Strange & Unusual Attractions in Greater Philadelphia

Imagine your parents left you in the amusement park after hours. This is all the wonder and whimsy inside the tent, minus the carnival barkers. 

Founded in 2010, inside a former B.F. Goodrich tire plant, the Museo American Treasure Tour spotlights the era before high-tech computers ran the show. It contains roughly one million items, including a 20-foot-tall Gumby, a gigantic Ronald McDonald, animatronic characters from Hershey Park’s Candy Cane Lane, a Pinocchio puppet show, a castle made of 400,000 popsicle sticks, the world’s longest Slinky, and a slew of classic cars and vintage bicycles stockpiled by the museum’s “mysterious” benefactor. 

Lo que debes saber antes de ir: You can jump on a tram ride for a 45-minute tour of the museum’s oddities. 

Housed in a renovated stone bank barn from 1834, the Museo de Herramientas Antiguas para el Hielo tells the forgotten story of the now-defunct ice trade, which harvested natural ice from frozen rivers and lakes and shipped it worldwide. 

This cool (really cool!) museum features everything from horse-drawn ice wagons and insulated rail cars to 19th-century ice chests and ice picks, including 5,600 pairs of ice tongs hanging from the ceiling. Remember, ice is heavy — with some blocks weighing as much as 300 pounds. 

Visitors are greeted by a short introductory film, with an audio guide available. 

Lo que debes saber antes de ir: The museum is open April through October, with guided tours only available on Saturdays at 10 a.m. 

Looking for a good place to wait out the end of the world? You found it.

Johannes Kelpius, a German Pietist and Transylvanian scholar, brought a group of devout followers — America’s first doomsday cult — to this stone cave built into the side of a hill in 1694. They believed the Great Comet of 1680 had foretold the apocalypse and chose the lush countryside overlooking Arroyo Wissahickon as a safe haven.

Obviously, the world didn’t end. Visitors can wander into the Cave of Kelpius, located near Hermit’s Lane in Roxborough, and explore one of history’s first survival bunkers. 

Ideal para: Novice and serious hikers, thanks to 2,000 lush acres and 50 miles of trails

Pennywise the Clown just got a new gig as your favorite bartender. 

Salón de los sueños del payaso de neón, located above Kung Fu Necktie in Fishtown, serves up dreams and nightmares four nights a week (Wednesday through Saturday). This boozy silly-string factory is decked out in clown masks, from the neon stage to the lighting fixtures, with a majority of the jester paraphernalia salvaged from shuttered amusement parks. 

This isn’t just a gimmick. “Clown neutral” mixologists make killer cocktails while the bar hosts live music, DJ sets, drag shows, vinyl listening parties, tiki-themed nights and much more. 

Lo que debes saber antes de ir: The bar never charges a cover, and its food menu consists of only one thing: $2 hot dogs. 

Opened in 2026, Ministerio del Asombro is quickly turning into Philadelphia’s go-to playground for the weird and bizarre. This ever-evolving immersive art experience, lurking inside a six-story bank building designed by architect Frank Furness in 1870, loans out human curiosity.

Philly muralist Meg Saligman worked with roughly 100 local artists to get the vibe right, marrying the macabre and the magical on a tactile journey (touch a pile of bones!) where you crawl through a tunnel and climb down a ladder to a secret Mesoamerican calendar nook, or pick up a ringing phone and receive existential clues. 

Explore the Department of Final Affairs to sign your own birth certificate and utter your last words (!) before attending your own funeral. 

No te pierdas: The Vestibule of Domesticity, where you can shrink down to the size of a diamond ring and dance next to a tiny ballerina in a vintage jewelry box.

No list of strange and unusual landmarks would be complete without a cemetery. 

En Cementerio de Laurel Hill gets much of the gravedigger’s buzz (there’s a reason it has its own podcast), Cementerio Mount Moriah sports an even spookier story. Once the largest burial site in Pennsylvania — and the former resting place of Betsy Ross — Mount Moriah was neglected and abandoned for years, eventually swallowed up by the forest. 

Does that mean it’s haunted? Maybe. It has been reported that 85,000 graves, spread out over 200 acres, have been consumed by encroaching trees and vines. 

The Friends of Mount Moriah, an all-volunteer non-profit organization, took control of the cemetery in 2011. Today, the group works tirelessly to restore the graveyard to its former glory, including repairing collapsed mausoleums and tombstones. 

Ideal para: Conspiracy theorists. There is much debate on whether Betsy Ross’ remains got moved, so a plaque was installed at her gravesite in 2022 — next to an American flag. 

