Washington County, NY is home to some of the most unique things to do in upstate New York – and most visitors have no idea they exist.

Tucked between the Adirondacks and the Vermont border, this corner of the state has quietly accumulated one of the most wonderfully odd collections of sights, stories, and places.

You won’t find anything quite like it anywhere else in the Northeast. A Bigfoot sanctuary. A Victorian taxidermy museum frozen in 1909. A real wizardry school. A farmhouse where a folk art legend was discovered at age 78.

Washington County doesn’t just do ‘beautiful.’ It does quirky, in the best possible way.

Some towns have a mascot. Whitehall has an official cryptid.

In 1976, three teenagers encountered a 400-pound creature outside of town, a sighting that snowballed into eleven witnesses, eight of them law enforcement officers from three departments. The Beast of Whitehall made national news. In response, the town passed legislation declaring itself a Bigfoot sanctuary and launching an annual Sasquatch Calling Festival every September.

Skene Valley Country Club: Tee Off With a 12-Foot Sasquatch

Yet the story actually starts a year earlier, when Skene Valley Country Club owner Clifford Sparks came face-to-face with a glowing-eyed, seven-foot creature on the Hole 1 tee box before dawn. He turned it into a marketing opportunity: sculptor Steve Mestyan was commissioned to create a nearly 12-foot steel-wire Sasquatch, putter in hand, standing on the exact spot of the encounter.

Golf-Squatch is part art installation, part legend, and entirely worth a detour, whether you’re a golfer or not.

Skene Manor: A Castle on the Mountainside

While you’re in Whitehall, look up. Clinging to the side of the mountain above the village is a three-story Victorian Gothic mansion built of grey sandstone, constructed in 1874 for a New York State Supreme Court judge.

Since then, Skene Manor has accumulated ghost stories, changed hands repeatedly, and came within a whisker of demolition before the community rallied to save it. Today, it’s open for free tours Friday through Sunday, May through mid-December. Stop for lunch in the Victorian Tea Room, which feels like stepping back in time. And the views of Whitehall from the grounds? Worth the drive alone.

The Grey School of Wizardry: Where Magic Has An Address

Also in Whitehall is the physical campus of the Grey School of Wizardry, a 501(c)3 nonprofit educational institution that has been teaching the academic and practical disciplines of wizardry since 2004.

The school’s nine-acre Highspire campus, with its mature woods and gardens, hosts an annual Conclave, weekend intensives, and specialty workshops, with a residential boarding program in development. The curriculum spans sixteen departments. However, the campus isn’t open for drop-in visits. Instead, the school invites guests to attend scheduled events, with upcoming gatherings listed on their website.

This is not cosplay or LARPing. A real school for wizards exists in Washington County, and the quirky town of Whitehall – home to Bigfoot, a mountaintop castle, and the birthplace of the U.S. Navy – is the ideal home for it.

Granville has a library. On its second floor is one of the most extraordinary rooms in upstate New York: the Pember Library & Museum of Natural History, which opened in 1909 and looks almost exactly as it did then. Thousands of taxidermied specimens from around the world, arranged in wood-and-glass cases, glass eyes catching the light. After its founders died within weeks of each other in 1924, the door stayed mostly closed for fifty years. Revived by the community in the 1970s, it’s now open and active, and still wonderfully, authentically Victorian.

Just a short drive away, the Pember Nature Preserve invites you to enjoy the living counterpart to everything inside. And if you want to stay a night, the beautifully restored Station House Bed & Breakfast housed in Granville’s former train station is just down the road.

Read more about the Pember Library & Natural History Museum >

One More Thing

Keep your eyes open as you pass through Granville: the Pine Grove Diner has a life-sized metal moose on the roof. No further explanation needed.

If you’ve driven past the hills outside Salem and noticed strange, beautiful objects on the hillside, that’s Salem Art Works. And it’s exactly as interesting as it looks.

The 119-acre campus has been an active arts community since 2005, with former farm buildings converted into studios for glass blowing, blacksmithing, ceramics, welding, and more. Up the hill, the Cary Hill Sculpture Park spreads across the landscape with installations that shift with the seasons. The grounds are free and open to the public to explore year-round, as well as during special hilltop concerts in the summer. Each September, the Festival of Fire showcases fire-based arts over three days.

Looking to make a weekend of it? The Out On a Limb treehouse rental is tucked in the woods near Argyle, with a hot tub and fire pit. And it’s just a short, scenic drive away.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses spent most of her life farming in the Eagle Bridge hamlet at a place called Mount Nebo. There, she painted on the side for her own enjoyment. Then, at age 78, an art collector happened to spot her work in a drugstore window. He brought it back to New York City, and despite initial skepticism, Grandma Moses soon became one of the most beloved folk artists in American history. She died in 1961 at 101, internationally famous.

