Laclede's Landing Wax Museum

Presidents, monsters, movie stars and decades of wonderfully strange St. Louis tourism under one roof.

Lobby of Wax Museum

Among the brick warehouses and cobblestone streets of Laclede's Landing survives one of downtown St. Louis's strangest attractions: a traditional wax museum filled with celebrities, historical figures and monsters.

The Story

The Laclede's Landing Wax Museum belongs to an older style of American tourist attraction: part history lesson, part celebrity spectacle and part haunted-house weirdness. Its exhibits range from presidents and world leaders to movie stars, sports figures, superheroes and horror characters.

That mixture fits the Landing itself. The surrounding district has repeatedly reinvented old riverfront buildings for new generations of visitors, and the wax museum preserves a particularly eccentric layer of that tourism history.

For years, the museum's strangest attraction waited below the celebrity and historical figures: the Chamber of Horrors. Its lower level was packed with gruesome figures drawn from nightmares, torture scenes, monsters, and Hollywood horror. That basement became a cult favorite precisely because it felt darker, rougher, and stranger than the galleries upstairs. The Chamber of Horrors is still part of the museum's lore, but visitors no longer have access to that former lower-level experience.