The Cabinet of Curiosities

Every collector begins with a single strange object — a thing that refuses to sit quietly in the ordinary world. A tooth said to belong to a giant. A letter written by a condemned man on the morning of his hanging. A photograph of a face nobody can name. The Cabinet of Curiosities is where I keep such things: a wall of small wooden drawers, each holding one verifiable oddity, each waiting to be pulled open by a curious hand.

Think of it as a room you may wander at your own pace. Some visitors move methodically, drawer by drawer, reading every label. Others prefer to reach out and open whichever handle catches the eye. Both are welcome. The Cabinet does not insist on a route — only on a certain quality of attention, the willingness to look closely at things most people would rather hurry past.

What a Cabinet of Curiosities Was

The idea is older than it may seem. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wealthy Europeans assembled private collections known in German as a Wunderkammer — a “wonder-chamber” — and in Italian as a studiolo. These rooms gathered together whatever struck their owners as marvellous or instructive: fossils and coral, preserved specimens, coins and antiquities, mechanical automata, exotic shells, and objects believed at the time to be the horns of unicorns (often, in truth, narwhal tusks). The naturalist Ole Worm kept a celebrated example in Copenhagen; the apothecary Ferrante Imperato published an engraving of his Neapolitan collection in 1599, one of the earliest pictures we have of such a room, its ceiling hung with a crocodile.

These cabinets did not sort the world as a modern museum does. Natural history and human artifice, the genuine and the misidentified, the sacred relic and the anatomical curiosity all stood side by side. That was rather the point. A Wunderkammer was a theatre of wonder — an argument, made in objects, that the world is far stranger and more various than daily life admits. Scholars now regard these collections as ancestors of the public museum, but something was lost in the tidying: the sense of astonishment at everything at once. This Cabinet tries, in a small way, to keep that older spirit alive.

The Five Kinds of Drawer

Each drawer belongs to one of five families, and every entry inside is a real thing — documented, dated where dating is possible, and told plainly. I do not embroider. The material is strange enough without help.

Strange deaths. The first drawers hold deaths that defy the tidy actuarial tables — people who died in ways so improbable, so bitterly ironic, or so quietly mysterious that they lodged in the record and would not leave. These sit close to my writing on Death & Disfigurement, where the body and its undoing are treated with more curiosity than dread.

Odd crimes. The second family gathers the crimes that resist ordinary motive: the confession that raised more questions than it answered, the theft of something no thief should want, the trial that turned on a detail from a nightmare. Many of these open onto the longer accounts under Crime & Punishment.

Historical mysteries. The third drawers hold the unsolved — a vanished ship’s company, a coded message never cracked, an identity the world has argued over for a century. Some are famous, like the Boy in the Box, the unidentified child found in Philadelphia in 1957 whose name went unknown for decades. Others are obscure enough that you may be among the few living people to have read them.

Horror folklore. The fourth family collects the beliefs themselves — the revenant, the changeling, the death omen, the burial customs designed to keep the dead in their graves. These are not presented as fact but as evidence of what frightened people, and why. They live alongside the seasonal pieces in Halloween & Horror.

Medical anomalies. The last drawers hold the body at its most improbable: the documented case that rewrote a textbook, the syndrome so rare it bears one patient’s name, the affliction that history mistook for a curse. These are handled with care. A human being stood behind each one.

How to Browse It

There is no wrong way in. If you have arrived with a question already forming — a half-remembered case, a subject that has always unsettled you — the drawers are grouped by their five families, and you may go straight to the one you want. Each drawer opens to a short, self-contained account: what happened, what is known, what remains uncertain, and where you might read further. I keep the entries brief on purpose. A curiosity should be handled, considered, and set back in its place, not exhausted.

If you have arrived with no question at all — only the itch to be surprised — pull a random drawer. The Cabinet will choose for you, and you will find yourself somewhere you did not expect: a Victorian inquest, a folk remedy for keeping the dead asleep, a disappearance that was never explained. This, I think, is the truest way to use the collection. The Renaissance visitors to a Wunderkammer did not consult an index. They walked in and let wonder ambush them.

Return often. The Cabinet grows. New drawers are built and filled as I find things worthy of them, and the wall you see today is smaller than the wall you will see next season. Some visitors treat it as a nightstand book, opening one drawer before sleep — though I make no promises about the sleep that follows.

A Word on Why This Matters

It would be easy to mistake a collection like this for a catalogue of morbidity, a place to gawk. I hope it is understood as something gentler and more serious. To look closely at a strange death is, in the end, to look closely at a life — at how fragile and various the human span turns out to be. To study an old horror belief is to meet the fears of people long gone, and to recognise a few of our own in them. The Cabinet is dark, yes, but it is not cruel. Every drawer holds a real thread of the world, and pulling it teaches you something about the whole cloth.

So take your time. Pull the handles that call to you. Let one drawer lead to another, as they always do. And if you find something here that stays with you long after you have closed the drawer — a case you cannot stop turning over, a story you carry into the next room — then the Cabinet has done exactly what a wonder-chamber was always meant to do.