Wax Museums

New York - Coney Island

CONEY ISLAND WAX MUSEUM TICKET ROLL

Many of the wax figures at the museum were of murderers.

Posing in their gruesome moments of homicide, there was Julio Ramirez Perez, the screwdriver killer, plunging his tool into the neck of Vera Lotito in 1948;

 Richard Speck, holding a nurse bound and gagged in her white uniform (she was one of eight nurses Speck murdered in 1966).
 

One of the bloodiest scenes in the museum was played out by Hickman the Fox, who kidnapped and murdered 12-year-old Marion Parker in 1927. In this ancient wax tableau, itself dating back to the 1920s, Hickman dismembers Marion in a bathtub, removing her internal organs and wiring her eyes open.

And perhaps the most infamous of Lillie's killers was Ruth Snyder, the "Double Indemnity" murderer, later played by Barbra Stanwyck in the Billy Wilder movie. Here, Snyder stands by her lover, Henry Judd Gray, the corset salesman she seduced into killing her husband

The museum did not focus only on murders. It also showcased presidents of the United States, celebrities, and strange births. The two-headed baby had a starring role.

     

As did little Lina Medina, "the youngest confirmed mother in medical history, giving birth at the age of five years, seven months and 21 days." Here she is in 1939, lying in her hospital bed under the headline, "Baby Boy's Mother Is Baby Too."

"No exhibition devoted itself more fully to the celebration of domestic trauma than Lillie Beatrice Santangelo's World in Wax Musee,"

Colored Images of World in Wax Musee by photograph: Costa Mantis, 1981