Mudlark Oddities Communes with Curious Minds and Spirits
Display of trinkets and curiosities at Mudlark Oddities
The Evergreen Echo
Mudlark Oddities sits nestled on a side street in the Ravenna neighborhood. To enter, you descend an unassuming staircase, then pop into a shop with narrow, cozy aisles and a seemingly never-ending collection of beautifully macabre things to look at. I’ve never stayed less than an hour in the place. In keeping with the name, which dates back to 1800s London and refers to people who scavenge riverbeds for valuable objects, the shop holds many gems in its keep and has fostered a dedicated community around it.
To give you a sampling of what you might find in Mudlark Oddities on any day, here are some of the items that caught my attention during my recent visit:
A Tibetan Buddhist kapala, or cup made of a human skull, where offerings would traditionally be placed. The bone is engraved with geometric patterns and coated in silver with ornate silver skulls lining its edge.
A preserved Victorian-era medicinal leech from Paris.
Ouija boards aged over 100 years old.
Medical moulages, including a wax copy of a hand covered in scabies. Prior to photography being accessible to the public, doctors would make wax copies of diseases on the body.
Jared Lee Steiner, Mudlark Oddities’ owner, started the shop nearly four years ago. A collector since he was a teenager, he had prior to opening the shop been using his collection as props and set pieces for videography and photography shoots. But with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, freelance photography and videography gigs dried up, and Steiner turned to selling from his vast collection on Etsy. And it really took off! Two years in, he was shipping out around 100 packages a week. This eventually became too much. “It was just giant bookcases full of skulls in my kitchen and it was just crazy,” he said. That’s when he found this place, took the risk on a 2-year lease, and launched a new career as a shopkeeper.
Steiner and his partner Rant are the shop’s two employees. Rant is also a licensed tattoo artist who does handpoke appointments out of the back room. Mudlark sources its collection from “everywhere,” said Steiner. He showed me some of the most recent oddities to arrive. Just the day before, he’d gotten a few items from someone who works for the city and clears estate sales. These included a mountain lion skull and a carving from Bali showing Vishnu riding Garuda. A year ago, he took a trip to Greece and Serbia, and after deep-diving in flea markets for two weeks, he “lugged back two massive rolling suitcases full of stuff… It comes from everywhere all of the time.”
Mudlark sources from friends and fellow artists in the community as well. When an object doesn’t come with much information or description, he does research online, but adds that the shop is specialized and niche enough that he’s developed a pretty good eye for identifying what he sees.
Nkisi doll on display at Mudlark
The Evergreen Echo
Sometimes in this line of work, you come across haunted objects. One of these is a 16th century executioner’s axehead, which came from another longtime collector who didn’t want it in her house anymore (it had been giving her nightmares). There is also a Nkisi, a wooden figurine from the Congo covered in nails which is said to hold spiritual power, including bringing misfortune and punishing wrongdoing. Steiner remarked that while he is “not generally a superstitious person,” he does remember taking the Nkisi out of its box and having a feeling of “Whoah, this thing is pissed.” It has also moved to different parts of the case on its own. Once security cameras were installed, they captured the Nkisi in its normal spot on the shelf, then the camera cut out for thirty minutes, and when the footage started up again the figurine had moved backwards to take the spot of the box behind it.
Another eerie thing has been happening lately—and strangely—only at night. There’s an infrared beam at the front door which sets off an electronic chime in the back to alert staff when people enter the store. But recently, when Steiner has been working in the back after hours with the front door locked, “it’s been going off by itself at 10:00 at night,” he said. He further described these spooky moments: “I’ll hear the door chime and I’m like ‘What the fuck?’ and I go out front and the door is locked and there’s nothing in the security camera. There’s nothing. It doesn’t chime by itself during the day. It only does it at night when I’m here by myself.”
There are a lot of animal friends in the store, both alive and dead. In the left corner of the entry is a friendly fellow, a big taxidermied raccoon with curious and kind eyes. One of the most iconic creatures in the shop is a silicone cast of a dead sphynx cat curled up and resting on a pillow. This is not the first of these cats to be in the store. They had a similar one which was sold, but Steiner doesn’t want to sell this new one. “I think he has to be permanent,” he added. “He just gets too many good reactions from people, and he just feels like a weird shop pet at this point.” Then there’s Custard, a white, shabbily taxidermied creature with red eyes. “Once upon a time it was a deer, I think,” Steiner said, “but it’s crazy. It looks like a sock.” I found Custard unsettling yet charming. He nodded, saying, “Custard has found a place in the hearts of many.”
Then there are the living shop pets—four leeches with beautiful patterned bodies of dark green and orange. One of them is importantly named Soup Spoon. When I said hello to them, they were all quite active, poking their heads out of the water and cuddling each other. Rant volunteers to let them feed on them twice a year, which is the frequency leeches typically need. Leeches are still used in modern medicine for their powerful anti-coagulent saliva which helps particularly with skin grafts, keeping the blood circulating, preventing hematomas, and pulling the blood up into the capillaries in the newly attached skin.
Another component of Mudlark is their emphasis on community events and collaboration. Up until a few months ago, the shop was hosting around four or five events a month, including monthly vendor markets every second Saturday, where 10 or so small businesses and artists would set up folding tables in the spare room in the back. Both Jared and Rant remarked on the unexpected popularity of these events, which sometimes would bring in over 1,000 people and with lines that went around the block.
These vendor markets are currently on hiatus as Jared has been building a new wall in the back room to sound-proof it, but things should be back up and running in about a month. To enter the back room, you go through a bookshelf door. The final piece of this door, which is almost finished, is a row of books which hides the doorknob. “My hope, now that I built this wall here, is that it will be relatively sound-proofed,” he said. “Where if there’s somebody back here giving a presentation on bug pinning, then it will feel separate enough that people can still be shopping.” In addition, the Pine Box in Capitol Hill has also reached out about doing a spooky collaboration in the future.
Shhh, the shop cat is sleeping.
The Evergreen Echo
A growing community of regulars has sprung up around Mudlark. Steiner said that on opening day, “I remember being really nervous about whether or not people would actually show up, and people were in here all day.” Rant and Jared both reflected on the warmth they feel from the regulars who come by the shop and consistently want to support them. I can say from experience that I am a fan of this local business, and have purchased a variety of items which have become beloved objects to me, from a horse brass depicting a devilish imp holding a lantern to a whimsical ‘70s red and silver Libra pendant that I regularly wear.
“I want it to be curated, I want it to feel like it’s worth taking your time to look through, so it feels really special when people actually want to stick around and look through the stuff,” said Jared in conclusion.
Stay tuned for the return of Mudlark Oddities’ events now that the back room’s renovations are nearly complete!
