The Simcoe County Museum held its final Liars Club of the summer, Tuesday night, and no one’s pants even caught on fire.
As part of the Midhurst facility’s Museum After Hours programming, participants had a chance to test their knowledge of historical artifacts.
Afterwards, in one of the meeting rooms, a pair of museum workers presented their story (one real, the other fake) in an attempt to mislead visitors on the true identity of some of the rare items in the collection.
“It’s extremely hard,” said 10-year-old Emerson Pfrimmer as she contemplated one of the items. “Both of them (the stories) sound so believable.
“I love looking at all of the games and learning about old times,” she added.
“It’s not as easy as you’d think it would be,” said Jamie Levy, a historical interpreter at the museum.
Levy said the Liars Club is a variation on the previous Night at the Museum event where guest curators would present the real and fake stories.
“This is a little bit of an offshoot of that,” she said.
The new version sees visitors going around the museum on a self-guided tour, with a checklist in hand. They look at nine objects scattered throughout the facility, each with a pair of stories. They then pick ‘A’ or ‘B’.
At the end, visitors gather in one of the meeting rooms where the museum folks -- Levy and summer intern Emily Parker were doing the duties on Tuesday night -- then try to sell their stories.
“The artifacts are all pulled from our collection,” Levy told BarrieToday. “We want to fool people as much as we can.
"People might look at an artifact and think they know what it is, when it’s truly something else completely.”
Of course, half the fun choosing the most obscure and peculiar artifacts in the museum’s collection, some of which haven’t been on display for some time.
“We want things that make you think,” Levy said.
The items are culled from a variety of time periods.
“All of the artifacts we have have to do with the history of Simcoe County, because that’s our mandate,” Levy said.
