Places Archaos Wants to Go

This massive steel pyramid can be entered by a set of jagged steps that let visitors stand in its heart.

The birthplace of an eccentric alchemist and possible inspiration for the fictional reanimator of monsters.

This wooden hotel is a temple to German sustainability and forest conservation.

This decommissioned nuclear power plant offers tours of its Communist-era control room and reactor hall.

This giant, 83-year-old ship elevator is an engineering feat to behold.

Countless stories attempt to explain Poland's mysterious J-shaped trees.

Sweden's southernmost point is located in this charming fishing village.

The first (but not only) upside-down house in Germany.

An elevator into the Baltic Sea.

This 1960's Soviet submarine in Peenemünde Harbor claims to be the largest submarine museum in the world.

The NASA scientists behind Apollo 11 started out developing Nazi weapons at this abandoned German rocket factory.

Hitler's bleak vision of relaxation still stands as a mostly abandoned 10,000-room resort complex.

A long spiraling walkway winds through the woods, and around a copper beech tree at the center.

This jaw-dropping 19th-century bridge uses its reflection to form what appears to be a perfect circle.

The industrial monstrosity known as Bagger 258 is a colossal mining machine built in the DDR - but now left for dead in a German field.

A fiery crater has been burning in the Karakum Desert since 1971.

Once a bustling fishing port, this semi-ghost town is now more than 90 miles away from the shore.

Rusting ships sit in a desert where a sea used to be.

This lake in northwest Iran has started turning from green to red more frequently than scientists are comfortable with.

A small but immensely extravagant palace built by the "Night King."

This spire on an Austrian mountain is wrapped around a long spiral slide and has the world's tallest wooden observation deck.

Austria's very first and only nuclear power station was completed but never used.

Part ski resort, part modern art space, this lodge brings giant metal spiders and bloody doors to the Austrian Alps.

Visitors dip into a variety of pools of what was once ice.