Harrisburg area’s newest addition: Abby Normal’s Museum of the Strange

It started with a cancerous toe.

Jason Haack wanted to preserve it after doctors amputated it following a diagnosis of a rare form of bone cancer in 2007. His request came too late, however, as the toe already had been incinerated with other hazardous waste.

The brush with death changed Haack’s outlook on life.

“It kind of changed my perspective on things, and my collection started getting deeper and darker. Instead of just collecting the animal skulls, I did more the funeral stuff and got into the art side of it,” the Sioux Falls man said.

You read that correctly. Haack has had a longtime interest in curiosities, oddities and collectibles that some might consider macabre and morbid.

But he’s not alone. This year, he will set up his display at 26 expos and markets. His next event, scheduled for later this month in Kansas City, Missouri, will feature 150 booths.

A former journeyman plumber, Haack also is a taxidermist and an artist. His business is known as Bonez by Dezign. Earlier this month, he and his wife, Kayla, along with their 9-year-old daughter, Abby, started something new: Abby Normal’s Museum of the Strange.

Its name is a tribute to the Mel Brooks movie “Young Frankenstein.” In it, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant Igor selects the wrong preserved brain from a lab. He misreads the label “Abnormal” as “Abby Normal,” and an imperfect brain is implanted in Frankenstein’s creature before reanimation.

The fact that fourth-grader Abby’s name ties perfectly into the family’s interest is just a fortuitous coincidence, her parents said.

“The first time she ever watched that and when the abnormal brain part came on, she died, absolutely just died, laughing. She thought it was a best thing ever,” her father said. “It was kind of fitting to play along that card with her name being Abby and everything else and her growing up into this.”

Abby Normal’s Museum opened earlier this month in a metal building just off the Interstate 29 exit for Harrisburg. Haack had tried for several years to open the museum in Sioux Falls but found no one willing to rent a location.

Haack has been in the news before as he searched for a permanent site and for an unusual Valentine’s Day promotion. He knows not everyone understands his interest in the unusual. In fact, he said, he has received death threats, warnings of physical harm and promised-but-unfulfilled lawsuits.

“Doing what we do is not the norm, so people don’t understand the science behind it or the beauty side as far as the artwork goes,” Haack said.

Abby Normal’s Museum steers clear of anything occult, although it does sell Ouija boards in its gift shop.

“To me, it’s just a piece of cardboard,” Haack said. “Also, we don’t knock on that door to meet new friends either, just to be safe.”

“You don’t even believe in ghosts, Dad,” Abby interjected. “Your own daughter has seen one.” When was that? “When I was a little girl, when my grandma lived in a trailer house,” she said.

Jennifer McNamara of Sioux Falls visited Abby Normal’s on its opening weekend.

“I think it’s a classic sideshow-attraction-style spot,” she said. “‘Step behind our velvet curtain, and see the oddities of the world! Be shocked! Be amazed!’ That sort of thing.

“You could certainly take school-age kids along. There are no jump scares. There are some things parents might have to explain. You have to know the sensitivities of your kids.”

What Abby Normal’s Museum does offer is displays such as the ghostly yet beautifully intricate skeletons of dead animals, a taxidermied two-headed calf and other animals, body parts preserved in jars, battered Victorian dolls with lifeless eyes, quirky artifacts like a parking meter from a Bill Murray movie and jars upon jars of human remains, all obtained legally.

Haack has collected skeletal and tissue specimens over the years from various sources.

“A good majority of the animals, they come from trappers and hunters, that industry,” Haack said. “The human stuff, it’s retired medical specimens from colleges and doctors’ estates, nothing fresh.”

Its new home, on a gravel road off Kenworth Place in an industrial area on the northeast side of the I-29 exit, has 2,400 square feet with more than half of it taken up by the museum. The Haacks carefully chose what to include.

“Most based on the rarity of the items,” Haack said. “There’s one human skull in there that is, in my eyes, kind of priceless.”

According to the provenance the Haacks traced, it belonged to a man who was hanged in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1914 for shooting seven men. Two died, including a police officer. Its provenance indicated a medical student acquired it first. It was handed down to his son, also a doctor. After the son’s death, his widow sold the collection.

Haack worked with a historian in Texas, South Dakota’s state burial coordinator and several forensic pathologists while obtaining the skull.

“We just wanted to make sure everything was confirmed,” he said. “The damage to his skull was consistent with the injuries obtained during his arrest.”

Another exhibit that draws much attention is still living. Abby Normal’s Museum is home to 14 alligators of various sizes. Visitors are allowed to hold the reptiles under careful supervision.

Abby treats the alligators much like any other pet, amazed that some people are squeamish about touching them.

“She gets giggly when people are scared of them,” Haack said. “I get it, anybody coming in here that’s never been close to one, you’re going to be a little nervous. I would be.”

Kayla Haack’s favorite piece has its own Wikipedia entry. It’s the two-faced skull of Edward Mordrake, or Mordake. According to urban legend, Mordrake killed himself at the age of 23, unable to bear the malicious whisperings of his other face. McNamara calls it a must-see.

Abby’s favorite? An Aztec death whistle. She blows it to startle others, usually her mother.

Haack grew up a fan of Robert Ripley, the collector behind the oddities that make up Ripley’s Believe It or Not. He sold the skeleton of a flying fox bat to the Ripley’s Museum in St. Augustine, Florida, several years ago.

“Honestly, my favorite pieces ended up not even being the oddities but the framed and displayed bat skeletons,” McNamara said “They are really works of art.”

While the Haacks have had several public events such as bringing in Butch Patrick, who played Eddie Munster on the 1960s television comedy “The Munsters,” they don’t push their interest onto others. People interested in such curiosities will seek him out, Haack said.

“I found out about Abby Normal’s Museum from my friend Thea (Miller Ryan),” Jeni Mc said. “I’m known to love the macabre, oddities and curiosities. I took my daughter because we share that love of strange things, and the idea of a local ‘cabinet of curiosities’ sounded like a great way to spend an afternoon together.”

Haack’s artwork includes “Little Shop of Horrors”-esque plants made of bones. He grew up watching the movie musical, and with the help of various articulated bones, he can replicate Audrey II, “planted” in a Maxwell House coffee can.

“I’ll usually start with some sort of idea in my head, but the end result is always different. I think it’s fun that way,” Haack said.

Abby Normal’s Museum of the Strange is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Admission is $10, with children 12 and younger free. Its address is 27280 Kenworth Place, Harrisburg, two block east and one block north of the Harrisburg exit on Interstate 29. Look for the hearses parked outside the blue building.