It was a rainy day in Bangkok and I felt like being unsociable. What to do? I decided to play tourist for a day and take a look around the Corrections Museum, a grizzly collection of torture and execution instruments showcased in a former maximum security prison from late 1800s.
When I arrived, the museum looked distinctly closed. Locks on, lights off. I wandered around looking stupid for a while until a policeman took pity on me. A short conversation in my bad Thai revealed that I needed to find the guard in the second block in order to unlock it and switch the power on for me.
It seems the museum is not overrun with visitors.
Once inside, I was instructed to take off my wet flip flops and to slip on a pair of comfy slippers. But it was to take more than a squishy pair of pink slippers to prepare me for what I was about to see. Under the guise of a history lesson, this museum displays all sorts of horrific items, such as faded photos of recently beheaded prisoners with blood spurting from where their heads were recently fixed. There’s also ancient swords and machine guns that were used in the execution of prisoners. The displays would be a little less gratuitously macabre if the English translations of texts included dates and a little context. Instead, most of the displays are just relentless horror if you don’t read Thai.
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The whole museum is very visual; from displays of uniformed guards lining up a rifle to execute a prisoner, photos of a beheading or paintings of some torture methods used in the Ayyuthaya times – such as (don’t read this bit if you’re squeamish) cutting out chunks from a prisoner, frying them and making him eat them, slicing off the skin and pulling it down to make a kind of skin sarong and opening up the skull and putting hot iron on the brain. So, perhaps not the ideal place to visit before lunch.
Next, the guard let me in to Cell Block 9, which is as pleasant as it sounds (i.e. not pleasant at all). Most of the small cells, where prisoners were executed and would eat their last meals, display a torture method with the helpful addition of a full size mannequin to demonstrate how they would work. Probably the most traumatic was a man-sized rattan ball with nails hammered into it. The prisoner would crouch inside while an elephant kicked the ball around. Quite, quite ingenious.
Being the only visitor made the experience all the creepier and, when you have to walk through a narrow corridor lined with mannequins of guards and prisoners, it’s really easy to freak yourself out.
I’m not sure I learned a whole lot from the museum (except that I’m really glad I was never a prisoner in Ye Olde Thailand), but there’s no denying it is entertaining in a really gruesome way.
FIND IT:
The Corrections Museum, Maha Chai Road
Open 9-4pm Monday – Friday
Closed on the weekends
Entrance free (but a donation is expected)
