Museums37.1146° N, 112.5552° W
Kanab, UT
A roadside sandstone cave houses a family-run collection of fossils, minerals, Native American artifacts and pioneer objects. The cave itself began as a 1950s bar and dance hall.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
Museums
Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Museums1,031
Suggest a stopSmall, specific collections run by people who care far too much.
- Museums45.7461° N, 85.5208° W
St. James, MI
Built in 1850, this small Beaver Island building was used by followers of James Jesse Strang, the self-proclaimed Mormon king whose island community became one of Michigan's strangest religious experiments. The restored print shop now interprets Strang's kingdom along with broader Beaver Island history.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums40.7956° N, 74.4480° W
Morris Township, NJ
The Morris Museum houses the Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata. Self-playing organs, music boxes and elaborate moving figures preserve a world of entertainment machinery built before electronic media.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums39.6489° N, 105.1941° W
Morrison, CO
A small working museum near the historic Morrison Formation quarries, with real fossils, casts and hands-on interpretation focused on local dinosaur discoveries. Its scale and direct connection to the surrounding fossil beds make it stronger for OddWay than a generic natural-history stop.
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- Open to visitors
- Museums34.7423° N, 92.2777° W
Little Rock, AR
This Arkansas Heritage museum interprets African American history and the Mosaic Templars of America, a fraternal organization founded in Little Rock in 1882.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums41.8301° N, 86.2558° W
Niles, MI
Inside Borrowed Time Oddities is a small museum focused on mourning customs, funerary objects and material culture surrounding death. The collection turns a modern oddities shop into a more structured historical stop, with displays interpreting how people have remembered and cared for the dead.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums45.5165° N, 122.6180° W
Portland, OR
Inside Portland's giant video store, a museum displays screen-used costumes and props among a collection of more than 90,000 rental titles.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums39.9335° N, 75.1476° W
Philadelphia, PA
Philadelphia's elaborate Mummers tradition fills this museum with feathered costumes, sequined suits, parade props, photographs and artifacts from more than a century of New Year's performances. The collection explains one of the city's strangest long-running civic traditions and is open during posted museum hours.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums39.1534° N, 80.0425° W
Philippi, WV
In 1888, amateur scientist Graham Hamrick experimented with embalming two cadavers and produced a pair of remarkably preserved mummies that later traveled with sideshows. They eventually returned to Philippi and are now displayed at the Barbour County Historical Museum, whose schedule is more limited than a conventional year-round museum.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums37.8104° N, 122.4170° W
San Francisco, CA
Hundreds of coin-operated automata, arcade machines, mechanical fortune tellers and antique amusements remain playable at Pier 45.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums41.6771° N, 71.2662° W
Bristol, RI
Musée Patamécanique is an intentionally strange cabinet of curiosities inspired by pataphysics, automata and absurdist invention. Its objects and installations blur the line between museum, mechanical theater and conceptual art. Access has historically been appointment-based and irregular, so availability should be confirmed before routing a trip around it.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums43.9333° N, 103.5756° W
Hill City, SD
The Black Hills Institute displays dinosaurs, marine reptiles and other fossils connected with one of the world's best-known commercial paleontology organizations. Its collections make Hill City an important stop in the complicated South Dakota story of fossil hunting, preparation and ownership.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums47.9514° N, 116.6022° W
Athol, ID
Farragut State Park preserves the brig from the enormous World War II Farragut Naval Training Station. The museum tells the unusual story of a naval base built deep in inland Idaho.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums61.5777° N, 149.5447° W
Wasilla, AK
Aircraft, locomotives, tractors, military machines and industrial equipment sprawl across this outdoor-and-indoor collection. The scale and variety make it feel more like a graveyard of northern machinery than a conventional transportation museum.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums30.5278° N, 96.2401° W
College Station, TX
A military-history museum with restored tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and uniforms, many of them maintained in operating condition.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums35.1305° N, 92.9133° W
Morrilton, AR
Located atop Petit Jean Mountain, the Museum of Automobiles displays vintage and rare cars in an unexpected rural setting. The collection includes vehicles tied to Arkansas motoring history.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums42.3222° N, 71.0625° W
Boston, MA
The Museum of Bad Art deliberately collects artwork judged too strange, awkward or unsuccessful for conventional museums. Its current Boston gallery is inside Dorchester Brewing Company, where rotating selections from a collection of hundreds of pieces are displayed with deadpan curatorial interpretations.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums43.6791° N, 70.2879° W
Portland, ME
This specialized museum focuses entirely on beadwork as art, craft, and cultural expression. Exhibitions range from contemporary pieces to traditions from different communities, creating a museum around a material that is usually relegated to a small section elsewhere.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums42.8601° N, 112.4413° W
Pocatello, ID
A large, eccentric museum devoted to cleaning, sanitation and the history of cleaning tools. The subject matter and monumental displays make it a strong OddWay museum rather than a routine local-history stop.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums41.5905° N, 95.0544° W
Elk Horn, IA
This national museum explores Danish immigration through artifacts, folk traditions, temporary exhibitions and outdoor heritage spaces. Its prairie setting and specialized collection pair well with Elk Horn's transplanted Danish windmill.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums34.1000° N, 118.3290° W
Los Angeles, CA
The Hollywood museum displays funeral material, crime-related artifacts, serial-killer artwork and other macabre objects at its current Selma Avenue location.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums29.9559° N, 90.0698° W
New Orleans, LA
This macabre museum displays material connected with funerary practices, crime history, forensic subjects and death culture. The subject matter can be graphic, so it is best treated as an adult-oriented OddWay museum stop.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums34.7475° N, 92.2643° W
Little Rock, AR
Arkansas’s oldest science museum mixes hands-on exhibits with oddities from natural history and technology. Its collection roots stretch back to an early cabinet-style museum.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums44.6409° N, 72.2058° W
Glover, VT
This self-service museum gives ordinary objects the kind of attention normally reserved for fine art or major historical artifacts. Rotating exhibits have examined everything from pencils and matches to locks, toothbrushes and other objects people usually overlook.
- Access
- Open to visitors