5. The Creepy Bar Inside a Brooklyn Mall Cinema

It rises, like an apparition from the night: a glowing sign, lit up with carnivalesque lightbulbs, reading simply, “House of Wax.” Below the lights, gloomy faces stare out of glass cabinets, at once warning you away and daring you to enter.

This is the entrance to one of Downtown Brooklyn’s creepiest locales. Located in the back of Brooklyn’s City Point mall, in the lobby of the newly opened Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, this is one of the strangest bars you’ll ever have a drink in. It houses 100 anatomical models, 25 death masks, and wax depictions of various diseases and mutations. On display are wax busts of fetuses and women giving birth, tumor-riddled tongues, and other sensational objects including a figure of a woman whose organs have been distorted by years of wearing a corset.

This collection is reappearing nearly a century after its last time in public. Originally, the figures were displayed at Castan’s Panopticum, a Berlin museum that closed in 1922. Since then, they were kept in deep storage until they were purchased by Tim League, the CEO of Alamo Drafthouse.

Castan’s Panopticum was eerie and off-kilter even during its heyday, and was probably frequented by late 19th century goths. It has, amidst other illustrious attractions, a full-body bust of the serial killer Fritz Haarmann, also known as the “Butcher of Hanover.” At the “House of Wax,” for $13, you can order your very own “Butcher of Hanover”—a mixed drink.