United States
Every logged mystery in this country.
- New York
33 Thomas Street (Titanpointe)
A windowless, 550-foot AT&T switching building in Manhattan. In 2016, The Intercept reported, drawing on Edward Snowden's leaked documents, that it appears to house a major NSA surveillance hub.
- Washington
Afterglow Vista
A roofless Masonic mausoleum stands in the woods of San Juan Island, where a limestone baron seated his dead family around a stone dinner table. One column was left deliberately broken.
- California
Alcatraz
On June 11, 1962, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin left papier-mâché heads in their bunks and launched a raft of stolen raincoats into the bay; no bodies were ever recovered. Guards and visitors have reported screams and cold spots in cellblock D, particularly cell 14D.
- New Mexico
Alleged UFO Skip Site
The Bureau of Land Management built a parking lot and a mile of walking to a patch of public land near Corona it officially calls the place where some people believe a craft came down in July 1947. The ranch where the debris was found is a separate property, private, and closed.
- Pacific Ocean (Howland Island vicinity)
Amelia Earhart's Disappearance
On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan left Lae, New Guinea, for Howland Island, roughly 2,556 miles away, and her last transmissions said she believed she was near it but could not see it. No wreckage matching their Lockheed Electra has been definitively located.
- New Hampshire
America's Stonehenge
A hillside maze of stone chambers, walls, and a grooved "sacrificial table" in New Hampshire has been called both a 4,000-year-old ceremonial site and a 19th-century farmer's root cellars. A century of argument has not settled it.
- Nevada
Area 51 / Rachel, Nevada
A flight test site on a Nevada dry lakebed that the United States declined to admit existed for 58 years, until a CIA history of the U-2 program was released in 2013 on a records request filed 8 years earlier.
- Vermont
Bennington Triangle
On November 12, 1945, hunting guide Middie Rivers, 74, vanished near Glastenbury Mountain, the first of at least five disappearances there by 1950. In October 1950, Frieda Langer went missing on a walk of less than half a mile back to camp, and her body surfaced 7 months later in ground searchers had already combed.
- Florida (representative point)
Bermuda Triangle
Lloyd's of London and the U.S. Coast Guard have each gone through the loss records and found no disappearance rate above what other busy, storm-prone shipping lanes produce. No government or geographic body has ever defined the triangle's boundaries, which move depending on who is drawing the map.
- California
Bigfoot / Sasquatch
In August 1958, bulldozer operator Jerry Crew found 16-inch footprints at a Humboldt County logging site, and the local paper's story put "Bigfoot" in front of a national audience. On October 20, 1967, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin shot 59.5 seconds of 16mm film at Bluff Creek.
- Colorado
Bishop Castle
Jim Bishop was 15 in 1959 when $450 he had saved went toward a mountain lot beside the San Isabel National Forest. In June 1969, he and his father began a one-room stone cottage there, and from 1973 he turned it into a castle, building alone and without blueprints until 2019. He died on November 21, 2024, at 80. His son Daniel keeps it free to enter, and in July 2026 the Aspen Acres fire burned to within about 200 yards of it.
- California
Bodie
Letters arrive at the park office most weeks. They are handwritten, often unsigned, and something is usually rattling inside: a square nail, a shard of sun-purpled glass, a bottle stopper. Each one comes from a visitor who took a piece of Bodie home, had a bad year, and decided the two facts belonged together.
- California
Bohemian Grove
The Bohemian Club, founded in San Francisco in 1872 by journalists and artists, bought this 2,700-acre property in 1899. In 2000, Alex Jones filmed its Cremation of Care ceremony at a 40-foot stone owl, and the club confirmed the footage while calling the ceremony fraternal theater.
- Massachusetts
Bridgewater Triangle
Roughly 200 square miles of southeastern Massachusetts named as a cluster of strange reports by one cryptozoologist in the late 1970s. The swamp at its center was called the place where spirits dwell long before he got there.
- North Carolina
Brown Mountain Lights
In 1922, the U.S. Geological Survey sent George R. Mansfield to Brown Mountain with a surveying telescope. Over about two weeks he took bearings on every light that appeared and plotted them against rail lines, roads, and homesteads. He attributed 47 percent to automobile headlights and 33 percent to locomotives.
- Virginia
Bunny Man Bridge
A man in a rabbit costume reportedly attacked people with a hatchet in Fairfax County, Virginia, in 1970. The real incidents happened miles from the railway overpass that internet legend has since adopted as the 'Bunny Man Bridge.'
