The Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata displays a hair wreath woven from the hair of a dead woman, Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2007, in Austin, Texas. Curator Scott Webel and wife Jen Hirt found the item on ebay and included it in the museum's latest exhibit, "Ghosts." (AP Photo/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Jack Plunkett) **DALLAS MORNING NEWS OUT, NO SALES, MAGS OUT**

Fort Worth Star-Teleram photos by Jack Plunkett The Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata in Austin displays a "pygmy kangaroo," above, which is in its permanent collection. Below, haunted skates with laces that spell 'ice.' Curator Scott Webel said the museum "taps into the history of museums in the broadest sense." "It's both educational and entertainment."

The Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata in Austin, displays Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2007, haunted skates with laces that that spell "ice." (AP Photo/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Jack Plunkett) **DALLAS MORNING NEWS, MAGS OUT, NO SALES**"This taps into the history of museums in the broadest sense," said curator Scott Webel. "It's both educational and entertainment. And everything we present, we can back up with history."

AUSTIN -- An alleged tuft of Elvis' hair. Spooky recordings made by ghost hunters. A lipstick-stained cigarette -- but was it really the last one ever rolled by Marilyn Monroe?

Welcome to the Museum of Ephemerata, a collection of bizarre and troubling artifacts in a private home just east of the state Capitol. For suggested donations of a dime up to $4, visitors can witness a working model of a 19th century Pepper's Ghost illusion or can decide for themselves whether the display of human horns is real.

The Museum of Ephemerata is a tribute to early 20th-century dime museums and sideshows made famous by P.T. Barnum and his ilk. Like the spectacles offered at tent carnivals, the museum bridges the gap between science and pop culture.

"This taps into the history of museums in the broadest sense," said curator Scott Webel, 31. "It's both educational and entertainment. And everything we present, we can back up with history."

Located in two small front rooms in the tiny home that Webel shares with his wife and fellow curator Jen Hirt, the Museum of Ephemerata is more Sanford & Son than Smithsonian.

Patrons can thrill to gooey Ghostbusters-style ectoplasm and marvel at a stuffed pygmy kangaroo. There's a "hair wreath," which was supposedly woven from the hair of a dead person. Webel said he found it on eBay.

Is this stuff real or not? Who knows? "These were called dime museums because they cost a dime to get in," Webel says of the heritage from which his museum draws. "It was like a mix between a scientific museum and Disneyland. It could be a natural history museum, or have (exhibits about) industrial history with machines like automatons, but there was also a question of quackery in the whole way it was presented."

Webel and Hirt started their museum in 1999, while they lived in Tucson, Ariz. They based it on a collection of artifacts Webel inherited from his great-great-uncle, who operated an Arizona dime museum during the 1920s. Now it's like an intimate version of a Ripley's Believe It or Not museum (itself an inheritor of the sideshow tradition) albeit one with more of a personal, counterculture feel.

The permanent exhibit includes the Marilyn Monroe cigarette butt, an antique porcelain souvenir commemorating conjoined twins, and other oddities. Webel and Hirt call the fixed display the impermanent exhibit, in reference to the fleeting nature of many of the fads the museum celebrates.

This month, the museum features a temporary exhibit devoted to ghosts and ghost hunters. The display includes a small ghost road diorama that makes use of Victorian stagecraft technology to illustrate weird sightings in East Texas. Webel and Hirt also included creepy recordings that ghost hunters claim come from haunted houses.

"They're like disembodied, fragmented voices that are indistinct and unclear," Webel said. "They were recorded in an empty room or in a haunted house. The person who did the recording couldn't hear it at the moment of the recording, but when they played back the tape and amplified it, they could hear the voices."

Like attempting to judge the authenticity and scientific basis for many of the exhibits, Webel says the question is almost beside the point. "Our intent is not to prove or disprove, but rather to display all of the phenomena around the debate. It's the debate itself that's interesting."