By Chris Gethard author of Weird New York
The village of Lake George is one of the most popular vacation destinations in the entire Northeast. Each and every summer, thousands of tourists find their way to this serene small town nestled away in the Adirondack Mountains. The main drag of Lake George Village, Route 9, reflects the town’s status as a vacation spot. The street is packed full of restaurants, gift shops, and video arcades. Basically, Lake George is full of the usual run of the mill summer resort town fare.
But there is one building right in the middle of all this tourism that stands out as truly unique—not in a subtle way, either! There are usually screams and moans emanating from the building, and occasionally a large man dressed as Frankenstein terrorizes children who pass by, lifting them into the air by holding onto their ears. This venerable institution is the House of Frankenstein.
The House of Frankenstein is a wax museum that has been in operation for over thirty years. It is truly a bizarre place that any kid who spends a summer in Lake George stops by at least once. Inside are over fifty strange exhibits depicting numerous forms of torture. The exhibits feature not-so-realistic looking mannequins in bizarre painful situations, such as being eaten alive by ants or split into pieces by various ancient weapons.
The House of Frankenstein is a true must see for anyone interested in strange roadside attractions. Weird NY reporter Clayton Gibbs knows it just as well as anyone—he worked at the vaunted establishment for a number of years. His stories delve deep into this famous roadside oddity—his look at the history of the House of Frankenstein and his experiences there show that it has more strange activity associated with it than most of the locations sitting right out there on the road.
The House of Frankenstein Wax Museum is the creepiest wax museum I have ever been in. After working there for seven years, I soon found out why it always felt so creepy. I began when I was 15 in 1991 and I was already familiar with the interior layout. It is very large––and very dark. While not meant to be the typical intentionally scary horror house, this museum is more of a true-to-life depiction of medieval torture and famous murders/monsters. Located in the heart of Lake George Village, this was the first business property to replace a local house. The house which it replaced had a horrific history horrific of it's own. Two brothers had once resided in the house and both committed suicide in the early 1970's just three years before the HOF was erected. The house was torn down and the lot was purchase by Canadian owners.
Centuries before the House of Frankenstein was constructed in 1973, the area where it now stands had been used for the town gallows, and it was then known as Caldwell. Opposing French forces, along with traitors, Huron Indians, and an array of religious heretics were slaughtered and tortured within this square of land. Over one thousand people were executed and tortured on the soil which later became the House of Frankenstein.
 The two-story wax museum opened in 1974. It seems odd to me that a majority of the exhibits within the House of Frankenstein revolve around methods of execution and torture. Given the history behind the use of the land long before the museum’s construction, I find it more than coincidental that the theme therein is so gruesome. Although the history of the land is not widely known, I wonder if in fact the owners of the museum had access to such information. Stranger still is the fact that the owners are descendants of French colonists, and since many of the people who were tortured and executed on these grounds were French, it strikes me strangely they should choose such a location. There are several exhibits that reference the French Bastille, a house of torture, and the prolonged theme again is the torture and execution of the French. Though this may be a coincidence, I beg to differ that the owners chose the location randomly. It is my belief that in many ways, they were drawn to it, recreating the once prevalent horrors by gruesomely displaying the methods used against their ancestors.
In the first three years of it's operation, five employees committed suicide, but not at the museum. One female parked a car that she stole by the lake at Shepards Park, dug a hole during a full-blown rainstorm, covered the hole with a tarp, ran a hose from the tail-pipe of her car into the hole and then laid in the hole to choke. The girl’s ghost is said to still been seen roaming the halls, but I have never seen her. I have noticed a few terribly noticeable cold spots throughout the museum, notably one directly adjacent to an exhibit called the 'Druids', which portrays human sacrifice. Often times, we noticed that some of the audio tracks which are assigned to different exhibits will start playing old music. One song in particular that seemed to be heard often was "Raindrops keep falling on my head". Every morning when the place is opened, before the squeeking of moving motors and the screams of the soundscapes, I could hear footsetps in the floor above. The same happened at night when everything was shut down. Too often, I would notice that the angle of a wax figurine's head had changed from one day to the next. And stranger still was how whenever I was alone and walking about, I thought I always saw a shadow disappear around the corner ahead of me no matter how fast I tried to catch up.
The areas that stick out most in my mind as the creepiest are the first floor Torture Chamber, nearby the guillotine; the Witch Burning exhibit on the second floor; the Crypt exhibit, also on the second floor; and an area once known as the Strange Planet (now the Lost Jungle), also on the second floor. Within these areas, I felt not only colder, but a deep sense of dread.
Within the Grim Reaper exhibit, a small journal was found recounting another employee’s bad feelings when he neared the Strange Planet attraction. Admitting that he had never felt so bad in his life, he vowed to hang himself there on August 10, 1987. There were no further entries and a cross reference check with the local newspaper revealed that an employee had died unexpectedly on that day. The obituary said he had worked there for six years, and it was unknown why he killed himself. I found the journal in 1991 in a dresser drawer within the Grim Reaper exhibit, among other strange artifacts.
– Clayton Gibbs
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THE HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN WAX MUSEUM