Atlas Obscura
Reviews
- Smygehuk Fyr Sweden's southernmost lighthouse, an iron tower ordered by contract in 1882, dark for 25 years and lit again in 2001
- Milton College's Main Hall A closed college's 1850s administration building, kept as a museum by its alumni
- Kanmon Pedestrian Tunnel Walk from Honshu to Kyushu under the sea
- Tiptree Jam Museum A free barn museum at the Wilkin & Sons jam factory, with a four-legged chicken and a Gladstone letter
- Eastern California Museum A county museum in Independence, California, said to keep a set of homemade coyote-tooth dentures
- Hầm Hô A stretch of falls, pools and granite boulders on Vietnam's Kút River, best seen from a basket boat
- Khada Parsi A cast-iron Parsi philanthropist on a pillar, ringed by mermaid fountains in the middle of a Mumbai junction
- Round Barn Capital of the World Fulton County, Indiana, where a 1924 round barn was carried off a farm and a title was settled by letter
- Pinkie the Pink Elephant A fiberglass elephant in giant black glasses, guarding a Wisconsin gas station since the 1960s
- Wahpper: The World's Largest Catfish A 40-foot fiberglass channel catfish on the Red River, built in 1997 to say what the river is good for
- House of the Gladiators A 3rd-century Roman mosaic that names its gladiators, mid-duel
- Wild Bird Petroglyph Life-sized birds carved into boulders along the trails of a Maine land trust
- The Abandoned Monorail of Melaka A 2010 monorail loop that never found its riders, left standing
- The Mocking Mural in Oslo City Hall A boy sticking out his tongue at the second door cut into a painter's wall
- Mini Statues of Uzhhorod Eighty-odd palm-sized bronzes hiding on the railings of a Ukrainian old town
- Havneholmen Metro Station A Copenhagen platform where the benches hang from the ceiling
- 23rd Street Mural An Austin wall painted in 1973–74 that its three artists kept adding to for fifty years
- Metro Argüelles Mosaic A 1995 broken-tile view of Madrid's Parque del Oeste, with the cable car crossing the sky
- The Ivanhoe Clock The four figures atop this Leeds arcade have mimed striking its bells since 1877
- The People's Treasure A Bishkek monument that lost its bronze heroes, and the living Kyrgyz who climbed up to stand in for them
- The Press Mosaic A Soviet printing house whose facade is carved into two giant open pages
- Colle Eletto Cableway Gubbio's 1960 cableway, ridden standing in an open birdcage
- Sydney Hospital's Il Porcellino A bronze boar from Florence that has raised money for a hospital since 1968
- Nick Weerts Memorial Phone Booth A Madison phone booth where the past does the talking
- Benedictine Monastery of Las Condes Two monks designed a church out of two white cubes and let the Andean light do the rest
- The Warner Theatre A 1931 movie palace whose marquee went dark for 40 years, then came back as a faithful rebuild
- The Peeping Tom of Tallinn A gilded lorgnette on a 1909 gable, and three incompatible stories about why it is up there
- The Prince of the Lilies Fresco The most famous Minoan is three fragments, no face, and a 45-year argument about which way he was facing
- Palm Temple A cedar dome of dichroic glass outside a chemistry building, with a bell inside counting the day's extinctions
- The Rabbit Hole, Rue Jankowski Six storeys of anamorphic painting that turn a Le Mans dead end into a tunnel, from one spot on the pavement
- Waldkunstpfad A 3.3-kilometre forest path outside Darmstadt that becomes an art exhibition every second summer
- Bunker Tombé The Atlantic Wall shelter that was pushed off a Normandy cliff and landed on its end
- Cape Bear Lighthouse and Marconi Station The first place in Canada to hear the Titanic
- Freedom Park Twenty miles of mountain bike trail, and three cabins that were somebody's address
- Fossil Beach at York River State Park A mile of trail, and a beach the cliffs keep restocking
- Bunski Kanal The last 850 metres of a river that is only nine kilometres long
- Gin Drinkers Line Eighteen kilometres built to hold for weeks, navigated by London street names, overrun in two days
- 'The Missing' Cabin A film set left standing in a volcanic bowl, twenty-three years after the crew left
- Volvo Island A man dug the ground out from under his own car and left it there for fourteen years
