In the woods of Morristown, Tennessee, just past Martin Road, are all that's left of the chimney where the Necronomicon met its fiery demise. That, and a tomb-sized hole in the ground where a witch locked in a cellar desperately tried to lure a young Linda to her doom.
This is the site of the cabin where Sam Raimi shot the original Evil Dead movie. The cabin was largely destroyed in the process of filming. Twenty-one-year-old 'enfant terrible' director Sam Raimi was willing to do just about anything to get his shot, including maneuvering a dirt bike down a wooded hill and through the back door of the cabin, stopping just short of Bruce Campbell to catch the terrific POV shot that closes the movie. Though this is a contested story, the general story is that the young actors nearly killed each other out there in making the movie.
Coming from Morristown and just past Martin Road, there's a little trailhead on the right behind a barbed wire fence. Be forewarned: this is currently private property and to step on its grounds means you will be trespassing in a rural section of Appalachia.
Brazenhead Books is a bookstore located inside a private apartment, existing just outside the laws of retail, where a sense of impishness and wonder pervades the air.
Once inside, the beloved bookshop's owner, Michael Seidenberg, delights in entertaining visitors with a meandering tale of Brazenhead's earnest conception. Begun in a sub-sidewalk retail space on Manhattan's Upper East Side, located just a few steps below street level, its current reincarnation is now in a semi-undisclosed location in Midtown.
Even in its earliest form, as a non-secret retail bookstore Brazenhead was adored by its patrons. However the fanaticism of the bibliophile crowd wasn't enough to stave off skyrocketing rent, forcing Seidenberg to take move his operation underground in 2008. Hilariously, this move involved taking Brazenhead's stock several stories upward, into Seidenberg's apartment. Away from the prying eyes of city zoning officials, the bookstore settled into its most permanent, legendary existance, where the man and his wares shared a living space 24/7. Inside this world where proprietor and books existed side-by-side, patrons were free to come and go as they pleased, so long as they made an appointment. Seidenberg would also throw open his doors to host the occasional party by invitation only, whose attendees were largely those of a creative and literary type.
Gradually, word of mouth turned Brazenhead into a bona fide speakeasy of books, with publications ranking it among the most stunning bookstores anywhere on Earth. By late 2015, however, Seidenberg was once again facing the potential death of Brazenhead when an eviction notice forced him out of the apartment that had been his and Brazenhead's home for so long. Yet, as the curtain lifted the following year, Brazenhead had, against all odds, once again magically resurrected. This time it finds a new life in a secret Midtown location.
Despite its move, this laissez-faire atmosphere of the salon-book-party remains at Brazenhead's new location, where Seidenberg still cohabitates with many precious volumes, all for sale at a range of prices accessible to the common man and collector alike. Once again bibliophiles' secret temple is open for pilgrimages, so long as one is willing to put in the legwork to make an appointment with Seidenberg, whereupon Brazenhead's exact address will be disclosed.
A warning: the video above contains imagery of medical experiments conducted on animals that some might find disturbing.
In 1940, Soviet scientists reanimated a dead dog.
Dr. Sergei Brukhonenko had done pioneering work in blood transfusion several years earlier, a procedure which still remains essential in modern hospitals. But if you can move life-giving blood from one individual to another, why stop there?
While the Americans experimented on primates, the Soviet scientists experimented on dogs. Brukhonenko was able to isolate individual organs and maintain them in working order: a heart would keep pumping blood, lungs breathed on their own.
But those pieces, while important to life, do not a life make. The next step was to reanimate an entire head, brain, face and all, by pumping oxygenated blood through the arteries with the help of a contraption called the "autojektor." With a blood supply to the brain, the head reacted to stimuli as it would in life, twitching its ears and eyes at pokes and prods. It even licked a substance off its own nose.
Next, another dog, this one completely intact, was given a clinical death, then brought back to life with the autojektor. "After the experiment," the narrator of Experiments in the Revival of Organisms says over triumphant music, "the dogs live for years, they grow, they put on weight, and have families."
Some have suggested that the whole thing is a hoax, an elaborate scheme to intimidate American scientists, but no evidence of fakery has been revealed. A contemporary video shows a puppy surgically attached to the torso of another dog, and images of a robot suit piloted by a dog's head and brain have surfaced online. The only reason these experiments haven't been recreated since is that the blatant animal abuse and disregard for modern standards of medical ethics would turn stomachs even more that this 1940 video does.
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.
The case of Mercy Lena Brown, a 19-year-old resident of the town of Exeter, was the last known instance in the state of Rhode Island of a large group of otherwise sensible folks exhuming, mutilating, immolating, and cannibalizing a corpse to kill a vampire.
In 1892, a farmer named George Brown lost his wife Mary, then his daughter Mary, and then his daughter Mercy. When his son Edwin was teetering on the edge of death with the same mysterious symptoms (which today we know to be those of tuberculosis), George and the villagers exhumed the bodies of the two Marys to see if they were actually vampires preying on the living members of the family. Finding nothing but bones, they turned to Mercy’s body.
Here the accounts diverge a bit. Some say she was exhumed from the ground. Others say that since she died in the month of January, her body would have been kept in a nearby crypt until the thaw. Either way, the citizens of Exeter found the body to be suspiciously well-preserved, so they cut out Mercy’s heart, burned it, and then had Edwin drink the ashes. He still died, but nobody else in the Brown family seemed to be affected after that.
