Vent Haven Museum

The story

In 1910, a Cincinnati tile company executive named William Shakespeare Berger bought a wooden puppet named Tommy Baloney while on a business trip to New York. He wasn't a professional performer—just an amateur who fell completely under the spell of ventriloquism. Over the next six decades, W.S. Berger filled his Fort Mitchell home, his garage, and eventually dedicated outbuildings on his property with over 500 figures, alongside playbills, photographs, and personal correspondence from ventriloquists across the globe. Having outlived his entire immediate family, Berger set up a charitable foundation before his death in 1972 to ensure his hoard wouldn't be broken up at auction.

That suburban residential plot opened to the public in 1973 and has since grown into a sanctuary housing over 1,000 performance figures. Walk down the aisles and you're surrounded by two centuries of handcrafted sidekicks perched on tiered benches—from Civil War-era antique dummies and vaudeville relics to replicas of Edgar Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy and authentic working puppets donated by performers after retiring or passing on. You didn't hear it from us, but it remains the only place on Earth functioning as a retirement home for ventriloquial history.