- Portsmouth Flood Wall Murals The wall Portsmouth built to keep the Ohio River out, painted into a half-mile gallery of its own history
- Rogue Creamery A Depression-era dairy co-op in southern Oregon that has twice made the best cheese in the world
- The Gävle Goat A 43-foot straw goat that has survived Christmas only seventeen times since 1966
- Mělník Chapel of Bones An anthropology professor arranged thousands of bones into a pile, a cross, and his own signature
- South Main Plaza Dog Fountain Eighteen dogs, one cat, and a man who drove to Toronto to ask permission
- The 2027 Eclipse at Luxor Six minutes and twenty-three seconds of totality, and nothing longer on reachable land until 2114
- Lazareto de Menorca An island laid out so that 111,184 people could arrive without touching anyone
- The Original Backrooms Location The internet's most famous liminal void was a hobby shop building a racetrack
- Reynard's Cave The arch is the famous part; the cave next door held the coins
- Møllestien Aarhus's prettiest lane is about seventy years old, and that is the interesting part
- Southernmost ATM Two cash machines at 77°51′ south, one of them kept alive by eating the other
- The Torment of Saint Anthony Sold as workshop, cleaned, and re-read as the earliest Michelangelo
- Karafuneya Coffee The Kyoto kissaten that built a parfait for 25
- Oshirado A pavilion of a thousand horse-god effigies, rewrapped in prayer cloth every year
- Braun Collection The industrial-design canon, one flight up in a Kronberg strip mall, for three euros
- Kawran Bazar Dhaka's wholesale market runs hardest at 2am — and the city has been trying to move it since 2024
- Saugerties Lighthouse An 1869 lighthouse you can sleep in, if you read the tide chart first
- The Living History Museum of Camping A museum where the exhibits have beds and you sleep in them
- Submarine Safari A submarine that takes 44 people thirty metres under Tenerife
- Fuel Tank Orca Mural A leaping orca turns Palmer Station's biggest fuel tank into Antarctica's most recognizable landmark
- Drops of Rain Giant resin faces surfacing out of the topiary above the Étretat cliffs
- Gedenkstein Melitta Bentz The stone in a Dresden back street for the woman who fixed coffee in 1908
- Königshöhle The cave that lent a Copper Age culture its name, and a hole in the roof the Devil is blamed for
- The House of David Bowie Hauptstraße 155, where strangers still tuck roses into the iron door
- Old Jail Art Center A 19th-century Texas jail rehung with Picasso and Renoir
- Humphrey the M5 Camel A homemade carnival float that never left its Somerset field
- Statue of Lennie Gwyther and Ginger Mick The nine-year-old who rode his pony 620 miles to watch the Sydney Harbour Bridge open
- Porcelain Room A Rococo chamber at Aranjuez sheathed floor-to-ceiling in porcelain
- Tropfsteinmaschine, 1996–2496 A basement museum machine growing a stalactite-stalagmite pair over 500 years
- Lai Tak Tsuen Estate Hong Kong's only cylindrical public housing — four 1976 drums around open-air atria, and still someone's home
Finds
- The Bedford Flag A painted crimson silk cavalry flag from the early 1700s, on view in a Massachusetts library
- Giant Perstorp Vinegar Bottle A five-metre concrete vinegar bottle, standing where Perstorp's vinegar-making began
- Paine House Museum A Coventry, Rhode Island house that grew from a 1691 core into a colonial tavern
- House of Egyptian Architecture An eighteenth-century Cairo house, once home to the city's artists, now a museum of its own building tradition
- Gruta 77's Rescued Shop Signs A Madrid punk venue's façade, lit by signs saved from closed neighbourhood shops
- Lubee Bat Conservancy A Florida bat sanctuary with flying foxes and reserved guided tours
- Smygehuk Fyr Sweden's southernmost lighthouse, an iron-clad tower first lit in 1883
- Grave of John Gray The last verified soldier of the American Revolution, buried in rural Ohio
- The Iron Fountain of Gyumri A 1982 Soviet fountain of cast metal plates, standing dry and silent
- Milton College's Main Hall A closed college's 1850s main hall, kept as a museum by its alumni
- 'Cross-legged' statue A bronze of the man who sat down in Pristina while a crowd ran
- Rhossili Down Radar Station The footprint of a 1942 Chain Home Low station above Gower's best beach
