The Wonder Spot is in Wisconsin

LAKE DELTON, Wisconsin (AP) -- After more than half a century of impressing tourists, the Wonder Spot, a mysterious cabin where people cannot stand up straight, water runs uphill and chairs balance on two legs, is no more.

Owner Bill Carney has sold the iconic attraction to the village of Lake Delton for $300,000. The village wants to build a road through the place where the Wonder Spot has stood since the 1950s.

"We're kind of wondering how the town is going to deal with the gravitational forces under the road," joked Doug Kirby, publisher of RoadsideAmerica.com, which catalogs odd tourist attractions.

Kirby's site lists the Wonder Spot as one of 21 so-called "mystery spots," also called "gravity vortexes."

The story behind each one is similar -- gravity doesn't work in them. People seem to grow smaller, can't stand up straight and can barely walk.

Promotions boast that strange forces in the spots trump the laws of physics. Others say they're just elaborate hoaxes.

"It seems like to spend a lot of scientific effort to debunk these places you're just sucking the fun out of a tourist attraction a lot of people enjoy," Kirby said.

The Wonder Spot lies just off U.S. Highway 12, a corridor packed with water parks, giant resorts, museums, hotels and restaurants.

In many ways, the Wonder Spot is the antithesis of those giant parks.

Louis Dauterman took out the first permit for the spot in 1952, making it the longest-permitted attraction in the area, said Romy Snyder, executive director of the Wisconsin Dells Visitors and Convention Bureau.

The spot itself is a plain, worn gift shop at the top of a ravine and a crooked cabin built into the slope.

According to a sign proudly placed at the base of the ravine, the Wonder Spot was discovered June 16, 1948. People who enter the spot, the sign warns, won't see correctly, stand erect "or feel quite normal ... in fact, on the cabin site the laws of natural gravity seem to be repealed."

Generations of people have stopped to see it. Children who visited would return grown up, their own children in tow. During the mid-1990s, Carney saw up to 50,000 people per summer.

When people asked what caused the Wonder Spot, Carney's guides blamed it on igneous rock or simply replied they didn't know. He's seen people at the spot studying it with instruments who declared a force was at work. When pressed, though, Carney said it's all an optical illusion.

"We said don't try to figure it out," Carney said. "Just have fun."