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Maryland Oddities

Unusual destinations, curious landmarks, and worthwhile detours across Maryland.

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13 documented oddities Highest curiosity first

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Giant Objects

The Awakening

National Harbor, Maryland

Five enormous aluminum body parts make it look as though a screaming 72-foot giant has been buried alive beneath the Potomac waterfront.

Curious Landmarks

Vanadu Art House

Hyattsville, Maryland

A former museum conservator covered his house, yard, fence, and drivable cars with machinery, horns, glass, antiques, scrap metal, and objects that look salvaged from a…

Roadside Attractions

Papermoon Diner

Baltimore, Maryland

Mannequins, dolls, toys, sculptures, kitchen tools, vintage objects, and brightly colored installations turn a functioning Baltimore diner into a constantly mutating art environment.

Strange Museums

American Visionary Art Museum

Baltimore, Maryland

Baltimore built an entire museum around self-taught imagination, filling it with giant whirligigs, transformed cars, mechanical creations, mosaics, and art made from materials that conventional museums…

Historic Oddities

Elijah Bond’s Ouija Tombstone

Baltimore, Maryland

The man who patented the Ouija board lay in an unmarked Baltimore grave for decades before receiving a monument whose back is carved like the talking…

Roadside Attractions

Mr. Trash Wheel

Baltimore, Maryland

A solar and water-powered machine with enormous googly eyes waits at the mouth of Jones Falls and slowly eats Baltimore's floating garbage into a dumpster.

Roadside Attractions

Enchanted Forest Relics

Ellicott City, Maryland

Giant shoes, crooked houses, storybook castles, nursery-rhyme figures, and other rescued pieces of a vanished 1950s theme park have been gathered back together on a working…

Strange Museums

National Museum of Health and Medicine

Silver Spring, Maryland

A federal medical museum preserves the bullet removed from Abraham Lincoln's brain, the shattered bones of a general's amputated leg, anatomical specimens, antique instruments, and artifacts…

Strange Museums

Ripley’s Ocean City

Ocean City, Maryland

A giant shark appears to crash through the Ocean City Boardwalk building that houses shrunken heads, odd artifacts, strange art, and hundreds of exhibits designed around…

Historic Oddities

Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay

Nanjemoy, Maryland

The Potomac River holds the skeletons of more than 100 abandoned ships, many built for World War I and later burned, salvaged, scuttled, and slowly transformed…

Curious Landmarks

Bromo Seltzer Tower

Baltimore, Maryland

Baltimore's 1911 clock tower replaces the twelve numbers with the letters BROMO-SELTZER and once carried a 51-foot glowing medicine bottle above the skyline.

Curious Landmarks

Phoenix Shot Tower

Maryland

The Phoenix Shot Tower looks absurdly tall for a brick industrial building because its manufacturing process required one essential ingredient: a very long fall. Workers once…