Six Haunted Attractions Spread Across 60 Acres of Pennsylvania Woods After Dark
One attraction here is called Pitch Black, and the name is not a metaphor. You walk through total darkness with only your nerves for company.
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Halloween Never Ends in This Pennsylvania Neighborhood Filled With Gothic Shops, Taxidermy, and Strange Treasures
A shop in Pittsburgh sells funeral flower tea. That's the actual name, and it sits on a shelf near real taxidermy, bone jewelry, and incense with names that sound like a lost sideshow.
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After a Pennsylvania Town Lost Its Only Grocery Store, One Family Brought It Back and Created 60 Jobs
A grocery store with sushi, a coffee shop, and a Korean restaurant at the same address sounds like a big-city thing. This one sits in a small, friendly Pennsylvania borough that...
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Built in 1895, This Pennsylvania Hotel Now Terrifies Visitors Inside Its Original Rooms
A real hotel built back in 1895 now spends its autumn nights scaring guests on purpose. The hallways and rooms that once welcomed travelers are now part of the fright.
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A 1985 Tornado Damaged This Pennsylvania Reptile Zoo, but It Is Still Thriving 60 Years After Opening
A Komodo dragon lives just off a busy highway in central Pennsylvania. So does an albino alligator, along with a whole flock of parakeets ready to land on your hand.
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Fire Destroyed This California Restaurant in 1980, but Its Owner Reopened Without a Roof
A fire ripped through a beloved Italian dining room in 1980, and the owner gave the most stubborn answer possible. He reopened without a roof.
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A Pennsylvania Drive-In That Opened in 1958 Still Lets Families Watch Movies Under the Stars
Three giant outdoor screens, movie sound piped straight through your car's FM radio, and a snack stand serving made-to-order burgers and pizza. That lineup has been running in...
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An Ohio Family Turned a Glassmaking Tradition Into a Factory Where Visitors Can Watch Molten Glass Become Finished Pieces
Glowing blobs of molten glass get pressed by hand into Christmas trees and candlesticks, and you can stand close enough to see it happen. Then you can walk next door and buy the...
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A 240-Year-Old Grandfather Clock Still Has a Home Inside This California Shop That’s Been Open for 55 Years
A grandfather clock built around 240 years ago still stands inside a small downtown shop. It was ticking before most of today's furniture had even been designed.
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Eight Kitchens Now Fill an Ohio Newspaper Building That Once Sat Empty for Years
Eight kitchens now fill an Ohio building that once printed newspapers, their ovens warming rooms where presses used to rumble. For years, the place sat empty, its windows dusty...
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One Ohio Customer Loved This Roadside Sausage Shop So Much, He Started Arriving by Helicopter
Silly signs are a great way to get attention, and an Ohio sausage shop has turned them into a roadside tradition. One red sign reads "No fatty in our patty," and it made me laugh...
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A North Carolina Lighthouse Was Moved Nearly 3,000 Feet to Keep It From Falling Into the Atlantic
Lighthouses are supposed to stay put. This one did not. In 1999, a towering brick beacon on the North Carolina coast was lifted...
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An Ohio Golf Course Sat on a 2,000-Year-Old Sacred Site Until a Legal Battle Finally Opened It to the Public
Long grassy walls roll across a quiet Ohio neighborhood, their smooth green ridges shaped by Hopewell people around 2,000 years ago. The earthworks still line up with the moon,...
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A 1,348-Foot Snake Was Built Across an Ohio Hill, and Its Original Purpose Is Still a Mystery
Rolling hills and a high ridge hide a giant earthen snake, nearly a quarter mile long, curling above a creek. Ancient people shaped this Ohio landmark by hand, basket of earth...
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A Giant Two-Headed T-Rex and a Bumblebee Made of Car Parts Stand in This Pennsylvania Sculpture Garden
Two-headed dinosaurs with spark plug teeth sit on a front lawn in Pennsylvania. Just down the road, a giant bumblebee wears the face of an old car, and a rocket points straight...
