Forget the Louvre. Skip the Smithsonian. There’s a whole world of museums out there that have nothing to do with Impressionism, dinosaurs, or another hall of medieval armor.
Instead, this list is for the curious, the morbidly fascinated, and the easily sidetracked.
These are museums filled with pickled organs, surreal installations, over-the-top ceiling frescoes, spy paraphernalia, and rooms devoted entirely to fictional characters or medical oddities.
Some are quietly unsettling. Others are pure chaos and spectacle in gallery form.
You’ll find them tucked into royal palaces, old hospitals, underground tunnels, and buildings that barely look like museums at all.
What they have in common is that they’re hard to forget. And you probably won’t find them on your average top ten list.
So if you need something unusual to grab your attention, this one’s for you. Here are 20 of the world’s weirdest museums.
Strange And Eccentric Museums
Mütter Museum – Philadelphia, USA
The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia is one of the strangest, most unforgettable museums in the U.S. It houses an unsettling collection of medical curiosities: preserved organs, wax models, skulls, skeletons, tumors, and body parts floating in jars.
Thomas Dent Mütter, a pioneering surgeon, founded the museum in 1859. It was originally intended to help doctors understand what happens when the body goes terribly wrong.
The collection has a distinct Victorian vibe: dim lighting, glass cabinets, and handwritten labels. Nothing feels polished or overly modern.
You’ll see slices of Einstein’s brain, the famous Soap Lady (whose corpse underwent chemical saponification), and the Hyrtl Skull Collection (139 skulls).
The museum doesn’t shy away from the grotesque. Nonviable fetuses with visible malformations float in cloudy jars.
There’s a skeleton with ribs crushed by a corset and a towering giant standing beside a woman with dwarfism.
The Mütter isn’t a museum you breeze through. It’s graphic, fascinating, and a little emotionally heavy. But if you’re curious about the history of medicine, or the fine line between science and spectacle, there’s nowhere else quite like it.
Hunterian Museum – London, UK
The Hunterian Museum is not for the squeamish. Housed inside the Royal College of Surgeons, this place is a dense archive of medical history and gross things. It’s packed with preserved specimens, surgical tools, and some seriously unsettling displays of human anatomy.
It recently reopened after a long renovation. Thankfully, to my mind at least, it still manages to feel like a 19th century curiosity cabinet.
The museum was founded on the collection of John Hunter, an 18th century surgeon who was equal parts scientist, showman, and body snatcher. He gathered thousands of anatomical specimens. Everything from cross-sections of organs to preserved skeletons.
The displays walk a fine line between scientific and disturbing. There are jars filled with fetal skeletons, deformed limbs, and entire nervous systems delicately suspended in fluid. The surgical instruments section is a grim reminder of what surgery used to look like before anesthesia or antiseptics.
What makes the Hunterian different is how unapologetic it is. It doesn’t try to soften the impact. The lighting is clinical, the specimens stark, and the text panels refreshingly blunt.
It’s not a crowd-pleaser, and that’s the point. The Hunterian is one of London’s strangest, most unforgettable museums. Just don’t visit right after lunch.
Casa Azul – Mexico City, Mexico
Casa Azul is the former home of Frida Kahlo. It’s located in Coyoacán, a charming neighborhood in Mexico City. It’s now the Frida Kahlo Museum, and it’s unlike any other artist’s house museum you’ve visited.
With Frida-mania sweeping the Western world, this museum is now a pilgrimage site. You should definitely get an advance ticket or prepare to wait in line (or both).
Don’t come here expecting to inspect Kahlo paintings, though there are some.
Instead, this is where you come to see her personal world and get a psychological snapshot of the artist. You’ll see how Kahlo lived and the intense pain she suffered to just get through life and create her art.
The bright blue house displays her art, her belongings, her orthopedic corsets, her wheelchair, her bed, her kitchen, her brushes, and her pain. All writ large.
You’ll see everything from her prosthetic leg to her vividly decorated corsets and body braces.