- St. Michael's Church, Sunset Park Brooklyn's own Sacré-Cœur, with a beehive dome
- Ta Kon Citadel A 500-meter fortress wall in Vietnam that nobody built
- Art of Play A curiosity shop with a hidden magic theater, in Brooklyn Heights
- Birds of the World in the Skies Over Alcorcón A flock of colorful birds, frozen in flight above a Madrid suburb
- Kanmon Pedestrian Tunnel Walk from Honshu to Kyushu under the sea
- Steaming Tender A restaurant inside H. H. Richardson's 1884 railroad station
- Tomb of Agios Athanasios A painted Macedonian tomb outside Thessaloniki
- Statue of Žorik A bronze for Kalamaja's street dog, in Tallinn
- World's Largest M A hillside letter in Platteville, Wisconsin
- Tiptree Jam Museum A free barn museum at the Wilkin & Sons jam factory in Essex
- Wood Street Steps The last of William Penn's public stairways to the Delaware
- Eastern California Museum A small Inyo County museum reported to keep a set of homemade coyote-tooth dentures
- Hầm Hô A stepped chain of falls, pools and granite boulders on Vietnam's Kút River
- Khada Parsi A cast-iron Parsi philanthropist on a pillar, ringed by mermaid fountains in the middle of a Mumbai junction
- Pinkie the Pink Elephant A fiberglass elephant in giant glasses, posted at a Wisconsin gas station
- Round Barn Capital of the World Fulton County, Indiana, where the round barns are still standing
- Susannah Place Four 1844 terrace houses and a corner shop, left as they were lived in
- Üç Haçlı Kilise A Cappadocian cliff church with three huge crosses cut into its roof
- The Abandoned Monorail of Melaka A 2010 monorail loop that never found its riders, left standing
- Queer Arts Featured Harvey Milk's old camera shop, now a gallery and gathering place
- The Mocking Mural in Oslo City Hall A painted boy sticking out his tongue at a door the painter never asked for
- Camp Butner Museum A WWII training camp that rose overnight on North Carolina farmland
- Mini Statues of Uzhhorod Eighty-odd palm-sized bronzes hiding in a Ukrainian old town
- Havneholmen Metro Station A Copenhagen platform where the benches hang from the ceiling
- Musée Industrie Lithique A one-man museum in Laayoune, by appointment on WhatsApp
- 23rd Street Mural An Austin wall painted in 1973–74 that its three artists kept adding to for fifty years
- Airpower Museum An Iowa hangar museum beside a grass airfield, where many of the antique aircraft still fly
- Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum Mumbai's oldest museum keeps a stone elephant from Elephanta Island and maps of the city's seven original islands
- Metro Argüelles Mosaic A 1995 broken-tile view of Madrid's Parque del Oeste, with the cable car crossing the sky
- The Ivanhoe Clock Richard the Lionheart and Friar Tuck have struck the hours in a Leeds arcade since 1877
- Wahpper: The World's Largest Catfish A 40-foot fiberglass catfish on the Red River that looks like it is swimming when the spring floods come
- Wild Bird Petroglyph Life-sized bird carvings on the trails of a Maine land trust
- The People's Treasure A Bishkek monument whose stolen bronze founders were briefly replaced by living people doing the same jobs today
- The Reydon WW1 Pillbox A vandalized WW1 bunker near Southwold, being rebuilt block by cast replica block
- Replica of the Portal of the Casa de la Cadena A 1998 replica doorway rebuilding the house where a Spanish king spent his wedding nights
- House of the Gladiators A 3rd-century Roman mosaic that names its gladiators, mid-duel
- The Press Mosaic A Soviet printing house whose facade is carved into two giant open pages
- Colle Eletto Cableway Gubbio's 1960s cableway, ridden standing in an open birdcage
- Créac'h Lighthouse Europe's most powerful lighthouse, on the island of Ouessant
- The Guthrie Center The church where Alice lived, now Arlo Guthrie's folk venue
- Sydney Hospital's Il Porcellino A bronze boar from Florence that has raised money for a hospital since 1968
- Grosjean's Noah's Ark A 1901 light-and-motion show in a small Ohio museum that predates animatronics by decades
- Huu Nha Basalt Column Waterfall A Vietnamese waterfall that pours over a honeycomb of stone
- Nick Weerts Memorial Phone Booth A Madison phone booth where the past does the talking
