At this museum, the tide brings in odd treasures that become a lasting lesson

At this museum, the tide brings in odd treasures that become a lasting lesson Corinn Flaherty holds the first doll head she found washed ashore in 2015. It propelled her "descent down the flotsam rabbit hole" and was her inspiration for the Plum Island Museum of Lost Toys & Curiosities. Tovia Smith/NPR hide caption toggle caption 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." Pez containers, golf tees, the remains of printer's blocks and a sand timer are among the items collected from the beach and displayed at the Plum Island Museum of Lost Toys & Curiosities. Tovia Smith/NPR hide caption toggle caption 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,...

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