Join us in Anniston, AL, where we will be visiting both the Berman Museum of World History and the adjacent Anniston Museum of Natural History for an afternoon of discovery.

Join us at The Bone Room for a show-and-tell tour with the owner and founder, Ron Cauble. Explore the wonders of Berkeley's venerable natural history store with the man who knows it best. Hear behind-the scenes stories and get a chance to ask all those questions we know you have.

In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself: the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now as a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, the outer edges of California City are like some peculiarly American response to the Nazca Lines. The uninhabited street plan has become an abstract geoglyph--unintentional land art visible from airplanes--not a thriving community at all. Join Atlas Obscura and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG on a photographic expedition to this ghost-grid, a mirage of suburbia in the middle of nowhere

Join Atlas Obscura and Paul K. Sholar of Suede Shirt Travel on a day long journey through Joshua Trees most curious locals, such as the Integratron Self-Guided Tour and Sound Bath, originally designed as a rejuvenation and time machine, today it is the only all-wood, acoustically perfect sound chamber in the U.S., the Giant Rock the largest freestanding boulder in the world, and the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum.

The Echo Park Time Travel Mart and Atlas Obscura are teaming up to lead a special bus tour of some of Los Angeles' most time-specific places. We will travel back to the days of cane sugar sodas, panoramic paintings, and whimsical marionette performances. Lunch included!

Join us at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for a demonstration of their amazing Victorian Computer, the Difference Engine #2. Regarded by many as the first example of a mechanical computer, the Difference Engine was only one of many inventions by the mathematician Charles Babbage. Due to his difficult personality and the enormous technical challenges involved in building his designs, the machines were never completed in his lifetime.

Join Stanford University Hospital chief engineer Leander Robinson on a tour of one of the largest pneumatic tube networks in the world. Snaking through the medical center's walls are four miles of tubes that shuttle specimens and paperwork around the facility at 18 miles per hour. Robinson will explain how this incredible system works. (Photo courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine)

Please join us for a reception at The Long Now Foundation Museum & Store from 5-7pm on March 20th for Atlas Obscura Day. Several of the engineers and project staff working on the 10,000 Year Clock and Rosetta Project will be on hand to give explanations and demonstrations of artifacts in the Museum. We are walking distance from Musee Mecanique and our space in San Francisco is home to a few Atlas Obscura sites including a Longplayer listening outpost, and later prototypes of the 10,000 Year Clock. We will have wine and nibbles for those in attendance, and our large monitor will be displaying the recently launched Long Now Locations category on Atlas Obscura.

Join Atlas Obscura editors for an afternoon excursion to the amazing Musee Mecanique for an afternoon of wind-up fortune tellers, prisoner-made toothpick automata, and naughty peep shows of yesteryear. Proprietor Dan Zelinsky will be on hand to tell stories and answer questions about his collection of nickelodeon contraptions. When all the quarters run out, we'll head down to Aquatic Park for afternoon snacks on the terraces made of discarded Gold Rush era tombstones.

Normally closed to the public, the Zymoglyphic Museum will be hosting a special Obscura Day tour of the world's only repository for the study and display of Zymoglyphic art, artifacts, and natural history. Join us!

Join us for an afternoon of exploration of the unique stone circles and hidden chambers at the Gungywamp archaeological site. The Gungywamp complex of ruins is perched at the summit a kame terrace spanning approximately 24 acres. There are extraordinary stone structures of unknown origin, albeit not without controversy. We will explore two rows of standing capstones, with a bird of prey image carved in one of the standing stones, double-ring of stones (old tanning mill?), and stone chambers (the Calendar Chamber and the tomb chamber).

In Celebration of Obscura Day the Colorado Steampunks have arranged a glorious day trip to Colorado Springs. Join them on a trip to a Wild Wild West Museum, a Castle for an afternoon tea, and to a "Garden of the Gods."

Join us on a special Obscura Day tour of the National Musem of Health and Medicine. Come explore an astounding collection of anatomical and pathological specimens dating back to the Civil War.

