By the 19th century, church graveyards had a worse reputation than you might expect. In addition to their general doom and gloom, they were rife with body snatching, gambling, and prostitution. Add to that the fact that they were literally overflowing, sending decaying matter into water supplies and causing deadly epidemics, and you've got a real problem on your hands.

At the same time, social attitudes towards death were shifting. While before, the church graveyard was meant to be a memento mori—a reminder that you, too, would meet your maker someday and so you'd better shape up—in the Victorian era when men, women, children, and the elderly were dying at an unprecedented rate, people didn't want to be reminded of death and damnation when they buried their dead. They wanted to mourn in peace. 

The architect Sir Islington Wren had introduced the idea of a garden-like cemetery on the edge of town as early as 1711, but it wasn't until the 19th century that rural cemeteries caught on. When they did though, everything about death changed.

With names like "Green-Wood" and "Forest Lawn," graveyards came off as places of natural respite, not of decay and foreboding. Grassy lawns, flowering trees, and reflective ponds made them as much a place of repose for the living as for the dead. The skulls and crossbones of 16th century grave markers were replaced by more artistic, interpretive symbols like lambs, lilies, and open books. And unlike the restrictive religious burying grounds, in these new rural cemeteries of the 19th century, municipally operated and religiously unaffiliated, anyone was welcome to be interred.

The living flocked to rural cemeteries in droves. In some places these were among the first parks open to the public, and when they opened Victorians would take day outings to the new cemeteries. Celebrity corpses were a draw, but so were those who became famous in death—tragic young women who threw themselves into rivers and pioneering balloonists who fell from the sky. Memorials, too, gave sculptors and artists a place to showcase their work, some of which became famous in its own right.

Death was never more present than in the Victorian era. But rather than pretend it wasn't there, people living in the 19th century got cozy with their final fate in bucolic grounds where the notion of beauty in death was celebrated. 

1. Père Lachaise Cemetery

PARIS, FRANCE

A fork in the path at Père Lachaise. (Photo: Clayton Parker/CC BY-SA 2.0)

It all started in Paris, a city known for its overflowing catacombs, which was more in need of an expansive burial ground than most. Père Lachaise was established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804 in response to the squalid church graveyards, and set aside specifically for the purpose of being an organized and beautiful burying ground owned by the city, the first of its kind. The cemetery really gained repute when Molière's remains were reinterred there. Since then, its dramatic grounds have become known as the final resting place for many tragic misfits: Oscar Wilde is buried there, as are Jim Morrison and Edith Piaf. The classically French monuments, which shrug austerity for romantic, dramatic sculptures, brought tourists along with mourners right from the start.  

2. Highgate Cemetery

GREATER LONDON, ENGLAND 

The cramped, ivy-covered headstones cast a spell over all those who visit Highgate. (Photo: Atlas Obscura user allison)

Inspired by Père Lachaise, the garden cemeteries of London were soon to follow. Kensal Green Cemetery and Catacombs, West Norwood Cemetery, Brompton Cemetery, Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, Nunhead Cemetery, and Abney Park (which actually took its cues from American rural cemeteries rather than a European source) were all built in the 1830s and '40s. Their idyllic beauty became renowned worldwide, and the cemeteries were branded as London's "Magnificent Seven."

Highgate was not the first of these to open, but it is the crown jewel. The densely overgrown greenery shrouds the crumbling granite headstones, and the literal "high gates" surrounding the grounds cut off the world outside, making Highgate feel like a secret garden for the dead, equal parts fairytale and horror story. It's been the set for many movies, plenty of them vampiric, but many visitors still come to the dilapidated cemetery simply to pay their respects to the dead—in particular, the famous ones like Karl Marx.

3. Mount Auburn Cemetery

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Winding paths in Cambridge's Mount Auburn Cemetery. (Photo: Daderot/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Although the relatively new cities of the United States were not as crowded with dead as those in Europe, American burial grounds nevertheless trended towards the rural cemetery as well. Following the French and English examples, the first American garden cemetery opened in Cambridge in 1831. Winding paths looped around sunny hillsides, with peaceful gravestones under shady trees.

As if the draw of literary figures like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wasn't enough, Mount Auburn is also protected by the National Park Service and functions as an arboretum and a wildlife refuge. This distinctly park-like atmosphere set the tone for practically all rural cemeteries to come. With the success of Mount Auburn, idyllic green cemeteries that offered respite to city-dwellers as well as the dead and buried began to crop up all over the U.S. 

4. Laurel Hill Cemetery

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

Philadelphia merchant William Warner's monument features a female figure lifting the lid off a coffin so Warner's soul may escape to heaven. (Photo: dbking/CC BY 2.0)

Not to be bested by Boston, equally historic Philadelphia opened its own rural cemetery a mere four years later. If Mount Auburn was the resting place for American literary figures, Laurel Hill was the garden cemetery for America's war heroes. Its headstones, much like those in Père Lachaise, tended toward the sculptural and often depicted the veterans and statesmen buried beneath them. 

5. Green-Wood Cemetery

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

Graves at Green-Wood. (Photo: Michelle Simoncini/CC BY 2.0)

Shortly after came Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, which was quickly folded into New York City lore. It was instantly a coveted place to spend the afterlife. Hundreds of New York's famous and infamous are buried at Green-Wood. Just a few of the most notable interred include William and Henry Steinway, F. A. O. Schwarz, Samuel Morse, Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed, and Louis Comfort Tiffany. People flocked here to see the graves of these famous people (this was often closer than they could have ever gotten when they were alive), but also to see the resting places of those who became famous in death. These included those who died in the tragic Brooklyn Theatre fire and a young debutante killed in a carriage crash.

The grounds also boast some impressive monuments, including pyramids, mausoleums, and an intricately carved Gothic entranceway that apparently houses a flock of escaped parakeets. The cemetery conducts an extensive series of events (many with Atlas Obscura!), and makes its resources available to the public, including the undertakers' ledgers.

6. Mount Hope Cemetery

ROCHESTER, NEW YORK

A massive tree in Mount Hope Cemetery. (Photo: Ryan Hyde/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Bucolic Mount Hope Cemetery is home to some of upstate New York's most famous, many of whom were political pioneers. Susan B. Anthony is buried here, as is Frederick Douglass. Taking full advantage of its park-like atmosphere, the greenery in Mount Hope is as impressive as are its residents. Its towering trees dwarf even the highest obelisks, and the fall foliage is a breathtaking sight. It followed the example set by Mount Auburn, Laurel Hill, and Green-Wood, solidifying park cemeteries as a distinctly American phenomenon.

7. Spring Grove Cemetery

CINCINNATI, OHIO

Sunlight streams through trees and monuments at Spring Grove. (Photo: David Ohmer/CC BY 2.0)

Soon states outside the Northeast caught wind of the trend and the movement spread. It wasn't just a nicer way to bury the dead, it was a representation of European civilization, and as such any cities that considered themselves metropolises ceased the use of musty church graveyards and opted for new, lush, green garden cemeteries instead.

