Jonathan Livingston Crab. (Photo: Paul Yacovitch)

These days it's normal to announce your pet's birthday or adopt-iversary online. But it's definitely not common for the number to be 40—especially if that pet is a hermit crab.

Many people have bought hermit crabs at boardwalk souvenir shops on beach vacations, once or maybe twice. The little crabs come in wire cages and often wear tackily-painted seashells, and most die after just a few weeks.

Carol Ann Ormes purchased her hermit crab in the summer of 1976, but the big difference between hers and everyone else’s is that Jonathan Livingston Crab is still going strong in 2016. As far as anyone knows, Jonathan holds the longevity record for a hermit crab in captivity.

Other hobbyists refer to Ormes with terms like "legend" and "the crab queen." And in response to Jon's anniversary announcement, in August, Ormes got dozens of replies of congratulations, both from online and real-life friends, including ones who were with her on that beach vacation at the Delaware shore four decades ago.

A close-up of a hermit crab on sand. (Photo: Dan Meineck/CC BY-ND 2.0)

Before that fateful trip to the beach, she’d never even heard of hermit crabs. When a fellow traveler told Ormes about how the creatures could change seashells, she was intrigued. Yet when that friend actually bought one, it wasn't exactly love at first sight. "He was kind of strange," says Ormes. And their other friend was terrified of him: "When we'd get back from dinner or something, she'd say, ‘You two go in first!’”

By the end of their two-week vacation, though, Ormes had decided she needed a hermit crab for herself. They stopped at a shop in Ocean City, Maryland, and bought Jon on their way home. 

When Ormes got Jon, there were no resources where she could research how to care for him. In fact, those little cages they come in are pretty much certain death, because they don't retain enough moisture. Now you can buy heaters, thermometers and hygrometers to monitor the environment for cold-blooded pets, but she didn't have any of that. "I could tell by putting my hand in there whether it was moist enough or warm enough," she says.

Ormes figured out what was needed on her own by instinct and experimentation, starting with buying a glass tank and covering the bottom with fine gravel. At the same store where Ormes bought Jonathan Livingston Crab a new cage she also bought him a female companion. Crab Kate was with them for 35 years until she passed away in 2011. Zoos only started keeping statistics for invertebrates recently, but the lifespan of both crabs is believed to be record-setting.

An illustration of hermit crabs from 1857. (Photo: Biodiversity Heritage Library/CC BY 2.0)

Ormes’ professional background likely helped, too: she spent 38 years as chief of microbiology at a Washington-area hospital, and she'd worked with rats, mice, frogs, and toads. "I loved all those bugs, the frogs we used to have in the summer that barked like dogs," she says. "I was primed for it."  She was comfortable with a pet that needed proper humidity more than cuddling, and she was also okay with some of the other odd aspects of living with invertebrates.

Later, though, she discovered that Jonathan Livingston's name was a bit off the mark. "They were both females, but I've never told Jon that," she says. "You don't know that till they get older."

Jon was already almost 20 when Ormes retired and got her first computer. Her fame spread as she got online and started to connect with other hermit crab lovers all over the world, sharing her advice on care and feeding. For a while she helped run an online club, where she would chronicle the suspense of Jon and Kate's molting process—a delicate time for hermit crabs, and often their downfall if the right conditions aren't provided. The club is no longer active, but Ormes still sends around emails when Jon molts. In 2014 she wrote:

“This morning before breakfast I had the feeling that I should peek into Jonathan's molting tub. And there he was, out from under his slate roof and almost finished eating the egg shell that I had put in there before he dug under. He looks absolutely beautiful, a very shiny toasty brown with furry (golden) legs and sharp toe points. He has new eye stalks and antennae along with his new legs and claws and upper body. His green turbo seashell is nice and shiny because he was in very fine gravel this year and not coconut fiber which takes the shine off his seashells.”

A hermit crab in an aquarium using a whelk shell. (Photo: Les Williams/CC BY-SA 2.0) 
But it's not just other crab fans who've ended up coming along for the ride. Karen Riecks, who's known Ormes since the 1990s, remembers getting emailed photos of the crabs each time they molted and moved to new shells. "I even went to a sea shell store with Mom Carol Ann to pick out possible new shells for her two babies," she says. When Ormes retired and moved to Florida, Riecks offered to drive the crabs to Florida when Ormes was having trouble arranging for them to fly. And even the terrified friend from their beach trip has cared for Jon and Kate while Ormes traveled.

Her online renown has led to surprising encounters. One time, at the Delaware shore, she was showing pictures of her crabs to the staff at one of the shops when a customer came in and asked if she could see them too. "She started looking at them, and then she looked at me and said, 'Are you Carol of Crabworks? I just wrote to you yesterday,'" Ormes says. "She was another crab person from Pennsylvania."

At the community in Florida where she lives now, Jonathan Livingston Crab is well known, although people are sometimes a bit confused about what exactly he is. "People will say 'How is your hermit frog? How is your snail? I'm sorry, I don't mean snail, I mean your shrimp,'" Ormes says.

People who come to the apartment always ask to meet him, and he gets out to socialize too. She does presentations where she shows the tiny shells he lived in as a baby, then dramatically unveils him so people can see his current size. Recently he went on a visit to the community's call center. "Everyone outside of that office came to see him," she says. "He walked everywhere, even on their desks and keyboards and cables."  

Painted shells for sale at Panama City Beach, Florida. (Photo: tink tracy/CC BY-ND 2.0)

Julie Smith, a neighbor, says, "I just love when she walks Jonathan down the corridor to come to visit.  It's truly amazing to see him scurrying around the apartment." And when Crab Kate died, a neighbor saw her looking around for a burial site: "He said, 'it would be an honor for me to have her buried in my garden.'"

Jon's great age is an amazing accomplishment, but can you really have a relationship with a crab? Ormes says Jon can tell her apart from other people, and he clearly seeks out her company. "He follows me places. When I'm out on the lanai [enclosed porch] on my computer he comes out there and climbs on my feet, if I go to the morning room he comes out there and walks around the table," she says. "If I go out and leave him out of his tank, I come home and he's at the front door."

