HISTORICAL MUSEUM 'Beyond Bizarre' displays oddities

The display is educational and fun, a group official said.
DAYTON (AP) -- Bizarre artifacts that historical societies like to keep under wraps have crept out of the shadows and into the spotlight.
The tattered leather shoe blown off a woman's foot after she was struck by lightning. A light bulb still filled with water from the 1913 flood. A gas meter speared by a stick of wood from the 1974 Xenia tornado.
These and other items found in the storerooms of historical society museums around the state and in Indiana have been put on display at the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery in an exhibit titled: "Curious Collections: An Exhibit Beyond Bizarre."
"The fact is people just like seeing strange and interesting stuff," said Brian Hackett, executive director of the Montgomery County Historical Society. "We're competing with television. We're competing with Disney World. Don't lose your education leanings, but you still need to make it fun for people to come."
Graduate students in the public history class Hackett teaches at Wright State University put the exhibit together as part of a class project. Over five weeks, the students found and collected the items and then built the displays.
Some examples
Among the 70-plus items:
U A photograph taken inside the Marietta Library about 1900 that appears to show a ghost standing between two windows;
U The trap door of a gallows dubbed "the door of no return." It was used to hang people in downtown Dayton in 1876 and 1877;
U The pants of John Van Cleve, a founding father of Dayton who weighed 300 pounds and had a 77-inch waist;
U Blown-up photos from NCR Corp. showing a chimpanzee and a horse operating the company's cash registers to show how simple they were to use;
U Three skulls all purported to be those of William Hewitt, a hermit who lived in a cave south of Chillicothe and helped wagon trains cross the hills in the early 1800s.
"This is just weird stuff that ends up in museum's collections," Hackett said. "Every museum's got things that they are kind of embarrassed to show or let people know that they have because it doesn't fit the academic or history approach. So we thought let's dust it off and let people see what we don't want them to see."
It is also the first public display of John Dillinger's gun. The weapon was confiscated by police who arrested the famed bank robber at a Dayton boarding house in 1933. Officers had the weapon engraved and presented it to the police chief. His family donated the gun to the Montgomery County Historical Society earlier this month.
The water-filled light bulb was found by workers with the Dayton Lighting Co. after the 1913 flood, which sent waters as deep as 27 feet streaming down the streets of Dayton.
Comments
"It's pretty neat. I like unusual," Kristi Austin said of the exhibit as she, her husband and three children took in the items Friday. "We're history buffs. We like that kind of thing."
The exhibit opened June 7 and is to run through the end of the year. Attendance at the museum is up, jumping from 5,445 in the first two weeks of June 2003 to 6,991 for the same period this year.
"It certainly has had some effect," said Lynn Simonelli, the museum's curator of anthropology.
Hackett said he was a little concerned about the sideshow aspect of the exhibit and said a few historical societies chose not to participate because they did not want to be ridiculed.
"We think that they made a mistake, but we also think that's the reason why most of these things are never seen," Hackett said. "I think you've got the dirty little secret, you might as well air it out."