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It made no sense. So far, Thailand had been almost everything we’d dreamt it would be. Back in Britain, we’d talked excitedly about the Grand Palace, the big Buddha at Wat Pho, the holy temples. Yet, as we walked under the muzzy Bangkok sun, a feeling of ennui descended. What were we doing wrong? We had it all. Palaces! Buddhas! Temples! It was all so ...

“Boring,” my girlfriend muttered as we entered temple number three.

And she was right. Reading the guidebook in the chilly gloom of our flat at home had imbued these sights with an almost supernaturally exciting quality. When you’re nursing a tea and the sniffles in the damp depths of an English winter, a picture of the sun trickling like molten gold off an exotic temple roof has that sort of power. But it hadn’t taken long for reality to make its wearisome presence felt. We needed a break from temples.

So we decided to find an internet cafe and rummage online for something to jolt the life back into us. An hour later, we were staring at a testicle even bigger than the Wat Pho Buddha’s. And this one was real.

The Museum of Forensic Medicine, where this elephantiasis-swollen body part is to be found, is hidden in a back block of the Siriraj Hospital. Built principally for the education of medical students, it’s actually six museums that were united in August 2004 into a low-budget palace of the macabre. But it’s the exhibits to be found in the parasitology, pathology and forensic departments that will revisit you in your dreams. Here you’ll find chain saws, guns and kitchen knives used in murders, along with the bloodstained clothing of the victims; diseased livers and legs; lungs with stab wounds; and heads that have been dissected and suspended in formaldehyde so you can see where the bullet went through.

Because these exhibits are housed in a converted office block, it feels less like a museum and more like a repository for the private collection of an insane millionaire. And, for what is ostensibly supposed to be a place of education, there’s a surprising lack of actual information. Mostly, it’s display cabinets marked by a simple label.

Of course, the joy of a great museum come not from the dry learning of facts, but from the electric thrill of being near something that has had a role in history – something that was present at some mad, ghastly scene, such as the instruments and surgical gowns used in the 1946 autopsy of Thailand’s murdered king, Ananda Mahidol. It’s as if the objects get soaked in some indelible magic. And there’s little here that hasn’t been to a place, in the personal history of one poor soul or another, that is so staggeringly grim, it’d make your jaw drop right off your face. Which, come to think of it, would make you fit right in.

Perhaps the most moving of the exhibits is the collection of dozens of babies – some conjoined, some stillborn, others with various tragic deformities. Local visitors have left touching little gifts for many of them. The Cyclops baby, for example, has some pink plastic soldiers, a half-eaten packet of Clorets and a single Pringle.

The rickety infrastructure adds to the museum’s sinister atmosphere. As you squeak around the polished floor and peer tentatively into the thin, homemade cabinets, you feel almost too close to the weirdness. Similarly, the potted plants dotted here and there – presumably to cheer the place up a bit – have a perverse effect. It’s as if this is almost normal. And it’s then you realise, with a profound shudder, that this is normal. Things like this happen every day.

The single exhibit that trumps all the others is so unbelievable, I feel like I’m lying just writing it down. But I’m not. They actually have the hanged corpse of the Chinese serial child-killer and cannibal Si-Oui. Preserved in paraffin, his naked, teak-brown, waxy body leans forward at a horrible angle in his telephone box-like cabinet. With his feet at the back and his head resting on the glass of the door, it’s as if he’s trying to get to you. Which, as his label suggests, he may well have done had he lived. Apparently, Si-Oui fed on people “because he loves to eat human’s organ, not because of starving”. Even more grotesquely, he’s leaking slightly.

If voyeurism is a universal secret vice, the Bangkok Museum of Forensic Medicine will one day become the popular attraction it deserves to be. It’s already unforgettable.

— Museum of Forensic Medicine, 2nd floor, Adulaydejvigrom Building, behind Siriraj Hospital, Phrannok Road; 00 66 2 419 7000; admission 60p