- California
Cabazon Dinosaurs
Two enormous roadside dinosaurs built by a theme park sculptor outside Palm Springs, made famous worldwide by a single scene in Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
- Texas
Cadillac Ranch
Ten Cadillacs buried nose-down in a Texas Panhandle field in 1974, at the same angle as the sides of the Great Pyramid. Visitors are invited to spray-paint them, and the entire installation was dug up and moved in 1997.
- Illinois
Cahokia Woodhenge and Mound 72
Warren Wittry found the post circle in 1961 by reading maps from a highway salvage dig, and noticing that certain pits ran in an arc. South of it, Melvin Fowler dug a low ridge-top mound and counted about 270 people inside, five of them in mass graves. The burial at the center of that mound was read as a warrior king for 40 years, until a 2016 reanalysis reported it was a man and a woman.
- Nebraska
Carhenge
A replica of Stonehenge built from 39 American cars at a family reunion in 1987, as a memorial to the builder's father. The state tried to classify it as a junkyard, and the town that wanted it removed now owns it.
- Colorado
Casa Bonita
A giant pink Mexican restaurant with cliff divers and a fake cave system became a cult legend through a South Park episode, then reopened in 2023 after a $40 million restoration by the show's creators.
- Pennsylvania
Centralia Mine Fire
The Centralia Mine Fire was first reported on May 27, 1962, the Sunday before Memorial Day, in an old strip-mine pit the borough used as its dump. The fire got into the abandoned workings of the Buck Mountain coal bed and is still burning. Congress appropriated $42 million to buy out and move the town, and Pennsylvania estimates the fire could burn for more than 100 years if left alone.
- Vermont
Champ
A creature reported from Lake Champlain for long enough that three governments have passed measures protecting it. The 1609 Samuel de Champlain sighting that anchors the whole legend was invented by a magazine in 1970.
- Florida
Coral Castle
Edward Leedskalnin, a Latvian immigrant, began carving oolite limestone in 1923, then spent years moving the whole project, with stones of over 21 tons, to land he bought in Homestead in 1936. He credited only the secrets of the pyramids and the laws of weight and leverage, and photographs that surfaced later show tripods, winches, and pulleys at the site.
- Kansas
Coronado Heights
A sandstone castle crowns the Kansas hill where legend says Coronado gave up his hunt for the golden cities of Quivira in 1541. A square of 16th century chain mail dug up nearby keeps the story breathing.
- Washington
D.B. Cooper / Tena Bar
A hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper parachuted out of a Boeing 727 over the Pacific Northwest with $200,000 in 1971 and was never seen again. Nine years later, a boy raking a riverside sandbar found part of the ransom cash, the only physical trace of the case ever recovered.
- Colorado
Denver International Airport
An airport that opened in February 1995 with apocalyptic murals, a dedication capstone bearing a Masonic square and compasses, and a baggage tunnel network it never fully used. It now prints the conspiracy theories about itself on its own construction barriers.
- Minnesota
Devil's Kettle
Half the Brule River drops 50 feet as an ordinary waterfall. The other half pours into a pothole in the rock and does not visibly come out. For decades people threw in ping-pong balls, logs, dye, and by local rumor a car, and reported that none of it ever surfaced.
- California
Druid Heights
Druid Heights is a former bohemian community beside Muir Woods where Alan Watts lived and died. The National Park Service owns the site, which is not open to visitors. Some residents still live there.
- New Mexico
Dulce Base
The underground base was invented, and the people who invented it worked for the U.S. Air Force. A counterintelligence officer at Kirtland fed forged documents to an Albuquerque businessman to steer his attention away from the base he was filming, and years later said so publicly.
- Pennsylvania
Eastern State Penitentiary
A former prison in Philadelphia that operated from 1829 to 1971 and pioneered the solitary-confinement-based "Pennsylvania System" of incarceration, now a museum widely promoted as one of the most haunted sites in the United States.
- Michigan
Edison's Last Breath
In a museum case in Dearborn sits a test tube of air from the room where Thomas Edison died in 1931, sealed at his son's request and later sent to Henry Ford. It has long been called Edison's last breath, and a later story holds that Ford believed the soul leaves the body in the final exhale.
