Leila’s Hair Museum – The Weird Side of the Internet

Leila’s Hair Museum – by Liam Sweeny.

Death can be as fascinating as life sometimes. This is because the whole entire process of a person dying is a social event. Everything from the preservation of the body to the complicated layers of a funeral or service, the public consoling of the bereaved, and the fact that grief trails death, close on its heels for some, slow to hit for others. What we go through today is, of course, constrained that modern life moves fast, and that condenses the process. I, of course, am talking about American death. Other countries take their time.

The eighteen hundreds were fascinating when it came to death in America. The dead were propped up and imaged with daguerreotype, an early type of photography. They made death masks. But one of the eeriest thing, perhaps, is that they used to make dolls and other art with the hair of the deceased. They used the in lockets, and even made wreaths out of them.

No one knew about hair art than Leila Cohoon. She began collecting it, and after her house and school were filled with it, she found it all a permanent home – in a building between a fast food joint and a car wash. She called it Leila’s Museum of Hair. And she’s had many visitors, including Ozzy Osbourne. However her death at 92 has marked the end of an era, and her daughter Lindsay Evans has had to rehome the collection.

I’m a bit superstitious. All I’m thinking here is that a whole lot of ghosts are hitting the streets, I watched this episode on the show “Supernatural” that had a merderous ghost, held to the earth by her hair, which was used to make a doll placed in the family mausoleum. Once they broke into the mausoleum and burned the hair, the ghost died. Again.

I’m sure I would’ve gone there.

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