Museums of the Weird

The museum was established as a place where medical students could study specimens. Shown here is a 3-D image of a male skeleton from a recent exhibition.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine

This Silver Spring, Maryland site scares and educates, with displays of prosthetic eyes, amputated limbs and incomplete skeletons

Quack medicine? Inhaling the breath of a duck, according to the exhibit, was once used to cure children of thrush and other disorders of the mouth and throat.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

A throwback to the private museums of earlier centuries, this Los Angeles spot has a true hodgepodge of natural history artifacts

Whimsy runs riot at Harvey Ladew's Maryland estate, from a library with a shelf that swings open to reveal a secret entrance to the gardens to the topiary hedges, featuring a fat man walking a tiny dog, and a rider and hounds in hot pursuit of a fox.

Ladew Topiary Gardens

Clipped hedges and a house full of antiques are the main attractions for this museum north of Baltimore, Maryland

Visitors to the missile museum may touch a Titan II, which stands 103 feet tall.

Titan Missile Museum

In Sahuarita, Arizona, in the midst of a retirement community, tourists can touch a Titan II missile, still on its launch pad

The Voodoo Museum "is an entry point for people who are curious, who want to see what's behind this stuff," says anthropologist Martha Ward.

The New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum

Wooden masks, portraits and the occasional human skull mark the collections of this small museum near the French Quarter

The library in the Ava Gardner Museum is filled with portraits painted by Bert Pfeiffer, who vowed to paint one of Ava every year.

The Ava Gardner Museum

What started as a childhood friend's collection has grown into a full-fledged museum just miles from the movie star's hometown

Siegfried's Mechanical Music Cabinet displays 350 or so automatic musical instruments—prototype jukeboxes, hand-cranked carnival machines and monstrous pianolas—all in working order.

The Offbeat Museums of Europe

Lost souls, music boxes and shoes fill some of the continent's most peculiar collections

The Audubon Insectarium is the largest freestanding museum in the country dedicated solely to insects and relatives.

Going Buggy at the New Audubon Museum

Crickets, spiders, ants and many other insects thrive in historic New Orleans, where kids and adults learn about creepy crawlers

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