Jim Thompson House

Jim Thompson was an OSS officer (the CIA's forerunner) who stayed on after WWII and single-handedly turned dying Thai silk into a global luxury — his shimmering fabrics dressed 'The King and I' on Broadway. On Easter 1967 he went for a walk in Malaysia's Cameron Highlands and was never seen again: no body, no note, one of Asia's great unsolved disappearances.

His house is six antique teak houses he found upcountry and in Ban Khrua, barged to this canal and reassembled in 1959 — some walls turned deliberately inside-out, which Thai tradition considered eccentric to the point of bad luck. He disappeared eight years after moving in.