Join us at the Coral Catle for a tour of one the world's most unusual self-built monuments to lost love.

Join us for a trek through the abandoned streets of Unit 11 in the Everglades. A failed development that has remained untouched for nearly 40 years, Unit 11 has become a home for wild boars, carnivorous plants, and exotic birds living amid a suburban rectangular grid of forest.

Join the Atlas Obscura for a tour of the immaculate and eccentric Gold Pyramid House outside of Chicago. The six-story-tall, 17,000-square-foot house is located in Wadsworth, Illinois and is believed to be the largest 24-karat gold-plated object in North America. The home's builder, Jim Onan, will lead a special Obscura Day tour.

Sixty-five stories below Hutchinson, Kansas sits a massive salt mine with mineral veins stretching from Kansas all the way to New Mexico. Join us on a tour of the Underground Salt Museum to see the piece of crystal on which the oldest known bacteria was found. We'll also be taking the "Dark Ride," a tram tour of the mine.

Come tour one of the "Eight Wonders of Kansas Art." The Garden of Eden is an eccentric home and sculpture park built by civil war veteran Samuel Dinsmoor.

This eccentric museum near New Orleans is a folk art environment with thousands of found objects and homemade inventions. Join us on a tour with its founder John Preble.

Dominic Hall, curator of Warren Anatomical Museum at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, will conduct a special Obscura Day tour of the museum’s exhibition gallery and its historic collection of anatomical preparations and medical instrumentation and models. The gallery includes casts from the phrenological collection of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, papier-mache anatomical models made by physician Louis Auzoux, a teaching Beauchene "exploded" skull, and the life cast, skull, and tamping iron of Phineas Gage, the railroad foreman who became one of the most notable 19th century medical case histories detailing traumatic brain injury. Admission limited to 15. Be sure to register now.

Join writer and independent scholar Matthew Battles for a tour of the Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Like a locket at the end of the Emerald Necklace, Forest Hills Cemetery encloses memories that both charm and haunt New England's metropolis. The final resting place of Anne Sexton, e.e. cummings, and Eugene O'Neill, the cemetery boasts graves of Revolutionary figures and leaders of the abolition movement as well.

Join us for a short walk thru the Needham Town Forest to Martini Junction, where we will explore Jim Metcalf's model railway and miniatures set in the woods, and get a rare demonstration of the G Scale model train in action.

Join us on a special Oddities tour of the National Museum of Dentistry, where you will see amazing teeth feats, marvel at George Washington’s choppers (they’re not made of wood after all!), and sing along to vintage dental commercials.

Join Atlas Obscura for a scavenger hunt and tour of the eclectic artistic offerings at the American Visionary Art Museum, the nation's foremost collection of works by self-taught outsider artists.

Over the years, Loren Coleman has amassed an unrivaled collection of replicas and artifacts relating to world's famous and lesser-known cryptids, ranging from the fanciful (P.T. Barnum's Feejee Mermaid, shown at right) to the factual (like the coelacanth fish, long thought to be extinct but discovered alive in 1938). For Obscura Day, Coleman has generously agreed to lead a band of curious souls on a tour of his newly opened International Cryptozoology Musuem.

The Heidelberg Project is an outsider art environment in the heart of an urban community on Detroit's East Side. Tyree Guyton, founder and artistic director, has used everyday, discarded objects to create a two-block area full of color, symbolism, and intrigue. Join us for a special Obscura Day tour.

Join us in exploring sculptor Allen Christian's "House of Balls" in Minneapolis’s Warehouse District. This funhouse of found art and participatory sculpture has earned Christian a reputation as the Willy Wonka of the Twin Cities.

