💎 Don't believe your eyes

Good morning! Today is Friday, July 10, 2026. You’re reading The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.

Today’s Charlotte Ledger special series “Hidden Gems” is sponsored by Foundation for the Carolinas. From tackling critical needs to sustaining cultural treasures, Foundation for the Carolinas helps people, companies and nonprofits create remarkable impact in our region. Learn how at fftc.org.

You know those places you've always meant to visit — the ones that have been around for years but rarely make headlines? They remind us of our history — good and bad — our remarkable achievements, the glories of nature, and, sometimes, they make us look at ourselves in new and occasionally weird ways.

In this series, longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman visits five overlooked Mecklenburg County destinations that deserve a spot on your summer itinerary. Here are places Toppman has already covered in this week’s series:

by Lawrence Toppman

I have always heard that two heads are better than one. But I had two heads one Wednesday afternoon last month, and I’m not convinced.

That happened at the Museum of Illusions, where I was duplicated, decapitated, kaleidoscoped, turned into a blur of colored shadows, dwarfed by my suddenly gigantic wife, slowly squashed and stretched as I strolled across a tilted room, dropped into a seemingly infinite well and apparently thrown off the ledge of a high-rise building.

This pocket museum uptown, part of the global Museum of Illusions group, has a South Tryon Street address but an entrance along Good Samaritan Way. It’s hard to find, yet it drew a crowd of fans who giggled and shook their heads at the mess-with-your-mind displays, whether elementary schoolers or gray-haired elders reluctantly coaxed into the swirling Vortex Tunnel. 

(Granddaughter: “Nana, you have to go in. It’s great!” Nana, staggering out: “No, I didn’t.”)

The term “museum” makes some sense because wall texts explain how the illusions trick our eyes and brains and tell us who discovered these effects. Yet the MOI is mostly a place to relax and take zany photos of yourself “climbing” up a wall or dangling from a ceiling. Having the magic explained doesn’t diminish the fun one iota.

A few rooms will give people prone to sensory overload a tough time. The Vortex, where you walk along a pathway that seems to be tilting — it isn’t, but rotating cloth walls give that impression — can have you reaching for a handrail to keep from toppling. The hallway outside seems to spin even after you quit the room.

The museum warns patrons prone to epileptic seizures or other conditions to forego certain areas. But there are relatively few of those, and there’s plenty left to enjoy without queasiness.

The compact, shrewdly laid-out venue offers four types of pleasures. First, paintings lining the hallways do their trompe l’oeil best to make you see something that can’t be true. They appear to rotate, fade in or out, approach or recede, go in circles when you know they’re stationary. Not all of these worked for me, but people around me swore they saw movement.

Some are famous: You’ve probably encountered the impossible trident, where two cylindrical prongs at one end of a drawing “transform” into three prongs at the other end. You’ll know Rubin’s vase, which is either a drinking vessel or two human profiles, depending on your point of view. In one case, tiny squares with numbers in them looked like just that, until you stepped much farther back and saw the head of Albert Einstein.

Second, you can enter rooms or alcoves that alter your viewpoint. In one, as you cross an angled floor diagonally, you appear to shrink or enlarge. People who sit on the Beuchet chair — a floor platform near free-standing “chair legs” that yield a false perspective — appear tiny compared to normal humans. The museum provides not only markers on the ground from which to take the best photographs but cheerful staffers, who’ll take them for you if you and your companion both want to be part of an illusion.

Third, a Brain Teaser Room offers a tableful of puzzles, mostly tangrams that test spatial perception: a Star Puzzle with six pieces, a Broken Heart in eight segments, a Devil Cube where eight misshapen chunks can presumably be made to fit tightly together. (I say “presumably,” because I have the spatial awareness of an amoeba and skipped these.) I did take a hand at the Hanoi Tower, in which you take apart a stack of discs and reassemble them according to certain rules of size, but I finally gave way to a third-grader who had a better grasp of the idea.

The largest group of illusions depends on mirrors. One exhibit sets LED lights between a normal mirror at the bottom and a one-way mirror at the top; you see through the latter from your side, while the other side of it reflects normally. When you stand between the mirrors, light bounces back and forth between them, giving you the feeling of looking down (or tumbling) into an endlessly deep well.

Mirrors turn horizontals into verticals, fragment or multiply images, even create the impression that a three-legged table against a wall has four legs. That exhibit lets you creep behind the table, where the fourth leg ought to be, and stick your head up through an opening, as if your noggin rested on a plate in the middle of a “solid” piece of furniture.

“Infinity” is a dominant concept at the MOI, whether you look down a passage or “deep” into a painting. The freakiest room was full of mirrors reflecting off each other, so visitors faced hundreds of images of themselves from all angles, stretching on forever — an egomaniac’s dream, a nightmare for the rest of us. (For a panicky moment, I couldn’t find the exit, which was also covered with mirrors.)

The gift shop contained many a brain-twister, eye-baffler or gewgaw at which I could stare for quite a while. My favorite was the anti-gravity humidifier, where water seemed to flow upward and produce steam from the top of the device. Droplets actually fell downward (duh), but LED lights flashing at a specific frequency made them appear to rise. Knowing how the trick was done didn’t prevent me from gazing in wonder. For me, that sums up the entire museum. 

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for The Charlotte Ledger’s Toppman on the Arts newsletter.

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A museum, a cool antique store, a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, a walking trail — we want to hear your favorite secret spots in and around Charlotte! Fair warning, though, it may not remain hidden for long, as we may share some of our submissions in a future edition of The Charlotte Ledger. Email [email protected] to share.