The Lil Accursed Antique Shoppe will open to the public this coming spring. It is located far past the darkest turns your life has yet to make, beyond your most unspoken fear, in Chesterton. The business previously rented space in several of the area’s antique malls..
Chesterton- Shoppers in Northwest Indiana have an exciting new (yet unknowably ancient and evil) place to look for knickknacks, tchotchkes, and affordable finds (the-cost-of-which they cannot imagine) with this spring’s opening of “The Lil’ Accursed Antique Shop” just outside of the historic Chesterton downtown area thanks to the town’s dual-purpose zoning.
Showcasing some of The Region’s quaintest décor and period pieces haunted by the ghosts of their original owners, The Lil’ Accursed Antique Shop will cater to Northwest Indiana’s antique enthusiasts as well as casual collectors of nostalgic treasures from yesteryear. Distinguishing itself from competitors in the Antiques space with a theme of passing along the unspeakable burden that accompanies the pursuit of material answers to our spiritual and moral failings, the store also has an ebay presence.
Owner-operator Jill Twinnings spoke to The Field Notes Report when we stopped in to discuss her newest business venture and explore her store’s offerings.
“I see you’ve found something that’s interested in you!” Twinnings called out as she approached, appearing suddenly from behind a grandfather clock. Her voice was filled with an exuberance that’s made her quite successful in the Northwest Indiana antiques market and a favorite amongst the damned.
At just 27, Twinnings can’t help but admit to being a serial entrepreneur. “I started out with a lemonade stand when I was nine. By the time I was 16 I’d started a business screen printing custom t-shirts that really took off when I started landing the contracts for local high school teams and marching bands. That’s when I really caught the bug. When I finished my bachelors in Advertising from Purdue I just didn’t see myself going to work for one of the agencies and trying to fit into someone else’s idea of what success looked like, but I had student loans to pay. It didn’t take me long to realize that the cursed antiques market was exactly where a person like me could make the kind of money I needed while living the kind of lifestyle I wanted.”
“I started out just renting booths in antique malls around the region,” Twinnings informed us as a tea kettle whistled in the kitchenette of the store. “I guess I just have a knack for antiques and resale, because it was less than half a year later that I went from two locations to having three booths in four different towns. I just kept finding incredible things I knew would sell, and people kept begging me to take things back from them at no cost. Some even attempted to pay me to take things back.”
When asked what the most commonly purchased cursed items were, Twinnings didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Books and music. That’s not even a trend, that’s a well-established fact of the antiques and resale world.”
“I just kept finding incredible things I knew would sell, and people kept begging me to take things back from them at no cost. Some even attempted to pay me to take things back.”
-Jill Twinnings, Proprietor, The Lil’ Accursed Antique Shop
Walking us back towards a second room at the back of the store Twinnings continued, “People outside of the business don’t realize it, but there are whole subsets of the music and publishing industry that run entirely on brand-new cursed items. Self-help, easy listening, religious fiction; those don’t even have to be involved in some terrible car crash, a murder-suicide, or the Blagoyovich administration to pick up ties to the shadow forces lurking in our fears, waiting to harm us. Those come from the factory with bad mojo.”
Twinnings showed us a hand-painted portrait of Ron Paul. “Everyone who’s owned it has become famous, only to lose all their money investing in whoever sponsored them. It’s first known owner had a talk show in Cleveland. He lost all his money investing in gold coins. It disappeared from the records for a while until it turned up in the collection of a tech blogger who ended up making some bad investments in an Iraqi Dinar scam sometime in 2002. The last owner was a woman with a YouTube show called ‘Today in the Colonies’ that thought the Constitution was a hoax. She had millions of followers but had to sell everything because something called ‘Tulsicoin’ crashed last spring.”
“People that shop local don’t just want the same cookie-cutter, boring things you can find everywhere online or in big box stores,” Twinnings told us as she presented us with a case of rings and necklaces she seemed particularly excited about. “You see this silver scarf pin? Isadora Duncan was wearing it the night she died. Not a lot of people know who she was, but there’s a young lady who’s been in three nights in a row just to look at it. She’s the perfect person to have something like this. She’s a dance major who’s fiancee is strangely emotionally unavailable and her first big production is coming up next month. I just have that kind of luck, you know? I’ll be at an estate auction looking for something for the store that’s popular on Instagram this week and something like this will just speak to me. When I found this, I knew that just the right customer would come along for it. She’s told me twice that she’s got no use for a scarf pin, but at this point I know who’s going to leave with something. Even if it’s not what they really came in looking for…”
Pressed to tell us what the most cursed items she’s ever dealt with were, Twinnings couldn’t give a definitive answer. “There’s a monkey carved from a coconut that’s really ruined everyone’s life that’s owned it. I’m very tempted to call it ‘most-cursed’ of all the items I’ve worked with, mostly because of how closely tragedy follows behind it and how often it involves actual exotic animals. But you have to take a long view with cursed antiques. Every time it comes back to the store or I find it again at an estate sale it get much more frayed and damaged. I don’t think it’s going to be able to cycle through the ecosystem of doom and regret three more times. Four or five at the most, and that’s if college students get their hands on it.”
Before we left, we had one more question we needed Twinnings to answer.
“Is there an item so cursed, so laden with the essence of the Old Ones, so abhorrent to man that even I would not engage in its trade? Is there something even I would not sell?”
She paused for a moment as she looked out over the store.
“The heads that the hats are displayed on, the mannequins, and the shelving. Their evil is mine alone to bear, and when I die I shall carry it with my soul into the next world. Now go from this place. If you are wise enough to know that there are things of this world and other worlds still that are best not met by man, GO.”
The Lil’Accursed Antique Store is located in Chesterton several blocks off the path you were meant to take. They are open only in your darkest hour, Monday through Saturday.
