AMERICAN HAUNTINGS SPECIAL EVENT

EVENING WITH
THE DEAD

THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FUNERAL CUSTOMS

AMERICAN ODDITIES MUSEUM
MINERAL SPRINGS HOTEL | ALTON, ILLINOIS
$48 PER PERSON | 7:00 pm
OCTOBER 12, 2024

CLICK HERE FOR RESERVATIONS!

Join Troy Taylor for another night of our “An Evening with…” series of events! This eerie night will include a catered dinner at the American Oddities Museum, located in the Mineral Springs Hotel in Alton. After dinner, author Troy Taylor will be presenting “An Evening with the Dead,” a fascinating and sometimes chilling look at America’s history of death, dying, funeral customs and traditions, and more!

Have you ever wondered how some of America’s most unusual funeral customs began? Interested in the tradition of postmortem photographs? Tried to understand the purpose of wearing black, stopping clocks at the moment of death, using flowers at funerals, and why we started embalming the bodies of the dead?

Then you won’t want to miss this historic — and sometimes eerie — evening with Troy Taylor!

about the night:

Join us at the Mineral Springs in Alton, Illinois for another great event!

- Doors open at 6:00 PM / Dinner starts at 7:00 PM

- Events held at the Mineral Springs Hotel Located at 301 East Broadway in Alton, Illinois

- Limited number of guests for each event

- Private Event in the American Oddities Museum, which will open at 6:00 Pm for browsing by guests before dinner

- American Hauntings Bookstore located in the Museum so books will be available for purchase and can be autographed by Troy Taylor

the AMERICAN TRADITIONS OF DEATH

America has a strange relationship with death.

Death was a common occurrence in American history. Life was tough. There were a lot of diseases that could kill you. Medical treatment was poor. Vaccines didn’t exist. People starved, froze to death, there was bad water, bad food, and bad liquor. There was rampant crime, murder, and short life spans. This was the reason that people had so many children -- because so few of them would live to be adults.

Death was an ordinary part of like and people died at home, not in a sterile hospital room. The undertaker was called to care for the body in the family kitchen. After that was finished, you’d be laid out in the parlor of your home for your friends and family to come and see you one last time. You went to the church or the cemetery from there.

That’s how it was done – although in time that would change. Death went from being accepted to being celebrated with rituals and customs to being avoided and talked about as little as possible. By the 1930s, the dead were whisked away to the funeral parlor and the embalming was done out of sight. The name of the “parlor” at home was even changed so we’d forget about what it used to be used for. Now we call it the “living room” instead.

We do all we can to distance ourselves from death.
But it didn’t use to be that way.

During this special event, we take a trip back in time to understand America’s obsession with death. From the chilling death rites of the Puritans to the aftermath of the Civil War and the Victorian Celebration of Death, we discover how our funeral customs came into existence.

We’ll take a look at American funeral traditions and history like:

* Creation of the American Cemetery
* How the Civil War created the funeral industry
* The rise of America’s Spiritualist Movement
* Abraham Lincoln and our traditions of death and mourning
* Victorian Rituals of Death
* Children and Death in the Nineteenth Century
* Postmortem Photography
* And more!

Skeletons, skulls, death photographs, macabre children’s toys, embalming fluids, and more — many of the traditions and rituals of the past can be confusing, complicated, and strange but Troy Taylor will unravel the stories behind them and present a vivid portrait of our connections with death.

Don’t miss this special night — one we’ve “brought back from the dead” after several years on hiatus!