Top 10 Bizarre Roadside Attractions in North America

Joseph Sohm, Corbis

1. Extraterrestrial Mania — Roswell, New Mexico

In the summer of 1947, as Jackie Robinson was making actual history on the baseball fields of America, a high-altitude surveillance balloon malfunctioned and crashed in the desert.

Or, alternately …

In the summer of 1947, as Jackie Robinson was making actual history on the baseball fields of America, a spacecraft from a highly advanced race of aliens crashed in the desert, and the military immediately covered it up.

Enough people believe (or want to believe) that latter version to make the alien business the biggest windfall industry New Mexico has ever seen.

And, after all this to-do, wouldn’t it be a terrible thing if our first official contact with alien cultures were to occur anywhere else

Dennis Macdonald/Getty Images

2. The Basket Building — Newark, Ohio

The Longaberger Company is committed to making fine handcrafted baskets. So committed, in fact, that the entire company works inside a giant handcrafted basket. It is exactly what you picture in your mind when you think of a Yogi and Boo-Boo style picnic … only 160 times larger.

Don’t you just feel like a gigantic is about to descend from the heavens and lift the building up

sneakerdog

3. World’s Largest Shoe House — Hellam, Pennsylvania

Apparently life imitates art (in the event that you concede that nursery rhymes are art) in a tiny Pennsylvania town. But no old woman with many, many children was involved when this building was originally built in 1948 as an extravagant advertising gimmick by a shoe salesman.

If it were built today, we wonder if it might be a little more stylish, perhaps with a stiletto heel

magnetbox/flickr

4. World’s Largest Six-Pack — La Crosse, Wisconsin

The storage tanks at the La Crosse Lager Brewery can be seen far and wide. What draws unusual attention is that they are a Homer Simpson dream – enormous cans of beer. The vital statistics: The tanks hold enough beer to fill 7,340,976 cans of beer, or enough cold, golden nectar to provide a person a six-pack a day for 3,351 years.

Of course, if you drink a six-pack every day you’ll never make it past 3,000 years old.

Scott T. Smith/CORBIS

5. The Freemont Troll — Freemont, Washington

Visitors of a certain age will recall the tale of “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” in which a mean old troll lurks beneath a bridge threatening to eat anyone who dares try to cross it.

Spoiler alert: The billy goat brothers outsmart the troll and turn out to be the heroes. The troll is never heard from again.

That is, until the Aurora Bridge went up in Freemont. That was 1932.

Almost immediately there were troll sightings below the bridge. Of course, 1932 was the next-to-last year of Prohibition, so home-made booze may or may not have been a factor here.

(In case you’re not up on your fairy tales, a troll is a sort of misshapen dwarf [or sometimes a giant] who lives in dark places, preferably under a nice bridge. They were characterized as being ferocious, ugly creatures fond of eating human flesh.)

Anyway, the stories inspired the town council. In 1989 they commissioned an artist to build this monument to the bad guy who had haunted the dreams of untold generations of children.

Today it is the focal point of such town activities as “Troll-a-ween,” and “Shakespeare at the Troll.”

Note: Never mistake a troll for a gnome or leprechaun. They really hate that