- Arizona
El Tiradito
In 1927, the Tucson City Council accepted one story as the official origin of this shrine: a young shepherd named Juan Oliveras, killed with an axe by his father-in-law and buried where he fell. A University of Arizona folklorist has recorded more than 20 versions of the story. People have lit candles for a man said to be buried in unconsecrated ground since the 1870s, and on this lot since 1927. In 1971, residents fighting an expressway through their barrio got the lot listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
- New York
Eternal Flame Falls
A flame burns in a grotto at the foot of a waterfall in an Erie County park, behind the water rather than beside it. A 2013 study found the rock underneath is neither hot enough nor old enough to make the gas the way geologists assumed, and the seep runs about 35 percent ethane and propane, possibly the richest of any known. The flame goes out. Hikers relight it.
- California
Forestiere Underground Gardens
Baldassare Forestiere, a Sicilian immigrant, dug rooms, passageways, and sunken courtyards into the hardpan under his land in Fresno from about 1906 until his death in 1946, working by hand and with no plans on paper. In 1923 and 1924, the Fresno Bee counted 50 rooms and a tunnel for automobiles; later counts range from 65 rooms to more than 100 rooms and tunnels. Many of the trees he planted in hardpan planters under open skylights are still growing.
- Kentucky
Fort Knox
The United States Bullion Depository, completed in December 1936, has been opened to outside visitors only a handful of times, most notably for a 1974 congressional and press tour meant to quiet rumors that the gold was gone. It reports holding more than 147 million troy ounces.
- Connecticut
Gillette Castle
William Gillette played Sherlock Holmes on stage about 1,300 times, then spent 1914 to 1919 building a fieldstone house 200 feet above the Connecticut River, with 47 doors that each have their own carved wooden latch, a bar fitted with a trick lock, and mirrors he used to watch guests try to open it. A 3-mile railroad of his own circled the grounds. His will, signed in January 1937, hoped the place would never fall to "some blithering saphead." The state bought it in 1943.
- Ohio
Great Serpent Mound
North America's largest serpent-shaped earthwork stretches a quarter mile along an Ohio ridge. Archaeologists have argued for over a century about which ancient culture built it, and when. A 1991 radiocarbon study pointed to the Fort Ancient culture; a 2014 study revived the older Adena attribution.
- California
Hotel del Coronado
A beach resort that opened in 1888, where a young woman signed the register as "Mrs. Lottie A. Bernard, Detroit" on Thanksgiving Day 1892 and was found on the beach stairs 5 days later with a revolver near her hand. The newspapers argued over who she was for 2 weeks, and the hotel now names her as Kate Morgan and runs tours of her room.
- Wisconsin
House on the Rock
A Wisconsin recluse spent decades building an impossible house on a sandstone pillar, then filled it with a carousel of 269 animals and 20,000 lights, a 200-foot sea creature, and rooms of artifacts with invented histories.
- Massachusetts
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Theft
Two men in police uniforms spent 81 minutes inside the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990, and left with 13 works the FBI valued at more than $500 million. None has been recovered and no one has been charged. The museum repaired the frames the thieves left behind and put them back on the walls as placeholders.
- New Jersey
Jersey Devil
A winged, hoofed creature reported out of the New Jersey Pine Barrens since colonial times, and the subject of roughly 1,000 sightings in a single week of January 1909. A Philadelphia press agent later admitted he had helped manufacture that week.
- Kentucky
Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter
On the night of August 21, 1955, the Sutton and Taylor families near Kelly said small, silver-eyed creatures kept appearing at their farmhouse windows and on the roof, and they fired on them for roughly 4 hours. Responding officers found bullet holes and shell casings but no creatures or footprints.
- Minnesota
Kensington Runestone
A 200 pound slab of greywacke cut with runes and the date 1362, pulled out of a Minnesota field in 1898 by a Swedish immigrant who said he found it clamped in the roots of an aspen. Runologists called it a forgery within a year. A state historical committee called it genuine in 1910.
- West Virginia
Lake Shawnee Amusement Park
An amusement park that opened in 1926 on Mercer County land where a settler family had been attacked in 1783, closed after a girl was killed on the swing ride, and was later found to be sitting on a Native American burial ground. The swing frame and the ferris wheel are still standing in the grass, and the family that owns the land runs tours by appointment.
- New York
Lily Dale Assembly
In April 2023, the Lily Dale Assembly rejected three applicants for its register of mediums after they scored 82.6, 83.1, and 84.2 percent on graded readings, and the three sued over whether the pass mark was 82 or 85. Only mediums on that register may give readings on the grounds of the Spiritualist camp, which was founded in 1879. In summer, mediums stand at Inspiration Stump in the Leolyn Woods at 1pm and 5:30pm and pass on messages they say come from the dead to a few people in the pews.
