This botanical garden outside Chicago boasts an array of more than 300 varieties of lilacs.

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

A river with some unusual, and occasionally dangerous, habits.

One of the largest pieces of scientific equipment ever carried on a NASA space shuttle sits in a Chicago alley.

Eclectic collection of rare and beautiful stones in a historic home.

Even with only two residents and one building, this tiny Illinois town is famous for its burgers.

The legacy of an unsolved, gruesome murder rests beneath the spans of this historic bridge.

One-of-a-kind preserved ruins of an abandoned 1880s church in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood.

The mysterious white squirrels of this Illinois city are treated like sacred cows.

The world's largest collection of the world's largest objects is in one small Illinois town.

Taxidermy, Cigar Store Indians, A Model of a New York Tenement and Delicious Draft Root Beer.

A six-story-tall golden pyramid, surrounded by a moat.

The city of Rockford, Illinois is symbolically protected by a quartet of fittingly stony sentinels.

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

The beloved home to all publications indie, erotic, and punky.

This grave in a ghost town cemetery marks the death of a witch on a day that never happened.

The final resting place of the world's first nuclear reactor.

The 606 is a decade in the making.

Once one of the world's great cities, Cahokia was a place of religious worship, trade and mass human sacrifice before being mysteriously abandoned.

This elaborate Hindu temple is located in a Chicago suburb, but looks like it was transported directly from India.

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

A little-known subterranean street runs under some of the best-known buildings in Chicago's River North.

This alley in downtown Chicago held the bodies of over 600 people after the fateful Iroquois Theatre fire.

A shining sculpture made of 3,115 lights, the number of visible stars in the Northern Hemisphere.