30 photos from the Museum of Incredibly Interesting Things (31 photos)

The museum of incredibly interesting things exists only in virtual space, but it is so beautiful that more than 4 million people have already visited it. The online museum celebrates the strange, the creative, the macabre and the eccentric. Often all this at once.





An unusual online art space created by exhibition curator and art critic Chelsea Nichols. The exhibition features a variety of artifacts that defy traditional classification, from early 20th-century German Halloween accessories to 18th-century Japanese illustrations for medical books. In general, there is something to see for an inquisitive person.

1. Gilded bronze "Bats" chandelier, made around 1910 by the Swedish company Böhlmarks. A unique detail - pendant lights in the shape of bats hanging upside down



2. A woman of many faces! An unusual hobby from the mid-1600s: miniature oil portraits, onto which various costumes were superimposed using transparent pieces of mica.



3. Amazing illustrations from a 1720 Japanese medical book about smallpox. Paper embossing shows changes in the texture of smallpox lesions at different stages of the disease



4. Black cat paper fan made in Germany in the 1920s. Halloween accessory made for the American market



5. About 4,500 years ago in Ancient Egypt, parents placed this homemade ball in their child's grave so that he could play with it in the afterlife.



6. Traditional Irish Jack Lantern, carved from a turnip, circa 1850



7. This is a very rare set of Italian "musical" knives from the 16th century. The steel blade is engraved on each side with notes and lyrics intended to be chanted as prayers before and after meals.



8. Neon lamp salesman's promotional suitcase, circa 1935



9. Porcelain doll "Screaming Baby", made by German dollmaker Kästner around 1920



10. The shoe that Marie Antoinette lost when she tripped on the steps to the guillotine on the morning of her execution, October 16, 1793



11. Gold spider earrings, 300-100 AD. BC BC, from the Bactria region in modern Afghanistan



12. A shoe doll that belonged to a child in the slums of London at the beginning of the 20th century. It is made from scraps of fabric and the heel of an old man's shoe, and the hair is from an old black sock.



13. Victorian era gold keychain from which a devil with sparkling eyes jumps out. These totems were worn as a symbol of alcoholic abstinence and a reminder that sinful temptation must be resisted



14. A tiny devil enclosed in a glass prism. In the 18th century, the Vienna Imperial Treasury claimed that it was a real demon, caught in a glass trap during an exorcism in Germany a century earlier.



15. Gold earrings with pendants in the form of the severed heads of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI. Made after their execution by guillotine in 1793, stored in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris



16. A 15th-century painting of Saint Bartholomew. He wears his own skin as clothing.after she was flayed alive from him



17. In the early 1900s, one man couldn't afford proper dentures, so he made them himself using melted toothbrush handles and dead coyote teeth.



18. Don't fear the Grim Reaper, but fear poor oral hygiene. Fancy Memento Mori toothpick in the shape of a skull with a hand holding a sickle



19. These amazing vintage Krampus claws come from a small town in Austria. They have been used at the annual Krampus festival for approximately 70 years



20. A silver-plated glass bottle in which the spirit of a witch supposedly lives. It was received in 1915 from an old woman from Sussex, who strictly forbade opening the wax seal (otherwise there would be trouble)



21. Marble sculptures of the left hands of Princess Louise (1848), Prince Alfred (1845) and Princess Beatrice (1859)



22. An antique machine gun whose fur was destroyed by a moth infestation



23. One of the soap heads Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin placed in their beds to fool the night guards during their successful escape from Alcatraz prison in June 1962



24. “Morgue Chocolates,” made from casts of wounds found on bodies in a New York morgue



25. Charming painting “The Silence of the Forest” (1885), in which a nymph rides out of a dark forest on the back of a frightened unicorn



26. A creepy 17th-century mask made from real human hair, animal skin, feathers and fake teeth.



It was worn as a disguise by the outlaw preacher Alexander Peden (1626-1686), a popular Scottish Covenanter hiding for his treasonous views in rejecting King Charles I as the spiritual head of the Church of Scotland.

27. Witch's whistle or "hexenfluit", made from a rat's paw and carved bone. Made in the 19th century in Belgium and acquired by the Aan De Stroom museum in Antwerp in 1964



28. Posthumous portrait of a child holding a lizard that sheds its skin and grows a tail - a symbol of resurrection, rebirth or regeneration



29. Exorcism scene. The demon sits on a frightened child. Folk art, wood carving



30. Brown velvet hat, owned by a street "dentist" or traveling dentist in London in the 1820s-50s. Decorated with 88 teeth of his former patients