Missouri Life June 2023

LACLEDE’S LANDING WAX MUSEUM St. Louis Cleopatra, Gandhi, Barack

Obama, Vladamir Putin, Donald Trump, and The Rock have all made appearances here. For 40 years, one 10,000-square-foot

Missouri museum has been home to more than 200 of the world’s most famous and infamous characters—their wax likenesses, that is. Where else might you find the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Marilyn Monroe mingling with Abraham Lincoln and Captain Jack Sparrow? The Laclede’s Landing Wax Museum, at 720 North Second Street in St. Louis, boasts life-size effigies of world leaders, superheroes, athletes, and movie stars. This eclectic assembly of characters, real and imagined, delights riverfront visitors with its verisimilitude. Their dwelling is a five-story, 1885, National Historic Landmark building with a cast-iron façade. Brave visitors can enter the macabre Chamber of Horrors, complete with terrifying characters and animatronics. Everyone else is welcome to linger in the ice cream parlor or gift shop. Accommodating up to 150 guests, the wax museum is an unusual venue for special events. Have a different location in mind but need an appearance by a special guest? The museum rents wax figures. Don’t be a stiff. Go see for yourself. StLWaxMuseum.com

HEATON-BOWMAN SMITH FUNERAL HOME MUSEUM St. Joseph St. Joseph may be known as the town “Where the Pony Express started and Jesse James ended,” but a somewhat obscure funeral home museum in the city where he met his demise helps keep the memory of the famous bank robber alive. In a back room at the Heaton-Bowman-Smith & Sidenfaden funeral home is a museum containing mortuary relics, most notably those related to the infamous outlaw. Nearly a century and a half after the bandit's interment, the original wicker corpse pick-up basket, a photograph of his embalmed body, the sales slip, and a ledger entry for his $250 steel casket with drapes and $10 shroud, are on display. Considered deluxe for the day, Jesse James’s services exceeded the $50 average cost for a funeral in 1882. A local newspaper reported that for nearly a week at the mortuary, “four United States marshals stayed with the body constantly, armed with black snake whips to keep souvenir hunters from carrying away parts of the clothing, casket, and cooling board used at the funeral.” Among the antique caskets, newspapers, heirloom urns, and embalming artifacts on display is a black, raised-top octagon coffin on a wooden stand. Beneath it lies a bearskin rug that was used to absorb dripping moisture before embalming became commonplace. Possibly due to its macabre nature, the mortuary museum is not mentioned on the funeral chapel’s website, but it can be found at Heaton-Bowman-Smith & Sidenfaden’s Frederick Avenue location. HeatonBowmanSmith.com

PIGS ALOFT MUSEUM Linn

The colloquial expression about the impossibility of pig flight does not apply when speaking of a porcine attraction that boasts the

largest pig figure collection in America and the second largest in the world. Here, everything is possible. Where Pigs Fly Farm and Pigs Aloft Museum promotes porkers, real and charmingly whimsical, and has also rescued hundreds of farm animals. The Linn area farm at 2810 Highway 50 East is a pig museum and animal sanctuary. Visitors are encouraged to touch and feed animals and are issued a brush and a sleeve of crackers upon arrival. Please note, Emma the emu prefers to eat her crackers crumbled from your hand. Put a cracker in your mouth and you might find yourself lip-to-lip with Leroy the camel. School children on field trips rave about the petting zoo, and the proprietor is amazed at the number of adults who find it a therapeutic place to visit. Aside from the living assemblage, Oinkin’ Hall and the historic 1882 stone house display the vast collection of pig-themed items. A thrift store and gift shop round out the Osage County rural mecca. WherePigsFlyFarm.com

Scan this code or visit MissouriLife.com for more delightfully wonderful Missouri museums to explore.

MICHAEL SCAUZZO, CINDY BRENNEKE, GLORY FAGAN

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