Deep in the California desert exists a strange, lawless town, where folks live without running water, yet create outdoor art installations and host concerts.
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Slab City, CA, is unafraid to embrace its quirks, and it’s one of a rare breed of towns that draw travelers for their novelty factor at a time when the world feels increasingly homogeneous, teeming with high-rises and chain stores.
After all, we’re not talking about just an offbeat tourist attraction; these places take strange to a whole new level.
Consider Thames Town: the Chinese knack for knockoffs has spawned this full-on replica of an English town in a suburb of Shanghai, complete with cobblestoned streets and red phone booths. Have a pint at the pub, post the photo to Facebook, and your friends will be none the wiser.
In upstate New York, Lily Dale is odd in an entirely different way, attracting an outsize population of mediums and psychics who claim to reconnect with the afterlife. Steven Cantor, who directed the recent HBO documentary No One Dies in Lily Dale, tried to capture the town’s peculiar energy.
“There are dozens of psychic mediums strolling the grounds, doling out messages from the beyond, particularly during regularly scheduled, immensely popular group sessions centered around an old tree stump, which they believe to be a vortex of spiritual energy,” says Cantor. “It’s something you have to see to believe.”
That sentiment applies to each of the strange towns that made our list, perhaps most of all Elista, a Russian town almost as passionate about chess—an enormous board covers much of the town square—as it is about Buddhism.
If you’re inspired to go hunting for the unusual, you may not have to look far. Just outside of Tampa, FL, there’s a town popular with retiring performers who keep circus trailers and elephants on their lawns. Your hometown might even take inspiration from a place in Australia that went to unconventional means to put itself on the tourist map—by covering its buildings in dozens of murals.
While every town has a story, these strange spots have the best punch lines.
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Longyearbyen, Norway
There is no dying allowed in this remote Arctic town—well, you can die, but you can’t be buried here.
You heard that right: no body has been buried in the local cemetery in almost a hundred years.
Why? The perpetually frigid temperatures prohibit corpses from properly decomposing. Following the influenza epidemic of 1917, Longyearbyen banned burials in the town’s graveyard.
The local polar bear population rivals the human one, and it’s not abnormal for the townspeople to shoot a bear in self-defense (hunting is illegal).
Even after a polar bear takes its last breath in this mining town, it must also be sent away for its final resting spot.
Monowi, NE
Everyone in town knows the name Elsie Eiler, and it’s not just because she’s the mayor—she’s the sole resident.
The population had been diminishing since the 1930s, when this northern Nebraskan town had 150 residents, and by 2000, it was down to one couple: Elsie and her husband, Rudy, who has since passed away.
Now in her mid-70s, Eiler serves beer at the Monowi Tavern (with an official liquor license) and turned her late husband’s collection of 5,000 books into a one-room public library.
Elista, Russia
The king is threatened daily in this Russian town because here, it’s all about chess.
Play a game on the enormous chessboard painted on the ground in the Town Square or head to Chess City, a domed complex that hosted the 1998 Chess Olympiad.
Indeed, some of the world’s finest chess players have paid a visit to Elista, which is the capital of the Republic of Kalmykia.
Its other strange claim to fame is being the only Buddhist region in Europe; Elista’s chess complex includes a museum of Buddhist art.
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