In the Shawnee National Forest, amazing rock formations peer through the treeline.

A once-booming Mississippi River town with a history of racial violence is now eerie and mostly abandoned.

An enormous natural sandstone bridge in Kentucky.

You have to love a museum with a truly dedicated focus. A focus on Superman, for example.

This national park dedicated to the tallgrass prairie ecosystem still displays its military past.

Meant for a railway that was never built because of the Great Chicago Fire, these piers still stand nearly 150 years after they were installed.

A replica viking ship from the Chicago World's Fair is still in dry dock in an Illinois park.

This cemetery is all that remains of a school for "wayward" girls.

Tucked away amongst townhomes lies a restored, early 20th-century tea house and garden, the only remains of a historic estate.

Burial mounds of prehistoric Native Americans who lived along the DuPage River.

An unassuming store hides relics of its former life as the jazz club that hosted some of the best black performers of the 1920s and '30s.

These abandoned grain silos and tunnels are an urban exploration dream.

This cheerfully-named branch of the Chicago River is the fetid result of years of blood, entrails, and meatpacking waste.

Chicago's North Park Village was once the largest municipal sanatorium in the country.

Cemetery featuring rare glass-fronted columbarium.

This morbid, delightful curiosity shop offers everything from animal bones to human teeth.

This small, but long-running hobby club has built one of the largest model rail lines in the US.

In a quiet north Chicago neighborhood rests a stunning relic of the golden age of earthenware design.

All of Chicago's wood-paved streets are long gone but two alleys remain.

A monument to the art of slicing people open.

A small abandoned and abused cemetery that has become a magnet for ghost hunters.

The NBA player's elaborate former home is now a ghost of its old glory.

A one-armed veteran of the Battle of Waterloo lies in a cemetery for one in the middle of a Chicago scrapyard.

This historic-shipwreck-cum-diving-spot can still be seen poking its boiler out of the Lake Michigan waters that claimed it.