It wasn't only trend-following that prompted Cincinnati to open Spring Grove Cemetery though. In the early 1840s a massive cholera epidemic swept the city. As churches grew unable to handle the daily influx of corpses, the city stepped in and opened Spring Grove Cemetery. At first it was just your average burial ground, but in 1855 Cincinnati hired renowned landscaper Adolph Strauch. He dug ponds and lakes with their own islands, planted small forests, and designed a Gothic chapels and mausoleums where there had been practically nothing before. Like those that came before it, Spring Grove instantly became a desirable place to be buried, a lovely place to take an afternoon walk, and one of Cincinnati's crowning gems.

8. Elmwood Cemetery

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

"Snowden's" tomb at Elmwood Cemetery. (Photo: Atlas Obscura user allison)

If the names of these cemeteries are beginning to read as somewhat generic, it's because they often didn't mean anything. Elmwood Cemetery's name was chosen from a hat.

Like Spring Grove, Elmwood's population was largely "born" out of a yellow fever epidemic. It took the lives of roughly 5,000 Memphians, about half of which are buried in Elmwood. Because the death toll was so high, many of the dead didn't have anyone left behind to bury them, and so are interred in a mass grave labeled "No Man's Land." Elmwood is the only rural cemetery that has made a regular practice of memorializing the unknowns. Following in the example of the yellow fever grave, there is also a headstone dedicated to fallen Civil War soldiers (both Union and Confederate), enslaved Africans, and people who donated their bodies to science. 

9. Cave Hill Cemetery

LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY

Some of Cave Hill Cemetery's original graves. (Photo: Garden State Hiker/CC BY 2.0)

While most rural cemeteries were the result of neat city planning, others grew by accident. In the case of Cave Hill Cemetery, it was first farmland purchased by the city to be quarried, but became the site of a "pesthouse" for diseased persons in the first half of the 19th century. Following all the death that came out of that place, the land was dedicated by a Reverend Edward Porter Humphrey. Continuing the thematic trend of the rural cemetery movement, he stated that, "...reason and taste suggest that [this cemetery] should be decorated appropriately by the beautiful productions of our great Creator...."  

Unlike most of these cemeteries, Cave Hill continues to inter bodies today. As such, its grounds are a hodgepodge of somber gravestones like the ones seen above, effusive Victorian monuments, and modern interpretations of the sentimental tombs of yesteryear. These include a life-size sculptures of a couple bearing swords, Jesus holding a swing for a little girl, and an eagle and a hawk fighting to the death.

10. Hollywood Cemetery

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Graves at Hollywood Cemetery overlooking the James River. (Photo: Andrew Bain/Public Domain)

Like Cave Hill, Hollywood Cemetery was built around an older cemetery, and so it contains elements of pre-Victorian graveyards as well as the flowery effects of a typical garden cemetery. It formally opened during the wave of rural cemeteries in the 1840s, but received most of its burials during the Civil War. It has all the trappings of its companions (rapturous monuments, shady oaks, winding paths), with one colorful addition: a vampire.

Legend has it that following a mysterious railroad tunnel collapse in 1929, a human-like creature covered in blood with jagged teeth and flesh falling off its body was seen creeping into a mausoleum. Ever since, the cemetery has been a popular place for teenagers to sneak into late at night in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the Richmond Vampire. It just goes to show that despite all efforts to strip the dark and depraved from a cemetery's reputation, some spookiness avails.

 The rural cemetery eventually became the de facto model for burial grounds, but it's easy to forget it wasn't always this way. As interest in the morbid grows more acceptable and even encouraged, people go to cemeteries not just to mourn or gawk, but to look into the past.

People will always die, and we will always have to do something with their remains. However, cemeteries themselves are becoming a less efficient option of funerary treatment. Burial is space-consuming and embalming is bad for the environment. It's becoming less and less common to be buried at all, and new cemeteries are almost never opened. As such it's fascinating to walk through these sumptuous parks that were once the height of innovation and style in funereal treatment. Bring a blanket and make like a Victorian to your nearest rural cemetery to spend some time with the dead.

Johanna Under The Ice - NOWNESS from NOWNESS on Vimeo.

“My leg was so badly broken, they thought I might lose it.”

So begins this visually hypnotizing short documentary by British director Ian Derry. Surrounded by monochromatic arctic landscapes, we follow Finnish diver Johanna Nordblad through snow-covered pine forests to the middle of a frozen lake. As she slowly cuts a triangle in the ice, she tells us in a calm voice the story of how she got there.

After a terrible cycling accident, she almost lost her leg to necrosis, but the ice saved her. At first a truly agonizing experience, she came to discover the peace that lay beyond the pain.

She sits on the edge of the triangle, getting ready to plunge in. When she disappears beneath the surface you can almost feel the sharp shock of the icy water.

“There is no place for fear, no place for panicking, no place for mistakes,” she says. When she comes out for air, she seems as if she was born to do this. It is not difficult to imagine her diving 50 meters under the frozen surface—wearing only a swimsuit and a mask—to break the women’s world record for freediving under ice.

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.

In 1942 a British forest guard in Roopkund, India made an alarming discovery. Some 16,000 feet above sea level, at the bottom of a small valley, was a frozen lake absolutely full of skeletons. That summer, the ice melting revealed even more skeletal remains, floating in the water and lying haphazardly around the lake's edges. Something horrible had happened here.

The immediate assumption (it being war time) was that these were the remains of Japanese soldiers who had died of exposure while sneaking through India. The British government, terrified of a Japanese land invasion, sent a team of investigators to determine if this was true. However upon examination they realized these bones were not from Japanese soldiers—they weren't fresh enough.

It was evident that the bones were quite old indeed. Flesh, hair, and the bones themselves had been preserved by the dry, cold air, but no one could properly determine exactly when they were from. More than that, they had no idea what had killed over 200 people in this small valley. Many theories were put forth including an epidemic, landslide, and ritual suicide. For decades, no one was able to shed light on the mystery of Skeleton Lake.

However, a 2004 expedition to the site seems to have finally revealed the mystery of what caused those people's deaths. The answer was stranger than anyone had guessed.

As it turns out, all the bodies date to around 850 AD. DNA evidence indicates that there were two distinct groups of people, one a family or tribe of closely related individuals, and a second smaller, shorter group of locals, likely hired as porters and guides. Rings, spears, leather shoes, and bamboo staves were found, leading experts to believe that the group was comprised of pilgrims heading through the valley with the help of the locals.

All the bodies had died in a similar way, from blows to the head. However, the short deep cracks in the skulls appeared to be the result not of weapons, but rather of something rounded. The bodies also only had wounds on their heads, and shoulders as if the blows had all come from directly above. What had killed them all, porter and pilgrim alike?

