The Weird and Wonderful America We Live In

America was founded by men and women in search of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of expression. In the just over two hundred years since these rights have been guaranteed, this right has been tested. Over and over again. Look around any town or city in the U.S.A. and you will see all sorts of clothes, hair, piercings, tattoos, art, music, theater and architecture that exists because it can. Freedom of expression has spawned a country of individuals with individual dreams and desires. What follows are edifices of freedom and individuality that can be found throughout the United States. They are testaments to the mind, body, spirits and love that freedom of expression fosters.

Mütter Museum
19 South 22nd Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103-3097

This museum, located at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, exhibits collections of strange and fascinating medical history and paraphernalia. It was founded by 19th century Philadelphia physician Thomas Mütter to help educate the doctors of tomorrow. Upon entering, visitors numbering upwards of 25,000 every year, are greeted by an exhibit dedicated solely to infectious diseases. Of the museum's 20,000 displays there are 900 fluid-preserved anatomical and pathological specimens, and 10,000 medical instruments from 1750 to the present. There is even a sewing kit belonging to Florence Nightingale.

To the left of the entrance on the second floor is the Lewis and Clark exhibit "Only One Man Died". It includes surgical tools, long forgotten medicines and daunting techniques used by the physicians in the expedition. Bleedings were quite popular and at times were performed using a penknife. After this frontier fun, visitors walk through a display of kitchen hazards and into the main display area.

There is a series of displays called "When the President Is the Patient". It includes Abraham Lincoln's bloodstained collar, FDR's leg braces, and an actual growth removed from the jaw of Grover Cleveland. In the upper gallery, you’ll find a collection of 19th century wax models of skin diseases along with skulls and long bones displaying the ravages of syphilis. At the head of the stairs is the Soap Lady, a perfect example of decomposition of fatty tissue into adipocere tissue.

Continuing around the upper gallery, you’ll find a gangrenous hand and the skeleton of a woman whose ribcage was deformed and compressed by a lifetime of wearing a corset. The collection consists of over 139 skulls and The Natural History of Crime room devoted to the development of forensic science in the 19th century. The brains of many murders lay within along with the thorax of John Wilkes Booth. The upper balcony contains a history of conjoined twins and their development that includes a plaster cast of Chang and Eng with the genuine attached liver. You’ll find the Chevalier Jackson Collection of Foreign Bodies Removed from the Food and Air Passages that includes over 2000 objects.

The lower gallery is devoted to four main subject areas. The first is the Normal and Abnormal Fetal Development section. The Obstetrics and Gynecology section. Then we
move on to Internal Medicine, including the bladder stones of Chief Justice John Marshall by Dr Phillip Syng Physick in 1831, wax models of hernias and the highlight for most visitors, a massive human colon which engorged to twenty-seven feet long by eight feet around. Disorders of the Skeleton is the next stop and this display features the skeletons of a 7’6" giant and a 3’6" dwarf. A collection of documenting the effects of various forms of trauma and deformities on the skeleton includes that if Harry Eastlack, a 30 year-old man that suffered from fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. This disease converted his bones to an almost concrete-like consistency. The Neurology Section contains the Muniz collection of trephinated skulls and a series of sliced sections of the human head made in 1910.

Where else can you see Eye Wall of Shame, a display of wax models of eyeballs depicting a wide assortment of eye injuries including a toothpick penetrating the retina? They even have a gift shop where t-shirts, Sticky Body Parts, A Growing Brain and a spine keychain can be
purchased.

A photography book on the Mütter Museum can be found at. Amazon. Publisher: Blast Books

The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices

The Science Museum of Minnesota includes many wondrous displays. There is the usual Egyptian mummy,
seven-foot diameter Douglas-fir tree trunk and numerous mounted taxidermied animals. And, then, there is the Questionable Medical Device Collection. It was donated by Bob McCoy, international expert on Medical Quackery and Health Fraud.

Several devices are displayed in the Collections Gallery. A Phrenology machine that "deduced" your personality, a 1950's foot x-ray machine that claimed a perfect shoe fit every time, and the Orgone Energy Accumulator that instilled vitality.

There is an entire series of strange gizmos, machines and contraptions from 1790 to the present that do everything form straightening your nose to the spectrochrome that supposedly healed even cancer with the use of colored lights.

Mr. McCoy has a book called Quack! Available on Amazon. Publisher: Santa Monica Pr; (November 2000) http://www.smm.org/visitorinfo/permanent/Collections.php

The Mystery Spot
1953 Branciforte Drive
Box 2817, Santa Cruz, CA, 95063
(831) 423-8897

Thousands of people have visited this natural phenomenon since its discovery in 1940. What they have experienced are numerous variations of gravity, perspective, compass, velocity, and height that science have yet to explain.

