Warning: This story may make you think twice about your holiday shopping and how those shiny, new gifts you're buying might long outlast the joy they bring. Or at least, that's what a museum near the coast of Massachusetts is hoping it will do.
It's not your typical exhibition space. A colorful blast of stuff covers every inch of the walls: Little green army guys, broken rusty knives, hairbands and hard hats. Tons more isn't even recognizable.
"Yes, it's a lot!" laughs museum founder Corinn Flaherty, "because the stuff keeps washing up."
Washing up - specifically - on the quarter-mile stretch of beach on Plum Island, about an hour north of Boston, where Flaherty walks her dog. She made her first discovery there back in the "Snowmageddon" winter of 2015, when she spotted the head of a 1940's era doll on the deserted beach.
"The beach was absolutely a sheet of ice," she recalls. "There was nothing on it except this one doll head that was upright in the sand. Frozen. And alone."
Flaherty says she carefully "wrestled it out of the ice and took it home." Ten years later, she's still not sure why.
"It spoke to me," she shrugs, tenderly holding that same doll head, and readily conceding that it is indeed a bit creepy.
"Yes," she laughs. It can "haunt you a little bit."
Still, that first rescue would lead to countless more, propelling Flaherty's "descent down the flotsam rabbit hole."
What started as a "hot mess" of stuff piling up in her home, was eventually transferred to a studio space in Amesbury, Mass., and officially opened in 2021 as the Plum Island Museum of Lost Toys & Curiosities.
Flaherty calls it a kind of "graveyard" for one-time treasures-turned-trash, which she hopes will be a sober reminder about human consumption and the eternal life of plastic waste.
What the tide brought in
On a recent afternoon, about a dozen locals came for a tour of the museum. Whispers of "wow" floated through the room as they took in the sheer quantity of it all: squirt guns, kazoos, 1950s-era hair curlers, a McDonald's Happy Meal toy, which one young visitor explained to Flaherty was also a 1980's era transformer, as he flipped out the creature's hidden limbs.
Also consigned to eternity are countless headless and limbless dolls, each with a tale untold. Flaherty is intrigued by the figurines of The Hulk and Ariel, The Little Mermaid,
"What happened with these two?'" Flaherty wonders aloud. "There are infinite stories behind these things."
Flaherty doesn't seem to mind that she'll never know those stories -- whether items were lost or tossed, or by whom and why -- before they were swept down a river or into a sewer, carried into the ocean, and eventually washed ashore on her beach.
"To me, I just like to imagine things, so I'm okay making the story up," she laughs. (The way she decided to display Ariel laying in Hulk's arms offers an idea of the story she landed on.)
A few retirees in the group were particularly taken by a display of cracked clay pipes, likely smoked in Colonial times, and shoe forms and broken high heels, likely from the shoe factories that were upstream beginning in the 19th century.
Others were drawn to more recent relics, ghosts of tech gone by, including VHS tapes, flip phones, the dial from a rotary phone and an early generation Nintendo Game Boy. Nearby are vestiges of low-tech games like Monopoly houses and Lego bricks.
One piece in particular delighted 21-year-old Sam Nathan.
"A Lego shark," he exclaimed, brimming with memories of the one he had himself. "That's a little bit of my childhood. I recognize the exact piece."
I had my own nostalgic moment, after spotting a small plastic disk with letters and numbers around the edge. I immediately recognized what was a mystery to Flaherty. She purposely doesn't Google pictures of unfamiliar objects, preferring to learn through the serendipity of a visitor who can identify it.
"What is it?" she pressed.
It's a 1970s-era label maker, I explained, the kind where you turn the dial to a letter, squeeze, and emboss a piece of plastic sticky tape to be used to label toys or school things. (This was gold to a kid with a name like "Tovia" – who never had the option of buying something personalized off-the-shelf.)
"Ohhh!" Flaherty exclaimed, thrilled to have one more mystery solved.
A carefully crafted message
A librarian by day, Flaherty is also a weaver, and The Plum Island Museum of Lost Toys & Curiosities is adjacent to her studio in an 19th century converted horse-drawn carriage factory.
Her artistry is as much on display as all the detritus she has collected. The place is a kaleidoscope of color, with carefully curated displays on shelves made from driftwood, also rescued from the same stretch of beach. Other items-- from lobster bands to plastic forks and spoons – are woven into wall hangings.
Perhaps never has junk been more artfully arranged, nor a lesson so carefully crafted.
While every washed-up doll head and twisted toy ukulele here may have its own story, to Flaherty, they all add up to a cautionary tale – that seems to be getting through to visitors.
When one woman questions a collection of colorful cylinders, Flaherty explains they are shotgun shells, likely from duck hunting in the marshes along a nearby river. They are the item she finds most frequently.
"Even more than bottle caps," Flaherty says.
That immediately prompts the woman to ask why the shells aren't made from a biodegradable material instead.
"That's a good question," Flaherty says. "We should maybe be writing letters to the manufacturers of these things and asking them, 'Why is plastic the chosen material for this object?'"
Several visitors say the exhibit made them think about their own choices, including Alex Matthews, a local rabbi who was planning a Chanukah party for kids.
"I'm handing out glow sticks," Matthews says. "I know those are going to glow for two hours. And hopefully they won't wind up in the ocean, but I know they're not durable goods that a kid will treasure forever."
As he left the museum, Matthews thanked Flaherty for making the point in a way that is persuasive without being preachy.
"I'm glad that this is a kind of bright, colorful, joyous space to communicate that message and not depressing," he said. "That would make you want to just hang your head and walk home in shame."
Copyright 2025 NPR
