Doylestown’s VAMPA Museum: Where history meets the paranormal

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On crisp fall days, visitors to the Vampire and Paranormal (VAMPA) Museum, just outside of Doylestown,  are greeted by grounds that are more whimsical than terrifying.

There’s a hyper realistic dinosaur playground for kids, a big red barn filled with antiques, colorful unicorn and mushroom sculptures — and wandering throughout it all, three brilliantly colored peacocks.

It’s an unlikely place to revel in the frights and fears of spooky season — until you step inside the museum and the playful exterior fades. As you wander rooms lined with vampire killing instruments and the unsettling presence of dolls that may or may not move, owner and curator Edmondo Crimi will regale you with tales about demonic infestations and a mysterious, mischievous presence on the property.

Suddenly, the paranormal feels a lot closer.

Crimi opened the museum a year ago in his own house, on the grounds of what was an old dairy farm that dates back to the late 1700s. He collected most of the pieces in the museum over the past 40 years during his travels as an antiques dealer to England, France, Germany and Italy.

Crimi traces his interest in vampires and the paranormal to his ancestry: His grandfather’s brother and uncle were priests in Catania, Sicily, who also dabbled in fighting the demonic. There are “a lot of stories in the family about the exorcisms,” Crimi said.

The folklore surrounding vampires dates to the Bible, Crimi said, but stories about vampires became popular in the 1500s in Europe, after more than 30% of the European population was decimated by the bubonic plague. Europeans used holy water, herbs, salt, wooden stakes, crucifixes and other tools to “kill” vampires, Crimi said. The oldest item in the museum’s collection is a vampire killing instrument from the 1400s, he said.

The museum offers more than just vampire artifacts, though. There is a display with exorcism chairs examining “levels of demonic ownership,” a seance exhibition and a doll room which Crimi said sees “the most paranormal activity” of any space in the museum.

“Sometimes things will move,” Crimi said. “I don’t think it’s demonic, necessarily. I think it’s just, you know, activity …Children love to also go into dolls. People like to go into dolls. So it’s just a way of the spirits feeling happy.”

As word has spread about the eerie museum, its number of visitors have grown to 500 each weekend, Crimi said. Visitors travel across the nation and internationally to see VAMPA’s collection of antique vampire killing sets, the largest in the world.

Crimi said they’ve benefitted from the widespread cultural appeal of the paranormal — an interest which, for all the technological advancements of the 21st century, is still as compelling to many people as it was in the Dark Ages.

“People are fascinated by what they don’t understand,” he said. “That’s always been a fact of life. People are searching and trying to understand life as they’re trying to deal with the concept of death.”

The various objects in the museum’s collection are sinister, but what makes the site special is the presence of “a little girl by name of Abigail,” Crimi said.

Crimi has lived on the property for more than 30 years. He said during that time, employees often argued amongst themselves over who had spilled the milk, and his own daughters, when they were young, would accuse each other of having drank the milk.

“This was a dairy farm, so we think there’s a correlation with Abigail and milk, and we still have experiences,” he said. “Even last week, I poured milk for the cats, and within two minutes, the cats weren’t even in the room, half the milk was gone.”

Crimi said that unlike other, more negative experiences he’s had with paranormal activity, which he declined to share, Abigail is “not demonic in any sense of imagination.”

“She’s more mischievous,” he said. “She’s a little girl, so she likes to play.”

Investigation into Abigail and other paranormal activity on the VAMPA Museum property is one of the subjects of a two-part documentary, “Paranormal Pickers,” featuring Crimi and paranormal investigator Eric Mintel and his team. It premiered at Doylestown’s County Theater on Oct. 11.

Crimi said putting all the spookiness of the museum aside, he sees it as a family-friendly experience that emphasizes goodness in the world.

There’s a room in the museum dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel and his battle against the devil — a room which Crimi said is his favorite because it helps express the museum’s central focus: “How to fight evil.”

Even objects like carved skeletons aren’t necessarily meant to be scary, Crimi said. The Stoics, for example, displayed skulls with the Latin phrase, “Memento Mori” — ”Remember you will die” — as an affirmation of life.

Crimi said the museum has donated to St. Jude’s Hospital for Children and other charitable causes, and he wants to continue to grow their community impact in the coming years.

The museum is open year-round, Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., and by appointment during the week. Admission is $15 for adults, $8 for children ages 6-17 and free for children under 6. Information about upcoming events and special ticketed experiences can be found on VAMPA’s Instagram.