Her ashes are kept in a pre-Columbian urn shaped like a toad. This is allegedly because her faithless husband Diego Rivera called her “my little toad.”
The house is also filled with portraits of Lenin, Mao, Stalin, and Marx—alongside indigenous art, milagros, and pre-Hispanic finds.
Museum of Broken Relationships – Zagreb, Croatia
When relationships fail, this Zagreb museum keeps the stuff left behind. Anyone can donate. No matter how quirky or sentimental the item or artifact.
The idea behind the museum is that it would be interesting, and revealing, to have a place where everyone on the planet could send objects after a break up.
The theory goes that a global archive of failed relationships would help other people move on. Everything is donated anonymously, most often by mail.
Today, former lovers run the museum. And it’s one of the most weirdest, and most popular, things to do in Zagreb.
You can see every possible manner of mementos: notes, wedding cake, toys, stolen objects like toasters, intimate wear, and ultra-weird discarded gifts like garden gnomes.
Just in case, the museum doesn’t offer returns if and when a couple is reconciled.
>>> Click here to book a ticket
Paris Sewer Museum – Paris, France
Paris is one of the world’s most enticing cities. But, beneath the glamor, there’s grit and gore underground in the bowels of the city. Take the Sewer Museum.
You enter through what looks like a big manhole on the sidewalk. It’s a section of the sewers that’s been adapted to give tourists an idea of what the 1,320 mile network looks and smells like.
Initially, the sewers were dumped into the Seine and used as drinking water. Horrors! But even Napoleon found this alarming. He ordered the first underground sewage canals to avoid just this fate.
Undergound, the canals and passages are identified with the names of the streets above. There’s a little museum with paintings, drawings, and photographs. A slide show, with French commentary, gives you the same information.
You may be surprised to know that, for such a weird museum, it receives 100,000 visitors annually. Though it’s “clean,” rats are a distinct possibility.
Paris Catacombs – Paris, France
Beneath the elegant streets of Paris lies something far stranger: a mile long tunnel packed with skulls and bones.
The Paris Catacombs hold the remains of over six million people. They were moved here in the 18th century when the city’s cemeteries became overcrowded and dangerously unsanitary.
The tunnels themselves began as quarries, dug out over centuries to provide limestone for Paris’ grand buildings.
Starting in 1785, bones were transferred here in nightly processions, complete with chanting priests and black-veiled carts.
Later, Napoleon decided to tidy things up, turning the piles into walls of femurs and skulls, and adding plaques and macabre slogans.
Bones were arranged into circles, crosses, even heart shapes. It made the Catacombs both a cemetery and a strange kind of art installation.
The route open to visitors is about a mile long. But the full network stretches far beyond. You enter by descending a long spiral staircase into the quarry tunnels.
The deeper you go, the quieter it gets—until you reach the ossuary, marked by a sign that reads, “Stop, this is the empire of the dead.” From there, you walk past anonymous stacks of bones, dimly lit and disturbingly orderly.
It’s eerie, unforgettable, and oddly beatiful. A Gothic detour beneath the city that once tried to forget the dead.
Click here to book a skip the line ticket. I can also recommend this excellent 2 hour guided tour with VIP access.
Vagina Museum – London, UK
The Vagina Museum in London is the world’s first brick-and-mortar museum dedicated entirely to gynecological anatomy and health.
Located in the Bethnal Green neighborhood, it’s more than a quirky curiosity. It’s a thoughtful space grounded in science, activism, and public education.
The museum isn’t sensational. Instead, it aims to demystify and de-stigmatize. There are rotating exhibitions, posters, anatomical models, and multimedia installations.
The museum tackles everything from menstrual equity and reproductive rights to anatomy, gender, and body politics.
It’s small but sharply curated, with an approachable tone that blends humor with insight. The shop, of course, leans cheeky. And best of all, admission is free.
The Museum of Bad Art – Massachusetts, USA
MOBA is a weird museum that bills itself as holding “art too bad to be ignored.” On first impression, you might think the museum is a joke. After all, “art museums” are usually a bit highbrow.
