What is the most disconcerting object you have ever seen in a museum?

I was surprised and disgusted by the amount of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia in the Kennedy Library.

https://bodyworlds.com/ Is the stuff of nightmares.

The $5.50 burger in the cafeteria. Was in the 80’s so very pricey

The hundreds of shoes in the Holocaust Museum in DC. They belonged to hundreds of Jewish people killed by the Nazi. I almost burst into tears.

Egyptian mummies on display.

@Rocketguy I’ve seen pictures of those shoes. Some are very small. Horrific!

@gondwanalon Agreed! They should still be in there tombs.

@cheebdragon Great tribute to a president, eh? :( But very cool museum!

The crematorium at Dachau.

dammit!...I didn’t mean to give RDG a GA. Hate when that happens!

The displays in the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, which was housed in the apartment where she and her family were in hiding.

I don’t think I can make just one.

So many many displays and vignettes in the DC Holocaust museum. When you first arrive they give you a passport of someone who died in the Holocaust, like you are that person. The museum has so much information about the horrors of those years and it’s overwhelming how many people were lost.

The Civil Rights museum in Memphis is housed in The Lorraine Motel where MLK was shot and killed. Really sad thinking about what happened there as you stand outside. I felt it more outside than in the building. Most of the information in the museum I was aware of, but there was one section talking about excuses made by Southern states to maintain segregation and I remember getting a sinking feeling, because it was everything I was hearing present day to deny people civil rights. Specifically, at the time I visited the museum, gay marriage and gay people in the military was a hot topic. This was in the 2009/10 time frame.

So many choices . . . several come to mind:

* the bodies inside sarcophagi.
* vertical 1” slices of human bodies sandwiched between glass.
* shrunken human heads
* human nervous systems
* very rare birth defects preserved as fetuses in jars
* probably other things from the medical museum that I’ve wisely chosen to forget about

Oh, and old-old dental tools.

An elephant’s dried penis.

As a kid I was horrified by a shrunken head on display in my local museum. It was about the size of my clenched fist and very long and very ordinary looking lustrous black hair hung down from it.

I hate bugs, and a whole wall of every species with a pin stuck in it horrifies me.

I went to the Bodies: The Exhibition. That shook me up a bit.
Using a process they called Plastination they somehow were able to inject a goop that stiffened up the bits so the bodies could be sliced and diced and put on display. Slices of bodies!. Like at the deli counter!
Supposedly they were bodies of Chinese prisoners, but you never know.

Crown jewels.

Bodies: The Exhibition reminds me of a travelling exhibition of Pompeii remains (I must have visited both around the same time – they are inextricably linked in my mind).

But the bodies in Bodies: The Exhibition look like freshly opened human bodies. Very disconcerting.

@RocketGuy You are correct. It looked like they were sliced and diced moments after they were killed died.