The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Visits and Departures

Visits

Over the years, several people visited Dr. Lambshead, and saw his cabinet. Few, however, can agree on its dimensions, exact location, or its contents. Sometimes, it isn’t even clear that these visitors actually saw the core collection rather than just an overflow room on the first floor of the house. In three separate journal entries, Lambshead alludes to “a special room for the rubes,” which he set up out of frustration at the number of requests to visit his cabinet. Many times he would relent and allow a visit, only to have his housekeeper lead the party in question to “the Rube Room” and then out the front door again.

A few notes on these entries, regardless of their accuracy. First, there is no truth to the claim that the chronicler of “The Singular Taffy Puller” simply “mistook Lambshead’s kitchen for his cabinet,” as put forward by Poe scholar S. J. Chambers. Nor is Mur Lafferty’s failure to pass a polygraph test in 1965 relevant to her account. Those who doubt the testimony of Rachel Swirsky, meanwhile, should note that in 1994 she underwent a five-hour polygraph interrogation about her visit as part of misguided therapy for her “condition.”

Finally, better investigators than the current editors have come up with inconclusive evidence as to the veracity of Lambshead’s housekeeper, Paulette, whose account ends this section. Certainly, it’s as good a story as any, even if it paints a rather narrow portrait of the good doctor.

As for more personal “visits and departures,” Lambshead wrote on the subject in his journal while visiting newly independent Algiers in the late 1960s. He was no doubt thinking back to his involvement on the side of the National Liberation Front during the fight against the French a decade earlier.

“A visit presages its own departure, and almost no one makes it out,” he wrote. “There’s a hideous truth hidden in there—that sometimes things do the visiting for you and sometimes they’re the message. Sometimes, too, whether it’s a bullet or a collapsed roof or a fire or some other act of fate or chance, you don’t always get to take out what you brought with you—even your own life.”

Reports that a Greek woman, about a decade younger than Lambshead, was seen with him in Algiers that year, much as his wife, Helen, had in the 1950s, are entirely apocryphal. Certainly, no one matching the description appears in any of the official state footage of various public events. Indeed, Lambshead himself is rarely on display in these films—a matter of a few seconds here and there, his image soon gone and fading.