The doors are closed and the windows are dark at Leila’s Hair Museum, for years one of the most unusual attractions in Independence, Missouri.
Inside the small storefront on Noland Road, Lindsay Evans has been on a mission: find new homes for her grandmother’s most treasured artifacts.
“From far away, you look at them and you just think, ‘Wow, that's a beautiful piece of art.’ And then you get close and realize, that's hair,” Evans says. “It’s absolutely incredible.”
Evan’s grandmother, Leila Cohoon, died last fall at the age of 92, and the museum closed in September. But for almost four decades, Leila’s Hair Museum was what Cohoon called the world’s largest collection of hair work.
The 3,000-piece collection includes Victorian-era watch fobs, bracelets, necklaces, rings, earrings and brooches. But around a thousand delicately-crafted wreaths, all made from human hair, make up the heart of the collection.
Cohoon used to say there were two common reactions to the odd collection, Evans says.
“The first one was, ‘Oh my gosh, this is hair? Wow,’” Evans says. “The other was, ‘This is hair?’ Oh my gosh’ — and they would kind of run the other way.”
“Some people have a little bit of an ick factor with it,” she says.
Working overtime to rehome artifacts
Since February, Evans, an editorial director at Hallmark Cards, has worked evenings and weekends to organize visits with curators from museums across the country.
“It is my greatest wish that millions of people are still going to be able to see these pieces, appreciate them, and fall in love with them, just like my grandmother did,” she says.
The elaborate wreaths, encased in shadow-box frames, once covered the walls. But gaps have appeared as artifacts are donated to institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.
“I’m setting them aside, trying to document them, taking photos, because I’m keeping a record of where those pieces are going,” Evans says.
Many of the donations from Cohoon’s collection will be added to local institutions, too.
Sarah Bader-King, curator at the John Wornall and Alexander Majors house museums in Kansas City, selected several wreaths, bracelets, and brooches that will be used in displays she hopes will help bring visitors closer to history.
“It just seemed like the perfect opportunity to, you know, help her keep things in Kansas City while also adding to our collection in a really substantial way,” Bader-King says.
Evans also reached out to the Morbid Anatomy Museum, in Brooklyn, dedicated to the intersections between death, medicine and culture. When museum co-founder Joanna Ebenstein realized the depth and breadth of Cohoon’s collection, she flew in to get a closer look.
“New York City has everything, but there's nowhere you can go to see Victorian hair work,” Ebenstein says. “New York Historical Society has some, but this blows every collection I've ever seen out of the water.”
Popular acclaim
Cohoon told KCUR podcast A People's History of Kansas City that her collection started in 1956, with a small, woven wreath in a gold frame that changed her life.
Cohoon, a cosmetologist, had been shopping for shoes, but was transfixed by the loops of Victorian hair art she saw in a shop window on the Country Club Plaza.
Eventually, “she actually had pieces under her bed, in closets, hanging on the wall,” Evans says. “And when she outgrew that, my granddad finally said, ‘Well, you've got to find a space for all of this.’”
The museum was a way to contain Cohoon’s passion for the artform, and give curious visitors from all corners of the country a place to take a look.
Cohoon also had a visit from heavy metal rock star Ozzy Ozbourne in 2018, and she was featured in an episode of Mike Rowe’s “Somebody’s Gotta Do It” in 2014.
Evans says her grandmother enjoyed the notoriety. With the collection dissolving, Evans says she still wonders if it’s what Cohoon would have wanted.
“I actually found a letter from her, written to me, as I was going through all of her paperwork. And, in it, she wrote that she was giving the museum to me,” Evans says. “She wanted me to share it with my brother and my cousins, and that she trusted me to do the right thing by her museum.”
As she begins to wrap up the months-long process, Evans says she’s been grateful to have a chance to share her grandmother’s passion.“That’s what she wanted for me, and it's helping me grieve in a way I didn't even realize I needed,” she says, “and so I’ve loved that.”
