Welcome to Weird Wisconsin, where strange stories, bizarre attractions, haunted places, roadside oddities, and unique destinations across the Badger State come together. From unusual things to do and offbeat attractions to mysterious locations, forgotten history, and local legends that blur the line between fact and folklore, Wisconsin Frights explores the places that make Wisconsin unlike anywhere else. This isn’t a typical Wisconsin travel guide, it’s a collection of the weirdest, creepiest, and most fascinating corners of the state waiting to be discovered.
Featured Weird Wisconsin
Kitsch & Weird Wisconsin Dells
It may be the “Waterpark Capital of the World,” but Wisconsin Dells also has a dark side for those of us who want more from our vacation than wave pools and lazy rivers. The Dells is home to fun spooky attractions like Haunted Mansion, the lingering spirits of the area’s haunted history, and even the actual severed head of a serial killer.
Hodag Country
One of the strangest Wisconsin cryptids can be found lurking in Rhinelander. There, the mythical hodag can be found everywhere you look, from the World’s Largest Hodag Statue at the visitor center to the life-size re-creations you’ll find at the Pioneer Park Historical Complex.
Haunted Wisconsin History
Some of the most haunted places in the world can be found in Wisconsin. From the ruins of Summerwind Mansion, where the ghost of an 18th-century explorer still searches for his missing land deed, dark and chilling haunted roads, and the ghost of Ed Gein, to Shaker’s Cigar Bar where you can spend the night with a spectral prostitute and tour the haunts of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Wisconsin’s Roadside Wonders
Experience the dark, twisting surreal spaces of The House on the Rock. See JFK’s World Famous Ball of Twine that God told him to make. Explore weird sculpture gardens. Storm the gates of Mars Cheese Castle. Wonder the graveyard of Sparta’s fiberglass molds. Pray the bowling ball rosary. Wisconsin’s backroads are full of oddities.
Ed Gein Tour
Ed Gein was the inspiration for Norman Bates, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Silence of the Lambs, and many more, and he called Plainfield, WI home. Many of the locations associated with Gein’s life and crimes can still be seen today, from the property where his house once stood, the jail cell turned museum where he was held after his arrest, and his final resting place…surrounded by the empty graves he robbed to make his ghoulish crafts.
Close Encounters
Wisconsin isn’t the first place you think of when it comes to flying saucers and little green men, but there’s so much extraterrestrial activity here that for years there were no less than three UFO festivals around the state commemorating strange sightings. UFO research as we know it was pioneered here by Coral Lorenzen after she witnessed an unidentified flying object in the 1930s. Not to mention we have the curious case of alien pancakes in Eagle River, a police officer killed by a UFO in Elmwood, and a UFO base in Dundee Mountain.
Weird Wisconsin Festivals & Events
Unusual Wisconsin Tour Experiences
Seasonal Things to Do
