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14 Weird and Wonderful Museums Worth Building a Trip Around
Forget the Louvre. These 14 genuinely strange museums will make you reroute flights, add extra nights, and text your friends in all caps.
I have planned entire itineraries around a single weird museum. Not as an afterthought, not as a rainy-day backup — as the reason. A friend once told me this was deranged. That friend has never stood inside a converted castle full of mustard memorabilia and felt, briefly, that the world made perfect sense.
If you’re the kind of traveler who finds the permanent collection at most major art museums faintly exhausting, this list is for you. These are the places mainstream roundups ignore — the hair museums, the parasitology labs, the halls of failed products — and they are absolutely worth booking a flight for.
The Museum of Bad Art — Somerville, Massachusetts
MOBA’s tagline is “art too bad to be ignored,” and it delivers. Lucy in the Field with Flowers, a serene woman with one enormous foot, is their Mona Lisa. Admission is free (it’s inside the Somerville Theatre), and you’ll spend a genuinely joyful 45 minutes. Go on a weekend afternoon when the theater is quiet.
Vent Haven Museum — Fort Mitchell, Kentucky
The world’s only museum dedicated entirely to ventriloquist dummies holds over 900 figures on open shelves, all facing outward. It is deeply, deliberately unsettling — and I mean that as a recommendation. Tours are appointment-only (about $10/person), which keeps it intimate. Budget 90 minutes and bring a sweater; the building runs cold.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology — Culver City, California
This one is genuinely hard to describe. Is it a natural history museum? A surrealist art installation? A meditation on how institutions construct authority? Yes. All of those. The exhibits are presented with the full gravity of the Smithsonian, covering topics that may or may not be real. Admission is $10. Plan 2–3 hours and accept that you will leave confused in the best possible way.
The Sulabh International Museum of Toilets — New Delhi, India
A history of sanitation from 2500 BC to the present, curated by a sanitation activist who genuinely changed policy in India. It sounds like a joke until you’re standing in front of an ornate Victorian commode used by royalty and realizing this is a serious, fascinating story about public health and class. Free entry. Go in the morning before the heat peaks.
The International Cryptozoology Museum — Portland, Maine
Bigfoot hair samples. Coelacanth specimens. A life-size Fiji mermaid. Loren Coleman has spent decades assembling the most thorough collection of cryptid evidence and folklore in the world, and the museum takes all of it seriously without being credulous. Admission is $10 for adults. The gift shop is outstanding. Portland’s food scene is excellent, so this pairs naturally with a longer weekend — check out itineraries for planning the surrounding days if you want to build a proper trip around it.
The Museum of Failure — Touring (check current city)
A rotating exhibition of spectacularly failed products — Harley-Davidson perfume, Colgate beef lasagna, Google Glass — that has toured Stockholm, Los Angeles, Chicago, and beyond. Check museumoffailure.com for the current location. It’s part design critique, part business history, and entirely funnier than it has any right to be. Usually $15–20 depending on venue.
The National Museum of Funeral History — Houston, Texas
Caskets used by US presidents. Fantasy coffins shaped like cars and fish from Ghana. The complete history of embalming. This museum is genuinely moving in stretches, often hilarious in others, and always thoughtful. $10 admission. Give yourself 2 hours. Houston has enough other oddities to fill a long weekend — pair it with the Menil Collection and you’ve got one of the stranger cultural trips in the American south.
Glore Psychiatric Museum — St. Joseph, Missouri
A working state psychiatric hospital from 1874 to the 1990s, now preserved as a history of mental health treatment in America. The exhibits on early treatments are harrowing and important. This is not a place for cheap shock value — it’s genuinely educational and worth the detour off I-29. Admission is around $7. If you’re already building a midwest road trip (the national parks stretch is different but equally underrated — see this guide to parks you can actually enjoy without a reservation), St. Joseph makes a logical overnight stop.
The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic — Boscastle, Cornwall, UK
The world’s largest collection of witchcraft-related artifacts, housed in a 16th-century building on the Cornish coast. Ancient ritual objects, cursing bottles, taxidermy familiars. The village of Boscastle is tiny and genuinely beautiful, which makes the whole visit feel like something from a novel. Entry is around £6. This one requires real planning — Cornwall isn’t easily dashed through — but that’s the point. Definately worth two nights in the area.
The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum — Gatlinburg, Tennessee
Over 20,000 sets of salt and pepper shakers arranged by theme, era, and origin. Gatlinburg is usually associated with Smoky Mountains tourism, and this museum is exactly the kind of unexpected detour that makes a trip memorable rather than predictable. The owners are obsessive in the best way and will gladly tell you the history of any piece. Free admission with a requested $3 donation.
The Parasite Museum (Meguro Parasitological Museum) — Tokyo, Japan
Free entry to see 300+ preserved parasites, including a 29-foot tapeworm displayed in a spiral jar. The gift shop sells tapeworm-themed keychains and scarves. It’s only open Wednesday through Sunday, closes at 5 PM, and gets genuinely crowded on weekends despite being relatively unknown to international tourists. Build 90 minutes into a Meguro afternoon. If you’re comparing flight prices for a Japan trip, there’s real data on when to book in this breakdown of booking-day myths.
The Hair Museum — Avanos, Turkey
Chez Galip pottery studio hosts a cave underneath lined floor-to-ceiling with locks of hair from over 16,000 women, collected since 1979. Every six months, two donors are drawn at random and invited back for a free week in Cappadocia. Yes, this is a real ongoing thing. Yes, you can submit your own hair. Cappadocia is already one of the more surreal landscapes on earth — this adds an appropriate layer.
Museo delle Anime del Purgatorio — Rome, Italy
Tucked inside a small church near the Tiber, this single-room museum displays evidence of souls returning from purgatory to ask the living for prayers — scorched handprints on books, burned fingermarks on clothing. The Catholic Church’s relationship with this collection is complicated. It’s free, open during church hours, and almost nobody on the tourist trail finds it. If you’re already in Rome eating your way through the city (the food-focused travel energy in this Naples guide translates well), add this as a single afternoon detour.
The Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum — Osaka, Japan
The inventor of instant noodles gets a full museum in Ikeda, just outside Osaka, where you can design your own Cup Noodle from a choice of soups, proteins, and toppings. It costs about $4 for the customization experience and is one of the most fun 90-minute activities in the Kansai region. It also takes Nissin’s weird, world-changing invention seriously as an industrial and cultural object, which I appreciate.
Every one of these museums started as someone’s obsession — a collector, an activist, a potter, an inventor. That’s what makes them worth a detour, or a flight, or an extra night somewhere unexpected. The mainstream itinerary will still be there. The 29-foot tapeworm in Tokyo might close for renovation.
The best trips are built around the things nobody else thinks to visit — these 14 museums are exactly that.
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