Ormes thinks that all that exercise outside the tank is one of the factors that kept her crabs healthy for so long. These days, Jonathan Livingston Crab keeps her active too, since he likes to get under the furniture. She'll be 80 at the end of October, and, she says, "I still have to crawl around on my hands and knees looking for him."

It's one of the many things they've shared over the years—and his 40th anniversary treat was another. He got a lobster tail that he ate out of her hand. "He likes the exoskeleton part. He doesn't want the meat," she says. "I get to eat the meat."

Fifth Avenue at night, 1899. (Image: Charles W Jefferys/Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library) 

Bike lanes are pretty clearly not parking spaces, but, as any city cyclist knows, cars and trucks still insist on parking in them. In New York City, cyclists have become aggrieved enough about cars in bike lanes that in September activists launched a name-and-shame, crowd-sourced map of offending vehicles. It turns out, though, that this persistent misbehavior hasn't just been around for a few years, but for more than a century.

In the 1890s, New York City started laying asphalt down on city streets, in large part because of lobbying from cyclists. Sometimes whole stretches of road would be paved, but sometimes the city would lay down asphalt strips specifically for cyclists to use. Right away, other vehicles started blocking them.

As The Bicycling Worldwrote in 1897, "it would seem as if an asphalt strip a few feet in width would fulfill every requirement of the cyclist, but it does not; and the reason why may be summed up in one word—'wagons.'"

But it wasn't just wagons. It was carts, trucks, carriages, and other vehicles, too. By 1899, one city councilman was pressing his colleagues to pass a law that would fine these bike-lane blockers, as the journal Public Improvements reported:

That $10 fine would be the equivalent of hundreds of dollars today, although the journal doesn't report if the law actually passed. If it did, it had disappeared a century later, when in the 1990s, the New York City Council was again considering a fine for blocking a bike lane. In 2016 it is illegal to park in a bike lane in New York City; the fine now is $115. Perhaps after a century of trying to chase other vehicles out of bike lanes, it's time for a new strategy—prioritizing protected bike lanes, for example—or a steeper fine.

There is a famous bridge in Thailand that crosses a river called the Khwae. It’s a destination for visitors of all kinds, including Europeans and Americans—who mostly have no idea they’ve been mispronouncing it for over sixty years.

The river under the famous crossing is known to most westerners as the “Kwai,” thanks to the 1952 novel and 1957 movie version of The Bridge Over the River Kwai. The specific plot and characters are a fiction, but the underlying story is true, and the 500-foot span has become Thailand’s most visible and poignant remnant of a brutal chapter of World War II.

The bridge is in the quiet, provincial town of Kanchanaburi, about 30 miles east of the Myanmar border. It was constructed during the War as part of the Thailand-Burma Railway, a transport system that came to be known as the “Death Railway,” its dark history bloodied by the nearly 100 thousand forced laborers and 16,000 prisoners of war who lost their lives during its construction.

The historic bridge is a symbolic reminder of the harrowing cruelty suffered by the Allied POWs (some American, the majority English and Dutch) and the conscripted Southeast Asian laborers, all forced into service by the Japanese. The intent was to build a 250-mile railway as a supply route from Ban Pong in Thailand to Thanbyuzayat in Burma (now Myanmar). A project estimated to take up to five years was forced to completion in 16 months, and with it came unrelenting brutality, rampant disease, squalid conditions and workers’ rations barely above starvation.

The bridge served its intended purpose for less than two years, when the railway was heavily bombed by the Allied forces in 1945. What was intended as a line to supply Japan and its plans to conquer further west, instead becoming an escape route for retreating Japanese troops. Control of the railway was divided between the British, who took the Burmese side, and the State Railway of Thailand (SRT), who took the Thai side and what remained of the bridge.

Although the stories of the novel and movie were inventions of Pierre Boulle and Hollywood, the bridge itself was an important part of the railway—it just didn’t happen to cross the Kwai (or Khwae, which is pronounced more like “kware”). There was no bridge over the Khwae—Boulle simply got his rivers mixed up. It’s the right bridge, but the river is the Mae Klong. So rather than change minds over the mistake, the government of Thailand simply changed the name of the river in 1960, rechristening this stretch as the Khwae Yai.

The Bridge over the River Khwae Yai suffered heavy damage in the bombing, taking out all but the outer steel structure. It was rebuilt by the SRT, and has since been used for commercial and tourist travel. You can cross by rail car, or see this piece of history up-close on foot.

No, not even this creep. (Photo: Graeme Maclean/CC BY 2.0)

Police in Orem, Utah would like to make it clear that neither they, nor you, can legally shoot random clowns. With the increasing number of creepy clown sightings across America this may actually be an important message.

From Texas to Connecticut, sightings of strange clowns are on the rise, and accordingly, police officers are now in a position to have to deal with them. The clown epidemic has also hit Utah, and in the wake of a series of online threats posted by some self-identified clowns, some people are getting scared.

Luckily the police officials in the city of Orem, Utah are keeping a level head about it all, and would prefer if citizens did too. In a recent Facebook post, the department addressed the issue in a statement that begins, “Here's seven words we never thought we'd be saying.....’Let's have a serious talk about clowns.’”

From there they go on to remind concerned citizens that while they will show up if someone reports seeing a suspicious clown in the area, there is really not much they can do if the bozo isn’t breaking any laws. It isn’t illegal to dress up like a spooky circus freak.

However, they also don’t rule out that they COULD shoot a suspicious clown, but they just say that it’s complicated.

“‘Can I shoot or take action against someone that is dressed up like a clown?’ That's not a simple yes or no question. It has a lot of variables to it,” the statement says. They also link to the Utah laws regarding use of force against another person, in case anyone is still having trouble deciding whether they should enact some vigilante justice against clowns.

Whether you think the creepy clown fad is hilarious, unsettling, or just dumb, the use of force against them is not recommended. If you find them suspicious, just call the cops. “This goes for when you see, Joe Citizen in a dark parking lot or someone dressed up like a Clown.”

