Right on the waterfront in downtown Seattle, tucked between all the tourist crowds, joggers cruising along Elliott Bay, and the Olympic Mountains quietly hanging out in the distance, sits a shop that's been collecting weird and wonderful things since 1899.
It's easy to walk right past if you don't know what you're looking for, but once you step inside, you're probably not leaving anytime soon.
You walk in and you're immediately surrounded. A tiger skin on the wall. A walrus skull. Cases full of historic ivory carvings. Butterflies pinned behind the checkout counter. It doesn't really ease you in. It just throws you into it.
I probably spent twenty minutes staring into the same display case because every time I thought I'd seen everything, I'd notice something hiding behind something else. It's one of those places where your brain never really gets a chance to catch up.
The shop was founded in 1899 by Joseph Edward Standley, better known as Daddy Standley. He arrived in Seattle by way of Denver just as the city was booming from the Klondike Gold Rush and opened his shop along the waterfront, where sailors, traders, and travelers regularly came ashore carrying objects from all over the world. By 1907, it was officially operating as Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, complete with the slogan "We Beat the Dickens," a cheeky Victorian-era nod to Charles Dickens that the shop still proudly uses today.
What's even cooler is that it has never left the family. Standley's son Edward joined him in the business in 1907. Later it passed to his grandson Joe James, who ran the shop for more than fifty years. Today it's owned by Joe's son Andy and Andy's wife Tammy, with their own sons helping keep the tradition alive. Five generations, the same waterfront, and somehow they're still finding new oddities to squeeze onto the shelves.
The farther back you wander, the stranger things get.
Eventually you'll find a little corner dedicated to Daddy Standley himself, complete with photographs from 1904 and another taken not long before his death in 1940. Around that same area is where things really start to get weird. A chicken with legs that definitely aren't where you'd expect them to be. Multi-headed ducks. Human skulls. Shrunken heads. Alligator heads. Nesting dolls. Beautiful jewelry from cultures all over the world.
I caught myself saying, "Wait...come look at this," about every thirty seconds.
And then there's Sylvester....you have to say hi to Sylvester.
He's an Egyptian mummy who's been part of the shop since the 1950s and has become one of its biggest attractions. For years, people believed the hole in his chest was the wound that killed him, but researchers eventually determined it had actually been carved into the mummy much later during his sideshow days.
Sylvester isn't alone, either.
In 1970, another mummy named Sylvia joined the collection. A CT scan later revealed she was a woman who likely died from tuberculosis, living in a completely different place and time than Sylvester.
And don't forget to say hi to Gloria, the shop's infant mummy. She's much smaller than the others, so she's easy to miss if you're not paying attention.
Three mummies. Three completely different stories. All sharing the same little corner of one of Seattle's strangest shops.
The store is also home to an incredible collection of Native art and towering totem poles. Daddy Standley became one of Seattle's biggest promoters of Northwest Coast Indigenous art, commissioning and displaying works carved by Native artists. While the tradition itself comes from Indigenous peoples farther north along the Pacific Coast, his displays helped make totem poles one of the images visitors came to associate with Seattle during the early twentieth century.
It's a lot to take in.
It's dusty and cramped in the best possible way, and every display case seems to reward you for slowing down and taking another look. There are places you visit because they're beautiful, and then there are places you visit because you'll never see anything else quite like them.
Ye Olde Curiosity Shop is definitely the second one.
If you find yourself in Seattle and have even the slightest appreciation for the strange, the unusual, or the wonderfully unexpected, this one isn't optional.
