Chamblee Oddities Museum contains a curious collection

CHAMBLEE, Ga. - Ask Jeremy Gibbs where the strange collection inside his Chamblee museum comes from, and you’ll get a quick answer.

"I search high and low," he says with a grin, "but mostly low."

Gibbs is the founder of The Oddities Museum in Chamblee, a nonprofit institution that’s essentially a Smithsonian of strangeness. Considering the museum is packed floor to ceiling with weird and whimsical items, it would be impossible to list them all here. But we can tell you this: you’ve never seen anything like it.

"I was obsessed with weird things ever since I was a small child," says Gibbs, a native of Social Circle. "I would run around through the woods out in the country … so I went to find bones and skulls and old bottles and artifacts and stuff like that."

A lifetime of collecting curiosities led Gibbs and his wife, Kim, to first open the store Rainy Day Revivals in Little Five Points, and then expand the business to prop rentals for film and television. But Gibbs says a museum was always the goal — one which was achieved in April of this year, when The Oddities Museum opened its doors.

Visitors to the museum are met by a barrage of bizarre relics, including antique taxidermy, vintage medical equipment, circus and carnival memorabilia, and one-of-a-kind artwork.

"When it comes down to it, this is nature. This is life," says board member Nick Morgan. "We may look at it and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s weird,’ but because it’s so different, you know, that should be honored."

The Oddities Museum is located at 3870 North Peachtree Road in Chamblee, and regular hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursdays through Mondays (the museum is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays). Admission is a $10 donation, and memberships are available. For more information on visiting the museum, click here.