Placerville, California

Gothic Rose Antiques & Curiosities

Eclectic collection of dark and macabre antiques.

Located in the historic downtown Placerville, California, across the street from the Court House, Gothic Rose Antiques & Collectibles seems a little bit out of place. It’s the sort of shop that would fit in well around Halloween but at no other time, even though it’s open year-round.

The proprietors of Gothic Rose sell anything, they say, “old and macabre, haunting and unusual or dark and romantic that looks like it came out of Dracula’s Castle or an old cemetery, mortuary, opera house, funeral home, Victorian boudoir, haunted house, bordello, circus, sideshow, carnival, gypsy caravan, wax museum, insane asylum, horror movie, alchemy laboratory, or dungeon.”

To give you a sense of their wares, the Gothic Rose shop celebrated on its site at the time of this writing the acquisition of a carved Griffin treasure box, claws of rats, a silver finger claw, a bronze goddess sculpture with “ERTE” scrawled on the base, a 19th century youth-sized coffin, an old articulated leg and foot once used as a teaching aid, and a collection of surgical and undertaker instruments from 1903 through 1949. The shop almost always had apothecary bottles, strange old books, anatomy charts, embalming fluid jars, and bones available for purchase.

Everything that the store owns and sells is arranged into three different themed rooms: a Victorian-era parlor room, an alchemist’s library, and a New Orleans cemetery.

If you have something old and unusual to sell and are based in the area, the Gothic Rose shop is always looking to add to its eclectic collection.

Update May 2017: Gothic Rose Antiques & Curiosities is permanently closed.