When a carpenter's level is set across two cement blocks, their tops are on the same level. One volunteer stands at one end of the level (inside the spot) and a companion at the other end (just outside the spot). One of the volunteers suddenly appears disproportionately taller.

Discovered in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, the spot is 150 feet in diameter. Visitors lean towards the southwest when they enter and lean more as they walk, or stumble, towards the center of the spot. Even the trees do not stand perpendicular. http://www.mysteryspot.com/

There is a spot in Oregon as well.
The Oregon Vortex
4303 Sardine Creek L Fork RD
Gold Hill, OR 97525-9732
http://www.oregonvortex.com/

Fox Point Art Yard - Mary Nohl
7328 Beard Road,
Fox Point, Milwaukee WI

"Do you want to see the witches house?" This is how I ended up see Mary Nohl’s house for the first time. For years, teenagers drove by her house in Fox Point, some throwing rocks and shouting; others just to see what they could see. Rumors that she’d murdered her family and placed them within the many statues around her yard circulated. Others believed her husband and son drown in the lake viewed from her windows and the statues were her sentinels, awaiting their return. None of this is true.

Ms. Nohl received a degree in art from the Chicago Institute of Art and inherited the house from her mother. She created art on a full time basis and never married. The yard is inhabited with sculptures, including human figures, dinosaurs, mythical beasts, fish, mammoth Easter Island heads and other pieces that delight. Odd art hangs from trees and the house itself, which looks like something out of a fairy tale, is trimmed with wooden fish and other relics. Nohl used rocks from the beach, driftwood and other found objects in her sculpture to wonderful effect. The beauty and charm of the site is what made me want to go back.

Despite the chain-link fence and barbed wire around the property, band members of The Violent Femmes somehow got inside the yard to photograph the cover art for their album, "Hallowed Ground." http://www.agilitynut.com/nohl.html

The Winchester Mystery House
525 South Winchester Boulevard,
San Jose, CA 95128
(408) 247-2000

In 1884, Sarah L. Winchester, heiress of the Winchester Rifle fortune, arrived in the Santa Clara Valley of California after many years of traveling. When he infant daughter and then her husband died, Sarah had been told by a medium that there was a curse on the Winchester family. The numerous deaths caused by the rifle were at the epicenter. With the advice of heading towards the setting sun and to "never stop building when you get there" ringing in her head, Sarah set out for the West Coast.

Here, she found a six-room home under construction. Purchasing the house and it’s surrounding 162 acres, she tossed out the blueprints and she began to build. With her pick of local workers and craftsmen, for the next 36 years, they built and rebuilt, altered, constructed and demolished one section of the house after another. Sarah kept 22 carpenters at work, year around, 24 hours each day. The sounds of hammers and saws could always be heard.

Sarah met with the contractor every morning and told him her ideas. These consisted of doors leading into walls, windows in floors, staircases leading to nowhere and a door opening onto an eight-foot drop into a kitchen sink. Another door opens to a 14-foot drop to an outdoor garden. The séance room in the center of the house could be entered and exited by numerous means. It is said Sarah came in and left a different way each time, in order to confuse the spirits. In fact, she spoke to them nightly, ringing a bell at midnight to summon them. A second bell rung at 2:00 a.m. told them it was time to leave.

Sarah was known to have more than just a passing interest in the number "13". Nearly all of the windows contained 13 panes of glass; the walls had 13 panels; the greenhouse had 13 cupolas; many of the wooden floors contained 13 sections; some of the rooms had 13 windows and every staircase but one had 13 steps. This staircase has 42 steps and turns 7 times, which would normally be enough to take a climber up three stories. In this case, however, the steps only rise nine feet because each step is only two inches high. In the 13th bathroom (the only one with a shower), there are 13 windows. Thirteen palm trees line the driveway. As a final gesture, Sarah's will was divided into 13 parts and signed 13 times.

When the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 struck, what had been a seven-story structure collapsed to three. The fireplace located in the Daisy Room where Mrs. Winchester had been sleeping, collapsed and trapping Sarah inside. Because she slept in a different bedroom every night, it took the servants over an hour to find her. She was convinced that the spirits had been angered by the near completion of the house. Vowing never to complete construction, she decided to board up the front 30 rooms of the mansion, trapping spirits residing in portion of the house. And, she slept in the same bedroom from that day until her death.

