Weird, Wicked Weird: The home of 'Junk and Dead Things'

COOPERS MILLS — About 20 years ago, fully living up to its name, Elmer’s Barn of Junk and Dead Things sold a coffin with a body inside to a Pennsylvania man looking for a coffee table.

Today, the shop is a little lighter on the dead, but just a little.

The popular stop on Route 32 just north of Augusta greets visitors with a yard full of curious folk art and rust. It’s antique shop meets “Flea Market Flip” paradise meets the unexpected, like, say, a cracked assortment of random doll body parts, which, owner Ivana Wilson assured, won’t sit on the shelves long.

“We sell a pile of doll parts, the real creepy ones,” Wilson said.

Her father, Elmer, bought the building 40 years ago when it was a sporting goods shop, moving in his antique store from up the road. In 1985, he added a large addition to the front. It’s made for three-plus floors of winding staircases and rooms packed with finds from auctions or people coming by to sell by the truckload.

“Somebody would call, ‘Are you open?’ (Elmer would answer), ‘Does a bear (blank) in the woods? That was one of his favorite sayings,” Wilson said. “Or, ‘Do you buy stuff?’ ‘Does a bear (blank) in the woods?'”

She came to work here 11 years ago, seven years ago turning part of the space into an antique mall that’s up to 48 vendors now with their own niches carved out. Wilson, too, still buys and does antiquing house calls.

“I’m lucky because they still bring truckloads,” she said. “I know what sells and what doesn’t and how much it sells for. Everybody likes wire, rusty metal and wood boxes are really good. Glass is very, very, very dead.”

A number of shoppers walk in clearly inspired by cable TV.

“Anything they can refurbish is the thing, too. Take a door and turn it into a bench,” said Wilson. “It’s funny when they buy this stuff. I wait until they pay me (to ask), ‘What are you going to do with that?’ because I don’t want to deter them from buying it. There’s a lot of creative people out there; you’d be surprised.”

The downside to TV’s influence: Dickering. For decades, the price was the price for most people.

“(Elmer) got sick of it toward the end of it,” Wilson said. “Everybody wants to dicker because they want to be the pickers (from ‘American Pickers.’)”

At 74, he hasn’t been in the shop for about a year, but his legacy is everywhere. In one room on the third floor, there’s a stack of old wooden blueberry boxes, many marked Monmouth Canning Co., the remainder of a lot of 10,000 boxes Elmer bought.

Chairs hanging from the ceiling are just the tip of the chair iceberg, Wilson said. She grew up in a house right behind the shop and worked there as a kid.

“I hate, hate chairs,” she said. “We used to lug them to the fourth floors.”

She could only carry one up at a time, and as a kid, that was a long four flights.

“If someone wants to sell me a chair, I refuse,” Wilson said.

Different shelves hold tools, trunks, hinges, salt and paper shakers and the occasional new item, including Matchbox cars, stocked to offer something for young customers.

Years back, Elmer’s had “a ton of taxidermy,” she said. “Twenty to 30 years ago, he bought out Perry’s Nut House — the elephant, the giraffe (and more.) So we had that kind of stuff for four or five years.”

The coffin with the body inside may have been the one displayed at Perry’s or it may have been a realistic fake. She can’t be sure.

There’s little taxidermy in the shop today, though a bespectacled skunk, Stinky, the store mascot, greets customers by the register.

“He just got glasses; he’s getting up there in age,” Wilson said.

A few other animal heads hang out back, one a deer with its skin sloughing off that makes her wince.

“It’s pretty gnarly,” she said.

Elmer’s Barn of Junk and Dead Things, open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week, may yet have a few former inhabitants still hanging around. There’s a you’re-not-quite-alone feeling in the building at night, the kind that makes your hair stand on end, Wilson said.

“My fiance got creeped out — he heard the door open and close,” she said.

She’s had picture frames wiggle on the wall.

“It’s the wind,” Wilson tells herself. She’d rather not think about dead things she can’t see.

Weird, Wicked Weird is a monthly feature on the strange, intriguing and unexplained in Maine. Send pics and ideas to kskelton@sunjournal.com, but please, keep the doll parts to yourself.

A mannequin sits on a ledge alongside other items in Elmer’s Barn of Junk and Dead Things on Thursday in Coopers Mills.

“Stinky” the skunk wears a pair of reading glasses and sits near the entrance of Elmer’s Barn of Junk and Dead Things in Coopers Mills on Thursday.

Elmer’s Barn of Junk and Dead Things is housed in a multi-level barn in Cooper’s Mills and open for treasure hunters seven days a week.

Ivana Wilson looks at a stuffed moose head at Elmer’s Barn of Junk and Dead Things in Coopers Mills on Thursday afternoon.

Elmer’s Bard of Junk and Dead Things in Coopers Mills offers curious juxtapositions like this Asian plate among rusty tools seen in the barn on Thursday.