The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon members at Oracle & Joanna’s Psychopomp Salon ($15/mo) and above levels. Eligible members will receive a viewing link in their Patreon inbox on the day of the event. Become a member here.

Hope to see you at this free, informal, online monthly meetup devoted to open and non-judgemental conversations about death with likeminded people from around the world. Any related topic is welcome.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon Members at the Memento Mori ($5/month) and above levels. Eligible members will get an invitation in their Patreon inbox. Become a member here.

Join Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein for a book club session devoted to Lolly Willowes or the Loving Hunstsman (1926). Written by the fascinating bisexual writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, this gentle, thoughtful, and slyly subversive novel focuses on the midlife journey of a woman who dares to dream of something beyond traditional family life. As she settles into a new life in the countryside, the book moves into the territory of the supernatural and transgressive, exploring radical freedom and the importance of creating a space of one’s own.

Before the rise of modern medicine, disease was experienced as physical, spiritual, moral, and social all at once—and healing required more than physical treatment. Across medieval and early modern Europe, this worldview produced a vast and remarkably specific system of healing saints, each invoked against particular ailments: diseases of the eyes, childbirth, plague, cancer, and countless other bodily threats. Drawing on art history, religious practice, and the history of medicine, join Art Historian Brenda Edgar to explore how saints became specialists, why particular illnesses were paired with particular bodies.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon members at Danse Macabre and above levels; eligible members will receive a Zoom invitation in their Patreon inbox. Become a member HERE.

Grab a drink and join Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein to share your own—or listen to others’—mysterious encounters, whether ghost stories, uncanny synchronicities, or unusual happenings.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon Members at the Danse Macabre ($10/mo) and above levels. Limited to 25 people; RSVPs from eligible members will be accepted on a first come, first served basis. Become a member here.

Join Cloisters Assistant Educator Dénia Lara for a special members-only tour of the new exhibition “Creatures of Myth and Imagination: Europe and the Americas.” Set in the evocative atmosphere of The Met Cloisters, the exhibition explores hybrid creatures as envisioned by artists and makers in Europe and the Americas, as seen through over 50 objects including sculpture, ceramics, ivories, textiles, paintings, and metalwork.

Join Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein for a richly illustrated talk celebrating The Art of Fairy Tales, her stunning new book exploring how master artists have brought these timeless stories and figures to life. Spanning fairies to monsters, witches to mermaids, and drawing on artworks from across continents and centuries, the book invites us into enchanted realms that are at once awe-inspiring and unsettling. From the haunting visions of Golden Age illustrators such as Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen, and Maxfield Parrish, to the Pre-Raphaelite romanticism of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the symbolist shimmer of Gustav Klimt, and the dreamlike surrealism of Leonora Carrington, the book gathers a breathtaking array of works that reveal the enduring power of fairy tale imagery.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon Members at the Danse Macabre ($10/mo) and above levels. Limited to 20 people; RSVPs from eligible members will be accepted on a first come, first served basis. Become a member here.

Join us at the Morgan Library for a special curator-led tour of Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions, a new exhibition exploring tarot’s origins in Renaissance Italy and its continuing relevance as a source of inspiration for twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists. On view through October 4, the exhibition features the Morgan’s Visconti-Sforza Tarot cards—the most famous surviving deck from the Renaissance—alongside works by André Breton, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Jess, Niki de Saint Phalle, Betye Saar, Kerstin Brätsch, Chris Ofili, and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon Members at the Danse Macabre ($10/mo) and above levels. Limited to 15 people; RSVPs from eligible members will be accepted on a first come, first served basis. Become a member here.

Join us at the Morgan Library & Museum for a special curator-led tour of Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions, a new exhibition exploring tarot’s origins in Renaissance Italy and its continuing relevance as a source of inspiration for twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists. On view through October 4, the exhibition features the Morgan’s Visconti-Sforza Tarot cards—the most famous surviving deck from the Renaissance—alongside works by André Breton, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Jess, Niki de Saint Phalle, Betye Saar, Kerstin Brätsch, Chris Ofili, and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon Members at the Danse Macabre ($10/mo) and above levels. Limited to 20 people; RSVPs from eligible members will be accepted on a first come, first served basis. Become a member here.

Visit the Morgan Library & Museum's Sherman Fairchild Reading Room. The Reading Room serves scholars, artists and life long learners who wish to access the Morgan Library’s rare and special collections for research. In this special tour, Nilda Lopez, Head of Reader Services, will showcase facsimiles of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts and reference material related to Children's Books, Tarot, Witchcraft and much more! 