The Hair Museum in Independence, Missouri displays 159 wreaths and more than 2,000 pieces of jewelry made out of human hair. Join us for a tour of this incredible collection led by founder and curator Leila Cohoon

Join us in Bonne Terre, Missouri for a personal tour of the Space Museum by its founder Earl Mullins. The collection is filled with artifacts from space programs around the world. Highlights of the collection include a flag flown to the Moon in personal preference kit of astronaut Gene Cernan on Apollo 17, a very early Mercury spacecraft design model and Scott Carpenter’s flown Mercury Operator's Manual from Mercury 7

Join us for an expert-led tour of the country's largest Superfund site, once a huge copper pit mine, now a toxic man-made lake of extremely acidic water.

Near Butte Montana, some very special stones exist. Part of the edge of the Boulder Batholith, and found in a large jumbled pile of boulders, the rocks in this unique geologic formation chime melodically when tapped lightly with a crescent wrench or mallet. Synchronized with another such ringing rocks park in Pennsylvania, this will be the first simultaneous "rock" concert ever performed. Bring hammers, mallets, wrenches, and other percussive instruments for this gathering on Obscura Day to collectively rock out in this most curious of rock parks.

Join us at the home of Anne and Paul Gulley of Elkin, North Carolina, who have transformed their livingroom into an ersatz wunderkammer, complete with an alligator hanging from the ceiling.

The open tour will be a free tour (free!) of Elsewhere's living museum and 58-year collection of re-organized thrift and surplus led by artists, collaborators, and tour participants as they walk through aisles of relics from past lives and exchange about these unusual objects that compose stage sets for exchanging about everyday life in an exceptional musuem.

Join Bruce Gardner of dorodango.com for a workshop on creating hikaru dorodango, the Japanese art of shiny mud balls. Mr. Gardner will demonstrate the techniques he uses to transform common soil into these elegant spheres.

Join us on a special tour of an eccentric museum created over four decades by a carnival backdrop painter.

Dead Horse Bay is named for the bones that still wash up there, remnants from horse rendering plants on what was once Barren Island. From the 1850s through the 1920s, when horses were the cars clogging the streets of New York, their carcasses were used to manufacture glue and fertilizer, and the boiled bones were dumped in the bay. In 1926, the waters surrounding Barren Island were filled in with sand, coal and garbage to make Floyd Bennett Field, and in the 1950s, the cap on a twenty year old garbage dump burst, scattering the sand with eras of waste. Today the beach is littered with thousands of toys, vintage bottles, horse bones, and a slew of wacky trash from eras past. Luckily, we’re into that kind of thing! Join Underwater New York in exploring this treasure trove of lost history, stories and objects.

Join Atlas Obscura and the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association for an exploration of Vanderbilt's lost subway tunnel, right under Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Rediscovered by an urban explorer in 1980, the tunnel remains one of New York's great secrets.

For decades Steve Erenberg (aka <a href="http://www.radio-guy.net">Radio Guy</A>), has searched for extraordinary mechanical, electronic, musical and industrial items that have, irrespective of their primary use, a strong visual appeal. He has acquired many different objects from museums, hospitals, clinics and laboratories throughout the world. Industrial masks and helmets, anatomical models, countless bizarre, scientific contraptions, electrostatic devices--he has thousands of pieces with qualities that far transcend their original application. On Obscura Day, Erenberg will be opening his incredible private collection to a small tour for the first time ever. Only 10 spots are available. Reserve your place now!

Join us on a tour of eccentric playboy William K. Vanderbilt II's astounding natural history collection. An avid sailor and explorer, Vanderbilt traveled the globe collecting artifacts and specimens for his own private natural history museum. We'll be getting a guided tour through the "Hall of Fishes," one of the largest private collections of marine specimens in the world, containing a mounted whale shark, the largest known piece of fish taxidermy.

Join us at the Niagara Science Museum for an afternoon of classic, historical experiments conducted with restored antique scientific equipment.

Join world-famous naturalist/author "Wildman" Steve Brill on a foraging tour of Forest Park in Kew Gardens. This is one of the best places in the world for early spring foraging, with a wide selection of wild herbs, greens, roots, and even some cold-weather mushrooms.

