"We see your kind, sweetling, building mausoleums to history. We see the British Museum. Down in Temple Court, we see a nearby department of that institution, the British Museum of the Occult. But look. The doors always seem locked, the exhibits always seem closed to the general public. It has always been this way. Those who are savvy of the Secret World may gain admittance to the seemingly closed museum, finding a vast treasury of artefacts from around the world... and beyond. Considered one of the foremost institutions of occult history, its halls are visited by a wide array of paranormal academics and adventurers. Just as you have visited, sweetling. They need benefactors to fill their exhibits. Your mind is a perfect museum. And now they have the technology to extract the exhibits inside your skull, and display them in their hallowed halls."
— The Buzzing, The Secret World
Nish: So what is all this stuff?
Rolo Haynes: Authentic criminological artifacts. If it did something bad, chances are it's in here. Take a look around, take your time, see what pops out at you. Anything piques your interest, I can tell you all about it. There's a sad, sick story behind most everything here — just like our main attraction, which is just through there. But let's not get ahead of ourselves...
Rolo Haynes: Authentic criminological artifacts. If it did something bad, chances are it's in here. Take a look around, take your time, see what pops out at you. Anything piques your interest, I can tell you all about it. There's a sad, sick story behind most everything here — just like our main attraction, which is just through there. But let's not get ahead of ourselves...
— Black Mirror, "Black Museum"
The museum was to house the aberrations created alongside the development of the sciences and the arts, intended in no way to criticize our clumsy advancement, but simply to note some of the interesting and incredible tangents. As many of our pieces were still living, we were forced to exist, in part, as a commune. Attracting all kinds of scientific bungles — transient fellows out of place from society, contemporary deformities — we were, for a time, a family of all sorts.
The museum was divided into six sections and I follow them here: Breeding, Genetics, Evolution Control, Art Pieces, Mechalogical, and Items of Ambiguous Classification (which included the botanical exhibits).
The museum was divided into six sections and I follow them here: Breeding, Genetics, Evolution Control, Art Pieces, Mechalogical, and Items of Ambiguous Classification (which included the botanical exhibits).
— The Museum of Unnatural History, by David M. Henley
The Museum of Anatomical Anomalies is a droopy Georgian mansion a couple of miles south of the state line. It's the kind of old-fashioned attraction that tends to impress tour guide writers, because they can't believe they've never been, and because it's just so quirky. That's what Noah Crayne relies on, because he's not going to get many visitors in otherwise. Without visitors, he'd never be able to fund his hobbies.
Noah, a thickset man with a professorial voice and a smile that makes his cheeks bulge, dresses as he feels an undertaker ought to. That's what he is, he tells his visitors, an undertaker to the strangest mysteries ever to greet human eyes. A fetal mermaid, for instance, preserved in a yellowing fluid, or the skull of a dragon, distinguishable by its burnt teeth. Noah gives exuberant tours of his thousand spectacular and unlikely specimens, each lovingly preserved and accompanied by paintings depicting the creatures as they might have lived. He delights in leaving visitors unsure whether or not he believes what he's saying. He doesn't, and if the question is put to him bluntly enough, he'll admit it. Most of his exhibits, expensive as they are, are frauds. He should know, too. He's got a private gallery full of the genuine articles.
Noah, a thickset man with a professorial voice and a smile that makes his cheeks bulge, dresses as he feels an undertaker ought to. That's what he is, he tells his visitors, an undertaker to the strangest mysteries ever to greet human eyes. A fetal mermaid, for instance, preserved in a yellowing fluid, or the skull of a dragon, distinguishable by its burnt teeth. Noah gives exuberant tours of his thousand spectacular and unlikely specimens, each lovingly preserved and accompanied by paintings depicting the creatures as they might have lived. He delights in leaving visitors unsure whether or not he believes what he's saying. He doesn't, and if the question is put to him bluntly enough, he'll admit it. Most of his exhibits, expensive as they are, are frauds. He should know, too. He's got a private gallery full of the genuine articles.
"There is a room in the basement of the Natural History Museum which they keep locked. Among other oddities in there are the tyrannosaurus with a wristwatch and the Neanderthal skull with gold fillings in three teeth."
— Dr. Carl Untermond, "The Overcrowded Eden", Strata
"Our uncle had transformed his house into a tourist trap he called 'The Mystery Shack'. The real mystery was why anyone came."
— Dipper Pines, Gravity Falls, "Tourist Trapped"
