Exploitation or Education? Modern Cabinets of Curiosity and Haunted Tourism

Lyric Lott, WPAMC ’24

What is the key to a frightfully good haunted house? One’s mind might jump to dark corridors and crowded interiors scattered with dusty human skulls, creepy masks, and the sense of being watched by glassy-eyed, taxidermied beasts. Intriguingly, this is not far off the mark from what one can currently find in the basement of the Armour-Stiner Octagon House in Irvington, New York. From now until October 31st, 2023, visitors may descend to the basement of the famous house museum to discover an artist installation by Ryan Matthew Cohn, consultant on the Science Channel show Oddities. Titled “Cabinet of Curiosities,” the installation at Armour-Stiner boasts Cohn’s personal collection of “oddities,” or specimens ranging from taxidermied alligators, to Aztec masks, to even an actual human skeleton. 

Though a house museum may initially seem an odd locale for such a spooky, eccentric installation, it feels quite at home in Irvington, a town only a stone’s throw from Sleepy Hollow and named for the author of the that very tale. In recent years, Sleepy Hollow country has become a hub for what some have come to call “haunted tourism,” or travel to sites historically affiliated with the paranormal, with organizations in the area now offering various tours, events, and installations that provide visitors a chance to explore all things ghoulish and gruesome. 

It is because of haunted tourism that the cabinet of curiosities, a relic of the early museum world, has reentered the popular sphere. Originating in the homes of European elites in the seventeenth century, cabinets of curiosities housed collections of natural and ethnographic specimens, sparked from a colonial urge to collect and document the landscape and culture of their rapidly expanding known world. Frequently housing taxidermied animals, skeletons, and botanical specimens, they resulted in interiors that embraced eclectic and bountiful displays of what collectors deemed “odd,” “rare,” and “exotic.”¹

Amidst the recent public fascination with all things spooky and macabre, the image of the cabinet of curiosities has resurfaced as an aesthetic inspiration, with TikToks and Pinterest pages dedicated to how to make your own collections of oddities at home. Yet the larger history of these collections is not as light as they may initially seem. In their deep ties to European colonization, cabinets of curiosities also offered collectors spaces in which to assert racist and xenophobic views of the world. This reality is on display in the famous depiction of Danish collector Ole Worm’s collection, which depicts an automaton dressed in mock Indigenous American attire, which could be wound up like a puppet to walk around the room.² This objectification of Indigenous people turned more violent in other early cabinets, such as the collection of Danish King Frederik III, which included the desiccated corpse of an Indigenous American individual.³ 

In many ways, the installation at Armour-Stiner acts as a revival of this violent, problematic past, especially in its display of human remains. Yet what if it could also serve to educate visitors on this dark history? Many educational sites today remain resistant to interpreting such dark, uncomfortable matters, but it is these stories that sites of haunted tourism survive on. As it stands today, the “Cabinet of Curiosities” installation at Armour-Stiner fails to do justice to the macabre history it stems from. However, in a world where many museums still recoil from confronting the interpretation of human remains and their related histories, sites like this could offer a valuable opportunity for reinterpretation and education.

¹ Feest, Christian F. “The Collecting of American Indian Artifacts in Europe, 1493-1750.” In America in European Consciousness, 1493-1750, edited by Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

² Grazer, Brian, and Charles Fishman. A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

³ Hafstein, Vladimar Tryggvi. “Bodies of Knowledge: Ole Worm & Collecting in Late Renaissance Scandinavia.” Ethnologia Europea: Journal of European Ethnology 33, no. 1 (2003).

⁴ Impey, Oliver R. and Arthur MacGregor. The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Europe. Cornwall, UK: House of Stratus, 2001.