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.
St. Albans, VT
A heavy stone monument marks the place where Lawrence Brainerd reportedly killed an exceptionally large gray wolf in 1839. The monument was restored and reinstalled near the trail in recent years, preserving a strange local episode of human-wildlife history.
Bellows Falls, VT
Humanlike faces were carved into rock beside the Connecticut River long before modern Bellows Falls developed around the site. Their exact age and meaning remain uncertain, and travelers should view the protected carvings only from safe, permitted public areas rather than climbing onto the riverbank rocks.
Burlington, VT
A plaque marks the downtown location where Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield opened their first ice-cream shop in a renovated gas station in 1978. The original building is gone, making the marker the physical reminder of where the Vermont brand began.
Bennington, VT
The 306-foot obelisk is the tallest structure in Vermont and commemorates the 1777 Battle of Bennington. One of the odd historical details is that the battle carrying Bennington's name was actually fought several miles away across the present-day New York state line.
Bennington, VT
One of Vermont's oldest cemeteries contains the graves of Revolutionary War soldiers, political figures and poet Robert Frost. Signs also identify the work of early local stone carvers, turning the burial ground into an outdoor archive of changing gravestone styles.
Middlesex, VT
A roughly five-foot granite clothespin marks the grave of Jack Crowell, associated with Vermont's once-significant wooden clothespin industry. The monument turns an ordinary household object into an unexpectedly literal piece of funerary art.
Windsor, VT
Built in 1866, this 449-foot covered bridge crosses the Connecticut River between Windsor and Cornish, New Hampshire. It remains one of the longest surviving wooden covered bridges in the United States and still carries road traffic across the state line.
Addison, VT
The Lake Champlain crossing at Crown Point played a prominent role in the 2000 supernatural film What Lies Beneath. The original bridge seen in the movie was demolished in 2009 and replaced, so today's crossing is both a film-location stop and a reminder of a vanished landmark.
Corinth, VT
East Corinth stood in for the fictional Connecticut town of Winter River in Tim Burton's 1988 film Beetlejuice. The village landscape and recognizable road views remain, but OddWay visitors should remember that most individual buildings are private homes rather than film attractions.
Dorset, VT
An abandoned marble quarry cuts deep into the mountain near Dorset, leaving underground workings where winter ice formations can develop. The quarry is not a maintained tourist cave, so access conditions, land permissions and underground hazards should be checked before any visit.
Rutland, VT
A helmeted soldier appears half-embedded in a block of marble in this unusual Vietnam veterans memorial. The sculpture was begun by veteran John Reno and later completed by another veteran after Reno's death, producing a memorial that looks almost like a figure frozen inside stone.
Isle La Motte, VT
Exposed limestone at this preserve contains remnants of the roughly 480-million-year-old Chazy fossil reef, one of the oldest known reef ecosystems. Trails and interpretive material let visitors literally walk across rock containing traces of an ancient tropical sea.
Middlebury, VT
A Middlebury cemetery contains the burial place of an ancient Egyptian mummy once owned by Middlebury College. After deterioration made the remains unsuitable for continued display, the thousands-of-years-old individual was given a modern Vermont burial.
Manchester, VT
Near the summit of Equinox Mountain is the granite grave of Mr. Barbo, the beloved dog of industrialist Joseph George Davidson. The unusually elaborate canine memorial recounts how Barbo was killed by a hunter in 1955; reaching it requires seasonal access on Skyline Drive.
New Haven, VT
Doctor Timothy Clark Smith feared being buried alive, so his nineteenth-century grave was built with a window that allowed people above ground to look into the burial chamber. The unusual design survives in Evergreen Cemetery as a physical reminder of Victorian fears surrounding premature burial.
Westminster, VT
William French was killed during the 1775 Westminster confrontation between local protesters and New York authorities. His unusually direct gravestone inscription condemns King George III and his supporters, and French's death became part of the political chain of events preceding Vermont's declaration of independence.
Montpelier, VT
This hillside cemetery is packed with elaborate Victorian funerary art, including carved stairways, sculpted figures and the locally notorious Hubbard memorial. Ghost and curse stories have attached themselves to some of the monuments, but the carvings themselves are the documented attraction.
Danville, VT
A once-busy mill village largely disappeared after a destructive nineteenth-century fire. Today interpretive signs, foundations and landscape remnants allow visitors to walk through the remains of a Vermont community that effectively vanished.
Barnet, VT
Harvey's Lake is locally associated with Jacques Cousteau's childhood and is promoted as the place where the future ocean explorer had his first significant diving experience while attending summer camp. The unlikely inland Vermont connection makes the lake a peculiar landmark in diving history.
Derby Line, VT
The international boundary between the United States and Canada runs directly through this library and opera house, with a marked line crossing the interior. Border procedures changed in 2025 and a separate Canadian entrance opened in 2026, so visitors must use the proper entrance for the country from which they arrive and cannot treat the building as a border crossing.
Barre, VT
Barre's granite industry turned this cemetery into an outdoor gallery of unusually elaborate gravestones carved by local stoneworkers. Memorials include life-size figures, airplanes, soccer balls, race cars and other personalized sculptures cut from local granite.
Royalton, VT
A tall polished-granite monument marks the Vermont birthplace of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement. The memorial rises dramatically from a wooded hillside near the site of the Smith family's former home.
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.
Cavendish, VT
A marker commemorates the 1848 accident in which railroad foreman Phineas Gage survived an iron tamping rod passing through his skull. His survival and subsequent behavioral changes became one of the most famous cases in the history of neuroscience.
