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Strange Museums

Browse documented strange museums from across America.

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Strange Museums

Ye Olde Curiosity Shop

Seattle, Washington

A working waterfront souvenir shop doubles as a free museum packed with mummies, strange animal specimens, vintage machines, and more than a century of collected oddities.

Strange Museums

Mütter Museum

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Anatomical specimens, skeletons, preserved tissue, medical instruments, models, and unusual case histories fill a museum that still feels like a nineteenth-century medical cabinet.

Strange Museums

John Hampson’s Bug Art

St. Johnsbury, Vermont

Thousands upon thousands of real beetles, moth parts, and insect wings were arranged into elaborate symmetrical mosaics that look decorative until viewers realize what they are…

Strange Museums

SKELETONS Museum

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

More than five hundred real skeletons fill an Oklahoma City museum where whales hang overhead and animals are stripped down to the architecture hidden beneath their…

Strange Museums

Mercer Museum

Doylestown, Pennsylvania

A six-story concrete castle crams thousands of preindustrial objects into rooms, balconies, niches, and a towering atrium where boats and horse-drawn vehicles hang overhead.

Strange Museums

City Museum

St. Louis, Missouri

A former shoe factory became a maze of slides, tunnels, salvaged architecture, and rooftop oddities.

Historic Oddities

International UFO Museum and Research Center

Roswell, New Mexico

Roswell’s downtown museum turns a 1947 mystery into a full alien encounter.

Strange Museums

Birthplace of Kermit the Frog

Leland, Mississippi

A tiny Delta museum celebrates the childhood landscape that inspired Kermit the Frog.

Strange Museums

World’s Oldest Ham

Smithfield, Virginia

A ham cured in 1902 became a local celebrity, acquired a brass collar, traveled to exhibitions, and now spends retirement inside a museum with its own…

Strange Museums

Glore Psychiatric Museum

St. Joseph, Missouri

Historic equipment, patient-made objects, and displays trace changing approaches to mental health care.

Strange Museums

Kazoo Factory and Museum

Beaufort, South Carolina

A working factory that produces enormous numbers of plastic kazoos also contains a museum of historic examples and lets visitors assemble one of the buzzing instruments…

Strange Museums

Museum of Death

New Orleans, Louisiana

Coffins, skulls, morgue photography, mortician tools, body bags, and serial-killer correspondence fill a museum that makes death the entire subject instead of a side exhibit.