This dreamlike & eerie Los Angeles institution is a counterfeit museum, not that the artists behind it made that obvious. Since 1988, the exhibits weave a confusing, semi-credible, and ever-expanding warren of supernatural science & mathematics, historic figures who never lived, and ethereal art. Founder David Hildebrand Wilson was awarded the MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship in 2001.

Because Disneyland is the definition of tourism, it’s easy to forget that theme parks are a pinnacle of art + engineering. Since the 1950s, Imagineers launched “dark ride” development (so-called because they’re indoors, rather than having frightful themes). Each blends storytelling, jaw-dropping sets, & practical effects for an incomparable, technically masterful art experience.

One critically-acclaimed play in the genre of “promenade theater,” Sleep No More is a contorted adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that premiered in New York in 2011. At their own pace, audience members walk through the performance space (themed as the many rooms of a Depression-era hotel) as the play unravels. Productions of site-specific theater are widely varied, with locations ranging from highly stylized sets to sprawling outdoor spaces, and differ in the audience’s participation & ability to influence the plot. These principles strongly inform HAUNT CAMP’s vision for the final production.

The popular narrative: the mad widow Sarah Winchester consulted a psychic to construct her dizzying, eclectic mansion in order to “appease the spirits” of her late husband’s deadly invention. There’s a far more scintillating theory, however: that Sarah—a brilliant female architect in the 19th century, all but prohibited from practicing—funneled the entirety of her talent into creating this opus, protected from busybodies by the paranormal fib.

Founded by a Santa Fe artist collective in 2008, expanding to Denver & Las Vegas, Meow Wolf is an explosively popular, difficult-to-describe, entirely genre-bending immersive art experience. At its flagship location, visitors are greeted with a serene, nighttime scene; the softly glowing porch of a Victorian farmhouse beckons the curious to enter. Once inside, reality distorts the further one travels the hallways, and through the house’s many exits—doors, windows, or the hidden portal inside the refrigerator—visitors are ejected into a riot of otherworldly installations to explore.

The childhood playground of program director JR Rymut, who insists to this day there exists no finer museum. While other stuffy institutions keep their exhibits sealed behind plate glass, and modern exhibit renovations lazily default to touchscreens & videos, for generations the Milwaukee Public Museum pioneered a fully immersive visitor experience. The enormous, moodily lit, labyrinthine museum is a time capsule of Victorian salon-style collections to sharp midcentury design. Curiosity & exploration are rewarded by learning, such as in JR’s favorite exhibit: where visitors wander gaslit village streets, and by peering through the windows of buildings & houses, are transported to other countries and even our own past.

A maze of mirrors & frosting, Scott Hove’s uncanny installation has been evolving since 2016. Through its claustrophobic, gaudy & disorienting passages, Cakeland creates a delightfully unnerving experience, and sets a high bar for HAUNT CAMP to push the limits of expectation.

Established in 1997 out of a vacant 10-story shoe manufacturing warehouse, St. Louis’s City Museum may not be as oriented towards storytelling as other institutions on this list, but no other comes close when it comes to tallying scrapped knees & lost teeth. City Museum shifts its identity on every floor, going from Brutalist jungle gym, to circus school, to vintage arcade, to architectural museum, to operational shoelace factory, to repository for the world’s largest pencil, and at one point septupled as the city’s aquarium.

Lore has it that Frank Lloyd Wright once insulted the amateur architect & wealthy recluse Alex Jordan Jr. during a casual conversation, after which Jordan constructed his gravity-defying house—perched over a sheer cliff face—out of spite. While the story doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, it’s too good not to repeat, and Jordan himself never left many clues to explain his boggling complex. Besides, as Jordan’s surviving collaborator once explained of the house’s eclectic installations & collections, “There was never any need to worry about historical accuracy. We were creating a fun place.”