Museum of the Bizarre

09/15/2026

09/10/2026

Father Ernetti: The Monk Who Said He Built a Machine to See Through Time
Father Pellegrino Ernetti was a Benedictine monk — not the kind of person you’d expect to claim he helped build a device called the Chronovisor, a machine that could view past events like a recording. He said the device used electromagnetic resonance to capture echoes of history, allowing users to witness moments long gone.

Ernetti claimed he saw ancient performances, historical speeches, even biblical events. After he spoke publicly, the Vatican allegedly seized the device and ordered silence. Ernetti died shortly after, and all documentation vanished.

Some believe the Chronovisor was real. Others think it was a metaphor. But the sudden disappearance of everything related to it keeps the mystery alive.

Sounds like he was watching TV - What do you think...Real or no?

09/08/2026

Wilmington, NC 📍

09/04/2026

📌 Cat Island Fort — Winyah Bay, South Carolina
📍 33°15'1.28"N, 79°13'49.86"W

Five rivers fed into this bay, and Confederate engineers had to figure out how to defend all of them at once.

Hidden within the marshes at the mouth of Winyah Bay is one of the surviving Confederate earthworks built to defend Georgetown and the waterways leading into South Carolina's enormously important rice-growing region. During the Civil War, Winyah Bay provided access to five rivers, the Black, Sampit, Great P*e Dee, Little P*e Dee, and Waccamaw, and Union gunboats entering the bay could potentially push inland along any of them, threatening plantations, transportation routes, and the rice economy around Georgetown. Confederate defenses went up around the bay entrance in response, including positions on North, South, and Cat islands.

The Cat Island Fort was an earthen redoubt built directly along the shoreline. A surviving plan shows a substantial enclosed work with projecting wings, interior traverses, magazines, gun positions, and a central bombproof or defensive structure, roughly 300 feet across its front with about 19 feet of relief, a much more substantial fortification than its wooded appearance from the ground would suggest today.

As Confederate defensive strategy shifted, the outer Winyah Bay positions were eventually abandoned in favor of defenses farther inland, including Battery White at Mayrant's Bluff and the works at Frazier's Point.

Today, Cat Island is part of the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center, and the fort survives in a heavily vegetated, normally restricted landscape. This is exactly where LiDAR shines. With the vegetation removed, the angular walls, interior compartments, and overall footprint of the redoubt emerge clearly, closely matching the surviving historical plan, while conventional aerial imagery gives almost no hint that such a large fortification remains beneath the trees.

More than 160 years later, the earthworks are still remarkably legible, a hidden Civil War fort still guarding the same shoreline it was built to defend.

08/31/2026

Long after the battles ended, pieces of history remain.

A medal once worn with pride.

A weapon carried into an uncertain future.

Artifacts that witnessed moments of courage, sacrifice, fear, and survival.

At the Museum of the Bizarre, our wartime history collection offers a glimpse into the past through the objects left behind.

These aren't just old artifacts.

They're fragments of real lives.

Real stories.

Real history.

🎖️⚔️🪖

Step closer.

Look carefully.

And remember...

History is never truly silent.

📍 Museum of the Bizarre
201 South Front Street
Wilmington, NC

08/28/2026

🩸 TRUE CRIME. DARK HISTORY. REAL ARTIFACTS.

Step into the Museum of the Bizarre’s chilling True Crime collection, featuring artifacts connected to infamous names including Jeffrey Dahmer, BTK, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, Henry Lee Lucas, Otis Toole, and Bonnie & Clyde.

Not glorification. History. Crime. The stories behind the headlines.

Come see it for yourself?! 👀

📍 201 South Water Street, Wilmington, NC
⏰ Open daily 11AM–8PM
🎟️ Admission: Only $3

08/25/2026

📌 Goldsboro Nuclear Bomb B-52 Accident Site
📍 35°29′34.08″N, 77°51′31.33″W — Faro, North Carolina

Somewhere beneath this ordinary farm field, part of a 3.8-megaton thermonuclear weapon has been sitting since 1961, and only one safety switch stood between this being a quiet news story and something far worse.

On January 24, 1961, a U.S. Air Force B-52G carrying two Mark 39 Mod 2 thermonuclear bombs broke apart in the sky near Goldsboro, North Carolina. Each weapon carried a maximum predicted yield of 3.8 megatons, hundreds of times the explosive force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The bomber, based at nearby Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, was flying as part of Strategic Air Command's airborne nuclear-alert program when it developed a serious fuel leak. The crew lost control while trying to return to base, and the B-52 began breaking apart around 9,000 feet. Five crewmen survived. Three were killed.

