University of Tennessee Body Farm, Knoxville

The Anthropology Research Facility sits behind UT Medical Center on about 2.5 fenced acres. William Bass opened it in 1981 so donated bodies could decompose in known weather, and investigators could time real deaths from that record. The Forensic Anthropology Center sadly doesn't sell tours. Donors cannot walk the field in advance. Families may later see skeletal remains in the collection but not the outdoor lab. Western Carolina’s FOREST in Cullowhee, a couple of hours east, runs the same rule for cooler mountain decay. The local public trace is a lecture or a McClung Museum exhibit instead of a public attraction.

 

Sky Cave Retreats, southern Oregon

Private hillside cabins, no light, meals passed through a hatch. A four-night booking has run about $1,770, with a night to settle in and a night to come out around the dark stretch. Staff check once a day unless you arrange otherwise. In January 2025, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson booked five days and left after twelve hours. The fear in this attraction isn't so much the attraction itself but the ambience around its marketing if you explore the website and YouTube channel, plus Hoskinson's experience fleeing the facility less than a day into his stay.

Bug Appétit (New Orleans, LA)

Bug Appétit is the snack counter inside the Audubon Insectarium in New Orleans, open daily from about 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. with an Insectarium ticket. A chef cooks in front of you: chocolate cookies topped with a roasted cricket, cinnamon-sugar waxworms, chili-fried waxworms, and Cajun crickets, plus a cricket king cake at Mardi Gras and cricket pumpkin pie near Thanksgiving. The bugs are farmed and food-grade, mostly from Fluker Farms in Port Allen. The cookie is easy. The bowl of intact waxworms is the part where people stop.

FAA Portable Hypoxia Tent

The PROTE is a reduced-oxygen enclosure the FAA takes to airshows, including Oshkosh and Sun ’n Fun. The pressure stays normal but oxygen drops to about what you get at 25,000 feet, where useful consciousness lasts a few minutes. People describe tingling, numb hands, and a simple word puzzle turning impossible. It is free when the tent is on site. The signup line fills early.

Orfield Laboratories, Minneapolis

An acoustic lab with an anechoic chamber that has held the Guinness record for the quietest room on earth, measured around −24.9 decibels. Fiberglass wedges eat the sound. A standard tour runs about an hour and a half and includes roughly twenty minutes in the chamber; published rates have been about $200 a person, with cheaper group slots when they schedule them. A TikTok rumor claimed the lab would pay millions to anyone who lasted a full hour. That prize does not exist, and the staff is tired of the calls. What happens instead is that you start hearing your own body: heartbeat, blood in the neck, joints, blinking. Most people leave before the half-hour mark. Musician Questlove lasted 47 minutes and said he would not be the same.

Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Scottsdale

A nonprofit cryonics lab founded in 1972 that offers free on-site tours, usually twice a week, lasting 30 to 60 minutes. You see the operating room, the cool-down bay, and the patient-care bay, where members are stored in liquid-nitrogen dewars after vitrification. Whole-body preservation is priced at $220,000 or brain-only at $80,000. The tour is the part that costs nothing. More than 250 patients are in storage, including James Bedford who was frozen in 1967. Tours are not run while a body is being processed. It is the Body Farm’s opposite bet: the farm studies what a body does after death, and Alcor is charging the dead to wait.

Cave Peak Stairway, Utah

Cave Peak Stairway, Amangiri, Utah, is a guided way to walk a fear of heights out over open air. The resort’s via ferrata ends on a sky ladder of 120 metal slats, about 200 feet long, hung roughly 400 feet over the desert. Aman calls it the longest stairway of its kind in the northern hemisphere. The steps are open. The desert is the floor. You reach it on a three-hour route that already has you pulling along cables on the cliff, so the ladder is the last test, not the first. It is not a walk-up ticket. You book it through the resort, and you pay resort prices for the privilege of looking down on purpose.

McKamey Manor, Tennessee

McKamey Manor sits in Summertown, Tennessee, about seventy miles southwest of Nashville, in the same state this project calls home. Russ McKamey started it in a San Diego backyard and moved the operation here around 2015. There is no ticket. The price is a bag of dog food and a waiver that runs dozens of pages, read aloud, listing waterboarding, electric shock, tooth extraction, and fingernail removal as things that may happen. The advertised prize, $20,000 for finishing, has never been paid. No one has finished. Tours have run six to ten hours. A safe word is part of the pitch, and former participants say it was ignored.

The reviews are atrocious, and the reason is the treatment, not the acting. Laura Hertz Brotherton, who went in 2016, said she was waterboarded, tased, whipped, and hit in the face until she drove herself to a hospital. She left with a swollen face, a hairline fracture in her foot, and a reopened surgical scar on her knee. A lifeguard hired to handle the aftermath described a man whose eye was full of blood and another whose nose looked broken. A petition to shut it down gathered nearly 194,000 signatures. The Tennessee Attorney General’s office said in 2023 that it was reviewing complaints. Criminal charges filed against McKamey were later dropped. A claim that a reviewer had a toe cut off circulates with the rest of the lore; the injuries that show up in hospital photos and interviews are the foot, the face, and the eye. McKamey has said nobody was ever seriously hurt, apart from one heart attack, and that you can die at Disneyland too.