Dispatches Little Museum of Horrors

By JEFFERY C. RUBIN/IN PHILADELPHIA

The Mutter Museum was closed on Halloween. But in many ways, it is Halloween at the Mutter every day. The first-time visitor is confronted by macabre marvels: monstrously misshapen skulls and skeletons, fetal remains of offspring that could never be human, shadowy effigies of things that went bump in the night. The Mutter's polished wood, gleaming brass rails and dark oil paintings suggest the library of a wealthy if eccentric 19th century aristocrat. But when professor Thomas Dent Mutter bequeathed his collection to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1856, he intended it as a teaching aid, a guide to the eccentricities -- however terrifying -- of the human body. "This is absolutely serious, scientific and educational," said Mutter director Gretchen Worden. "That's the only way I can justify having human remains on display."

Nevertheless, the museum, while graceful, elegant and pedagogical, is a freak show -- a kind of Nightmare on Elm Street as scripted by Edgar Allan Poe. There is the Soap Lady, who, underground and buried, decomposed into a waxy gray substance called adipocere; she was purchased by the museum for $7.50 when Philadelphia's old cemetery was moved in 1875. Then there is the pair of twins who share a single skull; the Frenchwoman who grew horny protrusions all over her body, including her forehead (top left); a heart made translucent by chemicals; the constipation-racked colon of the Balloon Man, which swelled to 8 ft. long and 27 in. around before -- as the organ's label records -- his case "terminated fatally." The bladder stones of Chief Justice John Marshall (1755-1835) are here, along with a death cast of the original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, connected at the chest. (Their fused liver sits in formaldehyde in a display tray below.) Floating inside a small glass bottle, item No. 13,671 is a thumb-size brown chunk of flesh "procured at the postmortem" of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin. (Last week Booth's ancestors petitioned for exhumation of his body from Baltimore's Greenmount Cemetery, hoping to prove that the man killed by federal agents in 1865 was not the infamous actor. The descendants believe that the real Booth escaped and died in obscurity in 1903. They can start by examining the piece of evidence already aboveground at the Mutter.)

Thanks to its grotesqueries, the Mutter is beginning to trade offbeat obscurity for popular renown. Five years ago, it drew just 4,300 visitors; this year's attendance will be nearly four times that. Says Worden, who has appeared on David Letterman's show three times: "We're getting better known because we're just so interesting." The museum's photo calendar, she adds, sells briskly. The first ones, issued in 1993, are now collector's items, at $40 apiece. Each picture, like each exhibit, is a memento mori, a ghoulish reminder of our own mortality, malevolently fascinating, weirdly beautiful.