After Fort Knox we both felt like the day wasn’t over yet so we set out to find some antique stores. The first one we stopped at was the Central Maine Antique Exchange. We had half an hour before it closed so our visit was abrupt but not bad. This place was sizable but not enormous – a good collection with the usual mix of haunted dolls, inexplicable buckets of doll parts, and of course a light smattering of offensively racist things – I think the winner of that went to a rubber doll named “Chief Wahoo.” It wasn’t all bad though – there was also a HUGE bucket labelled “peanut butter chips” and a lot of nice artwork on the walls. I don’t know if I would really go out of my way to see this place again buuuut I would stop in if you just happen to be in Bangor.
It was yet another day and yet another antique store. I know we’ve been hitting a lot of those lately but it’s hot outside at this time of year so I tend to run for the shade. This time it was at the Cambridge Antique Market which was 5 whole floors of weirdness.
I wasn’t in the most receptive of moods knowing that Cambridge is basically parking purgatory filled with empty parallel parking spots because there’s signs with super conflicting information wafting above each space confusing the ever-loving shit out of even the locals. You’ll see cars driving around and around the block for hours because there’s also not enough spaces to go around. It’s a nightmare. The antique mall was fortunate in that it had a parking lot but it was tiny, shoved between the building and some fences, big enough for maybe 10-15 cars. The front part was full so I had to go to the even tinier back bit which had parking so tight and bizarrely shaped it’d take me a 300 point turn to eventually get out. But parking drama aside this was another delightful adventure.
We had chosen this local for it’s size. It was in another mill building and sprawled out for five whole floors with who knows how many different vendors, each a new chance to find something crazy or wonderful. We’d been in a car a long time though and I had to pee so I tried to find the bathroom right off and it was… a whole separate adventure. They had an old one stall bathroom that felt like the light should be flickering. The lock on the door was this tiny antiquated dead bolt that barely aligned with the door and I was more than a little amused that they had tried to add a little class by using toilet paper with frills. I’ve never seen anything like it! It was like using a doyly! I washed my hands with their fittingly super fragrant soap and hopped out as quick as I could. This adventure was followed by getting into an elevator that could be the whole set for a horror movie any day.
It was one of those days we wanted to go to a familiar haunt so we ended up at Gilette Castle and spent some time enjoying life there before coming home. We had time to spare though and didn’t feel our adventures were quite over so we kept an eye open to antique stores that may be on route and that’s how we ended up at G’s Treasures.
It was a sweet little store right off the street front. I even parallel parked for it! Well… sorta. There were 3 open spaces and just drove in but I’m still counting that because I need a win. ANYWAY, this place was adorable. It was tended to by a young guy who upon reading my companion’s T-shirt “Ninja Turtles don’t do drugs” snickered, “Maybe, but the guy drawing them sure did!” I don’t know if he understood it was supposed to be ironic but I was enjoying his youthfully enthusiastic energy nonetheless.
This shop was well maintained and had everything from antique furniture to a whole double wide case of old wooden duck decoys. Of course, I was immediately drawn to a rum thing(??) that looked like a soulless Pilgrim with no eyes. Touch the dark side, I dare you. There were lots of other scary things in there too – a stuffed duck that could inspire its own horror movie, a mannikin head with a giraffe neck, a cookie jar in the shape of a fat friar and of course more clowns and a single mammie doll that was tucked away in a dark corner all hidden and coy-like.
I sort of feel bad wandering through all these antique stores because I barely have money for gas much less buying anything and usually leave whatever cool things I find behind. A total tease. Today however one of my travel companions had claimed a couple shinies (necklaces) off a jewelry table to satisfy his “magpie brain.” And they were very reasonably priced at ten dollars a pop! So really everyone left happy.
And if you happen to be in the area looking for lunch there’s plenty of options but we went right next door to Deep River Pizza and all got various wraps and grinders which were all goddamn amazing. So well worth it!
