July 18, 2013 — The bad thing about putting my name, face, and geographical location on a website is that I’m pretty easy to find. The good thing is that I’m also pretty easy to find. Like to past teachers.
Mrs. Slaughter was the Spanish teacher at one of the high schools I attended in Maryland. And now that I think about it, she might’ve been the English teacher, too…which is probably an enormous conflict of interest that went right over my head at the time.
Over the years, she’s kept in touch with me through OTIS and regularly sends me links for the Oddity News section. I’m pleased to say that she’s since been promoted from Spanish teacher to Spanish resident as she and her husband have been living in Mexico for a long while now. Recently, she sent me a bunch of pictures from an Inquisition Museum that just opened in Zacatecas. I had to post them. One day I hope to go it or one like it, once Mexico stops being so scary.
There are Spanish Inquisition museums all over Central and South America, memorializing the horrors that bled over from Europe into the New World as the Catholic Tribunal of Terror attempted to make sure everyone was either orthodox or an unrecognizable pile of broken bones and bloody flesh.
These museums are chocked full of antique torture devices and, I assume, American tourists making Monty Python jokes.
According to Mrs. Slaughter, “Everything was gross and authentic.”
For the record, I was tempted to subtitle this post, Slaughter at the Inquisition Museum.
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| According to the museum, Inquisitors would stick this contraption on the head of a victim, insert a worm in that tube, cap it, and then watch while it enters through the nose and eats the brain. |
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| This mummy and the two below came from a church nearby. |
I found a video of the museum. It's in Spanish, so I don't know what's going on (sorry, Mrs. Slaughter), but it's cool to watch.
