Oddities & curiosities in Los Angeles

Looking for oddity shops & curiosities in Los Angeles? These 9 are the genuinely strange ones — Whaley House Museum, Memento Mori, Wacko / Soap Plant & La Luz de Jesus Gallery and more — each hand-vetted and sourced, not pulled from a top-ten list. Great for an unusual date, a weird afternoon, or showing a visitor the side of Los Angeles they'd never find on their own.

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Whaley House Museum Built in 1857 on the site of Old Town's public gallows, this two-story brick house has been dubbed America's… Old Town San Diego
Memento Mori A small Hollywood storefront packed with vintage medical and dental instruments, mounted insects under glass,… Hollywood, Los Angeles
Wacko / Soap Plant & La Luz de Jesus Gallery A 6,500-square-foot Los Feliz institution running since 1971, crammed with more than 10,000 items: tongue-in-… Los Feliz, Los Angeles
Bearded Lady's Mystic Museum Two side-by-side units on Burbank's Magnolia strip: one a shop of insect and bat taxidermy, apothecary goods,… Burbank
Vulture Culture Oddities A Magnolia Park shop packed with vintage taxidermy, bones, skulls, occult goods, and dark art from local make… Magnolia Park, Burbank
Museum of Death A single-obsession shrine to mortality packed into a Hollywood storefront, holding what's billed as the world… Hollywood
Psychiatry: An Industry of Death Museum A free, deeply strange Sunset Boulevard museum run by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, filled with an… Hollywood, Los Angeles
The Museum of Jurassic Technology A deliberately disorienting warren of dim, velvet-hushed rooms where the exhibits blur the line between real… Culver City
Elmer's Bottle Tree Ranch On a stretch of old Route 66 in the high desert, Elmer Long welded hundreds of metal 'trees' and hung them wi… Oro Grande, California