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A post on Medium in May 2016 attempted to tackle a seemingly unanswerable question: what's the weirdest town in America? To do this, Lyman Stone used 20 different variables, including what percentage of each city's population was foreign-born, married, working, in the armed forces, etc. He then compared that data to national averages. What he found was that San Jose, CA, is the most bizarre town in the US. But though it may be demographically weird, San Jose doesn't hold a candle to these weird small towns in the United States.
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The American Road Trip
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An experience full of gas station snacks, tourist traps, and eventually, a destination worth sending a postcard about
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But what if we're looking for something stranger? What if we want to find an underbelly that makes Twin Peaks look like Candyland
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If you've ever wanted to travel America in search of the silliest, saddest
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and most unhinged of all the states, Consider this travel guide your ticket through a Twilight Zone toll booth
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Today, we're examining the weirdest small towns in the United States. Now, to paraphrase Michael Keaton, you want to get weird
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Let's get weird. In 1981, there were a thousand people living in Centralia, Pennsylvania
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But by 2010, there were less than a dozen. What the heck happened
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Did everyone get sick of cheese steaks? Did they owe the Philly Fanatic a bunch of cash
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In fact, Centralia lives above a burning coal mine fire that began in 1962 and still blazes to this day
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And there's no sign of stopping soon. Experts believe it may burn for another 250 years
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The town is full of sinkholes, toxic smoke, gas. Even the highway is hot to the touch
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But on the plus side, you could probably cook a cheese steak on that blacktop. If for some bizarre reason this sounds like a place you'd like to live, you can't
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In 1992, the state of Pennsylvania seized all the property in the town and condemned it
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They allowed the residents to stay, but once they're gone, that will be the end of Centralia
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58 miles southeast of Anchorage, Alaska, there is a town called Whittier
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And if you're the type of person who needs your space, we'd recommend you stay much further than 58 miles away from Whittier
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Because in Whittier, every single resident lives together in one building, kind of like if the grandparents' bed in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory had its own zip code
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The 14-story Begich Towers, originally an army barracks, is home to the 214 people of Whittier, Alaska
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The tower grew to include a police station, a post office, store, church, playground, bed and breakfast, health center, and video store
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We don't know what's more remarkable. The fact that 214 people of a city live in just one building
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This one building has a bed and breakfast for any extremely adventurous tourists who happen to pass through
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Or that this one building still has a video store. And in this case, if you're not kind and don't rewind, literally everyone in this city will know about it
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Whittier had too many people in one place for you? Try Monoway, Nebraska, home to just one resident
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Seriously, the entire city is occupied by a single human being. Talk about an introvert's paradise
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Well, don't talk about it since you're introverted. Elsie Eiler is the sole resident of Monoway, Nebraska
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like Will Smith in I Am Legend She the town mayor bartender librarian and presumably both its vigilante superhero and its cop who doesn think Cape Freak should take the law into their own hands
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She also pays taxes to herself, which her accountant must love. Oh, right, she's probably her accountant, too
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But the population of Manawai used to be twice as big, as Elsie was married to her husband, Rudy
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until his passing in 2004. Colma, California takes up two square miles of space
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and within those two square miles lay 17 cemeteries That's a lot of cemeteries
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If the zombie apocalypse hits and you find yourself passing through Colma just keep right on driving
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The San Mateo County necropolis has been dubbed the City of Souls
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because it hosts an estimated 2 million dead people and only 1,200 live ones
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That means for any one living human, there are 1,667 deceased folks
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And when the middle school hosts their co-ed dead alive dance, you know they're all going to be on one side of the gym
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This wildly skewed ratio began when bodies were transported to Colma from San Francisco to make room
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an arrangement we're sure the truck drivers moving all those skeletons had zero questions about
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And among this cavalcade of corpses lie famous folks like Wyatt Earp and William Randolph Hearst
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Imagine thinking you were going to be laid to rest in the city. only to find yourself haunting an overcrowded boneyard in Colma, California
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With a charmed name like Miracle Village, Florida, you might expect this small hamlet to be filled with a very specific type of person
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Medical professionals, perhaps. Or maybe magicians. Well, if you guessed registered sex offenders
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um, congratulations, because you are exactly right. Miracle Village is a small housing development outside of Pahokee, Florida
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that's home to more than 100 registered sex offenders. It was founded by a minister named Richard Witherow
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who worked in prisons for 30 years. Witherow created the development as a place for recently released sex offenders to live
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while reintegrating into the community. And he and his ministry, Matthew 25, oversee the development
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and have final approval over who is permitted to live there. Remember the scene in Into the Wild
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where Emile Hirsch meets Kristen Stewart in that very strange, seemingly lawless town
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Remember Into the Wild? That unusual town would be Slab City, California
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referred to by its residents as the last free place in America. Slab City is decommissioned and uncontrolled
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a wild desert city full of 150 eccentrics, military vets, hippies, and anyone looking to unplug from the grid and get their freak on
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Not to mention the many squatters and RV campers who want to find their own temporary wild