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Customers Have Been Sticking Their Chewing Gum to the Wall of This Ohio Sandwich Shop for Decades
Gum in my pocket turned out to be the smartest thing I packed all day. The outside walls of this Ohio sandwich shop are covered in thousands of colorful blobs of chewed gum, each...
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This Ohio Antique Store Has 600 Dealer Booths Spread Across Nearly Two Acres Under One Roof
Old songs drift over the aisles, mingling with the creak of shopping cart wheels. Ohio has a massive antique mall that swallows afternoons whole, its aisles lined with glass cases...
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A California Farmer’s Son Built a Giant Artichoke, Then Started Serving the Real Thing Beside It
A twenty-foot artichoke rising beside a California highway is not something you see every day, and laughing out loud before pulling over is a natural reaction. The town calls itself...
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Workers Renovating a North Carolina Hotel Found a Room With No Doors or Windows and Two Trunks Still Inside
Sealed rooms inside old mountain hotels send people planning road trips. Coffee got set down when I heard about this one. The...
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A Pennsylvania Waiter Put $10,000 on a Credit Card to Buy an Abandoned Building, Then Covered It in Art
Bright pink flamingos, painted steps, and murals waving hello on every wall. Turning a corner in Pennsylvania can deliver a surprise like that, and laughing out loud is the only...
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NASCAR Raced Here in Its First Season, and the Abandoned North Carolina Track Is Still Hidden in the Woods
Dirt ovals hidden in pine forests are not something you expect to find a few minutes outside a downtown. Following a trail and spotting the curve of an old track underfoot brought...
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A North Carolina Town Once Had Nearly 60 Taverns, Shops and Homes Along Its Main Street, Then the Railroad Passed It By
Quiet weekday mornings in this North Carolina town come with an odd feeling that the whole place is holding a secret. Back in 1769, this little spot on the Roanoke River had nearly...
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This 1830 South Carolina House Now Opens Its Darkened Rooms for After-Hours Ghost Tours
Tall and dark against the evening sky, that four-story house in South Carolina looks like it has been waiting for someone to finally knock. It has been standing since around 1830,...
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A 1700s Pennsylvania Farmhouse Was Expanded Into a 28-Room Mansion, Then Became a Prohibition-Era Club
Stone walls and wide porches caught my eye on a winding country road, and I almost missed the turn because staring seemed more important than driving. The building looks like it...
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Charlie Chaplin Used to Race a Friend to This California Restaurant on Horseback, With Dinner Going to the Winner
Hollywood has always loved a good contest, and one of its oldest involves two friends, two horses, and a dinner bill. The loser paid at a grill that has been standing on the same...
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A Pennsylvania Museum Dedicated to America’s First Coast-to-Coast Highway Has a 25-Foot Gas Pump Outside
Giant vintage gas pumps are not something you see every day, and laughing out loud at the sheer size of one is a perfectly reasonable reaction. The towering pump serves as the...
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A Pennsylvania Lighter Company Has Repaired Millions of Zippos for Free, Even When Their Owners Send Back Decades-Old Ones
Shiny metal and good stories turned a quick roadside stop into a lost afternoon. Somewhere in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, a small town holds a company that has fixed...
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This North Carolina Barbecue Joint Still Makes Its Cornbread With Just Cornmeal, Water and Pork Drippings
Wood smoke drifting across a small Eastern North Carolina town pulls cars off the road like a magnet. A silver dome on the roof marks the spot, and the smell of whole hog barbecue...
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This Georgia Hospital Once Held More Than 12,000 Patients at Once, With Thousands of Unmarked Graves Left Across Its Grounds
Brick buildings rising behind tall oaks on a Georgia campus look like their own small town, quiet and a little mysterious. What waits inside the grounds is harder to picture.
