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.
Ashland, MA
Collapsed rock shelters in Ashland Town Forest are traditionally associated with people fleeing persecution connected with the Salem witch trials. Very little of the original cave space remains, but the location preserves the broader story of displaced families who settled in the area once known as Salem End.
Sudbury, MA
Dozens of sealed concrete ammunition bunkers from World War II remain scattered through today's wildlife refuge. The military storage landscape has been reclaimed by forest, wetlands and trails, producing an unusual mix of bird habitat and wartime infrastructure. The bunker interiors are closed.
Concord, MA
A wooded corner of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery holds the graves of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott and other members of Concord's extraordinary literary circle. The concentration of famous writers makes the ridge feel like a compact cemetery of American literature.
Groton, MA
Stone ruins on Gibbet Hill are all that remain of General William Bancroft's ambitious early twentieth-century country estate. The unfinished structure later became a private club before burning, leaving castle-like walls that can now be reached by public hiking trails.
Springfield, MA
A bronze sphinx guards the entrance to the Barney family mausoleum in Forest Park. The Egyptian-style tomb was commissioned by wealthy industrialist Everett Hosmer Barney and looks dramatically out of place amid the surrounding New England landscape.
Becket, MA
An abandoned granite-quarry operation has been preserved as a public forest filled with old machinery sites, derrick remains, quarry pits and interpretive trails. Instead of clearing away the industrial past, the Becket Land Trust has left much of it in place as an outdoor museum.
Boston, MA
High inside Old North Church is the chamber containing the oldest set of change-ringing bells in North America. Paul Revere was among the early ringers, and scheduled tours climb into the tower to explain the highly mathematical ringing tradition.
Eastham, MA
A once-inhabited Cape Cod island with a lighthouse, homes and fishing community was gradually erased by erosion until it slipped beneath the water. At very low tides parts of the former island can reappear, but currents, tides and offshore access make this a view-or-boat-history stop rather than a casual walk.
Boston, MA
Boston's oldest downtown graveyards are filled with winged skulls, hourglasses, skeletons and other stark Puritan mortality symbols. A walk through the historic burying grounds becomes an outdoor gallery of macabre colonial stone carving.
Boston, MA
A 221-foot granite obelisk marks the Revolutionary War Battle of Bunker Hill. The monument's enormous interior staircase can be climbed when open, turning a familiar historical site into a surprisingly strenuous vertical stop.
Wellesley, MA
A stark stone monument on the Babson College campus memorializes Protestant martyr John Rogers, who was executed by burning in England in 1555. College founder Roger Babson believed Rogers was an ancestor and installed the memorial as one of several unusual monuments scattered around campus.
Clinton, MA
A disused railroad tunnel cuts beneath a wooded ridge near Clinton. The damp stone bore is a surviving remnant of nineteenth-century rail infrastructure and has the atmosphere of an abandoned underground passage; conditions and access can change, so follow current local rules and never enter if posted closed.
Boston, MA
A plaque marks the neighborhood where the Cocoanut Grove nightclub burned in 1942, killing 492 people. The disaster led to major changes in fire codes, emergency exits and burn treatment, yet very little of the infamous nightclub is visible today beyond the memorial marker.
Deerfield, MA
A communal grave in Deerfield marks the burial of residents killed during the 1704 French and Indigenous raid on the English settlement. The site is a serious memorial connected with a violent colonial frontier conflict rather than a paranormal attraction, but its concentrated history makes it a significant OddWay stop.
Gloucester, MA
The woods above Gloucester contain cellar holes from an abandoned colonial settlement known as Dogtown. Decades after the village vanished, millionaire Roger Babson had dozens of huge boulders carved with commands and maxims such as 'USE YOUR HEAD' and 'GET A JOB,' creating one of New England's strangest hiking trails.
Boston, MA
Near the vanished street where Edgar Allan Poe was born, Boston has installed a dramatic statue of the writer striding forward with a raven and a heart spilling from his suitcase. The surrounding plaza is officially named for Poe, despite his famously complicated relationship with his birth city.
Medford, MA
A memorial in Medford Cemetery remembers Elizabeth Short, the Massachusetts-born woman whose 1947 murder in Los Angeles became known as the Black Dahlia case. Short is not buried here, but the marker gives her hometown region a physical connection to one of America's most famous unsolved murders.
Somerville, MA
A stone marker and replica jars commemorate George W. Emerson's once-successful pickle factory, which burned in the nineteenth century. It is a wonderfully specific monument to a vanished condiment empire, sitting near Somerville's much older Powder House.
Boston, MA
A dramatic monument in Boston Public Garden commemorates the introduction of surgical anesthesia. The sculpture is unusually elaborate for a medical breakthrough, combining allegorical figures and biblical imagery around a discovery that transformed surgery.
Florida, MA
Gordy and Joyce Burdick's grave incorporates an actual parking meter labeled as expired, turning a roadside object into a permanent cemetery joke. The unusual marker sits in a small burial ground near the Hoosac Tunnel region. Visit respectfully during permitted hours.
Holyoke, MA
Stone walls and cellar holes are all that remain of a once-popular mountaintop hotel. The Eyrie House was destroyed in 1901 after owner William Street tried to cremate two dead horses on a funeral pyre and accidentally set the property ablaze.
Dedham, MA
Built around 1637–1641, the Fairbanks House is generally regarded as the oldest surviving timber-frame house in North America. Its irregular additions, low rooms and centuries of family occupation make it feel considerably stranger than a polished colonial reconstruction; tours are seasonal.
Quincy, MA
The first Dunkin' Donuts still operates at the site where William Rosenberg renamed his earlier Open Kettle shop in 1950. The modern store includes retro decor and displays recalling the chain's beginnings.
Sudbury, MA
Automobile magnate Henry Ford attempted to build a dam near the Wayside Inn, only for the expensive project to fail at holding water as intended. The surviving stonework is a monument to an unusually literal piece of engineering folly.