Named after Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter, America’s finest medical history museum has been drawing inquisitive visitors since 1863. There is a cornucopia of curiosities on view, from the Hyrtl Skull Collection — 139 inscribed human skulls — to the plaster death casts of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese Twins” who shared a liver. 

Additionally, you can see 46 thin microscopic slides containing slivers of Albert Einstein’s brain and a malignant jaw tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland, among a robust collection of rare books, biological specimens and historical objects. 

En Jardín de plantas medicinales Benjamin Rush explores natural healing and phytotherapy. 

Estilo: At its heart, this is a medical history museum. Researchers continue to analyze the human remains on display in an effort to identify those people and tell their personal stories. 

File this one under incredibly quirky traditions, with historical ties going all the way back to ancient Egypt.

A tradition for over 125 years, the annual Mummers Parade struts down Broad Street on New Year’s Day as thousands of cheering Philadelphians line the avenues and sidewalks to watch. 

En Museo Mummers, established in 1976, displays some of the Mummers’ most outlandish costumes (glitz and glamor!)  from the Mummers’ five divisions: Comic, Fancy, Wench Brigade, String Band and Fancy Brigade. Not featured: Jason Kelce’s leprechaun outfit because, let’s be real, he wasn’t giving that one up.

Estilo: If Mardi Gras was a Philly thing. Wait, es Mardi Gras a Philly thing? 

Larry Fine, aka the “Middle Stooge,” was born and raised in Philadelphia, so it’s only fitting that his hometown would host an entire museum dedicated to the Three Stooges. 

El Stoogeum, located in suburban Ambler y Montgomery County, houses almost 100,000 pieces of memorabilia related to America’s most popular slapstick comedy troupe. Artifacts include stage-worn jackets, rare movie posters, charcoal drawings and ink sketches, plus the real flying submarine-tank-rocket military weapon they used to thwart a Martian invasion in fan-favorite film, The Three Stooges in Orbit. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk! 

Lo que debes saber antes de ir: The Stoogeum is an appointment-only attraction. Submit a visitation request aquí. 

An Italianate-style villa that can’t be defined, the Museo y Biblioteca Ryerss en Noreste de Filadelfia is an eclectic treasure hunter’s paradise that might make Indiana Jones blush. 

Snapper, a taxidermied alligator, holds out a small dish for calling cards. While on the first floor, you can explore an Asian art collection, including a Chinese puzzle ball made of ivory, a six-headed dragon statue and a set of Japanese Buddhist temple objects. 

Meanwhile, Stephen King fans can wander the grounds outside and discover staggered tombstones spread out under an old tree. These mark the graves of the Ryerss family’s deceased pets. (Yes, it’s an actual pet cemetery.) 

Ideal para: Family fun! Ryerrs hosts a variety of rotating scavenger hunts, perfect for kids — and the museum and library remain wheelchair accessible. 

Tie a garlic clove to your necklace and take SEPTA’s Regional Rail to Doylestown.

VAMPA, located on the grounds of an old dairy farm dating back to the late 1700s, chronicles the story of real-life vampire slayers. 

Owner Edmondo Crimi started the museum to honor his exorcism-fighting lineage — his grandfather’s brother and uncle fought demons in Sicily — while working with antique dealers in England, France, Germany and Italy. 

Fans of the occult can gawk at vampire-slaying kits — wooden stakes, crucifixes, bibles, holy water — and vampire-hunting hearses, as well as exorcism chairs and Ouija boards. There is also a room dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel, who defeated the devil. 

Making the museum even weirder is an outdoor park, filled with fiberglass dinosaurs. 

No te pierdas: A hand-carved exorcism chair from 19th-century Germany, featuring restraining straps and a wooden crucifix — with a bible opened to the Book of Nehemiah.

Did we pique your curiosity? Here are a few more interesting and peculiar places to visit around Philadelphia.

• Charles Addams Fine Arts Hall at the University of Pennsylvania: Charles Addams, creator of La familia Addams cartoon, studied architecture at Penn in the 1930s. Outside, you can see six silhouettes honoring the entire Addams Family, plus 56 bronze hands honoring the character Thing. 

• Anastacia’s Antiques on Bainbridge Street: Opened in the 1990s by Anastacia Fahnestock and Scott Evans, this curiosity shop sells Victorian-era oddities and weird collectibles like a wax bust of Joan Crawford or a stained glass window from 1880.

• Weaver Dental Museum at Temple University: Edgar “Painless” Parker graduated Temple’s dental school in 1892, then turned his degree into a vaudeville act by traveling the country, carnival style. Two weird items remain at the school’s Konenberg School of Dentistry, including a bucket of thousands of teeth that he yanked from sore mouths.

