Three abandoned missile silos are hiding in plain sight behind a suburban development in Maryland.

Franciscan monks created a facsimile of the Holy Land for North Americans who couldn’t afford the trip overseas.

The U.S. government built the million-pound stack of steel during the Space Race.

This golfball sized platinum iridium cylinder is the official starting point for all national weight calibrations

Politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers gathered in this field near the Capitol to settle their disputes with blood.

FDR's Art Deco hospital tower was hopelessly inefficient.

Live data is transmitted from the Atlantic coast to instantly recreate the ocean waves in this fountain at the NOAA headquarters.

Brain collection and database that narrows the gap between man and animal.

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

A girls' boarding school inspired by the Chicago World's Fair, once abandoned, now restored to strange and scenic glory.

An FDR-era tuberculosis sanatorium has stood abandoned in the suburbs of the U.S. capital for over 30 years.

A relic of FDR's brief foray into utopian urban planning.

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

This dig site outside D.C. is known for its exceptionally high density of baby dinosaur fossils and dinosaur eggs.

A priceless collection of the Nation's cryptologic history.

This abandoned sea fort has become an accidental bird sanctuary.

Fascinating museum dedicated to the under-appreciated medical history of urology features some wince-inducing devices.

Ship skeletons haunt Baltimore's waterways.

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

The 320-year-old tree that greeted General Lafayette and rerouted an interstate highway.

A faded sign from the 1920s remembers Baltimore's resistance toward banning alcohol.

One of the oldest anatomical theaters in the U.S. still in use was once the site of an infamous cadaver riot.

Eighteen miniature death-scene dioramas.

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