Since we were already antiquing we decided to move on from Jules Antiques and find another little shop nearby. That’s how we ended up at Cookie’s. Now, just to be clear, not all of my adventures end up somewhere magical, sometimes we just end up in these weird little places that smell of electricity and feel like you’ve entered the Twilight Zone.
Cookie’s was like that. It was a ramshackle little place with parking for a handful of cars. When we drove up we immediately noticed a big sign reading, “cookies” over an open barn door. It was dark and it didn’t seem like there was anyone around. We both wondered if this wasn’t some sort of trap and if we weren’t about to bumble into some serial killing mastermind just beyond, you know like whoever drives around the big black van that reads, “free candy.” This place reminded me a lot of central and northern Maine. It was for all intent and purposes a glorious junk shop – the kind any hoarder would be proud. As we walked into the barn we realized there was barely any place to walk. From floor to ceiling there was junk piled high and even hanging. Random. Strange. Often totally useless crap. We still scrambled through what we thought were isles before they too ended abruptly at a total impasse. Towards the window there was a selection of pretty bottles and lamp I was only halfway convinced wasn’t made of human skin.
Walking further we got into the actual shop and it was cramped and had that familiar smell of musk and mildew. There were two other customers, and we couldn’t get by them. Everyone except one guy and the woman running the place seemed vibrantly uncomfortable as we stared down at boxes full of VHS tapes, none of them anything good or memorable. And who the hell is buying VHS tapes?! We stayed long enough to be weirded out by the male customer who was obviously a familiar in this haunt. He seemed off. Maybe he was trying to woo the missus. Who knows.
As we beat it to the car (sans cookies as there wasn’t a baked good within miles) we giggled what an experience that had been. For me it did bring back many memories of the junk shops in Maine as well as a number of hoarders I have had the *ahem* privilege of visiting. And don’t get me wrong junk shops can be surprising. Sometimes you find some crazy things in them for a few cents. It’s always a complete toss up but if I were to ever find a forgotten million dollar painting it’d probably be in a place like this sitting next to a pile of dog chewed rubber duckies.
We’ve been really getting into the antiquing lately, mostly because it’s like a little treasure hunt. We go to strange new locations and we never know what we are going to find. On this particular day this spirit was especially strong. We started in Richmond at the Jules Antiques and General Store, picked at random by the fact the photos made it look large enough to be worth combing through. We weren’t disappointed!
This was the perfect place to go on a hot summer’s day. The parking lot was vast for such a place which is always a good sign, and the building was no shrinking violet either. Several other people had already had the great idea to come here today and right after getting out of the car I was already enamored by the decrepit stagecoach rotting off to the side.
Inside it was a well-organized place with lots of different nooks and crannies and I am guessing different venders. We were greeted almost immediately by the strange cartoonish head of a moose on the wall. It wasn’t long before I had toppled into the strange and morbid when I found a Lizzie Borden themed paper doll book. I guess it’s good fun for the locals… to add to our macabre little jump rope rhymes about poor Lizzie. But it didn’t stop there. This place was absolutely swarming with terrifying Easter bunnies hidden in every little crevice, their soulless eyes staring into the void. We even found a Halloween skeleton dressed up as Uncle Sam! Fun for all the holidays (especially if you only want to shop for decorations once.) There was also the usual assortment haunted dolls and evil Donald Duck statues. A more endearing find was a rooster shaped glug glug jug! If I lived in the sort of place it wouldn’t be immediately broken I probably would have taken that sucker home with me. I also didn’t end up bringing home any of the dolls. I’m looking for just the right one. Preferably one that giggles at three in the morning as it’s rearranging the living room furniture.
I know I have written about the Rhode Island Antique Mall before, several times in fact, but I continue to blog about it because there’s always something new to find here no matter how often we go or with whom. It’s always a fun little adventure!
