More than 50,000 objects are packed into a group of small buildings in Abita Springs, Louisiana, 40 miles north of central New Orleans.
They started as one man's collection. By 2000, the UCM Museum was open, and the family later changed the public name to Abita Mystery House to attract more families.
Some of the buildings came from wherever they could be found. A 1910 gas station is the entrance, a Creole cottage was hauled onto the grounds, and a horse barn was covered in broken tile and mirror.
The museum is still open and still privately owned, and the tour is self-guided. Admission is $5 for anyone over five. The hours run 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except major holidays.
A New Mexico detour in 1995
In October 1995, the Preble family pulled off the road east of Albuquerque and walked into Tinkertown, a museum Ross Ward had built by hand out of carved miniature scenes.
Andrew was 10. William was five.
The scenes moved when you pushed a button. A whole roadside attraction, running on one man's carving and collecting.
John Preble met Ward and went into his studio.
Before the vacation ended, the family went back a second time, and Preble talked about building a Southern version back home in Louisiana.
Then they went home to Abita Springs, a small town 40 miles north of central New Orleans that had once drawn city families to its artesian springs, and Preble started building.
The UCM Museum opens in 1996
He already had the raw material.
He had been making Abita Springs Pottery since the mid-1970s and working junk shops and garage sales across southeast Louisiana for years, keeping things other people threw out.
He had also proposed the town's Whole Town Garage Sale in 1994, two years before the UCM Museum opened.
The UCM Museum opened on September 1, 1996. The initials were meant to be read aloud as "you-see-em."
UCM stood for Unusual Collections and Miniatures, or Unusual Collections and Minitown, depending on the telling.
What opened that day is now the Abita Mystery House, a private roadside museum in Abita Springs, St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana.
A 1910 gas station becomes the front door
The collection outgrew the house, and Preble moved it to Highway 36, a block from the town traffic circle and beside the old rail corridor that's now the Tammany Trace bike path.
The property came with a service station dating to 1910.
He turned it into the ticket counter and gift shop, and left the pumps outside as props once they quit working.
A concrete stucco structure out back, once a horse barn, got covered inside and out with more than 15,000 pieces of broken ceramic, tile, mirror, and glass.
That's the House of Shards.
He moved a Creole cottage 90 years old onto the grounds and built a large exhibit hall for the miniatures.
Covered walkways went in between the buildings, bamboo and vines around them.
He parked an Airstream trailer with a flying saucer stuck in its side.
Martians crash a miniature Mardi Gras
Much of Preble's own work went into Minitown, the miniature Southern town he built after seeing Ward's.
Push a button and Martians drop into the middle of a Carnival parade. Another scene runs a New Orleans jazz funeral, with recorded music.
Elsewhere in the miniatures: an oil refinery next door to a plantation, a Cajun barbecue shack, a dance hall, and a trailer court.
Other machines belong to no scene at all.
A marble machine built from Popsicle sticks, hot-glue sticks, pinball components, and plumbing parts sits in an old movie-theater ticket booth.
Some arcade and pinball cabinets still take a coin. Elsewhere, fortune tellers and moving skeletons run on buttons and cranks.
Parts break. Preble keeps adding something new, which is why two descriptions written a decade apart won't list exactly the same exhibits.
The 32-foot alligator has 32 feet
The count passed 50,000 objects, and it keeps moving because visitors bring things in.
Old radios, paint-by-number pictures, pocket combs, and barbed wire are in there somewhere.
Preble also built creatures in the language of old sideshow fakes. Darrel the Dogigator is half dog and half alligator.
Edmond the Allisapien is sold as an alligator-human hybrid. One sign promises a 32-foot alligator and delivers an alligator with 32 feet.
The museum has also shown a plaster cast of a four-toed track said to be from the Honey Island Swamp Monster, the St. Tammany Parish creature Harlan Ford spent years searching for.
His granddaughter donated it.
The biggest creature lives outdoors: Buford the Amazing Bassigator, 22 feet of fish and alligator, mounted on a boat trailer so he can leave for Mardi Gras parades.
Why the name changed in 2006
UCM never told anyone driving Highway 36 what was behind the pumps. In 2006 the family started calling it the Abita Mystery House.
The old name stayed on signs and in tourism listings, so both still point at the same address.
That year brought a harder change. Ann O'Brien, the jeweler Preble married in 1979, was 54 when she passed on July 1, 2006.
The gift shop kept selling her work, and still does.
The business has stayed private, created without government grants or nonprofit status.
Admission ran $3 in 2008, when the museum drew 5,000 visitors a year, some of them Europeans who had found it in a guidebook.
Television in 2013, then a shutdown in 2020
The swamp monster footprint put the museum on national cable in 2012, in a "Mysteries at the Museum" episode about the Honey Island story.
The bigger visit came the following year.
"American Pickers" broadcast its Louisiana episode on August 12, 2013, with the Airstream and its flying saucer on camera.
State tourism listings still mention it more than a decade later.
Then came March 20, 2020, when the museum landed on a national list of attractions closed until further notice.
By July 18, 2020, the doors were open again, masks required. By 2021 admission was listed at $5.
The collection was still there after the shutdown. The daily hours came back.
Who takes over the Abita Mystery House
In late 2023, Preble said he wanted to make the museum twice as big.
He also said a man in his 30s had started turning up every Saturday, and that he expected him to take the place over. The younger man was not named.
Neither the expansion nor a change of owner has been publicly documented since, and as of August 2026 the museum is still described as Preble's.
Age shows on the property. A 2025 visit found rust, mildew, moss, and worn surfaces across the place.
It opens anyway, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except major holidays, $5 for anyone over five, self-guided, at 22275 Highway 36.
Buford is still outside on his trailer.
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