- Ohio's Small Town Museum Home of the traffic light that ran at Long and Main for fifty years
- Benedictine Monastery of Las Condes Two monks designed a church out of two white cubes and let the Andean light do the rest
- Old Route 5 Stone Wall A waterfall that comes out through a dry-stone wall beside the road
- Puerta del Hospital de la Latina A 1499 Gothic doorway that outlived its hospital, its convent, its street and its neighbourhood
- Rimske Terme A mineral spring in a Slovenian valley that Roman soldiers bathed in, still open
- Holy Trinity Oak Tree Chapel A working chapel hollowed into the oldest oak in Serbia
- The Mack Truck Museum A century of build records, and the Megatron from the third Transformers film
- Old Sagiada A village abandoned in the war, with trees growing through the rooms
- The Grand Mesa The world's largest flat-topped mountain, carrying more than 300 lakes across its summit
- The Warner Theatre A 1931 movie palace whose 8,000-bulb marquee went dark for 40 years, then came back on
- The Adam and Eve House Two figures cut into wet mortar in 1584, each holding a gourd
- Larz Anderson Auto Museum Fourteen of one family's 32 cars, in the largest carriage house in New England
- The Mountain House A pump station, then a frontier saloon, now two Michelin-starred chefs under the redwoods
- Gods of Olympus of La Ribota Park A suburban Madrid park where Pluto is still a planet
- Intschi-Reuss Bridge A footpath slung between the girders of a Swiss railway viaduct
- Linh Phong Pagoda Six hundred stone steps up Ba Mountain to a white Buddha watching the sea
- Pyramide de Verlée Belgium's only pyramid points at a castle that is no longer there
- Ebenezer Scrooge's Gravestone A real gravestone recut for the 1984 film, still lying in a Shrewsbury churchyard
- The Argyle Street Ash The only tree on one of Glasgow's busiest streets, and the UK's Tree of the Year
- Moaning Caverns Down a 1922 spiral staircase made from a battleship, into a chamber tall enough for the Statue of Liberty
- The Rumour of Discord A bronze horse balanced on one hoof, six metres up, in the middle of Madrid
- The Schnoor Bremen's oldest quarter, named for the string its houses are threaded along
- Museo del Árbol An open-air museum in Paraguay where the forest itself is the exhibit
- Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery Hong Kong's misnamed hillside shrine holds well over 12,000 Buddha statues
- The Peeping Tom of Tallinn A wigged stone gentleman on Pikk Street, lorgnette still raised at the window across the way
- Durham Town Hall A three-foot 'Count' toured Europe's courts, then settled here
- Art Exhibits at OAX Airport Where Mexico's printmaking capital chose sculpture for its airport
- Ahuehuete del Centenario A centennial tree that's not a century old yet
- David Sassoon Clock Tower The only Palladian building in Mumbai, at the zoo gates
- Papier-Mâché Altarpiece at Plaza Capuchinas Mexico City's papier-mâché folk art, built to church-altarpiece scale
- Parque Ciudad de las Canteras Oaxaca's green stone came out of this hole in the ground
- Giant Puppet Parade The children who built them carry them through Siem Reap at night
- Liverpool's First Enclosed Dock The 1715 wall that turned weeks of unloading into a day
- Palm Temple A chapel of dichroic glass with a bell that counts extinctions
- The Prince of the Lilies Fresco The most famous Minoan is mostly plaster
- The Rabbit Hole, Rue Jankowski A dead end painted into a tunnel, from one spot on the pavement
- The Birdhouse Tree of Riga One dead tree, scores of painted nest boxes, no known author
- John Ford Statue The man who invented the American West was from Maine
- Waldkunstpfad A forest outside Darmstadt that has been an art gallery since 2002
- Acueducto de La Partida A tiny 1778 aqueduct hiding in Madrid's largest park
- Bunker Tombé A WWII bunker pushed off a Normandy cliff that landed on its end
- Duong Long Cham Towers Late-12th-century Cham towers rising out of rural Binh Dinh
- Timothy Dexter's William Pitt Statue The one sculpture that survived Lord Dexter's outdoor gallery
- Fir Street Cemetery Three separate graveyards on eight residential lots
- Cape Bear Lighthouse and Marconi Station Where a Canadian first heard the Titanic
- Liberation Mural A Muybridge horse that only animates at 40 mph
