6 Shockingly Brutal Realities Of Working For A Museum

Some things don't come in dangerous but get progressively more deadly with time, like silver nitrate photo film. At a historic house museum where I worked, my supervisor was going through some old photographs when she stumbled upon a box full of silver nitrate film negatives. She knew it was silver nitrate because, upon opening the box and getting a whiff of the fumes that had been storing up, she became violently ill. She got lucky -- silver nitrate film can spontaneously combust if it builds up enough gas and gets too hot. There's no way to salvage the film; when we find it, we have to call the fire department to destroy it.

Back in the day, collectors of taxidermied animals (and other cultural objects made of animal and plant products) discovered that there are a whole lot of insects that would love to turn their priceless collections into an all-you-can-eat buffet. Their response to this problem was to coat all organic objects with a nice heaping layer of arsenic or cyanide, because the past was underwear-on-head stupid. Don't laugh; one day we'll be the past, and the future will be cursing our names.

On rare occasions, even the museum doesn't know what it has hidden in storage. One time we were going through a bundle of objects that had been found on a mummy from Peru. Two staff members opened up a woven purse and found a khipu, an Incan counting tool made of knotted strings. Khipus are very rare, and it was incredible enough that our museum had two of them already; finding a third was downright miraculous. Fun fact: Archaeologists dance really funny when they get excited.

That's why funding is pretty important -- not just for us but for the people who want to see our cool shit. Some university-associated museums have been forced to sell off parts of their collection when the college is going through a rough patch. Even the places that you would expect to be, ahem, very well-endowed, don't have as much money as they would like.

Since donors know they've got us by our charity balls, they can be really demanding before, during, and even after their donation. Many of them will pitch a fit if they don't see their donation on the exhibition floor, even after we explain that most objects aren't displayed. Or else they'll think that they can come by whenever and go behind the scenes and touch things.

A few years ago, one donor contacted the museum wanting to donate his collection of ancient stone ax heads. He apparently had his own private helicopter, so it was agreed that he would just fly the objects out himself, land at a nearby airfield, and then someone from the museum would come pick them up. But when he was flying over the college campus where the museum is located, he decided that the quad in front of the student union was just as good a place as any to land his helicopter, so he just touched down on the grass and carried the trashcan full of axes down the sidewalk to the museum. Security was not pleased.

If your museum is lucky enough to be attached to a college or university, someone might spring for a basic alarm system, but usually even the most precious and irreplaceable items in the collection are pretty much up for grabs -- which, yes, happens all the goddamn time. But it's not always professional art thieves with their tuxedos and tiny mustaches: Some patrons and even donors think nothing of taking whatever they can get their grubby hands on. One time our museum had an after-hours event to showcase a bunch of recently donated items. Most, if not all, of the people who attended were donors to or volunteers at the museum. As we were cleaning up, we discovered that one of the donated objects had been swiped off the table near the door. It wasn't even valuable; it was a cardboard cube used to hold sewing pins.

My anthropology museum was on a college campus that was interspersed with about a dozen Native American burial mounds from before white settlers ever set foot in the area (yes, it was literally built on an Indian graveyard). In the first hundred years of the college, several of the mounds were dug up for studies, and the remains and any objects inside were brought into the museum and used as displays and educational material. A fraternity on campus back in the 1960s through the '80s used to steal one of the "mummies" every Halloween and use it as a prop at parties. If there's a better way to end up haunted, I can't think of it.

Thanks to time, legislation, and some much-needed introspection, museums and the people who work in them have come to think of these practices as the disrespectful, unprofessional, and generally awful things that they are. However, while we've tried hard to put the kibosh on collecting anyone else's grandparents, a good majority of the remains dug up from around the world in the past are still being held in collections. In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known to us as NAGPRA, has set some standards for how Native American remains and sacred objects should be handled. At my anthropology museum, all NAGPRA-covered human remains (anything that wasn't "freely given or naturally shed," like hair, fingernails, or umbilical cords) are kept in a special section of one of the collections rooms and are not allowed to be used under any circumstances. Those umbilical cords, though, all bets are off. They make festive Christmas decorations!