Twine and Terror: Cawker City, Kansas is home to a couple of the world’s most unique phenomena

Photo by Elijah LaFollette

When we arrive in Cawker City, Kansas—home of the world’s largest ball of twine—we have been driving for several hours, so our first stop is the town’s small public library, where we ask to use the facilities. The librarian kindly allows us to do so, while also explaining that they aren’t technically available to the public, and that there are restrooms at the park about a block away.

While we’re there, she asks where we’re from and what has brought us to Cawker City—In a town of only around 450 souls, strangers must be fairly conspicuous. We tell her that we’re there to see the monster museum, and she explains that it’s closed. We assure her that we have an appointment, which she grudgingly accepts while cautioning us not to “bother” the nice lady who runs the place, as she recently lost her husband. “I’m a little protective of her,” the librarian explains.

She then asks if we’re going to see the ball of twine, which we say we’ll do after visiting the museum. Before we know it, she’s on the phone with “Linda,” who is apparently in charge of the twine, ensuring that she will be there to tell us about it and let us add a piece of twine to the ball.

While the ball may be what put Cawker City on the map, it isn’t the primary reason for our visit. That stands on an adjacent corner, in a garish but otherwise unassuming storefront that was once a bank. 

Photo by Elijah LaFollette

Eyegore’s Curiosities & Monster Museum is located at 732 Wisconsin St., on Cawker City’s main drag, where it has been since Matt Alford spotted the building for sale when he was visiting the ball of twine. “When I met Matt, all this stuff was just in his house,” Julie Alford, the shop’s “Master of Monster Management,” informs us. “My friends told me to run.”

She obviously didn’t and, in 2020, they bought the building that would become Eyegore’s Curiosities and moved halfway across the country from Virginia to Cawker City, where they got married in front of the ball of twine and lived in an apartment above the shop itself.

When we reach Eyegore’s Curiosities, we are greeted by an array of bizarre objects, beginning before we ever step through the front door. The mat outside welcomes “UFOs and Crews,” while the sidewalk out front is home to gargoyles, a statue of Bigfoot, a giant monster hand, and a Tin Man riding a bicycle, to name a few.

The interior is even more packed to the gills. Though the space is not large, every time you feel like you have seen everything, something new catches your eye, as oddities of various sorts are jammed everywhere from floor to ceiling. The contents range from the absurd to the genuinely macabre. There’s a wall of taxidermied animal butts, an entire human skeleton, old monster toys, a Fiji mermaid, parts of a real human brain, signs from sideshow attractions, and so much more.

Photo by Elijah LaFollette

Genuine articles from the modern equivalent of a cabinet of curiosities jockey for position with Star Wars toys and fakes concocted by Matt Alford himself. “He was always building stuff,” Julie recalls. Among his creations are a “mummified juvenile sasquatch,” made from a store-bought plastic Halloween skeleton, hair extensions, and papier mache, as well as “Count Cluckula, the World’s Only Vampire Chicken,” which is accompanied by an admonition not to remove the stake piercing its chest.

In what was once the bank’s vault, there is now a “baby alien” in a tank, labeled “Alien Specimen #3, Roswell Army Air Field, 8 July 1947.” Other exhibits include a “haunted ventriloquist dummy,” cases of real bones and fossils, a replica of the skull of the Elephant Man, the “third largest ball of twine in Cawker City, KS,” and others.

Those that weren’t manufactured by Matt Alford, the “Wizard of Odd,” were acquired in his various travels—or sometimes donated by visitors, as is the case with “Ky’s tonsils,” which are located in a display of various medical ephemera and were apparently donated by a local child after having her tonsils removed. “She said, ‘I thought you would want these,’” Julie tells us.

While there, we also get to meet Larry, a local cat who is lounging on the outside windowsill of Eyegore’s Curiosities. Larry apparently ran for mayor of Cawker City—one of his campaign posters is behind the counter of the shop—but was beaten out for the position by the city’s current human mayor, Doug Bader.

Unfortunately, while Cawker City left its mark on Matt Alford and he left his on the town, he wasn’t able to enjoy Eyegore’s Curiosities for very long. The unusual shop opened its doors in 2021, and Matt was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic pancreatic cancer in 2022 and passed away on October 16, 2024. In an update on Caringbridge.org, Julie Alford wrote, “When he told me he wanted to move here, and asked if I would come, I was scared to leave what was comfortable, but I found my next home, and we built a life here that I love.”

Photo by Elijah LaFollette

It’s obvious from even the handful of other people that we talk to in Cawker City that the town loves them, too. When asked about the future of Eyegore’s, Julie says that she doesn’t know. “This was Matt’s dream, not mine,” she says, sharing that while she loved running the attraction with him, she isn’t sure what the future holds for the unique destination. 

For now, Eyegore’s Curiosities is open by appointment, but Julie says that she hopes to have it open more often, at least in the summer, when as many as 200 people a day come to visit the ball of twine just half a block from the shop’s front door.

When we leave the monster museum, we are, of course, duty-bound to also visit the ball of twine. After all, the librarian phoned ahead and, sure enough, Linda Clover is there waiting for us. The “Belle of the Ball” is a diminutive woman who can’t stand much over four feet, and when we first see her, she is holding a piece of PVC pipe with a reel of twine around it and a pair of scissors stuck in one end, so that we can add a piece to the ball.

“We just have fun here,” Linda tells us, as she explains the history of the ball of twine, which was started by farmer Frank Stoeber in 1953, using pieces of twine left over from feeding bales of hay to his cows. Today, the ball, which is about the size of a van, weighs some 27,017 pounds and counting.

“I know how many feet are on the reel and how much it weighs,” Linda informs us, “so I know what to add to the total when it runs out.”

As befits a tourist attraction that is the town’s claim to fame, drawing thousands of visitors every year from all over the world, the ball of twine has its own roofed shelter, and you can even stay across the street from it, in a retro gas station that has been restored and converted into a kind of one-room AirBnB.

Photo by Elijah LaFollette

The town hosts various events throughout the year, including its annual Twine-a-Thon, which is held on the third weekend in August. During a recent art walk, a local artist painted some fifty reproductions of famous paintings, all incorporating balls of twine, and hung them in various local businesses—a version of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” can be seen in the window of Eyegore’s Curiosities.

Dutifully, we take our turns adding a length of twine to the ball, while Linda explains that sometimes visitors add their own bits of rope or string that she has to come by later and remove—After all, it’s not the world’s biggest ball of sisal twine if there’s other stuff in there.

She also regales us with various bits about the town’s history, including how four men played a game of cards for the right to name the town after themselves. “Guess the name of the fourth man,” she says, after rattling off the first three. The poker game is one of several pieces of local lore immortalized in a mural next to the ball of twine.

“I’m going home,” Linda says, as we leave the ball of twine and Cawker City behind. “I’ve already seen lots of folks today.” If you want to visit Cawker City, however, and add a bit of twine to the ball, there are links to call and email Linda on the town’s website, while you can set up an appointment to visit Eyegore’s Curiosities & Monster Museum by calling or texting Julie Alford from the shop’s own website at eyegores.com.

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