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Brooklyn’s freakiest librarian presides over creepy curios at the Morbid Museum

When she was a little girl, Joanna Ebenstein didn’t play with dolls, she played with dead animals.

Interested in natural science, she became a backyard biologist of sorts. She began creating her own natural history museum, with her father’s encouragement, from lizards, snakes, cats and fish she found, and preserved in formaldehyde. For a little kid, what’s the big difference between alive and dead natural things, anyway?

“I don’t see a distinction between loving nature and the world, and loving representations of dead nature,” says Ebenstein, who lives in Park Slope and travels the world doing research and writing on morbid issues. “Museums are filled with dead things, right?”

Ebenstein, 41, has made a career out of her quirky fascination by founding the Morbid Anatomy Library and Museum, a small but intricately packed room in Gowanus for all lovers of the macabre.

The space — part research library, part museum of curiosities and part personal art exhibit — is stocked with obscura that Ebenstein has collected from all over the world. It recently scheduled regular public-viewing hours for the first time, every Saturday from 2 to 6 p.m. in addition to offering classes, exhibits and lectures.

Ebenstein finds glory in the gruesome, and thinks you should, too: Her goal is to get society to stop being so darned prudish about death, which, after all, is coming for you whether you like it or not.

“My entire life I’ve been called morbid because I don’t turn my eyes away from these things. What’s truly morbid is a culture that considers it morbid to contemplate death.”

Here’s a look at some of the library’s most curious items. If you’re inspired, check out some upcoming events, such as Sunday’s Bat in Glass Dome workshop, where students learn how to create a 19th-century zoological display ($200, bat included), at morbidanatomy.blogspot.com. The library is located at 543 Union St., Gowanus, Brooklyn.

tdonnelly2@nypost.com