Danjōgaran, a temple on Mount Kōya in Japan. (Photo: V663highland/CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Japanese climate is not exactly conducive to mummification. There are no peat bogs, no arid deserts, and no alpine peaks perennially encased in ice. The summers are hot and humid. Yet somehow a group of Buddhist monks from the Shingon sect discovered a way to mummify themselves through rigorous ascetic training in the shadow of a particularly sacred peak in the mountainous northern prefecture of Yamagata.

Between 1081 and 1903, at least 17 monks managed to mummify themselves. The number may well be higher, however, as it is likely some mummies were never recovered from the alpine tombs.

These monks undertook such a practice in emulation of a ninth-century monk named Kūkai, known posthumously as Kōbō Daishi, who founded the esoteric Shingon school of Buddhism in 806. In the 11th century a hagiography of Kūkai appeared claiming that, upon his death in 835, the monk did not die at all, but crawled into his tomb and entered nyūjō, a state of meditation so profound that it induces suspended animation. According to this hagiography, Kūkai plans to emerge in approximately 5.67 million years to usher a predetermined number of souls into nirvana.

The first recorded attempt at becoming a sokushinbutsu, or “a Buddha in this very body,” through the act of self-mummification took place in the late 11th century. In 1081, a man named Shōjin attempted to follow Kūkai into nyūjō by burying himself alive. He, too, was hoping to come back in a far distant future for the good of mankind, but when Shōjin’s disciples went to retrieve his body, rot had set in. It would take nearly two more centuries of trial and error before someone figured out how to mummify himself and, they believed, cheat death to enter a state of eternal meditation.

A portrait of Kōbō Daishi from the 14th century. (Photo: Art Institute of Chicago/Public Domain)

The process of self-mummification is long and arduous, taking at minimum three years of preparation before death. Central to this preparation is a diet called mokujikigyō, literally “tree-eating training.” This diet can be traced through Shugendō to the Taoist practice of abstention from cultivated grains.

For a thousand days, the mokujikigyō diet limits practitioners to only what can be foraged on the mountain, namely nuts, buds, and roots from trees. Some sources also report that berries may have entered the diet, as well as tree bark and pine needles. Time not spent foraging for food was passed in meditation on the mountain.

From a spiritual perspective, this regimen was intended to toughen the spirit and distance oneself from the common human world. From a biological point of view, the severe diet rid the body of fat, muscle, and moisture while also withholding nutrients from the body’s natural biosphere of bacteria and parasites. The cumulative effect was to arrest decomposition after death.

At the completion of a thousand-day cycle on this diet, practitioners were considered spiritually ready to enter nyūjō. However, most monks completed two or even three cycles to fully prepare themselves. After the final cycle, the devout would cut out all food, drink a limited amount of salinized water for a hundred days, and otherwise meditate upon the salvation of mankind while waiting to die.

A wooden statue of Kōbō Daishi. (Photo: PHGCOM/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Many believe that some adherents at this stage drank tea made from Toxicodendron verniculum tree bark. A kind of sumac, the Japanese lacquer tree is called such because it is used to make traditional Japanese lacquer, urushi. Its bark contains the same toxic compound that makes poison ivy so poisonous. If ingested by these monks, urushi tea would have both hastened death and made the body even less hospitable to the bacteria and parasites that aid in decomposition.

When the devout felt death approaching, his disciples would lower him into a pine box at the bottom of pit three meters deep in a predetermined spot. They would then pack charcoal around the box, insert a bamboo airway through the lid, and bury their master alive. Sitting in total darkness, the monk would meditate and regularly ring a bell to signal that he was still alive. When the ringing ceased, the disciples would open the tomb to confirm their master’s death, remove the bamboo airway, and seal the tomb.

A thousand days later, the monk would be disinterred and inspected for signs of decay. If any such signs were found, the body would be exorcised and reinterred with little fanfare. If not, the body was determined to be a true sokushinbutsu and enshrined.

The last person to become a sokushinbutsu did so illegally. A monk named Bukkai died in 1903, more than three decades after the ritual act was criminalized during the Meiji Restoration because the new government deemed it barbaric and backwards.

By then Japan had entered the modern age, and most people considered Bukkai more madman than sage. His remains were not disinterred until 1961 by a team of researchers from Tohoku University, who were amazed by Bukkai’s pristine condition. Though he entered nyūjō in Yamagata, his remains now rest in Kanzeonji in neighboring Niigata Prefecture. There are 16 extant sokushibutsu in Japan, 13 of which are preserved in the Tohoku region. Seven of the eight found in Yamagata remain in the vicinity of Mt. Yudono, making it the ideal place for a pilgrimage.

Kanzeonji, the location of Bukkai's remains. (Photo: Jakub Hałun/CC BY-SA 4.0)

The oldest and best preserved of these mummified monks can be found at Dainichibō, mentioned above. His name is Shinnyokai, and he entered nyūjō in 1783 at the age of 96. Like all the others, he sits in the lotus position behind glass in a box on small shrine within the temple that looks after him. His skin is an ashen grey, pulled taught over the bones of his hands, wrists, and face. His mouth is stretched into an eternal jackal’s grin, his face turned towards his lap.

Shinnyokai’s elaborate robes are ritually changed every six years, twice as often as all the other sokushinbutsu. The old robes are cut into small squares and placed inside padded silk pouches that can be purchased for ¥1,000 as protective amulets. Testimonials sent in by people swearing by these talismans’ miraculous effects are plastered around the base of Shinnyokai’s shrine.

Another sokushinbutsu, Tetsumonkai, resides at nearby Churenji, also mentioned above. Tetsumonkai entered nyūjō in 1829 at the age of 71, and of all the sokushinbutsu, his life is perhaps the best documented. Tetsumonkai was a commoner who killed a samurai and ran away to join the priesthood, an act that allowed him full legal protection. Later, Tetsumonkai visited the capital city Edo, present-day Tokyo. There he heard about an ophthalmic disease afflicting the city and gouged out his own left eye as an act of merit that might counteract the malady. Incredibly, Tetsumonkai is one of several sokushinbutsu to auto-enucleate—remove one’s own eye—as a charitable act.