Mercy’s grave exists to this day in Chestnut Hill Cemetery, a small graveyard behind a tiny, white Baptist church off of Ten Rod Road, just a couple of miles from I-95. A path goes directly through the center of the cemetery, about halfway down which and on the left is the Brown family plot, beneath an evergreen tree.
Mercy’s grave is reinforced with a metal band connected to a post imbedded in the ground to protect the famous grave from being stolen. Directly across the cemetery from the Brown plot is a small, triangular stone building cited as the crypt in the story.
Last September, following a particularly heated Republican primary debate, Fox News commentator Rich Lowry described then-nominee Donald Trump as having been, shall we say, gelded by another candidate.
Trump was not happy, and called on the FCC to fine Lowry.
Incompetent @RichLowry lost it tonight on @FoxNews. He should not be allowed on TV and the FCC should fine him!
A hundred years ago the acronym PTSD or the words “post-traumatic stress syndrome” would have meant nothing. The term used to describe what soldiers faced after living through the horrors of war rattled the ears: it was “shell-shock.” Words far less clinical but no less devastating to those who endured the trench warfare and unrelenting battle fatigue of the First World War.
In England, as in other countries, hundreds of servicemen—often hastily tried—faced not treatment but a firing squad, for offenses labeled as “cowardice” or “desertion.” Shot at Dawn at the National Memorial Arboretum is a tribute to the legacy of these young men of Britain and the Commonwealth, many of them only boys, their honor finally reclaimed.
The memorial was designed and installed by sculptor Andy DeComyn in 2001, in recognition of the injustice faced by the soldiers. The public’s positive response may have played a role in the government’s decision in 2007 to grant a pardon to the victims of a system that failed to recognize the effects of prolonged exposure to such brutal combat and constant shelling.
A group pardon had been resisted by some in the past, including Prime Minister John Major in 1993, but in 2006 Defense Secretary Des Browne led the cause to pass the Armed Forces Act of 2007, granting a pardon to all 306 men and boys who had been “shot at dawn” for desertion or cowardice. There was one catch though—the pardon had no effect on the sentences themselves, which were not expunged. As one Member of Parliament asked during debate, “Are we entitled to ask what it does do?”
Still, the symbolism has gone a long way towards healing old wounds and erasing decades of the unwarranted but shameful shadow of untreated shell-shock.
The memorial consists of a statue of a blindfolded young soldier tied to a stake, modeled on the likeness of 17 year old Private Herbert Burden, who had lied about his age to join the military. The figure stands with 306 wooden posts bearing the names of the serviceman who were executed, unbearable suffering their only crime.
Nighttime in Transylvania is as atmospherically spooky as you would hope it would be. During the winter, a thick, low-lying mist covers thick forests of pine trees and firs. Above the fog, you can see the silhouetted turrets and spires of ancient castles and fortified churches. Many of the old homes there still burn wood fires, adding to the smoky air, while the towns are filled with gothic and baroque buildings that were once beautiful, but are now marked by peeling paint and crumbling facades.
It is common at night to hear howling in the forests, either from stray dogs or wolves. It’s easy to see why Bram Stoker chose this part of Romania to be a setting for his most chilling creation, Dracula.
The first section of Stoker’s gothic horror masterpiece takes the form of a travel journal, written in shorthand by a young English solicitor, Jonathan Harker, who is traveling across Europe to help conduct a land purchase on behalf of a noble client. Harker keeps a detailed diary of his journey from Munich to Transylvania, where he plans to meet the mysterious Count Dracula in his castle.
"We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England...and there shall be to you, many strange things." - Bram Stoker, Dracula. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
My plan was to follow in the footsteps of the fictional Harker, taking the same train routes—where possible staying in the same cities, towns and hotels—and ending my journey at the home of Vlad the Impaler, the real-life inspiration for Dracula. Partly encircled by the Carpathian mountains, Transylvania is still largely unexplored, despite its beauty and wealth of fascinating, centuries-old sites.
What better way to see Transylvania than by investigating if the novel that made it famous could be used as a travel guide today?
When Dracula was published in 1897, Munich’s Hauptbahnhof was just half a century old. It opened in its current location in 1848, with a glorious red and yellow brick grand hall designed in the style of the Italian Renaissance. It was largely destroyed by American bombers during World War II, but regained its status as Bavaria's principal train station after the war.
In the book, Harker’s journey by steam train from Munich in the 1890s took the better part of 12 hours. Today Vienna can be reached in just under four, courtesy of the high-speed rail.
3 May. Bistriz - Left Munich at 8:35 P.M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. - Jonathan Harker’s journal
With more time at my disposal than Stoker’s young protagonist, I stopped in Vienna to visit a macabre landmark. St. Stephen’s Cathedral, over 700 years old, is one of Vienna’s most notable landmarks. Mozart was married here, and Joseph Haydn sang as a choir boy in the ornately carved stalls. But deep underneath the cathedral is something much more gruesome: catacombs filled with the bones of over 11,000 victims of the bubonic plague.
