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My brothers and I took an overnight trip last weekend to Myrtle Beach.  Growing up, we would go to Myrtle Beach every summer for our dad to attend a big public works conference.  While he languished away in conference sessions all day, our mom would take us all over Myrtle Beach to various attractions.

Naturally, we have fond memories of these annual trips, and we have several regular spots we like to check out on our visits as adults.  One is the weird, wacky museum (for lack of a better word) that is Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

Ripley’s is named for the famed cartoonist Robert Ripley, who started his Believe It or Not! concept as a newspaper column.  Ripley travelled the world and scrupulously documented everyone of his claims, even employing a team of researchers to help corroborate the wild facts that came pouring in from his journeys and his readers alike.  Ripley built his first museum of oddities, which he called an “Odditorium,” in Chicago in 1933.  He was also responsible for mobilizing public opinion in favor of making “The Star-Spangled Banner” the official national anthem of the United States (Congress passed a law, which President Herbert Hoover signed into law, in 1931, making the song the official anthem).

Ripley’s “Odditoriums” capture something of the spirit of a circus sideshow while also being, essentially, cosmopolitan museums of anthropology and natural history.  If all of the artifacts, human remains, fossils, animals, etc., in a Ripley’s were presented less sensationally, almost all of them would fit nicely into the environment of your standard history or natural history museum.  Ripley’s, however, goes a step further, and makes these weird, scary, cool things even more weird, scary, and cool by way of a mysterious, slightly sleazy, very sensationalistic presentation.

Consider that the name of the “Odditoriums” officially end with an exclamation point:  Ripley’s Believe It or Not!  Almost every placard has a nice exclamation point in its description, adding that extra level of grammatical excitement.  It really draws attention to how wild, crazy, and/or unusual the factoid is, which just makes it even more memorable.

Then, of course, there are the artifacts themselves.  Some are replicas; some are full-sized wax figures; some are actual artifacts.  I was surprised by the sheer number of actual human remains on display in the museum, from shrunken heads to limbs to mummies.  There are additionally wax reproductions of people with strange deformities, like a man with two pupils and irises in each eye; a Chinese man with a candle implanted into his skull; and a woman with a horn growing out of her head.  There’s even a model of a pig, John Arnold, with six legs (and he’s from Darlington, South Carolina!):

The museum has a fun, often spooky, slightly dangerous feel to it, even though it is perfectly safe.  It very much conjures up that sensation of being at a weird circus or county fair, with all sorts of freaks and oddballs skulking about.

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