Places lostslav Wants to Go

Less a museum than a bizarre fantasy world created by artists and engineers.

European castle ruins in an American state park are actually the product of death and grief.

The history of the treatment of mental illness, illustrated in all its gory detail, and housed in an asylum.

Bigfoot prints, Feejee mermaids, and haunted dolls on display in a tiny North Carolina town.

This unmarked and unloved Manhattan subway grate created one of the most iconic images in American cinema.

This historic lavatory leftover features two levels of defecation stations completely without context.

An abandoned observatory in the middle of the Illinois prairie.

This botanical garden outside Chicago boasts an array of more than 300 varieties of lilacs.

An Art Deco gem that held together the artistic heart of an agricultural community for 92 years.

The 40-year-old machine serves soda quicker than you can catch it for a mere 75 cents a pop.

The park that the Chicago Stockyards built.

These Depression-era WPA sculptures have made a couple of stops over the years.

One of two identical monuments marking the sites of military training encampments in Peoria, Illinois.

A massive bur oak tree believed to be some 500 years old is the centerpiece of this quiet urban greenspace.

Built in 1869, this now-retired structure looks more like a medieval fortress than a county lock-up.

Fresh wooden posts have been added to ancient holes to recreate a primitive henge clock.

This softly rounded mansion was built without corners not to avoid evil spirits, but to make them more comfortable.

This lagomorph-obsessed Route 66 emporium is home to a giant jackrabbit that sits in a bunny graveyard.

Buy a token from the liquor store and you can make this beast spew flames on command.

The 30,000-volume library is one of the world's most impressive poetry collections.

A river with some unusual, and occasionally dangerous, habits.

In a quiet north Chicago neighborhood rests a stunning relic of the golden age of earthenware design.

One of the largest pieces of scientific equipment ever carried on a NASA space shuttle sits in a Chicago alley.

This alley in downtown Chicago held the bodies of over 600 people after the fateful Iroquois Theatre fire.