Gettysburg, Pennsylvania - Doc Weitzel's Traveling Curiosity Show

Anyone mourning the loss of the American Dime Museum in Baltimore should take heart. "Doc" Weitzel can fix what ails you. While not as large, focused or grand as the late, great Dime Museum, Doc Weitzel's Traveling Curiosity Show packs a lot of gaffs, oddities and curiosities into a small space in the Old Gettysburg Village, within a musket shot of the battlefield. The exhibits range from Halloween prop kitsch to real medical and natural oddities with quite a few quality carnival gaffs thrown in.

The excellent feegee mermaid would have been worth the trip for me, but there were mummified heads of Custer and the Marquis de Sade, a two-headed baby duck, a half size model of Joseph Merrick, The Elephant Man, and shrunken heads.

Some of the exhibits truly creepy; a lock of John Wilkes Booth's hair and drops of his blood, Lincoln's death mask, a huge human hair ball and tucked in a lower cabinet; an autographed picture of John Wayne Gacy as Pogo the Clown along with a creepy clown doll.

Our guide was still working on learning his spiels for the various exhibits, but he was super nice and very accommodating. Photographs are allowed of most of the exhibits. We were even allowed to handle some of the items, like Jaws' steel choppers from the James Bond movies, and a rubber Necronomicon hand puppet (a mass market collectible from Army of Darkness movie). [Crowolf, 09/19/2009]