On September 4, 1922, after a session with the spirits in the séance room, Sarah went to her bedroom. At some time early morning hours, she died in her sleep. She was 83. The house was sold by her niece, Frances Marriot, to a group of investors who planned to use it as a tourist attraction. As they assessed it for advertising, the rooms of the house were counted over and over again. A different total was reached each time. Finally, five years later, it is estimated that 160 rooms exist, covering 4.5 acres of land.

Today, the house has been declared a California Historical Landmark and is registered with the National Park Service as "a large, odd dwelling with an unknown number of rooms." In the years that the house has been open to the public, employees and visitors alike have had unusual encounters. There have been footsteps; banging doors; mysterious voices; windows that bang so hard they shatter; cold spots; strange moving lights; doorknobs that turn by themselves.... and scores of psychics who have their own claims of phenomena to report. They give flashlight tours every Friday the Thirteenth and every Halloween. http://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/

The Coral Castle

While World War II ravaged Europe, Latvian born Edward Leedskalnin arrived in Florida with a dream and tuberculosis. It seems that when he was twenty-six, he fell in love with Agnes Scuffs and asked her to marry him. Agnes accepted, but cancelled the wedding the day before the ceremony.

Ed was devastated. His lifelong quest became building a monument for the woman he loved and lost. And even Emperor Shah Jahan, who created the Taj Mahal for his lost love, Empress Mumtaz Mahal, cannot claim the diligence, meticulousness and mysteriousness of Ed’s creation, The Coral Castle.

Without any assistance, machinery or concrete, Ed built the Coral Castle out of over 1200 tons of coral. This 100-pound man cut, carved and moved all of the coral by himself. The walls of the castle were approximately 125 pounds per cubic foot. Each section of wall is 8 feet tall, 4 feet wide, 3 feet thick and weighs over 58 tons. Ed quarried one piece of stone that weighed over 28 tons and then erected it himself. Some stones are twice the weight of the largest blocks in the Great Pyramid at Giza. His tools were handmade saws, chisels, chains, hoists and hammers of primitive creation. His only mode of transportation was a dilapidated bicycle without tires. All of the furniture within the castle walls is made of solid coral. One piece, a rocking chair, weighs thousands of pounds and can be rocked with one finger. There is an underground structure that is reached by climbing down a one-piece spiral stone staircase. It leads to a subterranean refrigerator.

A working sundial calibrated to the Winter and Summer Solstices is so accurate it tells time within two minutes. Leedskalnin shaped and drilled the castle’s 9-ton gate out of a single piece of coral. It fits within a quarter inch of the walls on either side, pivoting around an iron rod resting on an automobile gear. It was carved with such perfect balance that it once swung with the touch of a finger. The castle’s next owners had to brake the gate in order to keep the 9 tons from swinging into people unaware of the ease of its movement.

How Ed built the castle and it’s solid coral furniture is a mystery he chose never to reveal. When asked how he did it, all he would say was that he understood the laws of weight and leverage well. He is quoted as saying, "I have discovered the secrets of the pyramids. I have found out how the Egyptians and the ancient builders in Peru, Yucatan, and Asia, with only primitive tools, raised and set in place blocks of stone weighing many tons."

The original castle was in Florida City. In the mid-1930’s, a subdivision was planned nearby. Spurred by his deep need for privacy, Ed packed up the entire quarry and everything he’d made so far and moved it to Homestead, Florida where it remains today. No one saw him load or unload any of the massive stones from the truck he borrowed for the event.

Then one day in 1951, visitors saw a sign on the front door that he had gone to the hospital. Ed died three days later of malnutrition and kidney failure. His life savings, $3,500, were found on his property. His only living relative, Harry, inherited what was then known as "Rock Gate Park." Shortly before he died in 1953, Harry sold the property to a Chicago family, who gave it its present name. Thirty years later, Coral Castle was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. When Hurricane Andrew struck in 1993, massive destruction lay outside the castle walls. But, all within lay untouched. Ironically, the site can be rented for weddings. http://www.coralcastle.com/home.asp

Eccentric America: The Bradt Guide to All That's Weird and Wacky in the USA by Jan Friedman.

The New Roadside America: The Modern Traveler's Guide to the Wild and Wonderful America's Tourist Attractions by Doug Kirby, Ken Smith, Mike Wilkins.

America Bizarro: A Guide to Freaky Festivals, Groovy Gatherings, Kooky Contests, and Other Strange Happenings Across the U.S.A by Nelson Taylor.

Offbeat Museums: The Collections and Curators of America's Most Unusual Museums by Saul Rubin.