Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Creatures people keep reporting and nobody has caught.
Churubusco, IN
Churubusco's signature legend began with reports of an enormous snapping turtle called Oscar in Fulk Lake, culminating in a highly publicized attempt to capture it in 1949. The town still embraces the "Beast of Busco" through Turtle Days and a large turtle statue in the community park, giving the cryptid story a clear public stop.
French Lick, IN
Otis is a 25-foot wooden Sasquatch built by Bear Hollow Wood Carvers in 2023 and posed on a broken dock with an enormous fishing pole. He stands on the French Lick Cabins at Patoka Lake property and has become a destination in his own right, but visitors should remember that the surrounding cabins are an operating lodging property.
Stories a place tells about itself, passed down and still repeated.
Avon, IN
The railroad bridge west of Indianapolis has accumulated several local ghost stories, most famously involving a mother and child and another tale about a worker supposedly entombed in the structure. The bridge remains an active railroad structure, so OddWay visitors should view it only from legal public areas around Washington Township Park and never walk on the tracks.
Wheatfield, IN
This unusual steel bridge over the Kankakee River carries a persistent local story that some of its metal came from the original 1893 Chicago World's Fair Ferris wheel. The bridge itself is real and historically significant, while the Ferris-wheel connection is best treated as legend rather than settled fact.
Clinton Falls, IN
The 1922 Edna Collins Covered Bridge crosses Little Walnut Creek and carries one of Putnam County's persistent ghost stories. Local legend tells of a girl named Edna who would wait for her parents to honk three times at the bridge and is now supposedly connected to unexplained sounds and sightings around the structure.
New Harmony, IN
New Harmony tradition once claimed that the Archangel Gabriel visited communal leader George Rapp in 1819 and left footprints impressed into a limestone slab. The weathered slab still survives behind a brick wall near Church and Main Streets, but it is on private property and should only be viewed from the public sidewalk through or over the wall.
Fort Wayne, IN
John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, died near Fort Wayne in 1845 after decades of planting and tending orchards across the frontier. A prominent memorial in Johnny Appleseed Park marks the burial place traditionally accepted as his grave, giving the American folk figure a real public destination.
Arlington, IN
The grave of young Lova Cline is marked by an elaborate miniature house built by her family rather than a conventional headstone. Local stories later attached eerie details to the little structure, including claims that objects inside change position, making it one of Indiana's better-known unusual cemetery monuments.
Hotels, theatres, prisons and back roads with a reputation.
New Albany, IN
Industrialist William Culbertson began building this elaborate Second Empire mansion in 1867, filling it with ornate woodwork, painted ceilings and other high Victorian details. The state historic site is also widely associated with local haunting stories and seasonal paranormal programming, giving visitors a legitimate way to experience the building rather than approaching a private haunted house.
Indianapolis, IN
Alexander Moore Hannah built this large brick house in the nineteenth century, and it later became one of Indianapolis's best-known paranormal locations. The organization preserving the property offers historical access and scheduled paranormal investigations, allowing visitors to experience the site legally instead of relying on abandoned-building lore.
Huntertown, IN
The Irene Byron Tuberculosis Sanatorium complex once treated tuberculosis patients outside Fort Wayne, but the surviving historic structures were ultimately demolished. There is no public sanatorium attraction left to visit, so this entry should not be routed as an active destination.
Story, IN
Guests at the historic Story Inn have long reported a female apparition known as the Blue Lady, particularly around one of the inn's rooms. Accounts collected by the property describe details such as the scent of peaches and sightings near a dressing table, while the active inn allows visitors to experience the location through normal lodging and dining access.
Columbia City, IN
The Haunted Jail is a seasonal scare attraction in downtown Columbia City that transforms a jail-themed space into a live-actor Halloween walkthrough. It has operated for decades but is only available during its posted fall schedule.
Mitchell, IN
Built in the 1890s, this house has been operated specifically as a paranormal attraction rather than simply marketed through outside ghost stories. Whispers Estate offers scheduled investigations and events centered on reported voices, apparitions, movement and other unexplained activity inside the property.
Real events too strange to have made the textbook.
Bloomington, IN
A stone marker on the Monroe County Courthouse grounds commemorates the point calculated as the geographic center of the United States population after the 1910 Census. The actual statistical point reflected the country's westward population shift, turning an abstract census calculation into a physical downtown landmark.
Evansville, IN
Between roughly A.D. 1000 and 1450, Mississippian people built a major town here containing large earthen platform mounds, plazas and houses. The preserved archaeological site and museum allow visitors to encounter the landscape without treating the Indigenous city as a mysterious or vanished-civilization legend.
