Oddities & curiosities in Chicago
Oddity shops, curiosity cabinets and taxidermy counters: 10 of the strangest small storefronts in Chicago, Alchemy Arts, Sideshow Gallery and Augustine's Spiritual Goods among them. The kind of quirky, offbeat retail you leave with a story and a jar of something. They spread across Edgewater, Logan Square, Bridgeport, Near West Side and 4 more areas, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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Alchemy Arts
Open since 1989, Alchemy Arts bills itself as Chicago's most complete occult and metaphysical supply store, and the inventory backs it up: hundreds of herbs, roots and resins, custom-blended oils, hoodoo curios, and a deep wall of new, used and rare occult books. It doubles as a community hub for pagan and occult lectures and classes. The congregational Wiccan group Center of the Elemental Spirit gathers here for ritual after the new and full moons.
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Sideshow Gallery
Opened in 2013 by artist Anne Elliott and tattoo-shop co-owner Cheri Basak, this Western Avenue storefront is an immersive curiosity shop and art-gallery hybrid. Taxidermy specimens and one-of-a-kind vintage artifacts compete for space with handmade jewelry, books, tarot decks, herbs, and candles. It also hosts markets, pop-ups, and rotating exhibitions, and runs classes ranging from tarot to taxidermy.
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Augustine's Spiritual Goods
A South Side spiritual boutique that calls itself 'an apothecary for the soul,' specializing in hand-made hoodoo and conjure work. The owners blend their own oils, washes, baths and bath salts and assemble mojo bags and dressed candles on site. Crystals, incense, amulets, books and other empowerment tools round out the shelves.
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Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded this settlement house in 1889, and beyond its serious social-reform legacy it carries Chicago's most enduring supernatural folklore. In 1913 thousands mobbed the house to glimpse a rumored 'Devil Baby,' and a second-floor bedroom has long been tied to ghost stories, with staff reporting footsteps and cold drafts. The original Hull mansion still stands on the UIC campus, preserved as a free museum.
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International Museum of Surgical Science
North America's only museum devoted to the history of surgery occupies a stately 1917 lakefront mansion modeled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Among more than 7,000 artifacts are an Austrian amputation saw from around 1500, an iron lung, a reconstructed apothecary, antique medical instruments, and the Hall of Murals depicting surgery through the ages. The grandeur of the Gold Coast mansion makes the cabinets of bone saws and bloodletting tools feel especially uncanny.
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Covet Oddities & Macabre Gallery
Run by Ben and Erica Santine, who moved their collection from Austin to Logan Square, Covet is part oddities shop, part museum, part occult gallery. Shelves hold death-themed collectibles, preserved animal specimens, photographs, crystals, books, and apparel from independent makers. An occult cabinet displays artifacts connected to Aleister Crowley and Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey.
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Andy's Art, Antiques & Oddities
This LGBTQ+-owned shop mixes the beautiful, the bizarre, and the just plain cool, blending antique furniture with vintage artwork, curios, nostalgia, and work from local artisans. Inventory updates frequently, so the oddities on display shift between visits. A friendly shop dog named Sophie often greets browsers. Note: the shop recently moved to 1138 W Thorndale Ave in Edgewater.
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Nuclear Energy (Henry Moore sculpture)
Henry Moore's 1967 bronze marks the exact spot where Fermi's team triggered the world's first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction under Stagg Field's bleachers in 1942. The bulbous crown was designed to read simultaneously as a mushroom cloud, a skull, and a cathedral dome — it was cast in over 50 pieces in Berlin and welded together like a giant 3-D jigsaw puzzle.
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Ed Paschke Art Center
A free museum ten miles from the loop devoted entirely to Ed Paschke, the Chicago Imagist painter whose neon, glitch-distorted portraits looked like TV static made flesh decades before anyone called it that — his actual studio easel and materials are preserved alongside rotating shows by living Chicago artists working in his hallucinatory vein.
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Armadillo's Pillow
A far-north-side used-and-rare bookshop where the shelving logic mixes spirituality, the occult, history and psychology with literary fiction, and the browsing is meant to be slow — there's seating built in so you can "get lost among the shelves for hours." Incense, candles and handmade jewelry share space with the stacks, and it's been recommended in print as the city's best bookstore "for wanderers."
Oddities & curiosities in Chicago — FAQ
Which oddity shops & curiosities in Chicago are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: Sideshow Gallery, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and Covet Oddities & Macabre Gallery. Sideshow Gallery — Opened in 2013 by artist Anne Elliott and tattoo-shop co-owner Cheri Basak, this Western Avenue storefront is an immersive curiosity shop and art-gallery hybrid.
Where in Chicago are they?
Across Edgewater, Logan Square, Bridgeport, Near West Side and Gold Coast and 3 more. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Is this a good weird date in Chicago?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at Sideshow Gallery, for instance: Poke through the taxidermy and natural specimens, then pick out a tarot deck or oddity to take home as a memento of the day.
How were these oddity shops & curiosities chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Chicago guide.