Important Museum Distinctions

There’s a difference between a Children’s Museum and a Museum of Childhood.  A big difference.

childhood smiles at a children's museum

I’ve been to a few children’s museums in my life - more specifically when I was a child myself.  From a few hazy memories they seem to involve a lot of make believe and fun, colorful things to crawl through.  And some sort of water area that was 100% guaranteed to drench any child who dared play with it.  They’re mostly fun places, full of exuberant children and fairly exhausted parents.  All of my vague memories from children’s museums have a warm nostalgic glow around the edges, full of longing for simpler times, when play-acting as a mail carrier or a lobsterman (that’s New England children’s museums for ya) meant hours of fun.

My memories of the Museum of Childhood have no such warm glow, rather instead they’re accompanied by a sense of impending doom and acute onset pediophobia (if you don’t know what it is, don’t look it up - spoilers!).

Unlike my numerous trips to children’s museums, my one, and only, trip to the Museum of Childhood was after my childhood had passed (barely, but still), and the memories are all too clear...

On one of the last few days I was to be in Edinburgh, Scotland with my sister, we decided to check out some of the smaller museums of the Royal Mile.  (Full disclosure: she read about the museums and planned the day, I’m woefully lacking in attention when it comes to guidebooks).  So on this beautiful sunny (yes, sunny) summer day, we made our way to the Royal Mile to explore the “quirky” museums the city had to offer.  But of course, small, independent museums don’t open until at least 10am, so after locating our first stop, the Museum of Childhood, we walked the sunny streets for at least a half hour.

Finally, slightly sweaty (the Royal Mile is a rather steep hill), and fashionably late (nobody wants to stand at museum doors as it opens), we found ourselves once again outside the small, but quaint, entrance for the Museum of Childhood.  Upon entering it was clear that the museum was fairly low budget, but we had already anticipated the rather independent nature of the museum - that it was a sort of labor of love was an endearing quality of the place.  One of the info cards mentioned the curator of the original museum, saying that he loved toys and had a weird sense of humor which was often reflected in his displays.  His spirit was most definitely felt in this museum.

The first room, right past the entrance/gift shop, was filled with toys in display cases.  After all, the whole point of the museum was to showcase childhood - how kids grew up throughout the twentieth century and the various toys and things with which they experienced childhood.

As per my usual museum-experiencing technique, I scoured the display cases of the first room, reading the yellowed typewriter-typed information cards and wondering about the roles those toys played in children’s lives.  Deep thoughts about childhood, probably reflecting my reluctance to leave it behind, blah, blah, blah.  That’s also how my sister felt.  So after indulging my for another few minutes, I gave into her stare and followed her up the creakiest little spiral staircase to the second room.

The second room was fairly similar to the first - full of old toys with information about children’s lives over the past 100 years.  These toys were mostly transportation toys; trains, cars, planes, etc.  Needless to say I wasn’t as interested here and after a brief look around, we travelled out of this room through a slight back hallway into the next room.  And this is where things got weirder.

The third room had a clear theme: dolls.  It was a cramped little room with a doorway at one end (the hallway from which we entered), and a doorway at the other which led to a staircase.  But to get to the next door, you had to pass through the dolls.  Every wall was lined with display cases, and those were stacked with odd pyramids of dolls.  Not only that, but a display case in the center of the room, facing out in every direction, was also filled with dolls.  The room didn’t actually bother me too much as first.  I took a bit of time to look at the dolls from around the world, only glancing up when I realized my sister was insistently calling my name from the door.  I waved her away and went back to examining the doll pyramids.  One pyramid was full of typical china dolls with half closed eyes - except for one doll in the display.  Her eyes were completely wide open.  Unblinkingly staring me down.  Which, while a little creepy, was less disconcerting then her actually blinking at me.  So there’s that.

Once I noticed the dolls surrounding the whole room, I quickly followed my sister up a tiny flight of twisting stairs to the fourth room.  While she went to use the bathroom, I examined a display case full of badges and pins from different youth organizations.  While I was yearning for the vintage badges and looking at decorative cigarette cards (or something of the like), I noticed a strange sound.  Most of the rooms we had been in were pretty quiet.  The first room was on the first floor, it had some street noise and noise from the few workers in the gift shop.  The second room was just a floor up and there was a father and son in there.  The third room was completely empty (aside from 200 dolls) and silent.  But while I stood there in the fourth room, admiring the odd little clubs that kids have been a part of, I heard a little bit of music.  I couldn’t quite make out what was playing, only that somewhere nearby, there was music.  Once my sister rejoined me, we moved on to the fifth and final room.

The fifth room, down a hallway from the fourth, was the darkest room we’d been in so far that morning, and an odd sort of shape.  It had a small pathway for museum-goers, but the majority of the room was taken up by a large display case with mannequins inside.  The purpose of this room was to demonstrate the clothes worn by children in the past century, so the mannequins were there to display the old fashion clothes.  It was very clear, however, that it wasn’t just the clothes that were old - the mannequins were probably at the very latest updated in the 1970s.  They had poorly formed and painted faces, the effect being a human-ish face with slightly melted and stretched features.

But that wasn’t all this room had to offer.  Oh no.  For upon entering this final room I realized where the music was coming from, and not only that, but I could finally hear it clearly.  It turned out that the music was a sort of child’s nursery rhyme sung in that eerie, slightly off-key sing-song style that always appears in horror movies when someone’s about to get murdered, which I was pretty sure was about to happen to me at this point.  And I knew that at my funeral everyone would laugh about my death by mannequin, and I couldn’t let that happen.  Although I wanted to leave, my sister had started to look through a poorly constructed binder, full of info about the period clothing.  The poorly constructed part is important, for it was at this moment that all the pages decided to fall out.  She tried to shove them back in somewhat neatly, but they seemed to be resisting her every move. 

As I impatiently waited for her to fix the broken display, I noticed one mannequin quite unlike the others.  Instead of wearing clothes from the early 1900s, this toe-headed mannequin was dressed in jeans and a long sleeve tee.  But more importantly, this mannequin was NOT in a glass case.  She was out in the open.  With us.  Like many museums we had been to in our travels, this museum had a “Try it On!” section, where you can try on clothing relating to the exhibit.  And this mannequin was stationed right in front of that area, leaning against the wall with one arm, back to us.  Which meant when I glanced in the mirror she was staring right at me.

As soon as my sister shoved the offending papers somewhat into the binder, we decided to quickly vacate the room.  We hurried past the free mannequin into a stairwell that only proved to be a dead end.  Meaning we had to turn around and run through the room again.  And not only that, but we had to go back through ALL the rooms again, since the museum was laid out with a single path from start to finish.  So back we went through the room with the badges, and down the little stairs, and then we had to once again travel through the room with the dolls.  While I wasn’t particularly scared of the room earlier, following the encounter with the mannequins, the dolls were especially unnerving the second time through.  We practically ran through the doll-infested room, as unblinking dolls stared us down from every corner.  We quickly breezed through the last two rooms, and only stopped briefly in the gift shop to buy a 50p pin before heading out into the bright sunshine that somehow still shone outside.

While neither of the other two little museums we visited that day were quite as…potentially deadly...we did decide that small attic museums and hand-crafted mannequins were not our favorite.

Having survived this ordeal myself, I felt it my obligation to spread the word and get awareness out there.  Children’s Museums and a Museum of Childhood are NOT the same thing.  I really cannot stress this enough.