The Most Mystical Places in the United States
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most mystical places in the United States are Bodie, Serpent Mound and Jacob's Well (Texas). The list covers 5 mystical places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The United States has its own kind of mystery: signs left on rock by peoples who kept no written records, towns abandoned when the gold ran out, and springs that open into water-filled caves beneath the dry limestone hills of Texas. Some of these places are ancient, others barely a century and a half old, and all of them leave questions unanswered.
Bodie, a gold-mining town in the hills east of the Sierra Nevada, stands with its houses, church and saloons left as they were when the last residents departed. Serpent Mound in Ohio is an earthen effigy of a snake that uncoils along a ridge for hundreds of metres. Jacob's Well in the Texas Hill Country is an artesian spring whose clear water drops into a deep underwater cave. Newspaper Rock in Utah crowds a single cliff panel with hundreds of petroglyphs made over many centuries, and Hamilton Pool near Austin is a collapsed grotto where a waterfall pours from an overhanging rim into a green pool.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bodie | Ghost town | |
| 2 | Serpent Mound | Geoglyph | |
| 3 | Jacob's Well (Texas) | Blue hole | |
| 4 | Newspaper Rock | Petroglyph | |
| 5 | Hamilton Pool Preserve | Blue hole |
01 Bodie
United States38.212° N 119.012° W
Image by Jmezes from Pixabay Bodie sits in a bare, wind-scoured basin at about 8,379 feet in California's Mono County, and the first thing that strikes you is how complete it still looks. Roughly 110 wooden buildings stand along the dusty grid of streets, their paint long gone to silver, many of their interiors still holding what was left behind.
Did you know? California has named Bodie its official state gold rush ghost town.
02 Serpent Mound
United States39.026° N 83.430° W
Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis derivative work: MagentaGreen · Public domain On a wooded bluff above Ohio Brush Creek, a low ridge of earth winds for 1,348 feet (411 m) in the shape of a snake: a head at one end, open-jawed around an oval, a body thrown into a series of curves, and a tail wound into a tight triple coil. Serpent Mound is the largest known serpent effigy anywhere in the world.
Did you know? In the 19th century some Christians believed the earthen serpent marked the location of the Garden of Eden.
03 Jacob's Well (Texas)
United States · 24.5 km from San Marcos30.034° N 98.126° W
Larry D. Moore · CC BY 4.0 Jacob's Well looks like nothing more than a round blue pool at the bottom of Cypress Creek — a 12-foot-wide opening in the limestone that people have swum in for generations.
Did you know? In 1924 the spring gushed with such artesian pressure that its water rose about 6 feet into the air above the creek.
04 Newspaper Rock
Newspaper Rock State Historic Monument
United States37.988° N 109.518° W
katsrcool · CC BY 2.0 Newspaper Rock is a single panel of sandstone, but it holds one of the densest concentrations of rock art in the American Southwest. On a vertical face of Wingate sandstone about 200 square feet in area, beside Indian Creek in southeastern Utah, more than 650 figures crowd against each other: deer, bison and pronghorn, human figures, riders and a host of abstract symbols whose meaning is lost.
Did you know? Look closely and you will find many footprints with six toes, a motif researchers link to the inherited condition of polydactyly.
05 Hamilton Pool Preserve
United States · 37.7 km from Austin30.342° N 98.127° W
Image by ravik777 from Pixabay A jade-green pool lies beneath a half-collapsed limestone dome, and from the lip of the overhang a waterfall about 50 feet (15 m) high drops straight into it. Hamilton Pool, in the Texas Hill Country west of Austin, formed thousands of years ago when erosion brought down the roof of a grotto carved by an underground river, leaving a natural bowl walled by cliffs and half-roofed by a great arching ledge.
Did you know? Traces of human culture found around the canyon date back more than 8,000 years, drawn by its water, shelter and rich plant life.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most mystical places in the United States?
- On our list, Bodie ranks first, followed by Serpent Mound and Jacob's Well (Texas).
- Who built Serpent Mound?
- Its builders are still debated. Archaeologists have attributed it to the Adena culture or to the later Fort Ancient culture, both of which lived in the Ohio Valley.
- Why is Bodie preserved the way it is?
- Bodie is maintained in a state of arrested decay: the buildings are kept from collapsing but not restored, and many still hold the furniture and goods left behind by their last occupants.
- How did Newspaper Rock get its name?
- The panel is so densely covered with petroglyphs, made by peoples of the region over roughly two thousand years, that it was likened to a page of a newspaper.
- How many mystical places are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 5 mystical places.