Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
One of our favorite witchy women, Janet Kolar of Alton’s Historic Museum of Torture Devices, is in the news again.
Kolar will be featured on tonight’s episode of 20/20 on ABC, on a segment called “Women in the Paranormal,” she reports.
A portion of the segment was filmed at Kolar’s haunt, the Mineral Springs Mall, said to be the home of various spirits. The mall is a historic building that the intrepid can tour with Kolar and her team of paranormal sensitives. After the ghost hunt, visitors can unwind in the torture museum, where Kolar makes macabre jokes about replicas of the gibbet, the impaling pole, and the “head cages.”
Who wouldn’t want to put this gal on TV? We fell in love with her dark sense of humor a couple of years ago, when the torture museum was young and all she had was a set of imitation stocks and a dream.
In truth, she owns dozens of other sinister devices illustrating man’s inhumanity, and what’s more, she plans to expand the museum to showcase “curiosities—models of abnormal fetuses floating in jars and old medical quackery,” she says. “I have an electric-shock therapy machine that never worked. I have a vampire-killing kit. Ya know, just weird stuff.”
Recent acquisitions on the torture side include “a dunking stool, some irons, and a tunica molesta,” she says, “which is a shirt impregnated with pitch or wax and then set afire. The Romans did that for entertainment.”
Kolar needs a gift shop where she can sell mini-versions of these devices as desk toys for sadists. We can think of a former boss or two who’d enjoy one.
On tonight’s 20/20, Kolar opines on the role of ladies at a ghost hunt, she says. “We use the same instruments and methods,” she says, “but men are totally different animals from females. I think we have an empathy and a different sensitivity. There is a lack of women represented in the paranormal. All the ghost-hunting shows on TV feature men.”
Another gal from these parts who specializes in gothy pursuits is no shrinking violet, either. Jodie Parks, featured on the same segment, gathered a group of attractive young lasses to form the Paranormal Hotsquad, a group of marginally clothed ghostbusters who offer both cheesecake and chills. (Their website is a little raunchy, so we'll let you find it for yourself.)
When Parks isn’t searching for evidence of life on the other side, she’s infamous for being one of the world’s loudest burpers. During the TV taping at Mineral Springs, Parks “did one of her burps to scare [20/20 reporter] Jay Schadler during the ghost hunt,” says Kolar.
You can’t make this stuff up.
When Parks wasn’t unleashing one of her otherworldly belches, claims Kolar, a creepy entity did make an appearance during the filming.
“Jodie led them on a ghost hunt, and she took them down to the slaughterhouse in the sub-basement,” Kolar recounts. “They went down there, and they took a ‘ghost box,’ which allows entities to vocalize. Something said, ‘Jay,’ the name of the reporter.”
20/20
KDNL / ABC
9:01 p.m.
Friday, April 5
Historic Museum of Torture Devices is open every Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 (and Fridays between Memorial Day and Labor Day).