Join us on Obscura Day at the 3D Center of Art and Photography which includes two small exhibit spaces - one for gallery shows, the other for projecting video shorts and programs of 3D slides. On March 20th, the Center will be exhibiting new work by California 3D photographer David Lee in the gallery, and in the projection theater they will be showing a program of nationally and internationally shown, award winning 3D shorts.

Join us a tour of the world's only nuclear reactor run by undergraduates. Learn about nuclear science, and experience the blue glow of Cherenkov radiation.

Arborsculptor Richard Reames grows and shapes tree trunks using the ancient arts of grafting, framing, bending and pruning. Reames believes that his living arborsculptures could one day replace many of the things that trees are typically killed to make. Gazebos, tables, chairs, spiral staircases, benches, entrance arches, bridges and fences represent just a small portion of Reames's imaginative vision of a world built entirely of living trees. He is currently growing a living tree house 15 feet off the ground. For Obscura Day, Reames will be opening up the Arborsmith Studio and showing visitors the techniques he uses to create living sculpture.

Bring hammers, mallets, bats, and other percussive instruments for this gathering at the mysterious Ringing Rocks Park in eastern Pennsylvania, where the stones have a most curious property: they ring out musical tones when struck.

Join us at the Mutter Museum for a morning of curious medical anomalies and human anatomy. You will get to explore a selection of anatomical and pathological specimens displayed in the same Victorian cabinets that the museum opened with in 1858. From the skeleton of the tallest man in North America to a collection of 2,000 objects extracted from people's throats the exhibits will be sure to convey a lesser-known side of medical history. The first 12 visitors will get a special tour of the museum's back rooms.

Join the Atlas Obscura at the Eastern State Penitentiary for a backroom tour of the nation's first true "penitentiary." On this special Obscura Day tour visitors will get a chance to see the central guard tower normally closed to the public.

Join us for a special Obscura Day tour of what may be the world's largest treehouse, led by Minister Horace Burgess, the man who built it.

Join us on Obscura Day for a special tour of 6th Street's Museum of the Weird. We will view the taxidermic oddities and a cornucopia of wonderful sideshow fare. After our jaunt through the weird, follow us to the Congress Street bridge to watch the nighttime exodus of the Mexican Free-tailed Bats as they pour into the sky to hunt insects.

Join us for an afternoon exploration of the backyard wonders of the Cathedral of Junk hidden behind the creator's unassuming suburban house.

Please join esoteric publisher William Keiselat for coffee and a presentation on wunderkammen and alchemy in the appropriately wonderful and odd surroundings of Ancient Grounds Cafe and art gallery.

Join us on Obscura Day for a tour through the William Ricketts Sanctuary. The local park rangers will give a one hour tour of the sanctuary showing the work of William Ricketts. Begun in 1934 the goal of Ricketts life-long project was to provide a relaxing setting where one could reflect on man's, oft forgotten, connection to nature. Nestled in a glade covered in fern and mountain ash trees, the 92 ceramic sculptures in the park all blend seamlessly into their natural surroundings.

Join us on an expedition to observe the incredible bioluminescent glow worm population that has colonized the Newnes Railroad Tunnel in New South Wales.

Join us on an expedition leaving from Brussels to tour the Tower of Eben-Ezer and marvel at this seven-level castle built by hand in the 1960s.

Thaw-di-Gras celebrates the approach of Spring and the fact that we've all survived another Yukon winter. Join us on Obscura Day for a day of games, competitions and unusual events, not for the faint of heart. New this year to the roster of events is the Body Parts Cocktail Bar Crawl where you can try yourself the infamous "Sourtoe Cocktail" complete with real human toe!

Join us at the Galt Museum & Archives for a special tour of the new exhibit “Treasures & Curiosities” – a selection of 200 artifacts selected by members of the community from our Collections Vaults. The tour will include highlights of the exhibit, and a behind-the-scenes visit to the Collections.

Stop by the Sunnyside Tattoos and Sideshow Parlour to see the stunning curio collection of Toronto mentalist Mysterion. Pickled punks, albino squirrels, and sundry other curiosities will be on display. Mysterion will be on hand to explain the collection and perform some of his famous metal magic.

