Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Real events too strange to have made the textbook.
Lowell, MA
Beat writer Jack Kerouac rests beneath an understated flat marker in Lowell's Edson Cemetery. Admirers have traditionally left pens, cigarettes, notes and other offerings at the grave. Visit only during cemetery hours and leave the site undisturbed.
Cambridge, MA
Harvard's famous bronze founder statue is nicknamed the Statue of Three Lies: the figure is not actually modeled on John Harvard, he was not technically the university's founder, and the inscribed founding date does not match the institution's history precisely. Students and tourists also rub its shoe for luck.
Chester, MA
A woodland trail reaches enormous dry-laid stone railroad arches built in the nineteenth century without mortar. Some rise more than 70 feet and survive as monumental remnants of early American railroad engineering.
Cambridge, MA
A plaque marks the Cambridge birthplace of Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej, born while his father studied at Harvard. The future monarch would become one of the longest-reigning sovereigns in modern history.
Boston, MA
Twenty-one tombs lie beneath King's Chapel, including the Strangers' Tomb, which contains dozens of people who died in Boston without the means for private burial. Authorized Bell and Bones tours descend below the church into the historic crypt.
Cambridge, MA
A small plaque marks the spot nineteenth-century chemist Eben Horsford claimed was the site of Leif Erikson's home from around the year 1000. Mainstream archaeology has not supported Horsford's theory, turning the marker into a physical relic of America's enthusiasm for speculative Viking history.
Fall River, MA
The house where Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered with a hatchet in 1892 now operates as a museum and inn. Guests can tour the rooms connected with the killings — or sleep in the house overnight — while the still-unsolved identity of the murderer keeps the case alive more than a century later.
Fall River, MA
Lizzie Borden is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery beside members of the same family whose murders made her infamous. Her own marker is unexpectedly small and simply reads 'Lizbeth'; painted arrows inside the cemetery guide visitors toward the Borden plot during open hours.
Salem, MA
Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated a successful long-distance telephone call from Salem's Lyceum Hall in 1877. The original building has changed uses, but the location preserves an unexpectedly important milestone in communications history amid downtown Salem.
Ashland, MA
Before the Boston Marathon starting line moved to Hopkinton, early races began in Ashland. This small park preserves the original starting area with markers and displays tied to the world's oldest annual marathon.
Wellfleet, MA
The dunes preserve the site of Guglielmo Marconi's enormous wireless station, where a transatlantic message from President Theodore Roosevelt was sent to King Edward VII in 1903. Most of the original station has vanished into the eroding Cape Cod shoreline, leaving interpretive remains and an unusually windswept communications landmark.
Medfield, MA
More than 35 buildings from a former state psychiatric hospital remain standing across an unusually intact campus. The town allows daytime visitors to walk many outdoor areas, and the property has appeared in films including 'Shutter Island' and 'Knives Out.' Every building interior is off-limits, and construction or filming can close sections without much notice.
Waltham, MA
Most of this former state psychiatric hospital was demolished or redeveloped after its 1992 closure, but the old administration building survives beside public trails and open space. The institution's history includes documented controversy over neglect and abuse as well as later ghost stories. The surrounding area is public; entering the surviving building is not permitted.
Northampton, MA
An abandoned quarry hides along conservation trails in Northampton's Mineral Hills. The exposed rock walls and flooded or overgrown workings create a dramatic industrial scar inside otherwise wooded public land. Stay on legal trails and keep back from unstable quarry edges.
New Bedford, MA
Herman Melville described a ship's-bow pulpit inside the Seamen's Bethel in 'Moby-Dick,' even though no such pulpit existed there at the time. After a movie adaptation built one, the church eventually installed a permanent version, allowing fiction to reshape the real place that inspired it.
Cambridge, MA
A massive, nearly perfect stone sphere from pre-Columbian Costa Rica sits outside Harvard's Peabody Museum. Weighing thousands of pounds, it belongs to a mysterious archaeological tradition in which craftspeople shaped enormous boulders into remarkably smooth geometric forms.
Cambridge, MA
America's first large landscaped rural cemetery mixes elaborate monuments, mausoleums, unusual funerary sculpture, ponds and a hilltop tower across more than 170 acres. It helped change American ideas about what a cemetery could look like.
Duxbury, MA
A 116-foot granite tower topped by a statue of Pilgrim military leader Myles Standish rises from a hill overlooking Duxbury. The unusually tall nineteenth-century monument looks like a stone watchtower and opens for interior climbing only on selected dates.
Edgartown, MA
The shifting sand of Chappaquiddick periodically exposes wooden wreckage believed to belong to the Christina, lost in 1866. One survivor reportedly clung to the mast for more than two days. Visibility changes with storms and sand movement, and reaching the area can require ferry and beach-access planning.
Plymouth, MA
An enormous 81-foot granite monument dominates a hill above Plymouth. Completed in the nineteenth century, it surrounds a towering central figure of Faith with allegorical sculptures representing morality, law, education and liberty, giving it the scale and visual drama of a fantasy monument.
Boston, MA
Concrete and stone remnants of the old Franklin Park Zoo bear enclosures survive in the woods, long after the animals moved to modern habitats. The abandoned pens were also used as a filming location for 'Mystic River.' Current signs prohibit entry into the structures, so view them only from permitted trails and areas.
Somerville, MA
A squat stone tower built around 1703 began as a windmill before becoming a colonial gunpowder magazine. Its stored powder played a role in rising tensions before the American Revolution, and the lonely tower now sits inside a public neighborhood park.
West Boylston, MA
A roofless stone church stands beside the Wachusett Reservoir as one of the few visible remnants of a community displaced when the reservoir was created. The building was stripped and preserved rather than submerged, leaving a lonely Gothic-looking shell beside the water.
Concord, MA
The Concord Museum preserves one of the original lanterns associated with the 'one if by land, two if by sea' signal from Old North Church on April 18, 1775. It is a small physical object tied to one of America's most famous historical warnings.
