Fright at the (City) Museum is more fun than frightening

If you know the City Museum, you know that every turn reveals something unusual and unexpected. But maybe the folks there outdo themselves at Halloween. Fright at the Museum, which runs Sept.

28-Oct. 26, is the City Museum’s third-annual Halloween event (the first year, it was called Misfit Halloween). This year and last, one of the displays shows real taxidermy mice dressed up like famous characters from horror movies.

A Freddy Kreuger mouse wears a battered hat, a striped red-and-green sweater and a knife-enhanced paw. A Hannibal Lecter mouse is wrapped tightly in a miniature straitjacket. A Leatherface mouse carries a tiny little chainsaw.

It’s hard to get more unusual and unexpected than that. The Taxidermy Horror Mice are probably as creepy as the themed exhibit gets. As far as children know, the City Museum is a place for them.

“Our event is not intended to be gory and bloody. It’s meant to be curious, odd and spookily entertaining,” says City Museum Director of Marketing Katy Enrique. “It’s not a haunted house.

” The (moderate) frights at the Fright at the Museum are included in the regular admission, and are spread out over every floor. The first floor serves as a kind of appetizer, “to get people in the mood,” Enrique says. The lights are dim and in Halloween-appropriate colors.

Giant black spiders hang from every surface, and skeletons climb the walls. The skeletons serve a dual purpose. First, obviously, they’re skeletons.

But they also subtly .