Let's go to the WAX MUSEUM!

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Sometimes it's fun to do touristy things in your own city.

That's why I braved Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in Times Square early this Sunday morning (after doing a quick load of laundry).

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The entire package set me back a hefty $50+... primarily because of this special feature:

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Ghostbusters VR Experience! Gonna bust some ghosts in Virtual Reality Space!

For a whopping $50, though, you bet your sweet ass I'm gonna share a shit-ton of pics with you right now! And you are gonna look at them all, damn it!

(Incidentally, this is the largest upload of pics I've ever tried in one post here, and one of the reasons I recently posited that it might be cool to have a "slideshow" multi-pic function here — something where you could upload a lot of pics easily and caption them easily. It might take a while for all these pics to load, and it might be suggested that this would be better broken up as a multi-post, but I wanted all of these together.)

Now, understand that I live sort of close to this wax museum and arrived RIGHT when they opened the doors, so it was fairly empty at the start. You take elevators to the very top of the building and sort of wind your way downwards. (That $50 admission included access to the full museum + the Ghostbusters VR.)

This was what greeted me as the elevator doors opened at the top level:

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A perfect horrorshow.

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The resemblance to these celebrities was uniquely uncanny.

Like an "uncanny valley".

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I wanted to get really close shots of these wax figures because — how rare is it to get to photograph these people close-up?

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It was... very creepy moving through the wax museum alone.

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The museum turns into more of a Ghostbusters experience right around here.

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It almost feels like a little haunted house section. Paintings come alive. Smoke machines on motion activates.

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It's all a bit of a lead-up to the actual VR detour.

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All right: this gentleman demonstrates how slightly silly you will look in the VR get-up.

Since I was there at the start of the day, I went right in — but they were having so many technical difficulties with the VR, it probably took me about 45 minutes or more of waiting and trial-and-error with different VR headsets/packs before I could finally begin the experience.

For a portion of that, I was chatting with a group of gentlemen who were MAGICIANS, which was splendid. One was from Texas, one from Upstate New York. Now, I'm not necessarily the friendliest New Yorker you'll ever meet but it was sort of delightful to have an unexpected chat with magicians before doing some virtual ghostbusting -- on a rainy Sunday morning.

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This was my gun.

When I finally got a headset that worked... it was pretty cool. I was with family from Israel (perhaps?) -- they didn't speak English, and it was a little cumbersome navigating the spaces with them. I have to say, the VR was pretty cool. It really felt like you were walking through this old hotel with ghosts all around.

There was one point where we were in a freight elevator and this little ghost girl stepped in with us. She stood right before me and looked up at me and it was so incredibly surreal.

Another point, you are standing on this fire escape looking out at the expanse of this ghost-infested city. You can see the streets below and the sky swirling with paranormal activity. It's kind of awe-inspiring.

And then... there's more wax museum!

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Poor wax Ozzy, forced to sit forever with his wax ex-wife Sharon.

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And we end with the tiniest handprints ever!