Capone, Kevorkian, Clowns….Curiosities & Curses Abound

Zak Bagan’s Museum of Haunted Objects in Las Vegas, Nevada is full of curiosities. To some it may seem cluttered, and to others it may seem dark and dingy, but to me it was delightfully entertaining and interesting. Whomever Zak hired to do his interior design/decorating did an outstanding job. The rooms and hallways were dimly lit, and some of the rooms even had fragrances to match the atmosphere of the particular room (more on that later). There is no photography permitted, but there is so much to capture with your senses. I need at least one more trip to really inhale every last detail. The real cherry on top was our tour guide, Virginia. She is the quintessential tour guide here and from what I understand, the most tenured employee of the museum. We had several tour guides throughout the two hour visit to the museum, and they were all great. Giving ghost tours myself, I can be a little bit critical of the style and delivery of others, but I found each of the guides here to be flawless and interesting. Overall, they were fantastic story tellers. Zak himself was there the day I visited, which happened to be Valentine’s Day. I didn’t get to meet him, but Virginia told us that when he is present, the “kids” (spirits) act up a bit more than usual. So let’s get into the details.

Let me go ahead and jump right in. I think I’ll start with one of the most talked-about items in the museum: the Dybbuk box. What is a Dybbuk, you ask? I didn’t know at first either. It is basically like a demon of sorts; the concept comes from Judaism. There is one here at the museum, trapped in an antique Jewish wine cabinet and surrounded by salt. (I have seen another demon contained in a box surrounded by salt in Cleveland at the Buckland Witchcraft Museum, which I talk about in another one of my blogs.) There are actually ten official Dybbuk boxes in the world. Each one aligns with the Tree of Life concept from Kabbalah, the basis for Jewish mysticism. Zak owns two of them. There is also a smaller one and it is contained in the same room. But the big one is the real problem. Zak acquired this particular box from ebay. Previous owners had experienced everything from fragrances of cat urine, a stroke, hives, nightmares, among other sinister happenings when in possession of the box. The original owner was a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. Is this box linked to that? Possibly. A lot of people have weird and aggressive things happen to them in the room where it is housed- like being pushed or scratched or otherwise tormented. I didn’t experience that at all. In fact, I actually felt at peace in there and the sandalwood fragrance that filled the room was really a nice scent and had almost a calming effect. Zak has a video of Post Malone and himself in the room where he experienced something weird and then Post had really bad luck (incidents like a car accident and his house being robbed) for awhile after his visit. Apparently Zak had unsealed the covering and touched the box for the first time since he had obtained it. Then when Post touched Zac’s shoulder, he somehow had transferred some really bad energy to him. Even our guide, Virginia has been pushed in that room and has seen a dark entity sneaking around on the other side of the display case. Yikes. If all this happens now, I wonder what happened when people drank the wine that the box was originally intended to house?

After that experience, we viewed a severed witches head. I thought it was pretty creepy looking. It was kind of shrunken with a few strands of whitish/greyish hair surrounding it. She did not have a happy face. I guess I might not either if I were on display in a room right next to an evil box.

Although I am not scared of clowns, I do not enjoy jump-scares. For one part of the museum we entered a midway of sorts, and were greeted with a popcorn smell as we walked through a circus-themed room with tons of clowns lining an entire hallway. Some of them were animatronics; they moved and jumped out at you. I thought maybe one of them would be a live person and I wasn’t really prepared to see a “funhouse” themed room like this in the museum. Alas, none of them were alive……but the sporadic movements did startle me a bit.

So remember when I went to Key West to visit Robert the Doll? Zak has his own answer to Robert. He has PEGGY the Doll. In the same vein as visiting Robert, you must greet Peggy and say goodbye to Peggy before you leave. She is in a room with some radio frequency stuff going on (kind of like the Estes method, but everyone can hear without the use of headphones). You are invited by the guide to ask Peggy questions and between the static of the frequency you can hear words as she communicates with visitors. There was really nothing significant that I heard during our visit, but it would be interesting to spend a little more time in there with her. Apparently some people choose not to go into the room, because they are deeply impacted by Peggy.

There are so many really fantastic themed rooms that I hope I am not forgetting any of them. There is one room that is a nautical theme, dedicated to Natalie Wood. She died while out at sea and strange things happen/objects move in that room and get caught on camera when no one is looking. In fact, there is another entire room dedicated to Hollywood. There are some things on display that hold a certain energy of their previous owner, like Sharon Tate’s wedding dress or the transaxel from James Dean’s Porsche Spyder. And then there are just fun things like Harold Ramis’s jumpsuit from “Ghostbusters”. Al Capone has his own room too – complete with the rug, desk, and mirror that belonged to him, plus a photo with his son. Made it even cooler that we were visiting on St. Valentine’s Day, the anniversary of the famous Chicago massacre of 1929, for which none other than Mr. Capone was likely responsible, but was never convicted.

There were some cool items from other places I’ve visited, such as some taxidermy that was discovered packed away in a closet in the Winchester Mystery House. As we were viewing some of the animal heads, a secret door swung open, and we were surprised to see a new guide on the other side. We also saw some other curiosities that Zak has collected over the years like a box that contains something which will manifest hypnotic dreams if you look into it. I didn’t catch what that box was called…..or Bela Lugosi’s mirror, which causes some other frightening experiences if you look into it. (FYI- I looked into both of these things. I’ll keep you posted if anything weird happens.)

