Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
“One of my biggest desires is a spiked chair,” says Janet Kolar. “I may at some point get an iron maiden, too. Those were so awful that I understand all they had to do was show one to someone and they would immediately confess to anything.”
Kolar’s hobbies run a little bit left of the dial, if you will. She runs ghost tours, complete with séances, in the creaky old buildings of Alton, Ill. She leads tours of cemeteries in Alton, too, with stops atop the, er, final stops of the locally noteworthy. Each day she takes one of two hearses in her driveway to work—either the white one she calls “Pearl” or the gray one, which once ferried her late husband, with a license plate reading “HAUNTUR.”
The grandmother of 10 says her family is used to it all. “I’ve been taking one of my granddaughters to cemeteries since she was 12,” she says. “She always wants me to take her at midnight for a séance.”
Kolar, obsessed by all things grave and macabre, is looking for that iron maiden to add to her newly revamped Historic Museum of Torture Devices in Alton. The four-year-old museum, formerly located in a basement dungeon in the Mineral Springs Mall, has moved upstairs to a larger space that once served as a ballroom, and has expanded to include many more replicas of devices used to punish people in horrible—and fascinating—ways.
Listening to Kolar list the contents of the place is a priceless experience. “We have a rack,” she says. “We have the wheel. We have ‘Vlad’s impaling pole.’ A branding iron. Two branks—those are head cages. An iron-spiked collar. An executioner’s sword and axe for beheading. A garrote. A gibbet. A pillory. And hopefully my guillotine will be in soon. I’m having one replicated by a carpenter.
“We have a display about burning at the stake,” she adds. “The mannequin on the stake is wearing one of my dresses. I thought it looked better on her than it does on me.”
Why on earth did Kolar start collecting all of this stuff?
“Two of my kids and I went to Europe seven years ago, and we checked out a torture museum in Prague, and we were absolutely fascinated,” she says. “One night over a bottle of wine—or several—my son said, ‘Why don’t we build one in the U.S.?’ We started doing research immediately. That museum’s curator put us in touch with someone in the Czech Republic who sold us thumbscrews, and we were on our way.”
Torture was, of course, one of the delights that made Europe’s Dark Ages dark. Today, the continent is dotted with museums memorializing (mostly) obsolete torture devices, grim reminders of what we have done—and still will do—to one another if the mood strikes.
Kolar’s museum is one of the few in North America, and to watch her lead a tour group through it, describing the how-tos of one fiendish iron implement after another to a modest crowd, is to feel a mounting sense of sickness and repulsion, coupled with a guilty frisson of excitement.
She may tell you about the “head crusher” (“Interestingly, the teeth are the first thing to shatter,” she says); the rack (“People were usually tortured until they passed out, put back in their cell, left there for a bit, and then put back on the rack to be stretched again”); the wheel (“People’s arms and legs were broken, then woven through the spokes of the wheel, and then, because they were often still alive, they were torn at by birds and wildlife”); and so on.
Kolar reports that some people on the tour are “unable to look and have to leave the room, but most are fascinated, and they ask a lot of questions.”
And what about that queasy mix of horror and titillation that brings us through the door? It’s a paradox.
“I think there’s a little bit of ‘Thank God it wasn’t me’ in all of us,” she offers. “If you pass a gory accident on the road, you’re excited and repelled by it both.”
A museum of torture devices may trade on its appeal to our baser natures, but it’s worth having a look at that darkness, for more than kicks.
“Outside of a cat playing with a mouse before it makes its kill, in nature, animals kill for food or territory,” says Kolar, “but they don’t tie another animal up and keep them around and torture them for days and days. I think only man is capable of that.”
For more information, call 866-465-3205 or visit mineralspringshauntedtours.com.
