Henry S. Rosenthal stands beside the hand-painted curtain to his Two-Headed Calf MOOseum in San Francisco with an impish smile on his face. In the background, the low, guttural sounds of mooing emerge on a hidden speaker. On the wall hangs an image of the gestational cycle of polycephaly in cows. A former musician—Rosenthal helped initiate West Coast punk in 1977 as a drummer in the band Crime—he is no stranger to showmanship.
“This is where it all begins,” he says, his voice taking on the tone of a carnival barker or big top emcee.
He slowly opens a miniature barn door to reveal a surprise—a painting of a cow giving birth, with two heads poking from her behind. It sets the stage for what is all around you: pairs of heads on one body peering out from their taxidermied stillness, odd not only in their frozen states, but in that there are four eyes where there should be two.
Not all two-headed calves are two-headed in the same way. Some have two distinct heads, others share one neck. One duo even has an extra pair of legs sticking straight up into the air. Some of the twin heads stare down at you with beatific smiles from mounting plates on the wall, others have forever-frozen gazes on full bodies. There’s a cabinet of ephemera that includes photographs, figurines, plush toys, collectible coins, and even preserved fetuses all documenting the many sides and appeals of two-headedness.
Rosenthal most likely has the largest two-headed calf collection in the world. He counts his cattle like they do in Texas—by the head. According to that measure, he has 50. Claims in the Guinness Book of World Records of the largest two-headed animal collections don’t even match what he has in cows. But he’s never bothered to apply. “There’s no way of knowing for sure, but I claim it and until someone tells me I’m wrong, I continue to wear the crown,” he said.
Polycephaly is a rare condition that results from an embryo not splitting entirely. Typically such embryos do not survive long enough to make it through a live birth, and if they do, they usually only live a few days because their organs are not formed correctly. Lucky, a two-headed calf born in Kentucky in 2016, was an exception. He lived 108 days and died the night before he was to have a potentially life-saving operation.
The rarity upon rarity—that these creatures should be born at all, and then that they should live long enough to be stuffed—only serves to increase the unlikeliness of Rosenthal’s herd.
The musician and film producer houses his collection in a storied San Francisco building known as the Complex, a warehouse he bought in 1979 that used to be part of the Weinstein Department Store. “It’s been a hub and incubator for a lot of artistic activity,” he said.
The historic building includes a stage made from old retail store counters—recalling the warehouse’s past life—and a professional recording studio. In its heyday, many a well-known name passed through its doors, including musicians like Brian Eno and David Byrne. “There have been thousands of bands here,” Rosenthal said. “This has been a storied stage.”
But now the cows take center stage. Rosenthal became hooked in his 20s, when he first spotted a two-headed calf in Mexico and couldn’t get it out of his mind. His brother saw one soon afterward in a junk store in Berkeley and Rosenthal took it as a sign—he bought it immediately. That was the same year he purchased the building where his collection now lives.
“I never intended to collect any more,” he said. But then a week later a friend called from outside a shop in Greenwich Village and told him he was staring at a two-headed calf in the window.
“The next thing I knew, I had two,” he said. “Then I remembered the law of threes,” Rosenthal continued. Soon after, he found himself with four. But then he said four was an unstable number and he had to get more—and that’s when his collection truly took off.
What drives someone to collect two-headed calves in the first place? The answers can be found, perhaps, with some of the people who have been inspired by Rosenthal’s collection.
Gregg Gibbs, a Los Angeles-based production designer, first met Rosenthal in 1995 when he approached him about producing a film. The two immediately hit it off. At that time, Rosenthal had his collection of calves spread throughout the floors of his five-level Complex—Gibbs helped him to curate the MOOseum and give it a cohesive visual appeal by crafting original artworks, a custom diorama, and the signature entry curtain.
A two-headed calf born in the United States is considered a curse, Gibbs said, and the harbinger of catastrophe. Gibbs began working on his project in 2020—creating hundreds of drawings and original pieces of art—all in the time leading up to the pandemic.
