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Oddity Directory

Explore strange places, unusual attractions, and curious landmarks across America.

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Explore Oddities

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478 documented oddities Highest curiosity first

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Giant Objects

World’s Largest Covered Porch Swing

Hebron, Nebraska

A 32-foot swing built with irrigation equipment waits in Hebron’s park.

Curious Landmarks

Mother Goose House

Hazard, Kentucky

A round stone building in Hazard wears a colossal goose as its roof, complete with egg-shaped windows, headlight eyes, and proportions based on a real bird…

Curious Landmarks

Biloxi Lighthouse

Biloxi, Mississippi

A cast-iron lighthouse stands improbably in the median of a busy coastal highway.

Historic Oddities

Road to Nowhere

Bryson City, North Carolina

A scenic mountain highway abruptly ends at a long, dark tunnel that was completed but never opened to ordinary automobile traffic.

Giant Objects

World’s Largest Pheasant

Huron, South Dakota

Huron's forty-foot-long, twenty-two-ton pheasant has been looming over Highway 14 since 1959, because apparently an ordinary pheasant was not enough.

Giant Objects

Albert the Bull

Audubon, Iowa

A 45-ton concrete Hereford with a 15-foot horn span watches over an Iowa park and tells visitors his story.

Roadside Attractions

Spiral Jetty

Corinne, Utah

A 1,500-foot coil of black basalt curls across the shore of the Great Salt Lake, disappearing beneath the water and returning again as lake levels change.

Giant Objects

Mickey Coffee Pot

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Two nineteenth-century tinsmiths built an enormous metal coffee pot as an advertisement, creating a landmark capable of holding roughly 740 gallons.

Historic Oddities

Kokomo Opalescent Glass

Kokomo, Indiana

An 1888 art-glass factory famous for hand-mixed sheets in hundreds of colors, now continuing through its historic shop and legacy.

Strange Museums

Phineas Gage

Massachusetts

In 1848, railroad foreman Phineas Gage survived an accident that should have been unsurvivable. An explosion drove an iron tamping rod through his head. The rod…

Abandoned Places

Central State Hospital

Milledgeville, Georgia

A vast former mental-hospital campus contains monumental buildings, quiet cemeteries, and difficult institutional history.

Natural Oddities

Bubble Rock

Mount Desert, Maine

A glacier carried an enormous chunk of granite roughly 30 miles and dropped it near the edge of South Bubble, where it still looks one hard…