- Massachusetts
Lizzie Borden House
Andrew and Abby Borden were killed here on August 4, 1892, and Lizzie Borden was acquitted on June 20, 1893. Dr. William Dolan described 18 head wounds and an additional neck wound on Abby, and 10 wounds on the fleshy part of Andrew's head. These are wound descriptions, not a count of distinct blows.
- Maine
Loring Air Force Base Weapons Storage Area
On the evening of October 27, 1975, by one account, a security policeman guarding the nuclear weapons storage area at Loring Air Force Base watched an aircraft with a red light and a white strobe cross the northern perimeter at about 300 feet. It came back the next night. A memo from the National Military Command Center recorded an unidentified helicopter "landing briefly in proximity to a weapons storage area," and the Air Force never identified it.
- Ohio
Loveland Frogman
On March 27, 1972, the Cincinnati Post reported that two Loveland patrolmen had seen a scaly, two- to three-foot animal beside the Little Miami River, and that one had fired at it. That officer, Mark Mathews, said within weeks that it was probably an iguana. In 2016, he said he had shot it and kept the body in his trunk, although in 1972 he said it fell into the river and washed away.
- New Jersey
Lucy the Elephant
A six story wooden elephant built in 1881 to sell New Jersey real estate is now the oldest surviving roadside attraction in America.
- Texas
Marfa Lights
Local tradition traces the first sighting to rancher Robert Reed Ellison in 1883. Witnesses at the viewing area on U.S. 90 describe small colored lights toward the Chinati Mountains that hover, merge, and split, and skeptical studies attribute many of them to distant car headlights distorted by heat shimmer.
- New York
Merchant's House Museum
A Manhattan row house where one family lived for ninety-eight years and left everything in place. Gertrude Tredwell was born in it in 1840 and died in an upstairs bedroom in 1933, and the museum has spent more than a decade fighting a development next door that its engineers say could bring the building down.
- Illinois
Millstone Bluff
Somebody hauled sandstone to the top of a bluff and walled off every side a person could climb, one of about ten of these in southern Illinois and not one of them shows evidence of a siege. Centuries later a village was built inside the wall, and its house floors are still legible as dents in the forest.
- New York
Montauk Project / Camp Hero
A Cold War radar station on the eastern tip of Long Island, decommissioned and handed to the state as a park. A 1992 book turned its sealed concrete into claims of mind control and time travel, and a Netflix series was pitched under its name.
- West Virginia
Mothman Museum
On November 15, 1966, two Point Pleasant couples said a winged, red-eyed creature chased their car at up to 105 mph near the old TNT Area. The Silver Bridge fell 13 months to the day later, and the federal investigation traced the collapse to a flawed eyebar. The museum, opened in 2006, displays the eyewitnesses' handwritten police depositions.
- California
Mount Shasta Legends
A California volcano credited with sheltering survivors of a lost continent beneath it. The belief has a traceable paper trail: the book usually blamed for it barely mentions Lemuria, and the one that invented the connection came out in 1931.
- Virginia
Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center
On December 1, 1974, a Boeing 727 descending toward Dulles struck the west slope of this mountain and killed all 92 people aboard. Reporters covering the crash named the federal installation on the ridge above it, and a facility the government had never discussed was on the front page.
- Indiana
Muscatatuck Urban Training Center
A complete American town sits in rural Indiana with a hospital, school, prison, and subway station, and no residents. The military built its most realistic fake city on the grounds of a century-old asylum.
- California
Museum of Jurassic Technology
A museum on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles that presents genuine scholarship and outright invention in identical vitrines, under identical engraved labels, and declines to tell you which is which. It has never explained what Jurassic Technology means either.
- Ohio
Ohio State Reformatory
A stone castle of a prison with the largest free standing steel cell block ever built inside it, left standing after closure because a film crew had made it famous. Almost everything reported here comes from a single apartment on the third floor, where the man who ran the place and his wife both died.
- Texas
Paluxy River Man Tracks
Roland T. Bird of the American Museum of Natural History came to Glen Rose in 1938 after seeing carved human footprints for sale in a New Mexico trading post. He found the dinosaur trackways that made the riverbed famous, and reported the human prints were carved. The claim outlived him by half a century, and the Institute for Creation Research retracted it in January 1986.