Walking through the cold depths of the cathedral surrounded by skeletons is eerie enough. That is until you reach the crypt. For here, in rows of sealed bronze jars, rests the hearts and viscera of 72 members of the Hapsburg royal family. It seemed a suitably gothic beginning to my journey.
From Vienna I booked a place on the evening train to Budapest, the snow falling as we headed east through Hungary. On the four-hour journey I thought of Harker’s diary entry:
The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.
It's important to note, while following in the footsteps of Stoker’s protagonist, that the author never actually set foot in Romania. The Transylvania that provides such an ominous backdrop in Dracula was entirely imagined, although the Dublin-born Stoker almost certainly studied the region and its folklore at the British Museum in London.
While staying in the small English town of Whitby, Stoker came across a book in the town library called An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, written by a William Wilkinson in 1820. Stoker’s notes about the book contain a mention of a historical figure: Dracula.
Over the course of seven years, Stoker researched Transylvanian folklore and superstitions surrounding the Strigoi, the evil souls of the dead. But to these he married an actual historical figure, that of Vlad the Impaler.
Vlad III was the ruler of Wallachia (now part of Romania) at various times between 1456 and 1476. He was born in Transylvania to the House of Draculesti, and as a Voivode (the equivalent of a nobleman), defended his county against invading Turks. He was given the chilling nickname of Tepes, Romanian for Impaler, for his predilection for mercilessly impaling his enemies, and raising them aloft for all to see in the town squares.
The archetypal Transylvanian scene; old town below, forests covered in mist, the spires of medieval churches and castles looming above. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
In reality, Vlad the Impaler was not much worse than many other feudal rulers in Europe, and in Romania he was even celebrated for defending the area’s Christian way of life against the invading Turks. In doing so, Vlad Tepes built a line of imposing castle fortresses, including Poenari and Bran Castle.
According to historian Benjamin Hugo Leblanc, Vlad Tepes’ reign brought prosperity; “crime and corruption ceased, commerce and culture thrived, and many Romanians today view Vlad Tepes as a hero for his insistence on honesty and order.” Indeed, it is entirely possible that had Bram Stoker not chanced upon his name researching Dracula in Whitby library, that Vlad the Impaler would remain little known today outside of Romania.
For Bram Stoker, Vlad Tepes of the House of Draculesti, son of Vlad Dracul, provided a suitable character on which to hang his research on vampire legends. It also helped that in modern Romanian, Dracula means the son of the devil.
Although Bram Stoker never set foot in Transylvania, its medieval setting in the mountains proved a perfect backdrop for his tale. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
My first stop on the vampire trail was meant to be the Hotel Royale, where Harker stayed the night in the old city of Klausenburg. But looking at an atlas today, there is no city by that name.
Located roughly halfway between Budapest, Hungary, and Bucharest, Romania, the city shed the name Stoker knew it by after World War I, when Transylvania became part of the Kingdom of Romania. Today it’s known as Cluj-Napoca, and it’s a bustling, bohemian university town.
The Hotel Royale doesn’t exist today, and maybe it never did. But nestled near the train station is an historic inn that claims to have been the inspiration for Bram Stoker. The Hotel Transilvania, located on Ferdinand Street, is one of the oldest in the city, and has been an inn since the Middles Ages.
When the Klausenburg railway station was built in 1870, the venerable old hotel went by another name, the Queen of England—perhaps a regal sounding inspiration for a Hotel Royale. Harker’s diary reads:
We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh. Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good... I asked the waiter, and he said it was called "paprika hendl," and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians.
These days, the Hotel Transilvania in Cluj-Napoca isn’t shy about drawing on its possible legacy. The owners have a number of plans in development to emphasize the connection to Stoker and his masterwork.
“We would like to follow the book in creating a suite that resembles the era that the journey was told in the novel through painting, pictures, albums, old movies, items and furniture,” explains Adriana Sava, the hotel’s general manager. “Our project is extensive and complex.”
The hotel owners are also planning to open a restaurant that serves dishes from the era. “We feel that this will attract visitors who have a longing to travel back in time and follow the footsteps of Jonathan Harker,” Sava says. Perhaps soon it will be as easy to find that paprika-spiced chicken as Harker's waiter promised.
From Cluj Napoca, Harker headed further east in the direction of Bistriz, today known as Bistrita. Nearly 120 years after Dracula was published, I did the same.
I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika...
To Victorian readers, the depths of Transylvania would have sounded as remote and mysterious as to seem possibly made up. As I headed deeper into the Carpathian mountains, there was a definite sense of entering a still wild and sealed off part of Europe. The trains are indeed as unpunctual as Harker described, and most are elderly relics from the Cold War.
Looking down from Castle Bran. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
Before I set off, a Romanian friend in New York gave me the following advice: Beware of stray dogs (they bite) and of people in general. Don’t trust anyone, authorities or the train employees. I noticed on the longer train journeys through Romania, that many people in the sleeper cars would lock themselves in with bicycle locks. My carriage was empty apart from a woman in a black cloak who decorated our compartment with religious icons, tucked her legs under her, and spent the hours with her rosary beads.
The train journey passed without incident, however, and the snow covered scenery looked nearly identical to what Bram Stoker imagined:
All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods...
Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country.