Samantabhadra, one of the 13 Buddhas of Shingon Buddhism. (Photo: PHGCOM/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Tetsumonkai once served as head priest at Honmyōji, a short drive from where his remains are now kept. Here he was charged with looking after another sokushinbutsu, Honmyōkai, the oldest self-mummified monk in Yamagata. The samurai-turned-priest Honmyōkai spent a mindboggling 20 years in ascetic training until May 8, 1681, when his disciples lowered him, delirious with hunger, into a pit behind the temple and buried him alive. A massive, moss-covered stone epitaph marks the site where Honmyōkai entered nyūjō amid a grove of pine trees only a few dozen meters beyond the hall where his remains are now displayed.

These three sokushinbutsu are by far the closest to Mt. Yudono and the sites of their respective training. Dainichibō and Churenji are accustomed to tourists, and on weekends visitors are likely to encounter gaggles of retirees being ushered on and off the air-conditioned coaches that stop by these temples on their way to or from Mt. Yudono. The ¥500 admission Dainichibō and Churenji each charge, along with sales from protective amulets and other trinkets, keep the temple doors open and their history alive. Honmyōji charges no admission and receives fewer guests, but they’re still happy to show off their wish-granting mummy. The temples are happy with the attention and even went so far as to issue a sokushinbutsu stamp card in 2015, along with Nangakuji in the nearby city of Tsuruoka, to encourage visitors to stop by all four temples.

Nangakuji houses Tetsuryūkai, who was mummified in 1878, a decade after the practice was made illegal. Tetsuryūkai died of illness before he could complete his training and so is not technically a sokushinbutsu. His body is artificially treated in order to better preserve it, and the relatively simple shrine surrounding his remains offer the closest look one can get of a mummified monk in Yamagata. Tetsuryūkai’s failure to properly enter nyūjō is written all over his face, the skin of which is peeling away from his nasal cavity.

Kaikōji houses two sokushinbutsu. Chūkai, who died in 1755, and his former disciple, Enmyōkai, who died in 1822, now sit side by side in eternal meditation. Despite their difference in age you’d think they were brothers. They have the same taut, glossy and blackened skin, as well as the same bony hands, sunken eyes, and gaping toothy mouths.

Un Regard Moderne in Paris. (All illustrations by Bob Eckstein)

For the past two years I have been looking for and illustrating the world’s greatest bookstores, for my latest book. My selections were based on their local contributions, their history and their beauty and uniqueness. I collected the stores’ best stories from the owners, employees, customers and some of today’s great artists and thinkers.

The list started with 150 bookshops comprised of recommendations, research and personal experience and was ultimately trimmed in half. While finding the top 75 was a difficult, yet interesting, task, the following four bookstores were—quite literally—the hardest to find.

Un Regard Moderne

Paris, France

“It's extremely easy to walk past it. Even now, knowing exactly where to find it, I don't ‘see’ it unless I'm really, really looking for it. It's almost like it appears magically in the wall,” Jenny Hart, an artist, designer, and author, said of Paris’ Un Regard Moderne. “The last time I stepped in was 2007 and there was only room for one person in the passages. My work had gained a lot of attention by that time and Juxtapoz had done a nice feature on me and there was a copy of the magazine right on one of the stacks. For me, this was something I never could have imagined! It was like a personal dream come true to be inside this bookstore in that way. It’s like a holy site and you feel anointed.”

Un Regard Moderne houses thousands of volumes–mostly art and pop culture–and it’s affectionately considered by many to be the greatest bookstore on earth. Customers have ranged from William S. Burroughs to Sonic Youth.

I asked my cousin, Allen Stone, to speak with the notorious owner because he’s a writer and could speak French. “It was the strangest place I’ve ever been in. The front of the shop is non-descript. All you see in the window are stacks of books to the ceiling. You don’t see it until there it is. The joint is packed, not much room to move around in and unless you've been there before, you'd never know where or how to look for things. When I spoke to the famous owner, Jacques Noel, and started to explain about your book, he immediately went ice cold and said ‘Je n'existe plus’ (‘I'm no longer here’). Why he no longer existed, I do not know,”’ Stone said.

Word on the Water

London, England

It took awhile to find this bookstore, as I was given the very general address of Regent’s Canal which snakes along quite a ways. It’s not even seen when you are in the vicinity as the canal is below street-level and accessed by descending stairs. Once strolling along the canal, one looks for the modest signage for Word on the Water, London’s only floating secondhand bookshop, among all the beautiful boats.

The 100 year-old Dutch book barge hosts poetry slams, book readings, and live music events on the roof stage on top of the boat. Stephen Fry and Russell Brand, among many others, are some of the many who have been on board.

The ship’s Captain, Jon Privett, explained to me how Word on the Water was elusive to him as well: “Back in 2002, I was evicted from my squat in Hackney, which was auctioned and the buyer had to pay us to leave. I used my share on a boat; I was homeless if I didn’t. It was an old 1950s Norfolk Broads cruiser, half-sunk, which took a lot of looking after and then literally fell apart one night. It actually split in two. So I bought an ex-police boat (by borrowing some money off my mum) that I kept for seven years, during which time I acquired this one. I planned the Word on the Water business with my friend Paddy: seeing this boat for sale, but not able to afford it, we asked the seller if we could rent it, showed him our business plan, and then he turned around and said he’d sell us the boat for a share. So we own a third each. We started out moving every couple of weeks, but it’s impractical to do it with a boat which is a hundred years old…The Canal & River Trust keep writing to ask us to leave, and we keep ignoring them. We’ve even given them a petition of 5000 names – and yet they still don’t acknowledge us. It’s shockingly expensive to live on a boat in London but still a fraction of what it costs to live in a house.”

Librairie Avant-Grade

Nanjing, China

In Nanjing, China there’s a road which goes down a hill and disappears into the ground, all very James Bond-like, leading to a former bomb-shelter that was later an enormous underground parking garage, before it became Librairie Avant-Grade, the world’s largest hidden bookshop. And one of the most beautiful. Many consider it the most beautiful bookstore in China. Inside the tunnel is a double yellow-striped road lined with books, while above you is a huge black Christian cross.

