The Strangest Tourist Attraction in Every State

Herkimer is a monster-sized model of a West Indian Hercules beetle that was built in the 1950s. Its intention is to attract passersby to the May Museum of the Tropics.

If you’re in Connecticut and feel like seeing something unique, a collection of deceased brains ought to do it. The collection can be found in Yale’s Cushing Center in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. It was donated in 1939 in the name of Dr. Harvey Cushing, considered the father of neurosurgery. Known as the Cushing Brain Tumor registry, the collection has more than 2,200 case studies that include human whole-brain and tumor specimens.

Visible from Highway 1, this car-crushing, red-eyed monster rises up 46 feet from the site of the Dover International Speedway. With its nickname of “The Monster Mile,” it’s fitting that the racetrack would have a mascot named Miles the Monster. It was unveiled holding a real race car in 2008.

The World’s Smallest Police Station on U.S. Highway 98 is a replica of the original phone booth in Carrabelle that served as the department’s call box beginning in 1963. In those pre-cell phone days, calls would come to one location – in this case, a phone booth bolted to the outside of a building.

You can find the smiling, peanut-shaped statue of our 39th president – a former peanut farmer – in front of the Davis E-Z Shop in Plains, Carter’s birthplace. The 13-foot statue has been a major attraction in the state for more than four decades. It was commissioned by the Indiana Democratic Party as a part of Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in 1976, the year he was elected president. Carter, at 97, is the country’s oldest living president.