- Ancient Underwater Wall of Nhon Hai Surfaces for a few days each lunar month, and nobody has dated it
- The Ring Thirty metres of steel hung over a staircase
- Chickahominy Riverfront Park A tidal cypress swamp that 1607 would still recognise
- Freedom Park The mountain bike trail runs past a free Black settlement
- Jolly's Mill Pond History you are expected to taste
- Nelson House A composed brick front that spent October 1781 inside the siege lines
- Fossil Beach at York River State Park The cliffs keep restocking the sand
- Scarborough Marsh A canal dug to hide ships from the British, still there
- Watermen's Museum The Chesapeake museum about the people, not the battles
- Bunski Kanal Where the emerald Buna is squeezed into the Neretva
- Gin Drinkers Line The Maginot Line of the East, held for two days
- Red Sea Terminal An airport ceiling shaped like the water outside it
- Doña Manolita Spain queues around the block at the counter that sells the most winners
- Fyllingsdalstunnelen Nearly three kilometres of mountain, for bikes and feet only
- Isis Heiligtum A Roman temple left in place under a shopping mall
- North American Cryptid Museum Bigfoot, the Wendigo and the Beast of Bray Road, at full height
- 'The Missing' Cabin A 2003 film set the Park Service decided to just leave standing
- Volvo Island A 2001 S80 parked on an island built for it
- Cinema Africa Asmara's third-most-famous Art Deco cinema, which is why it still belongs to its street
- Iglesia de la Asunción La Gomera's fifteenth-century church, still in use
- Salubria Preserved, deliberately not restored — the stucco is still coming off the 1757 brick
- Tin Pan Theater Twenty-eight red velvet seats down an alley in Bend, Oregon
- Dolphin Sunset Hong Kong's best harbour view is on the roof of the terminal everyone leaves from
- Gregg-Crites Octagon House An eight-sided Ohio farmhouse where the rooms are cut like slices of pie
- Portsmouth Flood Wall Murals Half a mile of Ohio history painted onto the wall that saved the town
- Rogue Creamery A Depression-era dairy co-op that twice made the best cheese in the world
- Gloucester Sea Serpent Statue A monument to a monster that hundreds of people swore they saw
- The Bolton Strid A river narrow enough to step across, with no recorded survivors of a fall
- The Gävle Goat A 43-foot straw goat that has survived Christmas only 17 times since 1966
- Highgate Cemetery Where Karl Marx and Douglas Adams rest, and vampire hunters once feuded
- Mělník Chapel of Bones Thousands of skulls arranged into a pile, a cross and a heart, and signed
- Murales del Borgo San Giuliano A fishermen's quarter that painted itself out of demolition, then into Fellini
- The Nutcracker Museum Over 7,000 nutcrackers from more than fifty countries, including a Garfield
- City of Justice A bronze plaque in Užupis narrating events that happened in a parallel world
- RoboCop Statue Detroit asked the internet for ideas and got exactly one it couldn't refuse
- South Main Plaza Dog Fountain Painted dogs spraying at a golden bone, with one cat sitting safely out of range
- The 2027 Eclipse at Luxor Six minutes and twenty-three seconds, and then not again until 2114
- Hundafoss The waterfall almost everyone walks straight past
- Lazareto de Menorca A walled island built so nobody could touch anyone else
- The Original Backrooms Location The internet's most famous empty room is upstairs from a hobby shop in Oshkosh
- Cattedrale di San Nicolò The cathedral of a town rebuilt ten kilometres away, all at once
- McCandless Collection Classic cars arranged like someone's very good garage, not a museum
- Reynard's Cave A limestone arch in Dovedale with a cave hiding behind it
- James Dalton Trumbo Statue The blacklisted screenwriter, cast in bronze, in the bath
- Møllestien Twenty-eight cottages, hollyhocks, and a very unquiet past
- Southernmost ATM Wells Fargo flies a technician to Antarctica every two years
- The Outer Rim Mid-century calm, wall-to-wall science fiction
- AZ–NV–UT Tri-State Monument A 19th-century survey error corrected with sub-centimeter GPS
- Post Office and Telecommunications Center, Skopje A lotus-shaped brutalist dome built for rebirth, gutted by fire
- The Torment of Saint Anthony Michelangelo's earliest known painting, made at twelve
