Evan Michelson, an owner of Obscura Antiques and Oddities, on Avenue A at Thirteenth Street, was waiting the other morning for the composer Danny Elfman, who lives in Los Angeles. Obscura sells “medical, scientific, and natural-history objects that are often overlooked,” Michelson said. “Things that tell a story but tend to be discarded.” Elfman, who will appear in July at Lincoln Center as part of “Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton,” is an ardent collector of peculiar things, some of which frighten him.

When Elfman arrived, he said that he began collecting when he was travelling the world after graduating from high school. “I was in Bamako, Mali, and I bought a standing, smiling skeleton carved from a single piece of bone, probably an elephant bone,” he said. “There was a guy in the market with three of them. I negotiated for a day, with breaks for lunch.”

Elfman also bought a mummified monkey’s paw. “When I was a child, the story my mother always told to scare me was ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ ” he said. The story concerns a man and woman who get three wishes that turn out badly. “Around Mali there were women who sold lizard heads and rooster feet and powders,” Elfman said. “They were the ones who sold the materials for casting spells. The hardest thing to find, and the rarest, would be the mummified monkey’s paw. A tiny hand. Each finger would be used for a different spell. A few times, I saw one, and it was withdrawn immediately. ‘It’s not for you,’ she’d say. ‘Too much power.’ One day in the Bamako market, I saw one, and the woman offered it to me and said, ‘For you?’ I put it in a box and wrote, ‘Do not open under any circumstances until I return,’ and sent it to my mother. Of course I knew she wouldn’t be able to not open it. She told me that she waited three months but confirmed later that she only waited about five minutes, and screamed so loud that it was like Krakatoa—the whole neighborhood heard it. Those objects kind of set my path for the next forty-four years.”

Elfman’s collection is sprawling and “breaks into categories,” he said. “Antique scientific instruments, anatomical drawings, archeological things—shrunken heads, carved skulls from Borneo and Peru, old taxidermy. I collect antique dolls like crazy. My whole place is filled with them. Ones that look like they would have scared me when I was a child. I was terrified of old dolls as a child. Also ventriloquists’ puppets.”

Elfman and Michelson talked about their late friend, a collector named Elli Buk, who had a store in SoHo that specialized in old scientific instruments. “He knew about everything,” Elfman said. “I bought about twenty weird electrical things with transformers and switches recently. Elli would have known what they were. I don’t dare plug any of them in. I’m looking for some electrical wizard who will say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m really glad you didn’t plug this in.’ ” He added, “That stuff sells cheap.”

“People shy away from it,” Michelson said.

“You don’t want to sell something that will kill someone,” Elfman said. Michelson held out some antique prints. The one Elfman liked showed the nerves of the body. Then he found a pair of ceramic hands from some kind of dummy. “I collect hands,” he said. “It’s because of a movie called ‘The Beast with Five Fingers,’ which I saw when I was about six. After that, I would have this dream of being pursued by a hand. My parents would be in the dream, and they would say, ‘Just ignore it,’ but I couldn’t. It was clearly following me.”

Stepping to the counter, Elfman said, “I’m going to go home with the nerves. And I’m going to ask about this box.” He picked up a box from a table. It looked like a box for a jig-saw puzzle, and on it was written “The Psychology of the Hand Simplified.” ♦