This dark Hollywood museum leaves people feeling glad to be alive

‘Have a nice life!’ says my entrance receipt cheerily. Anywhere else, I would brush this off as a standard bit of American jollity – but my location gives it a deeper meaning. I’m at the Museum of Death in Los Angeles.

A block back from the brass-edged stars of Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame, it’s housed in a two-storey building, its blank brick walls initially unremarkable. The skulls and blood-red neon sign at the entrance, though, remove all doubt about what awaits inside: a celebration and examination of death in its many forms including, most chillingly, its deliberate, er, execution.

Another red neon sign inside states ‘DEATH IS EVERYWHERE’, which is undeniable; but the displays concentrate mainly on the kinds of death that hopefully none of us will experience.

The Serial Killer Room, for example, contains closely-written accounts of some especially busy murderers. Many of them were local, including John Wayne Gacy who killed 33 men and boys and, incidentally, by dressing as the Killer Clown, did nothing to help sufferers of coulrophobia (fear of clowns). His red-spotted shoes are on display, along with artworks he and other serial killers created while on death row, and greetings cards they made that no-one would want to receive.

The Execution Room displays an electric chair, a case of shanks made by prisoners, a wicker coffin, and framed photos of beheadings, all accompanied by a loop-tape video of a guillotine execution.

Impressively thorough, the museum owns the decapitated head of Henri Landru, the ‘Bluebeard of Gambais’, executed in 1922. It is all, naturally, confronting and shocking, the worse for being authentic and real, and not everyone who visits is able to cope.

JD Healy and his wife Cathee Shultz, who opened the museum in 1995, refer to the regular episodes of fainting as “falling down ovations”, and prefer them to the vomiting, nose-bleeds and worse that also occur. They stress that no-one has ever died at the museum – “unlike Disneyland”.

Despite incidents like these, they see the museum as fulfilling a useful function, of trying to make people less afraid of death, by removing some of the taboos surrounding the subject. So, there are rooms devoted to funerals and mortuaries, with not just the expected coffins and body bags, but also displays of embalming and autopsy instruments, and explanatory videos of those processes too.

It’s the sensational side of death that gets the most coverage, though – hardly surprising, given that Shultz has stated she will be plasticised after her death, while Healy plans to become “a creepy mummy”, both for display in the museum.

There is a Cannibalism Niche and a Carnage Corridor, both with graphic crime-scene photographs and detailed accounts of their subjects. The 1997 Heaven’s Gate mass suicide is there, featuring one of the bunk beds from the community on which a dummy lies, under a genuine purple shroud and dressed in the uniform of the cult. On a television in the corner, cult leader Marshall Applewhite croons his crazy message continuously as museum visitors drift past.

The room arousing most interest, though, is the California Death Room. Against competition from OJ Simpson, and Elizabeth Short, the ‘Black Dahlia’, who in 1947 was cut in half and arranged for display by her never-caught murderer, it’s Charles Manson who gets the most space.

Much of that is taken up by “his personal blankie”: a patchwork quilt made by his women followers which looks innocuous until you stand back and see that the pattern comprises 36 swastikas. It wasn’t only the women who were handy: in a glass case are a tarantula and scorpion made by Manson himself out of thread and elastic extracted from his prison underwear, and dyed with KoolAid.

Most chilling of all, however, are the crime scene photos here of the Tate killings that few would ever have seen before coming to the museum. Brutal and bloody, they’re the stuff of nightmares, and all the worse for being real. There’s an almost constant chorus here of “Oh, my God!” from the visitors.

After that, it’s almost a relief to flit past the images of wartime massacres from around the world, and the shrunken heads from Peru, to enter the Specimen Room to view more everyday taxidermied animals.

These include the owners’ dog Buddy and pig Chaos, as well as Liberace’s cat and Jayne Mansfield’s chihuahua. The two-headed turtle at the entrance will join them one day.

Even here, though, there is a case of preserved ‘assorted testicles’; and in the Skull Room, alongside an elephant, horse and other animals, there is a careful, life-sized recreation of JFK’s head showing the precise damage caused by the bullet that killed him.

Even apparently innocuous items are there for a reason – an ordinary-looking leather-bound book is actually covered in human skin.

The exit is through a barred door from Alcatraz, into the gift shop where, besides the usual caps and T-shirts, you can buy a Jeffrey Dahmer apron or a two-part enamel brooch featuring Elizabeth Short.

After all that, it’s a huge relief to emerge again onto the busy street outside. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that,” another visitor mutters as she walks away, shaking her head. It’s an understandable reaction; but Healy and Shultz genuinely hope that the museum leaves people glad to be alive.

The Museum of Death, at 6363 Selma Ave in Hollywood, is open daily from 10am until 6pm. Admission costs US$20 (NZ$34). Young children are discouraged from entry and photography is prohibited. Allow at least an hour and be prepared to squint at pages of small writing. There is a second branch open in New Orleans. See:

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