The owner, Qian Xiaocha, first owned a bookstore across from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, converting to Christianity after he kept hearing the hymns.

“Reading,” Qian said, “is our religion and this place is the heaven for book lovers.” After the cross you’re met by a replica of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” which then leads to the main store filled with 300 chairs to read in, a coffee shop, event space and literally miles of books.

Underground Books

Coober Pedy, Australia

A mining town in the middle of Australia known as the “opal capital of the world,” Coober Pedy is one of the strangest towns in the world. With it’s impossibly high temperatures, this town is completely underground because residents can’t live on the surface.

Yet there is a bookstore. In the ultimate illustration of the perseverance of bookstores, Underground Books, is, as its name suggests, a bookstore built underground. It’s not only the only bookstore Coober Pedy, but also the only bookstore for hundreds and hundreds of miles in any direction in this remote region of the country.

"We sell a lot of books on Indigenous culture and history and the early central Australian explorers,” the owner says.

Inside, the store is extremely comfortable and the books more or less perfectly preserved, as the air below the ground is cool—without all the humidity.

Apart from the intercom on the wall, staying in this cavernous hotel suite is a bit like spending a night in the Mines of Moria (minus the Balrog). The relatively small room, situated 155 meters (508 feet) underground, took miners a painstaking ten years to carve out, given the time-consuming mining method called fire-setting that they used. Little did they know that people would one day pay to go down the mine shaft and sleep there for the night.

The world's deepest hotel suite is found in the Swedish town of Sala, which for centuries was home to the largest and most important silver mine in the country. By the twentieth century, however, the precious ore had run out, leaving behind a honeycomb of empty tunnels and excavated chambers. Now, you can spend the night in one of those chambers—in considerably more comfortable conditions than the miners had experienced when they hollowed it out.

The bedrock around Sala has long been known to be rich in silver, and organized mining began as early as the 16th century. Productive over the course of four centuries, the mine grew to eventually a depth of 300 meters (984 feet) with over 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) of tunnels. The mining ended in 1908 and today the mine serves as a tourist attraction with guided tours, concerts, and an unlikely subterranean luxury hotel room.

The suite is furnished with a luxurious double bed, champagne and, of course, silver furnishings. While the temperature of the surrounding tunnels sits at a constant, chilly 2°C (35°F), the hotel room sits in a warm pocket of air that keeps it at a comfortable 18°C (64°F). Naturally, there is no cell phone service that far underground. The only means of communication with the outside world is an intercom that can be used to contact a staff member that stands on call and at the ready throughout the stay. 

In 1985, major oil company Standard Oil of Ohio, aka “Sohio,” opened up the 45-floor Sohio Building in downtown Cleveland. At the height of 659 feet, the mundane corporate headquarters needed some color and distinctiveness to brighten it up, and Sohio CEO Alton Whitehouse had just the plan.

Whitehouse commissioned husband and wife sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen to design the world’s largest rubber stamp. The pair worked together for weeks to create a giant, 49-foot red stamp with the word “free” printed on the bottom.

The word “free” was chosen because the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument of Cleveland was located directly across the street from the Sohio Building, which honors soldiers from the Civil War and freedom from slavery.

Unfortunately for the sculptors, a short time after the stamp sculpture was commissioned, Sohio was taken over by British Petroleum (BP). Robert Horton, the CEO of BP, refused to give the project his stamp of approval. Horton apparently thought that the word “free” on the stamp was intended to mock and humiliate BP for taking away the “corporate freedom” of Sohio. Even though this accusation was unsupported and incorrect, Horton’s decision permanently banned the giant stamp from the property.

The giant stamp was held in a warehouse in Indiana for the next six years until 1991, when the stamp was finally released to the public. The heavy object was hauled into Cleveland's Willard Park, just a few blocks away from its original proposed location. To this day, the “Free Stamp” in Cleveland has held onto the title of “World’s Largest Stamp" and has won the approval of the city's park-goers.

Wild Bill's is apparently "not just a store, it's a way of life." It's owned by a large bearded man (Bill) who has no relation to the famous sharpshooter but is becoming a folkloric legend in his own right.

A reliquary of pop culture marvels, most of which are available for purchase, Wild Bill's Nostalgia Store contains everything from Soviet-era hockey jerseys and 50-year-old Playboy magazines to life-size Terminator statues.

Any outing to this mural-covered estate of curiosities takes at least an hour, due in part to the fact that calling Wild Bill's a "store" sells the place incredibly short. The property also has a large haunted house, a wrought-iron mountain lion in the back, and is constructing something called a "pretzel dark ride." 

But most importantly, Wild Bill's Nostalgia is home to the world's largest Jack-in-the-Box. Known for being that special toy to have scared the living crap out of children since the 14th century, someone at Wild Bill's thought the best choice was clearly to make one as big as possible. Rest assured, one look at the thing's sinister, grinning clown face popping out of its plaster silo is enough to send full-grown adults into the fetal position.

In light of this, we can do nothing less than offer our sincerest commendations to the masterminds at Wild Bill's Nostalgia for having successfully scaled the terror of a toy to fit grownups, too. 

Showcasing over 60 hovercraft and boasting a library containing everything anyone would want to know about the novel vessels, the Hovercraft Museum in Lee-on-the-Solent, England is the largest museum of its kind in the world. Here, visitors can see famous hovercraft from film and television, climb aboard historic specimens, and see the very first proof-of-concept machines that led the way to the hovercraft revolution.

The museum's collection includes the two hovercraft featured in the hovercraft chase in the James Bond film Die Another Day, as well as the craft built on Channel 4's Scrapheap Challenge and the one rebuilt on the same channel's Salvage Squad. Also featured are the world's first working hovercraft model, the world's first production-built hovercraft, a military craft that completed a round trip of the arctic circle, and a hovercraft that served as a ferry across the English Channel until 2000, when it was replaced by a catamaran. Despite being replaced, that hovercraft still holds the record for fastest cross-channel voyage, traversing the body of water in an impressive 22 minutes.