Part one of the tour will be of the building the museum is housed in, Vancouver's former City Morgue and Coroner's Court. Between 1932 and 1980, almost 15,000 autopsies were performed in this space, covering almost every major homicide and accident in the city during that period. Special behind-the-scenes opportunities will also be included; not for the faint of heart.

Obscuraphiles will be gathering at John Lennon park in Havana, Cuba to view a sculpture of John Lennon and celebrate the Beatles controversial legacy in Communist Cuba. We will then proceed to the Old Havana Perfume Museum where we will find an extensive collection of bottles, ingredients, and historical artifacts all related to perfume.

Join us for a special tour of the Musée Fragonard de Maison Alfort to learn about the incredible 18th-century "flayed" anatomical preparations of Honoré Fragonard. Only 35 will be admitted.

Dr. Semmelwies was famous for being one of the first doctors to ever realize that unwashed hands were spreading disease and to institute a policy of hand washing, saving thousands of patients, and women in childbirth from unnecessary death. Tour the terrific objects in the Semmelweis Medical Museum including a wax "anatomical Venus," an early X-ray machine, and even a shrunken head, all housed in the very building in which Dr. Semmelwies was born.

Join us on Obscura Day for a special tour of the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Husavik, which bills itself as "probably the only museum in the world to contain a collection of phallic specimens belonging to all the various types of mammal found in a single country."

Join the Atlas Obscura on a trip to the surreal and alien landscape of the Kukdi River Potholes in Nighoj, India. Believed to be the largest natural pot holes in Asia, the phenomenon known as giants kettles, giants cauldrons or potholes is caused when small hard pebbles are trapped in eddies and, over many thousands of years, drill circular holes into the riverbed. Join the Atlas Obscura in Nighoj, India for a picnic and exploration of these fascinating geolocial oddities.

Obscura day is your chance to have a calm and different kind of visit - just before the Bloomfield Science Museum will be packed with Pesach visitors. At the end of April, two of our exhibitions will be dismantled in preparation for a new one so this is your last opportunity to visit them. Throughout the day we will run a game called "find the exhibit". You will receive photos of exhibits , taken from unusual angels, and will be asked to find the exhibit in the museum. On the way, you will discover new corners at the museum. You are warned - it will not be easy but it will be great fun.

Join experts on Roman architecture and history, Context Travel for rare access into the underworld of Rome, and go inside the hidden Mithraeum under Circus Maximus. The mithraeum (a gathering place for adherents to the mystical cult of Mithras) under the Circus Maximus is one of the best examples of this type of subterranean site to be found in Rome. This special site visit will include an on-site lecture by one of our archaeologists, discussing the specifics of this mithraeum and also the cult of Mithras and other illicit religions during the first years of the empire.

On March 20th Join the Atlas Obscura on a tour of Nautilus in Turin, Italy. With the tag line "Antique Scientific Instruments and Old Oddities" Nautilus feels more like an 18th century wunderkammer than a modern-day shop. According to writer David Sederis "The greatest shop in the world is in Turin, Italy. It’s called Nautilus" On Obscura Day the shop owners will give a guided tour of the shop, telling histories about main pieces of the collections and some facts about where and how we found them: the mummy arm, the 2-headed calfs, the anatomical specimen, the electroshock machine, and many more.

Michael John Grist will be leading an Obscura Day expedition to the G-Cans project. G-Cans is a massive underground waterway and water storage area built by the Japanese government to protect Tokyo from flooding during the monsoon seasons.

Invented in 1864, the Beverly clock is one of the world's longest running science experiments. Powered only by changes in atmospheric pressure and temperature, it has never been wound in 146 years! Paul Yates of the University of Otago physics department will put on an afternoon of scientific wonder, with an explanation of the Beverly clock, followed by demonstrations of a water manometer, equipment belonging to radio pioneer Robert Jack, a Wimshurst electrostatic generator, cloud chambers showing radioactive decay, as well as liquid nitrogen demonstrations.

