A gleaming white tower in ornate Indian style soars above the low-slung bungalows of north Tampa.

The strip club's VIP lounge is actually a rare repurposed Futuro House.

An oddities shop that dabbles in the deathly and beautiful.

This free, take-a-book shop seems like a trick but isn't.

A model home in the Medical Examiner's Office in which grisly death scenes are staged to train forensic investigators.

These five Art Deco homes were meant to solve the "small house problem."

A lawn full of retired spacecraft on display at one of NASA's first research labs.

This abandoned asylum was once a state of the art facility before devolving into one of the most deadly mental institutions in American history.

Remnants of a storybook amusement park hidden behind a strip mall.

An eerie, decaying ghost town destined to fade into the forest.

The haunting "Hell House Altar" is one of the few remnants of an abandoned college that has been a magnet for local legends.

A miniature city within a city, complete with traffic signs, signals, and streets to teach Baltimore's youth traffic safety laws.

Once part of a dam servicing an early 19th century grist mill, the tucked-way falls are a tricky-to-find urban oasis.

The abandoned "Ghost Mansion" was left to decay in the mountains of Northern Italy.

The trials and tribulations of marking Poe's grave.

Crammed into a Baltimore row house is an oddities shop that sells everything from skulls to dead insects.

The headquarters of the Audubon Naturalist Society is a small slice of heaven for nature lovers.

An astounding collection of medical specimens, including bits of President Lincoln.

America's most famous museum of medical oddities is home to the remains of Albert Einstein's brain.

It's not hard to see why the historic Peabody Conservatory of Music's library has been described as a "cathedral of books."

This simple convenience store sits on the location where the Ouija board was named—and has a plaque to prove it.

Eighteen miniature death-scene dioramas.

Fiji mermaids, mummified remains, and recreated cryptids are among the morbid oddities at this Maryland museum.

The site where Poe "in great distress, and ... in need of immediate assistance" likely died.