The hovercraft concept was developed by an Englishman named Dr. Christopher Cockerell, and the first hovercraft was built in England in 1958. They thereafter enjoyed a brief heyday, being found useful in military, civilian, commercial, competitive, and recreational applications, and are still used in many of those capacities today. The Hovercraft Museum is located at a slipway where many new designs in the early hovercraft era were launched for testing.

Henry Bradley Plant spent the 1880s building up a network of railroad and steamship lines that both terminated in Tampa, then a sleepy and sparsely populated fishing village prone to yellow fever epidemics. To bolster this inauspicious nexus of his transportation empire, he built one of the most magnificent hotels in Victorian America: the Tampa Bay Hotel, which today houses the Henry B. Plant Museum.

Opened in 1891, the Tampa Bay Hotel was the crown jewel in the so-called Plant System, which included trains that rolled into Tampa from wealthy Northern locales, as well as steamers that departed Tampa Bay for Cuba, Jamaica, Bermuda, and Mobile. The hotel was designed to appeal to the well-traveled holiday makers of the age and represented the height of opulence. The Moorish Revival building sprawled over six acres and fully outfitted with contemporary extravagances like electricity, telephones, and Florida's first elevators. The project was so ambitious that Plant was unable to secure investor funding, instead spending $3 million of his own money on the construction and furnishing of the hotel.

The hotel was decorated with luxury items personally collected by Mr. and Mrs. Plant from Europe and Asia. The grounds spread over 150 acres, and included a Grand Salon, a Music Room with regular live performances, a Dining Room with lavish formal dinners, extensive gardens, a golf course, tennis courts, hunting and fishing facilities, a heated swimming pool, a spa, a bowling alley, stables, a race track, and a 2000-seat casino.

Outside of a stint as a base of military operations during the Spanish-American War that brought international significance, the Tampa Bay Hotel hosted guests from December to April until the Great Depression forced its closure in 1930. By then owned by the city, the hotel became the home of the Tampa Bay Junior College in 1933 (becoming the University of Tampa soon thereafter), with the south wing being preserved as the Tampa Municipal Museum to showcase the history of the building and the intertwined story of the city.

In 1974, the Tampa Municipal Museum became the Henry B. Plant Museum, which seeks to provide a faithful interpretation of the hotel in its heyday, as well as the general environment of late Victorian tourism and concurrent early days of Tampa. The exhibits primarily consist of original furnishings and artifacts that filled the hotel when it began welcoming Florida's first vacationers and snowbirds.

It's October and local grocery stores are well-stocked with Halloween candy, some that are specially made for the fall holiday. Like sushi body part gummies.

Spot, who posts all kinds of review videos to his YouTube channel TheReviewSpot, purchases and eats the odd Halloween-themed candy found at check-out stations. He found the body part edition of the Sushi Gummy Candy featured in the clip above at a place you'd least expect: a Michaels arts and craft store.

"Probably of everything that I've reviewed during Halloween, this is probably the most interesting and coolest candy I have seen to date," Spot says. The tray has eight pieces of sushi topped with gummy eyeballs, fingers, nose, ear, and a brain, which can be eaten with a pair of chopsticks included in the package. Too bad it doesn't come with some candy blood soy sauce.     

Spot also reviews some of McSteven's "Vampire Brew" or blood red hot chocolate, which he mixes in a special Halloween skull mug. It really tastes like your standard glass of hot chocolate, minus the pinkish hue (or Frankenberry cereal milk color, according to Spot). 

He takes a few chewy bites out of a creepy, two and a half-foot long gummy worm—the "world's largest" gummy worm in fact. The half blue, half red candy is denser than the typical gummy worm or gummy bear, the texture more solid and "beefy," he says. Spot recommends that you probably should not consume the entire the gummy worm in one sitting. That's a lot of sugar. 

Spot came across caffeinated Stay Puft Quality Marshmallow candy. Yes, it's inspired by the same Stay Puft Marshmallow Corporation mascot featured in the 1984 film Ghostbusters. The marshmallows have a "homemade" taste to it, according to Spot, and he suggests the ingenious idea of making Stay Puft Marshmallow rice crispy squares. Hear what else he has to say about the sugary treats below: 

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

When a SpaceX rocket exploded on the launch pad in early September, the initial speculation about the disaster was that it was a simple accident. Building rockets and going to space is incredibly hard, especially for a private company, and this wasn't the first time SpaceX had failed on their mission to make space travel cheaper and easier. 

But on Friday, the Washington Post reported that investigators were considering a different explanation: sabotage, possibly by United Launch Alliance, a fierce rival of SpaceX.

On video taken the day of explosion, the Post reported, there appeared to be an "odd shadow, then a white spot on the roof of a nearby building leased by ULA."

And, later, when a SpaceX employee asked to get access to the roof, presumably to investigate further, ULA denied SpaceX's request. Access to the roof was later given to Air Force investigators, who didn't find any evidence of sabotage. 

Still, the episode hints at something Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder, has also gestured at, as the enigma of what happened that day in Cape Canaveral, Florida lingers. 

“We’ve eliminated all of the obvious possibilities for what occurred there,” Musk said recently, according to the Post. “So what remains are the less probable answers.”

Sabotage or not, the rocket's explosion has confounded investigators. As Musk has written on Twitter, it occurred during a routine operation, and there were no apparent heat sources nearby. All investigators know now is that it was set off by a breach in the rocket's helium system. How that breach occurred remains a mystery. 

"Still working on the Falcon fireball investigation," Musk has said. "Turning out to be the most difficult and complex failure we have ever had in 14 years."

In 1991, Hollywood resident Gail Cottman purchased a small plot of land directly beneath her Hollywood Hills abode. Originally intended to house a patch of roses, Cottman’s flower garden soon grew into something much more spectacular, and magical, than she could have ever imagined.