Osgood, IN
U.S. Coast and Geodetic Surveyor Jasper Bilby designed a distinctive steel surveying tower in the 1920s that could be erected quickly above trees and terrain. One surviving tower stands near Osgood as a rare monument to the pre-satellite era of precision mapping.
Evansville, IN
Opened in 1915, Bosse Field is one of the oldest professional baseball parks still in regular use in the United States. It became even more recognizable after appearing as Racine's ballpark in the 1992 film A League of Their Own, and visitors can see it during games and scheduled events.
Aurora, IN
Aurora Schuck was buried at River View Cemetery in 1989 inside her red 1976 Cadillac Eldorado, reportedly requiring a burial area spanning multiple normal grave plots. Nothing dramatic rises above the burial today, but the cemetery itself is public and the bizarre interment story gives the site an unusually literal connection between car culture and burial custom.
Edinburgh, IN
Italian prisoners of war held at Camp Atterbury built this tiny Catholic chapel in 1943 using limited and salvaged materials. Restored after later vandalism and fire damage, the Chapel in the Meadow survives as a rare physical remnant of the camp's World War II prisoner compound.
Small, specific collections run by people who care far too much.
Auburn, IN
This museum occupies the restored 1930 Art Deco headquarters of the Auburn Automobile Company and preserves more than a century of Indiana automotive history. The building itself is part of the attraction, with period offices and showrooms surrounding rare Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg automobiles.
La Porte, IN
La Porte's museum maintains an exhibit on Belle Gunness, the Norwegian-born woman linked to a series of killings discovered after her farm burned in 1908. The case remains unusually murky because the headless woman's body recovered from the house was never conclusively established to be Gunness, and her ultimate fate is still debated.
Muncie, IN
Many episodes of The Joy of Painting were recorded in an unassuming studio inside Muncie's historic Lucius L. Ball home. The room has been recreated as part of the Bob Ross Experience, with original paintings, artifacts and the actual setting associated with one of television's most recognizable painters.
Dale, IN
Dr. Ted Waflart assembled a collection of self-playing musical machines ranging from small music boxes to enormous orchestrions and dance organs. The unusual part is that many of the instruments are demonstrated rather than left silent, but access is generally arranged for pre-scheduled groups, so travelers should call before routing here.
Auburn, IN
This museum is devoted to Ford vehicles and history from the flathead V-8 era, especially 1932 through 1953. Its collection includes dozens of restored automobiles, period displays and a recreation of an early Ford dealership, making it a much more specific stop than a general car museum.
Dana, IN
Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle was born outside the tiny town of Dana, and his birthplace farmhouse has been preserved beside museum galleries housed in Quonset-style buildings. The exhibits focus on Pyle's reporting and the ordinary soldiers whose experiences made his wartime columns famous.
Giant objects, odd monuments and things built for no clear reason.
Fort Wayne, IN
A 27-foot seated blue Hindu deity statue rises from the rural grounds of Omkaar Temple west of Fort Wayne, creating an unexpectedly monumental sight among surrounding farm fields. The scale and setting—not the religion itself—make this an OddWay stop; visitors should respect the temple as an active place of worship and follow posted access rules.
New Harmony, IN
Behind New Harmony's Atheneum stands a marker for the Kcymaerxthaere project, a worldwide network of plaques and installations describing an invented parallel geography. This piece, titled "A Healing Palindrome," deliberately blurs public art, fictional history and real-world place.
Albany, IN
A roadside tree on Edgewater Road became covered with shoes tossed and tied into its branches, turning an otherwise ordinary rural tree into a local landmark. The display has changed over the years as shoes disappear and new ones are added, so it is best treated as an evolving roadside oddity rather than a formal attraction.
Berne, IN
Berne built its 160-foot clock tower in 2010 as an elaborate tribute to the Zytglogge in Bern, Switzerland and the town's Swiss heritage. The public Muensterberg Plaza also stages a mechanical glockenspiel presentation several times a day, complete with large moving figures.
Bedford, IN
Bluespring Caverns contains one of the longest known cave systems in Indiana and an extensive navigable underground river. Commercial tours take visitors by boat through the dark cave system rather than along a standard walking path.
Brazil, IN
A towering fiberglass Great Dane named Champ has watched over this US 40 property for decades. The dog dates to the classic era of oversized roadside advertising and has been restored and repainted several times while remaining a recognizable Brazil-area landmark.
