Saturday, October 29th • 10 am – 6 pm
A convention about all things weird is rolling into town the weekend before Halloween. The Oddities & Curiosities Expo will be at the Seattle Convention Center all day on Halloween Saturday. The event is “one part horror convention and one part dark arts” with lots of strange sprinkled in. On the one hand, the expo is like your typical convention with a room full of vendors selling wares from their particular niche. The wares at this convention, though, are “antiques, handcrafted oddities, quack medical devices, creepy clothing, odd jewelry, skulls/bones, funeral collectibles & much more.” What a mix! According to the site, the sale of real bats was banned in January 2020, and the sale or real human remains was banned just last month.
The selling human remains ban probably had something to do with the trouble the expo ran into in Portland last year. The expo hosted a “Death Science class” where people could pay to watch a real cadaver get dissected ($250 for normal tickets, $500 for VIP). Legally, this was fine, but it upset many people, including the widow of the dissected dead man. So, because of that event, Multnomah County banned the “public display of human remains for profit” this past year.
While the expo no longer offers live autopsy events, visitors can still pay extra to visit a freak show or take a taxidermy class. The freak show costs $5 and gets you access to the world of two-headed animals, cyclops, and other anomalies. The taxidermy class costs $235, lasts 6 hours (from 10 am to 4 pm) and will show you how to make a two-headed duckling. There’s something for everyone at this expo!