Among Himalayan women there is an ancient and traditional folk song. The lyrics describe a goddess so enraged at outsiders who defiled her mountain sanctuary that she rained death upon them by flinging hailstones “hard as iron.” After much research and consideration, the 2004 expedition came to the same conclusion. All 200 people died from a sudden and severe hailstorm.

Trapped in the valley with nowhere to hide or seek shelter, the "hard as iron” cricket ball-sized [about 23 centimeter/9 inches diameter] hailstones came by the thousands, resulting in the travelers' bizarre sudden death. The remains lay in the lake for 1,200 years until their discovery.

The interactive map above tracks over 100 clown sightings and threats across America, beginning in early August. This map will be updated as more clown activity happens. 

The first American "creepy clown" sighting, by most accounts, ended up being for a movie. Gags, the Green Bay clown, was seen wandering around Wisconsin in early August, carrying a host of black balloons. People were a bit freaked out until a local man said that he was using Gags for a short film he was working on. 

The intent, in other words, was benign.

But then, on August 20, an anonymous caller in Greenville, South Carolina, said that they'd seen clowns in the woods, and the next day someone else said they'd seen clowns in the woods flashing green lasers. Just as everything started to calm down, on August 29, it happened again: two children reported seeing clowns in Greenville.

And with that, clown hysteria began. Next came clown sightings in nearby North Carolina. And, then, sightings—and, increasingly, social media threats—up and down the Eastern Seaboard. By mid-September, the sightings and threats had moved west, to Middle America. And by late September and early October, they'd reached the West Coast. 

Few of the threats have amounted to much more than a scare, and even fewer have produced actual clowns. But in at least a handful of cases, living, breathing clowns have turned up.

Take a case in Middlesboro, Kentucky, on September 23, when a 20-year-old man in a clown outfit and mask was arrested after he was spotted crouched in a wooded area by an apartment complex. Or, a week earlier, a 25-year-old in a Walmart parking lot who was arrested after numerous people called police to complain about him.

That clown told police it was merely just for fun, with Halloween coming up and all.

"It's not illegal to scare people," the man, dressed in face paint and a checkered suit, told a cop in a patrol car. 

But those guys are the exception, not the rule. If you think you've seen a clown, maybe stop for a second before calling police, and think about whether you're actually looking at a clown. If you verify that what you're seeing is a clown, then it might be a good idea to call 911. 

Or just run. 

Orange, but still deadly. (Photo: Olivier Testa/The Abanda Expedition)

It’s not easy being green, or orange for that matter. According to New Scientist, explorers in Gabon’s Abanda cave system have discovered subterranean crocs with vibrant orange skin (no relation to Mario Batali's footwear). And it’s because of bat poop.

Researchers first headed into the African cave network, known as “The Crocodile Cave” to study the strange cave-dwelling animals. These unique crocodiles live underground for most of their lives feeding on the copious population of bats and crickets that live inside the caves. Scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how they survive down there since, while food is plentiful, the cave ecosystem does not provide a good place for the animals to lay their eggs and reproduce. The crocodiles likely leave their underground shelter in order to lay their eggs and then return with their children for the easy feasting.

Oh, hello.(Photo: Olivier Testa/The Abanda Expedition)

As the researchers got deeper into the caves, they began to discover that the older crocs became paler, and that some of them had even turned a shade of orange. These orange crocodiles are the result of a lifetime of swimming in the waters of the cave. The cave’s large bat population also produces a large amount of guano that falls into the cave waters where the crocs swim. One researcher described the waters as little more than “an alkaline slurry formed from bat droppings.” The chemicals in the bat poop eventually erode the crocodile skin, and turn it orange.

Because the crocs don’t live exclusively in the cave, they are not likely to start adapting like other cave-dwelling animals, going blind, having naturally pale skin. But even half a life in those caves leaves its mark.

In 1948, after more than a decade on the road and riding the rails, Richard Zimmerman got an idea. Working along the banks of Idaho’s Salmon River, fishing and doing some small-scale mining, he figured it was time to settle down. At the age of 32, the restless hermit figured the best place to settle was right there in Salmon, Idaho—inside the hill, in a cave dug with his own hands.

The people of Salmon soon coined a new name for Zimmerman, who became “Dugout Dick.”  

Realizing that the rocky slopes of the mountains could be hollowed out to make cozy quarters, Dugout Dick got to work using only a pick-axe, a shovel, a wheelbarrow and his bare hands. He outfitted his cave with scraps and cast-offs, and moved in. Then he made another. And another. Until his death in 2010, Dugout Dick carved out an entire village of caves, renting some out to campers, sojourners, and like-minded “off the grid” homesteaders ($2 a night, or $25 a month).

Dugout was never actually deeded the land, and although essentially a squatter, local authorities and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) understood his place in the history of Idaho wanderers and settlers. They granted him lifetime rights, with the understanding that the land would be reclaimed by the BLM after he passed away. He squeezed as much time as he could out of the deal, living off the land until the age of 94.

After Dugout died, the BLM came in, and—to the dismay of locals and media alike—destroyed the caves citing health and safety concerns.

Newspaper publisher Roger Plothow enlisted all the support he could to create a memorial to Dugout. After the bulldozing there was one small cabin they left behind, built by Dugout into the hillside. With the help of local high school kids and the BLM, a small memorial was added in front of the cabin, with signs celebrating the life and creations of Dugout Dick.

The hillside along the Salmon River off US Hwy 93 shows little sign of the former cave village, but follow the old wooden bridge and dirt road to the former site and there you’ll find the memorial, the old cabin, and the story of an Idaho legend.

(Photo: Public domain)

A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.

On July 7, the Dallas Police engaged Micah Xavier Johnson in a 45-minute gun battle before ultimately sending in a bomb-defusing robot laden with explosives to kill him.

Later that week on CNN, Dallas Police Chief David Brown answered exactly the question everyone had been asking: How did the police department know to put a pound of C4 onto a bomb-defusing robot and use it as an execution drone? “They improvised this whole idea in about 15, 20 minutes - extraordinary.”

Documents acquired from the Dallas Police Department through the Texas Freedom of Information Act confirm exactly what Chief Brown said in July: there is absolutely nothing in the DPD’s robot training materials to suggest that officers and manufacturers had considered using the robots for this purpose.

Among the twelve pages of documents released in response to a request for all training materials about the bomb defusing robot are at least two pages ofTwitter and Facebook screenshots which indicate that this particular robot was acquired by the DPD on May 2, 2016, only months before the shootout.

The released training materials, however, consist solely of a 7-slide PowerPoint presentation from April 2003. Looking beyond the ongoing concerns raised in other MuckRock investigations as to whether military equipment always comes with military training this PowerPoint also raises the question of whether or not the protocols of the Explosive Ordnance Unit changed with the implementation of updated technology.

The improvised nature of the July 7 bombing raises more questions than this PowerPoint can even begin to answer about the efficacy and safety of how the robot was used, unless of course the “Hazardous Device School” and “International Bomb Technician Seminar” were more about making bombs than defusing them.

