Weirdness Magnet for PLACES, not characters?

[vicky_molokh]

Greetings, all!

Anyone got experience with settings/campaigns where a place is a weirdness magnet? Particularly one that makes it harder and more dangerous, but not impossible, to live there in the long term.

I'm currently trying to come up with ideas for a zone of alienation, which is home for dangerous anomalous phenomena . . . and a desperate people who decided to live there nonetheless (look here if you're curious).

I'm looking for things that are weird in an anomalous way, perhaps somewhat analogous to Roadside Picnic (but I neither read the Picnic, nor do I want to make/plagiarise stuff that would be recognizably from there; so reading it is probably counterproductive). Dangerous, occasionally deadly if not treated carefully, but mostly possible to avoid or deal with if one knows what one is doing.

Ideas so far:

• Aurorae, occasional radio static, and some sort of field interfering with the setting's reactionless drives.
• Water in some ponds behaving somewhat like a superfluid despite not being supercooled.
• Plants with contact poisons that do nothing immediately, but cause chemical burns after some amount of time spent exposed to sunlight (this one taken from real life).
• Mildly corrosive rainfall (perhaps slightly cinematically so).
• Weird adjustments in the temperatures at which things change their aggregate state. Alternatively, places where aggregate states are inexplicitly skipped, e.g. ice evaporating instead of melting, steam solidifying instead of condensing.
• Gravity adjustments in strength and/or direction (duh).

Any other good ideas - either specific examples or general advice?
Thanks in advance!