As a Dutch person I’d never heard of Ripley’s bizarre museum. It seemed to me like a typical American thing and when I read about it I immediately decided I just had to check it out.
Basically, Ripleys believe it or not is a museum full of curiosities. Among the items on display were shrunken heads and upper bodies, replicas of really fat and really thin people who have once lived. There were people with bulging eyes and a guy who’d taught a pet snake to crawl through his nose and come out through his mouth.
Spoiler alert! The best joke is a bunch of mirrors on the wall. Next to them hang stories of what some people can do. For example, one could touch his nose with his tongue. The sign said to check in the mirror if you could do it yourself. Haven’t we all tried this at some point? What’s fun about that, you may think. The good part came later, when your journey through the museum takes you to the other side of the wall and the mirrors turn out to be see-through from that side.
Furthermore I passed replica graves with funny lines on them. One was the shape of a tooth, saying: ‘here lies the body of dentist DeMille in the largest cavity he’ll ever fill’. The last feature of the museum I went to, in San Francisco, was a room that started spinning. I loved the way this museum was set up. I had a lot of fun walking through it. It is simply good entertainment that is special and, in some cases, can really amaze you.
The founder, Robert Ripley, was really a uniquely American guy, finding a way to make a living from presenting unusual facts. Newspapers ran his illustrations as a weekly series which i used to look forward to reading when i was young!