I'm

.

... Dear friends, we meet again for another exciting episode of Fireside Mystery Theater.

The following original radio drama made its debut as part of our Strange Anatomy show,

which we taped live at the Slipper Room on the 30th of October 2016.

How we wish Gretchen Warden was still with us.

She was certainly on our minds as we dreamed up this show we call Strange Anatomy.

Now, Gretchen Wharton, who left us too soon in 2004 at the age of 56,

was at one time the director of the Mooter Museum in Philadelphia.

It's a museum that houses a treasure trove of medical oddities

from the connected

livers that belonged to conjoined twins, Chang and Eng,

to a preserved malignant tumor that was extracted

from the hard palate of President Grover, Cleveland.

The Muter Museum is the very definition of strange anatomy.

With warden at the helm, the visitorship of the museum went from a poultry a few hundred a year

to over 60,000 people a year.

She was a frequent guest on Light Night with David Letterman,

gleefully terrifying the talk show host with creepy

artifacts and curios. But in spite of her well-loved, dark sense of humor, Warden was a woman

who approached her work with great sensitivity, reverence, and awe. She once said,

While these bodies may be ugly, there is a terrifying beauty

...