Clement Kunkle Talks About Collecting Oddities at Cleveland Curiosities

Clement Kunkle wasn’t a typical student and was wholly uninterested in college. So, when his high school biology teacher showed him a monkey skull after class one day, new doors opened. Kunkle and his now-wife Hallie Wallace became fascinated by antiques, natural history and animal anatomy. 

In 2018, they opened Cleveland Curiosities, a unique oddity shop in Lakewood that sells everything from taxidermy to vintage contraception devices to uranium glass. In early 2026, the couple’s little shop expanded into a larger space right next door. 

“We have a couple new human skeletons coming in because we have room for them,” Kunkle says. “The new place works really well for being able to compact stuff while still making it visible for everybody and having a flow where everybody feels comfortable.”

The new Cleveland Curiosities has provided space for Kunkle and Wallace to spread their collection across three connected rooms, with plans to turn one of them into a curated mini museum. With more space comes opportunities to collect and display even more cool, creepy and offbeat items. We talked with Kunkle about how the store started, where it’s going and the art of balancing the creepy with the educational. 

How did Cleveland Curiosities come about and how has it evolved?
We have learned a lot over the past eight years. We were doing this before the store, too. Hallie and I both found [school] to be so boring … We kind of just started getting into like antiques and natural history and animal anatomy, and then after high school we were like, dude, we’re not doing college. Nothing against college. It’s just not our thing. And then we were like, let’s just kind of go off what we’ve already built, and then we built the store.

How do you balance the shop’s creepy appeal with its scientific side?
We have our own specific interests, and it’s not always everything spooky and creepy. We do enjoy a lot of educational pieces and historical pieces, it just kind of all depends, because our interests vary … There are so many stores that have so many different things that have completely changed overtime, but since we deal in some really cool old antique occult books and medical books, we’re able to show the history behind some of this really cool, oddball history.

Is there an object or display in the new space that best represents what Cleveland Curiosities is all about?
So, we put a big taxidermy hyena and made a cool scene. When you walk into the other room, you get like an elephant skull, a hyena, an antique guillotine, a coffin. Like all of it hits you at once. So, I feel like that’s kind of a good area.

13377–13381 Madison Ave., Lakewood 44107, 216/777-0257, clevelandcuriosities.com

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