- Mississippi
Pascagoula Abduction
On October 11, 1973, two shipyard workers told the Jackson County sheriff that three gray figures with clawed hands had carried them aboard a craft hovering beside the Pascagoula River. Deputies left Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker alone with a hidden tape recorder, and the tape caught Hickson telling Parker, "It scared me to death too, son." A historical marker went up at Lighthouse Park on June 22, 2019.
- Minnesota
Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox
Built for a winter carnival that opened on January 14, 1937, and never taken down. Babe started as a parade float on a truck chassis, plumbed so the exhaust came out of the ox's nostrils. They are the oldest surviving pair of their kind and the National Register listed them in 1988.
- Arizona
Phoenix Lights
Shortly after 8pm on March 13, 1997, witnesses across nearly 300 miles of Nevada and Arizona watched a silent V-shaped formation of lights, and later that night a separate set of lights hung over Phoenix for hours. The Air Force attributes the second set to flares dropped during a National Guard exercise at the Barry Goldwater Range.
- New York
Plum Island Animal Disease Center
The federal government studied foot-and-mouth disease and other foreign livestock diseases on this island off the North Fork of Long Island from the 1950s until September 2025. Government auditors documented virus escapes on the island in 1978 and 2004. A 1990 study found the Lyme bacterium in Long Island ticks collected before the laboratory existed. In November 2025, the head of the FDA said Lyme disease probably started here.
- Texas
Presidio de San Saba
Treasure hunters have worked the country around this Spanish fort for two centuries looking for the Lost Bowie Mine. The reason they come is that sometime after 1895 a prankster carved the word "mine" into the gatepost, underneath Jim Bowie's name.
- Utah
Recapture Pocket
A pocket of Mars hiding behind Bluff: hoodoos, mushroom rocks, and balanced stones scattered across BLM land with no signs, no fees, and usually no other people. Goblin Valley's feral little sibling.
- Pennsylvania
Ringing Rocks Park
A county history published in 1876 described these boulders as giving "a peculiar metallic sound, the tone of each differing from the other" when struck. Only some of them ring: in 2020, acoustics engineers hit 534 and counted 167 that passed their test for ringing. Geologists have pointed to stress inside the rock, weathering of its minerals into clay, and how freely a boulder sits, without settling on one cause.
- North Carolina
Roanoke Colony
John White left more than 100 settlers on Roanoke Island in 1587 and returned from England in 1590 to find their buildings dismantled and "CROATOAN" carved into a post, without the agreed distress mark. In 2025, archaeologists found iron hammer scale from blacksmithing on Hatteras Island, the modern name for Croatoan Island.
- New Mexico
Roswell Incident Site
Debris from a ranch north of Roswell prompted an Army press release on July 8, 1947, announcing a captured flying disc, reversed within 24 hours. The Air Force explained it twice in the 1990s, and a government audit found the base's outgoing messages for those years had been destroyed.
- Kansas
S.P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden
Samuel Perry Dinsmoor, a Union Army nurse turned Populist, finished a limestone "log" house in Lucas in 1907 and spent about 20 years surrounding it with concrete sculpture: Adam and Eve, an octopus labeled Trust, and Labor crucified by a lawyer, a doctor, a preacher, and a banker. In the corner of the lot he built a 40-foot mausoleum and a cement coffin with plate glass over the face. He has been in it since July 1932, and the guided tour takes visitors in to see him.
- North Dakota
Salem Sue
A fiberglass Holstein on a hill above Interstate 94, built in 1974 for $40,000 raised from local farmers. She had to be assembled in three sections to get her up the hill.
- Massachusetts
Salem Witch Trials Sites
Accusations that began in Salem Village in February 1692 ended a year later with 20 people executed and at least five more dead in jail. The Witch House and the Old Burying Point carry decades of visitor reports of cold spots, footsteps, and voices. The last conviction was cleared in 2022, when Massachusetts exonerated Elizabeth Johnson Jr. after an eighth-grade civics class petitioned for her.
- California
Salvation Mountain
A 50-foot folk-art mountain of adobe, hay, and donated paint that one Korean War veteran built alone in the California desert over nearly three decades, turning a message of religious devotion into an unlikely Congressional-recognized "national treasure."
- West Virginia
Silver Bridge Site
On the evening of December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge's 1,460-foot suspended span fell into the Ohio River with rush-hour traffic on it, killing 46 people. Investigators traced the collapse to a single cracked eyebar, and writer John Keel later tied it to the Mothman sightings of 13 months earlier.
