This iconic Parisian bookstore doubles as the "Tumbleweed Hotel" for traveling writers.

The macabre collection of Jacques Sirgent, an expert scholar on the undead and all of their trappings.

France's most famous cemetery, with some of its most curious tombs.

The vast, legendary catacombs hold secrets much stranger than stacked bones.

Gaze upon chocolate sculptures depicting everything from chariot races to Gaudí's famous church at this shrine to sweets.

The only university zoological museum in London houses extinct animals, bizarre natural history specimens, and a Micrarium of microscopic creatures.

A working monastery hidden away in Brooklyn once abutted the location of a former inebriate's home.

The world's largest collection of materials relating to lesbian history is housed in a Brooklyn townhouse.

A Brooklyn exhibit all about Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding in 1994.

Thriving meadows span a rooftop in one of Brooklyn's most heavily industrialized neighborhoods.

Con Edison’s exotic and heat-loving pests.

A burial ground of rusting metal grave markers.

An abandoned subway tunnel that could have reinvigorated Staten Island still lies somewhere beneath this Brooklyn park.

Every animal in the torah taxidermied and crammed into a Brooklyn townhouse.

A Victorian cemetery in the heart of Brooklyn remains a popular mecca of morbid curiosity.

One of only two remaining Victorian-era greenhouses in New York.

Records of the dead describe the myriad odd ways people used to die.

Volunteer-run library dedicated to exploring five decades of activism history.

Sniff the Titan Arum's rotting flesh.

One of New York's best collections of pinball is hidden in a secret bar in the back of this laundromat.

Neon signs that grace the windows of Bergdorf Goodman's and Tiffany & Co. come from this studio in Brooklyn.

Tucked in a nondescript downtown Brooklyn mall is a bar containing a remarkable turn of the century anatomical wax collection last seen in 1920s Berlin.

The largest lake in the Faroe Islands seems to be held hundreds of feet above sea level thanks to an optical illusion.

This remote island village was in danger of depopulating completely until a tunnel was built to connect it to the rest of the world .