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A Giant Peanut Has Towered Over This Georgia Highway Town Since the 1970s
Giant golden peanuts wearing crowns beside the interstate are enough to make anyone hit the blinker without thinking. Laughter came first, then the exit.
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Immigrants Detained on a California Island Carved Hundreds of Poems Into the Barracks Walls, and They’re Still There
Words carved into old wooden walls are what stayed with me long after the ferry ride and the picnic. A detention barracks on a California island holds hundreds of poems etched...
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A 19th-Century Ohio Farmer Found a Network of Underground Rooms That Had Been Used Long Before He Owned the Land
Grassy fields hide a web of limestone rooms carved by water over hundreds of thousands of years. Native people once used these chambers for shelter, storage, and maybe even ceremonies,...
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A Tiny North Carolina Stone Village Has 27 Miniature Buildings, Including a Church, Theater, School and Hospital
Stone churches no taller than a shoulder sit in a side yard in North Carolina, glittering with white quartz. What was meant to be a quick peek turned into half an hour crouched...
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Pennsylvania Built One of America’s Earliest All-Metal Covered Bridges, and Its Iron Frame Is Still Inside
Pennsylvania backroads are good at making you wonder what is waiting around the next bend. Sometimes it is another farmhouse or a stretch of woods.
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One California Man Spent 24 Years Building a 35-Room Desert Pueblo Almost Entirely by Hand
Scrap wood, salvaged doors, and adobe bricks dried in a courtyard came together over decades to form a four-story pueblo that looks like a pile of sun-baked boxes stacked by someone...
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An 1850s Georgia Mansion Had Hot and Cold Running Water, Central Heat and an Intercom Before Most Homes Had Plumbing
Georgia has plenty of historic homes where the furniture, portraits, and sweeping staircases do most of the showing off. This one surprised me with what was hiding behind the walls...
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A South Carolina Man Turned Throwaway Plants Into a 3-Acre World of Living Sculptures
Spirals, arches, and curling green towers rise out of an ordinary front yard in South Carolina, and the shapes start appearing before the brain can make sense of them. Nothing...
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This 1946 North Carolina Drive-In Broke a Jim Crow-Era Norm by Serving Everyone Through the Same Doors
One counter, one door, everybody shoulder to shoulder is how a twelve-stool diner in North Carolina has operated since July 1946. A friend once described the place as somewhere...
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This California Restaurant Still Serves the Giant Family-Style Feasts That Once Fed Basque Sheep Herders
Checkered tablecloths and strangers passing bowls like old friends are what greeted a quick sandwich stop on a long drive through California.
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This South Carolina Drive-In Became Famous for an “A-Plenty” Plate That Practically Buries the Meal Under the Sides
Hiding your sandwich under a mountain of fries and onion rings sounds like an exaggeration. Then the neon sign appears over a building that has been feeding a South Carolina town...
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An Ohio Canal Port Boomed in the 1800s, Then a Flood and the Railroad Nearly Erased Its Prosperity
A quiet brick-lined street holds the bones of a wheat port that once hummed with canal boats and boot traffic. Almost two hundred years ago, this spot in Ohio was a busy stop on...
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This California Tavern Serves Dinner Beside a Free Museum Filled With Revolutionary-Era Artifacts
Dormers and chimneys rise above a California parking lot, making a brick building look like it was picked up in New England and set down near the Pacific. Inside, high wooden ceilings,...
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A South Carolina Textile Mill Burned Down Decades Ago, but Its Stone Ruins and Massive Dam Still Remain
Water folding over a long stone dam, scattering into white shoals, sounds like distant applause from the riverbank above. A plain county park in South Carolina turned out to hold...
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An Ohio Farm Still Has the Stone Home, Canal Boat and Indian Agency That Once Connected Two Eras of the Frontier
Corn fields open up and a tall brick farmhouse sits on a rise, looking like it has been waiting for company. The road narrows on a bright weekday morning in Ohio, and a quick history...
