Greg Newkirk and Dana Matthews are the founders and curators of the Traveling Museum of the Paranormal & Occult, which they call the “world’s only museum full of haunted, cursed, and paranormally significant artifacts that comes to YOU.”
Given the pair’s obvious dedication to democratizing access to their collection, it should come as no surprise that they’re also attempting to 3D scan and 3D print everything they have. That would offer even wider access to haunted objects like “a mirror that has given countless people strange and disturbing visions” and “a piece of the most iconic haunted house in history,”
As Matthews told Week in Weird, the problem is that the scans started confusing the ghosts that haunt the objects. Or, at least that’s what she says happened while they were scanning an African idol–nicknamed Billy–“with a history of giving intense nightmares”
“In the case of Billy,” she said, “he kept literally putting up a wall in front of his face every time we tried to scan it. We had to sit down and conduct an EVP session with him to find out he was just concerned about the scanning process; he didn’t understand what we were trying to do with him.”
The team explains that the 30 hours it took to scan the object was mostly spent negotiating with Billy. After all that, they say, their attempt to print the object melted the printer.
Though the story has more than a whiff of the fantastical, we can take the popularity of this youtube video as an indication that 3D scanning tech has not only infiltrated the mainstream, but also made its way into hyper-specialized fringe applications. The world is becoming more and more comfortable with 3D tech.