Bistrita is a small town in northern Transylvania, built around a river and surrounded by mountain villages. There is indeed a hotel called the Coroana de Aur (Romanian for Golden Crown), but this one was built in 1974, during the dark days of Romanian Communism. Inside, you can dine at a restaurant called Salon Jonathan Harker, but I wouldn't recommend it.
The home of Vlad Dracul, and birthplace of his infamous son, Vlad the Impaler. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
It was upon arriving in Bistrita that Jonathan Harker has his first contact with his mysterious client, in the form of a note left at the hotel.
My friend - Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well tonight... your friend, Dracula
Harker was to travel on the final stage of his journey by coach, through the Borgo Pass in the mountains. For the first time he encounters mounting tension and trepidation from local villagers, and notices they start crossing themselves whenever he mentions his mission.
Just before I was leaving, the old lady came up to my room and said in a hysterical way: "Must you go? Oh! Young Herr, must you go?"
If the local villagers in the novel are terrified at any mention of Dracula, there is a hotel to be found in the mountains that very much delights in it. Situated in the Tihuta Pass in the Bârgāului Mountains is the Hotel Castle Dracula, which claims to be located in the approximate spot of the book’s castle.
But while Stoker’s Castle Dracula was, “a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky”, the Hotel Castel Dracula was designed in a hulking concrete style some three decades ago, as a tourist attraction.
Faded grandeur of Brasov's Belle Epoque era buildings. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
The hotel is vampire themed, with an accompanying graveyard (not real), a bar in a tower, and Dracula’s “tomb” in the basement. While the overall effect is more theme park than Victorian, the hotel does highlight an interesting aspect of Romanian history.
It was built in 1983 during the totalitarian regime of Communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, in an attempt to lure Dracula tourists. Even though Romania was one of the most closed off countries behind the Iron Curtain, the Hotel Castel Dracula was reportedly commissioned by Ceaușescu himself. Romanians were no stranger to his follies; this was a man who bulldozed a huge section of the capital Bucharest to build the vast Palace of the Parliament, still one of the largest buildings in the world.
There were no traces of Dracula in Piatra Fântânele, the village where the hotel is located, so I headed south to find Bran Castle, just outside the city of Brasov.
If you were to search online for “Dracula’s Castle” you will invariably discover images of what the Transylvanians called Castelul Bran. An imposing fortress built on a mountainside dividing Transylvania from the region of Wallachia, surrounded by thick forests and dwarfing a small village, from the outside Bran Castle certainly looks like the kind of place where a centuries-old vampire might live.
Secret passageways inside Castle Bran. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
As the young English solicitor made his way into the mountains, each villager he passed would point two fingers at him, “a charm or guard against the evil eye”, upon learning of his destination. Boarding a rickety decades-old bus in Brasov for Bran castle, I was pleased to see that the front window was covered with half a dozen, eye-shaped religious icons hanging from red ribbons.
Bran Castle, while having little to do with either Count Dracula, or Vlad Tepes, has become known as “Dracula’s castle” mostly on looks alone. Perched high on a ridge, the castle shadows the small village below, where market vendors sell wooden crosses and plastic fangs, and closeted with thick forests and swirling mists, it retains a definite aura of mystery and spookiness.
Visiting during the quiet winter months, I was reminded of the scene where the increasingly nervous Jonathan Harker first encounters Count Dracula:
He made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed cold as ice, more like the hand of a dead than a living man.
A UNESCO landmarked site and one of the few still inhabited citadel villages in Eastern Europe, Sighisoara. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
Inside, Bran Castle contains narrow winding stairways, secret passageways, and a torture chamber. Beneath its turrets there's a fair amount of 20th century furniture, dating to the castle's days as a royal summer residence in the 1920s and ‘30s. The country’s Communist authorities turned it into a museum in 1956.
From his extensive research, it is likely that Bram Stoker would have read of Bran Castle, but Vlad the Impaler barely set foot in it, if at all, unlike Poenari castle, which is now a ruined mountain fortress.
Founded by Teutonic knights in the 13th century, nearby Brasov is a beautiful city, surrounded by the Southern Carpathian mountains, thick forests and fortified churches. Many of its streets are lined with faded Belle Epoque era buildings. Once painted in vibrant pastels of pink, yellow and teal, today they are gently crumbling, after a half century of neglect during the Communist era.
The city still retains the air of the medieval, aside from one peculiar feature: an oversized white town sign similar to Hollywood’s.
Still on Stoker’s trail, I headed further north to the ancient medieval city of Sighisoara, and the home of Vlad the Impaler. Sighisoara is one of the few intact walled citadels left in Europe. Climbing the steep cobbled streets and entering the city gates is like stepping back in time to the 1600s. Indeed, so much of Sighisoara has remained untouched that its whole historic center was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Sighisoara was one of the seven walled citadels built by the Transylvanian Saxons to defend against a Turkish invasion. Popular with visitors in the summer, in the dead of winter the mountaintop town is silent and virtually empty, its cobblestones wet with fog and snow. A steep, dark wooded covered staircase, known as the Pupils' Stairs, leads to the top of a hill.
The Scholar's Stairs of Sighisoara, leading to the mountain top school, still operating today. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
After climbing 176 steps, I came to an early 13th century basilica, known as the Church on the Hill, where it’s possible to see the coffins of Sighisoara’s noblemen—Transylvania's sole church crypt. It's one of the most haunted-looking churchyards I’ve ever seen. Shrouded in mists, with the ever-present howling of dogs in the surrounding forest, the tumbled down gravestones and mausoleums could certainly be home to the undead.
