Decayed Elegance

I came across this whimsical little film from Mulberry with the most enchanting interior.

It has the look of an old mansion being invaded by the woodland, very much like Wild Thing Sharon's post this week on her Air Bohemia blog, Feral.
I have always loved the look of crumbling plaster, old weathered floors ...

Elegant old stairways leading to adandoned rooms ...

A perfectly decrepit place where you could just move in your curious collections and be right at home with the past.

I once took a tour of an old mansion that was for sale in Virginia and it hadn't been lived in for over 40 years. There was one layer of old magnolia wallpaper that was peeling off in the parlor and everything was original in this 1840s house. The realtor was going on and on about how it could be fixed up and my husband said to him "You would be surprised at how little she would do to this place!" He knows me so well :-)

Well, it was a rough week for my kitty Pandora (AKA P.D.). She got out Monday night and we couldn't get her to come back in and we couldn't even find her the next morning. Finally she came bolting across the street from the bushes there. She got in a fight was one of the neighbor's cats and ended up with an abcess on her tail. I thought her tail was broken at first because she was dragging it along, but the vet said it is very common for a cat to get bit on the tail during a fight. PD must have been trying to run!

So the poor dear had to have a drain put in her tail and she couldn't stand having that horrible smell following her around for several days. There are two puncture wounds on her tail that look just like vampire bites!
She's doing better, but still on the mend. I had a very sleepless night Monday night (thanks PD!) and a big old headache on Tuesday and Thursday from the ordeal, but I still managed to get a few things done this week. It wasn't all moping around :-)
I posted more antique funeral photos to the Memento Mori section of my website. I love antique graveyard photos, they are great to prop up in cabinets next to other macabre items.

You can find these graveyard photos here.

And speaking of graveyards and ghostly things, I found this amazing antique Victorian paperweight with the most wonderful ghostly image of a lady inside. She is truly spooky! I have posted her to my website here.

Another great find this week was this antique embalming machine. It probably dates to about the 1930s or 40s and has two glass containers, one that says "Suction." Really a great old funeral home find! You can see it here.

I am always on the lookout for antique skeletons and other human bones and recently I found this amazing antique skeletal foot! It has he most wonderful old patina, like old ivory and the bones are all labeled. Very old piece and really great! You can see it here.

And last but not least is a new addition to the Mad Scientist section of my website. An antique child's medical brace. Very spooky old collar brace. Great for your mad scientist decor! You can find it here.

I have other antique medical braces, so be sure to stop by and take a look!

Well, I'm looking forward to a better week next week for both myself and PD. I hope your week is great :-)

Antique Funeral Vases, Framed Butterflies from the Akron, Antique Home Embalming Kit, Spooky Victorian Shadowbox, Post Mortem Pictures & Memento Mori

I had a busy, productive week. Lots of hunting and searching for strange items to add to my website, many hours spent on the computer uploading photos for slideshows and website postings. And of course, a few more episodes of Dark Shadows :-) We are somewhere deep into 1968 and Angelique is now a vampire. I was doing some research online about "The Old House" where Barnabus lives and came across this great article all about the real house used for the outside pictures on the show. Seems it really was The Old House on an estate that included a larger mansion, Lyndhurst which was the house used in the Dark Shadows movies of the 1970s. Sadly The Old House burned down and all that is left is the basement.

A wonderful find this week! A very spooky Victorian wedding shadowbox featuring clasped hands made of wax. The clasped hands represented the loved ones and you will also see that image on gravestones at cemeteries.
I will be adding this to my website this weekend.
Also this week, I sold some fun things to one of my best customers, Julie. She collects antique funeral vases (among other fun macabre things!) and she has a large collection, including some of my all time favorites from my shop. She has most of these ...

Well, I ran across a really great pair of graveyard vases with crosses on them and they have a wonderful old patina and I knew Julie would love them. Also on her wish list was some of the old framed butterflies and moths from the now-defunct Akrons store. Akrons used to be a home furnishings store back in the 1960s and Julie was telling me how she wished she had bought some of the butterflies they carried in the little black frames. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon three of these little gems in my travels! They even have the little faded "Akron" sticker on the back. It was fun to be able to get Julie what she was looking for.If you have any special requests for odd items, be sure to drop me a line because you never know what I might find.

New to the website this week is the Antique Home Embalming Kit. A very creepy collectible direct from an old funeral home. Click here for more info.

Also just up on the website is a new section called Memento Mori where I showcase my extensive collection of antique post mortem photos and other Victorian death-related photos. A really haunting one is this cabinet card of a compellingly beautiful young lady with this sad newspaper clipping attached at the bottom. It reads ... Macdonald at 24 Barony Street, very suddenly on the 27th inst, Violet Hall, dearly beloved and only daughter of William and Janet Macdonald; sadly missed and deeply regretted. Funeral to-morrow (Saturday) at 3 pm. Click here to see this one.

Another haunting image is this home funeral for a child with an elaborate canopy above the tiny casket. Click here for this one.

And on a lighter note, you just have to get a pair of these 3D hologram glasses! Great to wear and freak out your friends, but my favorite thing to do is to use them as props.

My mannequins love them! Click here for your pair.

And for the conspiracy theory/alien invader crowd out there, I have a fun vintage press photo with a picture of a horse skeleton and a veterinarian and a caption all about how Snippy the Horse was believed to have been killed by "something not of this world." Good fun! Click here to check out Snippy's posthumous celebrity.Well, now I'm ready for a nice weekend - some time with the family and more items to add to the website. Have a great weekend yourself!

A Little Walk Through My Shop

A pic of me with Mr. Boney, my Victorian skeleton.

And a little walk through my shop. If you see something you must have, email me for the price.