Places Edited by Sarah Brumble

Imagine playing a version of Legends of the Hidden Temple, but with a distinctly Southern Gothic flare.

This ostentatious Italianate palace of an Oklahoma billionaire is filled with several themed mini-museums.

There is nothing like a religious festival celebrated with blow-up sledgehammers.

This disused church, left to the elements of the Arctic Circle's forests is open for exploration.

Like Stonehenge, but with boats and oodles more charm.

A Cajun-style Christmas on the river also involves sky-high pyres and explosives.

Dr. Strangelove-esque tours reveal the inside a bunker once reserved for Stalin himself.

One of the world's most definitive collections of musical instruments, spanning all cultures and historical periods.

Leave it to Key West to drop a real-live drag queen instead of a ball to mark the arrival of the New Year.

Every four years, millions of salmon fill a river so densely that its waters appear deep crimson.

An 18th-century Catholic church converted into an eccentric temple of music and bacchanalia.

An abandoned faux-pub made famous by a Guinness commercial.

Rotterdammers' dirty minds gave this Santa a dirty nickname and cursed it to a life of wandering.

Leave the wardrobes and sweets to British schoolchildren, Shanghai's got a Coke machine that leads to booze.

After he picked up a brush at the age of 47 this simple barber turned his entire home into a canvas.

Birthplace of the "Cat in the Cradle" and a cluster of iconic, original windmills that let the Dutch tame the seas.

A graveyard of bathyspheres and diving bells paints a weirdly accurate account of ocean exploration's rickety history.

Religious perseverance and cultural coexistence manifest in an architectural gem that multiple wars couldn't topple.

The only place to see live frogs don pigtails and top hats, then eat their scrumptious legs.

This free, take-a-book shop seems like a trick but isn't.

Germany has its very own Centralia, whose spark remains attributed to "spontaneous combustion."

An experimental forest at the foreground of arboreal science is also the canary in the coal mine for climate change.

Gilded heaven for philatelists and architecture freaks, still in full working order despite sitting atop tremulous ground.

James Turrell's total color immersion art installation, hidden on the top floor of a luxury handbag shop.