Wandering around the citadel square, where witch trials and public executions were carried out, I came across an ochre colored home, with a wrought iron dragon hanging above the entrance. A plaque noted that the Romanian ruler Vlad Dracul had lived there between 1431 and 1435. His son, Vlad Tepes, was born there.
The medieval house is also a well appointed bar, where I tried the traditional Carpathian spirit palinka. The fruit brandy is so strong that there is a pot of lard on the bar, a dab of which is used to coat the tongue before sipping the fiery spirit. After visiting the bar, you can enter the first home of Vlad the Impaler, suitably draped in red velvet curtains and lit by candelabras, with a chilling oil painting of Vlad enjoying his breakfast in front of a forest of impaled prisoners.
Overgrown cemetery in Sighisoara. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
Stoker was 50 years old when Dracula was published, in 1897. At the time, he was the business manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre, working under the celebrated actor, Sir Henry Irving. Irving was well-known for his dramatic portrayals of gentleman villains, and is thought to have been an important inspiration for Dracula's mannerisms.
The novel went on to become the classic example of vampire lore, yet Stoker himself never enjoyed the financial success that its many film versions later enjoyed. By the end of his life, Bram Stoker was so destitute that he applied to the Royal Literary Fund for compassionate grants.
Although the author never saw Transylvania for himself, I was surprised by how evocatively he captured the beguiling landscape. In a country where horse drawn carts can still be seen on the Communist-built motorways, and where medieval fortresses are seemingly always emerging from the fog, Jonathan Harker's journal proved to be as accurate a guide book as a Victorian Lonely Planet.
Bram Stoker may have drawn heavily from ancient legends, but the actual physical route taken by Harker can still be followed today.
In 1895, paleontologists digging at Wombeyan Caves in New Zealand came across an unusual set of rodent bones. Because the fossils didn't resemble anything familiar, the experts named the poor creature the Mountain Pygmy Possum, declared it long extinct, and kept digging.
But 70 years later, a live Mountain Pygmy Possum showed up outside a ski lodge in Victoria—tiny, adorable, and very much alive. The world of full of such "Lazarus species:" animals and plants that disappeared on us, only to resurface years, centuries, or entire epochs after their supposed extinctions.
Whether for it or against it, everyone knows about bullfighting. But how many people have heard of bull leaping—bullfighting’s more likable and interesting cousin?
Bull leaping, or recorte, is the art of confronting a bull without any weapon besides your own agility and wit. In it, recortadores—the bull-leaping equivalent of the matador—simply evade the bull by turning their waists, side-stepping, or leaping over the bull. And yes, we do mean that literally.
This short video on bull leaping, produced by Great Big Story, takes us into the world of Jose Manuel Medina, a recortador. Along with countless other people in Spain, Medina dedicates his life to facing bulls in the ring with nothing to defend himself, and no intention of harming the animal.
“Everyone knows that a bull can kill you," Medina says in the video. "But I don’t see it that way. I think it’s the opposite. The bull gives me life." As he turns seconds before the bull pierces him with its horns, and performs acrobatic leaps over the massive animal, it is easy to understand this contradiction.
Several animal rights groups that oppose bullfights support bull leaping, with the argument that this tradition causes no physical harm to the animal. Others believe that the emotional stress that the animal endures is cruel, and that this practice—along with similar ones like American rodeo—should be banned.
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.
Known at one time as "The Largest Ghost Town in America," Jerome, Arizona was once thought to have been lost to abandonment. The town has made a successful resurgence in recent years and is now home to a population of almost 500 people, a number of preserved historic sites, and an active artist community. However its legacy of abandonment is far from forgotten.
Sitting on the outskirts of the town, which has also been called "America's Most Vertical City" (it sits 5,200 feet above sea level), is a huge post office building that is slowly mouldering into oblivion, no matter how much the town might be bouncing back. Visitors to Jerome come to see the many historic houses and artsy community, but they often bypass the crumbling hulk hidden not far from the town's free parking lot. And it may be for the better considering that the aging building is probably super dangerous.
Nonetheless, some have dared venture to the rickety structure to observe the decay within. The lower floor of the post office is scattered with old lockers, broken ceiling pieces, and glass, providing access to a wobbly staircase that feels like it will collapse in from under your feet (which it might). The second story is equally, if not more, destroyed, with much of the ceiling fallen in.
It may be wildly unsafe, and trespassing on the site is not recommended, but even from outside, the old Jerome post office is an impressive reminder of both how far a community can fall, and how resilient it can be.
Worshippers at the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, one of the many churches Wigglesworth visited. (Photo: Public domain)
After Smith Wigglesworth died in 1947, doctors are said to have found that some of the bone on each of Wigglesworth's knee caps was missing. Later, in his house, others found two indentations, about a foot apart, on the wooden floor of a corner room.
Wigglesworth, it was surmised, had spent a lot of time there knelt in prayer.
Is this story true? Who knows. But it belongs to the pantheon of Wigglesworth stories, a man who is said to be responsible for countless healings and the raising of 14 people from the dead.