But, with Reuters counting the number of bomb-defusing robots distributed to local police departments through the 1033 program at a whopping 451, the public’s knowledge of the capabilities and training behind the robots are more important than ever. Our understanding of robots that could be deployed to extrajudicially kill will never get any better, however, if police departments continue to respond to FOIA requests with screen shots of tweets and PowerPoint presentations.

Read the full release embedded below.

The Tulsa Center of the Universe is a worn concrete circle, approximately thirty inches in diameter, within the middle of another circle made up of thirteen bricks. Overall, the center is a little more than eight feet in diameter.

The center of the universe is an acoustic anomaly; when one stands in the center of the circle and makes a noise, that noise is echoed back several times louder than it was made. Imagine dropping a small pin and expecting to hear a tiny “tink” as it hits the floor. Instead, the sound the pin makes is more like the loud crash of a gong.

While this in itself is amazing, the truly amazing thing is that no one standing outside of the circle can hear a thing. A foghorn could be going off in the center of the circle, and those on the outside wouldn’t hear it... Or rather, that’s how the legend goes.

In reality, your voice does become extremely distorted when heard from outside the circle. Supposedly, the parabolic reflectivity of the circular planter walls causes the distortion. Many people have spent a lot of time studying how this effect is made, but there has been no consensus on what causes it. Whatever the causes of the distortions are, it is truly an amazing place.

Located in downtown Tulsa at the apex of a rebuilt span of the old Boston Street Bridge between 1st and Archer Street, the Center of the Universe is easy to find. A brick path leads to the pedestrian bridge that goes over the railroad tracks, accessible from the corner of W. Archer St. and N. Boston Ave. It is located directly northwest of the old Union Train Depot (now the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame), and immediately south of the Williams Center Tower.

Does Candle Cove sound familiar? That old children's show with the sinister talking boat, and the skeleton, The Skin-Taker? It aired on the local channel in Ironton, a small town in Ohio, back in the '70s, and had that creepy calliope music playing over every episode. There were those rumors, too, that when kids said they were watching it, all the parents could see was static.

Well, it never existed—until now. This month, the Syfy network will be launching a show called Channel Zero, based on one of the internet's most persistent and terrifying bits of lore, part of the scary story phenomenon known as creepypasta.

The story, "Candle Cove," was first released in 2009 on author and illustrator Kris Straub’s horror fiction site, Ichor Falls, which collected a number of creepy stories he had written revolving around the titular fictional town.

The story plays out between exchanges from members of the “NetNostalgia Forum,” who are trying to remember a strange children’s show from their youth, Candle Cove. As they bat their memories back and forth, the commenters recall marionette characters like Pirate Percy, a cowardly buccaneer who captained the Laughingstock, a living pirate ship with a wide mouth across its bow. They were joined on their adventures by a young girl named Janice, who was the protagonist of the show.

While they continue to remember the details of the program, they begin to recall some more sinister figures like the one-eyed Horace Horrible, whose handlebar mustache sat over a set of too-tall teeth, and most unsettling, a skeleton in a tattered cape and top hat, calling himself The Skin-Taker. Other details pop-up such as the Laughingstock’s repeated command to the scared Percy saying, “YOU HAVE… TO GO… INSIDE,” and memories of an episode where everyone is just screaming the whole time.

Without spoiling the ending of the short tale, which you can read in full here, the commenters begin to realize that Candle Cove was much more than just a normal kid’s show.

In a 2011 interview on Kindertrauma, Straub said that he wrote the story just to get the idea out of his head, having flashed on the idea of a horrifying, half-remembered kids show after reading a 2000 article on The Onion titled, “Area 36-Year-Old Still Has Occasional Lidsville Nightmare.” Straub said that while it was funny, the basic concept was frighteningly true.

“So many things that scare us as kids start from this innocuous desire to entertain children," he said, "but it’s produced carelessly, or some special effect comes out way more ponderous or ugly than the creators intended, and it lingers as we, as children, try to make it fit with our limited understanding of the world.”   

Without Straub’s approval, fans began sharing "Candle Cove" on larger horror fiction sites, and forum sites like 4chan and Reddit. As the popularity of the story grew, it truly morphed from a scary story into an internet-friendly creepypasta when fans began going on actual message boards and posting the stories exchanges as though they were an active conversation that was taking place. (A creepypasta is a scary story that has been cut and pasted around the internet to the point that it takes on a mythic life of its own, and "Candle Cove" became one of the most iconic.) In the process, the story became somewhat detached from Straub, but was often shared as some kind of urban legend.

Candle Cove quickly picked up a creepypasta fandom rivaled only by the Slenderman him(it)self. Line Henriksen, a doctoral candidate at Sweden’s Linköping University focusing on, among other things, hauntology, monster theory, feminist theory, and creepypasta, attributes the rabid popularity both to the story’s verisimilitude, and for its open-endedness. “In this sense, 'Candle Cove' forms part of the current Lovecraft renaissance, where existential anxiety in the (absent) face of a boundless and indifferent universe is what causes horror,” she says. “This type of horror is fairly common when it comes to creepypasta, which often claims to be presenting you with a glimpse of a terrible truth that cannot be unseen and that may infect, contaminate and haunt you forever.”    

Henriksen also notes that the story is also appealing in that it revolves around a barely explained television show, which has allowed fans to create their own visions of the horrifying program, and their own answers to its mysteries. And in the years since its release, fans of "Candle Cove" have not disappointed.

Today there is a whole Wiki devoted to its characters and mythology that has been fleshed out and expanded solely by the fans. You can find detailed episode descriptions for the two seasons of the show (a fan invention), an in-depth exploration of the 1767 book The Nickerbocker's Tale, which supposedly inspired the made-up show (another fan invention), and much more. There are countless pieces of fan art on places like DeviantArt, and there is even porn of it. The "Candle Cove" rabbit hole is deep. 

Fans have also produced tons of videos and music either about the show, or claiming to be footage of the fictional show itself (start your headphone volume on low, the screams can be pretty piercing). There are videos of people reading original creepypasta about their experiences seeing fake show-within-the-story Candle Cove as children, and even one peak-internet video that mashes up Candle Cove with the popular Fine Brothers series, Kids React:    

According to his interview with Kindertrauma, Straub saw the story’s growth into a fan-powered urban legend as a flattering evolution of his short story, realizing that the natural behavior of such a story is to be appropriated by shadowy corners of the internet. “I know that serves the mythos way more than me being a litigious dick about it,” he said. Although he also acknowledges his ownership of the copyright, and doesn’t like the idea of people making money off his work without authorization.

