Urban Legends and Oddities
- Welcome to the Atlas Obscura, a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica. The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloging all of the singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist. If you’re looking for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you’ll find them.
- A directory of wonderful things.
- Showman, author and humorist, Charles Phoenix is the Ambassador of Americana! Celebrating classic and kitsch pop culture, he is known for his retro slide show performances, school bus field trip tours, roller skating variety shows, test kitchen creations, coffee table books and Slide of the Week emails. He offers a hip and highly original take on American life and style.
- Freaks, wonders and human curiosities!
- This site is dedicated to the search for animals that are hypothesized to exist, but for which conclusive proof is missing. This includes the search for living examples of animals that are known to have existed at one time, but are widely considered to be extinct today. Those who study or search for such animals are called cryptozoologists, while the hypothetical creatures involved are referred to by some as “cryptids”, a term coined by John Wall in 1983.
- See Todd Browning’s famous 1932 film in its entirety. For free!
- The Museum was established in 1997 in order to promote knowledge about the phenomenon of hoaxes. It plays host to a variety of humbugs and hoodwinks―from ancient deceptions all the way up to modern schemes, dupes, and dodges that circulate on the Internet.
- Robert Ripley displayed his collection to the public for the first time at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. That first Ripley’s Odditorium attracted nearly 2 million visitors during the run of the fair. Based on the success of that first exhibition of his collection, trailer shows appeared throughout the country during the 1930s and the exhibits were the hits of many major fairs and expositions, including San Diego, Dallas, Cleveland, San Francisco and in 1939, an exhibit opened in New York City, on Broadway. That exhibit closed a year later and was moved to the World’s Fair in Queens. In 1950, a year after Ripley died, the first permanent Odditorium opened in St. Augustine, Fla. It is still in business.
- RoadsideAmerica.com is a caramel-coated-nutbag-full of odd and hilarious travel destinations — over 7,000 places — ready for exploration.
- THE SKEPTICS SOCIETY is a scientific and educational organization of scholars, scientists, historians, magicians, professors and teachers, and anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas, and the promotion of science.
Snopes.com: Urban Legends Reference Pages
- Snopes follows the more expansive popular (if inaccurate) use of “urban legend” as a term that embraces not only urban legends but also common fallacies, misinformation, old wives’ tales, strange news stories, rumors, celebrity gossip, and similar items. A wonderfully weird and comprehensive site.
- Co-hosted by Stan Lee, the legendary creator of the X-Men, the series scours the globe for the real-life counterparts of Lee’s characters–people with unique genetic traits that translate into remarkable powers. These include a man whose body is powerfully magnetic, another who can withstand deadly levels of cold and yet another whose brain performs complex calculations at staggering speeds.
- Travis Louie’s paintings come from the tiny little drawings and many writings in his journals. He’s created his own imaginary world that is grounded in Victorian and Edwardian times. It is inhabited by human oddities, mythical beings, and otherworldly characters who appear to have had their formal portraits taken to mark their existence and place in society.
- The Bible…as told through Legos.
The Busybody: Top 20 Literary Hoaxes
- A list of what are arguably the top 20 literary hoaxes of all time.
- A thorough index to cryptids (monsters and other unproven creatures).
- This site salutes the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who remove themselves from it. Of necessity, this honor is generally bestowed posthumously.
The Gallery of Regrettable Food
- This is a simple introduction to poorly photographed foodstuffs and horrid recipes. It’s a wonder anyone in the 40s, 50s and 60s gained any weight; it’s a miracle that people didn’t put down their issue of Life magazine with a slight queasy list to their gut, and decide to sup on a nice bowl of shredded wheat and nothing else. It wasn’t that the food was inedible; it was merely dull. Everything was geared for a timid palate fearful of spice. It wasn’t non- nutritious – no, between the limp boiled vegetables, fat-choked meat cylinders and pink-whipped-jello dessert, you were bound to find a few calories that would drag you into the next day. It’s that the pictures are so hideously unappealing.
The Museum of Jurassic technology
- The Museum of Jurrassic Technology is, surprisingly, not about the tool making abilities of Velociraptors. Rather, it is an experiment. An art project that serves, in part, to deconstruct what a museum is all about. Most folks go to a museum expecting…well, to learn something. To be given the facts. To be told the truth about astronomy or art or culture or what have you. The MJT, on the other hand, doesn’t present you with easily digestible facts and figures. Instead, you are presented with a collection of curiosities, folklore, letters and “scientific” experiments that leave you with more questions than answers. If you start wondering whether something you are looking at is real or not, you’re on the right track.
- The Onion is an award-winning parody newspaper published weekly in print and online. It features satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news as well as an entertainment newspaper and website known as The A.V. Club. It claims a national print circulation of 599,000 and says 67 percent of its Web site viewers are between 18 and 44 years old.
- A site and forum for discussion about unexplained mysteries.
- Be it that guests stay underground, inside an igloo, up a tree or even underwater, Unusual Hotels of the World has set out to be the online location for travellers from around the globe to access information and subsequently book rooms at unusual hotels.
- The museum of velvet paintings.