Oddities & curiosities in Denver
Oddity shops, curiosity cabinets and taxidermy counters: 25 of the strangest small storefronts in Denver, Crawford Hotel Lost & Found Wall, The Learned Lemur and The Shakespeare Elm among them. The kind of quirky, offbeat retail you leave with a story and a jar of something. They spread across Union Station / LoDo, Capitol Hill / East Colfax, City Park, Park Hill and 18 more areas, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. 6 of them cost nothing. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
-
Crawford Hotel Lost & Found Wall
When crews restored Union Station they pulled apart the original wooden waiting benches and found a century of stuff that had slipped through the seams — coins, tokens, claim tickets, luggage tags, wallet photos, trading cards, scraps of newspaper. Instead of tossing it, they framed it as artwork and mounted it on a wall in the Crawford Hotel's second-floor south wing corridor. It's a quiet little museum of strangers who passed through the hall over generations, and almost nobody walking the station below knows it's up there. You don't need to be a guest to wander up and look.
-
The Learned Lemur
Set inside a restored Victorian house on East Colfax, the Learned Lemur is Denver's longtime oddities dealership (going since 2015) — real, ethically sourced skulls, one-of-a-kind taxidermy, true antiques, and local art priced for every budget. In the back you'll find a tiny apothecary and reading room, and the shop runs a monthly artist market plus a sideshow called the Conspiracy Circus. It took Westword's Best Oddities Shop nod for a reason. This is the place to buy your date a beetle in resin instead of flowers.
-
The Shakespeare Elm
In the southeast corner of City Park stands an ordinary-looking elm that is secretly a piece of Shakespeare. It was planted on April 23, 1916, exactly 300 years to the day after the playwright died, grown from a cutting taken off the elm at his grave in Stratford-upon-Avon. A small bronze plaque at the base is the only thing marking it, so thousands of joggers and dog-walkers pass it every week with no idea what it is. It has outlived the Dutch elm disease that killed most of its neighbors.
-
Park Hill Treasures
An antique and artisan market crammed into a former bank branch on a stretch of East Colfax most people only drive through. The real find is the old bank vault, still standing, now leased by artist Catherine Beattie as a tiny studio where she sells jewelry made from repurposed antique tins alongside hand-painted furniture, the goods 'so precious they're kept in a vault.' Around 85 Denver and Colorado vendors fill the rest of the space with vintage, art, glassware, and oddities. Nobody puts this on a Denver itinerary.
-
The Oddemporium
An oddities shop crammed floor-to-ceiling on Antique Row, with arguably more items per square inch than any other curiosity store in Denver. Historical medical equipment, antique glass, taxidermy, and loose doll parts share shelf space with vintage furniture and fancy dress. It hides in the row of antique storefronts on South Broadway that most people walk right past on their way somewhere shinier. Everything has a story and the staff will tell it to you.
-
910Arts (former 7-Up bottling plant turned artist live-work complex)
Most people only hit the Santa Fe Arts District on First Friday, when it's mobbed — so almost no one knows you can just walk into 910Arts on a random weekday and roam the halls past open studio doors. The building was a 1920s livery, then a Seven-Up bottling plant, and the industrial bones (brick, loading bays) are still right there under the lofts where artists actually live above their own studios. It reads less like a gallery you found on a map and more like a place you accidentally wandered into. Studio hours vary by artist, so it's a treasure hunt — some doors open, some not.
-
Noctavia Obscure
A barely-a-year-old occult shop tucked into a storefront on Santa Fe Drive, with a full in-house apothecary where the goods are hand-crafted in ceremony from botanicals and curios. No tourist guide has caught up to it yet — you find it the way you're supposed to find a place like this, by hearing about it. Strange goods, sacred smoke, ritual tools, and books, curated to serve a spread of traditions rather than one aesthetic.
-
HORRID
Tucked down S. Acoma behind the Brutal Poodle, HORRID started as one woman's spare-bedroom horror brand and has metastasized into a whole 'House of Horrors' block. Inside you'll find bones, occult candles, taxidermy-adjacent oddities, art and patches from Denver indie makers, plus a horror-themed coffee shop (SCR3AM & SUGAR), a tattoo studio, and Creepatorium, an alternative event space. It's death-positive and witchy in a punk-DIY way, and it stays off the standard metaphysical-shop guides entirely.