- Utah
Skinwalker Ranch
On June 30, 1996, the Deseret News reported that Terry and Gwen Sherman had seen lights come out of circular doorways in midair above their Uintah Basin ranch, and that four of their cows had vanished and three had been found mutilated. Robert Bigelow bought the ranch that September. A 2024 Pentagon history says a Defense Intelligence Agency contractor studied an alleged paranormal hotspot at a property in Utah, work the agency did not authorize.
- Florida
Skunk Ape Research HQ
A real, still-operating roadside research station deep in the Everglades is dedicated to tracking Florida's own Bigfoot. It's run by a man who says he's seen the creature four times since childhood.
- New York
Sleepy Hollow
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" appeared in 1820 as the sixth number of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book, presented as papers found after the death of a fictional Diedrich Knickerbocker, and it never names the church that visitors now connect with it. Irving is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery nearby, under his third headstone. On December 10, 1996, the village of North Tarrytown voted 1,304 to 710 to rename itself Sleepy Hollow.
- Kansas
Stull Cemetery
A small Kansas country cemetery that a 1974 student newspaper article turned into one of the seven gates of hell, complete with a devil who visits twice a year and a grave said to hold the child of Satan.
- Florida
The 1715 Treasure Fleet
Eleven or possibly twelve ships carrying the accumulated treasure of the Spanish Americas sailed from Havana on July 24, 1715, and a hurricane put them on the Florida coast seven days later. More than a thousand people died. Salvors still working the wrecks brought up more than 1,000 silver coins and 5 gold escudos in the summer of 2025, worth about a million dollars. Spanish salvagers recovered most of the treasure in 1715, and coins still come out of the sand after storms.
- Florida
The Atocha Sterncastle
Mel Fisher searched for 16 years and found the main pile of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha in July 1985, more than 450 million dollars of it. The ship's 1622 manifest says that is not all of it. Still unaccounted for are 111 gold bars, 433 silver bars, 125,000 silver coins, 14 bronze cannon, and the 35 boxes of gems that were stored in the sterncastle, which has never been found.
- Texas
The Aurora Airship Grave
On April 19, 1897, the Dallas Morning News reported that an airship had hit a windmill in Aurora and that the dead pilot, "not an inhabitant of this world," was buried in the town cemetery. The state historical marker at the gate repeats the story. The grave is unmarked and the headstone has been stolen twice.
- Virginia
The Beale Treasure
In 1885, an anonymous pamphlet printed in Lynchburg claimed that a man named Thomas J. Beale had buried gold, silver, and jewels in Bedford County around 1820, and left the directions in three numbered ciphers. Only one cipher has been read, using the Declaration of Independence as its key, and it lists the contents but not the spot. The other two have held for 140 years, and the diggings around Montvale have turned up nothing.
- Wisconsin
The Beast of Bray Road
Reports of an upright, wolf-like animal on a farm road in Walworth County, Wisconsin. When a reporter went to the county animal control officer in 1991, he already had a stack of them in a folder labeled Werewolf.
- New York
The Cardiff Giant
George Hull had a 10-foot man carved out of gypsum in 1868, buried him on his cousin's farm at Cardiff, and waited a year before sending well diggers to that exact spot. Thousands paid to see the petrified giant they pulled out. P.T. Barnum, refused a sale, had a copy made and exhibited it as the real one, so for a while the public could pay to see a fake of a fake.
- Nevada
The Clown Motel
Leroy and Leona David opened this motel in 1985 and filled it with the clown figures their father had collected. Clarence David is buried on the other side of the fence, in the cemetery that closed the year he died. The collection has grown from about 150 figures to somewhere near 6,000, and nobody has counted them. The motel's own history has the year of his death wrong by 31 years.
- Rhode Island
The Conjuring House
The Rhode Island farmhouse where the Perron family reported a haunting inspired The Conjuring. It later operated as a paranormal tourism site. Public tours have not been verified, and independent historical research disputes parts of the story attached to the house.
- Illinois
The Couch Tomb
A sealed limestone vault sits on a lawn in Lincoln Park and nobody can say who is inside it. The plaques are blank. It is the last thing left of a cemetery that closed in 1866, and roughly 12,000 of the people buried there were never moved.
- Arkansas
The Crescent Hotel
A limestone resort hotel that opened in 1886 and in 1937 became Norman Baker's cancer hospital, a cure a federal appeals court later called "a pure hoax." Baker, who was not a physician, was convicted of mail fraud in 1940, and the hotel's ghost tour now ends in a basement room it calls the morgue.
