If you owned a mummified skeleton and someone offered to buy it for $1 million, wouldn’t you give it up?
Not Ye Olde Curiosity Shop’s fourth-generation owner, Andy James, great-grandson of founder J.E. Standley and owner of the mummified Sylvester, the most popular attraction at the Seattle w
aterfront store.
He’s spurned $1 million offers for the life of the party.
Sylvester was once owned by a doctor who kept him in a box with a glass top hidden under the pillows of a couch. When the doctor threw parties, he’d asked the guests sitting on the couch to look underneath the cushions.
When Sylvester arrived in Seattle in 1955, the story was that he became mummified in an Arizona desert. That changed when National Geographic, in producing the TV show “The Mummy Road Show,” chose Sylvester for the first episode.
Tests, including X-rays and CT scans, confirmed that Sylvester was human. The bumps on the side of his head are from shrapnel still close to the surface. The bullet that may have killed him entered his abdomen; a fragment is still lodged in his shoulder.
Tests showed that Sylvester was preserved with arsenic. The only time arsenic was used to preserve bodies was during the Civil War. No one knows why his last resting place was a desert.
Countless people have sold or donated items to Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. James said that his favorite donation was a rat.
“One day a guy came in and said that he worked for a lumber company and was cleaning up in the back of the warehouse and found a petrified rat and wanted to donate it,” James said.
“He was wearing a backpack and he reached back and pulled out this bag and handed me a rat. Maybe it was just stiff with old age and all dried out but we put it on display with Sylvester.”
Ye Olde Curiosity Shop has fascinated visitors since 1899. It has entertained and provided souvenirs to visitors despite wars, pandemics and iPads with oddities and Northwest art. Robert Ripley, of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” fame, visited in the 1930s and bought $40,000 in totem poles.
The current building on Pier 54 is smaller than the previous version on the Colman Dock, the one with an 18-foot Sasquatch (later donated to a Boys & Girls club). Every cubic foot is utilized for displays, with barely room for walking or breathing.
Items cover the average, the curious and the amazing, including sharks teeth, shells, a butterfly collection, the shrunken head of a Jivaro headhunter and another skull with an embedded arrow point.
The shop buys (and sells) carvings of nuts from the tagua (TAH-gwa) palm tree in Ecuador. When carved, it resembles animal ivory. One tree can produce 20 pounds of nuts, a renewable resource turned into fish, elephants, frogs and other subjects.
Some of the more unusual items include a narwhal skull with two tusks instead of one, the second growing through its head; a 2-inch-diameter ring worn by the tallest man in the world; a pig with three eyes, two noses and eight legs; a chick and chicken each with four legs; and a two-headed calf bought at an auction of the contents of Walter Potter’s Museum of Curiosity in England.
Check out the mounted head of a Cape buffalo, a giant eland, an Alaskan moose, and a deer-riere, the latter for sale.
Find the very old snowshoes, a giant crab from the China Sea and a solid brass samovar.
All very curious.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songanndword.com.
Ye Olde Curiosity Shop
1001 Alaskan Way Seattle
206-682-5844
Open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays to Thursdays, and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
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