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Tangier, Virginia, located on the appropriately named Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay
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is one of the oldest cities in America and one of the weirdest sounding Not the name itself though Tangier sounds more like an artis gin company than a city but the way its residents speak Linguists
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say members of Tangier, which we'd love to call Tangierines, have a unique accent unlike any other
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place in the U.S. The local dialect is an odd mix of a standard American accent and old British twang
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Some historians theorize the Tangier talk is how the founding fathers and early settlers of America
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may have sounded, but we think they're all just practicing their Katherine Hepburn accents
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Hey, we have a video about that. Hell on Earth exists. And during the winter, it does indeed freeze over
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Hell, Michigan is a small town close to Ann Arbor, known for the home of the University of Michigan
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But hell has its own college, Damn Nation University, or Damn You for short
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Hmm, where can I get a letterman jacket? You see, hell has embraced its unique name
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Given in the 1840s when a founder quipped, You can name it hell for all I care
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Originally a milling town and later a town full of bootleggers, hell leans into the hell of it all
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offering satanic churches to get married, ice cream shops called The Crematory that sling grave digger Sundays
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and pastries to die for at the Hell Hole Diner. If you want to buy a piece of hell
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you can head to go to hellmichigan.com and purchase a plot of land yourself
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Just be careful of the neighbors. Gibsonton, Florida contains 14,234 residents, and most of them are straight-up carnies
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When carnivals are in the off-season, many of their workers, from ride operators to sideshow human attractions, head to Gibsonton, or Gib Town as many call it, to relax in a warm and welcoming climate
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The town was even the subject of an X-Files episode titled Humbug
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although none of it was actually filmed there. At one point, the town fire chief was an eight-foot-tall giant
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and featured what was at the time the only post office with a counter situated at a height where people with dwarfism could use it
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Seems like a lovely place to live, but the initiation rite, where presumably everyone gathers around and watches you stick your head in a tiger's mouth
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is a little much. Ever lose your luggage on a flight? don't scream an unattended or rage tweet up a storm
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Instead, gather your hiking equipment and backpack through the Appalachian Mountains to Scottsboro, Alabama
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Because statistically, your luggage is lost there. Scottsboro, Alabama is home to the Unclaimed Baggage Center
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or the UBC if you like to save time when you speak. Started in 1970 by Doyle Owens
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the center now takes up 40,000 square feet of downtown Scottsboro. And they receive a whopping 1 million unclaimed bags
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and suitcases every year. No amount of uniquely colored tag is going to save you from that
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Most commonly, the UBC finds clothing and electronics. But for more adventurous treasure seekers
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the center contains a museum featuring the most unusual found items, including a painting the guidance system for an F fighter jet and a NASA space shuttle camera And you just know that thing doesn have an airplane mode
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As we grow older, we experience life transitions, often that includes moving into a retirement facility
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a place structured around medical care, routine, community, and apparently, knocking boots so loudly and often that you blow the roof off the joint
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The Villages, Florida, is this very retirement community, a place that in 2015 recorded a record number of sexually transmitted diseases
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The 70,000 members of Florida's Friendliest Retirement Home, the tagline we are certain the Villages is now regretting, were constantly, ah, enjoying the community jello
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One couple was even caught in a compromising moment on a golf cart. Please withhold your hold-in-one jokes until the end of the episode
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But if you're surprised that these retirees seem to be behaving like background characters in an American Pie sequel
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maybe you shouldn't be. As resident Rosalind Shelley told the New York Post
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whatever you know about 20-year-olds, it's the same with seniors. Oh, so that probably also means a lot of Sega
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Don Sammons, his wife and son, were the three sole residents of Buford, Wyoming
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which is 300% more people than the population of Monawai, Nebraska, for those keeping score
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But in 1995, Sammons' wife passed away. Then in 2007, his son moved away from home
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So Salmon's got fed up living by himself and decided to put the town up for sale
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Wait, you can just do that? Is there a Craigslist section called geography we've been missing
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Salmon's put the town up for sale in 2012. And the highest bid came from coffee magnate Fondink Nguyen, who purchased it for $900,000
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Nguyen renamed the city after his coffee brand, changing Buford to the more mouthy Findelli Town Buford
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And if you visit the one gas station in town, you'll be sipping Findelli coffee and nothing else
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And you'll like it. Ever wanted to feel like a cast member of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
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Head on over to Casey, Illinois, a town full of ginormous objects that would even give DeMontis a bonus a Napoleon complex
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Casey, Illinois was founded in 1834. It's about two square miles in size and has a population of around 3,000
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But frankly, we don't know where those 3,000 people can live. Because most of the town is full of big things
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A somehow official term describing objects that far out-proportion their intended size
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Because in Casey, Illinois, size does matter. There are at least eight items in Casey that have been officially certified by Guinness as the world's largest of their kind
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Including a 32-foot pencil and a 56-foot rocking chair. Although rocking and nothing would probably be more harrowing than relaxing
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Whether or not the residents of Casey have huge egos over all their huge things remains to be seen