But not this one. The art is mind bogglingly bad, beautifully bad. So bad it’s fun to look at.
And it’s not just a send up of the snooty pretentiousness of the art world. The museum claims to “celebrate the right to fail” and analogizes its artworks to “songs sung in the shower.”
Despite that ethos, the museum is popular. And picky.
It only accepts 1 in 10 works and reject reproductions or cliched kitsch. They only want genuinely bad art, not art created with the goal of looking bad.
UFO Museum – Roswell, New Mexico, USA
The UFO Museum is straight out of a conspiracy theorist’s scrapbook, in the best way. Roswell is the epicenter of UFO lore in the U.S., all thanks to a now infamous incident that happened in 1947.
In July 1947, something crashed on a ranch just outside of Roswell. The U.S. military initially announced they had recovered a “flying disc.”
The very next day, they retracted the statement, saying it was actually a weather balloon. That reversal kicked off decades of speculation.
In the 1990s, the U.S. government claimed the debris was part of Project Mogul, a secret Cold War balloon experiment.
But by then, conspiracy theories were fully baked. Claims of alien bodies, military cover-ups, and government secrets were everywhere.
The UFO Museum opened in 1992 in downtown Roswell. It’s part museum, part roadside attraction, part research hub.
Inside, you’ll find exhibits on the 1947 happening, alien displays, pop culture artifacts, and a library for the UFO-obsessed.
Most will find the museum campy, but it’s surprisingly thorough. It also leans into the mystery more than any “official” explanation. So, it’s a favorite among true believers and skeptics alike.
>>> Click here to book a haunted tour of Roswell
Dalí Theatre-Museum – Figueres, Spain
The Dalí Theatre-Museum is one of the strangest museums in Europe. And that’s exactly how Dalí wanted it.
Built on the ruins of the town’s former theater, it’s a disorienting, theatrical space full of visual tricks and contradictions.
Dalí didn’t want a retrospective. He wanted a stage set for his mind.
The exterior is already absurd: giant eggs on the roof, golden mannequins, and walls dotted with bread rolls. Inside, you’re dropped into a world of illusions and oddities. A vintage Cadillac rains on its passengers.
A living room turns into the face of Mae West when viewed from a platform. Staircases twist into unexpected galleries.
Paintings are only part of it. Ceilings swirl with dramatic murals.
Dalí-designed jewelry glints in dimly lit rooms. Sculptures, installations, and half-finished ideas all compete for attention.
There’s little order and no clear path, just one surreal scene after another. Dalí is buried here too, under the museum floor. He built this place as a self-contained legacy: part museum, part performance, and part puzzle he never meant you to solve.
>>> Click here to book a Dali museum ticket
House of Terror – Budapest, Hungary
The House of Terror in Budapest isn’t your average museum by any stretch. It’s more like a haunted house for history, minus the kitsch and with far more emotional weight.
It’s housed in a sleek gray building that once served as headquarters for Hungary’s fascist and communist secret police.
The museum feels cold, sterile, and ominous. The word “TERROR” casts a literal shadow on the street from its stenciled eaves, and that’s just the start.
Inside, things get darker, both visually and thematically. A Soviet T-54 tank greets you in the atrium, backed by thousands of black-and-white portraits of victims. The exhibits are high-tech, highly stylized, and deliberately disorienting.
You’ll wander through dimly lit halls packed with propaganda, grainy footage, gulag maps, personal effects, interrogation cells, and surreal recreations of life under fascist and communist rule.
Some moments feel cinematic, others genuinely chilling. The descent into the basement, where political prisoners were held and tortured, feels like entering a psychological thriller.
And the finale? A “wall of victimizers” featuring the faces of the perpetrators. In many cases, they lived out quiet lives without any consequences.
Not exactly “fun,” but absolutely fascinating—and undeniably weird in how it fuses trauma, architecture, and theatricality.
