S TRANGER THINGS

Shad Kvetko sold his prized possession, a genuine human shrunken head, earlier this year.

A longtime collector of strange things including antique funeral items and sideshow oddities, he’d searched for a real shrunken head for years — they can fetch up to $20,000. But he sold it to help fund a business venture.

Kvetko, his wife, Leigh, and their partners last month opened a mezcal bar in Exposition Park called Las Almas Rotas, “the broken souls.”

Mezcal is the latest obsession of Kvetko, a second-generation antiques dealer.

As a youngster, he collected “anything with skulls” because he thought it was punk rock. Later he got into Victorian-era funeral objects, including an embalming table and human-hair wreaths, and then carnivals and sideshows.

The Phoenix native at one time had a working sideshow with “things in jars” and strange taxidermy, such as a two-headed calf. He also owned a Mexican folk-art store in his hometown, called Saints and Sinners.

Mezcal, and the art and ephemera surrounding it, is a big part of his adoration for Mexican folk art.

“In Oaxaca, it’s all very connected,” he says. “In the mezcalerías, you see the work of local artists. That’s all part of it.”

Kvetko’s antiques collection now includes many hand-carved wooden mezcal bottles from the 1940s and ’50s.

“They’re extremely hard to find in Mexico,” he says.

Las Almas Rotas sprang out of a private club that Kvetko opened with buddies in Oak Cliff a couple of years ago — it was just a space for friends to hang out. They had a hard time dealing with liquor laws in Oak Cliff, so they opened the official bar on Parry Avenue, in the old Bar of Soap space.

Inside, you’ll find many varieties of mezcal, of course.

Plus there are a few weird things, including a 5-foot-tall St. Jude statue with glass eyes that seem to judge one’s every move. On the bar is a small, mummified monkey in a glass case.

That one Kvetko received as a gift from a santero in Oaxaca; there’s no way he could sell it.