The first safe in this California town had to hold all the gold.

A ruined hotel with an unlucky history and an eerie present.

The oldest continuously operating church in California.

One woman's Viking Castle on Lake Tahoe.

Coastal dunes, site of buried Egyptian movie set and former utopian colony.

The abandoned personal amusement park of the King of Pop.

It's not your typical library, memorial, or book store.

An old-timey medicine shop that once served Chinese laborers during the Gold Rush is still open for business to this day.

A house built from trash known as the poor man's Hearst Castle.

A hotel and restaurant serving as the mecca of kitsch.

An alley covered with 20 years of bubble gum.

There's nothing creepier than a cemetery next to a clown motel.

A brothel nestled amongst ghost towns, with an abandoned plane wreck to greet you.

The liveliest ghost town in the state.

Ten 25-foot-tall, beehive-shaped kilns, abandoned in Death Valley.

This once bustling boomtown hotel is now the hottest spot in Nevada for ghost hunters.

A land of debatable treasure.

Odd outsider art installations surround a Gold Rush-era ghost town.

One of the most unusual geological features, recognizable from a dozen hit movies.

A popular tourist cave with a dark past.

Hidden beneath a lake for decades, this brutalist mine has now emerged from beneath the receding waters.

In the country around Buttonwillow, California, a marker commemorates a revealing moment in the story of a water colony from the fictional Kcymaerxthaere that sought independence.

An abandoned Jazz Age dream home and con man's hideout in Death Valley.

A dwindling menagerie of anthropomorphic oil derrick animals still dot the barren California landscape.