6 Kinds of Unique Things to Do in CT
Every “hidden gems in Connecticut” list uses the same word, and it almost never means what it should. Unique is not a synonym for obscure. Obscure means few people know about it. Unique means you cannot get the experience anywhere else, from anyone else, at any price. That is a much higher bar, and it is worth setting for yourself before you commit a weekend.
As designers of one of the state’s award-winning indoor experiences, we spend a lot of time thinking about what actually makes a place one-of-a-kind. Here are six kinds of genuinely unique things to do in CT, one place for each kind, and a framework you can carry with you the next time somewhere calls itself unique.
The Person: Gillette Castle
When one person’s specific vision built the thing itself, you cannot recreate it. William Gillette, the actor best known for playing Sherlock Holmes on stage a century ago, designed every square foot of his stone castle above the Connecticut River in East Haddam. The trick locks on the interior doors, cut so that no two open the same way. The mirrored built-ins that let him watch guests arrive from other rooms. The wooden puzzle latches he carved himself. Even the layout of every window was set to catch a specific view of the river below.
Remove Gillette from the story, and it stops being that place. His personality is the building, not the collection inside it. That is what a Person-anchored place looks like: the presence of one specific human is the reason it exists at all.
The Collection: The Lock Museum of America
A single person spends a lifetime gathering something, and the accumulation itself becomes the point. The Lock Museum of America in Terryville houses the largest collection of locks, keys, handcuffs, and ornate door hardware in the world, most of it built on the personal collection of locksmith Thomas Hennessy, who started gathering in the 1960s and eventually merged his own trove with the archives of the Eagle Lock Company.
Locks from ancient Egypt. Prison locks. A cannonball safe. A wrought-iron trunk from the 1600s built for the Spanish Armada. You do not build a collection like this from a purchasing budget. You build it from a personality. The museum also runs a seasonal puzzle adventure through the collection on summer weekends, if you want to spend longer on-site. But the collection itself, walked slowly, is why the place matters.
The Location: Dinosaur State Park
Some places cannot be moved. In 1966, construction workers digging a foundation in Rocky Hill exposed hundreds of dinosaur tracks preserved in stone from about 200 million years ago. Rather than remove them, the state built the visitor center of what is now Dinosaur State Park directly over the trackway in place.
You cannot pack up the tracks and set them down somewhere more convenient without destroying them, and no one is going to make more of them. The park is small, easy to walk, and the geodesic dome protecting the main trackway is worth the trip on its own. This is what Location-anchored means: the experience only exists here because the physical evidence is here, and there is no version of it anywhere else on earth.
The Craft: Mystic Seaport
A method that only a small handful of people still practice, and you can watch them do it in person. Mystic Seaport is a working shipyard as much as it is a museum. Coopers assembling barrels the same way they were assembled in 1850. Blacksmiths at the forge. Riggers repairing the standing rigging of the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaleship in the world.
Craft preserved in books is one thing. Craft preserved in people, still being practiced, is another, and the difference matters. You are not watching a demonstration of something dead. You are watching someone continue a line of work that would otherwise be lost. That is a rarer experience than most people realize.
The Story: Old Newgate Prison
Some places are geometrically ordinary and become extraordinary only when you know what happened there. Old Newgate Prison in East Granby started as a copper mine in the early 1700s. Then Connecticut converted the underground shafts into a prison, holding suspected loyalists during the Revolutionary War among many others. Prisoners lived below ground for years at a time in near-total darkness. The shafts and cell floors are still there, walkable, damp, and quiet.
Without the story, it is a hole in the ground. With the story, it is one of the most affecting sites in the state. Which is exactly why the last kind of unique matters. A place with a story is powerful. A story you can walk inside of is something else.
The Room: REACT Premium Escape Rooms
A designed narrative space you inhabit is its own category. Not the story of a place. A story you walk through, as a character, for an hour, and can only encounter here. When we made our list of unique things to do in CT, we wanted REACT in Windsor Locks to earn its spot in this last category on its own terms. Every room is written, designed, and staged from scratch by our team, then tuned across the reactions of thousands of players. You cannot buy a copy of the room from anyone else because the room does not exist anywhere else.
Our next opening, Raiders of the Lost Room: Escape from Newgate Prison, is a live example: an original room built around the real Newgate site described above, opening this August. If any of the five picks above earned a spot on your list, this one belongs on it too.
How to Find Unique Things to Do in CT
The six kinds are a checklist you can carry anywhere in the state, or anywhere else. Before you commit a weekend to a place billed as unique, ask which of the six kinds it actually is. A Person. A Collection. A Location. A Craft. A Story. A Room. If you cannot name one, it probably is not, or at least not in a way that matters.
The best of the unique things to do in CT combine two or three kinds at once: a Location that also holds a Story, a Craft you can watch that has a Person behind it. If you are planning around Connecticut weather more than around uniqueness, our guides to indoor activities in CT and rainy day activities in CT pair well with this list. And if the Room category is where you want to spend an afternoon, come book with us. We think it fits the framework.
