Buckland Museum of Witchcraft & Magick

The story

Before Raymond Buckland brought Gardnerian Wicca to North America in the 1960s, his private stash of occult paraphernalia sat on a few basement shelves in Bay Shore, Long Island. Inspired by a visit to his mentor Gerald Gardner’s museum on the Isle of Man, Buckland—a British Airways employee—leveraged his flight privileges to haul home divination tools, ceremonial chalices, and rare texts from around the globe. When an arsonist torched his car shortly after he started his Long Island coven, Buckland decided that opening his basement archive to the public might dispel the neighborhood hysteria.

The collection spent the next five decades leading a nomadic, subterranean life, migrating through New Hampshire, Virginia, and New Orleans before sitting in Columbus storage. In 2017, curator Steven Intermill helped resurrect the display in Cleveland, eventually moving it to a former storefront on Broadview Road in Old Brooklyn. Across its 1,800 square feet, the museum showcases over 300 artifacts, ranging from Egyptian ushabti figurines and an Alruan (carved mandrake root) to personal ritual belongings once owned by Aleister Crowley, Anton LaVey, Sybil Leek, and Gerald Gardner. There is even a wooden box containing a 'trapped demon,' captured by Buckland and a ceremonial magician during a 1970s ritual.

Despite the heavy-hitting occult lineage, the space approaches its subject with dry historical rigor and outsider-art reverence rather than cheesy sensationalism. A sign hanging near the entryway reads 'Not for everyone'—a reminder that this isn't a theatrical haunted attraction, but a serious archive of modern neo-pagan culture, where ceremonial daggers sit alongside tinfoil practice axes and vintage Samhain decorations share shelf space with hand-copied grimoires.