Woonsocket, Rhode Island: Statue of Hachiko, Faithful Dog

Once again, a stranger-than-fiction film where Richard Gere is upstaged by a non-human creature has resulted in a unique small town statue. In 2001 Gere starred in the eerie Mothman Prophecies, and the resulting interest in its namesake monster spurred the creation of a Mothman statue in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

In 2009, Gere starred in Hachi: A Dog's Tale, the bittersweet tale of a dog so doggedly loyal that it spent ten years waiting at a train station for its master, who had died at work. This actually happened in Japan in the 1930s (The dog, Hachiko, passed away -- still waiting -- on March 8, 1935). The train station used in Gere's Americanized version of the story was the old Woonsocket, Rhode Island, railroad depot. The Japanese erected a statue of Hachiko at their train station, and the mayor of Woonsocket thought that his town should have one, too.

The president of Woonsocket's Beacon Charter School found an exact copy of the Japan statue on eBay (reportedly created by a Hachiko fan from New Jersey), bought it, and in May 2012 it was unveiled in the same spot where Hachi sits in the movie, waiting for Richard Gere.