For Morbid Anatomy Museum Founder, Spooky Things Are Life's Work

Joanna Ebenstein, founder of the Morbid Anatomy Museum, with a taxidermy two-headed duckling. Liyna Anwar for NPR hide caption

Joanna Ebenstein, founder of the Morbid Anatomy Museum, with a taxidermy two-headed duckling.

Joanna Ebenstein, founder of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, has always had a fascination with creepy things since childhood. Her father, Bob, always nurtured her passion. StoryCorps hide caption

Joanna Ebenstein, founder of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, has always had a fascination with creepy things since childhood. Her father, Bob, always nurtured her passion.

Joanna Ebenstein is founder of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn's Gowanus neighborhood, which features a human skeleton, a pickled possum and a two-headed duckling, among other things.

Ebenstein and her father, Bob, recalled during a recent visit to StoryCorps, how ever since childhood, she's been fascinated with things that make most of us squirm, including black widow spiders.

"I used to catch them, and I'd put them in jars," says Joanna, 42.

"And I remember having a dead one and bringing it to school in my hand, and it freaked everybody out," she says. "It was like shock and horror. At the bus stop, I remember. To me it just seemed cool."

"You were different," Bob says. "You were inquisitive. And I did the things with you that I liked to do, which is turn over rocks to see what'll crawl out from under. But the interest in dead animals was a little different."

Bob, 71, remembers when Joanna brought home a dead owl off the street on her sixteenth birthday.

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For Morbid Anatomy Museum Founder, Spooky Things Are Life's Work