There was another room that was set up to look like an old barn and smelled of wood and dust. Housed in that room was a kettle which had collected the blood of the persons hanged above it. This was Ed Gein’s room. There is a leathery stretched out canvas made of human skin framed on the wall. Ed is Gein the person who inspired the likes of Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs” and Norman Bates from “Psycho”. My stomach churned in this room, imagining the way he tortured his victims. I was not sad to leave that space. The other room that grossed me out for all different reasons was the room with the cursed bed from the Bunny Ranch, a famous Nevada Brothel run by Dennis Hof, until he died in that very bed in 2018. The bed was stained with god-knows-what and this is the same bed where Lamar Odom overdosed. Lamar blamed Dennis Hof for poisoning him, instead of owning up to his addictions. I honestly liked this room the least. I thought it was gross and I am not sure I believe that the bed is cursed. There was some sort of demon present in a photo of the mirror from that room, but like any other paranormal photography, you have to take it with a grain of salt. Anyhow, when you are surrounded by debauchery and drugs and such, you are bound to have at least a LITTLE bit of bad luck. Others may not agree with me, but this is part of the museum I would not have been mad to have skipped.

And then there is yet another entire room dedicated to serial killers. My travel companion told me later that it felt like it was pressurized. He felt very heavy until the door opened and we exited that room. I didn’t experience that, but I thought that was an interesting observation, because later on I read some accounts that relayed similar feelings in that room.

The one thing we did not do was upgrade our tickets to the “RIP” access. This gave visitors some added extras, one of them being able to access the basement, which is very creepy and once housed the practice of satanic rituals. Jenna Jamison’s family once owned this house and her father had some odd things going on down there. I’m not sure of all the details, but it sounded creepy and I was not all that sad that I didn’t get to go down there. Although my travel companion and I were the only two of the ten on our tour who did not purchase the RIP pass, I don’t feel like I was missing out on a whole lot. One of the things was entering a crawl space to exit the Exorcism room near the beginning of the tour. I would have had to have skipped that part anyhow, because I do not like tight spaces. If you were an RIP guest you got a lanyard and a tshirt as keepsakes. There were about three other parts of the museum that you could visit in addition to the basement and the crawlspace: some sort of circus trailer after the sideshow thing with the clowns, closer viewing of the “Devil’s rocking chair”, which was said to cause severe back pain, among other ailments. I’ve already got enough back pain, so I didn’t care to go any closer than I already was. Then there was one other exclusive RIP thing- but I wasn’t even sure what it was, because I was too busy trying to jog my memory at that point, remembering all the things to write about in this blog. Towards the end of the tour we visited some artifacts from the “Demon House” in Gary, Indiana, and I do remember that being one of the episodes of “Ghost Adventures”, but I don’t remember many of the details about the display itself, besides seeing some creepy basement stairs and a nervous blonde girl on our tour, twisting her hair and saying “I gotta get out of here.” Side note: that girl was a little peculiar throughout the entire tour. She had come by herself and she had strange commentaries for every room we visited. I am not sure if she was just naturally odd, or if she was really experiencing some crazy things in that house.

Another interesting display that stood out was Dr. Kevorkian’s controversial doctor assisted suicide display and his actual “death van”. He helped over 200 people voluntarily kill themselves with the mere press of a button, and although controversial, there is no denying that he was a brilliant man. He was a talented composer and in the room, some of his music played. It was macabre, yet peaceful at the same time. Kind of sounded like something you might hear at a funeral. This is what he played for his patients as they made the decision when to press the bottom to release the euthanasia and let go of their lives. He spoke five languages and also was an artist, specializing in oil paintings. Look, I’m not sure that dying is a crime when you are terminally ill and just need some clean assistance to pass on, but I definitely got the chills thinking about how many people died in that van.

Over-all, I think the admission price must have been worth it, because almost a week later I still can’t stop thinking about the house. I do wish that the tour had included more about the history of the building and the previous owners. We did get a little bit of that, but not a ton of information. Another friend who works for the Nevada courts told me that the Bar Association was housed there at one point and everyone who worked there was afraid to go into the basement, where they kept some records and such. One thing I had been told that there were some changes in temperature throughout the house. I did find that to be true, but I also noticed I was standing under fans during some parts of the tour. I thought it was actually quite warm in the museum for the most part. Lots of bodies occupying space at the same time. We heard stories and saw videos of people passing out in particularly “active” parts of the house. But I also noticed some of those rooms were the warmest. I was getting a little uncomfortable being on my feet for two hours, quite honestly. So if one were in poor physical shape, warm, and getting tired of standing with no break for a long period of time, I can see where fainting might come into play. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that we are in VEGAS, sin-city, for crying out loud!, where people might be visiting hungover. I’m not saying that paranormal experiences don’t happen. Otherwise I wouldn’t have this blog! But what I am saying is that some of these factors certainly would make physical reactions a lot more likely to occur. Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed my visit. If you have any interest whatsoever in curiosities, oddities, and cursed objects, do make it a point to visit.