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.
Burlington, VT
A waterfront monument recognizes Champ, the long-necked creature said to inhabit Lake Champlain. Reports and legends surrounding Champ stretch back generations, making the lake monster one of the Northeast's best-known cryptids even though no conclusive evidence has established its existence.
Underhill, VT
This rugged Mount Mansfield trail is named for the wampahoofus, a mythical Green Mountain creature said to have legs shorter on one side so it could circle steep hillsides. Reaching the trail requires a mountain hike from the Stevensville area, and mud, snow and ice can make access seasonal.
Stories a place tells about itself, passed down and still repeated.
Danville, VT
The American Society of Dowsers maintains its headquarters in Danville for practitioners of the centuries-old practice of using rods, pendulums and other methods to locate water or other hidden targets. The organization remains active in 2026, although the headquarters should be treated as a limited-access organizational stop rather than a walk-in museum.
Dummerston, VT
A nineteenth-century legend blamed the deaths of several members of the Spaulding family on a cursed vine creeping through their cemetery plot. The story likely grew from tuberculosis deaths, but the row of family graves in Dummerston Center Cemetery remains the physical location connected with the tale.
North Bennington, VT
This secluded stone mansion on the Bennington College campus is often identified as a possible visual inspiration for Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. The connection is literary lore rather than proven fact, but Jackson lived in North Bennington and the building's isolated setting closely fits the association.
Manchester Center, VT
A historical marker near Factory Point Cemetery records the story of Rachel Harris Burton, whose body was reportedly exhumed and burned around 1792 after townspeople feared she had become a vampire. The episode belongs to the documented New England vampire panic surrounding tuberculosis and other unexplained illness.
Richmond, VT
Built in the early nineteenth century, this rare many-sided meetinghouse looks almost circular from a distance. Local lore says its shape left the devil no corner in which to hide, adding a supernatural explanation to one of Vermont's most unusual historic buildings.
Craftsbury, VT
Vermont is known for occasional windows installed diagonally beneath rooflines, commonly called witch windows. Folklore claims the crooked openings were meant to prevent witches from flying through them, though practical architectural explanations are far more likely; the pin represents a Craftsbury area where examples can be spotted from public roads.
Hotels, theatres, prisons and back roads with a reputation.
Stowe, VT
The 1844 Gold Brook covered bridge is better known as Emily's Bridge because of a local ghost story about a young woman who supposedly died there after being abandoned by her lover. Tales of scratches, voices and other activity are folklore rather than established history, but the bridge remains one of Vermont's best-known haunted landmarks.
Brattleboro, VT
Patients from the nearby Brattleboro Retreat built this stone observation tower in the nineteenth century as part of therapeutic outdoor work. The tower itself is no longer intended for climbing, but surrounding public trails reach the structure, which has accumulated grim local legends and ghost stories.
Proctor, VT
This sprawling nineteenth-century mansion mixes Scottish, Romanesque, Dutch and Queen Anne architectural elements into an improbable Vermont castle. Seasonal tours explore its stained glass, antiques and eccentric rooms, while dedicated paranormal tours draw on the property's long-running ghost stories.
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.
Small, specific collections run by people who care far too much.
Jericho, VT
Wilson Bentley became the first person to successfully photograph a single snow crystal in 1885 and went on to create thousands of images. The Old Red Mill preserves his equipment, photographs and story in the Vermont community where his fascination with snow began.
Manchester, VT
This specialized museum preserves rods, reels, flies, art and archival material documenting the history of angling. Its intense focus on a single outdoor pastime makes it a strong niche museum stop rather than a general regional-history museum.
Windsor, VT
Inside a nineteenth-century armory, this museum preserves early machine tools and manufacturing technology tied to interchangeable parts and precision production. The dense collection of unusual industrial machinery makes it one of Vermont's strongest mechanical-history stops.
Huntington, VT
Hundreds of life-size wooden bird carvings fill this small museum, each painstakingly shaped and painted to represent species found in Vermont and beyond. The collection blurs the line between natural-history display and obsessive folk craftsmanship.
Glover, VT
Bread and Puppet Theater preserves decades of enormous masks, political puppets and handmade performance figures inside a converted barn. The collection is dense, theatrical and intentionally rough-edged, with seasonal performances continuing on the surrounding farm.
Brattleboro, VT
Brattleboro once produced hundreds of thousands of reed and pipe organs under the Estey name. The museum occupies part of the old factory complex and preserves instruments, manufacturing history and machinery from a company whose organs were shipped around the world.
Giant objects, odd monuments and things built for no clear reason.
South Burlington, VT
Two enormous black-granite whale tails appear to dive into a grassy field beside Interstate 89. Jim Sardonis created the sculpture in 1989, and its marine subject has become particularly memorable in landlocked Vermont.
Middlebury, VT
A granite monument on the Middlebury College campus promotes the eccentric dream of defeating or controlling gravity. It was connected with Roger Babson's Gravity Research Foundation, an organization that funded unconventional gravity research and placed similar monuments at colleges around the country.
Waterbury, VT
Behind Ben & Jerry's Waterbury factory, faux headstones memorialize discontinued ice-cream flavors with names, dates and rhyming epitaphs. The hillside cemetery turns failed and retired products into one of Vermont's most recognizable corporate oddities.
Burlington, VT
A ring of large stones at Oakledge Park forms a modern megalithic calendar designed to mark solar and seasonal events. Visitors can stand among the stones and use their alignments to observe the sun in a setting that resembles a miniature Vermont Stonehenge.
Shrewsbury, VT
A narrow cable suspension footbridge carries the Appalachian and Long Trail high above the Mill River gorge. The bridge was rebuilt after a deadly 1973 flood and reopened after repairs in 2025; the surrounding cliffs remain hazardous and require normal hiking caution.
Enosburg Falls, VT
More than 70 large-scale sculptures by David Stromeyer are spread across roughly 200 acres of fields and woods. The seasonal park lets visitors wander among massive steel forms in a landscape that functions as both sculpture garden and outdoor gallery.
