Via the aforementioned podcast episode I discovered this blog that has been saving examples of crazy walls just like our mad selves.
While it’s only been running since 2017 – six years after Crazy Walls started – its owner, Shawn Gilmore, has now amassed 1,299 examples, far more than this humble site.
A must-listen for all crazy wall aficionados, although the answer to the over-laboured question of whether crazy walls are really used by law enforcement will not surprise you.
Back in 2020 we had a LEGO crazy wall and here’s another. This one belongs to LEGO Sherlock Holmes and no doubt contains important clues for aficionados. Unfortunately, unlike that 2020 crazy wall from a police station, this one resists customisation. An investigation frozen in time.
If we were forced to split crazy walls into two simple categories, we’d have those created by people in the midst of the crazy – a serial killer, a time traveller, a script writer – and those created by people outside the crazy, attempting to figure it out from scratch.
Many of those in the latter category are the police and other security forces, either piecing together clues to catch the criminal or, as here, trying to work out what on Earth is going on in their little German town where people disappear, other dead bodies appear, and something weird seems to be happening every 33 years.
Dark, S01 E09, Alles ist Jetzt (Everything is Now), and S01 E05, Wahrheiten (Truths)
Of course, a show this complex requires more than one crazy wall and this one, spreading over more than one plane, is a nice variant. While the previous crazy wall was a simple photos-and-string affair, here we have a mess of clippings, notes, drawings, photos, pages from books, and so much more.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that a show featuring a large cast of interrelated characters, and storylines split over three time periods (so far) with many of the same characters, would feature crazy walls. How else is someone to keep track of everything? And so, in the very first episode, we have this dimly-lit creation. It’s impossible to know where the character obtained all these photos of people but let’s pass that mystery by.
When your 1989 East German house is decorated with such lively wallpaper it would be a shame to cover it up for the crazy wall you need to piece together whatever it is Thilo is piecing together here. So what better alternative than rigging up some red string around the place and hanging everything from that?
