Museums get spooky for Halloween,
ROM’s bat cave is just one spooky feature you may dare to visit at Halloween time
Halloween is only one day a year. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find something scary within the confines of three of Toronto’s best known museums all year round.
Among the more popular stops at the Royal Ontario Museum is the bat cave, a wonderfully spooky exhibit based on the St. Clair Cave in Jamaica. (ROM staff have captured the essence of the cave, located 30 metres underground, in meticulous detail thanks to numerous fieldwork site visits over the years.)
The cave features more than 20 actual bat specimens and more than 800 models.
The study of bats — known as chiropterology — is among the museum’s research specialties, led by assistant curator of mammalogy Bur- ton Lim, who was once bitten by a vampire bat. (He now prefers working nights. Just kidding.)
With a collection of more than 80,000 objets d’art, you can be sure there’s a few works at the Art Gallery of Ontario designed to unnerve as well as enlighten.
Among the more hair-raising: an original lithograph print of Vampire, a.k.a. Love and Pain, one of six versions by The Scream artist Edvard Munch between 1893 and 1895, as well as works from Francisco Goya’s late-18th-century collection of prints, Los Capricos, including They Spruce Themselves Up, depicting a playfully monstrous pedicure.
Is it any wonder the subject of Irish artist Thomas Frye’s 1760 work, Young Man with a Candle, looks so terrified?
The Gardiner Museum features a collection of almost 3,000 ceramic works from the Ancient Americas, the Italian Renaissance, Chinese, Japanese and European porcelain and a contemporary gallery that includes the works of Canadian artist Shary Boyle, who’s taste often runs to the macabre.
Two examples: Goblin Orchid, a richly detailed depiction of a fanged monster and White Fright, a menacing bat dangling on a chain.
Of more ancient provenance is the head of Mesoamerican god Xipe Totec, who looks even scarier upon the realization he’s wearing the skin of a sacrificial victim over his face.