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August 14, 2009

Let the fun begin

By Samantha Swindler / Managing Editor

A sign proclaims: “See IT Now!! The Strangest Thing You Will Ever See!”

And inside the booth — which is either the very last or very first one on Main Street, depending on where you start — is simply a table and a veiled box.

Behind that veiled box is IT ... and IT’s quite possibly the strangest attraction of Nibroc.

What is IT, you ask?

For a dollar, visitors can gawk, stare or ask questions about IT for as long as they want.

Nine-year-old Caleb Myers said he stared at it “ ‘bout a good five minutes” because, “It’s drop dead amazing.

“It’s like a devil baby. It had a mermaid tail, nose hairs down to its mouth, claws about that big,” Caleb said, holding up two index fingers about three inches apart. “It’s just creepy. It’s like half mummy, half alien and half mermaid. That’s all I can say.”

ITs owner hails from Crab Orchard, Ky. He travels the country with a collection of oddities under the stage name Daniel Hawthorne with his wife Connie.

The couple have been together 23 years and for the last several, they’ve been traveling in a mobile home, doing shows with IT and other strange items.

“What it boils down to is, if they pay me, I bring the whole show. If I pay them, we bring one item and try to make some money,” Daniel said with a laugh.

According to Daniel, who has a newspaper clipping about IT taped behind the veil, the creature was found in 1971 in central Kentucky. He bought it from the American Wonders museum when it closed in the mid-1990s, along with a few other oddities.

“It had three claws and it was weird,” said Sydney Hurst after viewing IT. “They said that it was preserved and it had a head with human characteristics and it had a fin on its tail.”

The couple only brought IT to Nibroc (and the Knox County Fair last year) but they have a larger collection that forms the Paranormal Curiosities Museum, which includes, among other things, several shrunken heads and what Daniel claims is a fairy mummy.

He also has a sideshow museum and does physic demonstrations (successfully pulling a three of clubs from his billfold in a mind game with this reporter) and spirit communication demonstrations.

“As odd as it sounds, I actually did my first reading when I was 12 years old,” Daniel said.

“I won’t do private readings,” he added. “I have an issue with that. I think that’s messing with people’s lives. It’s strictly entertainment.”

Connie says IT is one of the stranger pieces in their collection — and something she took time to get used to.

“I just wanted him to keep IT in his office ... as long as IT’s in the office,” Connie said. “This stuff has to grow on me. I don’t immediately accept everything.”

Nor did she immediately accept the idea of their traveling circus. Connie said the couple “did the normal thing” and raised their children before setting off on the road permanently with more than 20 years of Daniel’s collected oddities.

“Our youngest is 21, so we ran away from home and joined the circus,” Daniel joked.

“I had a meltdown for a while,” Connie said, “since, you know, we have grandchildren, but it’s all working. (You meet) odd people, interesting people, strange people... You only live life once.”

Daniel claims IT is a legitimate biological thing, but what IT is remains a mystery.

From some unscientific polling of those who paid to see:

“It was weird.”

“It was crazy.”

But it was worth a dollar to stare at.

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