Vent Haven Museum: Home Of Hundreds Of Creepy Ventriloquist Dummies
YouTubeThe Vent Haven Museum has almost 1,000 ventriloquist dummies, all with fascinating backstories.
The next place on our list doesn’t have the same violent past as LaLaurie Mansion, but it’s certainly one of the creepiest places to visit in the United States. Especially if you’re freaked out by ventriloquist dummies.
Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky has the largest collection of ventriloquist puppets in the world. In other words, visitors will be greeted with the eerily frozen faces of almost 1,000 ventriloquist dolls.
Founded by William Shakespeare Berger — a businessman and the former president of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists — in the 1970s, the museum’s collection is nothing if not impressive. The hundreds of dolls boast a wide variety of designs, and some date back to the Civil War.
Vent Haven MuseumWilliam Shakespeare Berger with the Vent Haven Museum’s collection of ventriloquist dummies.
The museum has both obscure ventriloquist dummies and those that belonged to famous ventriloquists, like Jeff Dunham, Shari Lewis, and Terry Fator, as well as a replica of the dummy used by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.
And while some of the ventriloquist dummies were donated to Vent Haven Museum specifically so people could handle them and see how they work, many of the ventriloquist dummies are not to be touched by anyone. The museum thinks it’s disrespectful to their former owners.
“You never handle someone else’s dummy, in particular you don’t animate it,” Vent Haven Museum curator Lisa Sweasy explained to Smithsonian Magazine, “because the ventriloquists have spent a lot of time developing those characters and giving them a voice.”