It seems as though Straub is receiving his due credit for inspiring Channel Zero, and the show looks to be upholding the creepy spirit of his story and the legends it has inspired (as well as including a kid made of teeth). For Henriksen’s part, she is optimistic about the show. “It’ll be interesting to see what Syfy does with 'Candle Cove'," she says, "Personally, I’m hoping Channel Zero will offer its viewers glimpses of a disturbing, contaminating truth that cannot be unseen. As any decent creepypasta would.”   

Clowns. They're everywhere. (Photo: Kevin Utting/CC BY 2.0)

America’s sinister clown trend has spread to Australia. According to the Telegraph, sightings of creepy clowns are on the rise around the country, and more are promising to rear their colorful heads.

Much ink has been spilled over the rise in clown sightings across America recently, as pranksters and creeps have taken to dressing as clowns, as if it’s their duty to promote the upcoming remake of Stephen King’s It. Now the trend is appearing in parts of Australia.

A number of “clown groups” have begun to appear across Australian social media, promising that the number of clown sightings in the country would soon increase. The group, Clown Nation Perth posted a message on their Facebook page saying, “You will start seeing clown sightings soon. We have been preparing for a while now.” What is being prepared is unclear, but probably clown stuff.

Police in places like Victoria, are responding in kind, issuing statements to reiterate that anti-social and alarming behavior will not be tolerated. Some have simply asked that people stop “clowning around.”

The trend is mostly harmless, save for some unsubstantiated threats from some American creepy clowns, but people seem hell bent on being afraid of the trend, and clowns, nonetheless.

In a densely populated city of over seven million people, it can be hard to gain a sense of space and calm. Not so for Hong Kong photographer Kyle Yu, whose architectural images on Instagram provide an unusually tranquil take on this dynamic city. 

Yu seeks out clean shapes and symmetry in his compositions, and unexpected angles. He shoots up towards residential towers, and down over street scenes, like a calm lens above the busy city.

“Hong Kong is quite lacking in space,” he says. “I guess I’m trying to represent that in my photos and at the same time create some space through my photos.” 

 

A photo posted by kyle_yu (@kyle_yu) on Sep 3, 2016 at 6:47am PDT

Yu has some particularly intriguing photographs of Hong Kong’s crosswalks. He says he’s “kind of obsessed with zebra crossings simply because of the lines.” For him, moving elements like people and vehicles “add an extra layer of meaning.”

“The contrast of light also interests me,” he says. Atlas Obscura has a selection of Yu’s striking architectural images from his Instagram account, which you can check out here.

A smaller, modern version of the same sort of oven. (Photo: timquijano/CC BY 2.0)

Sometime around 400 A.D., in a place now called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, someone started making a meal. They dug a pit and lined it with rocks and willow branches. They nestled meat inside, then created an oven by closing the hole and building a fire on top. It would have looked something like this.

Whoever made that meal never ate it; the oven sat untouched for hundreds of years until Bob Dawe, an archeologist in southern Alberta, rediscovered it, about 25 years ago. 

Since then, he’s been waiting to excavate the old earth oven, without messing with what’s inside. 

Now, with the help of experts, a local elder (the oven was found in Blackfoot First Nation territory), and a crane, the oven is being taken to the Royal Alberta Museum. Lifted from the earth, this set-up is huge. The CBC says it’s size of a kitchen table and had to be lifted from the earth with a crane.

Dawe still doesn’t know what exactly is inside, but based on bones found at the site bison calf or a "wolflike animal" are possibilities. Once the oven is in a local museum, he will be able to analyze its contents to find out what meal was left behind—for what, no one knows.

"It may have been a prairie fire or perhaps a blizzard, or maybe some other party of people interceded,” Dawe told the CBC. “We're not really sure. We'll never know."

Hidden in the dense jungle of the Peruvian Amazon is a percolating, roiling river. The steaming turquoise waters that can reach up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit are guided by ivory-colored stones and guarded by 60-foot walls of lush forest and vegetation. Locals believed that the river was sacred and that the hot waters held healing powers, and shamans incorporated it into medicines.

As a child, André Ruzo listened to his Peruvian grandfather tell the story of the Boiling River, or Shanay-timpishka—the ancient name loosely translating to “boiling with the heat of the sun.” The headwaters are marked with a boulder in the shape of a snake’s head. According to legend, a giant serpent spirit called Yacumama or “Mother of the Waters” who gives birth to hot and cold waters heats the river.

For 12 years, Ruzo was skeptical that the river truly existed. Then, as he was creating a thermal map of Peru during his graduate studies at Southern Methodist University in Texas he discovered an unusually large hot spot—one of the largest geothermal features found on any continent.

In November 2011, he went on an expedition to central Peru with his aunt to see the Boiling River for himself. From the nearest city Pucallpa, the entire journey took about four hours, including a two-hour drive, 45-minute motorized canoe ride, and an hour hike along muddy jungle paths. The river is protected by the shaman of the small town Mayantuyacu, a secluded healing center. After getting special permission from the shaman to study the water, Ruzo was led by the shaman’s apprentice to the almost four mile stretch of flowing scalding water.

The water temperature ranges from 120 degrees up to almost 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and reaches 16 feet deep in some places. The mud of the riverbank was too hot to walk on, and if you fell in your skin would be covered in third-degree burns in less than a second. Small unfortunate animals, like frogs, could be found floating dead and broiled in the water, the “eyes always seem to cook first turning milky white,” Ruzo wrote in National Geographic.

Ruzo, wearing only sandals, carefully hopped between the small white rocks the size of paper to take samples of different areas of the river. He found that the water averages 187 degrees Fahrenheit, which isn’t quite boiling, but is still really hot—steam emanating off the surface.

The geothermal feature struck Ruzo as odd since it isn’t located near volcanic or magmatic activity. “Boiling rivers exist,” he wrote in National Geographic, “but they’re always near volcanoes.”

A body of water the size of the Boiling River requires a heat source with a lot of energy, yet the closest active volcano is more than 400 miles away and there are no known magmatic systems in the Amazon jungle. After some investigating and testing different hypotheses, Ruzo and his research colleagues believe that a fault-led hydrothermal feature was causing the river to reach such temperatures. The water seeps deep into the earth, heats up underground, and resurfaces through faults and cracks. His team is still conducting further research on the river’s unique thermal characteristics.

Since his initial visit to the Boiling River, the trip from Pucallpa has been reduced to a three-hour direct drive because of the rapid deforestation and commercialization of the area. To preserve the sacred river, Ruzo started the Boiling River Project to protect and study the natural wonder in a safe manner. Ruzo details his experience with the Boiling River in his book The Boiling River: Adventure and Discovery in the Amazon. 

Memorial to Luis Andres Colmenares Escobar, the victim of the Colombia's most famous murder mystery. (Photo: Pedro Felipe (Own work) CC BY-SA 4.0) 

It reads like the perfect Agatha Christie novel. A presumed suicide turns out to be a murder. All the clues are elusive, all the witnesses suspect, all the theories imperfect. Oh, and it happened on Halloween.

