Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Giant objects, odd monuments and things built for no clear reason.
Somerville, MA
Two artists transformed a former Masonic hall into a floor-to-ceiling 'Temple of Art' covered with mythological figures, geometric patterns and intensely colored murals. Public access is event-based or arranged rather than conventional daily museum hours.
Memphis, TN
A massive pink-marble mansion built for Piggly Wiggly founder Clarence Saunders became the centerpiece of Memphis's science and history museum. The unfinished personal palace turned public museum mixes eccentric architecture with natural-history and regional exhibits.
Seale, AL
Butch Anthony turned stacked shipping containers into a free drive-through gallery filled with folk art, taxidermy, bones, found objects and visual oddities. The drive-through portion is open 24/7; tours of Anthony’s original museum and studio require separate arrangements.
La Jolla, CA
A pod-like concrete beach house built into the base of a cliff looks like science-fiction architecture. It is private property and should only be viewed from lawful beach access.
Marquette, KS
Wind and water eroded sandstone into oversized mushroom-shaped rocks balanced on narrow stems. The tiny state park is a concentrated collection of geological forms that look deliberately sculpted despite being natural.
New Orleans, LA
Music Box Village is a walk-through environment of artist-built structures that double as playable musical instruments. Performances and public hours follow a changing calendar, so confirm an event or open day before routing there.
Mason City, IA
This attraction celebrates Mason City native Meredith Willson and The Music Man with a recreated 1912 streetscape, exhibits and Willson's boyhood home. It turns the fictional River City into a physical Iowa destination.
Charlotte, NC
Artist Christopher Janney turned a nine-story parking garage into an enormous playable instrument. Touch-sensitive architectural fins light up and produce sounds, while programmed performances and a hidden puzzle add to the building’s interactive weirdness.
Palmer, AK
A nonprofit farm maintains a herd of musk oxen and interprets qiviut, the exceptionally soft underwool harvested from the animals. Guided visitation makes it one of Alaska's most unusual agricultural stops.
Phoenix, AZ
Boyce Luther Gulley built this sprawling hand-made castle from stone, adobe, automobile parts and other salvaged material beginning in the 1930s. The property changed ownership in 2026, but public tours are not reliably available, so OddWay should treat it as a preservation-site/exterior stop unless official access is announced.
Preston, MN
Minnesota's longest known cave winds beneath Forestville/Mystery Cave State Park through passages shaped by groundwater in limestone. DNR-guided tours are seasonal and route-specific, so travelers should reserve rather than treating it as an open cavern.
Onsted, MI
Mystery Hill has been confusing Irish Hills travelers since 1952 with rooms and demonstrations where water, balls and people appear to defy gravity. The revived attraction also includes Ward Hall's Strange Oddities, with sideshow-style curiosities and unusual animal specimens.
Blowing Rock, NC
This classic roadside “gravity hill” attraction has operated for decades around rooms and structures designed to distort visitors’ sense of level, balance, and gravity. The site has expanded with optical illusions, Appalachian exhibits, and other attractions while keeping the tilted Mystery House as its centerpiece. Location source: https://mapcarta.com/N2385806042
St. Ignace, MI
Opened in the 1950s, this classic roadside "mystery spot" uses tilted construction and visual cues to make visitors feel as though gravity is behaving incorrectly. The seasonal attraction has grown to include the original gravity experience plus other family attractions, but the old mystery-house presentation remains the reason it belongs on OddWay.
Santa Cruz, CA
The Mystery Spot is a classic gravity-house roadside attraction in the redwoods outside Santa Cruz, where tilted structures and forced perspective make visitors appear to lean at impossible angles. It was discovered in 1939 and opened to the public around 1940; today visitors buy tickets for a roughly 45-minute guided experience and can also use the hiking trail and gift shop.
Monroe, UT
Mineral water is diverted through outdoor bathtubs and pools surrounded by brightly colored travertine deposits. The privately operated site blends a natural spring with deliberately eccentric human additions.
Mystic, CT
The real Mystic Pizza inspired the title and setting of the 1988 film that helped launch Julia Roberts' career. The restaurant was not the movie's interior filming location, but it embraces the connection with photographs, memorabilia and its now-famous name.
Bottineau, ND
Often described as a 'Stonehenge of the Prairie,' Mystical Horizons uses stone and concrete alignments to frame the solstices, equinoxes and the north star. Its remote Turtle Mountain setting gives the intentionally astronomical monument a distinctly uncanny feel.
Stanton, KY
This narrow, unlit tunnel was blasted through solid rock in the early twentieth century for a logging railroad before being converted into a one-lane automobile road. Now known as the Gateway to Red River Gorge, it is just wide enough for a single vehicle and still carries normal traffic through the mountain.
Volcano, HI
A forest trail drops into a large lava tube formed when the surface of a lava flow cooled while molten rock continued moving beneath it. The illuminated main passage is managed for visitors, but rain, lighting, and park closures can affect access.
Kahakuloa, HI
Waves funnel into a lava-rock opening and erupt vertically from the coast at Nakalele Point. The blowhole is dramatic precisely because the shoreline is powerful and unpredictable; remain well back from the opening and avoid wet rock near heavy surf.
Greenbelt, MD
Outside NASA's Goddard Visitor Center is a collection of rockets and space hardware that gives travelers an up-close look at the scale of sounding rockets and launch technology. The grounds also include a Moon Tree descended from seeds carried around the Moon during Apollo 14, while the visitor center contains additional free exhibits.
Nashville, TN
A large ceramic public-art installation creates a strange miniature landscape of sculpted forms rather than a conventional statue. Its tactile, earth-toned construction makes it an unusual break from Nashville's bronze monuments and music murals.
Washington, DC
Its colossal Great Hall and giant Corinthian columns make the former Pension Building itself as unusual as the architecture exhibits inside.
