The Cecilnomicon: Night at the Museum

This weekend I took advantage of the conjunction of the summer solstice and the Supermoon to take a visit to the Peabody Essex Museum’s infamous Private Collection. While in theory this collection is open to the public year-round by appointment, actually making an appointment is pretty tricky. There are at least two false entryways to the Appointments Room and even then you have to be careful not to awaken the Keeper of the Book while dodging all the traps. Seriously, dropping by Acererak’s place to say “Hi” is an easier proposition. So when we hit one of these all too rare conjunctions, I always leap at the opportunity to visit the Peabody Essex’s less visible collections. If you want to see the collection without increased risk to your sanity, simply mark your calendar for conjunctions of lunar and solar events. On those days at the appointed times a doorway will appear in the sculpture garden of the PEM. Speak, friend, and enter.

Some quick background: The Peabody Essex Museum took its current form in 1992 when several local museums, notably The Peabody Museum of Salem and The Essex Institute, merged. A few smaller museums, such as Hope Cadavera’s Upstairs of Mystery and the Salem Observatorium, were swept up (and away) in the merger as well. The Salem Athenaeum barely escaped its own collections being absorbed into the PEM’s Voltron of History through judicious use of salt wards and incense (and even then it was pretty close - the moving vans were idling on Essex Street, ready to cheese it at the first sign of advancing PEM forces).

Anyways, since the PEM came into being it has had the problem that it simply does not have enough space to display every bit of its collection. Luckily, renovations in the mid-90s provided a temporary solution to this problem when the old catacombs of the East India Marine Society were discovered beneath the compound. After that, it was a pretty simple job to wall up the various tombs and move those elements of the museum’s collection that it did not want the public to be exposed to deep underground. While I personally believe that its shameful for the PEM to sit on these esoteric items like some sort of slumbering dragon, it’s better than the alternative: the release of strange and mysterious artifacts into the public at auction. That never works out well.

Here are a few highlights of the collection. Several other key pieces are currently out on loan to other institutions, a worrying prospect when you think about it.

Blackbeard’s Skull

A gift of the Widow Snow, the skull of Edward Teach aka Blackbeard has long haunted the depths of the museum, never to be placed on display. Why is that? I’ve spoken with Blackbeard’s ghost (who you might remember is on the Spirit Council of Salem, largely due to the placement of his skull and the binding rituals placed by Old Widow Snow after it caused the death of her husband, Edward Rowe Snow) and he cites the fact that his murderer, a Lieutenant Maynard, turned his head into a drinking vessel. “Yar,” confided Teach to me over swigs from his braincase, “Tis be my curse. I failed to read closely the fine print of the contract I signed with Ole Scratch - I thought I was sellin my soul in order to cause “great terror” but upon rereadin the contract, I found it said “great terroir” instead.”

“That’s a long way to go for a pretty weak pun,” I replied, taking another bonny boney sip.

“You be tellin me,” sighed the ghost, staring gloomily into the drinking vessel that was once his head.

The Hangman’s Noose

Bodies of the innocent were not the only things cut down from that twisted tree on Gallow’s Hill in 1692 - an equally innocent rope also faced its end. Jutey was born in 1691, the son of a piece of twine and another, longer piece of twine. All through his childhood, Jutey dreamed of growing up to be useful, to help the people of Salem Village in their day to day tasks. Maybe he would be part of a harness, used to plow fields? Perhaps he would see a life of adventure on the seas as the rigging of a fishing vessel? There were a thousand uses for a good length of rope in a Puritan village, but even in his worst nightmares, Jutey never dreamed what dread Fate had in store for him: Executioner.

Despondent over the role he played in ending the lives of so many innocent people, Jutey twisted in on himself, becoming quiet and withdrawn. He eschewed his friends, fellow ropes, and even his young wife, Cordelia. She was the one who found him, hanging alone in the barn on that stormy night in 1693. Such a waste.

Sibaso’s Hungry Warclub

When a young Sumatran shaman (known as a sibaso), eager to make a name for himself, invoked a great and powerful shark spirit to bless the tooth lined warclub that was to be his wedding gift to a royal groom, he did not know what powers he was dealing with. The shaman, whose name has been lost to history (i.e. the inebriated ship’s doctor and Salem native couldn’t be bothered to remember it when he bought the warclub from a mysterious merchant in a small black boat), proved that Beginner’s Luck is a double edged sword. The ambitious sibaso demanded that his gift be given the qualities of the greatest of predators, the shark, in hopes that such a treasure would win him favor with the royal family.

