"The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things": 30 Of The Weirdest Items Shared On This Facebook Page

Lisa Yaszek, a Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech where she researches and teaches science fiction as a global language crossing centuries, continents, and cultures, told Bored Panda: “Objects outside the realm of everyday experience prompt us to start asking questions: Who made this object? When and how did they make it? Why did anyone make something like this? What was (or is!) its purpose? More often than not, an object initially seems strange to us because it’s from a social, political, artistic, or scientific tradition other than the ones to which we are accustomed,” she explained.

According to the professor, we enjoy solving the puzzle presented by the strange object. “And once we’ve done so, we can indulge in yet another favorite human pastime—telling stories that connect us to these other people,” she said.

“We grieve with ancient parents who buried their children with toys; we empathize with patients searching through medical charts to understand their illnesses; we giggle at—but are also maybe a little bit impressed with—pornographers who ingeniously hide their products in plain sight.”

Lisa concluded that “the objects themselves are made from different materials and with different processes than the ones we use now in our own historical moment, but the motivation for creating and using these objects connects us all, as humans, across time and space.”

The creator behind The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things is curator and art historian Dr. Chelsea Nichols, who specializes in the strange and dark corners of art history, where monstrous things lurk. According to her official website, Chelsea has a Ph.D from the University of Oxford (2014), where her doctoral thesis examined so-called human curiosities in contemporary art. Moreover, recently she was the Curator of Modern Art at Te Papa in Wellington, New Zealand from 2013-2019. Here she worked with some of her favorite projects like an interactive art exhibition called Curious Creatures and Marvellous Monsters and gallery tours with a paranormal investigator.

Chelsea’s “mission in life is to get more people into art, through a very weird-shaped door probably hidden somewhere in a haunted house.” And it seems like she’s definitely successful at it. In fact, Chelsea has gained quite a following on social media with more than 53k followers on her Facebook page and almost 40k on her Instagram.

For anyone who is interested in the odd and peculiar side of our world, The Museum Of Ridiculously Interesting Things is basically a playground. It features the stories behind weird artifacts, unusual objects, and historical events the chances are you've never heard of before. The hidden mothers in Victorian portraits are one such example. Turns out that photographs in the 19th century contained hidden mothers that would keep their children still enough for a non-blurry picture. The mothers would be disguised as chairs or camouflaged under decorative throws behind them, so they were not that obvious from the first glimpse.