Places From the Backwoods Wants to Go

This massive tea kettle was once a promotional stunt for the Oriental Teashop.

This ambitious father and son team reigned supreme over the North End, and witches, for many years.

This evocatively named natural crevasse was created by a torrent of water that smashed right through a granite deposit.

A men’s restroom became a sandwich shop.

This giant Boston statue of Mary is standing on a globe to show her power over the universe.

America's original house of worship for Spiritualism, the religious movement based on communing with the dead.

Bouncing, delightful, mechanical art at the MIT Museum.

On top of Gibbet Hill lie the ruins of a lavish turn-of-the-century estate that never quite came to be.

Shelves covered in dozens of coffee bean varieties fill this North End institution.

This peaceful Massachusetts graveyard was one of the first "garden-style" cemeteries in America.

Resonating tubes make music from highway overpass.

Painstakingly built dioramas sit unnoticed in a Boston office building.

From economic backbone of a community to deadly diving hole, these former stone quarries are now a park for rock climbers and graffiti artists.

The history of the tea trade is told in bas-relief on this historic pair of Boston doors.

The tomb of Increase Mather and his son Cotton, influential colonial ministers obsessed with the occult.

"Mock all and sundry things, but leave the saints alone."

It's not a typo, now say it five times fast!

Run by a eugenics advocate, this aging institution conducted secret radiation experiments sponsored by Quaker Oats.

This is the house that spite built.

This miniature feudal castle was built on a whim to honor a US Navy pioneer.

The former locus of Boston's high culture has been shuttered and buried for over 70 years.

This landmark cemetery in Boston was created more than 300 years ago.

Berthed at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston, "Old Ironsides" is the oldest commissioned warship still afloat.

"the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well . . . The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges."