A Festival of Oddities

A Festival of Oddities A celebration of all things weird and macabre in Michigan. Admission to the grounds is free for all ages. Ever heard of an electro-thermo bath?

Voted the Lansing area's "Best Event/Festival" in 2021 and 2022's Top of The Town competition, Mid-Michigan's original oddities festival is presented by Scream Queen Productions and The Courthouse Square Association. On the lawn, you'll find our Macabre Marketplace featuring over 100 of the state's most talented artists and makers. Visit Food Truck Row for a wide variety of delicious cuisine from

all over The Mitten. Stop by the Kitten Tent hosted by Saved by Zade and adopt a new furry family member. Play vintage carnival games to raise money for the Epilepsy Foundation of Michigan. Visit Erica Jo Photography's Vintage Photo Booth and take home a one-of-a-kind souvenir. Swing by the Nordic Fire Festival's Axe Wall to blow off some steam. Peruse the Living Library, featuring the best paranormal, true crime, and horror authors in the state. Buy autographed copies of their books and chat with them one-on-one. Admission to the Historic Courthouse Square Museum is $5/person. Explore oddities from around the globe, including The Sturgill Collection presented by Stimson Hospital. Each stately room is brimming with historical artifacts, some stranger than others. Yeah, they've got one of those. They've also got restless spirits wandering the halls, if you're into that sort of thing. Attend presentations in the grand courtroom hosted by experts in the fields of true crime, the paranormal, and the macabre. Meet the Paranormal Collective, a group of experienced investigators from around the state. Hear their first-hand accounts of hauntings in Michigan, and get an up-close and personal look at how their gear works. Search the Snake Pit hosted by Saving Scales Reptile Rescue for the perfect cold-blooded addition to your household. Bid on thousands of dollars worth of unique wares donated by our vendors to raise money for local charities. The mission of A Festival of Oddities is to provide support to local small businesses, artists, and charitable organizations, all while offering the community a fun, affordable, unique experience. Come be a part of the festival with heart. We are the weirdos, mister! And now it's time to show the world.

EXCITING NEWS! Have you ever wanted to rappel from the old courthouse clock tower? At this year's festival, you can! Jus...
04/01/2026

EXCITING NEWS! Have you ever wanted to rappel from the old courthouse clock tower? At this year's festival, you can! Just $517 per person! *Helmets and safety harnesses optional. More details to come!

03/15/2026

FINAL REMINDER! Today is the due date for all pending vendor fees! We will be reviewing available vendor space next week, and will likely be able to send out one last small batch of approvals for this year.

If you've sent us an email or message recently, please hold tight- we'll get to all of those before we give away anyone's spot. This far out from the festival, we typically only check our messages and emails on/around due dates.

DO NOT RESPOND to anyone in the comments or anyone that reaches out directly offering booth space. The ONLY way to apply is through our official website.

FESTIVAL UPDATE! Our first payment deadline passed 2/15. If you were accepted to the festival, did not make your payment...
02/22/2026

FESTIVAL UPDATE! Our first payment deadline passed 2/15. If you were accepted to the festival, did not make your payment, and did not reach out with a request/question that we are working to resolve before you secure your spot, your spot has been offered to someone else.

We only had a handful of vendors miss the payment deadline, and were only able to send out another 10 acceptance notifications for round two. The next payment deadline is 3/15. At that point, we will do what will likely be our final round of acceptances.

Right now, our waitlist is 75+ vendors deep. So if you did not receive an acceptance, please do not take it personally. Once all of our spots are full, we will forward our waitlist to Needful Things and the First Congregational Church. Both of these properties are adjacent to the festival grounds, and host their own vendor events during the festival.

Our application is still up, and you are welcome to still apply, but we are just about at the end of our vendor acceptance journey for 2026.

We do still have a couple of spaces open in these very specific categories: authors and non-profits. If you know someone who would be a good fit, please send them our way!

REMINDER: If you received an acceptance email for A Festival of Oddities last month, the deadline to pay is THIS SUNDAY,...
02/11/2026

REMINDER: If you received an acceptance email for A Festival of Oddities last month, the deadline to pay is THIS SUNDAY, 2/15. We will not send out additional reminders or reach out individually. If your payment isn't received by Sunday, we will simply offer your booth to another vendor.

If you have applied but did not yet hear back, you are currently on our waitlist. We will review for available space next week, and send out a second wave of acceptances. As is outlined on the application and has been stated here many times- you will ONLY get an email from us upon acceptance into the festival. We don't send out denials or waitlist notifications.

Lastly, DO NOT respond to people in the comments offering booth space. The ONLY way to apply for the festival is through the application on our official website, and the only ways to communicate with us are through this page or our official email.

(Photo of my tarantula Drew Scarymore for attention.)

THIS SATURDAY in Jackson! Who's going?
02/05/2026

THIS SATURDAY in Jackson! Who's going?

Hey, all! I wanted to further address our stance on banning AI from the festival, as well as talk about some pretty dish...
02/05/2026

Hey, all! I wanted to further address our stance on banning AI from the festival, as well as talk about some pretty disheartening discourse that took place in the comment section of my last post on the issue.

As I admitted in the original post, this is going to be a really difficult rule to enforce, because there's a lot of gray area. While we can all agree that AI is bad for true artistry and horrible for the environment, we must also acknowledge that it's infiltrated pretty much every aspect of everything at this point. We're not going to go through every booth with a fine-tooth comb, questioning anything that looks like it might be AI-generated. We're not going to interrogate you about whether you used ChatGPT prompts to brainstorm as part of your creative process. But if we look at a booth and can tell that it's very obviously filled with AI "art," we're going to ask you to take those items down. I hope this makes things a bit more clear?

Additionally, another debate began in the comment section of my previous post that requires some important clarification. I said that we support artists, not that we are exclusively an art show. We support small businesses of all kinds, and it was disheartening to see how much bashing of different types of businesses went on in the comments. In my other life, I own a book and gift store- I didn't write every book or handcraft every (or any) tchotchke on the shelves. That doesn't make my business any less legit.

There will be ALL TYPES of small, spooky-themed businesses at the festival, including retail resellers, folks that sell 3D printed items, and folks that sell items made with sublimation- yes, even "those cups." It's my job, as the event organizer, to make sure there's variety in our vendor offerings, and that there's not too much of any one thing. If I just accepted everyone that applied to the festival without considering how many similar businesses might be there, it would be an entire city block of these four things: 3D printed dragons, sublimation t-shirts and tumblers, jewelry, and art made from animal remains. Will you see some of all of those things at the festival? Yes. But not too much of any one thing, and that's by design.

Either way, there was no reason to start bashing hard-working small business owners because what they make/sell isn't "real art." Not everyone has that talent. I certainly don't. It's supposed to be us vs. the cyborgs, not those blessed with natural artistic ability vs. everyone else.

So anyway. The festival is exactly seven months from today. That's exciting, right?

Oh, hi! Lots of new eyes on the page, and lots of questions coming in about the festival, so I thought it might be a goo...
02/03/2026

Oh, hi! Lots of new eyes on the page, and lots of questions coming in about the festival, so I thought it might be a good time to share some details!

"The FOO," as we lovingly call it, is a two-day festival dedicated to all things spooky. It is always on the Saturday and Sunday before Labor Day, which this year will be September 5-6th. It is always at the notoriusly haunted Courthouse Square Museum in Charlotte, Michigan, which is just southwest of Lansing.

This will be our EIGHTH year, and we've become known as the Lansing area's kick-off to spooky season. Annual attendance runs in the range of 15-20K. Admission to outdoor festivities is free- this includes the Macabre Marketplace (vendor area), Living Library (author area), Family Fun area (bounce house, axe throwing, animal education, face painting, etc.), and Food Truck Row (self explanatory.)

Admission to the museum is $5, and all proceeds go directly to the museum, which is a non-profit. Inside, you'll find unique exhibits, DIY ghost hunting kits, paranormal investigators, scheduled presentations, and our VIP area. (That last one is new, more on that later.)

We typically begin accepting applications about a year in advance, and review them in waves. We do not base acceptance on seniority, or on the order in which applications are received. Every year, we focus on bringing in a good mix of new and returning vendors, and a wide range of different goods.

Our applications are still open for 2026 (will link below), but we are also already in waitlist mode. How does that work? Let me explain. We sent out our first round of acceptance notifications a couple weeks ago, with a payment due date of 2/15. Once that date comes and goes, we will reevaluate available space, as well as what sort of vendors we're still looking for. We will then send out a new round of acceptances, set a new payment due date, and repeat the process until we are full. This usually works out to be three or four waves. Once we are completely sold out, we will forward our waitlist to two properties adjacent to the museum who also rent out space to vendors. (Needful Things and First Congregational United Church).

