The Thing?

The Thing is a roadside museum near Dragoon, Arizona, built around a paid-admission mystery exhibit and advertised for decades by hundreds of yellow billboards asking "The Thing? What is it?" along Interstate 10. Thomas Binkley Prince, who had run a similar attraction in the Mojave Desert since the 1950s, relocated it to its current site near Texas Canyon in 1965 after interstate highway construction closed his original California location. After Prince's death in 1969, his wife Janet continued running it, and the Bowlin family's travel-center company later took over, unveiling a modernized museum building in 2018. Inside, alongside the mummified figures billed as the attraction's namesake, the museum displays a mix of oddities, antique vehicles, and sideshow curiosities.