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Houston is an unusual city. I know, every city in the US is going to have a blog post tucked away somewhere on the Interwebs, with a writer breathlessly proclaiming how their town is wacky, zany and really-quite-bizarre-if-you-scratch-the surface.

The thing is, Houston really is home to more than its fair share of uncanny happenings. Sure, like any big city with enough history behind it, Houston has its haunted taverns, its unsolved serial killer cases, its belly-button lint and cockroach museums. But Houston’s tales of the bizarre and unexpected burrow a little more extensively than that.

Here’s three of my favorites.

The Unsolved Mystery of Room 322

How about we get the ball of weirdness rolling with a bit of unexplained fetish action? Locals will immediately drop a little sideways smirk when someone mentions “room 322.”

The start of this thread begins back in 2013, when a Reddit user posted a story about how one of his colleagues showed up, late at night, begging for any available room at Houston’s uber fancy-schmancy Zaza Hotel. The hotel had one room left and the distracted hotel attendant checked the guy in and sent him on his merry way.

How to describe what he found when he switched on the light?

The room was tiny. The walls were a bare brick and the floor an oddly stained bare concrete. The tiny bed was suspended from the wall by heavy chain. Adorning the walls were pictures of skulls, weirdly deformed faces … and … former President of Stanford Financial Group, Jay Comeaux.

Why?

He was quickly grabbed by hotel staff and taken to a “more appropriate” room, with no further explanation given than an oblique “that room isn’t intended for guests” — and that is, quite literally, all we know.

Is it the playground for some weird and obscure kink? Is it an odd social experiment? Is it a shrine to a little-known mid-level financial executive? No-one knows … or at least, no-one is telling.

If you’d like to see this bizarre little Houston hotel room in all its glory, allow me to link you up.

The Final Resting Place of Hard-timer and All Round Scoundrel, Jim Norton

Right! With possible fetish dungeons out the way, let’s delve into a subtler Houston mystery — the gravesite of lifelong criminal and historical oddity, Jim Norton.

If it weren’t for the circumstances of his burial, Jim Norton would probably not warrant much more than a footnote in Houston’s annals of strangeness. Jim was a criminal, through and through. In the early 1900s, poor old Jim did a lot of time, mainly on robbery and petty theft charges.

Behind bars, Jim was … well … one of those guys you probably keep well away from edged cutlery. He was a mean son of a cuss and accrued close to 3000 hours of solitary throughout his inauspicious career of incarceration.

How he died is unknown.

In Houston at that time, criminals who died behind bars weren’t given much of a send off. Prisoner graves were generally unnamed, and marked with a simple wooden cross hastily put together on prison grounds.

But not old Jim! Jim was laid to rest in a completely different cemetery in Southside black cemetery, a location significantly removed from the prison. He was given a permanent gravestone, too, something which would never happen if his burial was handled by the austere prison system.

Yet, there’s no way he was claimed by family. For one, he didn’t have any. For another, his grave is clearly marked with his prison number.

In short, none of it makes sense. A hardened criminal without a soul in the world to call family or friend is buried in comparative grandeur in a remote cemetery at a time when the “dregs of society” (as the saying goes) died in almost complete anonymity? Strange.

It’s one little Houston mystery, and sadly the story behind it will likely never be unearthed.

The Abandoned Cultist Palace on the West Side of Town

Right in the picket fenced heart of Houston’s western suburbs you can find an abandoned building. It’s hard to find if you aren’t a local, but right behind an immense gray backdrop of struggling strip malls it rests in faded grandeur on an 11 acre block of land, sitting all on its ownsome like the unpopular kid at school with the greasy hair and the hand me down trousers.

Despite being an architectural pariah, it’s literally a palace. Giant gold geodesic domes rest atop a stark white, unsettlingly symmetrical building. It’s beautiful in its way. But unnerving. It doesn’t belong. Houston locals refer to it as the Palace of the Golden Orbs but its intended name was the Chong Hua Sheng Mu Holy Palace.

The Palace was the dream of Kwai Fun Wong, a devout Taoist with aspirations to establish her own cult right in the heart of residential Houston.

Sadly her plans turned to dust when she was deported in 2001. For close to twenty years, the building has just sat there, slowly decaying, its marble white walls turning gray and its golden domes gradually burnishing to a dull, orange brown.

Unloved, unwanted, a slowly dying monument to shattered dreams. And yet, for all that, it belongs to Houston. It’s discordant symmetry is an integral part of the weirdly sublime asymmetry that is Houston.

It’s odd, and that’s exactly what makes it belong!

Houston is a wonderfully strange place with so many interesting stories to tell. Locals of a certain leaning to the strange and uncanny will never tire of uncovering its dark little secrets.