Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Ripley's wide world of the weird

The Believe It or Not! folks go beyond museums of odd artifacts, adding hotels and attractions to their purview. All, of course, feature wacky, unusual flourishes.

By TRAVIS REED, Associated Press
Published January 1, 2006

	[Photos: AP]
	The Ripley’s Believe It or Not! warehouse in Orlando is the repository for many unexpected artifacts from all over the world, including this shrunken head. Warriors would behead their foes, then remove the skulls, boil them and cure them over a fire.
	Edward Meyer, Ripley Entertainment’s vice president of exhibits and archives, stands by a male African elephant with two trunks in the Orlando warehouse. The elephant was legally shot for its ivory in 2004; the tusks on the elephant now are fiberglass.
	Edward Meyer displays the wax bust “Vlad, the Impaler” at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! warehouse in Orlando. Vlad is made in the likeness of Count Vladimir Tepes, the original Dracula.

ORLANDO - The first thing you'll probably notice is the shark. At 17 feet long, it's the biggest ever caught on rod and reel. What's left of its two terrifying tons now hangs preserved above a dull warehouse floor.

There are also medieval torture devices, human skull drinking glasses, a Coke-bottle-shaped coffin and a curious mix of embalmed livestock born with too many heads or limbs.

These items and many more are stored in an Orlando warehouse - without an audience.

But their owner, Ripley Entertainment Inc., is doing its best change that. The Orlando-based company of Believe It or Not! fame has announced rapid expansion plans over the next year and a half, including at least four new locations from Spain to New York City, where those lonely curiosities might soon find homes.

Ripley has doubled in size every three years for the past 15, and now claims annual attendance of more than 12-million. Its more than 50 attractions go beyond the museums to include two aquariums, a handful of Guinness World Record and wax museums, haunted houses, a miniature golf course and a theater.

And then there is the globally syndicated TV show and rights to a library of bizarre facts licensed for everything from state lotteries to pinball machines. They even do their own wax and costume work out of the company's Florida headquarters.

It all started from the curious pen of founder and adventurer Robert Ripley, who began drawing the Believe It or Not! cartoon for newspapers in 1918.

"The difference today from where we were is the magnitude of the projects we're involved in," CEO Bob Masterson said. "We went from doing small attractions - museum-type attractions, which have been our bread and butter for 50 years - to building signature inns."

The biggest of those is the under-construction Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls, Ontario, which will feature 406 all-suite guest rooms when it opens next spring and a 76,000-square-foot indoor water park with a treehouse fort.

(That Niagara lodge is owned by a Ripley's subsidiary through a license from Great Wolf Resorts, which operates lodges in the United States.)

"That's so far beyond what we were doing 15 years ago, but it really highlights what's happening in our company," Masterson said. "Life is good for us."

Of course, any new attraction wouldn't be Ripley's without the surreal. And they've got it here in spades.

The keeper, as it were, of these treasures is Edward Meyer, a self-described library science dropout. As vice president of exhibits and archives, Meyer is Ripley's main shopper.

Not surprisingly, his office is weird, with oddities including a human scalp, a Mother Teresa figurine made out of chewing gum and a pair of Judy Garland's ruby red Wizard of Oz slippers.

His favorite? Twelve pieces of belly button lint retrieved over time and sent in by one man who thought it strange and noteworthy they were all the same color.

"I get the best mail in the world," Meyer said from behind his cluttered desk.

Walking around the warehouse's endless aisles of shrunken heads, antique East Asian furniture and walking canes made into guns, Meyer can explain each one.

He has acquired an estimated 95 percent of Ripley's current collection and shares the same endless fascination with otherworldly items that made the well-traveled, real-life but long-deceased Ripley an entertainment baron to begin with.

"I put myself in his shoes every day. What would Ripley think? What would Ripley do?" he said.

A few feet away, Meyer walks past a riding lawn mower that was driven across the country, the world's biggest rocking chair, the world's tallest rideable bike and a 1932 Studebaker once modified into a "jockey hearse" to carry fallen riders off horse tracks.

Its neighbors in storage include entire sections of the Berlin Wall and a multimillion-dollar, 1988 Lincoln Town Car covered entirely in gold coins.

But Meyer's prize possession is way in the back - maybe the last thing you'd see on a winding walking tour: A just-acquired 700-pound elephant head with two trunks, both DNA-tested to ensure they're real and belonged to the same animal.

"He will be THE exhibit," Meyer said in front of the creature.

That is, when they determine just where the peculiar pachyderm will go. Meanwhile, Meyer's constant acquisitions will ensure it won't be the last item to enter and leave the warehouse of the weird.

"There's got to always be stuff in here," Meyer said, "so we can sell it to the next franchise."

To find one of the more than 50 Ripley's attractions worldwide, visit www.ripleys.com or call 407 345-8010. In Florida, Ripley's Believe It or Not! museums are in Key West, Orlando and St. Augustine.

[Last modified December 30, 2005, 09:10:05]