To build her garden, Cottman’s contractor, Manuel Rodriguez, placed her roses in a bed of concrete. Noticing the dullness of the cement, Rodriguez decorated the concrete with tiles and beads to brighten it up. When Cottman noticed this new flowerbed design, it reminded her of one of her favorite movies, The Wizard of Oz, whose concept of “everyone is their own wizard” had inspired her throughout her life. She used this inspiration to take her project to the next level, devoting her entire garden’s decor to “Munchkinland,” a plant-filled garden dedicated to the Land of Oz.

Weaving through trees and shrubs, the yellow-tiled path twisting through the Garden of Oz forms the “Yellow Brick Road," which directs the rare visitor through a landscape of thousands of shining tiles. Featuring a crystal ball, the “Wall of Toys,” and a mailbox where you can send a letter directly to Oz, this folk art project features hundreds of plants, tiled staircases, and towering mosaics.

There are multiple thrones in the Garden of Oz, each with a unique backstory. The garden features musical thrones dedicated to Elvis Presley and Duke Ellington and peacemaking thrones dedicated to inspirational figures such as Rosa Parks and the Dalai Lama. Also featured in Munchkinland is the Dorothy Throne, “A Throne of Your Own," and a throne dedicated to Musako Morioka, Cottman’s Japanese friend who is a survivor of the bombings of Hiroshima. Cottman later visited Morioka’s homeland to create the “Garden of Us” in the center of Hiroshima.

Although the Garden of Oz is not typically open to the public, Cottman has allegedly given the keys to all of the neighborhood’s children so that they have a direct pathway to a magical future. However, the adults wishing to see the garden can easily view it from the streetside.

A modern-day replica of the Porter Garden Telescope. (All photos courtesy of Russ Schleipman)

You know what a backyard telescope looks like. A sleek metal cylinder pointed to the heavens. An eyepiece at one end to peer into. A tripod to hold it all up.

Not always.

In 1923, Vermont artist, Arctic explorer, and amateur astronomer Russell W. Porter created an Art Nouveau telescope intended to serve as both garden ornament and functional scientific instrument. Cast in bronze, the reflecting telescope was adorned with sculpted lotus petals and curving leaves. The optics were disguised in overlapping bronze leaves, while the motion controls were hidden in a pair of cylindrical flowers.

The beautiful botanical details of the Porter Garden Telescope.

Porter created fewer than 100 of his garden telescopes, according to the Smithsonian, which holds one of the devices in its collection at the National Museum of American History. Their rarity was partly to do with cost—at around $500, the telescopes were beyond the means of most Jazz Age stargazers.

The sundial base of the telescope.

Intended to be kept in the garden year-round, the telescope was, in the words of a 15-page pamphlet written by Porter, “ever ready to entertain one’s guests—whether it be the study of the heavens, or to see what Neighbor Jones is doing to his place across the valley.”

The stem holding the optical elements could be dismantled easily. When these parts were removed, the telescope transformed into a handy sundial.

Russell W. Porter gazing toward the heavens.

As an amateur telescope designer, however, Porter did have a lasting effect on astronomy. Five years after debuting his garden device, Porter was invited to help design the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory just north of San Diego. From its dedication in 1948 until 1993, this telescope was the world's largest.

The telescope's removable optics kit.

Porter's original garden telescopes turn up at auctions from time to time, in varying states of preservation. But if you'd rather get a brand-new one, there is an option—as long as you're not on a tight budget.

Since 2007, Telescopes of Vermont has been creating made-to-order versions of Porter's telescope, using patterns made from the amateur astronomer's original design and adding 21st-century optics. At $125,000, they're not cheap, but Russ Schleipman, President of Telescopes of Vermont, says they're a hit among luxury buyers. "At that level, everybody's got the same toys," he says. A 110-pound Art Nouveau telescope stands out.

Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com

A man who was one half of what is believed to be the longest-married couple in the UK dies aged 110 https://t.co/pR2ysVZiDCpic.twitter.com/MsMsyQGX6u

— BBC News England (@BBCEngland) October 4, 2016

Karam Chand, who is believed to have been in the longest marriage in the world, has died, according to the BBC. 

Chand died Friday at the age of 110, after over 90 years of marriage to his wife Kartari, 103, who survives him. 

The couple, who were said to "never argue," were married longer than Queen Elizabeth has been alive. They moved to England from India in 1965, when they'd already been married for 40 years. 

They have eight children and 27 grandchildren, the fruit of a marriage that began in 1925 in the Punjab region of India, when that country was still ruled by Britain. 

They celebrated their 90th anniversary last December in West Yorkshire, where the couple are local celebrities, leading a parade there last year. 

"It's one of those things nobody can stop," Karam Chand's son Paul told the BBC, "everybody has to go."

In November of 1943 the villagers of Tyneham were given an evacuation notice by Winston Churchill's war cabinet. British forces had to be trained in modern combat in preparation for D-Day and, it was felt, Tyneham was the most suitable location with the fewest residents to inconvenience.

As live ammunition was to be used, villagers were ordered to leave their homes for their own safety. Residents were told that as of December 19, the village would be under the control of the military and they would need to stay away for a total of 28 days. On December 17 the townsfolk started to pack up and leave their homes behind—under the belief that it was only for a short period of time and they would soon be allowed to return.

The villagers were never allowed to return and, to this day, the village remains under the control of the military.

The cottages are in ruin, the manor house long gone. The church and the school are well preserved and inside the school you can still see the students' names above the coat hooks, posters on the wall, and children's work, all telling stories of a time long gone.

Today the village is nestled in a large military zone which is still used for training with live ammunition. As such the area is closed to the public for the majority of the year, but there are opportunities throughout the year to visit the ghost village.

Not far from Sydney's Central Railway Station sits an ornately decorated sandstone building, surrounded by a manicured lawn enclosed by a sandstone and iron palisade fence. The curiously imposing structure calls to mind the sombre atmosphere of a church, and has probably caused many a commuter to wonder exactly what it is.

The building is, in fact, the old mortuary station once home to a special train service that transported the city's dead to their final resting place in Rockwood Cemetery.

Designed in Gothic Revival style by colonial architect James Blackett, the building features heavily worked facades with carvings of angels, cherubs, and gargoyles on the walls. It was from here that the dead, and their mourners, could take the 17-kilometer journey (10 miles) to Rockwood Cemetery where a similar mortuary station would meet them at the other end, with special "Necropolis Receiving Houses" built on the platforms out of pale pink Pyrmont sandstone.

