This time it's for real. After struggling to convince Baltimore and beyond to believe in its homage to the grotesque, the freakish and the phony, the American Dime Museum's strange seven-year show has come to an end.

Soon, the entire collection will go to auction - every shrunken head, every bizarre biological specimen, every mummy.

"To the bare walls, as they say," says Dick Horne, the museum's owner, curator and biggest fan. "No offers refused."

Baltimore, a city that prides itself on an organic quirkiness, has been unable to sustain what has to be its strangest attraction.

"We're losing another great piece of Baltimore personality," said Baltimore filmmaker John Waters. "It was esoteric and great and hilarious and very fitting for this city. Maybe it was just too good to be accepted by enough people."

The American Dime Museum opened in 1999, a vehicle to showcase and justify Horne's obsession with turn-of-the-century curiosity venues and the circus freak shows they evolved into.

Horne, 65, stands in the museum's dimly lighted front room, hands jammed into the pockets of a black leather jacket, talking about why he's giving up. He can't afford to heat the building anymore, and he can't afford to keep going without a salary.

And he felt in his gut that, despite "having the best collection of human hair art anywhere," the museum would never obtain a corporate grant.

"If I had a lot of money," he half-jokes, "I'm not sure I'd give it to me."

People will find as many as 400 oddities for sale at the auction Feb. 26. Everything will go.

The tiny, leathery boots of an Idaho boy who was sucked right out of them and into his chimney in "a strange vortex" - never to be seen again.

A not-larger-than-life-yet-still-quite-large wax reproduction of Daniel Lambert, a 793 pound Englishman who died in 1809 at age 39.

The Olfactory Recognator, invented in 1918 to retain odors "for future enjoyment (or revulsion)."

Shrunken human heads stuffed into dome-shaped glass jars. George Washington's eyelashes. The flesh-eating toad from Madagascar ("extremely dangerous"), the killer eel, the mythical minotaur, the homunculus, the severed hand of Spider Lillie, a prostitute who offed her clientele with poisonous spider eggs she hid in a ring.

The crumbling mummies will, of course, come with their hand-crafted display cases.

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