Museum of Rescued Art – Rome, Italy
The Museum of rescued Art is located in a small but striking wing of the Baths of Diocletian. It’s dedicated to art that’s been looted, trafficked, stolen, or illegally exported, then recovered—often through international investigations.
It’s a rotating collection. Most of the pieces are only on display temporarily, before being returned to their original home museums, churches, or regions. Think: ancient Etruscan vases, Roman fresco fragments, or stolen devotional art.
It’s a weird experience because you’re looking at art in limbo. Every piece has a backstory involving smuggling, black markets, or diplomatic disputes. But their display is merely a pit stop until the disputes are resolved.
It’s more about provenance than aesthetics. Art as evidence, as survivor, as repatriated treasure. It’s quiet, serious, and incredibly moving—a kind of art crime confession booth.
Sir John Soane’s Museum – London, UK
This place is a fever dream for architecture nerds, antiquities lovers, and people who enjoy walking into a house that feels like a puzzle box.
Soane, a Neo-classical architect, turned his home into a private museum. It’s packed with Greco-Roman fragments, sarcophagi, strange skylights, and mirrored passageways.
You’ll find Hogarth paintings hidden behind folding walls and ancient ruins displayed like curios. The space itself is a labyrinth of shadow and genius.
It’s basically one man’s obsessive brain turned into a home. And it’s been left untouched since the 1830s by royal decree. You’ll feel like you’re trespassing in the best way.
Sherlock Holmes Museum – London, UK
This is a full museum dedicated to … a fictional character. Located at the famous (but also fake) address of 221B Baker Street, this London museum treats Sherlock Holmes like an actual historical figure.
You walk through period rooms filled with props, letters, and artifacts as if Holmes and Watson had just stepped out for a case. It’s earnest, immersive, and completely ridiculous in a fun way.
It’s essentially fan fiction as a physical space. It leans so hard into the illusion that you kind of go along with it.
After all, where else can you stand in a recreated Victorian sitting room and examine the non-existent belongings of a man who never lived?
>>> Click here to book a Holmes-themed walking tour
Musée Gustave Moreau – Paris, France
This small Paris museum was once the home, studio, and dreamworld of French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau. It’s preserved as a shrine to his myth-drenched imagination.
The lower floor still feels like a 19th century private residence. But climb the narrow staircase and you’re suddenly surrounded by enormous, hallucinatory canvases: Salomé, Oedipus, angels, beasts, and glittering biblical visions.
The best part? The spiral staircase winds up into a studio overflowing with paintings, drawings, and studies stacked to the ceiling.
It feels more like wandering through a forgotten artist’s attic than a formal museum.
Maison de Victor Hugo – Paris, France
Set on the elegant Place des Vosges, this museum occupies the apartment where Victor Hugo lived for 16 years. But don’t expect a calm literary retreat. To the contrary!
The rooms are decorated in the over-the-top style of a man who was both great novelist and … wait for it …. eccentric interior designer. There are dark, moody tapestries, Gothic furniture, a Chinese room, and symbolic flourishes Hugo designed himself.
The museum traces his personal life, political activism, and creative work. It comes completes with original manuscripts and illustrations.
But what makes it so atmospheric is the way it blurs the lines between his novels and his reality.
It feels like stepping inside the pages of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame or Les Misérables. It’s ornate, brooding, and unapologetically theatrical.
Museums of Illusions – Barcelona, Spain
The Museu de les Il·lusions is a mind-bending fully interactive space. It’s stuffed full of floor-to-ceiling murals that trick the eye and invite you to become part of the scene.
One moment you’re walking a tightrope between skyscrapers, the next you’re escaping a shark attack or surfing a massive wave. It’s absurd, over-the-top, and unapologetically made for photos and fun.
Each illusion is designed using perspective tricks, forcing you to stand in just the right spot to become part of the artwork. The results are often funny, occasionally disorienting, and always surreal. You might be starring in your own low-budget dream sequence.
