40 Of The Creepiest Things Ever Kept In Museums – And They’re Not For The Faint-Hearted

This sinister little monkey can be found inside a museum in the Slovenian city of Maribor, which is the country’s second-biggest urban center. The animal is actually a puppet – crafted with the intention of entertaining kids. But we’d wager that the nightmarish toy actually has quite a dark effect on their imaginations!

This crowd is the stuff of nightmares. Welcome to Kentucky’s Vent Haven Museum – reportedly the world’s one and only institution committed solely to displays related to ventriloquism. This artform sees performers holding a doll and making it seem like it’s chatting of its own accord. This can be unsettling anyway, but a museum full of almost 1,000 ventriloquist dummies may be just too much to bear!

Legendary children’s author Roald Dahl used to work inside his so-called Writing Hut – a room that he filled with a bizarre array of items over the years. According to his official website, they included a toy plane, a ball made of candy wrappers and a stone from ancient times bearing cuneiform markings. But the most disturbing item was undoubtedly the writer’s very own hipbone, which had been surgically extracted from his body. For some reason, he thought it was a good idea to keep this. Nowadays, these items can all be found inside a reconstruction of his Writing Hut in the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Buckinghamshire, England.

This creepy bird is found inside Bell Museum, which is a Minnesota-based institution concerned with natural history. The creature was once a pigeon that died after becoming trapped in a wall. There, the bird underwent a naturally occurring mummification process – meaning its remains were preserved in this remarkable and sinister way.

A lovely handwarmer is always a welcome addition in cold weather, right? Alas, this one from Normanby Hall Country Park in England is anything but pleasant. It might indeed be a warming garment for the wearer’s extremities. But we’d struggle to ignore those poor beasts’ pained expressions staring up at us!

Has a more terrifying photograph ever been taken? This image comes from the Wisconsin Maritime Museum’s archive and is thought to have been snapped some time in the 1920s. It depicts a band of clowns playing music, which is perhaps the most sinister concept imaginable. The picture was handed over to the institution about four decades ago as part of a collection belonging to a ship captain named Edward Carus.

According to its Twitter page, the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center is “dedicated to exhibiting local, international and political art.” Though that doesn’t exactly make it any clearer as to why these silicone moles were created. The weird things are capable of moving, which surely means they’re even more horrific in real life!

It’s quite an achievement to turn Santa Claus into a terrible character, but the makers of this figurine somehow managed it! The Otter Tail County Historical Society brought this sinister doll to the world’s attention with a tweet in May 2020. Just one look at this thing might make you dread the prospect of Christmas.

This weird scene is from Burlingham Schurr – the one-time head of the Holyoke Museum of Fine Art and Natural History in Massachusetts. He clearly had a taste for the eccentric – if his frog circus is anything to go by. Taxidermy is a pretty odd hobby anyway, but making the stuffed animals perform circus tricks is taking things to the next level.

This strange item can today be found at Norwich Castle – a museum and art gallery that was once a palace used by British royalty. It’s a peapod made out of leather, but instead of peas inside it contains the faces of kids. It’s the type of item that seems like it was ripped right from a fever dream.

Meet Myrtle: perhaps the most terrifying doll ever to grace this Earth. You might expect that this figurine resides deep within the depths of hell, but in actual fact it sits in Brampton Museum in Newcastle-under-Lyme, England. This picture of Myrtle is bad, but it doesn’t show you the worst thing. The doll is animatronic – meaning it moves!

This ghastly image depicts Andrew the Apostle – the patron saint of several countries such as Scotland, Russia and Romania. According to the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, it was painted as part of a wider altarpiece back in 16th-century Spain. For some reason, the unknown artist decided that the saint’s arms had probably been birdlike.

Art doesn’t get more disturbing than this. Here we see a cast of Marc Quinn’s face in Istanbul’s Arter Gallery – a piece that he created himself. It’s pretty weird to make a cast of your own image anyway, but this one gets even stranger. That’s because Quinn claimed that he made the thing out of blood drawn from his own body. And the artist apparently used ten pints!

This photo was brought to our attention by Joanna Ebenstein – a woman who clearly has an interest in the macabre. In her Twitter post accompanying this picture, she explained that these heads came from the year 1831. They were apparently used by practitioners of phrenology. For reference, this pseudoscience stated that the shape of an individual’s skull could reveal something about a person’s thoughts.

Before his passing in 1918, Walter Potter had built up quite an unusual collection. The Englishman was a taxidermist with a particular taste for anthropomorphizing the animals he used in his creations. Here, we see a bunch of young bunny rabbits working away in the classroom. If nothing else, it’s evidence that art from the Victorian era could sometimes be extremely creepy!

This horrifying doll was tweeted by Museums Victoria, which is an umbrella group of several Australian cultural institutions. It wrote in April 2020, “This doll was too horrendous for one of our collections staff to bear, so they covered the face. When it was delivered to another venue for storage, the tissue paper was mysteriously torn so that one eye could peer out!”

Here, we have an example of horrific taxidermy coming from Southland Museum in New Zealand. This bird is actually an amalgamation of several different species and was put together by a local taxidermist. They did this, according to the museum, for “educational reasons.”

At least this horrific 19th-century German mannequin is being housed in the appropriate place. It’s found nowadays at the Museum of Fear and Wonder, which is located in Alberta, Canada. The bust’s grotesque features came about because it was once stored in a heated room with its face flat against the ground. Apparently, this led the nose to melt into its present shape!

The idea that some poor child had to play with this skeletal-armed doll is chilling. This thing is now exhibited by Australia’s State Library of Victoria, but at one time it belonged to a young girl named Elizabeth. We can only hope that the toy looked less creepy when she owned it!