We do have a few rules. This is a festival with a macabre theme. All booths should be spooky in nature. No political propaganda. (This does not include items that reference human rights. Human rights are not political.) No MLM. No AI "art." Capisce? Capisce.

IMPORTANT INFO! With all of the discourse surrounding this past weekend's nightmare of an oddities festival, an importan...
02/02/2026

IMPORTANT INFO! With all of the discourse surrounding this past weekend's nightmare of an oddities festival, an important issue has come up that we hadn't even considered.

A Festival of Oddities supports artists. As such, there will be NO AI "ART" BOOTHS ALLOWED. This guideline has been updated on our application page, but we've already received hundreds of applications for 2026, so I'm sharing this information here as well.

Admittedly, this is going to be a difficult rule to enforce. In my other life, I own a brick and mortar shop. I order products from all over the world. I would never knowingly/purposely order AI "art," but I wind up with it here and there just the same. And it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference. So where's the line going to be?

Here's a personal example- last year, our booth was selling cryptid-themed candy and snacks. I didn't notice or even give any thought to the fact that the packaging had an AI-generated image on it until someone pointed it out. Something like that, where the product is legit but the label is AI, we probably wouldn't ask you to remove. If you're selling books, and maybe a cover or two appears to be AI-generated, but the actual book was written by a real human- we likely wouldn't ask you to remove that.

But if your booth is full of items that are adorned with very obvious AI images, we're going to ask you to remove them. And if that's all you brought? We're gonna have you pack it in early. This isn't the festival for you.

I'd rather have you bring art that looks like my hand-drawn poster here than AI "art." 🤣 Thanks for understanding.

A final update on the disaster that was The Michigan Oddities and Horror Fest, and then we've got our own festival to ge...
02/02/2026

A final update on the disaster that was The Michigan Oddities and Horror Fest, and then we've got our own festival to get back to planning:

In my last post, I stated that the festival was overbooked by 30-150+ vendors. While I have not seen a definitive number, it sounds like it was on the higher end of that range. If we split the difference and say 90, that's $13,500 that was stolen from small business owners. So I will say it again: THIS WAS NOT A MISTAKE. This was fraud. It would be IMPOSSIBLE to overbook a venue by that much, or even a fraction of that much, accidentally. Especially since this is the same venue that's been used for this event for years. Nate Thompson knew exactly how much space he was working with, and he knew exactly what he was doing. No self-deprecating mea culpa accompanied by a Zoolander selfie is going to change that. Don't fall for it. That's a classic narcissist move, and booooyyyy, if I've ever seen a narcissist... And yes, we saw the whole "reduced fee for day two" nonsense as well. If Nate cared about his vendors AT ALL, which we know he does not, he would have nixed the entry fee entirely, so that folks could go support the vendors without supporting him.

Anyone affected by this mess is encouraged to file a police report with Monroe Police, an AG complaint, and a BBB complaint. There is talk of a class-action lawsuit, but I don't know who is heading that up or collecting information for that. If anyone has that info, please share it below.

I would like to point out that it was not just the vendors who were turned away that were affected. The vendors that got in were squeezed into much smaller spaces than they paid for, and saw dismal foot traffic all weekend. The low attendance can be attributed to the drama, obviously, but also to the $20/person entry fee, which is INSANE. I encourage everyone who does vendor shows to ask about entry fees for attendees when they apply, because that will greatly affect attendance. In my opinion, the vendor area of any festival should be free. You're using those vendors to promote your event and boost your attendance. People shouldn't have to pay money to go pay money, ya know what I mean?

In our prior post, there are nearly 900 comments- many of which are links to the online shops for affected vendors. Go peruse them! I welcome you to post those links below again, not just for displaced vendors, but also for those who had to squeeze into smaller spaces than they paid for and deal with low foot traffic. Even if you're unable to buy from these vendors right now, be sure to follow them on social media and interact with their posts. It all helps!

There are a few folks trying to put together events to benefit affected vendors. One of them is being hosted by Meggaxp at the end of this month, which I shared in a previous post. If you know of any such events, please share them below.