A former plumber who traveled the world preaching, Wigglesworth was among the key early preachers of the Pentecostalism, whose practitioners are known in some circles as "holy rollers", so named for the behavior of early adherents, some of whom literally rolled on the ground in spiritual ecstasy. Today, Wigglesworth remains an important inspiration for the modern Pentacostal movement, and nearly an entire cottage industry exists selling Wigglesworth writings and biographies. He helped define one of the most iconic aspects of the religion, namely, speaking in tongues.
It might surprise some to know that practice, seemingly endemic to the American South, was in part popularized by a Brit. Or that Wiggleworth's laying-on-of-hands had a surprise element: his healings could be incredibly violent.
Wigglesworth was born in 1859 in Yorkshire, England to a poor family, later training to be a plumber and marrying Polly Featherstone in 1882. According to at least one account, one of his first healings was of himself. Tired of taking salts to ease his hemorrhoid problem, he anointed himself with oil and prayed on it. The hemorrhoids disappeared.
In 1907, he said he spoke in tongues for the first time, and spent the next six years establishing a church in Yorkshire known as the Bowland Street Mission. In 1913, his wife Polly died. Wigglesworth traveled to the U.S. for the first time the following year, launching his international ministry that eventually took him across the world.
However, Wigglesworth's real calling card was something that's all but lost in the modern Pentacostal faith: healing, which, for him, was a combination of prayer and violence. Wigglesworth believed that any sickness was actually the Devil inside of you, which meant that prayer was needed, but also, frequently, a physical assault. There are many such stories: the time Wigglesworth punched a sufferer of stomach cancer in the stomach, the times he violently shook those on their deathbeds, or, more commonly, the times in front of crowds when healing was in part dependent upon delivering a good hard slap.
"His notion of praying for the sick as an act of spiritual warfare helps account for his rough handling of people in his earlier ministry," the Pentacostal scholar Gary B. McGee has written. "He thought of striking a person where they hurt as actually hitting the devil. Although some reported healing as a result, others thought it best to avoid identifying the location of their pain."
Take this account from the Foursquare Crusader, an early Pentacostal periodical, which described Wigglesworth at a service at the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, when he visited in July 1927.
When this man prays for the sick he gets right down to business. He rips off his coat and rolls up his sleeves. Lifting his hand to heaven he cries. “Are you ready!” If assent is given, he “lays hands upon the sick” and prays: then, with a cyclonic movement of the hands over the afflicted part or a resounding slap that can be distinctly heard) throughout the auditorium, he declares that they are “free,” and commands them to stoop and bend over or to run up and down the aisle, as the case may be. His methods are spectacular, strenuous, and often humorous, but the results seem to justify the means, for at the close of the service when he asks all those who have been healed to stand, literally hundreds leap to their feet.
Here's another account, which happened in December 1934 in Washington, D.C., published inRedemption Tidings:
Just before the meeting began, we had noticed that a young girl, with crutches, was coming in. She was assisted by a man and woman. Her legs absolutely dangled, with the feet hanging vertically from them. From her waist she seemed to be limp and powerless. Room was made for her in the front row. When the invitation to be saved was given, she attempted to go forward aided by her assistants. Brother Wigglesworth, on seeing her start, said, “You stay right where you are. You are going to be a different girl when you leave this place.” When the rest had been dealt with Brother Wigglesworth turned to the girl and, having been told her trouble, said to the people, “This girl has no muscles in her legs; she has never walked before.” He laid his hands on her head and prayed and cried, “In the name of Jesus Christ, walk!” Looking at her, he said, “You are afraid, aren’t you?” “Yes,” she replied. “There is no need to be. You are healed!” he shouted. “Walk! walk!” And praise God she did – like a baby just learning! Twice she walked, in that characteristic way, the length of the platform! Glory to God! When we left the room, her crutches were lying on the seat, and on reaching the sidewalk we saw her standing, as others do, talking with two girl friends.
Often, the healings were too common to go into that level of detail. Take this description in the Pentecostal Evangel, from 1935.
A man with cancer on his face and hands was healed almost instantly. A woman with hernia of 17 years’ standing was completely delivered. A man with asthma of 8 years’ standing was saved and healed instantly. A lady was healed of deafness and afterwards heard clearly.
What's going on here? A complicated placebo effect in many cases, to be sure, but also old-fashioned marketing. Most all of the early publications that tracked Wigglesworth's exploits (and the three quoted from above) were written to attract new believers to the then-emerging Pentacostal movement, which would became more familiar to Americans decades later in the form of televangelists like Jim Bakker, Paul Crouch, and Jimmy Swaggart. (The Jonas Brothers also grew up in the faith.)
And in the days before cell phone cameras, the plausibility of faith healing was only limited by your imagination. Was Smith Wigglesworth a specially-anointed agent of God? It was hard to say, exactly, but there wasn't any evidence proving that he wasn't.
Faith healing could also be a powerful draw. Wigglesworth eventually took his act to Australia, India, Switzerland and Finland, among a rash of other places, often greeting crowds of hundreds. His legend followed him, too, though his gatherings were mostly ignored by the mainstream press, which meant few objective observers were along for the ride. The best accounts of Wigglesworth's life are his own and that of Stanley Frodsham, a friend and eventual biographer, whose Smith Wigglesworth: Apostle of Faith, published in 1948, is the foundational text for the Wigglesworth legend.
