Monthly Archives: May 2011
Creepy gift: The Human Lampshade
When collector Skip Henderson first saw the lamp at a New Orleans store, he knew it was unique. It looked old, and because of the style of the welds that hold the wire frame together, he could deduce that it was from Europe. But what caught his interest was the lampshade. Made of a material that was thin and yet had a strange texture. It was something he had never seen before. He paid the $35 price and took it home.
A lot of short stories in horror anthologies start like this, don’t they? The lamp turns out to be cursed or something?
Anyway, over the next few days, Henderson began to investigate and it became clear that not only was the lamp unique, the strange material was probably, as you’ve already guessed, human skin. The realization was too much for Skip. The lamp creeped him out so much that he decided it would make the perfect gift.
He got on the phone with his friend, Mark Jacobson, who happened to be a reporter. Henderson told him he’d just returned from a professional tanner who told him that animal that the shade was made of had no fur. Oh, and he said, “Since this thing appeared, it’s like my face has been shoved into hell.” Henderson then dropped the bombshell telling Jacobson that the lampshade was in the mail on its way to New York. Enjoy your new lamp, fucker!
Source: Historynet.com
Jacobson, not content to just stick his new lamp on an end table or re-gift it to his in-laws, sent it off to get tested. When the results came back, the DNA tests “found a 100 percent probability that the profile was human.” Whose skin? Who knows? The furthest they can trace the lamp’s origins is to an abandoned house in New Orleans. Some of you may be thinking it’s a gruesome product of the Nazi concentration camps, but there has actually never been any evidence the Nazis made such lampshades, and no such objects have ever been found — that’s considered a myth.
Once he confirmed what it was, Jacobson was also seriously creeped out by the light fixture and refused to have it in his home. He stashed it in a storage shed two states away. He has since written a book about the lamp (The Lampshade) and he has tried to get a museum to take it off his hands but it’s useless as a museum piece without some knowledge of the origins. Maybe Jacobson will find out once the hauntings start.