What he got instead was executed.

For you see, the shaman was too successful. The warclub he created, a wonderful wooden afair lined with razor sharp shark’s teeth, was too perfect, too much like the shark. When held, the club must always stay in motion - if it were to stop, like a shark the stops swimming, the wielder would die. The scent of blood in the air sends it and any who hold it into a unstoppable frenzy of death and gore. And the teeth! The thing sheds its teeth, constantly growing new ones to press out the old, each spent tooth hungry for blood and flesh.

The newlyweds did not survive their wedding night.

The shaman did not survive the week.

The club, however, survives to this day, chained in iron to cold stone walls, the tinkling sound of shark’s teeth falling to the ground below it its only company.

The Black Bible of Samuel Parris

After the Hysteria ended, the Reverend Samuel Parris left Salem under a bit of a cloud. My family’s records indicate that this might have been an actual cloud, a miasma of imps and devils each no bigger than a fruit fly, but if that were true then there would have been some merit to the disgraced preacher’s accusations, right? And everybody knows there were no witches in Salem in 1692, just bored, cruel teenagers and a handful of wizards.

When Parris beat feet back to Boston, he left behind many of his personal posessions. One of the objects abandoned was the Black Bible. Once a tome of beautiful simplicity, well made and cared for, the Bible had been corrupted by its owner’s misdeeds - the covers, the binding, every page turned black as soot. What’s more, the dark stain is contagous, infecting anyone who touches the book and leaving black marks that will simply not wash away. Unsure what to do with such a ‘treasure,’ the villagers attempted to burn it, but that just produced an awful cloud of foul smelling black smoke and a thick black ichor that stained those around it the same way touching a page would. Tossing it in a well merely tainted the ground water, killing cattle and blackening crops.

Eventually, the Black Bible was locked away in a lead-lined box and buried in a coffin where it slumbered fitfully for centuries until it was dug up in 1991 during the construction of the Witch Trials Memorial on Charter Street. Rather than risk contagion, the city foisted the book on the fledgling Peabody Essex Museum, commanding that they be the ones to care for it and ensure its black stain never infect Salem again. This is why the PEM pays no taxes to the city of Salem - care of the Black Bible is taxing enough!

The Singing Figurehead

She doesn’t sing so much as whisper a familiar melody. No two people who hear her song describe it the same way, but all agree it is beautiful, haunting. The name of the ship The Singing Figurehead once belonged to has been stricken from the records. The figurehead itself was discovered in 1886 floating in a pile of wreckage in the South Pacific and brought back to Salem by enchanted sailors. Commanded to turn over their prize at port by Adolphus Crowninshield, the sailors attempted to burn the harbor down. It was a close-run thing, but the fire was put out, the sailors jailed, and the figurehead locked away in the catacombs of the East India Marine Society.

In order to view the Figurehead, a visitor must don a harness attached to a giant winch. After a strictly mandated thirty seconds, museum docents crank the giant wheel, pulling the enraptured visitor away from the cursed figure at great speed.

Reader, though I saw her just a few days ago, I cannot tell you what she looks like. But the song! The song! It still thrums through my head, calling me back to her lonely chamber.

Elephant God of the Tcho-Tcho People

I’ll leave this one to an earlier account written by Frank Belknap Long in 1931:

“Words could not adequately convey the repulsiveness of the thing. It was endowed with a trunk and great, uneven ears, and two enormous tusks protruded from the corners of its mouth. But it was not an elephant. Indeed, its resemblance to an actual elephant was, at best, sporadic and superficial, despite certain unmistakable points of similarity. The ears were webbed and tentacled, the trunk terminated in a huge flaring disk at least a foot in diameter, and the tusks, which interwined and interlocked at the base of the statue, were as translucent as rock crystal. The pedestal upon which it squatted was of black onyx: the statue itself, with the exception of the tusks, had apparently been chiseled from a single block of stone, and was so hideously mottled and eroded and discolored that it looked, in spots, as though it had been dipped in sanies. The thing sat bolt upright. Its forelimbs were bent stiffly at the elbow, and its hands -- it had human hands-- rested palms upward on its lap. Its shoulders were broad and square and its breasts and enormous stomach sloped outward, cushioning the trunk. It was as quiescent as a Buddha, as enigmatical as a sphinx, and as malignantly poised as a gorgon or cockatrice.”

Perhaps it is just the flickering flouresent lights that line the hallway where the Elephant God's pedestal stands, but I swear I’ve seen the thing move.

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RIP Richard Matheson - You Are Legend