Museum
Museum of the Weird
Sideshow curiosity cabinet pairing a stitched hoax mermaid with genuine two-headed animal taxidermy.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Museum of the Weird on Sixth Street in Austin follows one object on the shelf above the entrance: a taxidermied Feejee Mermaid, the sewn-together sideshow hoax that Phineas Taylor Barnum turned into a sensation in eighteen forty-two New York. It traces the mermaid's odd path from anonymous craftsmen abroad through a sea captain and a rival museum man before it landed in this Austin curio shop, and what its arrival says about the true animal oddities upstairs in the Freaks of Nature room.
This audio guide was created using AI.