The Strangest Roadside Attractions In America

According to the Federal Highway Administration, the United States has over 164,000 miles of highway as part of over 4 million miles of public roads stretching like a vast, asphalt circulatory system through the country. That's a lot of real estate, and some of it definitely gets more traffic than others. If you're looking to bring more people–and let's be real, more dollars–to your particular stretch of highway, you could do a lot worse than investing in some kind of roadside attraction: an unusual, mysterious, ridiculous, or often downright weird kind of something that will make people want to stop their cars and look, just so they can tell people they'd seen it.

America's highways are just absolutely littered with these kinds of ostentatious-yet-charming tourist traps of all types, ranging from the world's largest versions of everyday items to places that claim to have non-standard physics to lots and lots of concrete dinosaurs. While it would be impossible to collect every bit of weird roadside Americana, here is just a sampling of some of the strangest.

If you like hiking, outsider art, and the scenes from Toy Story with the mean kid's messed up toy experiments, has Atlanta got the spot for you. As Atlanta Trails explains, the Doll's Head Trail is a short, 1.6-mile loop through Constitution Lakes Park, an urban nature preserve that was previously the site of a 19th-century brick company that excavated red clay from the area. After the company ceased digging, the dug out pits filled with water and created a system of man-made ponds known as the Constitution Lakes. The Doll's Head Trail gets its name from the work of Joel Slaton, a local carpenter who decided to use the various trash and refuse from the old site–which apparently included a lot of doll parts for some reason–to create an art project in the preserve. The displays throughout the trail include either whimsical or creepy scenes made of doll parts, vintage toys, old bricks, fishing gear, antique railroad parts, and lots and lots of Sharpie ink.

There are even signs in the park encouraging hikers to add their own pieces of art to the collection but only using things found within the park itself, adding to the trail's unique folk art feel. While those with a doll phobia might be terrified at a display of disembodied, mud-covered doll parts, apparently the real danger is the many snakes that inhabit the wetland area.

It's perhaps no surprise that the American highway system, somewhat famously sprinkled with billboards declaring the reality of Hell or the imminence of the end times, frequently in close proximity to adult bookstores, has its share of religious-themed roadside attractions. There's California's brightly colored Salvation Mountain, Alabama's miniature recreation of ancient Jerusalem (and more) known as the Ave Maria Grotto, Ohio's wax museum of Christianity BibleWalk, and giant statues of Jesus that look like they were carved out of butter in Arkansas and Ohio. But only one roadside stop dares to combine a love of Christ with an affection for kitschy religious collectibles of the 1980s: Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, Missouri.

As Atlas Obscura explains, Precious Moments figurines–which have been called "Funko Pops for Boomers" by various online wags–were the creation of artist Samuel J. Butcher, whose artwork depicting various teardrop-eyed children with enormous heads served as the basis for a collectibles boom in the '80s and '90s. Butcher subsequently created a chapel and surrounding gardens to celebrate these weirdly proportioned children. Besides the titular chapel, which is filled with cartoons and frescoes in some strange homage to the Sistine Chapel, the complex contains various gardens, including memorial gardens dedicated to deceased children, a visitor center recording the history of Precious Moments, a cafe, and, of course, a gift shop. See if your grandma wants to go next time you're passing through southwestern Missouri.

We can all agree that the coolest things that have ever been alive on this planet are dinosaurs, so it only stands to reason that some roadside attractions would target that most natural of human impulses: to look at rad dinosaurs. While many larger tourist traps such as South Dakota's Wall Drug or Arizona's Rainbow Rock Shop feature giant dinosaur statues as part of their collections of oddities, specifically dinosaur-focused attractions include Cave City, Kentucky's Dinosaur World and White Post, Virginia's Dinosaurland. But as cool as these must-see spots for sauropod sighting are, none of them reach quite the level of weirdness as Natural Bridge, Virginia's Dinosaur Kingdom II.

