More than 3,000 marionettes found in vacant Chicago home

Some of the abandoned string-operated puppets discovered in an otherwise empty Chicago home could end up in a theater near you.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that a goal of a new fundraising campaign to preserve the collection is to first get the marionettes into temporary storage. The hope is that they could later find permanent homes in different theaters.

More than 3,000 of the wood-carved puppets were found recently in a house in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood.

A co-founder of the Elephant and Worm Educational Theatre, Joseph Lewis, played a central role in the discovery. He helped launch an effort via the Kickstarter website to raise $25,000 for the salvage effort.

An Art Institute of Chicago curator says the collection could help revive the lost art of marionette theater.