“It was all made under duress,” Gibbs said of the art he made for the MOOseum. “And it had this foreboding darkness to it.” It felt fitting that he should be contributing to the museum’s planned expansion at a time of global upheaval and an administration change.
“The two-headed cow represents America right now in that we’re two heads on one body,” he said. “And the cow is a very sacred thing—cattle and beef and cowboys, Americana.”
The ongoing fascination with the two-headed calf is similar to the appeal of the sideshow carnival—it’s a dichotomy that both repels and attracts, Gibbs said. He became fascinated by the story of the long-lived Lucky in Kentucky. Gibbs crafted many drawings and even a book about him.
“He became a mascot of the collection,” he said.
The MOOseum has also inspired Jake Godby, one of the co-founders of the gourmet ice cream brand Humphry Slocombe. A family friend of Rosenthal’s for over 20 years, he remembers the two-headed calf collection being presented nonchalantly during a visit to the Complex over a Thanksgiving holiday. Godby borrowed one of Rosenthal’s mounted two-headed calves to display in Humphry Slocombe’s first shop, which opened in 2008.
“It was one of the ones that was more adorable looking,” Godby said. “They have little smiles.” People would always ask if it was real, Godby said, and eventually they had to move the head(s) up higher because customers kept trying to get selfies with the twin calves alongside their cones. When the call came to make merch for the burgeoning brand, the two-headed calf hanging in the shop felt like a natural mascot for a line of ice cream that pioneered unusual flavors like salt and pepper, secret breakfast (bourbon and cornflakes), and olive oil.
The calf heads hung in Humphry Slocombe’s original location until the COVID shutdown, when they returned to Rosenthal to become part of the new museum. A three-dimensional plastic replica hangs in one of their shops in honor of the original.
It’s not just Rosenthal and his contemporaries who are fascinated by polycephaly. While a sign of impending doom in the United States, in India the birth of a two-headed cow is considered a good omen.
A symbol representing both freakishness and fascination, the two-headed calf in Laura Gilpin’s poem of the same name embodies both: “Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum / But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. […] And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.”
Long before Rosenthal assembled his team, Robert Ripley of Believe It or Not! fame made it his mission to collect the world’s oddities, including two-headed creatures.
Just two miles from the MOOseum, a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum stands in the tourist destination of Fisherman’s Wharf, complete with three animals sporting two heads: a calf, a weasel, and a tortoise. By the entry desk, you can buy an assortment of two-headed plush toys—and an arcade claw game is full of them.
The vibe of Ripley’s is entirely different than that of the MOOseum. The latter is “temporarily closed on a permanent basis,” as Gibbs likes to say, since Rosenthal shows off his collection by appointment only. The collection is aesthetic, handcrafted, curated. It breathes authenticity.
The Ripley’s museum, on the other hand, is advertised to the tourist hordes flocking the wharf, the set-up a cringe-inducing mix of capitalist schlock and dated displays. Interspersed between the shrunken heads and cannibal skulls are vending machines with insect candy and an arcade shooting range. The two-headed animals are stuffed between a display of “The Great Fur-Covered Trout Myth” and a casting of a prehistoric shark jaw.
In the carnival world, a fake passed off as the real thing is called a gaff. Rosenthal only has a few in his collection, none of which are calves—like a faux double-headed pheasant and a tri-headed chick—but one has the feeling gaffs could abound in the Ripley’s museum.
Still, with his newspaper panel and traveling Odditorium, Ripley likely did more than anyone else to popularize the odd and unusual. A cherubic painting of him hangs in the MOOseum, depicted in his signature pith helmet with a two-headed calf beside him. Since Ripley relished what he called “pranks of nature,” maybe he can best explain our preoccupation with polycephaly.
“I’ve traveled 201 countries including Hell (Norway),” Ripley is quoted in the museum he inspired, “and the strangest thing I’ve seen… was man.”
The Two-Headed Calf MOOseum is open by limited appointments only. Visitors can reach out to Henry S. Rosenthal at deepgort@gmail.com to make arrangements to view the collection.
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