- Tousu at Tofuku-ji Japan's oldest surviving toilet, still standing after 500 years
- Window Rock, Nevada A dry desert ridge that was once ice-age lake shoreline
- Backscatter Radar Site A Cold War missile radar decommissioned before it saw real use
- Diamond Creek The only spot on the Grand Canyon's 278 river miles a car can reach
- Karafuneya Coffee 150 parfait flavors, some built to feed 25 people
- León Gil de Palacio's Model of Madrid Madrid in 1830, built at 1:816 scale from wood, silk, and sand
- Oshirado A folk museum pavilion holding a thousand hooded horse-god effigies
- Hidden Figures Monument Katherine Johnson in bronze, on the campus she reached at ten
- Statue of Unity A sculpture that only works if you take its hand
- The Mushroom Shop A grocery that sells one kingdom and nothing else
- The Pickle Guys The last barrel on the Lower East Side
- Tour aux Figures A 78-foot anti-monument with a staircase hidden inside it
- Braun Collection A design pilgrimage on the second floor of a strip mall
- Funatsu-Tainai Lava Tree Mold A cave in the shape of a tree that burned away
- Koolwink Motel Roadside Americana nobody ever renovated away
- Perrystead Dairy Cheese Vending Machine Cheese from a machine, in a garden, under the El
- Kawran Bazar A 2am fruit auction, and vendors who clear the tracks every time a train comes
- Burpee Covered Bridge A 1913 kissing bridge, still posted at 3.1 metres
- Champion Lodgepole Pine A 110-foot pine that germinated sixty years before Plymouth Rock
- Praia de Santa Mónica Eleven kilometres of empty sand, and the resort that never opened
- St Olaf's Church, Wasdale Head England's smallest parish church, seating 39 under beams said to be Viking
- Saugerties Lighthouse An 1869 lighthouse you can sleep in, if you read the tide chart first
- The Living History Museum of Camping A museum where the exhibits have beds and you sleep in them
- Pont Mac-Racken A bridge in Mayenne, on the Mayenne, in Mayenne
- The Nostalgia Box A hundred consoles in West Perth, and you can play them
- Rooey II A giant roadside kangaroo holding a tub of Vegemite
- Submarine Safari A submarine that takes 44 people under Tenerife
- The Afro-Antillean Museum A chapel Panama Canal workers built themselves, in their off hours
- The Mary Pit Head An 80-foot concrete winding frame, all that's left of Big Mary
- Medieval Strip Farming around Haxey Ridge-and-furrow fields plowed by hand, never flattened since
- Tuam Railway Station An 1860 Irish station, closed since the last freight run in 1993
- Yi Sun-Shin Monument A 16th-century Korean admiral's memorial in a Virginia strip-mall parking lot
- Gates of Heaven Synagogue A 200-ton 1863 synagogue rolled a mile through Madison to save it
- The Payphone at the Edge of the Forest A trailhead payphone turned into a place to say the goodbyes you never got to
- La Casa del Serpentello A Piedmont house facade hand-tiled by its owner, one unrepeated design at a time
- The Electrical Box Theatre A 6-by-3-foot utility box that may be the smallest performance space anywhere
- Fuel Tank Orca Mural A leaping orca turns Palmer Station's biggest fuel tank into Antarctica's most recognizable landmark
- Ike Towell's Grave A 1934 Texas headstone reading AN INFIDEL WHO HAD NO HOPE OF HEAVEN NOR FEAR OF HELL
- Leroy's Place A French Quarter gift shop guarded by a 10-foot hot-pink puppet cat
- Suns Cinema A DC movie theater whose rooms are decorated like the films it screens
- Bandai Co. Head Office Godzilla, Goku and Shin-chan standing life-sized on the pavement outside an office tower
- Drops of Rain Giant grey faces pouting and grinning out of clipped hedges above the Étretat cliffs
- Gedenkstein Melitta Bentz The memorial to the woman who fixed coffee with a punctured cup and her son's blotting paper
- Königshöhle The cave that lent a Copper Age culture its name, with a hole in the roof the Devil is blamed for
- Liebesweg Poppenhausen Parabolic mirrors set forty metres apart, so a whisper reaches whoever you walked up with
- Osaka's Midpoint The golden pin every distance sign in the city counts from
- Wabash & Erie Canal Park A restored stretch of the canal that hauled in the rails that put it out of business
- White Oak Avenue The tunnel of cedars in Granada Hills where the bicycles left the ground in E.T.
