Shrunken heads or mermaid tails

What in God’s name is marinating in that cloudy formaldehyde-filled jar? Was it ever alive? And what about that two-headed bat? Is it real or concocted by a con artist?

“That’s the thing about a cabinet of curiosities,” said oddity artist Levi Combs. “You don’t know what’s real. It’s about half things from the natural world, like taxidermy and fossils, and the other half is going to be strange things that you don’t know whether are real or fake.”

Last Friday at Pack Rat Antiques on West Fireweed Lane, Combs, 43, introduced oddities both created and collected by him, including nightmare clowns, a “certified haunted” doll, Ouija boards and a glossy Aztec skull, like a slightly less zealous sideshow barker presenting shrunken heads from Borneo to a gullible gawking crowd.

“We’ve got our fairy mummies right here, and there’s a Fiji mermaid,” he announced, pointing to a small, bumpy, desiccated skeleton with a dorsal fin and fish tail.

“That’s an old, old sideshow tradition,” Combs said. “They were trying to fool someone into thinking it was a mermaid or a merman, but usually it was just a monkey or fish. The original one was a monkey sewn to a fish.”

Those mock mer-folks are examples of “gaffs” or fake oddities, Combs explained.

The modern-day Dr. Caligari, whose company is called Babayaga Studios, has a fondness for the freaky. He delights in the murky space between the believable and the bunk that fuels curiosity culture, and his work captures the spirit of an old-time boardwalk or carnival sideshow.

While cities like New York and San Francisco have thriving oddity art and retail scenes with stores like Obscura Antiques and Oddities and Loved To Death, Pack Rat co-owner BreAnn Kim said Anchorage has a dearth of the kind of creepy masterpieces in which Combs specializes.

That fact makes Combs himself a coveted curiosity. Pack Rat is the only brick and mortar store in which his work is sold.

A perfectly macabre marketing match was made when Combs came into The Pack Rat a while ago seeking items to add to his own collection.

He started talking to Kim and it turned out their interests intersected.

“He came in looking for creepy stuff, so it was the right fit,” Kim said. “We’re trying to build up an oddities and creepy genre in here. Collectors of all sorts come in here.”

Amber Leach of South Anchorage is one of those collectors of the weird. She came to Pack Rat on Friday to find some disturbing home décor.

“The more odd, the better,” she said. The items are “good conversation starters. Nobody’s going to get bored when they come over.”

Right on corpse

When you’re going for that long-dead look, “corpseing” is the way to go.

Combs used the technique to make his two-headed mummy super-shriveled. He started with a faux skeleton from an art supply store.

“You wrap shrink wrap around the whole thing, then you hit it with a heat gun or a hairdryer and it shrinks up and looks like old, gross, nasty flesh,” he said. “Then you paint it, and you can poke holes in it.”

He also added an adhesive to apply layers of fireplace ash till the mummy looked adequately aged, and replaced the original skeleton’s skull with Styrofoam heads he shaved down to gruesomely authentic-looking nubs.

Combs is learning to master this method on his own. He didn’t have an odd art apprenticeship or formal curiosity-creating education. He is entirely self-taught, and partially relies on online tutorials and good old trial and error.

Curiosity-collecting can be an expensive habit, and Combs said he started his hobby as a way to make things he couldn’t afford.

He may have never cultivated this talent fully if he hadn’t relocated to Alaska from his hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas about four years ago. He lives and works on Joint Base Elmendorf – Richardson with his wife, who is in the Air Force.

“I needed something to do during the winter. They’re long and you better have something to do,” he said. “When it’s January and the sun comes out for three hours, I’m sitting in my garage, trying to figure out how to put this two-headed mummy together.”

Combs can trace his fascination with sideshow freakiness back to his childhood.

He said he was very into 20th century horror fiction fantasy author H.P. Lovecraft and was inspired by Lovecraft’s legendary fictional magic book “Necronomicon.”

Schlock-horror sitcoms also enchanted him.

“I was always a weird kid. I was always that kid watching ‘The Munsters’ and ‘The Addams Family,’” he said. “I just never really grew out of monsters.”

Dead heads

These days, a shrunken head is hard to find.

“That’s a tradition that goes way back. A lot of those were real,” he said. “It was only later on when the trafficking of human remains over borders became illegal that they started using things like monkey heads, and started using gaffs.”

Gaff shrunken heads are called “tourist heads,” because they’re meant to con clueless tourists, Combs explained.

Combs makes shrunken heads without going through the exhaustive process of scalping and preparing done by tribes like the Jivaroan of South America.

“They’d defeat an enemy, chop off their head, take the skin off the skull, pack it full of hot sand and hot rock and rub it with tannins and all kinds of spices and herbs. The Jivaroa carried them into battle and thought they held their enemy’s power,” Combs said. “When you actually hold a real one, and I’ve held a few, you can see the eyelashes, you can see the nose hairs, you can see the cracks in the lip, hair in the ears. It’s really gruesome.”

To create convincing shrunken heads, Combs pours resin into a mold, applies liquid latex and doll hair, and then uses a knitting needle to sew the lips shut and achieve a perfectly dead, dry pucker.

For Combs, keeping classic sideshow style alive strangely satisfying.

“I just enjoy creating things,” he said. “… just the art of creating and bringing something into the world.”

The Pack Rat Antiques is located at 1068 W. Fireweed Lane in Anchorage. For more about Combs and his work, visit Babayaga Studios on Instagram @americanmythos. He also takes orders through his Instagram page.