The museum leans heavily into pop culture and cartoon-style visuals. So expect less Dalí and more giant donuts, dinosaurs, and outer space.
Is it weird? Yes, but in a playful, not creepy, way. It’s not particularly intellectual, and it doesn’t take itself seriously. Think of it as a theme park for your phone’s camera.
Meow Wolf – Denver, Colorado
Meow Wolf Denver spans four floors, dozens of rooms, and hundreds of bizarre, hand-built installations. Called Convergence Station, the experience drops you into a chaotic alternate reality shaped by neon cities, alien landscapes, and a dense sci-fi backstory.
According to the lore, four universes collided in a cosmic event, merging their environments and erasing people’s memories. You can collect those memories using a scannable Q Pass, which reveals fragments of lost stories across the space.
The narrative is optional. But it adds structure to the madness, especially if you like puzzles, cryptic notes, or conspiracy boards.
Each zone has its own identity. There’s a glowing forest, a retrofuturistic city, a decaying temple, and a realm of warped sound and light. Some rooms feel playful, others vaguely apocalyptic.
At times it’s like walking through a video game. Other times it feels like you’ve stumbled into someone’s dream mid-sentence.
The art is maximalist. There are textured walls, shifting lights, secret passages, hidden messages, sonic experiments, alien bathrooms.
Meow Wolf isn’t tidy or linear. It’s crowded, theatrical, and often absurd.
You won’t see everything in one visit, and that’s by design. There’s no map, no path, and no clear way to know when you’re “done.”
But that’s part of the pull. It’s a museum that doesn’t behave like one, and doesn’t want to. You can just go to absorb the sensations.
Titanic Belfast – Belfast, Northern Ireland
Titanic Belfast is weird in the way only a massive, high-tech museum about a famous disaster can be. It invites visitors to peek inside a tragedy wrapped in spectacle.
The museum is built on the exact site where the Titanic was constructed. It has an angular silver facade that looks like a ship’s prow or possibly an iceberg.
Inside, the experience leans theatrical. You follow a one-way route through ten immersive galleries that walk you through the ship’s short life, from its construction to its infamous end.
The museum skips straight past the “Troubles” in Belfast and dives into the early 20th century, where the shipyard was booming and optimism was high.
There’s a simulated ride through the shipyard, a look at the launch slipway, and the eerie Sinking Gallery. It all comes complete with blinking Morse code and survivor testimonies.
The museum is moody and stylized, with more projections and drama than actual objects. In the final rooms, you’ll watch footage from the Titanic’s watery grave.
You won’t come away having seen much in the way of historical artifacts. But as a multimedia deep dive into one of history’s most mythologized disasters, it’s both strange and strangely moving.
>>> Click here to book a must have ticket
International Spy Museum – Washington D.C.
Game for some cloak and dagger action? The International Spy Museum will fit the bill.
In 2019, it moved into a bigger, sleeker glass and steel building in L’Enfant Plaza. And it’s now one of the most popular museums in Washington DC.
The curators had a rather daunting task: to appeal to kids as well as intelligence skeptics, and those (like me) whose knowledge of the spy trade comes from Netflix.
You’ll find rooms dedicated to torture, spy craft, intelligence failures, ethical scandals, and weapons of mass destruction. For those who love high tech gizmos, you’ll find them all here. There are quizzes, short films, video clips, disguises, and historical artifacts.
You’ll learn that spying isn’t always sexy and fun. It can really end badly.
If you are game, you can test your own skills at spy craft. You get assigned a cover identity and complete missions throughout the museum.
Think: lie detectors, code breaking, surveillance tests. Very fun for the kids.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my guide to the weirdest museums in the world. You may find enjoy these other guides to “real museums” and artworks:
- Best Museums in the US
- Famous paintings in the US
- 75 masterpieces in Europe
- Florence art bucket list
- Venice art bucket list
- London art bucket list
- Italy art bucket list
- Best museums in Paris
- Best museums in Rome
- Best museums in Madrid
- Best museums in London
- Best museums in Barcelona
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