- The Birthplace of Kool-Aid Hastings Museum keeps the original fiberglass pitcher suit, harness and all
- Devil's Stone A Devon village turns a one-tonne rock every November to keep the Devil under it
- The House of David Bowie Hauptstraße 155, where strangers still tuck roses into the iron door
- Museo Casa del Mendrugo A Puebla courtyard dig turned up a burial 1,500 years older than the city
- Teddy Bear Park A Minnesota park where the teddy bears are bigger than real bears
- Belden Point Rotting pilings are all that's left of a Gilded Age gold conspirator's resort
- Crankshaft Crossing A Death Valley junction marked by a pile of abandoned engine crankshafts
- H.H. Richardson House The only house the Trinity Church architect ever built for himself
- Old Jail Art Center A 19th-century Texas jail rehung with Picasso and Renoir
- Tongyili & Tongdeli A Shanghai gangster's Suzhou retreat, built with doors that face each other
- World's Largest Tortilla A 3-meter tortilla sculpted with 450 scenes of Mexican history
- Humphrey the M5 Camel A homemade carnival float that never left its Somerset field
- The Illinois Goat Tower A 30-foot brick tower built exclusively for the family's climbing goats
- Borden Avenue Bridge One of only four U.S. bridges left that opens by sliding sideways
- Gate of the Orient A Suzhou tower so trouser-shaped it drew an official complaint about weird buildings
- Statue of Lennie Gwyther and Ginger Mick The nine-year-old who rode his pony 600 miles to watch the Sydney Harbour Bridge open
- The Solgrylle at the Blacksmith's Bridge Four relief figures on an Aarhus bridge, each caught mid-squat
- Steve Ovett's Foot All that survives of a stolen statue of an Olympic champion — a single bronze foot
- The Big Galah An 8-metre pink cockatoo marking the halfway point across Australia
- The Dog Line A row of chained guard dogs that once sealed off a Tasmanian convict peninsula
- Celestia The forested remains of an 1850s utopia deeded to God
- Hubbell Rubbell A rancher's decades of welded scrap-metal creatures roadside in Kansas
- National Gallery of Armenia Donatello and Chagall turn up among 42,000 works in Yerevan
- Porcelain Room A Rococo chamber at Aranjuez sheathed floor-to-ceiling in porcelain
- Blackjack Cemetery Resting place of Sarah Rector, once called the richest Black girl in the world
- Friedrich Ebert Memorial The Heidelberg birthplace of Germany's first elected president
- Mathellaneous A free, fully hands-on math museum on a Kansas campus
- Pont de la Bâtiaz The last wooden covered bridge in Valais still open to cars, beneath a medieval castle
- Rex, the Beach Blvd Dinosaur A 1960s mini-golf dinosaur mascot Jacksonville saved and repainted in 2007
- Tropfsteinmaschine, 1996–2496 A basement museum machine growing a stalactite-stalagmite pair over 500 years
- Al-Saada Ruined hilltop palace in Saudi Arabia tied to the legend of Layla and Majnun
- Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens One of only two Japanese gardens in Ireland, honoring a writer who bridged two cultures
- Musee des Annees 30 A Paris-suburb museum devoted entirely to the art and design of a single decade
- Hoffmann Lime Kilns England's best-preserved Victorian ring kiln, free to walk through
- Lai Tak Tsuen Estate Four 1976 concrete drums, each hollow to the sky
- Gates of the City (Portas da Cidade) A full-scale replica of the Azores' city gates, rebuilt in a Massachusetts mill town
- HM Prison Maze (Long Kesh) The sealed prison that held Northern Ireland's 1981 hunger strikers
- Payson Grotto A short hike ends at a hidden, swimmable pool inside a rock enclosure
- Tomb of Dai Anga A wet-nurse's 1671 mausoleum, more brilliant than the monuments that overshadow it
- Hastings Museum Kool-Aid Exhibit A fiber-optic river of Kool-Aid in the drink's birthplace
- Doorless Shrine of Gogni The Georgian mountain shrine whose doors never survive
- Hello Kitty Cafe (Las Vegas) A bright pink container cafe tucked inside a Strip park
- Horror Studies Archive The world's only academic center devoted to the horror genre
- The Looming Head of Jānis Zvīdra An oversized Soviet stone head staring into a Latvian train junction
- Vancouver Crow Nesting Zone Thousands of crows roost on the same five blocks every night