It’s indescribable, but here goes. The Abita Mystery House is a roadside attraction in Abita Springs, Louisiana. The front is an old filling station. Behind it there’s a barn and a shotgun house. The whole complex is a museum, kind of. (It used to be called the “UCM Museum,” meaning “you see ‘em.”) Inside is a ton of, well, stuff, ranging from old advertising signs to arcade games to the many absurdist art projects of founder and curator John Preble. A lot of it is busted, rusty, falling to bits. Some of it’s whimsical, some of it’s weird, some of it seems like junk that ought to have been thrown away long ago. In places, it conjures up the feeling that you’re in a thrift shop deep in the bayou in 1956 and a hurricane has torn through the place and then extraterrestrials visited and subsequently left behind their used appliances. Admission to the House is free, but to leave it costs $5. (When I reminded Preble that it was, strictly speaking, unlawful to adopt kidnapping as a business model, he graciously waived my exit fee.) Condé Nast Travelersays of the House: “the furthest stretches of [Preble’s] imagination are all on display here, from wall-sized mosaics to miniature city scenes, to sculptures of half-human hybrid creatures to an Airstream trailer that has collided with a flying saucer,” and “considering the fine line it walks between hoarded junk and fine art, the place is well organized, though that’s a relative term.”

The Mystery House is indeed mysterious, insofar as you do not know what you’re going to find around the next corner. There are a lot of homemade contraptions, a lot of signs next to levers and buttons and knobs that say “PRESS HERE” or “DO NOT PRESS” (I pressed) and then make little thing-a-ma-jigs go spinning and jerking and dancing. The House’s website touts the chance to see a machine send a marble clacking through a structure “made of thousands of popsicle sticks, hot glue sticks, pinball machine parts, and plumbing supplies” and displayed “inside of an old movie house ticket booth from a nearby town.” Preble collects old arcade games (there’s Space Invaders and a Beatles-themed pinball machine from circa 1964), and if you bring a stack of quarters you can play some of them. (Others will just steal your quarters.) There is an unfathomably large number of little plastic action figures, tacky commemorative plates, old novelty postcards, paint-by-numbers paintings, tourist guides, diner signs, baseball cards, bottle caps, and other assorted tchotchkes. There is a chandelier made out of plastic flamingos and gator heads, sprayed gold. There is a little revolving platform with plaster dinosaurs on it. There is a Tesla coil. In the gift shop you can buy art prints of Fats Domino or a “mystery bag” of bits and pieces for $5. My bag contained some buttons, a Chinese finger trap, one of those fortune-telling plastic fish, a rubber cyclops, a turtle necklace, and a whistle. 

Death is omnipresent among the exhibits. There are dancing skeletons behind glass. In another room is a skeleton in a box with a sign that says “Jackie the Jump-Roping Skeleton.” Press the button, Jackie jumps rope. Elsewhere in a glass case is a horrible clown. Put a quarter in the machine and the clown will dance. There are little handmade dioramas of swamps and trailer parks and Mardi Gras and a jazz funeral. One scene depicts Union and Confederate soldiers fighting in heaven with a little plaque that reads “God Bless Our Forefathers, Who Fought In The Civil War So That We Can Play Goofy Golf In Peace.” There is a giant model of a medieval village that spans an entire room, with no explanation for its presence. There is a crash-landed UFO you can crawl into. A sign next to a hole says, “What You Will Have For Lunch.” Pull the crank, put your eye to the hole, and a wheel spins and comes to rest on a disgusting food. (I got “Spider Pie.” Others got “Fried Snot” and “Roaches on Toast.”) There’s another similar fortune-telling machine that predicts what the worst day of your life will be. Mine will be when I sit on an anthill. Not the worst thing that could happen, I suppose. (Someone else got “Wet yourself on a Ferris wheel.”) 

There is hoax taxidermy. Not the infamous “jackalope,” but the more obscure “dogigator” (specifically “Darrel the Dogigator, MIRACLE OF SCIENCE”), a cryptid that looks an awful lot like an alligator head grafted onto a dog sculpture. In fact, many of the exhibits seem like they might have been welded together by an adult version of Sid, the doll-dismembering kid from Toy Story. I did see a turtle that had baby doll arms glued onto it and a “miniature allisapien,” some kind of hybrid alligator/human thing in a jar. 

I fear I may not be selling it well. “This all sounds disturbing,” you may be thinking. Creepy, even. Look, it’s not for everyone. I’m sure Preble alienates some visitors with his tall tales and off-color jokes. He reminds me of the ferociously entertaining, larger-than-life patriarch in Tim Burton’s Big Fish,who exasperated his son by telling monstrous whoppers about meeting werewolves and giants. Preble told me that he was raised by Bigfoot, who saved him from being raised by wolves after he was abandoned as a baby on a remote mountaintop. (I think I’m remembering the story correctly.) He said he once met Princess Diana, who he says was hideous but very kind. He then insisted, despite my protestations, that I am Hugh Grant’s nephew, and the Abita Mystery House Facebook page now has a picture of me on it boasting that Hugh Grant’s nephew visited the House. 

But I like John Preble, and he took a shine to me, in part because the Current Affairs sensibility (eclectic, artistic, a bit absurdist, proudly Louisianan) is not so far from the Mystery House’s own. Not only did he release me from the museum for free, but he gave me a CD by an obscure piano player of his acquaintance called Bobby Lounge, who plays and sings like Jerry Lee Lewis, if Jerry Lewis sang picaresque nonsense stories about Abita Springs. 