This time around we were a group of four just poking at random things on both floors. As usual there was a delightful assortment of what I can only kindly call “folk art” of strange badly formed animals. And of course what antique store isn’t complete with at least a couple paintings that look like they could be totally haunted? It was light on the soul-sucking dolls on this particular day but what it lacked in that department it made up for in vintage Victorian porn which was everywhere. There was even a weirdly homoerotic postcard of presidents Lincoln and Washington in a seemingly forced embrace. Was this… the beginning of slash fanfiction?? We may never know. What I do know is that the speculum on display in our last visit seems to have been sold, luckily not with the Cat O’ Nine Tails that was next to it. That would have concerned me that there may be a serial killer in the area if they both sold to the same person.
At one point myself and one other in the party decided to play Racially Insensitive Bingo and we browsed to see the most offensive antiques we could find, marking off our imaginary cards with each ethnicity. It wasn’t long before we found something godawful for everyone… a wine corkscrew in the form of a faceless black figure (which got double points for also being sexually offensive,) some cigar-based paraphernalia with the familiar Indian chief, lots of literally yellow slant-eyed Chinamen, and for added flavor a few Gypsy fortune tellers. I don’t know why anyone in this day and age would want to touch any of these things with a ten-foot pole but OK…
All and all it was another great trip and I still highly recommend this place if you like wandering through isles of creepy old things. And the turn over is shockingly high making each trip a new experience!
I can’t tell you how many times I have driven by Aardvark Antiques, saw the big lions out front, and made a note to go there without ever making it. It’s one of those things – you know, a thing in town you just keep putting off because it’s so close.
Finally, the intrigue got the better of us and we decided we’d take a little poke at it. Nothing could have prepared us for what was beyond the big wrought iron gates. There in a small yard was a fascinating array of outdoor statuary. Some concrete, for those of us who aren’t dropping a trail of gold coins like a goblin, and others were bronze for those of us who really are. A life size bronze stallion galloped in place with a sort of intense realism. He demanded a $22,000 price tag. But if stallions weren’t your thing there were also an assortment of Grecco-Roman styled statues, a few dragons, a herd of African Safari animals, some creepy children, and two giant dancing frogs for anyone who was both rich and quirky.
Inside was even more interesting. This place was packed from floor to ceiling with just about anything to delight any eccentrics in the area. On the wall a giant moose head glowered down at us. The ceiling formed a canopy of random hanging things – everything from bicycles, to chandeliers, to a life-sized angel being lowered down from the heavens. It was almost like if the Catholic Church had a junkyard of antiquities. Moving on we came to a whole room full of stained-glass windows clearly from churches. Some were just ornate and colorful while others displayed whole religious scenes.
The furniture in this place all looked like it’d been freshly imported from some castle on Game of Thrones. Crazy heavy carved wooden chairs, tables, and writing desks played among smaller items that ranged in all categories. There was even a cabinet full of what looked like medieval Jesus paintings. And a lot of Asian pieces as well. It felt like getting lost in a bit of a time warp. Should I ever find myself a wealthy eccentric I’m coming back and just pointing at things to load into the truck! This was well worth the visit!
Another thing on our list of to-do’s was to visit an antique store. It’s something we had become accustomed to doing in Rhode Island (where the products are usually quite pricey) and Maine (where every rusty nail is a treasure.) We even discussed potentially finding an antique store with something Civil War related – maybe an old musket ball or something – to see if we could take home something to curse ourselves with. And of course I was on my usual mission of finding the world’s creepiest doll. It’s not a common hobby but it’s my hobby and I like it.
The Antiques Emporium was a great place to stop for all of this. It was huge. Two floors of absolute chaos. Everything from fine furniture to a copy of Marilyn Monroe’s drivers license. And of course there were steam punky things, sharp things, things with faces that shouldn’t have faces, creepy dolls galore, and a painting of an androgynous child I would have totally brought home with me if I had $250.
And some of this stuff was apparently haunted – I can tell because one of my travel companions had to bolt out of the store at one point. No worries, we’re all good now. It was just a case of the heebie jeebies.
