds dioramas with anthropomorphic taxidermy rodents.
There were glass jars filled with an assortment of things that would keep any normal person up at night—a two-headed lamb, a mummified cat, a “mermaid’s hand” that looked suspiciously like the paw of an angry raccoon.
An entire wall was dedicated to what they delicately termed as Victorian erotica. There they were, displayed without a hint of modesty, the most elaborate dildos of the 19th century. Nearby was a taxidermied dodo, looking quite offended by its proximity to antique adult toys.
We roamed through rooms stuffed to the rafter with antiquated medical instruments that made me grateful for living in an era of anesthesia and displays of vintage pornography casually placed next to, say, a portrait of a very stern-looking Queen Victoria, who seemed supremely undismayed.
The entire place was like a fever dream for a Victorian “scientist”—a disconcertingly well-labelled collection of animal droppings, a hippo skull, and the kind of objects you'd imagine in the background of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. It’s a tribute to human fascination with the strange, the disturbing, and the downright icky. It was uncomfortably intimate, like looking into the untidy mind of a mad collector.
And yet, among the two-headed kittens and Victorian pleasure devices, I felt a kinship. The world is gloriously strange, and there is comfort in accepting—even embracing—the weird. The collection is strange, morbid, and at times, indescribably intimate, offering a captivating glimpse into the human obsession with the peculiar and the grotesque. It’s the kind of place that makes you question your sense of normality, and yet, you can't help but feel inexplicably comfortable among the uncanny.
We took a train back home instead of a bus. And while we waited in the rain on the platform, I thought about how beautifully messed up and bizarre our world is—and how spectacularly ordinary we are in comparison. And you know what? That’s okay.
* Are there legitimate love children? I just never hear of any.
** Sadly, after avoiding The X-Files because I was afraid it would give me nightmares (I’m a delicate flower), this turned out to be the very first episode I ever watched. Nightmares, indeed.
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