The Shaw Occult Museum

The Shaw Occult Museum is a collection of supposedly possessed, evil, or just plain haunted objects and pieces of art. It is a large four story building in Nightfall Terrace, remarkable for its steeply sloping roof and gargoyles most hideous leer down at tourists from the corners of the building. Many people claim that the building itself as haunted, as witnesses have described the sounds of a female sobbing, footsteps in the first floor hallway, and faucets which turn on and off of their own accord. If the building is haunted the owner, Rachel Shaw, has no comment.

The Museum was founded by famed paranormal investigators Sebastian Shaw, a demonologist with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of spirit entities and his wife Judith, a powerful psychic sensitive. They opened the museum in 1962 and when Judith died at the age of 73 in 2018 their daughter Rachel took ownership.

The Museum is open to the public only on Saturdays, from 8 AM to 10 PM. and costs nothing to walk through.

On the west side of the building, not accessible to the public, is the enormous greenhouse. The greenhouse measures 100 yards long and 160 feet wide and is where vegetables, herbs, perennials, and other types of flowers and foliage is grown. Miss Shaw is quite fond of throwing garden parties in the greenhouse, and there are few whom dismiss the idea of a warm summer evening sipping champagne as a live band plays lilting classical music.

The first floor of the building is the majority portion of the museum. It contains a closed to the public kitchen and dining room reserved solely for the staff. The displays themselves are in six different rooms. Each room is 1200 square feet, and divided in the following ways:


 * Room One displays items of clothing reputed to be haunted or possessed. Here one can find suits, jackets, slickers, hoodies, raincoats, boots, hats and certain accessories like sunglasses and cuff links.
 * Room Two is the doll room and probably the most frightening part of the entire museum. It is here that antique china dolls, stuffed dolls, modern plastic dolls, and stuffed animals sit in brooding, malicious silence.
 * Room Three is the Jewelry Room. Here patrons can examine necklaces, rings, chokers, clasps, bracelets, and all other manner of objects from obvious fakes to expensive items made of jade, gold, and silver.
 * Room Four displays haunted artworks of all kinds, from famous paintings said to kill the viewers if photographed without permission to statues, models, ceramics, and objects from far away cultures like Russian stacking dolls and Chinese trinkets and statues carved from jade.
 * Room Five is filled with furniture: Sofas and couches, chairs and loveseats, beds and rocking chairs each with its own attendant ghost story or legend.


 * Lastly, Room Six is filled with an eclectic display of items that don't really seem to fit anywhere else. Here one can find an authentic dybbuk box, a 1932 Ford reputedly driven by a demon to murder 12 people, possessed jars and cookware, and a grand piano that is often, so the museum curator says, plays itself in the wee hours of the morning.

Each object is contained in a transparent plastic box with a little card describing what the object allegedly can do. Each of the six rooms is occupied by a security guard whom watches tourists carefully to ensure that no item is touched in any way or, God forbid, stolen.

The Basement is not normally open to the public, but can be accessed by appointment. Down in the basement is where Rachel will conduct psychic readings and seances for a fee. The second and third stories of the building are the living quarters for the Museum's live in employees.

The Second Floor
The second floor of the Chantry is closed off to the public, and Lance maintains a strict vigil over the stairs leading up to it. The second floor of the Museum houses an impressively large library of both mundane, occult, and true mystical lore in the form of books, scrolls, maps, and charts. (In game terms, utilizing the Library to learn a new Ability lowers the difficulty from 6 to 4.))

The second floor also leads to nine Practice Rooms, each room dedicated to a specific magickal Sphere. These rooms are utilized by the staff to hone the rotes they know, learn new ones, and experiment with magickal effects of their own creation. The Correspondence Room, for instance, holds 12 computers, writing implements, and other tools that deal with communication whilst the Entropy Room is arranged with a wall of slot machines and a tiny shooting range. Each of the rooms is 1200 square feet.

Because the Museum is Rachel's Sanctum, reality on the second floor conforms to her exacting standards. This is an incredible boon to the staff, as ALL magickal effects utilized on the second floor, no matter how flashy or wild, are Coincidental.

The Third Floor
The third floor of the Museum contains the living quarters for each of the staff. Each of the flats found here offer 600 square feet and includes a walk-in closet, single bathroom with a toilet, bathtub and shower; a kitchen complete with refrigerator, oven, and microwave. The last feature of each of the flats are laundry units, each one contains a washer and dryer.