- Illinois
The Devil Baby at Hull-House
For about six weeks in the autumn of 1913, Chicagoans arrived at Hull-House in a steady stream asking to see a devil baby, with pointed ears, hooves, and a tail. Jane Addams and the residents told all of them there was no such child. They kept coming, and in October 1916 she published what the visit had taught her about the women who came.
- New Jersey
The Devil's Tree
A lone, scarred oak in a Basking Ridge field that locals say punishes anyone who harms or mocks it. Axes have bounced off its trunk, cars supposedly crash after visits, and snow is said to refuse the ground beneath it.
- Alabama
The Face in the Courthouse Window
A smudge in a garret pane of the Pickens County Courthouse is said to be the face of Henry Wells, a freedman accused of burning the previous courthouse, which burned on November 16, 1876. Newspapers of 1878 report that Wells was shot twice during his capture on January 29 and died of the wounds on February 3. On February 20, 1878, 17 days after he died, the local paper reported that the new building's courtroom windows were still being fitted.
- West Virginia
The Flatwoods Monster
On the evening of September 12, 1952, a group of boys, a mother named Kathleen May, and a 17-year-old National Guardsman walked up a hill outside Flatwoods to look at something that had come down. Braxton County has since built a free museum and a set of giant monster chairs on what they said they saw.
- Arkansas
The Fouke Monster
A creature reported around Boggy Creek in southwest Arkansas that pulled a man off his own porch in May 1971. A Texarkana ad man filmed the story for about $160,000 and it became one of the highest-grossing releases of 1972.
- Massachusetts
The Gloucester Sea Serpent
On August 18, 1817, the Linnaean Society of New England appointed a committee chaired by the federal judge John Davis to gather evidence about an animal swimming in Gloucester Harbor. Eleven witnesses gave sworn depositions, examined separately against a list of 25 questions. The committee then named a new genus of serpent from a small snake speared with a pitchfork near Loblolly Cove, which a French naturalist dissected and found to be a deformed black snake.
- West Virginia
The Greenbrier Bunker
Congress built itself a fallout shelter under a luxury resort between 1958 and 1961, hidden behind the construction of a new hotel wing, with dormitories for 1,100 people and chambers for the House and the Senate. Staff maintained it under cover of a television repair company for 30 years. It stayed secret until Ted Gup published it in The Washington Post on May 31, 1992.
- West Virginia
The Greenbrier Ghost
On February 22, 1897, doctors exhumed Zona Heaster Shue and found her neck dislocated between the first and second vertebrae and her windpipe crushed. Her husband, a blacksmith known as Trout Shue, was convicted of her murder in this courthouse that summer and sent to prison for life. The ghost entered the trial only when his own lawyers cross-examined her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, who testified that Zona had come to her on four nights and told her how she died.
- Wisconsin
The Hodag
In 1893, the Rhinelander papers reported that a party of local men had cornered a horned, spine backed beast in the woods and killed it with dynamite. Eugene Shepard produced a live one three years later, kept it in a shanty, worked it with hidden wires, and charged people to look. He gave it up when the Smithsonian said it was sending someone to examine the animal.
- California
The Integratron
A wooden dome, pegged together without metal nails, built by a UFO "contactee" who claimed Venusians gave him blueprints for a machine that could rejuvenate cells and defy gravity. It's now a popular sound-bath venue sitting, by reputation, on a desert geomagnetic vortex.
- Arizona
The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine
Jacob Waltz died in Phoenix on October 25, 1891, and Julia Thomas, the neighbor who nursed him through his last illness, said he had spent his final days describing a rich gold mine hidden in the Superstition Mountains east of the city. No mine matching that account has been found in the 130 years since. By 1932, a Coolidge Examiner report counted Adolph Ruth as the ninth person lost to the search.
- Nevada
The M Cave
In 2014, a Las Vegas hiker described finding a cave shaped like a letter M that made his whole body vibrate. When he went back to find it, he vanished. Only his phone was ever recovered.
- Texas
The Menger Hotel
A hotel that opened beside the Alamo on January 31, 1859, where cattleman Richard King died on April 14, 1885, and where Rough Rider recruits and organizers stayed in May 1898. Its ghost stories center on King and on Sallie White, a chambermaid whose death in 1876 rests on the hotel's own account.
