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Historic Oddities

Browse documented historic oddities from across America.

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109 documented oddities Highest curiosity first

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Abandoned Places

Central State Hospital

Milledgeville, Georgia

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

Historic Oddities

Mercy Brown’s Grave

Exeter, Rhode Island

A small rural grave marks the young woman whose body was exhumed in 1892 during one of New England's last documented vampire panics.

Abandoned Places

Dungeness Ruins

St. Marys, Georgia

Wild horses wander around the roofless shell of a Carnegie mansion on a ferry-only barrier island.

Historic Oddities

Sputnik IV Impact Site

Manitowoc, Wisconsin

A Soviet spacecraft missed its planned descent, broke apart over Earth, and dropped a hot chunk of metal into the middle of a Wisconsin street in…

Giant Objects

Warren Redstone Missile

Warren, New Hampshire

A real Redstone missile towers over a tiny White Mountains town.

Curious Landmarks

Memorial Arch of Tilton

Northfield, New Hampshire

A Roman-style hilltop arch marks the tomb its wealthy builder never used.

Historic Oddities

Wooldridge Monuments

Mayfield, Kentucky

Eighteen stone figures gather around one man's grave, including relatives, hunting dogs, a horse, a deer, a fox, and Wooldridge himself at the center of it…

Abandoned Places

Benson Park

Hudson, New Hampshire

Walk a public park where an elephant house and gorilla house outlived the zoo.

Historic Oddities

Cincinnati Subway

Cincinnati, Ohio

Beneath Cincinnati lies more than two miles of abandoned subway tunnel and unfinished stations from a transit system that ran out of money before a single…

Historic Oddities

Stumphouse Tunnel

Walhalla, South Carolina

Workers dug this mountain railroad tunnel by hand before the Civil War, abandoned it unfinished, and decades later Clemson researchers discovered that its constant fifty-degree air…

Historic Oddities

Rye Sunken Forest

Rye, New Hampshire

At rare low tides, a drowned forest briefly reappears off the Rye coast.

Historic Oddities

Dentzel Carousel

Meridian, Mississippi

Hand-carved animals from a 1904 world’s fair circle beneath a jewel-like pavilion.