The Black Vault - Mermaids, sideshow freaks are museum's masterpieces

BALTIMORE — Most curators dream of stocking their museums with Picassos, Rodins or golden treasure from the pharaohs' tombs.

But James Taylor, who runs what he and partner Dick Horne bill as the world's only museum devoted to novelty and exotic performance, has always had other ideas about what makes a good exhibit.

"You get me a 300-pound guy clog-dancing on top of a bunch of olive-oil jars and I'm there," he said. "That's art."

The founders of the 3-year-old American Dime Museum have built their gallery on the theory that others are also tired of the dusty dinosaur bones and expensive paintings moldering in marble-columned halls.

They invite anyone with five bucks to come to their Baltimore museum and gaze on the corpse of the amazing 9-foot-tall Peruvian Amazon mummy or the mysterious Feegee Mermaid — half-monkey, half-fish.

The Dime Museum gets its name from the carnival-like museums of the 19th century, where, for the price of a dime, truth was stretched thinner than the taffy sold on a carnival midway.

Every year, thousands willingly suspend their disbelief and gawk at the stuffed unicorn goat that once toured with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. They gaze, gape-mouthed, at the shriveled right hand of Spider Lillie, a 19th-century English prostitute who released spiders from a compartment in her ring to kill her enemies.

In the 19th century, people depended on museums for their entertainment. From tiny roadside shacks to big city galleries, the idea was to get people in the doors by offering exotic exhibits from the far corners of the world.

"All forms of museums grew out of the original dime museums," Horne said. "They all were responding to what the public wanted to see."

In the museum's basement, volunteer Craig Coletta helps guide people through a sideshow exhibit featuring a devil-man mummy; Grace, the Mule-Faced Woman; and Fivey, the Five-legged Dog.

Coletta, who works as a conflict mediator, also lets interested customers pound nails into his nasal cavity as part of his human blockhead routine, once a staple of sideshows and dime museums.

"We're keeping alive a dying art form," Coletta said, smiling, the head of a four-inch nail reflecting the sideshow's lights as it protrudes from his right nostril. "After all these years, people still like to look at weird stuff. We're not that much different than our ancestors 150 years ago."

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