Who needs fancy modern water slides when this giant North Carolina rock works just as well?

The enormous 250-room Vanderbilt mansion conceals hidden doors and secret passageways.

This road in the Great Smoky Mountains was supposed to assuage a displaced community, but ended up a $52 million dead end.

This abandoned school has had many lives since the early 1900s, and all of them doomed.

The lasting remains of a historic spa.

Step into the courtroom to learn details of the only case in history where ghostly testimony led to a murderer's conviction.

The first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature came from the foothills of Appalachia.

The site of the one and only battle of Lord Dunmore's War.

This claimant to the title of "smallest church in the 48 states" doubles as an equally tiny, quasi-post office.

Visit a replica of the estate where Aaron Burr allegedly plotted a treasonous scheme against the United States.

This rural community has attracted both scientists and techno-refugees due to its federally-mandated lack of technology.

The last holdout of a pre-Civil War rebel who took the matter of slavery into his own hands.

The world's largest fully steerable radio telescope.

Home of a 28-foot tall stalagmite known as the War Club.

A historic coal mine that doubles as a museum and tourist attraction.

America's post-nuclear-attack chambers of Congress.

The "mysteries" of this quintessential roadside oddity were almost destroyed by neglect but were saved by fans of kitschy wonder.

One day a year it is legal to jump off of this astoundingly tall bridge that spans an Appalachian gorge.

Once connected to the outside world by a single train track, this ghost town is looked after by the National Park Service.

A Nessie-like monster supposedly lurks in this lake.

Formerly the most gerrymandered district in the U.S., it twisted and turned along racial borders.