Museum of the Weird

Museum of the Weird is an oddities museum located inside Lucky Lizard Curios & Gifts on East Sixth Street in downtown Austin. Steve and Veronica Busti opened the gift shop in July 2005, initially selling unusual souvenirs alongside a small collection of curiosities. Visitors often showed greater interest in examining the strange objects than purchasing them, leading Steve Busti to retain and expand the collection. The dedicated museum opened behind the shop on 5 May 2007.

The museum was created as a modern version of the American dime museum, a form of popular entertainment associated particularly with the 19th century. Such attractions combined unusual natural specimens, ethnographic objects, wax figures, mechanical displays, performers and fabricated curiosities, usually presented with exaggerated advertising. Museum of the Weird follows this tradition by displaying genuine specimens, replicas, film props and objects of uncertain or deliberately theatrical origin alongside one another.

The original section is arranged as a cabinet of curiosities. Its displays include taxidermy, animal abnormalities, fossils, skeletons, objects presented as mummies and shrunken heads, models of cryptozoological creatures and composite figures based on the traditional Fiji mermaid. Two-headed animals, cyclopean specimens and other congenital abnormalities form an important part of the collection. Additional exhibits cover Bigfoot, extraterrestrials, ghosts, zombies and other subjects from folklore and popular culture.

The museum’s best-known individual exhibit is the Minnesota Iceman, also advertised as the Creature in Ice. The refrigerated display contains a hairy human-like figure frozen inside a transparent block. It was originally exhibited by Frank Hansen at fairs, shopping centres and carnivals during the late 1960s and early 1970s, where it was promoted as a possible prehistoric human or unknown primate. Zoologists Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan T. Sanderson examined it through the ice and argued that it might represent an unidentified hominid.

Hansen gave several conflicting explanations for the figure’s origin, including claims that it had been found near Siberia, owned by an unnamed millionaire or shot by Hansen himself. The Smithsonian Institution investigated the case in 1969 and contacted a Hollywood effects workshop that stated it had manufactured the figure from latex rubber and implanted hair. The Smithsonian consequently concluded that the Iceman was a fabricated carnival exhibit. Museum of the Weird acquired the surviving display in 2013 and presents it as an important object from American sideshow and cryptozoological history rather than as scientifically verified remains.

Another section, Sfanthor’s Chamber of Horrors, is devoted to classic horror cinema. It contains wax figures and displays based on monsters and characters including Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolf Man and other figures associated with early horror films. The collection developed from Sfanthor House of Wax, a separate Austin attraction operated by Steve Busti that closed in 2016. Its exhibits were subsequently incorporated into Museum of the Weird. The chamber also contains a life-sized King Kong display designed as a photographic setting.

The collection includes material connected with famous supernatural claims and hoaxes. In 2020, the museum placed an early contact print connected with the Cottingley Fairies photographs on display. The original photographs were taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths beginning in 1917 and were promoted as evidence of fairies, notably by Arthur Conan Doyle. The cousins later admitted that the images had been created using paper figures, making them one of the best-known photographic hoaxes of the 20th century.

The visitor route extends through several rooms and levels above and behind Lucky Lizard Curios & Gifts. The museum is privately operated and presents its collection primarily in the style of an old sideshow attraction rather than as a conventional natural-history or scientific museum. The gift shop remains accessible separately and sells horror merchandise, locally produced items, unusual gifts and objects connected with the museum’s exhibits.