Last week, as I was perusing the auction listings of the controversial memorabilia amassed by former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed for his doomed National Museum of the Wild West, one item in particular caught my eye: a “Vampire Hunter’s Set.”

What’s a “Vampire Hunter’s Set,” you ask?

It’s a small wooden chest with painted decorations, lined in faded red velvet, containing instruments of the vampire hunter’s trade, such as: a pistol, a candle holder in the shape of a skull, several dusty apothecary bottles, a jar labeled “cloves and garlic,” an ornamental dirk, and sundry rusted crucifixes.

In other words, a second-rate theatrical prop.

The description in the online auction, run by Guernsey’s Auctioneers of New York, was scrupulously vague. It included the very strange sentence, “A story of Vampire Hunter’s Set history is enclosed.”

A story? Of the history of vampire hunter’s sets? Meaning what, exactly?

And then, to further prime the bidding pump, “One set is on display at the Smithsonian.”

Unfortunately, the only provenance offered for the item to be sold was, “This set was found in New Orleans.”

If you’re like me, and you find the whole idea of spending public money on this kind of hokum to be deeply offensive, you might go digging around to learn more about such a singular item. And, in fact, in 2007, a New York Times reporter also noted the strangeness of Mayor Reed’s vampire hunter set, and listed the cost of its acquisition, taken from an official inventory, as $6,500.

At the $6,500 price point, a question naturally arises: how can we be sure this is a real Vampire Hunter’s Set?

Since we’re talking here about, uh, vampires, the idea of authenticity may seem moot. But I suppose there’s such a thing as an authentic fake vampire hunter’s set, perhaps cobbled together as a prop for a circus side show, which might have value, even $6,500, as an object of historical interest.

But there’s also such a thing as a phony fake vampire set, expressly and cynically created to catch the eye of an amateur collector and relieve him of his money.

Who’s to say which is which?

In 2007 and 2008, Heritage Auctions, which had been selected to auction off some of the more valuable pieces in Mayor Reed’s collection, weighed in on the subject of authenticity by returning about 1000 items that didn’t meet their standards for provenance.

In the antiques business, provenance is important. But in the high-stakes world of museum pieces, where a connection to a celebrity or to a notorious criminal might increase value exponentially, it’s everything.

And here is where Mayor Reed and his team of consultants seem to have been chronically misled. In the case of one seller in particular, Langford Spraggins, a New Mexico antique dealer specializing in guns and Wild West celebrity memorabilia, the city of Harrisburg was forced to sue Mr. Spraggins’s estate to try to recover some of the money spent on hundreds of pieces that didn’t live up to their billing.

Let me just say, as a public service, that if you bought something at last week’s auction, only to find that you were sold a bill of goods…you’re probably out of luck. The terms spelled out on the internet bidding site say that you have 25 days to contact Guernsey’s, but that they will only offer a refund at their sole discretion.

And, as I mentioned, many of the descriptions in the auction catalogue were vague to the point of avoiding the question of provenance altogether.

Mayor Reed’s ill-fated collection is a sideshow to the much larger fiscal problems facing Harrisburg, a case of several million dollars of squandered discretionary funds as opposed to half a billion dollars of disastrous municipal debt.

Say what you want about the wisdom of an amateur’s wading into the shark-infested waters of Wild West memorabilia, there was a practical purpose to all that big-dollar collecting: plans for a popular tourist attraction that might help boost Harrisburg’s national profile and aid in the city’s comeback from decades of decline.

But let’s be honest. The idea of a Wild West museum in Harrisburg — Harrisburg! — was already a stretch, despite protestations that the city was once the gateway to the West.

And however honorable the Mayor’s intentions, his methods, which involved cris-crossing the country, buying antiques using money — public money — obtained by charging fees for arranging municipal bonds, and then having the purchases rubber-stamped by public officials that he’d appointed…

Well, let’s just say it doesn’t look so smart in hindsight.

In 1883, when William “Buffalo Bill” Cody assembled his Wild West show, he knew a thing or two about hokum and giving the audience what they wanted. Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, and Sitting Bull were real enough, but the American West they enacted for crowds week in and week out was a fantasy, a burlesque designed to reinforce stereotypes and increase the market value of newly minted “folk heroes.”

To this day, there’s plenty of money to be made by feeding our national hunger for myth-making, and playing on a willful ignorance of our past.

And, apparently, as Mayor Reed has shown us, plenty of money to be lost as well.