Louisiana’s packed with roadside attractions that are so weird, so wonderfully strange, they’ll have you pulling over to double-check they’re real.
Abita Mystery House: The King of Louisiana Weird
Start in Abita Springs at what locals call Louisiana’s most eccentric museum. The Abita Mystery House goes by another name too: the UCM Museum (say it out loud — “you-see-’em” — that’s the joke).
John Preble built this place with over 50,000 found objects. We’re talking vintage arcade machines, paint-by-numbers, transistor boards, bottle caps, and things you can’t even identify. You walk through a vintage 1930s gas station into a maze of buildings connected by walkways. Push buttons to activate miniature animated scenes of Southern life. There’s a 22-foot Bassigator, a UFO crashed into an Airstream trailer, and the House of Shards covered in thousands of glass pieces.
Admission is $5. The director of the New Orleans Museum of Art called it “the most intriguing and provocative museum in Louisiana.” High praise for what amounts to one man’s incredible junk collection turned art installation.
Where: 22275 LA-36, Abita Springs
Giant Crawfish: Louisiana’s Crustacean Obsession
Louisiana takes its crawfish seriously. So seriously that multiple towns have built giant crawfish sculptures.
The big one sits outside Swamp Daddy’s Seafood Restaurant in Alexandria. This red monster made from painted duct tape and plastic wrap over a steel frame holds two crawfish flags. It disappeared in 2016 for restaurant expansion, got repaired, and came back better than ever in 2018.
Breaux Bridge has its own version outside Crazy ‘Bout Crawfish Cajun Café. This one’s constructed from red-painted nuts, bolts, and car parts — pure metal scrap art on the side of I-10.
Where: Swamp Daddy’s on MacArthur Drive, Alexandria; Crazy ‘Bout Crawfish, Breaux Bridge
The Giant Mailbox of Newellton
On Highway 65 in Newellton stands a 14.5-foot-tall mailbox that’s been there since 1956. Ben Burnside Sr. bought it in Houston, Texas (because everything’s bigger in Texas) and had it trucked to his Franklin Plantation.
The mailbox became a local landmark. People stop for photos. Kids climb on it. In the 1960s, infamous swindler Billy Sol Estes even posed sitting inside it for a Time magazine photo.
There’s a sign warning visitors not to get in the mailbox. Apparently, if you pull your car close enough to climb it, you might flip the whole thing trying to get out. Don’t test it.
Where: Northeast corner of US Hwy 65 and Cutoff Rd, Newellton
Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum
The tiny town of Gibsland built its entire identity around one bloody morning. May 23, 1934. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow stopped at Ma Canfield’s Cafe, bought a fried bologna sandwich and a BLT to go, then drove eight miles down the road where a posse of lawmen riddled their car with 167 bullets.
That cafe is now the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum. Owner Perry Carver has filled it with the outlaw couple’s personal belongings — hats, sweaters, guns, even Bonnie’s manicure set. There’s a replica of the Death Car complete with bullet holes and red-painted seats. A morgue room displays bloody mannequins of Bonnie and Clyde.
Perry will tell you stories. He claims his family friend kept the original death car in a Gibsland garage, and as a kid he’d climb inside and explore. Says he remembers seeing pieces of flesh and a tooth still lodged in the upholstery.
After visiting the museum, you can drive the exact route Bonnie and Clyde took to the ambush site seven miles away.
Where: 2419 Main Street, Gibsland
Art the Dalmatian: Shreveport’s Glowing Guardian
Downtown Shreveport has a 19-foot-tall Dalmatian statue covered in 254 glowing spots. His name tag reads “Art.”
Art the Dalmatian guards the Central ARTSTATION and lights up at night with programmable light shows. The spots blink and change colors. At Christmas, they turn red and green. When the statue first went up in 2014, people could buy a spot to memorialize a relative, friend, or pet. Type your name into the kiosk and your spot lights up.
Academy Award-winning artists William Joyce and Brandon Oldenberg designed Art as a tribute to fire station Dalmatians. The old Central Fire Station got repurposed as an art center, so the guardian needed to be artistic too.
Where: Central ARTSTATION, downtown Shreveport
More Louisiana Oddities Worth a Detour
Monsieur Jacques in Rayne is a 12-foot-tall, tuxedo-wearing metal frog who tips his hat to visitors. Rayne is the Frog Capital of the World, and Jacques stands guard near the police station.
Chauvin Sculpture Garden features a 45-foot-tall lighthouse made from over 7,000 bricks, plus 100+ concrete sculptures of angels, cowboys, soldiers, and birds scattered through the bayou landscape.
Madonna Chapel in Plaquemine holds the title as the world’s smallest church at nine feet by nine feet. Built in 1903 by Italian farmer Anthony Gullo after promising the Virgin Mary he’d build a chapel in her honor.
The Reality
Louisiana doesn’t do subtle. These attractions are the work of individual obsessives, folk artists, and small-town entrepreneurs who built something weird and stuck it on the side of the road.
That’s what makes them worth visiting. You’re not getting a corporate experience. You’re getting one person’s vision of what Louisiana should look like. Sometimes that vision involves a 22-foot Bassigator. Sometimes it’s a mailbox tall enough to park a car inside.
Drive the backroads. Pull over when something catches your eye. Louisiana’s best attractions are the ones that make you say “wait, what was that?” and slam on the brakes for a U-turn.
