Many of us dream of quitting our jobs to stay at home practising a weird hobby every day, and a taxidermist and horror-lover from south Wales has done just that. Father-of-two Dave Roberts opened his Morbitorium in 2018 in the house which neighbours his partner’s property in the quiet village of Pontywaun nestled between Cwmcarn and Crosskeys.
He knocked through the wall to connect the two small houses and has stacked the building with curiosities he’s collected over the last decade to create what is surely one of the strangest places to visit in the country. His house of horrors is something to behold on the otherwise unremarkable street and the villagers love him. They even offered to have a whip-around to replace his lifesize skeleton Mort when he was broken by vandals.
The house, which is free to enter and where visitors can purchase most of the weird objects, has become so popular that last year the 51-year-old ex-IT worker from Penarth handed his notice in and decided to become a full-time master of the Morbitorium.
Dave, who dons a velvet smoking cap and a pair of round bold spectacles, directs us to a tiny skull sitting in a pristine glass dome inside his taxidermy workshop at the back of the house. “That’s my old pet cat Gene. He died a few years ago, he got knocked over and I buried him in the back garden. Then we had another cat that got run over and we buried that one, so I dug him up and wanted to do something with him. I was going to articulate his skeleton but while unearthing him he was so scattered I didn’t want to make a mess of him, so I just went with his skull. I’m going to add some stuff and make a little tribute to him.”
Alongside Gene his most bizarre exhibits inside are an abundance of stuffed animals he has created, a mummified cat which was found under the floorboards of a Tudor house, and wet specimens of moles, a puppy and a dog’s testicles - preserved for years by injecting chemicals into the specimens and putting them in a jar of alcohol.
“It’s a bit more Doctor Frankenstein, but some people who come here are really drawn to it [the wet specimens] and actually prefer it to the taxidermy,” Dave said. “I’m hoping to start doing some wet specimen classes in the future.”
He started taxidermy workshops after perfecting the technique ever since his partner bought him a class for Christmas around ten years ago. “I did that first,” Dave said, pointing to the rather unnerving large hare in the workshop surrounded by some of his other creations. “He’s knocking on a bit now.”
His taxidermy classes are surprisingly most popular with middle-aged women who now flock to the morbitorium in their droves. “They have told me how they’ve really gone for it with their interest in horror since they’ve got older and maybe have more time on their hands. That’s what’s happened for me too. We also have some from the alternative crowd who come. People come and I put a frozen rat or rabbit in front of them, for example, and I talk them through the whole thing and take it apart and make it look nice again. When I started teaching I was doing it in the kitchen next door but we’ve slowly got better and more professional.
“The animals that I use for the classes are reptile feed. They come pre-frozen and clean. I’ve got some stuff in the freezer that the cat has brought in but I’d never use that in a class.”
He shows us the head of a dormouse with its fur flattened behind it like a well-ironed cape. “Here’s one that’s not yet finished,” he demonstrates. “We start off with a proper mouse and at the end of the morning we end up with something like this. It’s just taking the top layer off. If you end up with guts you’re not doing it right. Then in the afternoon we sew it up after making a new body from wood shavings.”
His favourites are one of his mummified cats and Chester his dodo-peacock hybrid which sits on a cabinet near the front door and greets visitors. “I’ve had a couple of mummified cats, but that one I’m definitely keeping. The first one I had was from a guy in Neath who'd opened a tattoo studio. He went down to the basement and the mummified cat was there. But this one was found under the floorboards of a house. You can tell its age by the colour - the others I have had have been a sort of dusty grey.
“I saw Chester at an auction and I was kind of not surprised but also very surprised that I was the only person who bid for it. Chester would be classed as rogue taxidermy where you construct something from something that is real but make something entirely different. There are people who make their living from it.”
Dave isn’t doing badly from his new venture either. “It’s paying all my bills and the mortgage. It was my five-year plan to get out of IT and do the Morbitorium full time but then lockdown happened and that accelerated everything. I could do my job from a forest but they wanted us in the office again all the time after lockdown and it became too much, so I jumped ship. It was a bit too early and it’s been tricky at times but it’s been manageable. I don’t have much of a pension so I know I’m going to be working until I drop, so I’d rather spend it here than elsewhere.”
He invites a priestess from a coven in Mountain Ash to perform tarot card reading workshops at the house which is getting busier with new oddities each week. His dozen ouija boards which cover a whole wall have almost all been donated to him by people hoping he’d take them off their hands.
A sign on the wall reads: "Many of the ouija boards on display have been sent to us from people who have had negative experiences whilst using them. These boards are not for sale and we politely ask that you do not touch or play with them. Morbitorium accepts no responsibility for any experiences or attachments you may encounter as a result of contact with these donated boards."
Most of the boards have been sent with accompanying letters explaining scary experiences. He has kept the letters and flicks through them. “They’re pretty startling if you read through them. They’re mostly from America. Some of them just turn up but most write to me first.” One arrived through the letterbox randomly from a man named Lennie with an accompanying note: “Please accept this as a gift and use or dispose of it as you see fit.”
Dave is predictably unmoved by the letters. “The theory is if you give them to others they become blank slates again. I smoke cleanse them when they arrive just in case.”
What does his family think of his changed life? “My partner is all right with it, she’s quite alternative too. She wouldn’t collect it herself but because I’ve got it she’s into it. When my kids were younger they weren’t sure but because they’ve grown up with it they love it now.”
The locals are all in too. “It’s the best place I’ve ever lived. The first public facing thing we did was with Mort. He was seven-foot tall and was out the front of the house - quite an imposing figure. One day during lockdown two people came and snapped him in half, and the village offered to raise the money to get me a new one which was really cool. The kids used to love him as they went past every day on the school bus.
“Every now and then the local kids remember I exist and come in every night for a week. It’s always: ‘Is this real? Is that real?’ They’re fascinated by it. One night I came down and it was very quiet and a couple of the girls were in the front room with a ouija board on the floor asking: ‘Is anybody with us?’”
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