As a Harpers Ferry museum closes, its 92 wax figures are looking for a new home
The home of the John Brown Wax Museum in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, has been sold.
Now, 92 of the 93 wax figures that help tell the story of Brown, the abolitionist who led the raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859, need a new home.
Ted Staley, the man who has owned and operated the museum since 2010, told WTOP in an interview he had been planning on selling the building as he heads into retirement, but hoped that the life-size figures could be sold together.
Staley said the figures could be part of a new museum in a new space. There are two serious potential buyers “who are interested in keeping it alive somewhere,” Staley said.
“The last resort” would be selling the figures at auction, something he explained would likely mean splitting up the collection, a prospect he finds “not desirable.”
Staley said the person who bought the building plans on using it as a retail space, and Staley has been given one month to clear the building of the lifelike figures, except for one.
Staley explained there is a single smiling figure in the collection — one that was created in the likeness of Dixie Killam, the original owner of the wax museum which opened in 1963 — and the buyer of the building is taking that one.
As far as Staley can tell, most of the figures at the John Brown Wax Museum were made by the same Baltimore, Maryland, company that created those at the city’s National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, Dorfman Museum Figures, Inc.
On the museum’s Facebook page, there are comments from past visitors, one of whom shared the museum is a “must-see” when visiting Harpers Ferry.
Whoever buys the figures will need to keep a few things in mind, said Staley.
“They are prone to some changes in coloration,” he said, “Ironically, heat does not seem to affect them,” because despite the “wax” figure name given to them, they’re actually made of a kind of polymer with a rubberlike consistency.
Staley said he knows he’ll feel a twinge when he locks up the building for the final time, but he said he’ll also remember how it felt to see visitors flock to the museum: “It’s wonderful to see people from all over the world who comes to Harpers Ferry.”
Given the somewhat gory tableaus included in the scenes depicting the raid on Harpers Ferry, Staley said children would sometimes get spooked and be escorted out by their parents.
“If you have anxiety over going to a wax museum, this is not the one to go to learn how to get over it,” he said.
And Staley said the question of whether the place might be haunted has come up more than once: “I myself have never seen anything like that.”
Staley told WTOP he’s heard the kind of old house noises that might lead people to believe there are ghosts present, “but I’ve been in the basement in the pitch dark and have had no paranormal experiences,” he said.