To ease you into the oddities, I have started with the tamest festival of the bunch. The Lower Keys Underwater Music Festival is exactly what the name says. This festival attracts snorkelers and divers to the Florida Keys to experience a music festival in a completely different environment. While this festival is different from other music festivals for several reasons, one of the biggest is that your favorite artist won’t be there performing. Instead, the boats that bring people to the Looe Key Reef drop speakers into the water and play the local WWUS 104.1 FM radio station. You can expect to hear a lot of Jimmy Buffett on the nautical-themed playlist. But to compensate for the lack of a live performance, many attendees bring musical instruments underwater and pretend to play along with the music. While this festival is a great deal of strange fun, it aims to increase awareness and teach people about reef protection. This slightly peculiar festival is an excellent example of having a good time for a good cause.

Number two on this list involves attaching skis to an outhouse and racing down a small ski hill. Apparently, outhouse races are a thing, but they typically take place on a flat road with wheels attached to the bottom. When a homeowner in Sapphire Valley had the genius idea to bring that concept to snow, the Great Outhouse Races were born! The first race took place in 2006, and the event has entertained locals and visitors alike ever since. The first event had about 100 spectators, but after moving the race to President’s Day Weekend, they have seen crowds of up to 3,000 people. The race has a winner, a runner-up, and several awards that a committee votes on. Awards include the People’s Choice, Best Constructed, Most Humorous, and Best Theme. To enter the race, it costs $100 with a homemade outhouse and $125 to enter and rent an outhouse from previous races. The money generated by entry fees and food and beverage sales is donated to a different local charity each year.

If you love lumber and flannel shirts, you should make your way down to Hayward, Wisconsin, the home of the Lumberjack World Championships. Hayward was the location for the very first Lumberjack World Championship in 1960, and the competition continues to be held there to this day. Although the competition started small, it now brings in competitors and spectators from across the globe. Each year, there are close to 100 competitors and an estimated 12,000 spectators in the beautiful Lumberjack Bowl, where the event is held. Competitions include sawing, chopping, speed climbing, logrolling, and boom running. While lumberjacks and lumberjills used to compete for the glory and bragging rights, they now compete for over $50,000 in prize money!

The Great Outhouse Race’s older and cleaner sibling is aptly located in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The World Championship Running of the Tubs was started in 2005 as a way to pay homage to the town’s history and its connection with baths and bathing. The racecourse is located on Central Avenue between the historic Bathhouse Row and the shops and restaurants of downtown Hot Springs. The Visit Hot Springs Marketing Director, Bill Solleder, said, “The Running of the Tubs is another great family-friendly celebration popular with our residents and visitors. The crowds lining Bathhouse Row and joining in the wacky fun by shooting Super Soakers at the racers have been growing every year as word spreads about this super free event.”

The race features teams of five members racing their tubs down the street as spectators pelt them with water balloons from both sides of the race course. The race rules are “subject to change at the whim of the judges,” but a few rules usually stay the same. Each team must have five members: the captain, the bath towel attendant, the bathmat attendant, the soap attendant, and the loofah mitt attendant. The captain must ride in the tub while the other four team members must push the tub with one hand while holding onto the item that they are the attendant of with their other hand. Racers are competing for the coveted Steuart Pennington Cup, the highest honor one can achieve in bathtub racing.

Hopefully, you have been nicely eased in because this one is a doozy. So, Bredo Morstøl was cross-country skiing in Norway when he died of a heart attack. Bredo’s grandson, Trygve Bauge, put his grandfather’s body on dry ice and had it shipped to the United States in 1989. Trygve stored his grandfather’s body in liquid nitrogen to cryogenically freeze him. But, after Trygve was deported, the duties of keeping the body frozen were passed to Trygve’s sister Aud. She continued to keep her grandfather’s body cryogenically frozen in a shack behind her house until she was evicted in 1995. The city of Nederland, where Aud had been living and storing her grandfather, investigated the property and soon made it illegal to store a dead body on your property. But, since Bredo Morstøl had been there so long, he was grandfathered in (no pun intended). After news of this broke, Tuff Shed donated one of their sheds to store Grandpa Morstøl, and the CEO of Delta Tech took on the duties of keeping the body stocked with dry ice. Somehow, all of that led to the creation of the “Frozen Dead Guy Days” event.

The event has been held in Nederland every year since 2002. The event’s growing popularity led to the decision to move the festivities to Estes Park, which could better handle the tens of thousands of people who attend the event every year. 2023 marked the first year that the event was held in Estes Park, and the CEO of Visit Estes Park, Kara Franker, said, “We are more than happy and excited about how it turned out. You know, this was the first year of something that we plan to build on for the future, and I think it was a great event for the first year. It was a team effort. This would not have happened if there weren’t so many people who were dead set on making Frozen Dead Guy Days the best event it could be.” Events at the festival include coffin races, polar plunges, frozen t-shirt contests, ice turkey bowling, brain freeze contests, frozen salmon toss, and many more frozen dead guy-themed events. I’m sure you now have more questions than answers, but this is where I leave you.

I said it before and am saying it again: people are weird. There’s nothing wrong with that; just stating the facts. But this melting pot we call home is full of fun and strange festivals and events, from underwater concerts to something too strange for me to wrap my head around. Whether you are looking to have fun racing things that weren’t supposed to move or celebrating a weird local story about a backyard cryogenic chamber, there is something for everyone. Be sure to check out some of these strange festivals across America, and maybe consider doing something similarly weird in your town! Don’t try to replicate the last one, though. Please.