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

At Death Cafe people gather to "eat cake, drink tea and discuss death." For this free online event, join death midwife Lisa Cox on Zoom with a snack and beverage in hand, along with questions or stories and a thoughtful ear. There is no agenda, except as arises among those in attendance. Death Cafe is a worldwide non-profit movement to allow non-judgmental space for people to talk about death, online or in person.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

By the end of the 18th century, European cities had grown to such an extent that the tradition of burial in local churchyards had become a major health issue. In London, scandals erupted about overcrowding in pauper burial grounds and a corpse fire once burnt for a week, casting a pall of the ashes of the dead over the whole city. This illustrated lecture by professor Roger Luckhurst—author of Graveyard: A History of Living‍ with the Dead—will look in detail at the scandals that prompted reform in London in the 1820s and 1830s and how the campaigner George 'Graveyard' Walker got the law changed after decades of lurid reporting about the crush of the dead in the modern city.

Free to members of the Morbid Anatomy Patreon at Joanna’s Psychopomp level, Oracle Level and above. Become a member here.

For centuries, artists and makers have sought to reach beyond the everyday in order to create in communion with the depths of the unconscious, the divine, and the dead. Join Tiffany Hopkins, author of Beyond: A Living Person’s Guide To The Dead, for a seasonal art-making circle that begins with meditation to shift us into a receptive state. We’ll then create in our chosen mediums, and close each session with the opportunity for participants to share outcomes, experiences, and observations.

Join Morbid Anatomy for the grand re-opening of our library and exhibition space at Industry City—and be the first to encounter a remarkable new installation of the legendary Leila Cohoon Hair Art Collection. This special evening celebrates the arrival of nearly 50 extraordinary works from Cohoon’s collection, with special guest Lindsay Evans, Cohoon’s granddaughter, who will speak to her grandmother’s incredible work and impact during a tour of the collection. Come explore the new space, view the collection up close, and celebrate the next chapter of Morbid Anatomy with fellow lovers of the curious, the beautiful, and the macabre.

Join us as we inaugurate a new iteration of the Morbid Anatomy Library, now in a larger space and featuring a collection of nearly fifty pieces of Victorian hairwork donated by Leila’s Hair Museum in Independence, Missouri!

Leila’s Hair Museum, founded by Leila Cohoon in 1986, was the only museum in the world dedicated to artworks made with human hair. When Leila passed away in 2024, her family chose Morbid Anatomy as one of the spiritual homes for these gorgeous pieces, and—with the generous support of our community—we were able to bring part of this incredible collection to our home in Brooklyn.

Today will be the general public’s first chance to experience this incredible collection! Our founder and creative director Joanna Ebenstein will also be in attendance, signing copies of her new book The Art of Fairy Tales, which will be available for purchase.

And, just across the hall, our neighbors at White Ghost Tattoo Studio will be celebrating with us! White Ghost will offer limited-edition, Morbid Anatomy–themed flash starting September 27. Plus, enter a special raffle for a chance to win a custom 5-inch tattoo valued at $500!

Join visual artist and doctoral researcher Quinn Jacobson for a talk on his recent book Glass Bones, an interdisciplinary exploration of mortality awareness and the fragile structures humans build to live with the knowledge of death. Drawing from Ernest Becker, Terror Management Theory, existential philosophy, and decades of studio practice using 19th-century photographic processes, Jacobson examines how creative work can function as a site of metabolization rather than defense. Moving between psychology, philosophy, photography, painting, and memoir, the lecture explores the idea that art is not merely expressive but epistemological: a way of knowing that emerges when inherited structures of meaning begin to fracture.

Gargoyles and grotesques occupy one of the most unsettling positions in the history of art and architecture. Emerging in the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe, these distorted and often monstrous figures were not merely decorative. True gargoyles served a functional purpose, channeling rainwater away from stone walls, while their purely sculptural relatives—the grotesques—were designed to confront viewers with fear, excess, and bodily instability. This talk will trace the afterlives of the gargoyle and grotesque in modern architecture, including their revival in nineteenth-century restorations and their surprising persistence in twentieth-century skyscrapers such as New York’s Chrysler Building.

Using the library collection for inspiration, try your hand at prose or poems that draw from the shadow worlds of the imagination. The Sip & Scribe Salon, facilitated by longtime writing teacher Jocelyn Lieu, includes enspiriting writing prompts, writing time, and opportunities to share. Writing materials and refreshments are provided.

In her book Sacred Disobedience, religious studies professor Sharon Coggan traces the history of the ancient Greek God Pan, who became distorted into the image of the Devil in early Christianity. When Pan was demonized, the powerful qualities he represented, became repressed, as Pan’s visage twisted into the model of the Devil, who bears the horns, beard, and the lower body of a goat. This was the goat God, Pan! In this talk, Dr. Coggan will present the fascinating history of a nature god turned symbol of evil as examined through a Jungian lens.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon Members at the Memento Mori ($5/month) and above levels. Eligible members will get an invitation in their Patreon inbox. Become a member here.