Such is the Colmenares case, the most famous murder mystery to shake up Colombia in the past decade. However scandalous the details, there are two things that make it unfit for Christie’s collection: the case has not yet been solved, and the circumstances are too bizarre and fantastic to be in a work of fiction.

This is a case where the dreams of the victim's mother have become part of the public record.

The crime happened on October 31, 2010, in the aftermath of a Halloween party in Bogota’s hottest party district, the Zona T. Luis Andres Colmenares, a student at the prestigious University of los Andes, and Laura Moreno, a classmate whom he was romantically pursuing, were leaving the gathering. Both came from powerful and affluent families. 

Bogota, Colombia. (Photo: Pichiko Photography CC BY-SA 2.0)

Colmenares and Moreno, along with a large group of friends, came out of a dance club at around 3:00 am. Drunk and tired, Colmenares got a late night hot dog. Moreno and his good friend, Jenny Quintero, went with him. After this, nothing is certain.

According to Moreno and Quintero, for some reason, Colmenares threw the hot dog on the ground and began running. Surprised and concerned, Moreno ignored the difficulty that her heels presented and ran after him into the darkness of nearby El Virrey Park. She caught up to him twice, but both times, she failed to calm him down, even after passionate pleas and embraces. The second time, he pushed her away and ran in an unstoppable frenzy. “The last memory I have of him” she claims in an interview“is seeing his silhouette in the air.” Whether on purpose or by accident, Colmenares fell into one of the canals that run through the park.

It took two hours for the authorities to be notified, and 12 hours to find the body. As to why it was found meters away from where he supposedly fell, and in a place that had been previously searched in the morning, there are only guesses.

The official autopsy declared that Colmenares had suffered a blow on the head and died from asphyxiation. The case was ruled as a suicide, the body buried, and everyone involved tried their best to move on.

That is, everyone except Oneida Escobar, the victim's mother, whom he did not entirely leave behind. Or so she says. Months after the funeral, she had a dream. In it, Luis Andres told her to stop looking, that the truth lay in his body.

As a Wayúu woman, Oneida held a strong belief, central to this indigenous culture, that dreams are the way the dead communicate with the living. She was convinced that her son was trying to show her the way to the truth. So she had the body exhumed and a second autopsy performed. The conclusion? Colmenares had not committed suicide. He had been murdered.

According to the results (some of which have subsequently been questioned by other experts), instead of one blow, as the original autopsy stated, he had received seven individual blows to the skull. There were pre and post-mortem wounds, and marks on his back and on his knees that contradicted the position he had been found in.

Mystified by the account of a mother’s dream and the evidence of a vicious crime, the entire country went into an uproar. Laura Moreno and Jenny Quintero were arrested. Every news outlet in the country covered the case in minute detail; it went to the Supreme Court of Justice. 

The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court of Justice, located inside the Palace of Justice, pictured above. (Photo: Baiji - Own work, CC BY-SA 3)

Oneida’s dream was taken as a serious indication of the truth, not in court, of course, but in the eyes of the country. Several news sources reported on the dream, not questioning her motivation for exhuming the body. But Colombia hardly has a monopoly on unofficially using supernatural evidence to “solve” crimes. Even in nations with Western ideology, like the U.S. and the UK, there are cases of police forces recruiting clairvoyants and mediums to find bodies. In 1999, CBS reported that 35 percent of urban police departments have used psychics "at one time or another” (the report does not go into the efficacy of that help). 

A canal at El Virrey Park (Photo: Pedro Felipe (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0)

This case, though, has become a cause célèbre in Colombia the way few individual crimes ever become. Facebook groups dedicated to the case sprung up after the dream revelation. Most continue to be active, five years after the crime. In them, a few people defend the suspects, but most retort to violent language and call to higher powers to bring justice: “Liars but you cannot hide your secret from God,” claims one angry commenter in Spanish. His sentiments are echoed throughout the page.

More than just the strangeness of evidence seemingly being revealed in unconscious visions, this case spotlights problems of the judicial process itself. In the course of five years, there have been three district attorneys assigned to the case. Evidence has been mysteriously misplaced, witnesses have claimed to being threatened or bought by Colmenares' father, and “experts” continue to contradict each other on the type of injuries left on the body, and the number of blows received. Key witnesses are now incarcerated for false testimony, and a recording of a phone conversation shows Moreno’s father discussing the possibility of buying off the district attorney. At this pace, the case might need more revelatory dreams to be resolved. 

Puget Sound from the sky, as seen this past winter. (Photo: EcologyWA/Public Domain)

Imagine, for a moment, that you and your friend have been given a seemingly straightforward task: to measure the coastline of Puget Sound, in Washington State. Resources are tight, so you've got a yardstick, while your friend has a foot-long ruler. You each walk along, laying your measuring stick along the edge of the water, following the the ins and outs of the shore as best you can. When you're finished, you compare notes—and you're shocked. While you ended up with a respectable 3,000 miles, your friend and his foot-long got a way higher number, somewhere around 4,500 miles.

You guys aren't crazy. You're victims of the coastline paradox, a tricky mathematical principle that messes with cartographers, stymies government bureaus, and makes it impossible to know exactly how big our world truly is.

The coastline paradox, in one handy gif. (Image: Branden Rishel)

People have been confused by coastlines since at least the fifth century B.C., when Athenian sailors were reportedly tasked with measuring the coast of Sardinia and came back baffled. But the paradox first rigorously revealed itself in 1951, during a study of armed conflict. Lewis Fry Richardson, a pacifist and mathematician, was trying to figure out whether the length of the border shared by two given countries had any bearing on whether or not they would go to war.

He saw disagreement even in the data-gathering phase—while seeking the length of the Spain-Portugal border, he found that Spain had it plotted as 987 km, while Portugal said 1214 km. Fascinated by this discovery, he looked into it further, and worked out that not only are the lengths of coastlines and certain borders extremely variable—if you get a small enough measuring stick, each is effectively infinitely long.

This line of thinking was soon picked up by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, in a 1967 paper called "How long is the coast of Britain?" “Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible,” he later told the New York Times. In order to tackle it—and to measure other similarly wonky shapes, like clouds, snowflakes and mountains—Mandelbrot invented the concept of the fractal, a curve that gets more complex the more closely you look at it.

The Mandelbrot Set, a fractal likely familiar to you from the front of a math textbook. (Photo: Wolfgang Beyer/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Considered abstractly, the coastline paradox is an awe-inspiring thing, proof of the impossibility of pinning everything down, and of the essential irreducibility of our world. On a practical level, though, it's a huge pain, says Branden Rishel, a cartographer who works on shoreline restoration in Puget Sound. Like much of Washington State, Puget Sound is full of fjords, endless nooks and crannies carved into the land by glaciers 15,000 years ago. Fjords add a lot of crazy to a coastline—the endlessly crinkly Norway, for example, has about 18,000 miles of coastline with fjords, and a mere 1573 miles if you leave them out.

