If you have ever walked down a city street and found yourself fretting because your favorite neon sign or hot dog stand is no longer there, a trip to the Valley Relics Museum in Los Angeles, California is an absolute must. Valley Relics Museum founder Tommy Gelinas spent decades collecting discarded restaurant menus, dusty ashtrays,…
International Cryptozoology Museum founder Loren Coleman isn’t on a mission to prove that mysterious creatures such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster exist. Instead, Coleman encourages visitors to draw their own conclusions from compelling evidence—such as supposedly authentic fecal matter that a ferocious snow creature left in its wake. Cryptozoology is essentially the study…
Before there was Las Vegas, there was Hot Springs, Arkansas. Most people are unaware that a sleepy spa town in rural Arkansas was once the center of the organized crime universe in the United States. The Gangster Museum of America in Hot Springs, Arkansas features several rooms dedicated to the history of gangsters, gambling, and…
Outsider artist Butch Anthony has had a lifelong attraction to strange and curious objects. At the tender age of 14, Butch constructed a one-room cabin in his hometown of Seale, Alabama to store found objects such as arrowheads, fragments of bone, and mummified rats. Over time, Butch began to fashion his own unusual creations, which…
As soon as writer Mark Twain set foot in Hartford, Connecticut he fell in love with the place. Mark Twain instantly knew that he wanted to build a lavish home in genteel Hartford where he could write and raise his family in comfort and style. In 1873, Twain enlisted New York architect Edward Tuckerman Potter…
In the 21st century, multi-room immersive art installations are all the rage. Art lovers can view a vibrant projection of a Van Gogh painting that fills an entire room at a traveling exhibit, or walk though the door of a drink cooler at Meow Wolf’s make-believe grocery store Omega Mart in Las Vegas and enter…
The Illinois Railway Museum—which is located about an hour outside of Chicago—was founded in 1953 by 10 avid train lovers who each forked over a bit of their hard-earned money to save a retired train car from ending up in a junkyard. Since its inception, the Illinois Railway Museum has been a labor of love…
At first glance, the area surrounding California’s Salton Sea is strange, eerie, and desolate. The Salton Sea is a steadily dying lake that is contaminated by toxic farm runoff. Since the once popular Salton Sea began to decline in the 1970s, artists and other eccentric, creative folks have flocked to the lake’s shores in an…
