Weird history37.3414° N, 121.6428° W
Mount Hamilton, CA
Historic telescopes occupy a remote mountaintop observatory opened in the nineteenth century, with public programs when weather, staffing and road access allow.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
Weird history
Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Weird history2,650
Suggest a stopReal events too strange to have made the textbook.
- Weird history40.8986° N, 74.2077° W
Totowa, NJ
Electrician Sal Giardino's four-foot black granite tombstone is shaped like an incandescent bulb and includes lightning bolts, an electrical outlet and the words 'World's Greatest Electrician.' It stands inside Laurel Grove Cemetery, which maintains posted visiting hours.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Weird history46.1904° N, 123.8224° W
Astoria, OR
Board the retired Lightship Columbia at the maritime museum dock and see the floating lighthouse that once held station off the Columbia River entrance.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Weird history40.7837° N, 111.8623° W
Salt Lake City, UT
Lilly Gray's headstone bears the unexplained inscription 'Victim of the Beast 666,' making it one of Utah's best-known cemetery curiosities. State archivists have documented the woman behind the legend and caution against supernatural assumptions.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Weird history33.4927° N, 105.3837° W
Lincoln, NM
Billy the Kid escaped from this former courthouse in 1881 after killing two deputies, making the building one of the most concrete surviving sites in the Lincoln County War story. It remains part of the state-run Lincoln Historic Site.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Weird history41.1603° N, 100.7908° W
North Platte, NE
The museum preserves the story of the North Platte Canteen, where volunteers served millions of military personnel passing through by train during World War II. An outdoor heritage village adds relocated historic buildings, making this more than a standard county display.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Weird history41.4928° N, 87.5095° W
Dyer, IN
In 1923, highway planners completed an experimental "Ideal Section" of the Lincoln Highway near Dyer to demonstrate what a modern road could be. The model section used unusually thick reinforced concrete along with drainage, lighting and pedestrian features, and a marker now identifies this influential piece of early highway engineering.
- Access
- Roadside, no entry
- Weird history38.8891° N, 77.0498° W
Washington, DC
The enormous support structure beneath the Lincoln Memorial opened for public visitation in 2026, exposing the monument's cavernous concrete undercroft.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Weird history42.9290° N, 73.2421° W
North Bennington, VT
This small village square is associated with Shirley Jackson's years in North Bennington and is commonly identified as an inspiration for the setting of her disturbing short story The Lottery. Jackson lived nearby while writing the story, making the ordinary-looking square a useful literary-horror stop.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Weird history39.8234° N, 89.6557° W
Springfield, IL
Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, and three of their sons are entombed inside an enormous state monument topped by a towering obelisk.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Weird history39.9787° N, 89.8471° W
Petersburg, IL
A reconstructed 1830s frontier village recreates the small settlement where Abraham Lincoln lived before moving to Springfield.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Weird history33.7486° N, 84.3721° W
Atlanta, GA
A dying stone lion lies across the Confederate section of Oakland Cemetery as a monument to unknown Confederate dead. The sculpture is one of the cemetery's most visually memorable monuments and can be visited during normal cemetery hours.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Weird history45.5658° N, 107.4273° W
Crow Agency, MT
A memorial landscape interpreting the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, including the Custer battlefield, Indian Memorial, military cemetery, and sites connected to Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho combatants.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Weird history46.1196° N, 89.8575° W
Manitowish Waters, WI
In April 1934, federal agents attempted to capture John Dillinger and members of his gang at this remote lodge, leading to a chaotic gun battle. The restaurant still embraces the history, and bullet damage and memorabilia preserve one of the most famous episodes of the Dillinger manhunt.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Weird history42.9519° N, 92.5369° W
Nashua, IA
The small church inspired the famous nineteenth-century hymn 'The Church in the Wildwood' and became a destination for weddings and music pilgrims. Its modest rural appearance hides an outsized place in American hymn history.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Weird history32.0429° N, 81.0450° W
Savannah, GA
A life-size marble statue of six-year-old Gracie Watson marks one of Bonaventure Cemetery's most visited graves. The sculpture's intimate realism and the child's association with Savannah's Pulaski House hotel helped generate generations of local ghost stories, which should be treated as folklore.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Weird history37.0478° N, 112.5267° W
Kanab, UT
Kanab's long career as a western-film location is preserved through surviving sets, props and reconstructed facades. The attraction ties a real desert town to decades of manufactured Old West scenery.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Weird history37.1249° N, 95.8368° W
Independence, KS
The museum complex stands near the Kansas homestead associated with Laura Ingalls Wilder's family and includes a reconstructed cabin and period buildings. It ties a globally known frontier story to a specific rural Kansas landscape.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Weird history40.8673° N, 74.4163° W
Parsippany-Troy Hills, NJ
A handful of old gravestones survive behind a modern firehouse, almost completely disconnected from the landscape in which the cemetery was created. Its isolation amid later development gives the tiny burial ground its 'lost' character.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Weird history34.7370° N, 92.2999° W
Little Rock, AR
The school became the center of the 1957 desegregation crisis when the Little Rock Nine entered under federal protection. The preserved school and NPS visitor center interpret one of the defining confrontations of the civil rights era.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Weird history42.1965° N, 109.3784° W
Sublette County, WY
An overland-trail crossing associated with emigrant travel and the meeting of Jim Bridger and Brigham Young.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Weird history44.0745° N, 71.3773° W
Livermore, NH
Livermore grew as a White Mountain logging company town in the late nineteenth century before fires, floods and changing timber economics helped empty it. Foundations, cellar holes and traces of the settlement remain along Sawyer River Road. The road is seasonal and may be gated, but the former village can be explored on foot without trespassing on the nearby private camp. Secondary source: https://ournewenglandlegends.com/podcast-439-the-ghost-town-of-livermore/
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Weird history45.6617° N, 110.5630° W
Livingston, MT
A grand 1902 Northern Pacific Railway depot built as a gateway to Yellowstone, now housing seasonal museum exhibits inside its restored historic interior.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Weird history41.6988° N, 71.1564° W
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.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed