Dear Atlas: Where Can I Find the Most Unusual Festivals in the U.S.?

* * *

Dear Atlas,

I love a niche, regional festival. Are there any really unusual ones in the U.S. that I should consider attending? And how do I be respectful as a visitor to the community throwing one?

In the nichest of niches, the usual rules of responsible travel apply: come with curiosity and humility. Don’t be the urbanite hipster rolling in to chase the “kitsch” or “folkloric.” Don’t be a voyeur, gawker, or judge—treat these celebrations as opportunities to converse with people who may have different backgrounds, political convictions, and zany obsessions. And be mindful that in many of the festivals below, small towns are exploring their capacities to welcome and accommodate swelling numbers of visitors. Shop local, support independent businesses. Ultimately, get in the spirit of things, and just enjoy!

1. Mothman Festival (Point Pleasant, West Virginia)

In 1966, strange sightings of men in black and a giant flying creature with red eyes took hold of the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The creature, known as “Mothman” (picture a combination of Sasquatch and a Marvel hero), is now celebrated over a September weekend with a street fair drawing over 20,000 attendees. Described as a crossover between a comic con and paranormal conference, the Mothman Festival boasts a lot of family-friendly fun, including a 5k race, live music, cosplay, and a popular bus tour to a “TNT area,” site of WWII ammo bunkers and a “top secret West Virginia Ordnance Work facility.”

2. Jaialdi Basque Festival (Boise, Idaho)

Did you know that the densest population of Basques per capita outside the Basque country is in Boise, Idaho? I didn’t either, until I showed up hungover in Boise and was resuscitated by the most delicious croquetas at tavern-like Bar Gernika. There’s a whole “Basque Block” of delectable offerings: a particularly charming eatery nearby is an upscale pantry-restaurant called the Basque Market, with a rotating menu of elegantly skewered pintxos, bocadillos, and tortillas. The six-day Jaialdi festival takes place in the summer, drawing visitors from as far as the actual Basque country to celebrate their culture with Basque-American brethren. There’s the standard festival fare of Basque food and music, but don’t miss “sports night,” a traditional Basque competition of farm sports like woodchopping, wagon-lifting, and hay bale-throwing.

3. The Shannon Taggart Symposium (Lily Dale, New York)

I first heard about this gathering because I’m a big fan of Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast hosted by Phil Ford and J.F. Martel, two university professors who nerd out about David Lynch, tarot, the strange and the occult, and rips in the fabric of reality. If you’re surreal-curious, what better place to join them and Weird Studies enthusiasts than Lily Dale, famed home base of spiritualists and mediums? What I love about Ford and Martel is that they don’t pedal the woo-woo, but rather interrogate it with literary enthusiasm, an open mind and curiosity, and a genuine appreciation for artistic expressions; topics at this year’s symposium include the act of ectoplasm, the mystery of a talking mongoose, and theosophical architecture in Hollywood.

4. Pierogi Fest (Whiting, Indiana)

Yes, there will be beer and millions of pierogies, with fillings ranging from potato and cheese to alligator. There will also be buscias galore–Eastern European grandmothers with heads full of curlers, necks dripping with pearls, and eyelids heavy with electric-blue eyeshadows, competing in variations of the same outrageous floral house dress. Not to be left out are the dads of Whiting, who in the old days were known to mow lawns in their old Sunday-best outfits, now honored during the festival as the “Landmower Brigade” and in their socks-and-sandals best. The Lake Michigan town is only a half-hour drive from Chicago, and draws international visitors for this three-day block party featuring attractions such as a pierogi eating contest and a pierogi toss, in which you slather your hands with butter and throw pierogi at your catching partner.

5. Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta (Albuquerque, New Mexico)

Who says the sight of hot air balloons filling the sky is reserved for Instagram pictures of Cappadocia? Right here in the US of A, balloon aviators take flight over the New Mexican desert for a stretch of days every October, vessels glowing like lanterns in the dawn sky. Although watching the ethereal balloons’ mass ascension requires an early wake-up, festival-goers will find plenty of other attractions later in the day: chainsaw carving contests and auctions, skydiving, and drone light shows. Book hotels early and hot air balloon rides even earlier. Parking can be difficult, so renting bikes and riding them out to the field pre-dawn is a smart strategy. Pack a blanket, wool socks, a thermos of coffee, and breakfast burritos, and brace for the magic of the balloons rising in the crisp, nascent day.

6. Easter Jeep Safari (Moab, Utah)

Every Easter, monster trucks descend upon the desert landscape of Moab, Utah, for a nine-day extravaganza of trail rides. Stand in downtown Moab for the Jeep parade and feast your eyes on a veritable freak show of refitted Jeeps—stripped to their frames, fortified, painted over, militarized, Frankensteined. The campings and motels in town will be full of off-road enthusiasts, and they’ll tell you the unofficial, unsanctioned races are where the hardcore stuff happens. Find Potato Salad Hill, post up in a camping chair, and watch the hardiest drivers attempt to climb the near-vertical hill, many toppling over backwards and flipping their car. The crowd cheers either way. Everything that happens on Potato Salad Hill is probably totally illicit, but oh-so in the spirit of the Easter Jeep Safari.

7. Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival (New Orleans, Louisiana)

New Orleans is a writers’ town, and a literary festival here is anything but a stuffy hotel conference. Kick things off with a shrimp boil and blue crab in the French Quarter with Mister Gregory, the festival president, before heading to Hotel Monteleone for a riotous opening party. Fill your notebooks during workshops, book signings, and panels with luminary speakers—last year’s line-up included Gillian Flynn, Yuri Herrera, and Michael Cunningham—and meet local authors over cocktails at a cabaret show. The Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival is held the same weekend, so be sure to catch a workshop on queer poetry or the Drag Brunch Named Desire, and don’t miss, at any cost, the Stella Shouting Contest, where you can channel your inner Stanley for the most cathartic cri-de-coeur.

8. Geode Family Festival (Keokuk, Iowa)

Lovers of rocks, minerals, fossils, and crystals—this is a convention for you. The convergence of the Mississippi and Des Moines Rivers make this southeastern corner of Iowa fertile ground for geode-hunting, and this three-day festival every September draws experienced guides who lead outings to off-the-radar dig sites. Bring a bucket that you’ll load up with geodes for $25, and learn to crack the stone balls open to reveal the shiny crystals within. Want to tell your friends you’ve gone from a rock puppy to a seasoned rock hound, hauling buckets of geodes the size of snowballs and full of smoky quartz? Road trip through the corn fields and get thyself to Keokuk.

9. Florida Keys Underwater Music Festival (Big Pine Key, Florida)

The Florida Keys are a haven for the offbeat and the weird, the creative and the carnivalesque. One of my most cherished memories from a writing residency in Key West is shooting a music video on a houseboat that had a large opening on its base floor, with direct access to the seawater beneath. Musicians gathered around the opening and played instruments live, drawing a large manatee to swim by and greet us, grooving to the sound waves. This one-day music festival in July will give you a taste of that: mermaids and fish-costumed divers “playing” French horn or trombone on the ocean floor, surrounded by yellowtail snappers and the occasional barracuda. The instruments are made with non-corrosive metals by a local artist, and a real underwater sound system is rigged up so that divers can hear nautical songs such as “Yellow Submarine.” The concert raises awareness for coral reef preservation and eco-friendly diving, and, if you didn’t bring your scuba gear, you can listen to it broadcast on local station 104.1 FM while staking out a seat for the after party at the Looe Key Reef Resort’s tiki bar.

* * *

Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer and the editor-in-chief of Off Assignment, an independent literary travel publication. She grew up between Provence, northern China, and Shanghai, and graduated from Yale University in 2015. She worked in foreign policy before becoming an itinerant writer. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, LitHub, Electric Literature, The Millions, WBUR, The Florida Review Online, Litro, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” was selected for Best American Essays 2022. Her debut novel, River East, River West, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in January 2024.