With the Fall season coming up, many people may be searching for the fall spirit by decorating or watching horror movies. However, for some people, embracing the macabre is not necessarily a Fall activity, but a lifestyle.

Located on the Montana and Mesa intersection is Tooth and Veil Oddities and Macabre Shop, a store that can be describable to something conjurable by Elvira or The Addams Family. This store is filled with items such as coffins, wet specimens, apothecaries, taxidermy, vintage dolls, and so much more. Although walking into a store with items such as these may be unique for some El Pasoans, owner Michelle Bocanegra, also known as Deady Page, says that she has always been immersed in this lifestyle.

“I’ve always been a darkling,” Bocanegra says. “I basically learned everything from my grandmother. She was a curandera, a healer. Whether the ailment was skin or bones, she would help. My grandmother also had two sisters, Nina and Tonya, and every Sunday we would go to the cemeteries like Concordia, and they would fix all the headstones that were broken. They would get paint brushes and cement and would repair them every Sunday for about an hour or so.”

Bocanegra said that her grandmother taught her how to respect the dead through the way she carried herself at cemeteries.

“It’s probably where I got my sense for the macabre from,” she said. “My grandmother would tell stories like ‘look at this little boy, he’s here by himself and no one came to clean up his tombstone’, so she would bring little toys and pinwheels and talk to the headstone like ‘oh I don’t see your mother or father next to you but know that someone’s here and we’re going to take care of you.’ Even though they didn’t know these people, it was showing respect for these people not to be forgotten and respect for the last place they are going to be.”

Bocanegra says that even though it wasn’t her grandmother’s intention, she had a big influence on her lifestyle. Her style evolved from mimicking her grandmother and her grandmother’s sister’s 1950’s gothic style to making it her own within the world of pinup where she got her nickname “Deady Page.”

“I was always attracted to the way they dressed,” she said. “They always had very feminine heels, long black nails and all black outfits. They were pretty out there, but it was normal for me, but now that I look back at it, I realize it wasn’t normal to other people.”

In addition to finding the pinup community, Bocanegra also partook in events such as the Rockabilly Riot while also doing pop ups where she made hats for Dia de los Muertos.

“I was making about 3-4,000 fascinators and paper mâché masks,” she said. “I always noticed that my aesthetic for Dia de los Muertos was a little bit darker than what everybody else was doing. I did that and then it progressively got darker. I was starting to do taxidermy and apothecary and that’s where it just evolved.”

At this point, Bocanegra had been working in management at several restaurants like Cafe Central and DJing while saving years’ worth of antiques in storage units to one day open a store. She would take an extra suitcase to bring back antiques from California, Arizona, New York and New Orleans. Part of Bocanegra’s passion is also repurposing broken antiques to make them regain their charm while also adding her personal style to the mix.

“I had been saving antiques for about 30 years,” she said. “I’m attracted to a lot of mid-century and Victorian designs. A lot of broken things were the things that I gravitated to. I feel sad for stuff, and I just want it to have a purpose. So, I just started making and repurposing stuff. I’m a big fan of the underdog, so if someone doesn’t want something, I want it.”

In addition to the repurposed items in the store like porcelain figures redesigned to tell a dark story, a coffin reconfigured as a bed, or old lamps styled in a gothic and Victorian fashion, Bocanegra also does her own wet specimens and taxidermy, which she learned from her cousins.

“We either go walking in the desert and find animals or we have a woman who helps us named Lily, who lives in the desert and forages,” she said. “I don’t have taxidermy in my house, it’s not for me, it’s for the shop and it’s great. I love that you can actually see what is life and what is death.”

During Covid, Bocanegra had struggled after moving to her current location due to city shutdowns. However, with her knowledge of apothecary, she helped the community by creating jams and homemade hand sanitizer.

“A lot of people were happy to be able to support a business while also buying something that they needed,” she said. “My mother-in-law grows aloe vera, so we made our own aloe vera gel and we had tons of alcohol since I use it for my taxidermy. I was also able to make healing jams which people could put in hot water, and it would turn into tea. It had their medicinal and magical purposes. We had a blueberry luck and a love one. When creating my apothecary section, my choice was to have a collection of herbs that our ancestors or the indigenous people of this area would use. If you’re going a magical route, ancestors are the ones that help you with magic. Ancestors are familiar with things they knew in their lives, so if you have an herb like oregano, they know what you’re working with because it’s familiar to them.”

Not only does she share her passion for apothecary, oddities, and the macabre with the community through her shop, she also hosts events such as the Mystical Market, Mourning Tea and the Vampire Ball which is coming up Oct. 19.

“This will be our eighth-year anniversary doing the Vampire Ball,” she said. “It’s not a Halloween party. It’s not a masquerade party. It is a celebration of the vampire lifestyle. We’ve got some magical performers like Fish the Clown and Siggy Sauer who does burlesque in a bloodbath instead of a martini glass and for our Mourning Tea events we have Victorian style photography and seance photography where you can see ectoplasm.”

Bocanegra reciprocates the love she’s received from the community and aims at tearing down any misconceptions. By hosting her mystical markets at Keystone Heritage Park, she is not only trying to show people what Wicca is but also expose them to El Paso’s bird sanctuary and botanical garden that is run by volunteers.

“I wanted to do something good for my community because my community was good to me,” she said. “I feel that it’s always good as a businessperson to give back and make other people and businesses responsible for the community.”

Tooth and Veil Oddities and Macabre Shop is many things. It’s an apothecary, an antique and clothing store, a spot for taxidermy and wet specimen collectors, but most of all, it’s a representation of Bocanegra’s love for all things macabre and her community.