Here, we have yet more evidence that taxidermy is a shockingly weird craft. This photograph tweeted by North Lincs Museum in England shows us a pair of stuffed frogs. One is shaving the other – because... reasons. Also, the fact that frogs don’t grow hair didn’t seem to bother the scene’s eccentric creator!

England’s Egham Museum brought this startling image to the world’s attention thanks to a tweet in April 2020. It shows a roughly century old doll smashed into several pieces and wrapped up in packaging. The item was originally discovered at a school, which for some reason makes it even more terrifying.

Those at the Dorchester Heritage Center sure know how to decorate for Halloween – if this dreadful figure is anything to go by. The group explained on Twitter how it came to possess such a thing, writing in April 2020, “Ralph the Mannequin was donated as part of a train exhibit. But we only bring him out at Halloween because he even scares us!”

Take one glance at this horrible melted doll, and you’d say that it looks like something taken right out of a horror movie. Well, that’s actually what happened! This is a prop from an ’80s movie called Spookies, which was filmed at a huge estate in Rye, New York. Nowadays, this place apparently serves as a heritage center.

An artist named Kerry Jameson is behind this ceramic she decided to call Chair. Would it be fair to suggest, though, that the chair in this piece is probably the thing that stands out least? The eye actually tends to be drawn to what’s sitting on it – namely, that weird cat-human amalgamation.

Puppets tend to be creepy anyway, but this one is even worse than the average! The piece is called the Peanut Vendor and was apparently created in 1933. Nowadays, it can be found in the vaults of Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision – an audiovisual archive in New Zealand.

This mask is several hundred years old, but its terrifying potency has endured through the centuries. The item is held in the Charterhouse Archives in England, and we’re pretty disturbed by it. Just take a look at those huge teeth!

The beak mask once worn by doctors during plague outbreaks is emblematic of these terrifying times. This one’s now housed in Berlin’s German Historical Museum, though it originally traces back to some time between 1650 and 1750. You can only imagine how terrifying seeing it back then would have been.

Maybe the person responsible for this abomination was a first-time taxidermist? This should be a stuffed lion, but the species isn’t entirely accurate as the artist had apparently never seen one of the big cats before! This lion was originally the property of a Swedish king in the 18th century.

The National Guitar Museum isn’t necessarily the kind of place you’d expect to creep you out too much. But it turns out that one of the guitars there is pretty freaky. This is the Crossroads Guitar, which is a piece of art depicting the Devil making a deal for a musician’s soul. And it’s the most terrifying musical instrument you’re ever likely to lay eyes upon.

This frightening children’s toy has a will of its own, according to Canada’s PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation. The item was discovered in an old mansion – seemingly long-forgotten. Nowadays, if museum staff set it down, they’ll apparently later find that it’s mysteriously moved somewhere else!

Blame the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences for bringing this hellish creature to our attention. This beast was once a chimpanzee, but after being stuffed it became something else entirely. Nobody really knows where this demonic creation came from, which makes it even worse.

You might look at this piece of jewelry and wonder why it’s on this list. After all, there’s nothing creepy about it, right? Wrong! It’s actually made of human hair, according to the Cayuga Museum of History & Art. It tweeted in October 2020, “During the 19th century, keeping a lock of hair from a passed on relative to wear in jewelry or to use in decoration was very popular. They were also popular gifts between the living!”

This is thought to be the oldest diving suit on Earth, which can be seen at Finland’s Raahe Museum. It’s a pretty cool artifact, but the problem is that it’s so scary. Luckily, this is just a still image, but it must be a terrifying thing to see a person inside this suit and moving around.

This terrifying monster is the work of an artist named Coralee Miller, who was inspired by the mythology of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. The Sncəwips Heritage Museum, which houses the work, elaborated on its story in a tweet. The group posted in April 2020, “This is an artistic interpretation of Skalula – or Owl Woman. She is a child-eating monster that teaches children to stay inside at night! She is like the ‘boogeyman’ of Syilx lore.”

This little trinket might seem innocent enough – maybe even cute. But when you realize what it actually is, you might be inclined to be a little more creeped out. Business owner Lisa Boswell wrote on Twitter that she was given the item as a present from her Romani grandma. The item is actually a badger’s leg which then had a face somewhat crudely crafted onto it!

It seems that Disney had a much more palatable idea of mermaids than whoever made this abomination. This creature is housed in the natural science department of National Museums Scotland, but it looks pretty man-made to us! The mermaid was carefully pieced together with an artificial head, a real fish jaw and a body belonging to a Pacific wrasse.

A phobia of clowns is known as “coulrophobia.” And if you happen to be one of those who has the condition, we can only apologize for this picture! But you should blame the Wisconsin Historical Society, who brought it to the world’s attention with a tweet in April 2020.

Imagine walking along a beach and stumbling across this horrific creature known as a Jenny Hanvier. It would be a traumatic discovery, but luckily it’s unlikely to ever arise. The Australian Museum tweeted in April 2020, “Peddled as a dragon from the darkest depths, a Jenny Haniver was in fact the handy work of seamen faking exotic sea creatures from a far off land. Crafted out of trawled skate, the specimen is manipulated and mummified to resemble the stuff of nightmares.”

This would be a perfectly charming scene were it not for the fact that the figures playing cards aren’t people but crab claws! This bizarre Victorian artwork was tweeted by York Castle Museum in England, which summed it up quite concisely. The organization wrote in April 2020, “Typical Victorians: they loved weird [and] creepy stuff.”

This seemingly possessed bear with blood-red eyes is held at the Toy Museum in the English estate of Penshurst Place. But if this thing is considered to be a toy, then that means it was originally created for kids. Who thought this would be an appropriate thing for a child to play with?!