On top of the pure mathematical strangeness, coasts are constantly changing, says Rishel. Bluffs erode, sea levels rise, land masses slowly rebound from where the glaciers pushed them. Every day, the tides go in, shifting the waterline ten feet, and then back out again. "Beaches change shape with every wave," Rishel says. "How can you pin that down?"

You can't—even when you really want to. In 2006, the Congressional Research Service published a memo called "U.S. International Borders: Brief Facts," meant to ensure everyone was on the same page about exactly how much border we need to think about securing. But once again, there wasn't even a same page to be on. "The 'general coastline' data in this report are based on large scale nautical charts, resulting in a coastline measure for the 50 states totaling 12,383 miles," the report reads. "Another measure using smaller scale nautical charts more than doubles this measurement to 29,093 miles... while the figures used by the NOAA in administering the Coastal Zone Management program come to 88,612 miles (not including the Great Lakes)."

Washington State from way up. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)

Sometimes, though, people have to find a way to agree. In Washington State, experts like Rishel use what's called the "ShoreZone Shoreline," which was drawn by the Washington Department of Natural Resources in the late 1990s, based on photos and videos taken from low-flying helicopters. The ShoreZone version of the Puget Sound coastline is about 2,500 miles long, Rishel says—a manageable number, or at least better than "infinity." By agreeing on this approximation, people who work to restore beaches, track where fish spawn, or build waterfront homes can make sure they're speaking the same geographical language.

But attempted standardization has its own flaws. The ShoreZone shoreline treats some manmade structures, like certain jetties, as though they're part of the coastline, and leaves others out. "Sometimes the ShoreZone shoreline is dozens of feet from where any respectable shoreline should be," Rishel says. "In one place it's 800 feet off and there's an airstrip in what should be water." It even managed to miss an entire island.

Rishel expects ShoreZone to be updated soon with LiDAR data, which replaces cameras and human eyes with more precise laser measurements, taken from planes. Still, it's not going to be perfect. "Over the month or two it took to fly, even the best LiDAR would capture a blurred snapshot of the Sound," he says. "Winter beach profiles are drastically different from summer ones. Bluffs keep eroding. Landslides happen."

That's what happens when we try to work with something that's literally infinite—we just have to do the best we can.

Across the United States during autumn, there are fields that turn into a war zone of pumpkin pulp. The orange mulch is the mark of pumpkin chucking (also called punkin chunkin for rhyming reasons). For the annual fall tradition and competition, groups build and wheel out massive machines that hurl pumpkins up into the air. Some can even fling pumpkins thousands of feet away.

In the video above, pumpkin chuckers test and prepare a large wooden slingshot and trebuchet. These machines are impressive. At the 13-second mark, four men have to work together to pull the heavy counter weight of the trebuchet into place.

Both of the launchers send the pumpkins far across the grassy field—smashing them into bits. If you ever wondered what it's like to be catapulted from a trebuchet or shot from a slingshot, the pumpkin chuckers also strap a GoPro camera to the orange objects to give viewers a dizzying ride.

Punkin chunkin competitions, both formal and for fun, are held throughout the fall. All kinds of mechanical launchers are present at these events from the Middle Ages trebuchet and catapults to menacing pneumatic canons that use pressurized air to shoot the little pumpkins across fields. The farthest a pumpkin has ever been chucked was by a pneumatic canon named "Big 10 Inch," reaching over 5,500 feet.

People have even lit the flying pumpkins on fire:

Teams have been shooting pumpkins at the World Championship Punkin Chunkin in November intermittently since 1986. The 2016 championship will begin on November 4.     

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.

With a network of channels, lakes, and watery passageways spreading out over several kilometers, Ali Sadr Cave (غار علی صدر) is one of the largest subterranean water complexes in the world. Stable since its formation millions of years ago, the sunless grottoes feature clear waters, fantastical rock formations, and stalactite-covered ceilings soaring high overhead.

Unlike many other aquatic caves, the body of water in Ali Sadr is not a flowing river, but rather an extensive, web-like lake seemingly fed by spring waters from nearby Sarab Cave. Visitors to Ali Sadr are conducted to an underground wharf where they board boats that take them gliding silently through this chain of flooded chambers.

Colorful, glittering geological structures cover the tunnel walls above and below the surface of the water, which is clear enough to provide visibility to a depth of five meters. Tight, winding passageways branch off endlessly from one another, or open up into massive rooms like the Wedding Room (also called the 1000 Stalactites Room), the Island (which sits at the center of the complex), and the 600-meter-long Freedom Hall (the largest chamber in the network).

Prehistoric paintings, pitchers, and jugs found onsite indicates that the cave were inhabited by early humans starting 12,000 years ago. An additional entrance to Ali Sadr was constructed during the reign of Darius I (521-485 BCE), but at some point after that the cave was apparently forgotten, being rediscovered only in 1963. Since then it has been explored by mountaineers and geologists from both Iran and abroad. Its known extent at this point stretches over 11 kilometers, with its longest passage mapped thus far running almost the same distance.

The standard tour takes visitors on a 2100-meter journey through Ali Sadr Cave, 1470 meters of which is covered by boat—making it one of the longest underground boat trips in the world.

Over one million stray dogs roam Costa Rica. This is both unsafe for humans and the dogs, and the numbers tick higher and higher every day. The country has criminalized euthanasia, opting to simply spay and neuter dogs instead. Many street dogs are taken into shelters and adopted out, but purebred dogs are considerably more likely to be adopted than mutts.

One rescue is different—up in the mountains, Territorio de Zaguates celebrates the unique mix of each dog it takes in. Veterinarians at the free-range shelter did their best to analyze the mutts' physical traits to take a guess at the breeds they might contain. They then gave each dog their own unique pedigree, with names like the "Furry Pinscher Spaniel" and the "Freckled Terrierhuahua." An inspired artist painted beautiful portraits of the pedigreed mutts.

When Territorio de Zaguates' head vet appeared on Costa Rican television to talk about the canine and the special breed titles bestowed upon them, he emphasized their uniqueness. "These dogs exist only in our country," he enthused. Dog lovers who saw the program went wild. They contacted the show to say they wanted to reserve the "Bunny-Tailed Scottish Shepterrier" or the "Long Legged Irish Schnaufox" for themselves. This prompted an out of home ad campaign featuring the delicate watercolors of the breeds on bus stations and billboards, advertising that "When you adopt a mutt, you adopt a unique breed." This in turn led to more adoptions.

The made up breeds accomplished two things. First, drew attention to the arbitrary nature of pedigrees, which are themselves a human invention. Second, it made each dog appear special and unique. The shelter has grown in popularity, and now sponsors hiking events where visitors can frolic in the mountains with hundreds of pups.

There used to be parties in the apartments on the top floors of New York City's branch libraries. On other nights, when the libraries were closed, the kids who lived there might sit reading alone among the books or roll around on the wooden library carts—if they weren't dusting the shelves or shoveling coal. Their hopscotch courts were on the roof. A cat might sneak down the stairs to investigate the library patrons.

