September 29, 2024, 5:53 pm | Read time: 7 minutes
When Ben Stiller walks among living exhibits as a museum guard in “Night at the Museum,” you can still laugh heartily. In some real museums, however, it’s not only at night that you feel like you’re in a chamber of horrors: TRAVELBOOK unveils 11 museums that are not for the faint-hearted.
1. Torture and capital punishment
In idyllic San Gimignano in Tuscany, things are less harmonious than you might initially think. In the Medieval Criminal and Torture Museum, visitors can expect to see guillotines, instruments of torture, and terrifying illustrations from the Middle Ages. One of the most gruesome exhibits is a sarcophagus in which the victims were tortured with holes for long, sharp needles while standing upright. “It was very informative, but also very, very gory! I couldn’t sleep the following night – some of the photos and drawings I had seen in the museum kept coming back to my mind,” writes one visitor on Tripadvisor about this first one in our list of horror museums.
2. Horror in the bunker
Anyone who wants to be chased into an air raid shelter by masked horror figures will feel right at home in this museum, the Berlin Story Bunker. In the restored air raid shelter from the Second World War, long-lost artifacts and old construction plans are on display. Visitors can see scenes of medieval torture and medical procedures in the “Medicine in the Old Days” figure cabinet. If that’s not scary enough for you, there’s another adrenaline rush in the cabinet of horrors. On 700 square meters, you have to find your way through scary scenes in the dark to the exit – past disguised “frighteners” who emerge from dark corners, chase visitors, and make scary noises in their ears.
3. Tomb mummies in Palermo
The visit to the next on this list of horror museums resembles a nightmare: rows of mummies hang on bare walls, are stored in wall niches, and skulls are everywhere. Contrary to expectations, they are not to be seen in Ancient Egypt but in a Sicilian port city. The Capuchin crypt in Palermo has been the resting place of over 2000 mummified dead since the 16th century. Men – including many monks as well as priests – and women and children were preserved in sealed chambers with low humidity. It’s a creepy sight for those alive today.
4. Greetings from Purgatory
The small Museum of the Holy Souls in Purgatory, which can be found in a small adjoining room of the Roman church Chiesa del Sacro Cuore del Suffragio, displays a small collection of Bibles, prayer books, and other documents as well as textiles that are said to have been scorched by souls in purgatory – and is one of the horror museum. For example, a man is said to have recognized the handprints of his deceased wife on a nightcap. The small but nevertheless eerie collection goes back to the French missionary and collector Victor Jouët, who claims to have seen a trapped soul in an image of a burning altar wall during a church fire and then began to collect evidence of the phenomenon.
5. Paris anatomy collection
A room full of body parts pickled in formaldehyde is something you would only imagine in your worst nightmares. This takes on a terrifying form in Paris: Over 6,000 objects – from wax figures and bone parts to drawings and instruments – give you goosebumps at the Musée Dupuytren. On display are organs and brains, as well as specimens from the 17th and 18th centuries disfigured by disease. These specimens date back to the collection of French chemist Mathieu Orfila, which was first exhibited in 1835.
6. Not suitable for small children
The Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph (Missouri) shows a history of psychiatry in the USA dating back to the 16th century with showcases, mannequins, as well as replicas. A visit to this museum on our list of horror museums gives an idea of the torments patients were subjected to back then. For example, there is a hamster wheel on display in which the inmates had to pedal, as well as tubs for ice baths and an old electric chair. There are also objects on display that the patients swallowed. The museum’s warning that “some exhibitions are not suitable for small children” should be taken seriously.
7. Baby mummies in Mexico
The 119 mummified corpses on display in the Museo de las Momias Guanajuato all have one thing in common. They are all cholera victims from 1833. The mummies were discovered in a cemetery in Guanajuato (Mexico), some with bizarre and suffering facial expressions, including babies. “Not everyone will like this museum,” warns one user on Tripadvisor.
8. Creepy dolls à la Chucky
Anyone who couldn’t sleep after a night at the movies with “Chucky – The Murder Doll” in 1988 should stay away from the Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell in the US state of Kentucky. There are staring faces with wide-open eyes waiting there, most of whom don’t seek out company in the light, let alone in the dark. The collection of ventriloquist dummies dates back to William Shakespeare Berger, who bought his first dummy in 1910.
9. Looking death in the eye
Another one of the horror museums is The Museum of Death. The museum is located directly on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. It displays drawings of death row inmates, crime scene photos as well as equipment used to execute prison inmates. “If your stomach can take it, a real insider tip,” says one Tripadvisor user.
10. Body Worlds – art or scandal?
Admittedly, it’s a matter of taste. But you need a strong stomach to visit Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds, which can be considered one of the horror museums. The traveling exhibition shows sculptured bodies of humans as well as animals in various everyday positions while cycling, having sex, or even playing cards. You can see the human body in all its complexity – nerves, muscles, organs.
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11. The Fool’s Tower of Vienna
Hardly any other attraction in Vienna leaves such a lasting impression as the Fool’s Tower with its pathological-anatomical collection. Visitors should be warned: the images from this tower will not leave them in a hurry. It was completed in 1784. The circular, five-storey cylinder has 139 cells in which mentally ill people were once chained up. Today, the cells house the pathological and anatomical collection.
The approximately 50,000 objects include corpses or parts of corpses preserved in alcohol and wax replicas of diseased body parts – making the Fools’ Tower the largest and oldest pathological museum in the world. It is impossible to visit the museum without being confronted with your own fears of illness and death. “Primary effect of syphilis on the male genitals,” reads an old educational poster, also on display: Plague lung, Aleppo boil, tuberculosis of the finger, third-degree frostbite, smallpox face.
The original of this article was published in 2016.