Customer Reviews

Haunting Museums

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This is great fun as John Schuster explores some of the oddest exhibits; in many cases you will ask what were they thinking. These include the Carnegie Sauropods in which for fifty plus years experts pasted the head of a different dinosaur on the body of a different species. There is the Cardiff Giant and Lizzie Bordon B&B. At the Philadelphia Matter Museum of Medical Anomalies one can visit Grover Cleveland's mouth and then there is the infamous 1897 Living Eskimo Exhibit where people performed live and continued even after they died thanks to taxidermy. Curses abound whether they are Elgin Marbles or jewels taken from tombs while haunting are everywhere including at the Utah Museum. At times some of the entries can be verbose, but an interesting examination of the strange and uncanny on display whether it is DC, NY or Fall River. However, perhaps the strangest of all is the Darger art collection (read the artist's story to learn why).

Harriet Klausner

I picked up this book looking for stories of hauntings (ideas for a museum Halloween event), which the title suggested it would have aplenty. Instead, I found a collection of decidedly non-haunting related "odd tales" about happenings at museums and rumors around museum exhibits.

Although some of them were interesting to read, most were written in a very skeptical, newspaper-like style which focused mostly on what was wrong with the stories and why they couldn't be true than on the mysterious, uncanny events themselves. I didn't understand why some were picked at all - the Eskimos used for a living exhibit were a sad story but there was nothing unusual, uncanny or mysterious about it. Other stories were so easily and completely explained away in the first paragraph that the rest of the collection of somewhat-related facts that spill across the remaining ten pages seem pointless and unnecessary.

This isn't a bad read, but be aware before you pick it up that it's not really about ghosts or enjoying the mystery; it's about busting the myths and picking up random, little-known historical facts along the way.