Join Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein for a book club session devoted to Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture, a rich scholarly study by historian Per Faxneld that explores how nineteenth-century writers, artists, and activists recast Satan/Lucifer as a symbol of women’s emancipation, intellectual autonomy, and resistance to patriarchal Christianity.

Tonight, Andrew Lampert—editor of the new book Jackie Gleason: Library of the Paranormal—will share the story of Gleason's astonishing book collection and his deep fascination with subjects like psychic phenomena, life after death, and UFOs. Comedian Jackie Gleason (1916–1987) was a television pioneer, spiritual searcher, and insomniac who spent his nights reading esoteric books. Ranging from scholarly to crackpot, his 3,000-volume library spans the fringes of speculative thinking and reveals a man as concerned with the mysteries of the universe as with getting a laugh.

Join us for a deliciously Gothic event with Dr Alessandra Pino, co-author of A Gothic Cookbook. From Frankenstein to Dracula and Jane Eyre to Rebecca, Alessandra will explore the strange and fascinating role food plays in Gothic fiction. From lavish banquets to unsettling acts of consumption, the event explores how food reveals themes of desire, power, memory, and fear.

In this special Samhain lecture and ritual, mythologist Selena Madden, PhD will explore what it means to stand at such a threshold. Samhain arrives at a peculiar moment in the year. The harvest is ending. The days are growing noticeably shorter. The landscape itself seems to be withdrawing. For centuries, this seasonal turning has been associated with gatherings, fires, divination, the dead, and encounters with forces beyond the ordinary human world.

Across history, some of the most ambitious monuments to death were never meant to be built—or never could be built. Designed on paper at impossible scales, these visionary tombs reveal how artists and architects grappled with mortality, memory, and the limits of civilization itself. This lecture will explore a series of unrealized funerary projects from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when architects pushed monumentality to its conceptual extreme.

For centuries, artists and makers have sought to reach beyond the everyday in order to create in communion with the depths of the unconscious, the divine, and the dead. Join Tiffany Hopkins, author of Beyond: A Living Person’s Guide To The Dead, for a seasonal art-making circle that begins with meditation to shift us into a receptive state. We’ll then create in our chosen mediums, and close each session with the opportunity for participants to share outcomes, experiences, and observations.

"The Forgotten Dead" explores the history of these lost institutional cemeteries and the people buried within them. Through historic photographs, archival records, cemetery maps, and firsthand accounts from ongoing preservation efforts, this lecture uncovers how these landscapes came to exist, why they disappeared from public consciousness, and what they reveal about changing attitudes toward disability, mental illness, poverty, and death.

Join Dr. Jay Sullivan, author of Egyptian Gothic, for a captivating online talk that peels back the layers of modern Egyptomania. From the early, stomach-churning days of consuming ground-up mummies as medical treatments to the glittering, global frenzy of "Tutmania," Dr. Sullivan will guide you through an era where history, horror, and high society spectacularly collided.

Step into the lurid, seductive and shadowy world of German painter, graphic artist, film architect and stage designer Josef Fenneker (1895–1956), one of the great forgotten masters of Weimar-era cinema poster art.

From ancient Egypt to modern astronomy, the Sun and Moon have been more than just celestial bodies — they’ve been living gods and goddesses. This lecture will explore the history of solar, lunar, and planetary deities, and the complex roles they played in shaping human understanding of the cosmos, body, and gender. We’ll focus on the patterns and anomalies in the way deities are depicted from the rigid, masculine sun-gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia, to the mysterious moon deities in Greco-Roman and indigenous traditions.

What if perversion isn’t simply a pathology, but a way of navigating the dangerous terrain of sex, death, pain, and pleasure? Drawing on Freud, Esther Perel, literature, and film, Dr. Eddie Gamarra explores how fantasy, roles, and scripts can help us negotiate our most extreme desires and emotions.

Part generative writing, part guided reflection, this workshop offers prompts designed to stir introspection and honor the natural cycle of life-and-death. We’ll write individually, celebrate communally, and close the hour with firelight in a welcoming and inclusive space. 

In this lecture, Hartzman will share stories of booby-trapped seashells, exploding pancake mix, pigeon-guided missiles, feline spies, mind control, and many real top-secret projects commissioned by the US government and military. He will also share stories of his own experiences during research, including taking a course in remote viewing—and having unexpected success.

Join philosophy professor and author Stephan Asma for an illustrated introduction to his new book The Alchemist’s Thread, which chronicles the shadow history of this esoterica that has been practiced since ancient times.