Duane Beckett
Some museums celebrate paintings, fossils, or famous battles. The museums on this list do not. Instead, they’re built around objects most people never expect to see behind glass, from toilets and fries to pencil sharpeners. Below are some of the strange museum exhibits around the world that you should go see, and yes, they’re real.
Icelandic Phallological Museum
Reykjavík has one of the world’s strangest niche museums, and it doesn’t hide what it is. The Icelandic Phallological Museum is dedicated to phallology, with hundreds of preserved specimens from different mammals.
Visit Reykjavík states that the museum is located in central Reykjavík and focuses on the collection and study of phallic specimens, with biological displays, cultural objects, and folklore references all part of the exhibit.
It’s definitely weird, yet it’s presented like a serious natural-history collection, not a gag shelf in a novelty store. I collect odd things, but this is another level for strange museum exhibits.
Sulabh International Museum of Toilets
According to the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets, this New Delhi museum traces toilet systems from 2500 BC to modern times. That means privies, chamber pots, bidets, water closets, toilet furniture, and even records tied to early flush systems.
The strange part is not that toilets have history, which of course they do. It’s that the museum turns one of the most private things we do into an intriguing curated timeline. There are ornate commodes, medieval examples, and sanitation stories from around the world.
CupNoodles Museum
I’ve seen plenty of pop-culture shrines, from Star Wars displays to comic-book collections, but Japan turning instant noodles into a full museum experience makes a strange kind of sense.
The CUPNOODLES Museum has locations in Yokohama and Osaka Ikeda, tied to Momofuku Ando.
The official museum site states that guests can make Chicken Ramen by hand, create a custom CUPNOODLES package, and walk through exhibits showing how instant noodles became a global phenomenon.
It’s cheap pantry food treated like invention history, and that’s wonderfully strange.
Frietmuseum
The Frietmuseum describes itself as a unique fries museum and says it is open seven days a week on Vlamingstraat. That’s right, this is a museum dedicated to fries.
Visit Bruges states that the museum covers the history of the potato, Belgian fries, sauces, and dressings, with fries available in the medieval cellar.
This one is strange because fries are usually something you grab with a sandwich, not something you study panel by panel. Still, as a collector, it oddly makes sense. It’s an everyday thing telling a strange but intriguing cultural story.
Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum
Logan, Ohio, has a tiny museum built around one ordinary schoolroom tool. Explore Hocking Hills states that the Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum sits at the Hocking Hills Regional Welcome Center and includes more than 3,400 pencil sharpeners, with the added Frank Parades collection bringing the total estimate to about 5,000.
Ohio Magazine found that the newer museum space opened to the public in January. 20, 2024. The strange pull here is the huge variety, from animals, vehicles, and souvenirs to all sorts of novelty shapes.
In a world driven by computers, a museum about pencil sharpeners feels oddly nostalgic and fits perfectly in our strange museum exhibits list.