Tyrolean Nightmares

This Austrian Folk-Art Museum has made me lose sleep because the mannequins are planning to attack me

By Mark Orwoll

Mark Orwoll Is at It Again!

THIS MAY BE THE BLANDEST itinerary item you’ve ever read for the spookiest place in the Austrian Alps:

“The Tyrolean Folk Art Museum next to the Imperial Court Church hosts the most important collection of cultural treasures from local history, including handicrafts and artisanry, painted chests, tools, and nativity scenes. Traditional costumes showcase the fashion varieties of the area.”

Trust me: It gets worse from here. Source: Wikipedia

But they forgot to add the following disclaimer:

“After viewing this display of traditional costumes, your life will never be the same. You will wake with nightmares every hour or so, even when you’re already awake. You will ask yourself, Why would somebody even do this to other people?!

Admittedly, I was caught off guard. You’d think that someone like me, a Professional Journalist, might have done some advance research (Wikipedia) before visiting, or at least typed into the Google search bar: “Is there anything I should be concerned about that might scare the heck out of me at Innsbruck’s Tyrolean Folk Art Museum?”

By the way, when I finally open the tavern I’ve been threatening to unleash on the public, I’m going to name it the Search Bar.

But forget about that. If I’d followed Official Reporting Protocols (ORP), I know exactly how Google would have responded:

“Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

On Its Face, a Harmless Museum. But then…

The Tyrolean Folk Art Museum, or the Tiroler Volkskunstmuseum, is suspiciously normal-looking from the outside. Normal, that is, if you live in a gigantic 16th-century palace in the Old Town of Innsbruck, one of the most picture-perfect cities in the Alps.

Suspiciously normal—if you live in an alpine palace. But beware! Photo by Bede 735c/Wikipedia

You can’t help but learn that the museum is the most important museum of Austrian crafts, furniture, perfectly replicated farmhouse rooms, painted chests, nativity scenes, and historical costumes in all of, well, Austria. Every website you find tells you so.

Oh, jeez! I can hear you yawning from clear over here! You’re not even being subtle about it!

All right, wise guy, let’s start with the replicated rooms.

You turn off one of the museum’s grand corridors, and suddenly you’re in the parlor of a 19th-century Tyrolean wheat farmer’s cottage. (Note: Not sure if they actually grow wheat in Austria, but some kind of farmer.) Everything—the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the furniture—is made of wood, beautifully crafted, built to last. The only thing in the room that isn’t made of wood is the glazed-brick furnace in the corner, which would get so hot it would fry off the first two layers of your skin if you even looked at it. It gave off some serious heat.

Serious heat here. Photo: Daderot/Wikimedia Commons

Then you get to the nativity scenes. So many of them. So beautiful. And after the third one, so boring.

Aha! But what about the Precarious Life exhibit? “Complications at birth, unexplained illness, or an accident at work,” says the museum’s website. “Life in pre-modern times was full of dangers and characterized by worries and fears.” You’ll find a “Drude’s foot” on a baby’s cradle to keep away the night demons, the “fig of envy” to ward off the evil eye, and a hand-carved 17th-century towel rack with a beautiful princess on one end and “gaunt skeleton” at the other. Makes you want to get up and dance.

Now if all that doesn’t get you to fork over $10.75 on the admission counter, I don’t know what does.

Hölzerne Figuren in der Trachtenabteilung. Say That Three Times!

Traditional Austrian costumes used to signify the type of work you did, and thus your social status. Later, costumes were based more on the identity of where you lived—this valley, that mountainside, etc. And then the 19th-century hipsters got into the act.

The “isn’t that charming” crowd from Vienna and Linz fell in love with the traditional costumes, and began to adopt them for their own purposes, like wearing them for country weekends and on national holidays. Even today, you’ll find people in cities throughout Austria wearing dirndls and lederhosen on weekends, just for the hell of it—people who have never once in their lives herded a cow, carried a water bucket up from the river, or owned a luxury mountain ski lodge.

The idea of the “national costume” became so popular that when the Tyrolean Museum of Folk Art opened in 1929, they nabbed Virgil Rainer, a notable wood carver, to create mannequins for the costume display.

“Virgil,” they said, “we have all these costumes for what we plan to call the Hölzerne Figuren in der Trachtenabteilung, a permanent exhibition, but we need someone to carve wooden figures to wear the costumes.”

Virgil smiled to himself, rubbed his hands together, and began to laugh. “At last. The chance I’ve been waiting for all these years! At long last! Bwaa! Bwa-ha-ha! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

The Figures Arrive, Possibly on Their Own

The figures Virgil carved, supposedly the likenesses of people he knew, are terrifyingly realistic. Sculpted from maple, linden, and other light wood, the figures bear an uncanny resemblance to actual living humans.

Did you ever see that episode of The Twilight Zone in which a young woman keeps being drawn to the mannequin storeroom of a big department store, only to realize too late that she is actually a mannequin, and has been given life for just a day? But now it’s time to return and be a full-time showroom dummy again? It may be one of the scariest TZ episodes ever.

That’s what confronts you when you walk into the “Appearance and Reality” section of the museum, featuring 48 of Virgil Rainer’s carvings wearing traditional Tyrolean costumes. You don’t need me to convince you that each and every one of those dummies just walked in off the street and turned to stone. I mean wood.

A woman wearing a hat that looks like a floor mop stares at a man who clearly wants nothing to do with her. A man in a large sombrero and wearing a mustache that must have been placed there strand by strand stares at what I imagine to be sheep rustlers in the distance. Another mustachioed gent bears a crack on the right side of his face that looks like a scar from a hatchet duel. And on and on.

Well, heck, let me just show you some of the pictures I took, and see for yourself.

Notice, not a single smile? And no, that last woman isn’t smiling; she’s sniffing your blood. Photos by Mark Orwoll

When I was done looking at the monster carvings, I noticed a crowd of museum-goers in one of the replicated farmhouse rooms. Some sort of celebration was going on. They were serving cakes and shot glasses of schnapps. I walked up to the server.

Four shots of schnapps, please. And make it schnappy. Photo by Daderot/Wikimedia Commons

“No cake,” I said. “ Just schnapps for me and my three friends.”

I carried the four shot glasses to a 200-year-old wooden table and downed each of the glasses in turn. It didn’t help. I didn’t sleep for a week.

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