As the aircraft disintegrated, the two bombs fell separately, and what happened to each was strikingly different. The first descended almost as if it had been deliberately dropped, its parachute deployed, its arming rods pulled, and several stages of its firing sequence activated. Its 42-second timer even completed its countdown, and the contact switch closed when it hit the ground. But one crucial component remained set to SAFE, the Arm/Safe switch, which prevented the firing circuitry from completing the sequence that could have triggered a nuclear detonation.

The second bomb had a very different fate. Its parachute never deployed, and the roughly 9,000 to 10,000-pound weapon slammed into the farmland at high speed, punching a crater about nine feet across and five feet deep while much of it continued burrowing deep underground. Recovery crews dug through the muddy soil and found the bomb's primary nuclear component about 20 feet down, but groundwater, unstable soil, and collapsing excavation walls made the work increasingly dangerous, and the digging was eventually abandoned. The thermonuclear secondary component was never recovered, later estimates placed the remaining material roughly 180 feet underground.

In 1962, the federal government secured a perpetual 200-foot-radius easement over the site. The land can still be farmed, used for timber, or grazed, but excavation deeper than five feet and any construction within the restricted area are prohibited.

The LiDAR and aerial comparison here is what makes the location so interesting. From above, it looks like an ordinary North Carolina farm field, with a small isolated grove of trees standing in the middle of otherwise cultivated land. LiDAR strips away the vegetation and highlights the subtle shape and disturbances of the underlying terrain, though it's worth noting the grove itself isn't the precise burial location, the federal easement over the unrecovered material actually sits about 250 feet north of it.

More than six decades later, there's almost nothing visible on the landscape to hint at what happened here. But deep beneath this quiet farm field, part of a 3.8-megaton thermonuclear weapon has remained buried since 1961.

Special thanks to James Sandlin, Chuck Heumader, and Darrell Brown for recommending this site.

08/25/2026

📌 Accident Site for the Mars Bluff Atomic Bomb — Florence, South Carolina
📍 34°12'3.33"N, 79°39'25.50"W

On March 11, 1958, a U.S. Air Force B-47 Stratojet accidentally dropped a Mark 6 nuclear bomb over Mars Bluff, South Carolina. That's a pretty big "Oops, my bad!"

The aircraft had departed Hunter Air Force Base near Savannah as part of Operation Snow Flurry. About 25 minutes into the flight, navigator and bombardier Capt. Bruce Kulka entered the bomb bay after a warning indicated a problem with the bomb's locking mechanism. While attempting to secure the weapon, it accidentally released, crashed through the bomb bay doors, and fell approximately 15,000 feet toward the ground.

Fortunately, the bomb's fissile nuclear capsule was not installed, so a nuclear detonation was impossible. But the weapon still contained roughly two tons of conventional high explosives.

Those explosives detonated when the bomb struck the woods behind the home of railroad conductor Walter "Bill" Gregg.

The blast reportedly created a crater approximately 70 feet wide and 35 feet deep, destroyed the Gregg family's house and garage, damaged several nearby buildings, and injured six members of the family. Remarkably, no one was killed.

The Gregg family later received $54,000 from the federal government for their injuries and property damage. They even appeared on I've Got a Secret a few weeks later, where their secret was: "Our house was hit by an atom bomb."

Today, the surrounding landscape has been developed, and the enormous crater is no longer readily apparent from ordinary aerial imagery. LiDAR, however, provides another way of examining the terrain around the historic impact of the 1958 explosion.

A historical marker commemorating the accident was erected near the site in 2008, and fragments of the bomb are preserved at the Florence County Museum.

Special thanks to James Sandlin for recommending this site.

08/24/2026

You never know what you might uncover when you step into the world of Indiana Jones!

Our Indiana Jones feature at the Museum of the Bizarre is packed with legendary artifacts, mysterious treasures, and plenty of surprises. From Raiders of the Lost Ark to Temple of Doom, this is one adventure you won't want to miss!

Come explore the bizarre side of history and see what mysteries are waiting for you. 🏺💀🗿

📍 Museum of the Bizarre
201 South Water Street
Downtown Wilmington, NC 28401

🕚 Open 11 AM–8 PM every day
🎟️ Admission: Only $3