Wigglesworth ministering to a woman. (Photo: Public domain)
Since then, there have been numerous accounts, though many have engaged, as one scholar put it, in "blatant and unashamed acts of embalmment."
Wiggleworth was not able to heal all of those around him. In the early years, swaths of Pentacostals rejected modern medicine, instead entrusting their health to God, and Wigglesworth was no different. Perhaps as a result, there were several maladies in his life that no amount of prayer seemed to be enough for, like his daughter's deafness and his own battle with kidney stones.
He also, of course, couldn't prevent his own death, at the age 87, passing on March 12, 1947, in England, while attending the funeral of a close friend. Or that's at least according to the myth.
Dominating the silhouette of Tanna Island in the South Pacific is a mighty vulcan mountain of Yasur that, despite having spat fire into the heavens continuously for over 800 years, is surprisingly welcome to sightseers and visitors.
Daring travelers hoping to see a little action while in the Republic of Vanuatu would be hard-pressed to find a more active locale than Yasur Mountain. The volcano is a continuous hotspot of magma activity, spitting molten rock into the air above its caldera continuously for centuries. Unlike many active volcanoes, the summit of Yasur is approachable on foot by anyone daring enough to try, becoming a major attraction on the tiny island.
The mountain has become sacred to many of the locals who subscribe to the cargo cult based around the enigmatic man-god John Frum. The figure of John Frum is shrouded in mystery, some saying he is a white American serviceman, while others have described him as a black man in local dress. No matter his true form, to those who believe that he will lead them into a brighter future, he is a god. According to some, John Frum actually lives inside of Yasur Mountain, simply waiting to be reborn.
While it is unlikely that an enigmatic miracle man is living in a state of flaming un-death deep inside the volcano, the fires of Yasur Mountain are nonetheless awe-inspiring.
There is perhaps no greater argument that American English is a deeply flawed, infuriating, and difficult language than the simple phrase “you guys.”
“You guys” is the most common way Americans refer directly to a group of people; it is a de facto pronoun, duct-taped together. If you remember your high school linguistics, you might also remember that this pronoun would be the second-person plural. (First person is “I,” second person is “you,” third person is “he/she".) The need for a pronoun to directly refer to a group of people is not a small one, or one that can simply be brushed aside; this is one of the most basic elements of language.
In “standard American English,” meaning, essentially, schoolroom English, the second person pronoun is “you,” for either singular or plural. Talking to your spouse? Use “you.” Talking to your spouse and his or her entire family, at the same time? Use...well, also use “you.” It is a huge, strange weakness in American English: when someone is talking to a group of people, we have no way of indicating whether the speaker is talking to only one person or the entire group. Peeking your head out from the kitchen at a dinner party and asking, “Hey, can you get me a drink?” is likely to score you a look of confusion. Who are you talking to, exactly?
“Why would we have one word for something as fundamental as singular and plural? That just screams 'fix this,'” says Paul Reed, a linguist at the University of South Carolina who, as a native Southern linguist, spends a lot of time thinking about the second-person plural pronoun. “And dialect speakers have.” In place of any standardized second-person plural pronoun, English speakers around the world have been forced to scramble to make something up. You’ve heard the solutions: y’all, youse, you guys, yinz, you’uns.
These are widely seen as incorrect, or nonstandard. The most famous, of course, is y’all. So what’s the history of y’all? How did such an amateur linguistic fix become a pillar of everyday speech?
Ancestral varieties of English do, strangely, have words to distinguish between second-person singular and plural pronouns. Sara Malton, a professor at Canada’s Saint Mary’s University, has a great essay on the strange transition in pronouns from Old to Middle to Modern English. The basic history is thus: Old English, which would sound to modern ears more like German than English, did in fact have singular/plural distinctions.
Even crazier, they not only had basic one/many distinctions, but got even more granular: Old English had a third category, for dual pronouns, used for talking about or to a group of specifically two people. Old English’s nominative second person—nominative refers to the subject, like the “you” that is doing something—is þū. As for pronunciation: that first letter is pronounced with something dental (like a “t” or “th” or “d,” dental meaning a consonant that’s made with the tongue pressing against the teeth) followed by a high-back vowel (high-back referring to the position of the tongue within the mouth, like “oh” or “ooh” or “uh”).
For plural, the Old English version of “you” was gē, pronounced something like “yih.” And the dual form, which was completely thrown in the garbage by the transition to Middle English, was git, pronounced like “yit.”
Following the Norman Conquest in 1066, heavy influence from French speakers began to quickly change the nature of English, marking the move to Middle English. That dual form vanished, and the singular and plural forms changed. Within a couple of centuries, the dominant singular version of “you” was “thou,” and the plural was “ye.” Those each had their own families of related pronouns, like “thy” and “thine” and, interestingly, “you” and “your.” (The former is singular, the latter plural.)
The first page of the Peterborough Chronicle, one of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, originally written in Old English which did have singular and plural distinctions for "you". (Photo: Public Domain)
Thou and ye is a perfectly fine arrangement of second-person pronouns, and we’d all be better off if they’d stuck around, but they didn’t. Nobody exactly knows why, but scholars have focused on the mid-17th century work of Shakespeare to help tell us how people were talking to each other and what pronouns they were using.
