[arcangel]

There was a similar machine in an old fashioned amusement park here back in the early to mid 60's. The machine was also a "talker" like this but the mannequin was much more scarey looking than this Gypsy lady
I think it's amusing that the collectors want to buy it from the museum to "part of the world."

VIRGINIA CITY, Mont. (AP) — The Gypsy sat for decades in a restaurant amid the Old West kitsch that fills this former gold rush town, her unblinking gaze greeting the tourists who shuffled in from the creaking wooden sidewalk outside.
Some mistook her for Zoltar, the fortune-telling machine featured in the Tom Hanks movie "Big." Others took one look at those piercing eyes and got the heebie-jeebies so bad they couldn't get away fast enough.
But until a few years ago, nobody, not even her owner, knew the nonfunctioning machine gathering dust in Bob's Place was an undiscovered treasure sitting in plain sight in this ghost town-turned-themed tourist attraction.
The 100-year-old fortune teller was an extremely rare find. Instead of dispensing a card like Zoltar, the Gypsy would actually speak your fortune from a hidden record player. When you dropped a nickel in the slot, her eyes would flash, her teeth would chatter and her voice would come floating from a tube extending out of the eight-foot-tall box.
Word got out when the Montana Heritage Commission began restoring the Gypsy more than five years ago, and collectors realized the machine was one of two or three "verbal" fortune tellers left in the world.

http://news.yahoo.com/rare-discovere...082106931.html

[SophiaG]

That's pretty darn cool.