To this day, Mount Nebo still remains standing, owned by the Moses family. Will Moses, her great-great-great grandson, now runs it as an art gallery selling his own folk art.

Of course, you can see where the inspiration came from. The rolling hills around Eagle Bridge and Cambridge look close enough to a Grandma Moses painting that the effect is quietly disorienting in the best way. It’s like stepping from real life into one of those paintings.

In the hamlet of Low Hampton, a Washington County farmer named William Miller spent years studying the Bible. Eventually, he became convinced he had calculated the date of the Second Coming of Christ. His preaching drew a following of 100,000 people (the Millerites) who gathered to await the end of the world on October 22, 1844. The day came and went without incident, in what became known as the Great Disappointment. Miller died five years later on the same farmstead. Afterward, his followers splintered into several new denominations, including the Seventh-day Adventists.

Yet his 1815 farmhouse, the chapel he built in 1848, and Ascension Rock, where local Millerites gathered that October night, are all still there and open for tours. It’s one of the stranger pilgrimage sites in American religious history, and one of the least visited.

If you’re staying in the area, the Slateville Retreat fire tower rental nearby offers an unusual (and unusually scenic) place to spend a night.

The Rough ‘n Ready Engine Company No. 2 was founded in Greenwich in 1854, and their original 1904 firehouse remains to this day, undergoing preparations to become a museum. While community volunteers have crowdfunded new windows and are finalists for state revitalization funding, the building is already worth a visit.

The centerpiece is a 4,700-pound hand-pumped fire engine purchased in 1899 for $800, built for up to 60 men to work at once. Upstairs: two pianos, marching band instruments, and a trove of memorabilia from the local chapter of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, including a model skeleton named George, found under a staircase. Plus, it’s also home to the former town jail, with two cells intact.

Truly, Washington County contains multitudes. Sometimes all in the same building.

The Round House Bakery in Cambridge is worth a visit for its baked goods alone. But the buildings are half the story.

The round house was built using cordwood masonry, once one of the largest projects of its kind. The sauna made of similar materials is now available for public use on select dates.Next door, you’ll find the bakery and little shop, which were constructed with straw bale walls. Both methods are as sustainable as they are striking: thick, natural materials that regulate temperature naturally and lend each space a warmth and quiet that you feel the moment you walk in.

It’s no surprise that retreat and workshop groups keep coming back; the 78-acre farm has a serene, creative atmosphere that’s hard to manufacture – and harder to leave.

Tours of the buildings are available by appointment, and Pompanuck hosts public pizza and jazz nights, full sit-down dinners, and workshops throughout the year.

Read more about the Round House Bakery >

Built around 1772 using timber salvaged from the ruins of Fort Edward, the Old Fort House Museum is the oldest wooden structure in Washington County – and one of the most storied. George Washington drank here when it was a tavern. In 1828, Solomon Northup, whose memoir became 12 Years a Slave, married on its lawn. Burgoyne’s army camped outside while key decisions of the Revolutionary War were being made within its walls.

Today, the six-building campus includes a one-room schoolhouse, a toll house, an 1853 law office, an apothecary garden, and a permanent Solomon Northup exhibit. Additionally, ghost tours are available on select dates in September and October as officially listed on New York State’s Haunted History Trail.

Read more about the Old Fort House Museum >

Washington County is home to four historic covered bridges, and they make for one of the most quietly magical road trips in upstate New York.

One standout is the Shushan Covered Bridge. Closed to traffic, it’s been converted into a free museum of farm tools and antique machinery housed inside the bridge itself, which still spans across the Battenkill.

However,, the Eagleville Covered Bridge just 2.3 miles away is still open to vehicles. From there, the Rexleigh and Buskirk bridges complete the scenic circuit.

Nearly all of these spots are within easy reach of each other. A loop from Salem to Granville to Whitehall covers most of the list in a day. Or you could take your time and make a weekend of it.

Here, there’s no shortage of ways to fill the rest of your hours. Tee off at one of the county’s golf courses, including the one with a 12-foot Sasquatch on Hole 1. Cool off at a scenic swimming hole along the Battenkill. Browse antique shops and main street storefronts in Cambridge, Greenwich, and Salem. Pick strawberries, blueberries, or whatever’s in season at one of the county’s pick-your-own farms. Or head to the Battenkill for fly fishing, kayaking, or just watching the river go by.

Washington County isn’t the loudest destination in upstate New York. It just needs to be itself.

Explore more of what Washington County has to offer >