-
Galapago Space
It's a literal residential garage on Galapago Street that someone hung gallery walls inside, and you get in through the back alley like you're not supposed to be there. Outside of opening receptions it's appointment-only, with no signage, hosting rotating shows tied to the Sculptxr Group, a roughly fifty-artist Colorado collective. The whole thing runs on conversation and curiosity rather than sales, so you're basically stepping into someone's experiment. Even people who hit Santa Fe Art Walk every month tend to have no idea it's a block away.
-
Rocky Mountain Punk Nature Art & Oddities
A completely unremarkable Wadsworth strip-mall storefront hiding handmade bone jewelry, pinned-moth-and-butterfly nature domes, insect art, houseplants, and vintage music memorabilia. Run by self-taught artists Emily and Joe Salazar, who've been making nature art since 2013, with work from about fifteen other local makers crammed in alongside. It doubles as a small art collective. You would never guess it's here from the parking lot.
-
Chicky the Prairie Dog
In the Gems and Minerals hall sits a roughly nine-foot Brazilian amethyst geode, and if you crouch and look into the hole at its base you'll find Chicky, a taxidermied prairie dog frozen mid-wave from inside the crystals. The geode arrived from Montevideo in an anonymous hardwood crate with no paperwork and sat in storage for years; once identified, the hole at the bottom became an opportunity for a little institutional mischief. Westword named it Denver's Best Hidden Gem in 2025, and people still walk right past it.
-
Walker Mansion Ruins and Unfinished Summer White House
On Mount Falcon, tucked off the Castle Trail, sit the lightning-gutted stone bones of John Brisben Walker's 10-bedroom Italian-masonry chalet — the Cosmopolitan magazine tycoon's mansion that burned in 1918. A short spur leads to something even stranger: a Colorado yule-marble cornerstone laid on July 4, 1914, for a 'Summer White House' for U.S. presidents that was never built (Walker tried to fund it with schoolkids' pennies). Most hikers walk right past both with no idea they're standing in someone's abandoned dream of a presidential retreat.
-
Morrison Natural History Museum
This storefront-sized museum south of Morrison is so small you'd drive past it on the way to Red Rocks, but its staff actually discovered baby dinosaur trackways in the foothills — including running infant-sauropod prints and baby Stegosaurus tracks small enough to be covered by a coffee mug. There's an open fossil-preparation lab where you can watch researchers chip rock under a magnifier, and many of the specimens out front were found within a few miles. It punches so far above its size that the discoveries made national science press.
-
Odd Aly-Kat Emporium
Brighton's most unexpected new storefront: a 5,800-square-foot antique mall packed into a century-old Main Street building, opened in 2025 after a rough construction slog. Inside it's a warren of vendor booths — local art, antiques, taxidermy and curiosities — plus a custom-framing shop and a small photo studio run by the owner's family in back. Vendors rent anything from a single $30 shelf to a $550 booth, so the stock turns over and you never know what oddity surfaces next. Almost nobody outside Brighton knows it's there yet.
-
Wood Shark Trading Company
Founded in 2002 by Jim Corey and now run by his son Matt, Wood Shark Trading Company packs crystals, incense, Buddha statues, swords, knives, taxidermy, and genuine oddities into a single family-owned stall inside the Outlets at Castle Rock — a chaotic, deeply weird cabinet of curiosities in an otherwise ordinary outlet mall. Yelp shows it active as of March 2026.
-
Seven Keys Lodge Key Room (formerly Baldpate Inn)
Built in 1917 and now operating as Seven Keys Lodge, this mountain inn's key room drips from ceiling to floor with over 20,000 donated keys from around the world — including claimed specimens from Westminster Abbey, Frankenstein's Castle, and Mozart's wine cellar — and admission is completely free. The collection began during World War I when guests, inspired by the inn's literary namesake (Earl Derr Biggers' novel The Seven Keys to Baldpate), started leaving their most unusual keys behind.
-
The Lighthouse Bookstore
The Lighthouse Bookstore has anchored the Pearl Street Mall since 1986, filling two floors with metaphysical books, tarot decks, crystals, and an ever-rotating roster of psychic readers available for walk-in aura photos, palm readings, and tarot sessions daily from 11:30am to 6pm. It is Boulder's best-known destination for spiritual curiosity and the genuinely strange.
