The Paranormal Museum

Lincoln reported a recurring dream of his own assassination in the days before April 14, 1865. His apparition has been reported at the White House since the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. Winston Churchill, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, and multiple White House staff have documented encounters. Our exhibit includes a fragment of wallpaper from the Lincoln Bedroom, recovered during a 2019 investigation, which has produced consistent EMF anomalies.

Mary Surratt was hanged on July 7, 1865 — the first woman executed by the federal government — for her alleged role in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy. Her boarding house on H Street in Washington, D.C. has been one of the most consistently active paranormal sites in the capital for over a century. Our investigators documented Class A EVP evidence there in 2021. The exhibit includes items recovered from the boarding house during that investigation.

Booth was shot and killed at the Garrett Farm in Virginia on April 26, 1865, twelve days after the assassination. The barn where he died was demolished, but the site has produced documented paranormal activity for generations. Ford's Theatre — where Lincoln was shot — remains one of the most active investigation sites in Washington. Our exhibit includes a playbill from Ford's Theatre recovered during a 2018 investigation, and thermal imaging captures from the theatre's dress circle.

The Fiji Mermaid

P.T. Barnum · American Museum, New York · 1842

The Fiji Mermaid is the defining artifact of American humbug — and one of the most famous fabrications in the history of showmanship. Barnum acquired the specimen from fellow showman Moses Kimball in 1842 and exhibited it at his American Museum in New York, billing it as the preserved remains of a genuine mermaid caught near the Fiji Islands. In reality it was a masterwork of Japanese taxidermy: the upper body of a juvenile monkey grafted to the tail of a large fish, dried and lacquered to a leathery finish. The public was simultaneously horrified and transfixed. The exhibit drew enormous crowds and cemented Barnum's reputation as the master of manufactured wonder. The original was almost certainly destroyed in the 1865 fire that consumed the American Museum. What survives — including the specimen displayed here — are later reproductions made in the same tradition.

The Cardiff Giant

George Hull · Cardiff, New York · 1869

In October 1869, workers digging a well on a farm near Cardiff, New York, unearthed what appeared to be the petrified body of a ten-foot man. The discovery caused a national sensation. Crowds paid fifty cents — later a dollar — to stand in a tent and gaze at what many believed was biblical evidence of the ancient giants described in Genesis. The giant was in fact a gypsum statue commissioned by George Hull, a cigar manufacturer and committed atheist, who had it carved in Chicago, shipped to New York, and buried on his cousin's farm. Hull sold a two-thirds interest to a syndicate for $37,500 before the hoax was exposed. Barnum, unable to purchase the original, had his own copy made and exhibited it — then declared his version the authentic one and Hull's the fake. The Cardiff Giant is now on permanent display at the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown, New York. The reproduction displayed here was made from the original molds.

The Feejee Mermaid's Cousins

Japanese Ningyo Tradition · 18th–19th Century

The Fiji Mermaid was not a Barnum invention — it was a product of a centuries-old Japanese craft tradition. Japanese artisans, primarily in the Edo period, created ningyo ("human fish") as religious and decorative objects, combining animal parts with extraordinary skill. These objects were traded to Dutch merchants at Nagasaki and made their way into European and American curiosity cabinets throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Several genuine period specimens survive in museum collections worldwide. This exhibit presents three examples of the ningyo tradition alongside the Barnum reproduction, tracing the object's journey from Japanese religious craft to American sideshow spectacle — and examining what that journey reveals about the cultures that created and consumed them.

The Wolly Horse & Other Barnumiana

P.T. Barnum · American Museum · 1840s–1860s

Barnum's genius was not the hoax itself but the meta-hoax: he frequently exposed his own fabrications, then charged admission to see the exposure. The Woolly Horse — billed as a creature captured by John C. Frémont during his western expeditions, with wool instead of hair and no distinction between front and back — was one of dozens of exhibits Barnum cycled through his American Museum. Others included the "What Is It?" (a man with microcephaly exhibited as a missing link), the Bearded Lady, the original Siamese twins Chang and Eng, and Tom Thumb. This section of the exhibit examines the full Barnum tradition: the showmanship, the exploitation, the genuine wonder, and the complicated legacy of a man who understood the public's appetite for the impossible better than anyone before or since.