Ashwell, Massachusetts is the kind of town that smells like autumn year-round and has never quite gotten over the fact that the witch trials happened somewhere else. It’s beautiful, brooding, and deeply committed to the idea that every creaky staircase is a portal to another dimension.
Which brings us to the Ashwell Museum of Paranormal Pecularities, a self-described “living archive of the supernatural,” and in reality, a slightly moldy former funeral home now repurposed into a shrine for haunted bric-a-brac and theatrical overstatements.
Admission is $18.50, unless you’re “sensitive to energies,” in which case it’s $22, presumably to offset the risk of spectral interference. You enter through a narrow hallway strung with red string lights and a velvet rope, and are immediately confronted by a wall of handwritten warnings. “Enter at your own risk.” “The spirits remember faces.” “You may not leave unchanged.” I left with slightly damp socks and a mild case of eye-roll strain.
The museum’s collection includes:
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A rocking chair that allegedly moves when no one’s looking.
(Spoiler: it didn’t move, and I looked. A lot.) -
A ventriloquist dummy named Snickers who’s said to whisper your name.
(It whispered nothing, although I did catch the docent muttering about missing lunch.) -
The Haunted Hay Rake of Millfield, which is literally just a rusted garden tool zip-tied to the wall with a plaque that reads: “Found at the site of unexplained screams, 1932.” No mention of how they were “unexplained,” or whether the screams coincided with stepping on a rake in the dark.
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Annabellina, a porcelain doll “whose gaze follows you” — except it doesn’t. She stares vaguely left. Probably thinking about how she ended up in a glass box in a museum curated by people who think EMF meters make them ghost whisperers.
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And of course, the museum’s crown jewel: The Mirror That Sees You, a soot-smudged oval hung slightly crooked in a velvet alcove, surrounded by candles and a sign instructing you to “gaze into your truest self.”
I gazed. I saw Thurston Penwick the Third, tired, unimpressed, and overdue for lunch.
The final chamber is — I kid you not — a narrow hallway of “energetic imprints,” where guests are encouraged to press their palms to the wall and “feel the echoes of the past.” I felt chipped paint and mild embarrassment.
The Ashwell Museum of Paranormal Peculiarities isn’t haunted. It’s curated by people who think creaking floorboards are a personality trait. But as an immersive case study in the psychology of belief, it’s worth the price of admission. Just don’t expect the dummy to talk. He has standards.