-
Medusa Gothic
Medusa Gothic is a Fort Collins boutique stocking gothic apparel, witchy jewelry, crystals, herbs, tarot decks, premade spell kits, and locally made oddities — open Tuesday through Sunday. Recent reviewers praise the knowledgeable staff and surprising depth of selection, from occult supplies to gothic home decor and clothing up to 3X.
-
Hotel de Paris Museum
Built in 1875 by Louis Dupuy — an army deserter and culinary eccentric who imported French wines and fresh oysters to a Colorado silver-mining town — this impeccably preserved Victorian hotel is now a museum where 90% of the original furnishings remain exactly where Dupuy left them, and staff regularly report his apparition still wandering the halls in period attire.
-
Buffalo Rose
The Buffalo Rose is genuinely Colorado's oldest bar, operating continuously since 1859, and its main venue sits above the preserved art deco "Golden Plunge" indoor pool built in 1928 — a real basement swimming pool with a documented ghost story about a young girl whose presence is still reported by staff. It's a live music venue, full restaurant, and bonafide piece of Colorado territorial history all under one haunted roof.
-
Tiny Town & Railroad
Built starting in 1915 by a moving-company owner for his daughter, Tiny Town is a genuine foothills curiosity: 100+ hand-crafted one-sixth-scale buildings spread across a shaded creek-side property, with rideable miniature steam trains (and a replica Rio Grande diesel) circling the grounds on 15-inch gauge track. It has operated continuously for over a century and is currently open for the 2026 season daily through Labor Day.
-
Fifty-Two 80s: A Totally Awesome Shop
Crammed into 900 square feet on South Broadway, Fifty-Two 80s is equal parts retail shop, personal museum, and time capsule — 6,000-plus items spanning roughly 1975 to 1995, all sourced from Colorado basements and attics. Owners Dede Thompson and Tony Vecchio claim to run the first store in the country devoted exclusively to 1980s merchandise, and the place backs that up: working Atari systems, boomboxes, CRT TVs running period commercials, over 200 varieties of non-sports trading card packs (reportedly the largest assortment in Denver), vintage fast-food glassware, He-Man, Garbage Pail Kids, and costumes you didn't know you needed. Atlas Obscura called it "a tightly-packed womb of nostalgia," and that's not hyperbole — there is no online store, no chain, just one slightly overwhelming room that smells faintly of bubblegum while cassette-era pop plays overhead. The "Yo! Nineties" signage inside is an in-store section, not a second location, which means even locals who've heard of it tend to underestimate the scope of what's actually in there.
-
RitualCravt
A coven-run, Indigenous-owned metaphysical shop and folk-magic school running since 2015, with a 200+ herb apothecary, ritual tools, oddities, and a mini-museum of historical witchcraft objects. House Witches make custom potions, dressed candles, and charm bags during shop hours.
-
CC Oddities by Cera
An ethically sourced oddities and curiosities shop run by artist Cera, stocked with responsibly foraged or gifted specimens (no animals harmed), bones, minerals, and antiques. Hosts a monthly Community Night gathering for creative work and connection.
-
Herbs & Arts
A metaphysical healing sanctuary on Colfax since 1993, known for in-house ritual oils, incenses, and bath salts blended in ceremony and charged to moon phases and astrological timing.
Oddities & curiosities in Denver — FAQ
Which oddity shops & curiosities in Denver are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: The Shakespeare Elm, Galapago Space and The Lighthouse Bookstore. The Shakespeare Elm — In the southeast corner of City Park stands an ordinary-looking elm that is secretly a piece of Shakespeare.
Where in Denver are they?
Across Union Station / LoDo, Capitol Hill / East Colfax, City Park, Park Hill and Baker / South Broadway (Antique Row) and 17 more. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Are any of the oddity shops & curiosities in Denver free?
Yes — 6 are free to visit, including Crawford Hotel Lost & Found Wall, The Shakespeare Elm and 910Arts (former 7-Up bottling plant turned artist live-work complex). The rest are mostly low-cost.
Is this a good weird date in Denver?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at The Shakespeare Elm, for instance: Make a low-stakes scavenger hunt of it: hunt down the unmarked tree near 17th & Colorado Blvd using only the plaque clue, then sit under it and read each other a sonnet off your phone before walking deeper into the park.
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 Denver guide.