5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House

Sorry, Iowa Tractor Museum, but these terrifying museums really highlight the fact that you're the 'Gary from accounting' of educational institutions.
5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House

Museums range from entirely boring to boring to so boring we start doing math in our heads for fun, and we're fucking terrible at math. But those are just the ones you're forced to attend on field trips. Sorry, Iowa Tractor Museum, but these terrifying museums really highlight the fact that you're the "Gary from accounting" of educational institutions.

Museum Of Icelandic Sorcery And Witchcraft: Meet The Two-Headed Screaming Turd Worm!

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Strandagaldur Ses

You already have the necropants branded onto your temporal lobe, but they're just one of several disquieting wonders you'll find at the Museum Of Icelandic Sorcery And Witchcraft in the tiny town of Holmavik. This adorable little guy, for example, is a tilberi:

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Bernard McManus/Flickr


"I have so many mouths, and I must scream."

It was believed that a witch could create this two-headed turd-snake by stealing a rib bone from a graveyard early on Whit Sunday, wrapping it in wool and storing it between her breasts. Next, she'd spit holy wine onto it at the next three Communions, after which it would come to life and start to grow. When it could no longer fit between Mama's jugs, she'd cut a nipple into her thigh for it to suckle.

Once it got big enough, the creature would roll its way to a neighbor's field and "lie across a sheep's back and suck two tits at the same time." When it was close to bursting, it would roll back home and vomit the milk into a bucket. The witch presumably did all this for the extremely vitamin-rich cursed-worm vomit-milk that Icelandic nutritionists are always touting.

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Bernard McManus/Flickr


"To stay young, suck on the secretions of the Falkor larva!"

Then there's the invisibility spell, which involved collecting "three drops of blood from the index finger of your left hand, three from the ring finger of your right hand, two from your right nipple, and one from your left nipple. Mix the blood with six drops of blood from the heart of a living raven, and melt it all with the raven's brain and pieces of a human stomach."

Museo Lara: Chill With Countless Abominations!

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Sapo Sergio

At first glance, Juan Antonio Lara Jurado's private museum (and life's work), the Museo Lara in Ronda, Spain, looks fairly mundane. There are clocks and guns and, because this is Spain, the obligatory Inquisition exhibit. But then you turn a corner and -- oh, hey, there's a topless mermaid with Jack Skellington hands:

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
pieofthemonth/AtlasObscura


Under the sea, you cannot scream
You will be deader, where it is wetter
Take it from me!

Then there's a werewolf, ostensibly created from an actual canine skeleton:

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Angel O/TripAdvisor


Ostensibly. (Really, it's half-human.)

And don't miss the rare winged mohawk lizard:

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
skogslisa/TripAdvisor


Easy to miss, we know.

Or ... this thing:

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
pieofthemonth/AtlasObscura


"Spiderbat, spiderbat, does whatever a spiderbat-" *uncontrollable sobbing*

Did we mention that the creepiest parts of Jurado's "private" museum are housed in his cellar? Survivors -- er, visitors -- also report seeing a child's heart in a jar down there. We're sure it's fine, though. It takes a dead mermaid, a werewolf carcass, and two child hearts to open a Hell portal and summon forth Agablag, He Who Rules The Pits Of Shit. Hey, no reason, but did you know that every Tuesday is "bring a child you will not miss" day? Half-price admission!

H.R. Giger Museum: Get Hammered Surrounded By Stylized Alien Cocks!

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Museum HR Giger

Gruyeres is a tiny Swiss mountain town that's less famous than its cheese. If you were to stroll down its cobblestone streets and approach Chateau St. Germain, the town's medieval castle, you'd probably be expecting an afternoon filled with suits of armor, tapestries, and paintings of dudes in codpieces -- you know, castle stuff. But that's when you'd notice the Xenomorph crouched above the entrance ...

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Timo Newton-Syms


Especially since it wasn't there 10 seconds ago.

That's because this unassuming castle is the home of the H.R. Giger Museum, stuffed to the ramparts with the work of an artist who once said, "I only paint what frightens me."

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Heraldo.es


... and he was not an easy man to frighten.

After perusing the downright diuretic collections, pick up your facehugger fridge magnet and work up the nerve to check out at a cashier's desk that looks like it only accepts payment in pounds of flesh:

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montreux-vevey.com


"Credit? HISS."

In need of a little liquid courage? Luckily, the H.R. Giger Museum has its very own bar (thaaat's what museums are missing!). Here's where you're getting drunk tonight:

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Museum HR Giger


Whatever you do, do not order an Alien Blood here.

