little detectives: a reflection

by Adrian Kresnak

There’s a children’s museum that used to have a severed head in a freezer. I was young when I went. I was absent-minded, even as a kid, so for a long time I convinced myself it was just a remnant of a nightmare. (I have a lot of nightmares set in museums.)

Still, there was something about this memory that stuck with me as I grew up. My mom would never have taken us to see something so gruesome that explored violence or horror. (Part of being absent-minded as a child was that I also scared easily.) If she ever saw that thing, she never mentioned it.

A lot of exhibits can be unintentionally scary. I’ve been to cave exhibits with their darkness and enclosed spaces, lots of mock forests that play sounds of wild animals in the background. Exhibits that have freezers, however, are usually things like “See how much electricity you use in a day!” or “Pretend you own a restaurant! Get the food to your customers!”

Googling doesn’t help. Even ignoring the AI-Technobabble, searching for an experience requires putting it into words and then hoping someone else wrote about it using those same terms. What are the chances? “Children’s museum head freezer” got me nowhere.

I tried summoning up other memories about the place. In my mind, the room shimmers in and out of my vision. There’s something wrong with the tiles on the floors. I try to walk down a hallway, but I can’t keep my balance. I hear mice in the walls.

My mother knows I like mysteries. Every so often, there was an exhibit about detectives or spies or forensic science. I got to analyze fingerprints and “solve” crimes. Break-ins and thefts, mostly. I remember examining bullet casings, which meant one of those crimes involved a gun, but no body.

Then, I remembered a disappearance.

I remember standing in front of a mirror, pushing a button. The light changed. My reflection didn’t show me anymore — it showed a ghostly version of me, like I wasn’t really there, like I was looking through myself. That’s how a lot of my memories feel, nowadays.

The teenage daughter of a family disappeared. Where did she go? I had no idea. I remember my mother giving me the answer: She’s still in the house. She’s just invisible.

Pimple-disappearing cream. Disappearing cream. A shower door, closed, with seemingly nobody inside. Pull on it and a voice recording plays: “Excuse me! I’m busy in here!”

Perception and misperception. Miss Perception.

Finally! I had a proper noun to search.

Miss Perception’s Mystery House was an exhibit at a children’s museum in Baltimore. A family disappeared; visitors help the detective Perception figure out what happened to them. It was a play exhibit built around optical illusions.

The exhibit closed in 2017. I know this because I found a Facebook event advertising Miss Perception’s Mysteries Revealed. The museum would bring out all the solutions and bring the story to a close. Man, I wish I had been there. I have all these questions but no answers.

The family had four members: Daughter, Mother, Father, Grandmother. They had names, but I don’t remember them by their names, and, anyway, it’s easier to describe the story this way. I remember the daughter turned invisible. I remember the mother getting shrunk and living in a dollhouse. I don’t think the father was the head in the freezer, though I can’t say for sure.

I went on YouTube. There are walkthroughs of the exhibit, video diaries made by parents following their kids. I watch them. The cameras have a perspective that I didn’t have as a kid. For instance: on a shelf in the kitchen, there’s two stacks of plates, each leaning off the side of the shelf like it’s held up only by spite.

One video walks through the bathroom. It has the acne cream and the shower that I remember. Something I didn’t remember: there’s a toilet you can flush, and when you do, it plays a recording of a man hitting pipes and calling “Hello? Hello?”

So, the dad got washed down the pipes. Eventually, a kid experiences the world becoming too big, swallowing him or her up. It’s rare that kid sees it happening to a dad.

Daughter, Father, Mother. I try to recall what happened to the grandmother, but I’m not sure. I think it had something to do with the mice in the walls. My memory is misty, like the experience. The little kid in me wants to solve the mystery. I want to know. I want to understand.

I still don’t understand the head in the freezer.

Because there is a head in the freezer. The picture I found shows two small children looking in at it. It’s not a “real” head, of course. It’s painted in along with the rest of the freezer’s contents. It looks more cartoonish than I remember. Thank goodness for that.

Photo of Adrian Kresnak

BIO: A. S. Kresnak studies communication and makes zines. Xe enjoys mysteries and sci-fi.