Most Bizarre Museums In The United States

Whether you're taking the Great American Road Trip down Route 66 or spending a few days in Manhattan, one of the best ways to round out your travel itinerary is to work in a trip to a local museum. Getting lost in a museum is an excuse to explore your surroundings and work in a little culture on your trip — but who said that culture had to be refined? While we love a good Van Gogh as much as the next guy, sometimes it's fun to step off the beaten path and explore something just a little campier. And in the land of World's Largest Twine Balls and endless folk art creations, the good news is that the United States has no shortage of quirky or offbeat attractions.

From kitschy collections to exhibitions that delve into darker subject matter, there's a museum for every taste, no matter how obscure. Get ready to get a little weird on your next trip, as we take a look at the most bizarre museums the United States has to offer.

Few canned foods have as complex, divisive, and near-mythical an oral history as SPAM, the processed meat with a geometrically satisfying shape and its own cult following. A symbol of American gusto, resilience, and ingenuity, SPAM first emerged during the Great Depression like a porcine phoenix rising from the ashes of a burning economy. The inspired, shelf-stable creation of meat nepo-baby Jay Hormel, SPAM was a futuristic food with a surprisingly simple recipe of pork shoulder, potato starch, salt, sugar, water, and sodium nitrate. It would rise to new glory during World War II, much to the chagrin of SPAM-weary soldiers who called it "ham that didn't pass its physical." Today, the SPAM Museum serves as a tribute to this controversial meat whose popularity has ebbed and flowed throughout its more than eighty-year lifespan.

Fans of SPAM will be delighted to learn admission to the museum, which hosts around 115,000 visitors each year, is completely free. The museum takes about an hour to go through, give or take. Exhibits include a historic Hormel market, a children's play zone, musical instruments made from SPAM cans, and a World Market that highlights SPAM's popularity in places like Japan, the Philippines, and England. Courtesy of its friendly SPAM-bassadors, the SPAM Museum offers free guided tours upon request as well as free live virtual tours.

San Antonio local Barney Smith had one great love in life: decorative toilet seats. While it might seem like an odd interest, Smith's toilet seat art collection makes more sense in light of his bio as an artist who spent decades working as a master plumber. As a child growing up during the '20s and '30s, Smith was drawn to the art world, sketching countless comics he would display around his childhood home. Despite his passion, Smith dutifully went into the family business. But he never left that artistic spirit behind. When, one fateful day in a plumbing supply house, he came across 50 toilet seats bound for the landfill, he realized he had found his new medium. Using everything from doll heads to coins to calligraphy, Smith finished toilet seat after toilet seat, ultimately amassing a collection of more than a thousand.

The artist opened his collection (then housed in his garage) to the public during the 1990s. These days, the extensive collection resides at Truck Yard The Colony, an outdoor hangout and food truck garden where folks show up with their dogs in tow to check out some live music and relax with a cold brew. The toilet seats are on display for anyone who stops by, and it's completely free to check them out.

If you're curious about science or the generally odd and you have a strong stomach, Philadelphia's Mütter Museum offers an interesting look at the human body in a Victorian medical school setting. Founded posthumously on a donation from surgeon Thomas Dent Mütter as part of his commitment to boost medical education in the United States, the museum first rolled out in 1863 and has continued to expand in size ever since. Despite a move in 1909, the Mütter Museum still maintains its original 19th-century cases.

Inside the museum, visitors will find an extensive collection of artifacts, anatomical specimens, historical medical instruments, and various other items pertaining to medicine and human anatomy. Most items housed within the museum originate from the 19th to early 20th centuries, but peruse long enough and you'll encounter a few pieces dating back to the seventh century BCE. One highlight of the museum's permanent collection is a collection of skulls acquired by Viennese anatomist Josef Hyrtl as part of his efforts to refute the then-popular pseudoscience of phrenology. 

There's the body of the 18th-century yellow fever victim dubbed "The Soap Lady," an exhibition dedicated to human skin, and a collection of 2,374 foreign bodies removed by Philadelphia otolaryngologist Chevalier Jackson during his tenure. For medical students, artists, and the intellectually curious, Mütter Museum offers a lo-fi, high-interest experience. But sensitive viewers beware: As Tripadvisor reviewer John L. of London noted, "It'd give kids nightmares."

The drunk uncle of all roadside attractions, the Thing Museum is part sideshow relic, part Fox Mulder fever dream, and all wonderful. The wacky endeavor began with the artisanship of an unusual craftsman. A native of Poetry, Texas, Homer Tate was born in 1884 and managed to live a fairly ordinary (if interesting) life of mining, farming, and ascension to small-town sheriff before finding his strange calling as an artist. Like toilet seat virtuoso Barney Smith, Tate found himself drawn to an unusual art form — in his case, creating the types of ersatz specimens, chimeras, mummies, and cryptids found in carnival sideshows, lovingly crafting his papier-mache originals using hair swept from salon floors or bones salvaged from the desert.

One such exhibit made it into the hands of lawyer Thomas Binkley Prince, who used it as the centerpiece for his roadside attraction, enveloping it in increasingly complex lore as the "mystery of the desert" known as "The Thing." Through the years, the exhibit has expanded to a whopping 13,000 square feet, weaving together conspiracy theories that make QAnon look positively prosaic. This place has everything: aliens, dinosaurs, even Elvis. And for only a few bucks per person, it's well worth the price of admission.

For anyone who has ever dreamed of finding Bigfoot but lacks the constitution for conducting stakeouts deep in the American wilderness or sneaking onto Skinwalker Ranch, the International Cryptozoology Museum has you covered. Founded in 2003 by cryptozoologist and writer Loren Coleman from his personal collection of cryptid artifacts and curiosities, the museum has since expanded to two locations.

Hardened skeptics and visitors without much of a sense of humor tend not to love it, but anyone willing to go with the flow and appreciate it for the roadside attraction it is will have a good time. It's also popular among youth and teens, and the museum takes its role as a gateway experience into the world of science seriously. While the smallish museum is short on concrete evidence, it has enough interesting information on its subject matter to keep fans of the field entertained for an hour or two. A long list of cryptids is covered far beyond Bigfoot and Sasquatch — you'll also find information on the Skunk Apes, the Jersey Devil, the Dover Demon, the Abominable Snowman, and Yowie, just to name a few.

If ever a museum embodied the "waste not, want not" ethos, it's Maine's Umbrella Cover Museum. Perhaps unsurprising for a woman with a numerical name, museum curator Nancy 3. Hoffman has a strange affection for the mundane. Not long after a housecleaning sesh revealed she had inadvertently been hoarding umbrella covers — around seven of them – she found herself compelled to steal another one from a dime store. Apparently, things continued to snowball until the collection outgrew her kitchen, blossoming into a full-blown umbrella cover museum. After winning a Guinness World Record in 2012 with a whopping 730 covers, Nancy 3's collection clocks in at more than 2,000 today, with umbrella covers representing 71 countries.

Although the museum is small and getting there requires a 20-minute ferry ride and a short walk from the Peaks landing, reviewers on Tripadvisor insist it's worth the diversion, citing Nancy 3's charming personality and apparent accordion skills. As one guest put it, "I'm happy to live in a world where someone had the idea to create this tiny, quirky museum." If you're planning to visit, it probably can't hurt to sacrifice an umbrella cover to Nancy 3's cause — just try not to steal it.