Matt Marcinkowski
Janet Kolar doesn’t drive her hearse to work that often anymore. It’s too hard to park, she says. The Alton resident has made other changes, including a new name for her Curiosity Museum, formerly The Historic Museum of Torture Devices. (“I think ‘torture museum’ turned some people away,” she admits.) Among its additions: a section for failed medical inventions; optical illusions; and a vampire-killing kit (complete with garlic, holy water, a mallet, a stake, and the Kolar family’s Slovak-language Bible). Among the museum’s recent visitors: Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures, which plans to air an episode about Alton this month. Until 2016, Kolar led haunted tours through some of the city’s spookiest sites, including the former Mineral Springs Hotel, which now houses her museum. She took groups three stories below, to a onetime pool, where her team would host séances. The 81-year-old casually mentions these séances, as if chatting about brunch, which is to be expected from someone who created a torture museum—first in Wisconsin Dells and later Alton—after visiting similar museums in Europe. (“I am not a fan of torture myself,” notes the former physician’s assistant. Rather, she finds what the torture devices can do to the human body to be fascinating.) The $6 self-guided tour often sends shivers down visitors’ spines. As guests leave, one thanks her for the “interesting stuff.” Another adds, “Very eye-opening, ma’am”—to which the museum’s soft-spoken founder replies simply, “Yes, it is.”
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