Bearded Lady Vintage & The Mystic Museum

Look to your right for a pair of black storefronts that announce the other half of Magnolia Park's personality. This is Bearded Lady Vintage and Oddities, joined by the Mystic Museum next door. If the record store and the bakery are the neighborhood's warm side, this is its wonderfully weird one. Del Howison, who ran a famous horror bookstore on this very block for thirty years, once called Magnolia “a great strip for the nerd and geek in all of us.” Standing here, you can see exactly what he meant.

The shop is the work of Erick Yaro Wessel, who started small — literally stocking the shelves with oddities and furniture from his own apartment — and grew it into a Burbank fixture. On the Bearded Lady side you'll find creepy antiques, taxidermy, vintage Halloween decorations, funeral relics, even old surgical instruments. Next door, the Mystic Museum opened in 2016 as a rotating gallery of horror-themed art and immersive exhibits. In 2021 they added Camp Horror, a space devoted to the slasher and cabin-in-the-woods films of the 1980s.

And there's a reason all of this lives in Burbank rather than anywhere else. Wessel has pointed out that this is where the studios are — where the special-effects makeup artists, the set designers, and the prop builders actually live and work. The craftspeople who make monsters for a living need somewhere to shop, gather, and show off, and this is it. The place even hosts occult community nights.

So don't just peer in — step inside if you dare. It's a museum, an art gallery, and a store all at once, and it changes with every exhibit. When you've had your fill of the macabre, we'll continue west toward a store that trades in a gentler kind of obsession: pop-culture nostalgia, stacked by the thousands.