TOP 7 MACABRE COLLECTIBLES
1. TATTOOS
With over a hundred skinned masterpieces of the tattooed deceased variety, you won’t see any new age “Celtic/tribal” bands or Warner Bros. cartoons here. Dr. Katsunari Fukushi’s full-body inked skins are traditional Japanese tebori (hand applied). With a goal to preserve and study, Fukushi’s collection includes one-of a- kind Yakuza skins dating as far back as the 1920s. They can be viewed, on request, at the University of Tokyo.
2. BONES
The “Bone Palace” of Ray Bandar is home to seven thousand skulls. The only place free of this biologist’s collection is in the bedroom (at his wife’s demand). Seventy-nine-year-old Bender has been collecting skulls and bones for more than fifty years! That’s dedication! With official permits in hand, he has been able to get his skulls from virtually anywhere around the globe. His specimens come from zoos, beaches, and even off the road.
3. FREAKS
Peter the Great’s “Kunstkammer” is the result of fifteen years of collecting the oddities and rarities of Russia and the world, before making it available to the public in 1719. Animals with two heads or multiple legs or pickled punks are among Frederik Ruysch’s amazing anatomical dioramas (which included fetal skeletons surrounded by “trees” of their own preserved circulatory systems) and in the early days of the museum, live “freaks” were on display.
4. DEATH MASKS
Interested in obtaining a true likeness of great men, Laurence Hutton (1843-1904) set out to acquire death masks of historical or well-known figures. Some in his collection include Napoleon, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Goethe, Newton, and Charles XII, who was killed in battle (the bullet’s entry is visible above his right brow). Today the Hutton collection is housed at Princeton University and is available for viewing online.
5. MURDERABILIA
While the “killer clown,” John Wayne Gacy, was spending the rest of his life in jail, Rick Staton became his exclusive art dealer, becoming one of the first of America’s top collectors of murderabilia. Some well-known murderabilia buyers include painter Joe Coleman, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy from The Cramps, and shock rock performer Marilyn Manson. The Son of Sam Law does not allow a killer to profit from his crimes (i.e., movies or books), but murderabilia has become an Internet phenomenon and new laws have been difficult to pass, as first amendment rights are contested, so buying and selling is likely to continue. One proposal is the “Stop the Sale of Murderabilia to Protect the Dignity of Crime Victims Act.”
6. HAIR COLLECTION
They can be sold down to the follicle and by the inch! Lincoln, Kennedy, Monroe, Einstein, Lennon, and Presley are among John Reznikoff’s hair reps. When Britney shaved her head, guess who was super eager to get her locks? Reznikoff became more widely known for his small donation of Beethoven’s hair to LifeGem, a memorial service company that made three synthetic diamonds from the resulting carbon.
7. STUFFED ANIMALS
Walter Potter (1835-1918), a self-taught taxidermist, created strange tableaux of small dead animals that he arranged in unnatural or humanlike situations. These include gambling rats being caught off-guard in a raid, a couple of robins surrounding a tiny coffin in a funeral procession, and a yard filled with exercising toads. The collection was unfortunately broken up and sold at auction to different buyers in 2003.