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A South Carolina Gristmill Built in 1845 Still Turns Its Original Waterwheel Nearly 180 Years Later
A steady splash and groan came from behind the trees, and following the sound down a gravel path led to a twenty-foot wooden wheel turning like it had all the time in the world....
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A California Gold Mine Produced $2 Million Before Closing, and Its Stone Ruins Still Remain
Fenced-off shafts in the ground once swallowed men, mules, and steam engines for decades. The drive up into the mountains promised nothing more than pine trees and a quiet lake,...
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A South Carolina Plantation Mansion Burned After the Civil War, and Its Stone Ruins Still Stand Among the Trees
Crushed oyster shells rise from the ground under live oaks older than anything else around, and this low wall once held a mansion built in the 1790s. Fire took the house not long...
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A California Artist Spent 15 Years Turning Discarded Objects Into 10 Acres of Desert Sculpture
Towers of doors and rusted bicycle parts stand in the open sand, and nobody greets you at the gate. I took a wrong turn twice before the dirt road finally spat me out in front...
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A California Gold Mine Closed After More Than a Century, Leaving 367 Miles of Abandoned Tunnels Beneath the Hills
Warm pine needles baking in the morning sun gave off a smell I noticed first. I had driven up into the foothills mostly on a whim, curious about a gold mine that ran for more than...
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A Georgia Gold Mine Still Takes Visitors Underground Where Miners Once Chased Veins of Gold
Cool air and dripping water surrounded me the moment the tunnel door closed behind our group on a hillside in Georgia, and I did not expect to be swallowed whole by a mountain...
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A South Carolina Town Was Burned and Abandoned in 1781, but Its Star-Shaped Fort Still Survives
More than a thousand acres of quiet green fields in South Carolina hold one of the strangest survivors of the Revolutionary War, and I pulled off the highway expecting a small...
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This Ohio Restaurant Took Over an Open-Air School Built a Century Ago for Tuberculosis Patients
Colorful lockers still built into the hallway walls and sunlight pouring through enormous windows, that is what I found when I pulled up to an old school building on a quiet stretch...
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California’s Richest Man Built an Oceanfront Estate Filled With Hundreds of Statues, but His Mansion Was Eventually Demolished
Wind hit me so hard I had to grab my hood with both hands, and I laughed out loud because it felt like the ocean was saying hello.
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The World’s Oldest Operating Drive-In Theater Is Still Showing Double Features in Pennsylvania
Neon glowed against the trees at that Pennsylvania drive-in, and I honestly grinned like a kid the first time I turned off the road onto the gravel. Old speaker poles stood in...
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A California Resort Town Was Abandoned When Its Lake Dried Up, Leaving Streets and Buildings Behind
A swing set sitting in shallow water on a salt-crusted shore was not what I expected to find at the end of a California desert drive. The first time I rounded that dirt berm, the...
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A Pennsylvania Tavern Built in the 1700s Has Been a Ferry House, Post Office, Railroad Station, and Hotel
A stone building on the bank of a Pennsylvania river caught my attention during a winding drive through the countryside, and I pulled in expecting a quiet lunch. Instead I found...
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An Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike Still Disappears Into Miles of Dark, Empty Tunnels
Cracked pavement that once carried thousands of cars a day now holds nothing but wind in the trees, and I still remember the first time I walked that stretch in Pennsylvania. Thirteen...
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An Ohio Mansion Has Been Linked to Ghost Stories for More Than a Century, but Its Real History Is Just as Dark
Stone walls, tall towers, and watchful windows make that Ohio mansion look like a piece of old Europe dropped into a Midwestern neighborhood. I came for the ghost tales, but the...
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A North Carolina Preserve Leads to the Waters Where Blackbeard’s Final Battle Ended
The trees twist over sandy ground, birds move through the marsh, and the sound opens wide at the end like a page from an old sea tale. I found that quiet trail on a small North...
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