In addition, we asked folks to suggest REPUTABLE oddities festivals happening in Michigan this year, and have compiled a list:

Blood Bash, Jackson: Feb 7
Halfway to Halloween, Ann Arbor: May 8-9
Curious at Crossroads, Flint: June 20-21
Oddities & Curiosities Expo, Detroit: July 11-12
Oddities & Curiosities Expo, GR: July 25-26
A Festival of Oddities, Charlotte: Sep 5-6
Wicked Bizarre, Belleville: Sep 12
Hearsefest, Fowlerville: Sep 19

Lastly, it should be mentioned here that in addition to The Michigan Oddities and Horror Fest, Nate Thompson is behind the following ventures:

The Michigan Tattoo Convention
The Michigan Museum of Horror
The Ohio Museum of Horror
The Last Meal Restaurant

Let's be sure to show them the support they deserve, which is none.

02/02/2026

Free booth space at an event in Jackson later this month for exactly 72 people who were scammed by The Michigan Oddities and Horror Fest!

We are SO SORRY to hear what's happening at The Michigan Oddities and Horror Fest in Monroe today. We know how hard thos...
01/31/2026

We are SO SORRY to hear what's happening at The Michigan Oddities and Horror Fest in Monroe today. We know how hard those of you who vend at these types of events work on your products and presentation. How much money you front for booth fees and travel costs and product costs. How many hours you spend driving to and from. To hear that so many of you with "confirmed booth space" were turned away at the door this morning when you arrived to set up due to "overbooking" is INSANE.

We want to help, but first we want to make a couple of things super clear:

A) Despite our similar names, A Festival of Oddities and The Michigan Oddities and Horror Fest are not affiliated in any way. I've heard enough horror stories about this Nate Thompson dude to know that he's not someone we would ever want to do business with. What happened today just solidifies that by x1000.

2) Overbooking an event by 50-150 vendors IS NOT A MISTAKE. That's a scam. And I hope you all get your refunds and are able to get whatever other justice the law allows for in this situation. The list of vendors that were turned away grows every time I see a new post about the situation. The lowest number I've seen is 30. The highest is 150. The most common is 50+. So let's go with the conservative estimate of 30. 30 "overbookings" x the $150 booth fee collected for each one equals $4500 in stolen money. That's gotta be a felony of some sort, right? And this is not the first time this has happened. Logic would dictate that, when planning a vendor event, the VERY FIRST STEP is to determine how many vendors you can accommodate. Right? Now, mistakes happen- especially when you're planning an event for thousands of people with hundreds of vendors. We always have a handful of "emergency" spots that we leave open for that very reason- maybe someone didn't get transferred from one list to another, maybe someone's payment was overlooked. Maybe one or two vendors show up that, for some reason, didn't wind up on the vendor list even though they were accepted and paid for their spot. But 30-150?!?!? ABSOLUTELY F*CKING NOT.

To everyone who lost out on precious time and money today due to yet another Nate Thompson scam- we're so sorry. We'd like to help support you. I wish we could offer you all booth space at our festival this year, but we've already got a waitlist 50+ deep for 2026. (Applications are still open on our website, though, if you'd like to apply.) If you were turned away today and have an online presence, please share it in the comments so that we can hopefully help get you some sales. 🖤

Our wonderful logo artist, Scream Prints, was turned away from this event after driving from Lansing to Monroe early this morning, despite being a returning vendor with a "confirmed" spot. Please go show Steve some love!

Lastly, please share your favorite REPUTABLE Michigan oddities festivals in the comments, so that these talented vendors may find some other shows to do. I've heard good things about Blood Bash in Jackson and Wicked Bizarre in Belleville. DO NOT recommend Frankenfest. I have no idea how they treat their vendors, but I do know firsthand about their shady business practices- we don't f*ck with them, and we don't f*ck with Nate Thompson. You shouldn't either.

A LOT of work goes into planning large festivals. You have to be in it for the right reasons, or things like this wind up happening. Our primary goal at A Festival of Oddities is to support the local artist community and uplift unique small businesses. So to see this happen to so many folks we know and love is beyond disheartening. Please link to your businesses below so we can support you. 🖤

Last day to vote for your favorites in this year's Top of the Town! 🔗⬇️
11/18/2025

Last day to vote for your favorites in this year's Top of the Town! 🔗⬇️

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100 W. Lawrence Avenue
Charlotte, MI
48813

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