68-year-old Jackie Miley is famous for her enormous collection of stuffed animals. Now she has an official Guinness World record for the biggest collection, the DailyMail reports.
Miley is from Rapid City, South Dakota. She started her collection back in 2000 with just one stuffed animal.
Today she has thousands of stuffed animals from all US states and 29 countries around the world. The official count of her collection is 8025 stuffed animals.
All of them live in a special house called Teddy Bear Town in her yard. Jackie has turned it into a business. You can go to Teddy Bear Town just to explore the collection. But you can also buy souvenirs at her teddy-bear-themed gift shop.
She actually has probably more than 10 000 stuffed toys. But some are doubles, others for some reason don’t fall into the official category. So, the real number is 8025.
Even so, Jackie loves them all equally and they all have a rightful place in her Teddy Bear Town. “I’m referring to it as a house of memories. I’ve got people’s very first bears. I’ve got bears in memories of people who passed away… It brings back childhood memories to a lot of them”, Miley earlier told Fox News.
She says her most meaningful bear is from the elementary school she attended in Minnesota. The bear had a photo of her pinned was a special gift. ‘I was raised in foster homes and I don’t have a lot of childhood memorabilia, and that is the only picture I have of myself at the age of 7,’ she said.
Today Jackie has a lot more friends, both real and plush. And she can share her passion with likeminded fans from all over the world.
