Places Edited by Allison Meier

Slaughterhouse Five opens its dank doors to fans of Kurt Vonnegut.

This shop and gallery is a modern-day cabinet of curiosities, unassumingly positioned along an urban thoroughfare.

This museum boasts a bucket of teeth and tells the tale of a 20th-century dental circus.

The final resting place of the poets Shelley and Keats.

In the middle of downtown Brooklyn lies a 165 year old secret hidden right below the surface (closed to the public indefinitely).

A museum dedicated to exhibiting remarkable outsider art.

Self-built house and sculpture park where the creator can still be seen in a glass coffin.

An encyclopedic collection of mammal penises.

Home to the largest urban bat colony in North America, estimated at 1.5 million bats.

A six-story-tall golden pyramid, surrounded by a moat.

America's most famous piece of self-built architecture.

A large spinning bath of liquid mercury, used to probe the early universe.

An optical illusion found amid a logged redwood forest.

A beautiful but toxic fountain of mercury.

Surreal riveted sea forts once protected the Kent shores from German attack.

His music once banned in Communist Cuba, John Lennon is now immortalized in bronze by Castro, who considers Lennon a "fellow dreamer."

A Hawaiian stairway to heaven—that you can't climb.

The world's only international cryptozoology museum is host to an unrivaled collection of mysterious objects.

Once a private collection, now the only museum of arms and armor in the Western Hemisphere - CLOSED.

An historic and oft-filmed spot for musclebound iron pumpers on the Pacific coast.

The John Snow Memorial marks the epicenter of London's 1854 cholera epidemic.

Ride the subways of yesteryear.

Fortified homes of highland warriors that are still in use today.

A 26-foot shark sculpture—a statement about bombs—set off a municipal battle royale.