Waldo's Menagerie of Monstrosities: The "Baby Coffin"
You know that tiny coffin with the glass window that looks straight out of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, sitting a few feet from the entrance at Waldo's? Only five of these exist in the world. Four are in Smithsonian storage. The fifth is here, at Waldo's.
The coffin is just one part of a much larger story: Sexton's menagerie of monstrosities, built into the Driftwood Resort itself out of ship's wheels, cannons, cathedral bells, salvaged Palm Beach mansion doors, and roughly 250 bells. Nobody's ever cataloged the place cleanly.
Here's what's documented: Waldo always had a knack for collecting strange artifacts, and the real haul came during the great depression on runs down to Palm Beach as the Mizner-era estates went under and their owners sold off, or just abandoned, everything inside. Doors, tile, ironwork, all hauled north and bolted into his walls. He bought by the truckload, sight unseen half the time, from contacts who knew he'd take anything strange off their hands for cheap. The coffin turned up somewhere in that mess. Lee's understanding is that it's from a time before refrigeration, back when wealthier families would use these to bring a body home intact from a long sea journey instead of wrapping it in a sheet to be buried at sea.
There are a lot of tall tales on that property, and Waldo Sexton himself would be the first to admit it. Ask him how he came by any given oddity twice and you'd get two different answers, and if you caught him on it, he wouldn't apologize. "I'd rather be a liar than a bore." This one's the real deal.
