It’s downright amazing if you think about it, that this piece could have survived the massive fire that destroyed Wolf’s Museum of Mystery in New York State. When the fire happened several months ago, I was heartbroken. As time passed, though, and owners Wolf and Ali Mertz were able to sift through the wreckage of their former home and place of business, they discovered that not everything had been lost. Some relics survived. Then, with the passage of a little more time, they began to offer some of those pieces for sale. I was glad to purchase a few of them, to help my friends out and also to own small pieces of the Museum, the place I’d loved so much.
These two brass candleholders had stood on the altar in the Voodoo Room at Wolf’s former location in Saint Augustine, Florida. The scorch marks they bare only makes them more beautiful to me. And check out this authentic Mayan clay baby rattle. It’s hundreds of years old and fashioned in the effigy of a bat, possibly Camazotz, the vampire-bat-headed Mayan god of twilight and guardian of the underworld. It doesn’t rattle anymore, as it is broken, but I can’t believe it made it through the fire in as good a condition as it did.