Believe It or Don't

I wanted to start writing “When I was a kid” but I decided that makes me sound at worst like Andy Rooney, at best like Garrison Keillor. Talking about how things were different when you were young only serves to remind your audience that you are not young, that your frame of reference was from so long ago that you understand shaking it like a Polaroid picture or having your cassette tape eaten by the player or to change the channel on the television, you had to get up and walk across the room and manually turn a knob to see the three or four choices of programming available. But in order to compare my children’s experience to my own, I have to do the “when I was a kid” thing, even if I am only talking about seeing my first shrunken head.

When I was a kid, my mom took me and my sisters to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum in St. Augustine. I don’t remember how old I was, but I have a feeling I was still in the bed wetting years, and everything about that museum freaked me out. It was one of those ornate historic buildings, not that far from Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth (which sounds like a great name for a frozen mixed drink bar, kind of like a new Fat Tuesday’s) and the Old Jail. I only remember small details about the museum itself. I remember a log cabin made out of matchsticks. I remember something unusual made with pennies, but only that they were very shiny. I remember a picture of an Asian man with two irises in each eye. I am pretty sure there was an iron maiden somewhere in the building. But most of all, I remember seeing a shrunken head. A real head, only the size of an apple. It was black and leathery and boneless, but the hair was still long and dark. I was terrified of the shrunken head. For weeks after our visit to that shrine to all things weird, I could be reduced to tears merely by someone uttering the words “shrunken head” near me. Come bedtime, I was trapped in my bed, too scared to get up and use the potty, lest the shrunken head was somewhere in my room, waiting for me. No wonder I was such a chronic bed wetter. I don’t think it took weeks to get over that. It took months. No, years. Definitely years.

On our most recent trip to Myrtle Beach, one of my girls noticed a billboard advertising the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, which like all things once considered unique and one of a kind is now franchised regionally to optimize the all mighty tourist dollar. It was a billboard of the same Asian man, whom my sisters and I used to call Four Eyes. My husband didn’t really want to go because he was convinced it was only going to be pictures of oddities and gross stuff. But my girls and I convinced him that it was a must-see tourist destination, that they were old enough to handle it without a year of nightmares, and that it was not going to be a total waste of money.

While we waited outside for tickets, we watched a display featuring second rate animatronic figures playing instruments and singing-- a tiny man in a cage, a Thai woman with a big stack of neck rings, and the world’s tallest man appeared to belt out Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” “This is gonna be good,” I said to my husband while he shelled out more money than the experience was worth.

We hustled the girls through the gates. The first thing we spied walking in was a deer with its underdeveloped twin’s legs hanging down like a cow’s udder from its belly. “See?” I said to him. “That’s no picture!” We also saw a duck wearing prosthetic tennis shoes since he was hatched without webbed feet. We walked upstairs to a room that gave a little historical feeling to the whole museum. Ripley, after all, scoured the world for his collection of oddities that he shared with his audiences. It’s not like these people could learn about conjoined twins by searching the Internet. If there wasn’t a two headed calf on the next farm or the world’s fattest man at the local carnival, how would people even know of their existence? So, to some degree, my husband was right, because the museum did have pictures of things, but he seemed to enjoy the historical context and didn’t complain.

The next room was more human oddities and feats, including a cast of a unicorn man, a framed mat of hair cut from a woman who grew her ponytail until it was over six feet long, and a film of some dude in a suit who could lift a cinder block with his lower eye lids. My daughter E was feeling a little queasy about that time, so we went into a more dark and primitive area. There we saw weapons made of human bones, masks made of human skin, skull candle holders, and other disgusting artifacts of a simpler time, way simpler, when to deal with those who didn’t agree with you was a matter, literally, of kill or be killed, and possibly eaten. With the dim lighting and pounding tribal drums, I almost expected some high priest to come from behind a display and rip my still beating heart out of my chest. I always did like the Indiana Jones movies, so I was pretty happy.

And then we saw it, the Shrunken Head. It was as disgusting as I remembered, but not nearly as horrifying. Now, I could look closer at the empty eye sockets and sewn up lips and think, eww, gross but cool. My daughters, who never had the bed wetting years, just wanted to keep moving. They loudly questioned our judgment for choosing to take them to Ripley’s. Nobody wants to have their parenting skills criticized loudly in a museum in Myrtle Beach. I reminded them it was their idea, and no, we are not leaving, so look at that shrunken head, dammit!

The creepy part of the museum culminated in the gothic room, where, yes, the iron maiden was housed. There were some iron shackles, an assortment of shivs and shanks confiscated from prisons, and other torture devices dangling from the walls, and it was about this time my kids thought we had left the museum and entered the Ripley’s Haunted House, conveniently located next door. I assured them we were still in the museum, and luckily, the next room was a little more brightly lit and a lot less macabre. In it were a roller coaster made out of matchsticks, butterfly wing art, and a bunch of other boring stuff that was not made out of dead people. After walking through a moving tunnel designed to trick the eye and cause motion sickness, we were dumped unceremoniously into a video arcade. The museum was over.

I told the girls about when I was a kid. We would watch “In Search Of…” with Leonard Nimoy and “That’s Incredible” and the ultimate, “Ripley’s Believe it or Not,” with Jack Palance’s labored narration. I told them how that was when reality TV shows were good, not like today, with all the binge drinking and hook ups and ultraconservative Christians birthing giant litters of children. My husband explained to them that freak shows, which used to be commonplace at fairs and carnivals, have died off since people became more sensitive to people’s disabilities and differences. I told them we don’t even call them freaks anymore, because it can be offensive to freaks. The truth is, my kids can see a freak every now and then at Wal-Mart or You Tube. They aren’t a special treat anymore to be enjoyed with some cotton candy or popcorn.

We all agreed that the Ripley’s museum was worth the visit, but I could not convince them to go to the Haunted House. They had enough scary for one afternoon. But no one was as traumatized as I, which was great, because I didn’t have to change anyone’s wet sheets in the middle of the night.