As the name implies, Dinosaur Kingdom II is a sequel of sorts to the original Dinosaur Kingdom, which burned down in 2012. What sets it apart from other dinosaur attractions, however, is that it is less concerned with historical or scientific accuracy than with creating truly memorable tableaus. As Atlas Obscura explains, Dinosaur Kingdom is the brainchild of fiberglass artist Mark Cline and depicts multiple scenes of an alternate history Civil War in which the Union Army was defeated and eaten by dinosaurs. An Allosaurus rips a Union soldier off his horse, another Yankee is swallowed by a snake, Abraham Lincoln fights a raptor at Gettysburg, and there's even a cyborg Stonewall Jackson, because why not.

One of the most well-known monuments in the world is Stonehenge, the mysterious stone circle on England's Salisbury Plain, which is a true wonder of prehistoric engineering featuring a host of 25-ton stones carried from miles away to create some kind of monolithic calendar. As Atlas Obscura explains, experimental artist Jim Reinders decided in 1982 to pay homage to this ancient stone circle in the most American way he could think of: by building an accurate and proportional replica of the monument using old cars, creating the star of Alliance, Nebraska, Carhenge.

All 38 stones of the original Stonehenge are reproduced in Carhenge, with vehicles including cars, pickup trucks, an ambulance, and a classic Cadillac, all painted gray to better resemble the standing stones of Salisbury. In time, the roadside art piece has grown into a collection, featuring works from other artists, including a giant salmon and–of course–a dinosaur.

However, if you can't make it out to Nebraska, you could always seek out the similarly automobile-themed art attraction, Amarillo, Texas's Cadillac Ranch, which is made up of 10 Cadillacs covered in graffiti and buried nose-first "at the same angle as the Cheops' pyramids" in the middle of a field in Texas. Visitors are allowed and even encouraged to apply their own layer of graffiti to the cars, making it something of a living and evolving work of art.

Certain subsets of America are deeply obsessed with cryptids–that is, mysterious creatures that may or may not exist–whether they want to find them for science, hunt them for dinner, or make out with them big time, so it's not surprising that museums dedicated to the search for strange creatures dot this vast American landscape. These include Portland, Maine's International Cryptozoology Museum, and Point Pleasant, West Virginia's Mothman Museum, but the most famous cryptid of them all can best be found (so to speak) and studied at Expedition Bigfoot, the Sasquatch Museum in Cherry Log, Georgia.

According to Atlas Obscura, this northern Georgia museum contains one of the largest collections of Bigfoot evidence, information, folklore, and memorabilia in the world. The 4,000 square foot museum's collection includes numerous newspaper articles documenting sightings of America's most famous cryptid, as well as casts created from alleged hand- and footprints of the so-called missing link. Another crucial piece of evidence within the museum is a sample of Sasquatch feces gathered in Oregon in 2016. If you're still skeptical after all that, however, your time won't have been wasted, because there are free cookies for all visitors. For a certain brand of cryptid-hunter, however, there is one extremely crucial piece of evidence that will be worth traveling to Georgia for: a plaster cast that proves once and for all what Bigfoot's butt looks like.

If you've ever driven through the American Midwest, you have probably seen more corn than anything else. Just niblets as far as the eye can see. As such, it will probably not surprise you that a monument to America's yellow gold has been erected in the midst of this wide belt of maize, Mitchell, South Dakota's own Corn Palace. As Atlas Obscura explains, the Corn Palace was first constructed in Mitchell–the self-proclaimed "Corn Capital of the World"–in 1892 as a promotional attraction to draw attention to South Dakota's rich and fertile soil. Since then, the Palace has been rebuilt and added to a number of times, including as part of a 1905 attempt by the municipal Mitchell government to move the state capital there. The now-iconic Russian-style onion domes and minarets were added in 1937.

While the Palace itself is not actually made of corn, its exterior is covered in enormous murals made of corn cobs and other local grasses and grains. Each year the murals are dedicated to a particular theme, such as "Life on the Farm," "South Dakota Weather," "Salute to Rodeo," or "Rock of Ages." Despite sounding like it should theoretically be the ancestral home for a monarchical corn dynasty of some kind, the Corn Palace is actually used as a convention center and venue for sports and music. Each year, half a million people visit, more than 30 times the population of Mitchell.