Weird and Wacky in Bangkok - Forensics Museum

After visiting the Correction's Museum and learning about how they used to torture prisoners to death, I carried on my journey to find something weird and wacky to do in Bangkok. The Forensics Museum beckoned me. Another macabre place indeed.

We were greeted at the entrance by pictures of people who had died in unusual circumstances. Babies with bits of their heads missing, men who were sliced and diced by aeroplane propellers, people decapitated by trains, car accidents resulting in unrecognisable lumps of flesh that used to be people with lives and personalities. Victims of hand grenades, suicide, stab, gunshot and axe wounds lined the walls. One guy had a very well defined tyre mark covering his chest.

It makes you realise how organic the human body is. The combination of hot serrated metal, tender human flesh and chance made me feel uneasy.

In one cabinet there were the instruments of suicides. Cords of every sort fashioned into nooses. It was pretty moving to see how people ended their lives: some used TV cable, others just a thin towel. Then there were the clothes of some of the victims, women and babies mostly, some with knife wounds. It was heartbreaking to walk past their tiny little garments.

Murderers and rapists were mummified. Their bodies were black/brown and they had a waxy substance covering them, like Vaseline, presumably a preservative. They had their eyes closed, removed I guess, and their skin was wrinkled. One of Thailand’s most famous serial killers is there. Si Ouey used to prey on children and cannibalize them in the 1950s. He was caught, executed and mummified. He has been put on display to act as a deterrent against violent crime.

In the Pathological Museum the most common feature in the room were the jars of babies. There were so many babies in various stages of development. Some were still in the womb; others had their umbilical cords attached and many were extremely deformed. Strange head shapes, hare lips, spina bifida, Siamese twins, babies with organs on the outside, some of them didn't really look human.

Lots of people left offerings of candy and toys near the jars so they could use them in the afterlife. It was a stark reminder that the tiny bodies in the jars weren’t just there to be viewed with a clinical detached eye. Had they lived they would have enjoyed playing with toys and eating candy.

I think the image that has most stayed with me all this time was the terracotta flower pot. It was big enough to fit a 2 or 3 year old toddler, and that's what some bastard did and set it alight with the child inside. It showed the picture of the young child, charred and curled into a bundle.

The rest of the room was full of body parts and skulls, and even some severed arms with tattoos. There was also a section on how they identified the bodies of the 2004 Tsunami.

We thought the most horrifying part of the tour was over when we entered a room about parasites and diseases. That’s when why we came across photos of a man who had a very serious tapeworm problem. There were about 20 or 30 worms coming out of his ass, all of them as long and as wide as spaghetti. Imagine the sensation of them coming out and tentatively feeling around their surroundings...

Another jaw dropping photo was of a man who had a huge portion of his rectum hanging out of his bum. It looked like some kind of sick red raw cylinder. Then we saw pictures of people with Elephantiasis. Literally they had legs that were triple or quadruple the size of their other normal leg. One man had it in his scrotum. He couldn't walk, just had to sit there on a chair with his scrotum touching the ground. I simply can’t imagine how awful his life must have been. They must have removed it, or he died, because they actually had the enlarged scrotum preserved in a glass jar with formaldehyde.

Take the Chao Phraya ferry to the Tha Rot Fai pier and head west to the Siriraj Hospital.

So if you want weird and wacky in Bangkok, then you should most definitely visit the Forensics Museum. It’s creepy, disturbing and fascinating. You won’t forget this museum in a hurry.

Another interesting place to check out in Bangkok is the Correction's Museum. Follow this link here to read more about this prison.