The vaulted ceilings are composed of vertebral arches, and every surface is created from a polished concrete and fiberglass mixture that Giger specially concocted to feel like cool, otherworldly skin. If you'd like to replicate the atmosphere of your hometown bar, you can opt for the wall-o-babies:

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Museum HR Giger


Honestly, you may need a new hometown.

Or there are the Harkonnen chairs, designed for Alejandro Jodorowsky's ill-fated adaptation of Dune.

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Museum HR Giger


We're no longer so sure this bar is conducive to meeting new people.

Or sit at one of the many tables and just have your crotch uncomfortably stared down by the tiny faces trapped within.

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Tamquam Alter Idem


This is almost certainly not what you had in mind when you went out to the bar to "get a little head."

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House

Museum Of Osteology: Watch Flesh-Eating Beetles Devour Human Corpses!

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Joseph Caputo/Smithsonian

Oklahoma City's Museum Of Osteology bills itself as "America's ONLY Skeleton Museum" -- a claim which you, too, would be a bit skeptical of if you'd met our creepy neighbor Frank. To their credit, however, they may in fact be the only museum of skeletons created by flesh-eating beetles.

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Sklmsta/Wikimedia


Not to be confused with the Liverpool Museum Of Osteology, created by flesh-eating Beatles.

Rending the flesh from a dead thing is delicate business, at least if you want to end up with something museum-quality afterward (the lack of quality specimens is probably why nobody takes you up on your offer to "check out the basement," Frank). Scraping the skeleton clean with a scalpel is tedious and introduces the possibility of breaking particularly fragile bones, and no one really wants to handle flesh-burning chemicals, because flesh-burning chemicals. That's why many museums, including the Smithsonian, employ hordes of dermestid beetles to do the dirty work, just as they would in nature.

But while most museums have the common decency to do so out of sight, the Museum Of Osteology does it front and center.

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Skulls Unlimited


Hi, I'm Legion. This is my brother, Legion. And this is my other brother, Legion.
And this is my other brother, Legion. And this ..."

The dermestid colony on display at the museum is smaller than the one the staff uses backstage, due to the simple fact that the beetles tend to smell exactly the way you'd expect something that feasts on (and subsequently shits out) putrefying flesh to smell. Which, yes, is yet another reason basement attendance is down this year, Frank. Spray some Febreze or something, man. Dang.

Siriraj Medical Museum: See Mummified Serial Killers!

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Bobby/Wiki Commons

That up there is the shriveled-up visage of Si Quey, Thailand's very first serial killer, who murdered six children back in the '50s before eating their hearts and livers. He reportedly believed this would help him achieve immortality, and in a way we suppose he was right.

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Vice.com


And in every way, fuck him.

Just look at him. Stare into his forever-gaze, and feel your soul slowly begin to resemble his mummified husk. Now, meet his posse!

CrmYees vreOt 1 0 - H
Thai Museums Database


Keep eye contact. Don't stare at that one guy's crotch.

That's right: Si Quey is just one of several violent criminals on display at the Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Medicine Museum, part of the larger Siriraj Medical Museum in Bangkok. There they stand like history's most disturbing Slim Jim display rack, serving as a deterrent to aspiring psychopaths and a powerful laxative to unsuspecting field trip groups.

And just in case you're thinking the museum doesn't give victims their fair share of face time, be assured that you can get up close and personal with the grisly results of everything from gunshot wounds to propeller mishaps.

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Thai Museums Database


These Minecraft mods are starting to get out of hand.

Still don't feel like you've gotten your money's worth? Well, you can always step over to the other museums in the Siriraj complex: At the Parasitology Museum you can see a 77-pound, infected human testicle, and at the Congdon Anatomical Museum you can see ... dead babies. So many dead babies.

5 Real Museums Scarier Than Any Haunted House
Renegade Travels


More than zero (the ideal number).

Museum visitors have a tradition of leaving them toys, just in case they awake at night wanting to play. Hey, better a Stretch Armstrong than your screeching immortal soul.

Laura H loves eating gluten and exploring the Great Indoors. Follow her on Twitter.

There's terror lurking in the most unlikely of places. Like learn about how the Scooby-Doo universe is actually a destitute landscape in 6 Classic Kids Shows Secretly Set In Nightmarish Universes. Or see why today's horror movies have nothing on the 19th Century in 9 Terrifying Old Movies That Put Modern Horror To Shame.

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