The last feature of the third floor is a spacious conference room with an adjoining cafeteria laid out in buffet style and vending machines for water and soda pops.

The Basement
The basement of the museum is divided into two sections, each about 600 square feet. The first section, accessed by a door behind one of the tapestries in the third museum room, is where Rachel conducts her seances, tarot readings, and private meetings. It has a warm and comfortable atmosphere. The second room is a sitting or reading room of sorts, consisting of a small library of classic literature and poetry, two sofas, and a stuffed easy chair. The door to this room is always kept locked. The second room of the basement is rarely used by any of the employees, and is never open to the public. This second room is actually Tachete's private room, and everything here is provided for her and Evelyn's comfort.

There is another door here, like the previous always kept locked. Nobody, even the employees, are allowed beyond this door without the express permission of Rachel, and even then only if she or Amanda are in attendance. Beyond this strange door is a 120 foot hallway, boating twelve doors spaced teen feet apart and facing each other, six doors on each side. The doors are also painted different hues. They are, in order clockwise: White, blue, green, red, yellow, light grey, lavender, purple, dark blue, light blue, pink, and orange.

In The World of Darkness...
The Shaw Occult Museum is the only organized and operating Mage Chantry in Raven's Grove. In addition to the security that Lance provides, the Museum is protected by powerful rotes of Rachel Shaw's design. The yard lights that provide lighting to the outdoors each contain potent Forces effects fueled by the Prime consistently generated by the greenhouse. Each of these lights are triggered by specific offensive or defensive actions on the part of intruders, and each light is useful for only one discharge of its effect. Rachel can, however, alter the effects of the lights to suit the situation.

The Museum's six gargoyles are the bodies for six spirits that continually watch over the outside of the Chantry as well. Three of the gargoyles hold spirits of offense, two are purely defensive, and the final spirit is a Life spirit capable to healing wounds with Vulgar effects.

The greenhouse is undoubtedly the most powerful part of the Chantry. The greenhouse is built directly over a minor node, which continually generates the quintessences that fuels the Chantry's mystic defenses and can, if tapped into, generate small crystals of tass. As Rachel feels the greenhouse is the most powerful section of the Chantry, she has instructed her employees to guard and defend the greenhouse most of all in case of intrusion. Amanda and James both agree with this assessment, and both are willing to fight to the death if need be to keep the greenhouse safe.

Unknown to all, except Miss Shaw herself, the Chantry has a single, final guardian that will act to defend the interior of the Chantry if an invasion party is skilled, or lucky, enough to breach the outer defenses and penetrate into the interior of the Museum.

The Live-in Employees
The following people live in the museum full time, and help Rachel with the day to day operations.

Romana Brooks is the Museum's chef. In addition to manning and maintaining the third floor cafeteria, Romana also prepares meals and snacks for her co-workers on request and supplies the foods for the many parties and social events that Rachel is fond of throwing at the Museum. Romana is known to have extremely romantic feelings for Jack Knight.

James Exarch is the Museum's groundskeeper and maintains the lawns, rose gardens, and greenhouse. He has been employed at the Museum for three years, and enjoys a very highly flirtatious relationship with Rachel.

Amanda Fischer General Manager. Miss Fischer is the Museum's general manager, having lived in the Museum since 2010. In addition to her tasks of overseeing employees, checking the house and grounds for needed repairs or maintenance Miss Fischer, an attorney by trade, also acts as the Museum's legal representative.

Jack Knight

Lance is the Museum's Head of Security. It's his responsibility to ensure that visitors don't attempt to slip past the ropes and handle one of the objects. He is also responsible to ensure none of the visitors are armed, that nobody attempts to go upstairs or creep down into the basement, and locking down the Museum at closing time. Lance is also in charge of making sure that the Museum's mundane security systems are maintained and operational.

The Gathered
The following individuals have been called to the museum to partake of Rachel's hospitality and occupy it as a shelter in this time of need.

Constance Ouelette, a selkie in her late teens, spends a great deal of time at the museum providing what aid she can, though she does not reside there.

Evelyn is the second of the two Wraiths permanently haunting the Shaw Occult Museum, the other being her friend and mentor Tachete Rolle. Evelyn's history is a complete enigma, as (much to everyone's surprise) she mysteriously appeared on the couch in the basement still wrapped in her caul.