Macabre Museum Mondays

Museums are better with grave wax.  It's a fact. The Mutter Museum has grave wax and a bunch of other disturbing/fabulous things which makes it one of the creepiest museums out there and therefore a great place to start my Macabre Museum Mondays posts.


The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia is a medical museum which contains a collection of natural oddities, anatomical and pathological specimens, wax models, and antique medical equipment. The museum was established in 1858 with the collection  of Dr.Thomas Dent Mütter and is still involved in various research projects. 


The museum is known for showing everything from examples of rare human deformities to famous murderer's organs. While it is a font of educational value, it is safe to say that the main attraction is simply the plain ick-factor of most of their exhibits. 


If you can't get to the museum in person, every Thursday the museum posts a video called "Guess What's On the Curator's Desk". You won't be able to guess... and you won't want to. 


Here are just a bit of the macabre goodies the museum houses.:

• The Hyrtl Skull Collection
• A wax model of a woman with a horn growing out of her forehead along with several other wax molds of untreated head conditions
• A nine-foot-long human colon that contained over 40 pounds of fecal matter which originally came from a sideshow act called the human Balloon
• The body of the Soap Lady whose corpse turned itself into a soapy substance called adipocere better known as grave wax. 
• A malignant tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland's hard palate
• The conjoined liver from the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker
• A piece of tissue removed from the thorax of Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth