It is perhaps not a surprise that Adam Williams recently opened a shop downtown called Birmingham Oddities where he sells or displays items from his rather bizarre personal collection, which includes everything from coffins, doll parts and false teeth to gas masks, boxing gloves and vintage medical photos, from old signs and office equipment to animal bones and human skulls.

After all, as the 33-year-old Magic City native told two visitors to his shop on Wednesday morning, he has spent almost his entire life "intrigued with crazy, cool oddities" and fascinated by "everything unusual" -- including stuff like Ripley's Believe it or Not and the old sideshows.

An incurable collector, Williams enjoys "the thrill of the find," he said.

The unusual items he comes across stimulate his mind, especially his historical curiosity.

And perhaps most important for a shopkeeper, Williams said, he likes "educating people, talking to them" -- at least when he can talk to them about his own much-loved collection of strange stuff.

So Birmingham Oddities -- which is open only on Saturdays, at least for now -- provides Williams with a perfect way to take visitors for a walk on the strange side, to help amuse the increasing number of people who are finding their way to a revitalized downtown and to realize his long-time dream of loft living.

Good response so far

Birmingham Oddities -- Williams jokingly referred to it on Wednesday as "Amazing Doctor Quack's Emporium of Weirdness" -- is located in a live-work space Williams has in the Fix-Play Lofts on 23rd St. North between First and Second avenues.

The shop has gotten a good reception so far, according to Williams, who said that he "toyed with the idea" of opening an oddities shop for years. They had about 50 guests for "a soft opening" during the Birmingham Art Crawl on April 2, he said.

For the first official opening on the following Saturday, April 4, the shop had about 200 visitors, according to Williams. "At one point I counted 15 people in our little 400-square-foot space," he said. "It was great."

The shop is not currently open during the week because Williams has a day job -- a somewhat unusual job. "I work out in Alabaster building, designing and fitting prosthetics and bionic limbs," he said. "Most people think it's quite fitting for my personality, as well with the oddities gallery."

'It's awesome to wonder'

One of the advantages of collecting old, weird objects -- both natural and man-made -- is that they allow Williams to take a sort of intellectual journey.

"When I see or hold something unusual from history, it allows my mind to wander," he said. "I think of all the people that item has affected, and in what ways, and the people that have handled it through the years. I imagine the skilled worker that made it, the animal that hosted it, the locations it must have been in, the reaction of people who had to deal with it. It's like my own Ripley's museum, or Discovery Channel. It's just awesome to wonder."

A lot of other people experience something very similar, Williams believes. "I think people like to learn," he said. "We hate being told what to learn because we all have our own tastes. It seems that when we see something peculiar or unfamiliar that eagerness to learn more takes over."

'The kids flip out'

Williams took obvious pleasure in showing off some of the items in his shop. These included a bunch of stainless steel surgical instruments, including a few handheld drills and a particularly frightening item that, according to Williams, is called a urethral dilator, or sounding rod, and is used to help patients pass kidney stones.

In one of his wooden cases, Williams displayed a small artificial hip joint that he found at a crematorium -- something left over after a person's body was burned. "Yeah, it's steel," he said. "It's not going anywhere."

He showed some dynamite blasting chargers that he said were manufactured by Davis Electric Co.in Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s.

A wooden sign hanging on the wall read as follows: "Please steal. We need more human skulls."

Williams had an x-ray displayed in a lighted shadow box and said that he builds these boxes in different sizes so people can display their own films.

"You may have had a bout with cancer," he said. "You may have had an accident and had an x-ray. We all have that envelope tucked away in a drawer some place, and this is almost like a memory of it. You can relive that experience almost in an artistic fashion."

A small, wooden box is filled with animal bones -- sheep ribs, beaver jaws, raccoon vertebrae, bones from bobcats and foxes. "That's a box of bones we give away to kids," Williams said. "Every kid who comes in gets a bone."

Children enjoy having this unusual chance to learn more about nature and display a refreshing curiosity and enthusiasm, according to Williams. "The kids flip out," he said. "I'm into this more for the kids from a reaction standpoint. Adults are more reserved. Kids don't stop asking questions. I love it."

Perhaps these kids remind Williams of himself, when -- as he puts it -- he was "a very inquisitive kid."

"As a 13-year-old, I would run up to people that were wearing prosthetics and start chatting them up, asking them questions, learning about it, because I knew that was something I thought I wanted to do," he said.

'Finding great stuff'

Williams has been working to add more inventory at Birmingham Oddities, which is not necessarily easy.

According to Williams, he spends about 5-10 hours per week making calls, sending emails, doing research in the Internet and "digging through people's basements" in search of cool finds.

"You can't imagine the little old men that have eight sheds behind their house that let me dig through stuff," said Williams, who also finds things at garage sales and auctions.

Like picking but beyond

What Williams does as he searches for oddities is similar to "picking" -- like the guys on the "American Pickers" TV show -- but, he said, "it's beyond that in the sense that what you're looking for is not what everybody else is looking for."

He said that what he is searching for is "the stuff that nobody else really wants, but when you put it all together, all of a sudden, everybody wants it."

Unusual items benefit from being displayed together in a place like his shop, according to Williams. "If you walk past any of these items alone at a garage sale, you'll probably walk right past it," he said.

"I think a human skull by itself is kind of macabre, but if you host three or four of them of different origins, now -- all of sudden -- you can understand (their) uniqueness," he said.

Making 'fun stuff'

Not all of the items on display at Birmingham Oddities are vintage, and many of them are not quite as disturbing as, say, that urethral dilator or an old black and white photo of two medical students cutting up a cadaver that Williams has framed.

For example, Williams and some of his friends and fellow artists -- using his adjoining studio space -- make dolls or little robot figures from scrap metal and sell them in the shop. "Since we got busier doing this stuff, my friends will come over and bring a six-pack and we'll just make stuff,' he said.

Downtown 'is going to be amazing'

It is exciting to be a part of the ongoing revitalization of downtown, according to Williams, who grew up in Trussville and earned a degree in biology from The University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Williams, who left the city for four years while earning a graduate degree at the School of Prosthetics and Orthotics at California State University, got excited about the Magic City's possibilities when he moved back home from Los Angeles about eight years ago and drove around.

"I thought, 'This place is going to be amazing. We have all the remnants of a thriving downtown community,'" he said.

Since then, he notes, that has been an explosion on activity in the city center, with more lofts, more shops and restaurants, more people.

"I'm elated," he said. "It's been a dream of mine to live in a loft in a downtown environment like this in the city, and now that it is what it is, I'm thrilled."

'It's like my child'

Williams said that he is considering opening the shop more days per week than just Saturday but said that to do so he will have to get over his sense of ownership of the place and the oddities in it.

"It's kind of like my child," he said, laughing. "I want to be here to play with everybody that comes in. This is my personal collection. I want to be here to talk about it. You don't want somebody else telling you where something came from."

In the meantime, Williams said he wants to help create "an oddities market" and to get "people to bring to light all the items hiding in their basements. I just want to see the skeletons in everyone's closets."

Birmingham Oddities is located at 2301 First Ave. North, Ste. 101, and is open on Saturdays from 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

For more information, go to www.facebook.com/birminghamoddities or https://instagram.com/birminghamoddities.