• Selma Mansion in Norristown: This old mansion (circa 1794) in Montgomery County is thought to be one of the most haunted places in the country. Today, the property is maintained by the Norristown Preservation Society, which opens the house up for special programming in October, highlighted by the annual Psychic Fair. 

It’s systematic. It’s funeral-matic. Why it’s hearse lightning! 

FYNLRYD is a wickedly cool 1947 Pontiac Superior, souped up (500 cubic inch V8 engine) and tricked out (painted purple with chrome skeletal trim) in the best possible way. This creative take on a classic hearse rattles Laurel Hill’s gravestones when the ignition flips on, emitting an impossible-not-to-hear guttural rumble, amplified by a 200-watt stereo system.

Built by original owner Russ Slegel, FYNLRYD is permanently parked inside the cemetery’s entrance gate and gets showcased annually at the Annual Classic Hearse Show. Oh, and there’s a surprise tucked into the car’s interior: a purple urn with Slegel’s ashes. 

Lo que debes saber antes de ir: There are many famous people buried at Laurel Hill East, including General George Meade and the remains of Martha Drennan. 

“Polly, put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea,” quoth Grip the Raven in Charles Dickens’ novel Barnaby Rudge. It’s a popular phrase the famous author’s talking bird often squawked.

Grip is the legendary pet bird owned by Dickens, one he cherished and loved so much that he had her stuffed and mounted for display above his desk. Grip was sold at auction after Dickens’ death and her remains ended up in the hands of a Philadelphia collector named Colonel Richard Gimbel before eventually being donated to the Free Library.  

Today, Grip — also thought to be the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem, El cuervo — sits stuffed on the third floor of Biblioteca Central Parkway. Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

Lo que debes saber antes de ir: Grip can be seen in person, Monday through Saturday, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Rare Book Department. 

Wyck, a quaint farmstead in Germantown, draws thousands of visitors every year to smell the roses in its historic garden, which dates back to 1824. It’s a bucket-list item.

However, there’s more to explore at this National Historic Landmark. Step inside the main house and ask to see the 200-year-old cabinet of curiosities. In it, you’ll see a prehistoric squid fossil (baculites ovatus) dating back to the Cretaceous Period, about 65 million years ago. 

The fossil was feared lost until Wyck caretaker Matthew Halley rediscovered it, revealing its unbelievable story (rock solid!) on a podcast. In it, he explains that a holotype is a single physical example of an organism.

Estilo: A Revolutionary War field hospital with a garden of secrets

HitchBOT’s long-lost ancestor is a sight to behold.

Maillardet’s Automaton, constructed by Henri Maillardet around 1800, may look like something trapped in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, but it’s one of the earliest examples of a self-propelled computing machine — also known as an automaton. 

It features a doll’s face and human body (think: Pinocchio) that uses internal gears to respond to encoded instructions and predetermined sequences — including four drawings and three poems (two in French, one in English). 

It has the largest “memory” of any automaton ever constructed. The machine mysteriously showed up at The Franklin Institute in 1928. 

No te pierdas: Galería de colecciones Hamilton, a new exhibition inside that showcases a 350-ton steam locomotive (Baldwin 6000) and original artifacts from the Wright Brothers. 

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Peter the Mint Eagle. 

Yes, you can see a real bird — a taxidermied bald eagle, with his wings outstretched and his beak wide open — on display on the mezzanine floor.

How did he get here? History says Peter flew into the Casa de la Moneda de EE.UU. through an open window and took up residence in the building for a six-year stretch in the 1830s. Employees named him Peter and cheered his nightly arrival. Tragically, Peter was injured during his time there and died at his adopted home. 

Today, Peter peers out from his perch and greets visitors, daring anyone to challenge his Eagles fandom.

No te pierdas: Stop in the gift shop and take home a plush eagle as a souvenir. 

Romeo waxes poetic in one of William Shakespeare’s most enduring plays: “O, that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!” 

Perhaps the Bard was wearing this pair of leather gloves, embroidered at the wrist, when he concocted the line. The gloves remain under lock and key — resting on a tufted pillow of red satin in a glassed wooden box — and you have to put in a request to see them. 

While researchers haven’t been able to confirm they belonged to Shakespeare, scientific testing showed enough to prove they are plausibly from the 17th century. 

Oh, wait, here’s the rub: Shakespeare’s gloves are rumored to be cursed. According to 1937 curators, anyone who dares wear them dies within the year. (Spooky.) 

Estilo: Your favorite historical library opened up for show and tell.