When I was a kid my family would send me to my aunt’s house in Wisconsin…and she lived on a farm. [my aunt’s children] used to love to tell me ghost stories and freak me out. […] So it got really elaborate. […] So one summer I was there and they knocked down one of the old farm buildings and I’m digging through the rubble..and one of my relatives is there and is like ‘oh I wonder what that old piece of paper is, it’s probably nothing’…so I pick it up and it’s a letter [written in the 1860s, alluding to a women who killed her children on the very farm I was staying at]…So my dad let it go for a while [but then told me it was a fake].

Museum: “The Museum of Childhood Deception”

Exhibited by Susan Golland

Transcript edited by Susan Golland