Need a mummified bat? Shopping around for ghost hunting equipment, serial killer-related memorabilia, or creepy, ancient medical equipment? Gina Marie’s Antiques, Oddities, & Curiosities – which gets my vote for the strangest shop in Shreveport-Bossier – is your one-stop shop for all things macabre, dark, and strange. It’s not going to be everyone’s idea of a good time, but if you’re into the darker side of things, you’re going to want to check this place out.
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Gina and Steve, the shopkeepers, are warm and welcoming. Steve is a retired police officer. Together, they travel the South in search of weird, uncanny items to stock their shelves.
“When I go into antique stores, I’m looking for things that are out of the ordinary,” Steve told me. “We wanted to do something in Shreveport-Bossier that people hadn’t seen before.”
Currently (as of October 2018), Gina Marie’s is tucked away in a strip mall storefront at 1835 Old Minden Road in Bossier City, just next door to Los Potrillos Taqueria. However, the shop will soon be moving to the most talked-about piece of real estate in downtown Shreveport – the recently renovated space at 500 Texas Street, sandwiched between the main branch of Shreve Memorial Library and The Missing Link.
Gina Marie’s plans to be in that space by Halloween 2018, so if you’ve got your heart set on a new “alien skull” or that framed, hand-written letter from serial killer Danny Rolling, it’d be a good idea to check and make sure that they’re still open at the current location before making the trek.
For the most part, Steve tells me that the shop has been well-received, though a few groups of shoppers have been weirded out. But Gina and Steve don’t mind unsettling a few looky-loos; in fact, they kind of seem to get a kick out of it.
The long and short of it is this: If you’ve got a lovable weirdo, goth kid, Last Podcast on the Left or My Favorite Murder fan, True Blood obsessive, or otherwise unusual person in your life, there’s something in this store for them. Though I’m not sure about the return policy on mummified bats or ram skulls.
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