Join the Atlas Obscura in Sandviktoppen, Norway at NATO's Altantic North Command and Control Bunker, built during the Cold War deep under a mountain overlooking Kristiansand, Norway. This ABC (Atomic, Biological, Chemical) proof facility was in service until 1992. After being decommissioned, the bunker has been locked and sealed awaiting a decision about its future use. The ventilation system is still operational, however the lighting system has failed, so be sure to bring a flashlight!

Join us at the Warsaw Fotoplastikon for a stereoscopic presentation on life in Warsaw at the turn of the last century.

Join the Atlas Obscura and the on a tour of Mystical St. Petersburg, the first stop being the so called "Tower of griffins," said to actually a vent pipe of the alchemical laboratory of druggist Pelja where it is said he left behind some hidden alchemical symbols. The second stop will be the legendary Courtyard of Spirits. There are a numerous discussion about the exact place, but on March 20th, its real location will be revealed by the guide and the final place will be the hidden courtyard of the Kunstkamera, to discuss some of the very curious legends attached to this place.

Join the Atlas Obscura at the AutomatomaniA, also known as "The House of Automata" is a gothic stone workshop and store rooms on the beautiful Altyre Estate near Forres in Scotland. Michael and Maria Start are professional automata restorers who are dedicated to promoting knowledge of the subject and inspiring new makers.

Join us for a special tour of the Nikola Tesla Museum. We'll see Tesla's ashes (held in a gold plated sphere), a two-phase generator, the famous "egg of Columbus" (which Tesla used to secure funding for his AC motor), and of course, lots of Tesla coils.

Come to the Vasa Museum on Obscura Day for a rare up-close, "under deck" look at the legendary Vasa, the pride of the 17th century Swedish Navy, sunk on her maiden voyage.

Join Atlas Obscura at the Maison d'Ailleurs, a museum devoted to science fiction utopias and extraordinary journeys, for a special guided tour of the newly opened exhibit Galactic Hits: Music and Science Fiction! Space rock, cosmic jazz, scifidelic, futurepop!

Inspired by legendary medieval poison gardens, the Alnwick Poison Garden on the grounds of Alnwick Castle is one of very few places in the world dedicated not only to medical herbs, but to deadly plants. Join us for a special Obscura Day tour of the gardens and learn about the weird and wonderful world of poisonous flora.

Join us for a special tour of this unusual collection of "reproducing pianos," which recreate live performances by famous virtuosos. Listen to Greig, Rachmaninov, and Gershwin playing their pieces as if they were alive today.

Hundreds of carved figures and pieces of old scrap perform an incredible choreography to haunting music and synchronised light, telling the funny and tragic stories of the human spirit as it struggles against the relentless circles of life and death. Sharmanka was founded by sculptor-mechanic Eduard Bersudsky and theatre director Tatyana Jakovskaya in St.Petersburg, Russia in 1989. Join us for a 1pm performance of this kinetic theatre show.

The River Fleet, once a mad, bad centre of London life, is now buried beneath the streets, surviving only as anecdote and rumour. This walk unpeels the London layers to trace the course of the lost river, rediscovering its influence on the landscape and the forgotten neighbourhoods along its banks. Go with the flow and walk three miles of the Fleet's course, from Kentish Town to the Thames. Tom Bolton, author of the forthcoming book <em>London's Lost Rivers: A Walker's Guide</em> (Strange Attractor Press) will lead the tour.

Where in the world could you find transplant surgery on cockerels, hop-head anaesthetists, a graveyard which holds the key to London's first great public hospital, a medical trade union in the citadel of Theosophy, and the gory story of Samuel Pepys' paperweight? On a walk through the back streets of Bloomsbury, that's where. For two hundred and fifty years this quiet district been the beating heart of London's medical life - the place where generations of doctors and surgeons have tackled the ills of the sick city. We'll make the first incision at Holborn tube, and the last stitch will be tied two miles later at Wellcome Collection.