Beginning in 1865, a regular morning and afternoon funeral train ran from Sydney to the Rockwood terminus. On the front of each train departing the Mortuary Station was a large sign reading "FUNERAL." As the train approached each station, the driver would toll his bell and slow down, while men on the platform and railway employees would doff their hats in respect while the train passed.

Improvements in roads and cars gradually eroded the need for the deathly railway line, and by 1930 the service had all but ceased, except for visitors on Sundays and Mothers' Days. Sadly, on April 3, 1948 the service was terminated, and over the following decades both the Mortuary Station and it's twin at Rockwood Cemetery fell into disrepair.

In a strange twist, the Rookwood Station building was eventually removed brick by brick and reconstructed as the "Stations of the Cross" church in Ainslie, Canberra, where it still stands today. As for Sydney's Mortuary Station, it was recognised as an important piece of heritage and has lived several alternate lives as a tea-room, an event space and a wedding venue. Currently, it is maintained by Sydney Trains and while it is sometimes opened on special occasions to the public, it remains an everyday reminder of death that can be glimpsed from the train window. 

A postcard from 1917 showing a "Cigarette Fiend", in a spell from "Madame Nicotine". (Photo: Public Domain)

At the dawn of the 20^th century, the United States fell victim to an incredibly dangerous drug. Children were easy prey for the menace, one so toxic that even casual use turned the most mild-mannered man into a criminal maniac. “[T]he brain becomes sluggish . . . [a]t the same time the mind is full of wild fancies,” wrote Dr. Carlton Simon in the New York Journal. “[T]he actions are not guided by the will. Normal deeds vanish, and theft, murder and other horrible crimes result.”

What was this frightening Jekyll-and-Hyde drug? The “dope stick.” The “coffin tack.” The lowly cigarette.

You have to be kidding me, you’re probably thinking. My Uncle Ted smoked two packs a day for 30 years and he never hurt a fly. But cigarettes were still a novelty back in the early 1900s, with most still hand-rolled Turkish affairs; the vast majority of smokers chose cigars or chewing tobacco over the “paper pipe.” Philip Morris came to New York in 1902 and introduced Marlboros, manufactured (like all cigs of the time) from bits and bobs left over from producing other tobacco products. Nicotine was already established in medical research as a deadly poison, but exactly how it affected the human body was up for debate. (Some pioneers did voice a concern over “cigarette cough” and possible correlations to heart disease.)

One thing everyone seemed to agree on, however, was that it ruined the mind, creating the “cigarette fiend—a deplorable soul whose habit “sap[ped] the moral and mental life of its devotee.”

A signed pledge card from the Primitive Methodist Anti-Cigarette League, with a promise "to abstain from the use of tobacco in every form, until I am at least 21 years of age." (Photo: Wellcome Images, London/CC BY 4.0)

The theory that regular cigarette smoking invariably turned the user homicidal was so widespread that it became a regular part of the insanity defense:

• 1899: George W. Schan fatally shoots his father twice in the head. Despite ongoing tension at home over an inheritance feud, friends claim “the excessive use of cigarettes unbalanced his mind.”
• 1900: John Garrabrant beats his 16-year-old schoolmate to death. Another boy, Casmer Teresnick, uses an ax to murder a local canal boat captain. They are arraigned on the same day as “cigarette fiends both, with the yellow stain of the poison on their bony hands . . .”
• 1901: Jim Harris shoots John Allen, a wealthy and eminent shopkeeper, in the doorway of his own home. Though “ugly rumors” persist about a relationship between Harris and Mrs. Allen—possibly branding her an accomplice—Harris’ defense was he “had been a cigarette fiend since he was two years old.” (Mrs. Allen was acquitted.)
• 1905: Martin Paulsgrove shows little concern or remorse after fatally shooting his girlfriend. This, of course, is due to his being “a confirmed cigarette fiend . . . [n]o doubt the defense will be insanity, caused by the excessive use of the deadly cigarette.”

One of the most publicized “cigarette fiend” cases was that of 16-year-old Charles Cross. Sometime between the 7^th and 9^th of November, 1899, he brutally beat 60-year-old Sarah King to death. Cross lived with Mrs. King and her husband, Freeman, a printer who was frequently out of town for business. Mr. King hired the boy to do chores and generally help his wife around the house in his absence. After a brief period of denying he’d been involved, Cross finally confessed, stating an uncontrollable “desire to gratify his passions” caused him to attack the woman, smashing her head repeatedly against the floor when she resisted.

The New York Journal from November 14, 1899, with a report on the case of "cigarette fiend" Charles Cross. (Photo: Library of Congress)

The public was outraged by the vicious crime, but also confused; surely such a young boy, particularly one who had no recorded history of violence, could not have done this and been in his right mind. It had to be mental instability – and they didn’t have to look far for a cause. “The boy is not responsible. His mind is diseased,” claimed Dr. Simon, just before Cross’ sentencing. “Any boy that smokes one hundred cigarettes in a day is bereft of moral self-control.”

Similar pleas were published in newspapers across the country, and everyone from the governor to the Board of Pardons received petitions begging mercy for this “moral degenerate.” Unfortunately for him, Cross was hanged on July 20, 1900, 19 days after his 18^th birthday. He was one of the youngest people ever sentenced to death in Connecticut.

An anti-smoking advertisement from 1905. (Photo: Public Domain)

This carcinogenic “Twinkie defense” lasted well into the 1910s, especially where juvenile delinquents were involved. Study after study flooded newspapers about the number of boys in prisons or hospitals thanks to “their minds [being] weakened by the excessive smoking of cigarettes.” Reform schools insisted “the most hardened of the boys were all cigarette fiends,” and “more than any other one factor starts [them] on the road to criminal life.” It took World War I, when the ease and convenience of pre-rolled cigarettes followed soldiers home from war, to stub out their evil reputation.

Still, you might want to steer clear of Uncle Ted, just in case.