This historic address is home to the beloved ball and is an almost totally empty building among the most expensive real estate in the world.

Whisper secrets in a busy station only to be heard on the other side of this acoustic arch.

This stretch of beach along California's central coast is a busy highway for the largest seal in the northern hemisphere.

This shop specializes in oddities and Victorian-inspired wonders.

This Big Sur waterfall drops 80 feet directly into the Pacific Ocean, and inspired the hillside house up top.

The unbelievably opulent home built for an infamous newspaperman.

A strange house built only at night, with rumored mystic inspiration.

One of the oldest reform schools in the United States, home to wayward boys such as Merle Haggard, now abandoned.

The abandoned personal amusement park of the King of Pop.

The ruins of the castle that chemicals built.

A peculiar mansion built by the troubled heir to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune.

These once-beautiful historic graveyards are set against the barren Virginia City hills.

Aqueducts have dramatically changed this old lake, now home to tufa towers and its very own species of tiny brine shrimp.

Standing in a state of "arrested decay," this ghost town allows for a detailed peek into Gold Rush life in an unusually harsh climate.

Julia Morgan's Moorish-Gothic labyrinth of fountains, trees, natural light and Oakland's notable dead.

The seawater playground of gilded-era San Francisco burned to the ground in 1966.

The last remaining relic of San Francisco's glittering 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition.

Carnivorous plants, medieval aphrodisiacs, and the largest original wood structure glass conservatory in the western hemisphere.

A Roman-inspired temple once controlled half of San Francisco's waters.