Beyond the Glass

Daniel Barnum | Longreads | October 15, 2026 | 4,116 words (15 minutes)

The Hyrtl Skull Collection is the first exhibit you notice when you walk into the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. This is by curatorial design: The skulls face the main entrance, staring steadily at each person who crosses the threshold. All 139 are evenly spaced in long lines behind the glass doors of a towering cherrywood cabinet. Each one rests in a wire frame on top of a thin balsa box with a tag at its center. I recall tracking them with glances as I shuffled nearby with two friends, as part of a large crowd. Small bright lights illuminated them from inside the cases, making them glow dully from my angle. Seeing them for the first time, I was both mesmerized by this effect and intimidated by the skulls’ great number. I tried not to look for too long, but the density of people on the narrow walkway made that impossible: I was soon stuck in the dead center of the exhibit. Almost in spite of myself, I scanned the wall text and learned how they had been brought together to disprove a piece of 19th-century race science, which seemed like one of the better reasons to collect skulls. 

Most of the exhibits in the Mütter Museum have similarly odd origins. Tucked into a corner of the College of Physicians’ stately New Beaux-Arts building, the Mütter is a 19th-century medical teaching collection/cabinet museum with an annual visitorship of almost 150,000 people. Its staff goes on late-night talk shows with specimens in tow, hosts YouTube series. The gift shop sells soaps and keychains in the shapes of its artifacts. Coming out of a death-obsessed past into an incongruous living present, the exhibits are caught somewhere between scientific exemplar and exploitative spectacle. The museum acknowledges its reputation as a freak show and, in response, doubles down on the meanings of curiosity. Signs we saw at the main gate declared the place’s ethos: disturbingly informative. 

The text beside the skulls explained itself: Brought together is a euphemistic way of saying, assembled by grave robbing. Dr. Hyrtl dug up a lot of his collection, or had assistants do it for him. Or paid other collectors, other doctors. The graves were attached to hospitals, madhouses, prisons. Some of the people these skulls belonged to surely had surviving relatives, though none could afford or cared to pay for burials and upkeep, and no one has made any claims on them since Dr. Hyrtl sold his collection to the College of Physicians in 1873. The College has the distinction of being the oldest professional medical organization in the United States, and was thus a trusted member of the international buyers’ network for bodies, whole and in parts. 

I barely recall that history when I’m called in for a job interview. I quickly look up the museum online, which is why I have something to say about the Hyrtl Skulls during the interview. But I can’t keep up the pretense. I begin to ramble about the real reason I went that first day. There was a special exhibit of tsantsa (shrunken heads) on view, reported to be the most extensive group ever brought together, most on loan from private collectors. The Hyrtl Skulls were on the upper level, set opposite the entrance. We looked lost—so a security guard pointed us toward the stairway’s descending brass banister and red carpet. Across from the melting skeleton, she told us. 

Downstairs, we watched a middle-aged white woman wearing a fanny pack and soft baseball cap peer around curtains and squeal before turning away. We entered where she wouldn’t into a columned salon crowded with the museum’s teratology collection and displays of sundry wet specimens. Fetal variations. Rows of organs jellied into translucence, bound by webs of blood vessels dyed blue and red. At the far wall, the tsantsa were tiered on stands in a wide, purpose-built wood case. There were dozens: small, leathery heads still recognizably human though passed out of identity. The shrinking process had exaggerated some features, vanished others, and blackened the flesh. Many had long, black hair braided with beads and strung with bright parrot feathers. They were beautiful and horrible, familiar and strange. I could not stop staring. Their eyelids had been sewn shut. 

The poet Mary Ruefle writes about shrunken heads in her essay “My Private Property.” She reflects on growing up in Brussels and regularly skipping school to commune with a particular shrunken head in the collection of the Congo Museum, “that horrific monument of smashed lies and beautiful things.” The ruminations lead her to realize she “wanted to die.” My own day with the tsantsas felt like the opposite: It was initial, not iterative; it was a whole bunch of heads, not a singular one; I was happy, adult, new in town, not alone, truant, or passively suicidal. That first time in the museum, I by no means “wanted to die.” The life I was starting in the city was meant to be the cure for a bad ending, a bad boyfriend. For being a bad boyfriend. For Boston. When I got to Philly, I could believe that the last years of my life just hadn’t happened and here I would begin a real life in a real city. And even though, when I sit for the interview at the Mütter and have cause to answer the question Have you ever been here before?, I do indeed want to die, I am not, despite all my wanting, dead yet, so I need the job. 

Needing the job came from wanting to die. A month earlier, I quit the copy shop where I worked since coming to Philly. There, weeks earlier again, an unknown number with an area code I recognize—Tucson, Arizona’s—comes over my phone while I’m at the counter sending a fax. The call I’m expecting from my aunt. It’s been 15 years or more since we last spoke, and longer since we saw each other. She found me online and emailed late at night, while I was sleeping. I arrive for my shift, log onto a work computer—it’s a little before noon—and her note is waiting: Danny, I have to talk to you about something. Please send me your number. I type it into the message bar, then work keeps me distracted for the next few hours. The fax goes through. I charge the guy $4.27 and he calls me a criminal. I tell my boss, I’m gonna take off for a sec, then cross the counterline, snake between the customers, and open the door. 

Outside, I walk the block, not ready for the call. My mom’s family has been estranged my whole life and generations back before that. Growing up, hearing stories, it felt odd that any of my people should have found each other to begin with. They were from all over the map. Most were fleeing unimaginable things. They never stayed together, barely knew each other to begin with. Brothers, husbands, mothers, children, grandparents—all were lost again and again in life, and then in death. Was grief resounding? Some stories my mother told me about her childhood made her very sad (an angry father gone, her spine turning in on itself, the inheritable tragedy of her psyche), but many were happy. Her sister fit somewhere in the middle. I met her only a few times I could ever remember, and knew her best by her semi-regular phone calls with my mom, though I heard only my mother’s end of those conversations and was young when the two were still on speaking terms. What I knew of her was mostly my mom’s eye rolls, the gesture of her fingers forming a gun against her forehead and her deadpan expression as she cocked her thumb and pulled the trigger. This would make me laugh so loudly my aunt would ask, What’s so funny?—or so I supposed, hearing my mom’s response: Nothing. He’s watching a movie. 

I thumb the buttons on the side of my phone crossing the street to the main quad of campus. A spot appears on the open lawn, half under a plane tree’s shade and a bit beyond the arcs of a frisbee thrown between three people. I sit down. I know what this call will be, what she has to tell me. Though I feel certain, I hope for the best, or at least that she’ll deliver a line I’ve heard before: My mom is in the hospital, she’s in a psych ward, she’s in jail. No. I call my aunt, and after quick, strained How are yous, she confirms my worst thoughts in swift, worsening terms. Your mom is dead. She was murdered, and soon, Threw her body in a dumpster. After all the other details she knows: A month ago. She has waited a month to find me, to tell me. She cannot explain why. We don’t have much more to talk about. I make a plan to check in over the next few days about coming out for the memorial they’re holding where my grandma lives in New Mexico. We already had two here in Tucson, she tells me. I say, Okay, gotta go, and lie down in the grass. 

For three days I lie in bed, alternating between barely being able to move and being violently wracked with sobs. I toss back and forth between the numbness of certainty—of believing I knew before I heard—and supernatural disbelief. I wail like the wounded animal I am. On the third day, it’s my birthday. I ask for a new world. My boyfriend and my housemate take me to the trails through the forest above the little cliffs along the Wissahickon. The bright August light comes through the trees on the top of a rise, and my boyfriend takes my picture, but I have no awareness of this until the film comes back. I spend the hike trying to smile whenever I realize someone is looking at me, or, short of that, trying very hard not to cry. In my sunglasses, slumped into my boyfriend’s shoulder in the backseat on the way home, I feel like Bernie in Weekend at Bernie’s. Like the actor playing Bernie. 

I’m lying down in the grass again, in the front yard of my childhood home, visiting with my oldest friend, when she says something about how truly wretched the world is, and I laugh. Not at what she says, but how she says it. It’s the first time I’ve laughed since I talked to my aunt. Which is a euphemistic way of saying since I heard my mom was murdered. When it happens, my laugh feels like a betrayal. I do not know how I am going to live in this world. You get it! I tell my oldest friend. My boyfriend holds my hand on the flight from Philadelphia to Albuquerque, and on the bus down to Las Cruces. He holds my hand in the church hall at my mom’s third memorial service, except when I have to stand up in front of the room full of strangers to give a eulogy. On the ride from the service, sitting next to me in the back-backseat of an SUV so cavernous it swallows my aunt’s soft voice in the front, he pulls his hand back when he gets a text meant for me from our housemate back in Philly. Bad timing/great gig, it reads, with a link to a Mütter Museum job listing that closes the following day. 

There’s no grass to lie down in at my aunt’s hotel, where she’s having our family gather for a post-memorial pool party, so I update my CV in the computer lab. More betrayal. When I finally get in the water, I race my youngest cousin, whom I have never met before. I stay under as long as my breath holds. In a few days, I’ll be in the Pima County Courthouse in Tucson, sitting across from the murderer, and, that evening, my aunt will hand me the small black plastic box containing my mother’s ashes. My mother as ashes. My mother in the form of ash. Time and places are spiraling, have been since I heard. I’m still hearing, still seeing. The next week, in Philadelphia, the copy shop welcomes me back, but I can’t last more than 40 minutes of my shift. I do not know how I am going to live in this world. The world going on: the worst betrayal. 

