One day, Jerry Roth woke up and realized he had 4,000 hats.

I have no idea. I honestly don't. I just, all of a sudden, I just started going to yard sales and collected them and hanging them up there at home.

In 2006, Jerry was almost 70 and recently retired. He left Arizona to settle down in his hometown of Forest, Illinois.

It's a small town, the kind that's quiet and where most people know each other.

But it was a little too quiet for Jerry.

He just had more free time than he knew what to do with.

But one day, seemingly out of the blue, he decided to start collecting baseball hats.

One hat picked up here and there quickly became a dozen, and then several dozen, and then

a hundred. Once the people of Forrest got word that Jerry had picked up a new hobby, they

started dropping off hats they were trying to get rid of.

And it got a little lot of control.

The hats were crowding his garage.

He needed more space.

Plus, he wanted to let visitors peruse his collection without having to open up his home.

Lucky for him, there was an abandoned church nearby that was looking for a new owner.

I'm Gabby Gladney, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places. Today, I take a tour of Jerry's Hat Museum, guided

by Jerry himself. He walks me through how his retirement pastime snowballed into an eclectic collection

that holds a special place in the heart of his hometown.

More after this. I live in Chicago, which is about a two and a half hour drive from Forest, Illinois.

I don't own a car because I don't love driving.

But lucky for me, my boyfriend Kevin was also very interested in seeing

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