- Minnesota
The Palmer House Hotel
Sinclair Lewis clerked at the front desk here as a teenager and put the building into Main Street as the Minniemashie House. The ghost stories are a century newer, and in December 2025 the hotel was bought by a paranormal radio host, which makes the haunting the business plan as well as the folklore.
- Illinois
The Piasa Bird
Jacques Marquette wrote down what he saw on the bluff in 1673: two painted monsters, each about the size of a calf, with horns like a deer, red eyes, a beard like a tiger, and a tail wrapped around the body. Quarrying took that rock face away in the 1870s. What is on the bluff today was painted in 1998, on limestone that will not hold paint, and it is redone as the weather takes it.
- California
The Queen Mary
A Cunard liner that crossed the Atlantic from 1936 to 1967 and has been moored at Long Beach since, with hotel rooms aboard from 1974. On July 10, 1966, an 18-year-old crewman was caught in watertight door No. 13 during a drill. The ship now sells Stateroom B340, the cabin its ghost stories center on, as a suite, although no cabin carried that number at sea.
- Colorado
The Stanley Hotel
A resort hotel that opened on July 4, 1909, in Estes Park, where Stephen King spent one night in 1974 and came away with The Shining. A Colorado state agency led the partnership that bought it for $400 million in 2025.
- Arizona
The Thing?
A desert attraction advertised by billboards for hundreds of miles, built around a mummified figure brought to Arizona in 1965. In 2018, its owners spent $3.5 million rebuilding it around a story about aliens directing human history.
- Minnesota
The Val Johnson Car
At 1:40am on August 27, 1979, a Marshall County deputy radioed that a light had come at his patrol car. The Ford was found 854 feet on, stopped across the road with a broken windshield, a dented hood, and both antennas bent back. His wristwatch and the dashboard clock had each lost 14 minutes.
- Massachusetts
The Warrens' Occult Museum
Ed and Lorraine Warren kept the objects from their cases in a room at their home in Monroe, Connecticut, and Lorraine said priests came from all over the world to bless it. The best known is Annabelle, a Raggedy Ann doll that two nursing students said moved on its own in 1970. Monroe ordered the museum closed in 2017, and since August 27, 2026, the collection has been on show in Salem, where it stays until Christmas.
- West Virginia
TNT Area
The abandoned World War II ordnance works north of Point Pleasant where the first Mothman sightings were reported in November 1966.
- Pennsylvania
Toynbee Tiles
Cryptic tiles reading 'TOYNBEE IDEA...RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER' have been embedded in city streets since the 1980s. Investigators believe they've identified the reclusive likely creator, but he's never confirmed it himself.
- California (offshore, W-291 Warning Area)
USS Nimitz "Tic Tac" UFO Incident
A 2004 radar and visual encounter between U.S. Navy fighter pilots and an unidentified, wingless "Tic Tac"-shaped object off the California coast, later confirmed by the Pentagon as genuine footage, making it one of the best-documented unresolved UFO cases on record.
- Connecticut
Voynich Manuscript
A book of about 240 vellum pages, written in a script nobody has read and illustrated with unidentified plants, bathing women, and star charts. Radiocarbon tests on four of its leaves date the parchment to between 1404 and 1438. People have announced solutions since 1921, including in 2017 and 2019, and none has been accepted. Nobody knows who wrote it or in what language.
- California
Watts Towers
Sabato Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant tile setter, built 17 structures in his Watts backyard from 1921 to 1954, among them towers nearly 100 feet tall, working alone with scavenged steel, broken bottles, seashells, and tile. He then deeded the property to a neighbor and left Los Angeles for good.
- California
Winchester Mystery House
Sarah Winchester kept builders working on an eight-room farmhouse from 1886 until her death in 1922, leaving roughly 160 rooms and 2,000 doors. The spirit-guided design story was popularized by Susy Smith's 1967 book "Prominent American Ghosts," which named a medium, Adam Coons, for whom no historical record has been found.
- Ohio
Wright-Patterson AFB / Hangar 18
The Ohio Air Force base long rumored to hold the wreckage and bodies from the 1947 Roswell crash, in a hangar the Air Force insists does not exist.
- California
Yuba County Five
Five young men vanished after a Northern California basketball game in 1978, their car found abandoned on a remote, snowed-in forest road far off their route home. Four of them were found dead that June, one inside a locked Forest Service trailer 19 miles from the car, and the fifth, Gary Mathias, has never been found.