While we’d bet the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, might not be high on many travelers’ vacation wish lists, every destination has its own folklore and unexplained phenomena. Even Alaska! Rest assured it’s far less sinister, but mysterious nonetheless. Here are a few of our favorite “stranger things” people have found in our own backyard.

Gravity Hill

Sometimes the laws of physics simply don’t apply, even if only by illusion. Many eyewitness accounts and a few videos attest that on Upper Huffman Road in Anchorage, a car put in neutral gear at the bottom of the hill will mysteriously roll up the hill. Convinced or not, it’s a pretty easy experiment to conduct next time you’re in Anchorage with a car.

The monster of Lake Iliamna

You’ve heard of Nessie, the famous Loch Ness monster, but many say they’ve seen something that could be similar swimming in the waters of Lake Iliamna, a 77-mile-long lake in Southwest Alaska and the largest in the state. Iliamna is an Alaska Native fishing village, so its residents spend plenty of time on the water. Some have suggested the monster could be a white sturgeon, or even a seal, but nothing has been proven with any certainty. The most recent eyewitness account was just this past summer, and a group of at least six adults and a few children all agree they saw a large, mysterious creature surface out of the water.

The ghost of the Wendy Williamson Auditorium

The Wendy Williamson Auditorium is situated on the University of Alaska Anchorage campus, and it’s notoriously haunted. But don’t let yourself paint an image of a drafty, forgotten theater hung with cobwebs and filled with abandoned props. The supposed spirits and current patrons occupy the same space peacefully. The auditorium is used for classes, guest speakers, comedians, concerts and theater productions with quite some regularity. So where do things get eerie? Reported instances include a table of props suddenly flying against the wall for no apparent reason, a painting that refused to stay where it was hung, sightings of a woman in a long white dress, mysterious sounds of a piano playing in the lobby that, when investigated, led to no one sitting at the piano and a ghost with a particular tendency of giving women with long brown hair a shove when they walk down a certain staircase.

Fact, fiction or maybe somewhere in the middle, there’s no denying that mysteries add to the intrigue of any destination. A little strangeness can be found no matter where you go.