Anatomy of Death Museum
292 Cass Ave.
Mount Clemens, Mich.
www.anatomyofdeathmuseum.com
At 292 Cass Ave. in Mount Clemens sits a small, inconspicuous strip mall. The flat brick building with red awning is innocuous enough, until you notice the massive monster truck hearse sitting in the parking lot. With the exception of a small sign in the storefront window, it is the only indication that you have arrived at the Anatomy of Death Museum.
Opened in 2019, the museum is a collection of death-themed oddities and artifacts with a goal of educating the public about death practices and traditions around the world. The front of the building is an oddities novelty shop with an array of jewelry (including real blood vial jewelry), Ouija boards, art, incense and a mix of antique death-related objects. To get to the museum, you must pay $10 and enter through the body bag doors in the back of the store.
Upon entrance, you’re greeted by a larger-than-life skeleton with arms wide open, welcoming you to explore the world of the macabre. The space looks more like an eclectic antique shop than a museum. It’s dark and dusty with objects filling every nook and cranny. Except for a few small, posted signs, only about 50 of the objects are identified, labeled by numbers with corresponding notes available in a laminated notebook given to guests upon arrival.
At 4 p.m. on a Thursday, my friend and I had the tight, jam-packed space to ourselves. We spent a leisurely hour in the museum examining each of the labeled artifacts, sometimes on quite the hunt to find the next number, which wasn’t always in chronological order. (Hint: start on the right wall at the entrance, work your way counterclockwise around the center hearse to the left wall, before circling around the hearse itself. Then head to the unnumbered back wall and adjacent side room last.)
We explored rows of skulls, bones and full human skeletons, plus hearses, caskets, crucifixes, funeral signage and lots and lots of embalming supplies. There was also an extensive collection of African/Asian/Oceanic death masks and carvings displayed in-between. My favorite artifacts were the antique horse-drawn hearses, a pretty Victorian parlor display casket, and a can of “Restor Skin” – a flammable spray makeup foundation for morticians with a promise to “spray away problem areas!” For extra fun, a video of an autopsy plays in the corner, which is fascinating but also something I found I had limited tolerance for.
Certain aspects of the museum are educational, especially the notes on the death masks and carvings from cultures very different to ours in the United States. I learned, for example, that the elaborate mid-20th-century death mask from the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea was made by covering the skull of the deceased with clay to resemble the face. The clay was then painted with the same face paint pattern worn by the deceased while alive, before being decorated with shells, beads and sometimes the body’s own original hair. The skulls would then be placed in sacred areas for protection.
I’d also never seen historic hearses, caskets and embalming tools up close before. The limb amputation tools were also quite memorable, as well as the rather graphic anatomy lesson happening in the corner.
But largely the museum is a collection of eclectic death-related objects perhaps geared more toward entertainment than education. Those who are less inclined to learn about outside cultural death traditions can set their notebooks aside and relish in the preserved human hearts, bone-slicing machete and potion-like jars of embalming fluids, although, at some point, it does get redundant.
For the horror-averse, the vast amount of medical school-donated bones and equipment makes the ambiance too scientific to be truly scary (although best to avoid the front left corner video for the squeamish). A couple parts – like the random, gazing portrait of a young woman – were eerie, but the museum’s sound system wasn’t working that day, and the '70s and '80s pop music that seeped in from the outside dampened much of the creepy vibe. When my friend asked me, hypothetically, if I would spend the night alone in the museum for $500, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.
Still, we had fun. Both macabre-lovers and the macabre-curious can enjoy the museum at whatever level they’re most comfortable with, whether that’s a quick circle around the room, a full reading about the labeled objects or perhaps, someday, sleeping over among the dead.