I don’t say all that in my interview. Nobody is prepared to hear Devastating tragedy made life as I knew it incomprehensible in answer to Why did you leave your last position? A month has passed since I quit, two months since I heard about my mom (a euphemistic way of saying since I heard my mom was murdered), three months since her murder. As with her ashes, putting the murder into her possession feels off to me. Did she own it? Was it part of her? It wasn’t something she could claim, like a package or a piece of luggage. She didn’t have too much to do with it; she was the one with too much done to her. Too much: a euphemism my brain conjures to replace images of actual violence, conjured from police reports and testimony from eyewitnesses and the man I sat across from in the courtroom. This pattern—unbidden images, then banishing language—I can’t seem to control. 

In the interview, it’s just me and my broken brain and a copy of my CV I ran off on 24-pound cloudy-gray stock that last day at the shop. Bullet points about things someone with my name did, all the stuff I’m supposed to know how to do. I thought those shrunken heads were really cool, I tell the woman, and she says she thought so too. Gasps, Wasn’t that incredible?, when I mention the green and blue iridescent beetle wings braided into their hair. I understand her as someone who loves her job, which is something I have always thought questionable, if not impossible, but she is an adult goth on payroll with full benefits at a 19th-century wunderkammer of death, mourning, and human oddities, and that constellation of person and circumstance has never before formed in my mind. Although it should have, as I am, in my way, an adult goth, and all the more lately with mourning and death so readily in my thoughts. I would soon come to learn that most of the staff of the Mütter Museum and its parent organization, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, were, each in their way, adult goths. Where else would we go? 

They were really controversial. Holly, my new boss after the interview, tells me that the museum got a lot of heat for the tsantsa exhibit’s perceived disregard of ethical practices. It wasn’t always clear where the heads came from or how people got ahold of them in the first place. Plus they just really freaked people out. I laugh, then stop laughing, because I don’t want to seem like I’m laughing at ethics violations or shrunken heads. I’m laughing at people being freaked out by shrunken heads, although I understand. Really I was laughing in response to the tone in her voice which indicated humor in the phrase freaked people out. My focus was on cues: Smile when someone smiles at you. People like to complain, Holly says. 

You’ll be dealing with a lot of people, hundreds on the weekends. They’ll either love it or hate it, and they’ll let you know. If anyone asks for a refund, if they’ve been in the museum longer than 15 minutes, tell them no. Holly points to the red refund button on the museum’s ticketing screen, then clucks her tongue as she clicks and the amount on the screen turns negative. She touches a big gray button and a receipt prints on a scroll of paper as the cash drawer jolts out. Make sense? she asks, and I nod, mmmhmming in unison with the two other hires. It’s my turn. She has me pull closer to the screen and the chair’s wheels twirl beneath me. Gray button, red button, gray button, drawer. See? So easy. 

It’s a little after 3:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, one of the slowest times of the week, perfect for training. This is our first shift. We’ve been walking and talking since 11 a.m., and have been at the register for over an hour now with Holly explaining shortcuts and the various branchings of ticket types. Erin, Christina, and I take turns selling to dwindling bursts of visitors. Erin and Christina are nice, but nervous, and I assume I must be assumed as such too. I am smiling on cue and exhibiting a genius for point-of-sale software, but not making a big deal about it. I am trying hard not to cry, and I will somehow succeed at this during work hours for years. That morning I told myself in the mirror, NO CRYING!—which made me feel foolish, which made me start to cry. And then laugh. Early on in the shift, Holly mentions the possibility of this gig going full-time, and I take this as a reason to live. My survivor benefits end in a year; I’ll need the insurance to pay for the therapy I’m about to start after the predetermined date when the state of Arizona says grief should stop, or at least that their obligation to pay for it is over. I’ll need the therapy because it’s where my brain gets good at going to work, at living in the world. Once a week, I’ll feel normal, allowed to be wholly in grief. After each session, I’ll walk the mile home, and pass the same patch of grass I lay down in when I first heard. Everything I don’t want to think about will rise up from the ground all around me. Too much. 

Training overloads us with information. There are dozens of people on staff with names to memorize and departmental relations to understand, hidden wings of the building to explore, intricate calendars to master. Novelty begins to balance out my psychic deadweight. I touch the grid of buttons on-screen, and even that slight activity pushes the unwanted sights to the edge of my mind, even out of it. I’ve barely thought of my mom (mom becoming a euphemism for her murder) since I started this shift, but how long can that last? The number of minutes between visitors is increasing. When the museum closes at five, we’re to refill the brochure stand and empty the plexiglass cube people drop their guest badges into as they leave, but for the next hour, there’s not much to do. Why don’t you guys take a break and check out the collection? You’ll get a real tour next shift, but for now, just spend some time in there. Holly lists some of the exhibits she loves—The Soap Lady, Harry Eastlack—and tells us to go wild. 