After perusing the Wickford Village Antiques we made our way to the Rhode Island Antique Mall. This destination I suggested because it had the word mall in it’s very utilitarian title which indicated it had multiple vendors which is always good when you’re trying to find something weird. And I was. Sometimes it’s fun to actually try to find a specific item and this place looked promising. This time around I had chosen to seek a long silver pipette. Not because I have any particular interest in tobacco paraphernalia as a nonsmoker but because I was toying with the idea of being a flapper for Halloween and how cool would it be to have a pipette to complete that ensemble?! Especially knowing flappers were the first women allowed to go to bars and smoke in public (and vote!) which was HUGE at the time. Flaunt that independence! It’s amazing! Sadly, I did not find what I was looking for but the antique mall was still a great place to end up. We lost several hours wandering here.
This place was pretty big with two fully packed floors that had everything from rows and rows of sparkly jewelry to a fully functional pinball machine. But things didn’t get real interesting until we stepped into a little side room that I hope was tended to by a mortician with a sense of humor. If it wasn’t then…. I have some questions. You see the room contained a child sized coffin cooler (because adult coffin coolers aren’t morbid enough?) A couple fetish dolls (not sure what the correct term for them is?) an old wooden wheel chair and even creepier still a whole shelf full of expired embalming fluid. Because who doesn’t have a few bottles of that kicking around, ammirite? And if death related items weren’t your thing there was a cow yolk here with a tag reading, “This looks like a chastity belt but it’s just a cow harness.” Inappropriate humor! This one tiny room alone was totally worth the trip but there was so much more.
I ended up wandering downstairs not long after this and whew! What a wonderful assortment of random things! Haunted dolls, LOTS of probably haunted dolls made my heart jump with glee. There were even two possessed Micky Mouses and a Donald Duck I am pretty certain was employed reaping souls in the thirties. That’s not to mention the medical dummy with removable organs, the slew of terrible taxidermy and alligator purses, the really old Halloween decorations, or a brand new unicycle! I ended up going home with a $4 Phil Ochs record (a wicked steal!) and The Best of Procol Harem because… I don’t know, it struck my fancy that day. I mean what other band is named after someone’s pet cat AND a random phrase in Latin? That totally embodied the spirit of our meanderings that day.
This was an awesome place that I do believe I will visit again and highly recommend to anyone interested in antiques. Their prices were very reasonable and their assortment was vast!
Once again our weekly adventure was rained out so we did what any adventurous gaggle of millennials would do -we made sure to get a solid two or so hours of sleep and then went antiquing! OK, so I might be exaggerating a little but after 30 everything feels like two hours of sleep. Your knees gets creaky, you gain a fetching pair of black bags to place permanently under your eyes, and you look at children voluntarily sitting on the floor with immense envy. Youth really is wasted on the young. But I digress. We were talking about antiquing. I think. Yes. Antiquing.
ANYWAY. Earlier on my travel companion spent a good few minutes Googling cool places to check out. There was one in town and another whimsically titled store called The Book Garden that garnered his attention but alas the one in town was so devoid of personality I’m not even going to bother making an entry for it and the Book Garden was weirdly lacking in both books and gardens. It was a cute little place in the corner of one of those wedge shaped buildings that may have been nice to visit if you were already shopping on the street but it wasn’t worth just going to in it’s own. By now we were both wondering if today was going to be a total waste.
That’s when we finally stumbled half-hazardly onto a nearby winner – the Wickford Village Antiques! It was a cute little place absolutely loaded to the brim with loose buttons. Ten cents a piece. A button lovers utopia. But it wasn’t just the buttons that endeared me to this place it was also the strange doll in the window that looked like she was maybe an old Halloween decoration but I honestly couldn’t tell. And a creepy Humpty Dumpty plushie. And a windchime in the shape of a fish skeleton. Little weird. Loving that. And for the math nerds and historians there was even a tax book for the town of Coventry circa 1941. Suffice to say taxes were a lot less then. I admit it. I looked.
It was a sweet little shop in the end. Definitely worth a look if you happen to be in town.
