No mirage: Museum of Illusions Cleveland drawing visitors for mind trickery

Jul. 5—Consider our mind thoroughly tricked.

Even before we step onto the platform to walk through the Vortex Tunnel at the new Museum of Illusions Cleveland, the spinning imagery on the walls enveloping us had us convinced there was real physical movement in the room. We needed those rails, we believed, to cross the platform and emerge from the other side.

"The platform is solid — it is NOT moving," says Tom Clack, assistant general manager of the attraction, before we try it out for ourselves. "It will feel like you are getting thrown to the side."

Indeed, it WILL feel like that, we learn soon enough.

Billing itself as "the largest and fastest-growing chain of privately held museums in the world," the company's first Museum of Illusions proved itself to be no mirage after opening in 2015 in Zagreb, Croatia. Today, there are more than 45 locations around the world.

"Seattle just opened, as well, and they're working on San Diego next," Clack says.

The Cleveland location opened at the end of May in the May Co. building on Euclid Avenue, just off Public Square, with construction picking up in February and March, Clack says, and the folks from Croatia installing the exhibitions and stations in May.

Most of those can be found in all the locations, he says, but each gets a couple of areas with local ties.

"We're both entertainment and education — so that 'edutainment' buzzword we like to use," he says. "We're going to play tricks on your brain, and we're going to explain why your brain plays tricks on you."

On this hot-and-humid afternoon the day before the Fourth of July, it's air-conditioning cool inside the Museum of Illusions, and an energetic crowd — seemingly a lot of parents and children, as the attraction is designed to be family-friendly — is experiencing this, that and the other.

While Clack's job surely involves plenty of paperwork and the like, he seems to delight in helping guests make the most out of the experience. For example, he works with a young woman in the Reverse Room, one of the two Cleveland-specific areas. This one is a nod to the region's love of sports with an upside-down basketball hoop. Clack gives the young woman some tips on how she may want to hold the basketball so it appears — after a photo is cropped and flipped 180 degrees — as if she has performed a physics-defying dunk.

The same idea is key to at least one more station, the Infinity Portal, where Clack demonstrates how to make it look like you have come through one faux opening and are about to enter another. When you look through the bottom of the portal — which becomes the top component after the photo-based trickery — it does look like it goes on forever, not the foot or two to the floor it does.

"The series of one-way and two-way mirrors bounces that light," Clack says, "and it goes on and on."

This and other stops through the one-floor, roughly 9,200-square-foot museum have camera icons on the floor so guests know the best place to stand to get that keeper shot.

You're best photo may come at Head on a Platter, an easy-to-get but fun gimmick in which you stick your head up through a plate on a table, or Take a Peek at the Ames Room, designed so a person on the left side of the space looks much larger than another on the right. Clack gets a hand from the more recently hired General Manager Chris Caldwell to illustrate this for us.

Clack also shows us and others how to make the most of the Symmetry Room, which involves a long mirror and a hidden ladder.

He truly shines, though, at the other Cleveland-specific spot, the Building Illusion, where guests can do their best Spider-Man imitation and appear to be crawling on the facade of the May Co. building.

"We see the families climbing on the building illusion — climbing on the side of a Cleveland building, which they can only experience here at the museum," Clack says.

Families also can busy the kids — and their minds — with various wooden puzzles in the Brain Gym.

"We have some that give you a sense of your hands and your body and your mind working," he says. "Obviously, if you can't solve it, we're going to sell you that in the gift shop so you can take it home and figure it out."

(Yes, as you'd expect, your trip through the museum ends in said shop.)

It's hard to argue with the location of the Museum of Illusions Cleveland, with Clack saying the idea is to be an attractive option for families and couples whose outing may also include the restaurants on East Fourth Street, a show at the House of Blues, a ballgame or JACK Casino Cleveland.

So what do visitors like best in these early days?

"When we ask for their favorite, most people say the Vortex Tunnel," he says. "The kids like to go through it a bunch of times."

Yeah, um, once may have been enough for us, at least for a while.

Museum of Illusions Cleveland

Where: 186 Euclid Ave., Suite 130.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Tickets: Starting at $20; less expensive online than at the door.

Info: moicleveland.com or 216-350-5987.

Originally Published: July 5, 2024 at 12:54 p.m.