We walk a diagonal across the College’s marble entry hall, where a classical statue that I’ll learn is Asclepius, the Greek god of the healing arts, carries a big club with a snake wrapped around it. There are thick curtains to duck under, and suddenly we’re in a deep red chamber faceted in brass, glass, and wood. Bodies and parts are everywhere we look. The shelves are covered with objects and specimens in a curatorial vision bordering on horror vacui. Whoa! It feels totally different, Christina says. She’s never been here when the museum was empty like this, and neither have I. With no living bodies standing between us and the other bodies, there’s a lot to look at all at once. I turn to follow the balcony’s open ring around the stairs, my eyes passing over a bezoar, some bloodstained lengths of gauze . . . but I can’t fix on anything. Then: skulls. 

One hundred thirty-nine. I do not try to count them. They range in size, in general and specific shape. The color of each varies: gray, amber, yellow, ivory, gleaming white. There are different bumps and divots in the bone to take in, small details differentiating each one from the next. Many are missing teeth, a few have cracks or slashes or holes left from when something outside forced its way in. Knives and sabres and bullets. The trace of bone plates’ fusion remains in jagged lines like black lightning. Labels below each head form a piecemeal map of Europe, the Levant, Western Asia, and North Africa. Places people I come from came from. I stand for a long time in front of the case, thinking about how they all ended up here, together, these people who would likely never have met in life. The 19th century is long gone; phrenology is and was always bunk—so what lesson can the specimens teach me? My vision relaxes the longer I stare, and the skulls begin to blur into one another. When I catch myself and sharpen my sight, I see my face reflected in the glass, eye-level with the center row. My ghost between two skulls in a long line. 

For the next few years, I see these sights almost every day. Not like the images I try to block out: The skulls are real, not a secondhand reality become trauma, making life feel over while it’s still going on. My grandma tells me she has bad dreams. My aunt has religion. I have a diagnosis and a steady job at the goth factory. I see the skulls every day I work—five days a week when full-time comes through. Whenever security calls me into the museum over the walkie talkie, whenever I’m just strolling on shift, or passing through to use the secret door on my lunch break. Sometimes, I linger at their case and read what I can make out of the lettering on a few of the frontal bones. Some skulls were engraved with the names of their former owner, if known, along with ethnicity, occupation, age, and cause of death, as these were the pertinent details Dr. Josef Hyrtl needed for making his case against phrenology. Despite the claims of collectors, a skull can only belong to its own person, not a museum or any other buyer on the market. 

I appreciate the attention to detail. I’m close enough to read the incised black letters on one of the skulls. Despite wanting Philly to overwrite Boston, the German that I learned at an old job in Massachusetts is still good enough to let me make out most of the inscription. The tag on the base fills in the rest: Geza Urmenyi, 80. Romania. Protestant, shepherd. At age 70, attempted suicide by cutting his throat. Wound not fatal because of calcified larynx; laryngeal fistula remained. Lived until 80 without melancholy. There are no teeth in his jaws, and the sockets have smoothed over. I take a step back from the case, focused on the blank space where his mouth would have been. I can see him in the story engraved in his forehead. Clear hazel eyes set into two deep bruises. His nose’s sunburnt flesh. The lips, folded in to cover where his teeth should be. Very thin but leanly muscled; his body grown solid from a lifetime walking the herds up and down the mountains. Face sliced with wrinkles. He is exhausted. He doesn’t know how to live in the world. He draws his best knife across his neck as fast as he can, but something in his own body stops it. Won’t let it cut deep enough to do more than hurt and make a mess. 

Ten years without melancholy. It will take me just as long to become something like myself again. A decade on, releasing my mom’s ashes at last, I’ll know it’s over. No more dreams. If I hadn’t declared an end date, it could have gone on forever. Sometimes, I wanted it to. I didn’t know how else to live in the world. I only knew how I wanted to die: to draw my best knife across my brow and pluck my skull from my head. To hold it in my lap and sand down the spot where my story was engraved. To blow away the dust and polish the bone with a fine cloth. To set it gently back within the flesh of my head. To be born whole again into the world, a new world—a world without melancholy. To live there, beyond the glass. My skull looking out from behind my face, smiling, like all skulls.

Daniel Barnum’s poems and essays appear in Prairie Schooner, Guernica, Seneca Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, The Offing, and elsewhere. Their writing has received support from the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Hambidge Center. They live in Athens, GA, where they are at work on a novel.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands