The Devil Knows You’re Here: A Conversation with Erica and Ben Santine from Chicago’s Covet Oddities

If you’re someone who frequents oddities or metaphysical shops (hell, even antique shops in some instances), you start to get pretty good at sensing the authenticity of not just the items around you but the people, too. You’re able to distinguish whether or not those standing behind the counter love the stuff as much as you or if they’re in it for some other reason, be it money, fad, or something else. 

Walking into Chicago’s new space, Covet Oddities, though, I felt it instantly: home.

Free of judgment. Filled with connection.

And there’s a reason for that. A large chunk of the display in the macabre store and occult gallery comes directly from Erica and Ben Santine’s personal collection—everything from antique photographs to wet animal (and human) specimens. 

I knew from reading up on the opening of the store that Erica and Ben had moved here from Texas, following the pull of Ben’s lifelong love of Chicago and effectively uprooting their life to pursue this passion project of sharing their love of the occult, Memento Mori, true crime, and other oddities with the world. But I wanted to know more. How did this love start?

“My family is from Thailand, and horror runs so deep in Southeast Asia,” Erica said. “It’s the norm to tell ghost stories to your small children, and my mother did. I was just raised on horror movies. Like I came out of the womb watching horror movies with my mother.”

Erica shared some of the standard horror experiences of childhood: the nightmare of being chased by Freddy Krueger, being afraid to swim (or take a bath) because of Jaws, etc. Erica felt those fears and ran toward them. 

“It really motivated me to embrace my fears and to make it part of who I am,” she said. “Horror movies are in my DNA.”

Some of her favorites include classics such as the original Halloween, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Scream, and Drag Me to Hell. (I also received a frantic email after I spoke to them adding The Silence of the Lambs to the list.)

For Erica, horror movies represent family togetherness, sitting in the living room with her brothers and mom on a Saturday night after a trip to Blockbuster. For Ben, watching horror movies as a young child was an accomplishment after his dad would put on a movie and fall asleep.

“It was just me with the horror movie,” Ben said. “But me making it through it was one of the rare times that he was proud of me for being tough. So I think that was a seed, but then you grow to just appreciate the experience of being scared. 

“Until eventually you get to the point where you’re never scared, like me, and you crave that and you can’t find it.”

Selling everything to move across the country and open a shop, though? That was scary.

Both Erica and Ben carried their love for horror and the odd throughout their adolescence and adulthood and, when they met 11 years ago, they were both in a position of “starting from scratch.” Together, their collection grew to the point where they were giving tours of their house, which made the question Ben posed in passing—“Wouldn’t it be crazy if we sold everything and moved to Chicago and opened an oddities shop?”—a little less off-hand and a little more on-brand.

And because they had been collecting for so long already, ethically sourcing items to fill in the storefront wasn’t a challenge. 

“When you collect oddities or antiques or whatever it is that you collect, over time you build up familiar faces—people who you've worked with, people who didn't rip you off,” Ben said, “and that makes sourcing things possible. The community also gets to know each other. So people know, for instance, that I collect crime scene photos and if somebody sees crime scene photos come up in an estate or an auction, they'll let me know. The same goes for the human remains. That's kind of how the community works.”

Murderbilia, on the other hand, is a much tighter-knit community, which is part of the background that Ben gives patrons when they go into the back room of the shop, affectionately dubbed “The Death Room” complete with a warning sign displayed at its entrance. 

While photographs, books, crystals, candles, and taxidermy make up the bulk of the front room, The Death Room is lined with a gallery of crime scene photos and glass cases featuring vintage magazines illustrated with serial killers (prominently John Wayne Gacy) and horror icons as well as jarred specimens and human remains—most of which are not for sale.

In his discussions, Ben stresses that these items are not displayed for any type of disrespectful shock value. Instead, they’re displayed with the hopes of getting people to reflect, to think, and even to be entertained to a degree, just like we engage with the horrors of true crime in pop culture. 

“This isn’t the ‘90s internet,” Ben said. “But it’s also cathartic… because you’re confronting this very real thing with something other than fear.”

“Horror is something that really has connected us and something we can always find comfort in,” Erica added.

And that’s what is felt upon crossing the threshold into Covet. 

“I think for people who are already into this kind of subculture, I want them to leave feeling that they're satisfied with what we have to offer, but also feeling like, okay, maybe I'm not so weird for being into true crime murderbilia, or maybe I'm not so weird for collecting animal bones that I find in the woods,” Erica said.
”I just want people to know that it's okay to be weird, you know?”

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Article by Dr. Brandy Hadden

Brandy is a communications professor, award-winning journalist, marketing professional, and published poet. She is a member of the Pop Culture Association as well as the National Communication Association where she supports the Film, Theater, and Multimedia division. She enjoys thrillers, true crime, and the supernatural.

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