When these libraries were built, about a century ago, they needed people to take care of them. Andrew Carnegie had given New York $5.2 million, worth well over $100 million today, to create a city-wide system of library branches, and these buildings, the Carnegie libraries, were heated by coal. Each had a custodian, who was tasked with keeping those fires burning and who lived in the library, often with his family. "The family mantra was: Don’t let that furnace go out," one woman who grew up in a library told the New York Times.

But since the '70s and '80s, when the coal furnaces started being upgraded and library custodians began retiring, those apartments have been emptying out, and the idyll of living in a library has disappeared. Many of the apartments have vanished, too, absorbed, through renovations for more modern uses, back into the buildings. Today there are just 13 library apartments left in the New York Public Library system.

Some have spent decades empty and neglected. "The managers would sort of meekly say to me—do you want to see the apartment?" says Iris Weinshall, the library's chief operating officer, who at the beginning of her tenure toured all the system's branches. The first time it happened, she had the same reaction any library lover would: There’s an apartment here? Maybe I could live in the apartment.

"They would say, look, just be careful when you go up there," she says. "It was wild. You could have this gorgeous Carnegie…"

"And then… surprise!" says Risa Honig, the library's head of capital planning.

"You go to the third floor…"

"And it's a haunted house." 

The exterior of the Fort Washington library the year it opened, 1914. The top floor windows are for the apartment. (Photo: New York Public Library/Public Domain)

The downstairs of the Fort Washington branch of the library feels big and bright. The Carnegie libraries have tall ceilings and sweeping windows meant to keep the buildings light and cool; each of the bottom two floors is an open, book-lined space, and on the second level, several giant, colorful lampshades float over the children's section.

A low wooden gate stretches across the base of the wide stairway that leads to the next floor. Walking up that last flight feels like fading into a different building. A water stain darkens the wall, and the etched steps are dusted with the chips of peeled paint fallen like dandruff from above.

At the top, the stairway opens into a large, shabby room with high ceilings. To enter, you pass through a well-crafted wooden frame of what was once a wall; now there is empty space where the door and windows were. The front room is brown and full of the textures of abandonment—the walls and ceiling look like they're sloughing off dead skin. Once, the library hosted performances in this space, and dances, but now the prettily molded ceiling is covered partway with rectangular metal chutes.

 Fort Washington, the front room.

Fort Washington, the ceiling. 

The apartment is reached through a smaller door by the staircase. Inside it, there's a long, dark hallway stretching down the length of the building. The room to the right once had generous windows, two, on the far wall. They looked onto the library roof. Now, in their places, there are walls of concrete bricks that block out the light but also unwanted visitors. 

Even without lights to turn on, it's clear that the last family that lived here, probably a quarter-century ago, tried to make the apartment bright. The walls are painted in vibrant blue and yellow hues; the flooring in one room, now half torn away, is diamond-patterned with green and pink. No surface that could be decorated is left plain. 

 Inside the apartment, looking past the living room and kitchen doors. 

 Paint peeling.

The back bedroom.

The apartment doesn't feel haunted, exactly, but lonely and left behind. There is, however, a mysterious black door, with three sections, and a row of bells alongside it. No one knows where it leads, and it's jammed shut. It's the sort of door someone opens at the beginning of a horror movie that releases a demon or hungry creature.

Wrenched open, the middle section reveals a wall, brown and textured like washed-up seaweed. It's the back of a shaft. Look up, and there's a plate of glass keeping the rain out. Look down, and the hole plummets to the basement.

 Death shaft, looking up.

Death shaft, looking down.

Death chute aside, this would have been one of the nicer library apartments to live in. Often the flourishes that made the Carnegie libraries special—the large windows and decorative moulding—were left out of the custodial apartments, but this one has some nice details.

The apartment is larger than the others, too. Take a right at the kitchen, and there are two more bedrooms; go past it and there's another room in the back. Here's what the plan looks like:

Fort Washington plan. (Image: New York Public Library)

In that back bedroom, a small, dirty mirror is still hanging on the wall, at eye level. If it were my room, this where I might stand to apply mascara. Two dusty decals are still stuck to the door: one for the Muppet Movie, one that warns others to "Knock Before Entering."

In the kitchen, where the walls are covered with a stone-mimicking wallpaper, there are other remnants of previous lives—a Polaroid of a Christmas tree and a pirate-themed card, addressed to David J from William J, that reads: “You're a real treasure to me.” 

Fort Washington kitchen.  

Fort Washington. 

Another bedroom, used for storage.

In today's New York real estate market, this apartment is not unappealing. Yes, it would need cleaning and modernizing before anyone moved in. The one toilet in the apartment is facing into a corner. But the rooms are large enough, the kitchen could fit multiple people, and it's in a library. Finding this much empty space anywhere in Manhattan is a rarity; walking upstairs in a well-used building and finding an empty floor feels like being in on a great secret.

For the library, though, these apartments are a waste, almost an embarrassment. They were built to serve a particular function, when libraries could survive on just lending out books. Now, when many libraries are reinventing themselves, their physical spaces must transform, too. 

"We have so many demands on our space, besides just the books, that it’s almost criminal not to turn these apartments into program space," says Weinshall.  

 Fort Washington, in the kitchen.

Fort Washington.

Even the flagship 42nd Street building once had an apartment in it, occupied by a superintendent who had been a bootblack, bartender, Harvard man, boxing instructor, and a designer for Thomas Edison. The family moved out in 1941, because the library needed the space for a mimeograph room, telephone switchboard, and smoking rooms.

At Fort Washington, now, the library's programming room is a dark and narrow space on the second floor. After school, when the kids and teenagers arrive, the bottom two floors fill up fast. The teens have to stay on the first floor, with the adults; after-school tutors clash with parents over the proper noise level. There's no elevator here, either, so when parents bring their kids for story time, the entryway is crowded with a phalanx of strollers.

That's why the library is renovating the apartments, one by one. Not far from Fort Washington, at the Washington Heights branch, the third floor is almost ready to re-open. The glass elevator opens on a newly painted hallway, a bright blue not so different from the color in the dark apartment. In the ceiling, the white circles of new fixtures create pools of light. The front room has the same expansive quality as Fort Washington's, but this one is newly white.

A mock-up of the Washington Heights renovation. (Image: New York Public Library)

The apartment here was vacated more recently; there are still people on staff who remember Mr. Adams, the last custodian, and even after he left, employees would come up here to use the bathroom and even the claw-footed tub. Now, though, the space is divided into smaller, anonymous rooms; the kitchen has a brand-new fridge.

The renovation here is not quite finished, but the rooms look nice. Practical. The floor feels like any new space in 2016. It would be hard to tell anyone had ever lived here, or that this century-old library ever had an apartment in it at all, unless you already knew.