From reviews of the Abita Mystery House…

• “It’s definitely a ‘mystery’ lol. I wouldn’t suggest it - especially at $5 per person”

• “Was definitely nothing I've seen before, that's for sure.”

• “There's a room lined with hot sauce bottles, robots made of computer boards, a ‘home made Harley Davidson’ made of bicycle and machine parts... and so much more.”

• “You would have to see it for yourself to really understand what I am trying to describe. It almost looks like the famous artist ‘Salvador Dali’ had some say-so as to where most of the stuff went.”

The Abita Mystery House touts itself as one of a kind, but that is not quite true. It shares a certain kinship with other places around the country. In Los Angeles, there is the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a cabinet of curiosities that adopts a much more formal and technical approach to absurdist hoaxing. In Michigan there is Hamtramck Disneyland, a towering assemblage of colorful sculptures, kinetic elements, and found objects that features carousel horses and windmills and spans two garages in a back alley. The St. Louis City Museum is an enormous playground made of architectural salvage in an old shoe warehouse. In Florida, there’s the Coral Castle, a complex of megaliths built by Edward Leedskalnin, supposedly using mysterious “magnetic currents.” Tinkertown in New Mexico, perhaps the closest direct ancestor to the Abita Mystery House, is an exhibition of animatronic Western-themed dioramas built over a 40-year period by Ross Ward and housed in a rambling museum of Americana. 

These spaces were all built by devoted eccentrics who, unconcerned with wealth, poured countless hours into achieving an artistic vision. They are like nothing in their surroundings. And while they are not “political” in any obvious sense, they constitute an act of creative defiance against today’s creeping monoculture. They are proudly nonconformist and the exact antithesis of what Vanishing New Yorkauthor Jeremiah Moss calls “the new people.” By this he means not transplants to the city per se, but a new kind of mindset arising from the neoliberal era of gentrification and inequality. Moss writes about how the culture of New York City has changed over the years, as its rough edges have been sheared off, its messiness tidied up, and its eccentricity and individuality tamed in favor of a sleek, corporatized minimalism. The city, having once comprised many shades of the rainbow, has been drained of color in favor of white and gray. In an interview withCurrent Affairs, he elaborated: 

“I mean a new kind of person, a neoliberalized self. This sense of walking around and thinking they're not quite human, they don't feel quite human. They're not engaging with other humans, and they all look exactly the same. Their ability to root out any sort of difference that would mark them as individuals is profound, to the point where they have the same skin, the same kind of buttery tan white person skin. It's the same tone. The clothing has no variation on a theme, even. It's got to be exactly the same. I call them hypernormative, with this very intense need to conform to one another and to have this belonging. I'm fascinated by them…”

In his book, Moss writes of his neighbor, an influencer who is one of these types: 

Behind my crummy kitchen with its broken stove and leaky sink, I look for books painting some sign of a creative and uncontrolled life, conflict and imperfection, but there is nothing. She has one green plant, a housewarming gift from the landlord. Everything else is white. The couch is white. The pillows are white. The curtains are white. The bedsheets and blankets are white. The desk is white. The dining set is white. The rug is white. The new mirror, the one that replaced the old white mirror, has a blonde wood frame that looks almost white. The influencer loves the blonde wood because she says ‘everything's white, so I needed, like, some texture.’

Moss tells me that the use of the color white is an attempt to fill one’s life with “purity and cleanliness” and “indicates I’ve never been touched by anything. Nothing can get to me,” which he describes as “a hermetically sealed way of going through the world.” This is certainly not the Abita Mystery House way of going through the world. Some of the crap in there is mildewy. There is rust, moss, fungus, crud. There is color: bright, hand-painted signs everywhere. Imperfection. Disarray. But not total disorder, for everything is lovingly arranged. 

Skeletons are not among the white objects in the perfect white apartment. There’s no place for death there. By contrast, death is everywhere in the mystery house. Swamp ghosts, skulls, stuffed critters. The folklore that the Mystery House is steeped in is virtually death-obsessed. If you pick up an anthology of old American folk lyrics, as I did recently, you may be surprised to see just how many of them are about death: men robbing stores and then getting hanged, jealous lovers shooting their beaus, train accidents, wars, etc. Of course life expectancy was lower in those days, so maybe mortality was more on their minds. But we all die now just as they all died then, and in many ways, a culture that incorporates death into its art and song is probably healthier than one that doesn’t. (See Jennifer Dines’s 2023 Current Affairs piece on death for more on this.) 

In a time when every space threatens to become a Panera Bread or a CVS, we need the Abita Mystery House spirit. I have a suspicion that Donald Trump would not understand the Abita Mystery House. I cannot imagine Jeff Bezos or Jamie Dimon going there. Their worlds are too clean, too purified of history and mess and death and the surreal. The do-it-yourself utopianism of Abita or Hamtramck Disneyland is the very inverse of an Amazon warehouse or Trump Tower. 

In The Old Weird America, rock critic Greil Marcus coined the titular term to describe the culture that Bob Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes were steeped in, a “playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, Illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes.” This weird mental place, he said, was not just “quaint” but rather represented a “break in the fabric of modernity,” an imaginary America full of myth and mystery. If you want an antidote to bleakness and boredom, and if you want to appreciate your country again, you might think of taking a visit to this country of the mind, embracing the Great American Weird, with its dogigators, singing cowboys, giant roadside dinosaurs, and legendary swamp spirits. We keep that America alive down here in Louisiana, and they house one of the most precious collections of it out in Abita Springs.