Cleveland Curiosities

The story

Clement Kunkle started collecting bones, pinning insects, and gathering natural oddities at age 13 before turning his obsession into a trade—supplying authentic taxidermy and macabre props to productions like American Horror Story and My Friend Dahmer. In 2018, he and his wife Hallie Wallace opened Cleveland Curiosities in an 800-square-foot storefront along Madison Avenue in Lakewood. They filled the space with genuine human skulls, preserved wet specimens, vintage sideshow gear, and antique medical tools, turning the room into a dense, walk-in cabinet of curiosities.

The shop operates under strict legal and geographic realities: while selling human bones is legal in Ohio and across most of the U.S. (outside states like Louisiana, Georgia, and Tennessee), certain rare animal anomalies cannot legally cross state lines. That makes permanent residents out of items like Eyeris—a cycloptic lamb born with a single eye and hooves the size of quarters, delivered as a stillborn from Shafer Farms in Glenford, Ohio. She shares floor space with an authentic vintage spider girl sideshow booth and a taxidermied two-headed calf staring directly toward the shop entrance.

You won't find plastic party-store replicas here. Every jar, skull, and mount on the shelf carries a verified history, from Victorian-era medical pieces to real camel bone dice. Wallace regularly runs in-store insect- and butterfly-pinning classes, and local tintype photographers occasionally set up shop inside, giving you a chance to leave with something preserved from another century.