What changed around this point is that the singular/plural division between thou and ye became, we think, less important than the formal/informal divide. Thou became informal, and ye became formal. The general belief is that this change came from the French, thanks to the Norman Invasion: French has and had a firm formal/informal divide in its pronouns. “As is often the case in Middle English, English speakers like to say, ‘we have the French to blame,’” says Malton. If you remember your classroom French, you’ll remember the formal/informal pronouns: tu is informal, vous is formal.
Because of that rising influence of French, English began to show some formal/informal divide as well. We can see this in Shakespeare’s work, when he sometimes used it as a subtle dig: in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare has a noble refer to another noble with “thou,” which would have been a sign of slight but clever disrespect.
The formal/informal thing is also why “thou” makes so many appearances in the King James Bible, as in “thou shalt not (do anything).” “When you’re talking to God you want it to be this intimate thing, so that’s why the authors of the King James Bible used thou,” says Reed. But as Malton notes, this is really all just a guess; it’s not that clear that Shakespeare’s dialogue was really (or even meant to be) an accurate depiction of the way people really talked. Using it as a linguistic source has it’s difficulties! But we also don’t really have much better data, so.
By the beginning of the 18th century, “thou” began exiting the language completely. “Ye” stuck around, but changed slightly to become “you.” Nobody really knows how this happened; it’s possible that nobody really wanted to use any noun that was associated with the informal lower classes, and it’s possible that the colonization of North America, and subsequent desire for separation from England, led new Americans to spurn these social hierarchy language formations. There’s also the potential that the existence of the colonies, with suddenly possible upward social mobility, left little desire to use any informal pronoun at all.
“We all aspire to ‘you,’” says Malton. But that’s really all just guesswork based on how stuff turned out. All we know is that “thou” rapidly disappeared.
As the previously plural, formal “ye” became the universal “you,” English speakers worldwide became aware pretty quickly that losing a singular/plural distinction is...bad. So around the world, solutions began popping up.
“Y’all” is easily the most famous solution. Its provenance is unclear, but certainly it comes from the American South. The two possible ancestors of y’all are the Scots-Irish ye aw, which means “you all,” and the West African/Caribbean you all (a calque, or borrowed word, from England), which means, as you might expect, “you all.” Because these two phrases are basically the same, and because something was needed to fill that gap, and because both the Scots-Irish and the newly dumped African slaves both lived in the same region, eventually the two phrases were combined and shortened. Hence: y’all.
The water tower at Florence Mall in Florence, Kentucky. (Photo: madaise/CC BY-ND 2.0)
But y’all isn’t the only solution regional dialects have come up with. Reed grew up using “you’uns,” common in Appalachia, is a slight shortening of the Scottish “you ones.” “Ones,” in some forms of Scottish English, is a plural marker, like the American “guys,” so you can say “you ones” or “we ones.”
“You’uns” gets even shorter just north of the Appalachians, where it’s been turned into “yinz” by the residents of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. Yinz, like y’all, has become a sort of emblem of the area from which it comes; Pittsburgh residents sometimes refer to themselves as Yinzers, to honor the unique pronoun native to their fine city.
A simpler version comes from the other side of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, and has also bled up to parts of New York City: “youse.” This is an understandable creation: you normally add the letter “s” to things to make them plural, right? And the word “you” needs to be plural. So, I don’t know, add an “s” to it. Youse.
Which brings us to the most popular and worst plural form: “you guys.” This solution has so, so many faults. For one thing, it’s gendered; taken by itself, “guy” refers to males, and it’s both inexact and distinctly sexist to use that word to apply to a group of people of any gender. It’s also just kind of awkward, the most transparently stapled-together solution to the second-person plural problem we have. “You, uh...guys. All the guys.” It’s informal in a way that feels, in many situations, entirely too casual. (The word “guy” in English seems to originate from the Gunpowder Plot, a failed assassination attempt, and one of its plotters, Guy Fawkes. Eventually, in England, “guy” came to refer to the effigies burned in remembrance on Guy Fawkes Night, and eventually to any male.)
A sign using "Yinz", a version of the plural pronoun found in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. (Photo: Sage Ross/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Elsewhere in the English-speaking world, solutions vary. “Ye,” somehow, actually persists in some parts of Ireland, as well as in the strangely cockney dialect of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. But it’s also changed; “ye” is now plural, and “you” is usually the singular.
In England, the most popular version is “you lot,” essentially the English version of the American “you guys,” and just as awkward.
Though Quakers are stereotyped for their use of “plain speak,” which is said to include words like “thou” and “thee,” theoretically helping them to distinguish between singular and plural, in fact very few Quakers still actually use these words. Oh well. They’re good words.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the second-person plural pronoun is what it tells us about the entire idea of “standardized” languages. Standard English doesn’t have a singular/plural distinction, and this is what’s taught in schools, drilled into our heads through newscasters and books and media. At the same time, it’s self-evidently a weakness; there is absolutely no advantage to lacking a second-person plural, and plenty of reasons to have one.
Regional dialects around the world have filled in the gaps, with y’all and youse and yinz and you lot, but due to the weird tyranny of standardized language, these aren’t seen as clever solutions to a problem we all face: they’re seen as wrong. Incorrect. Maybe the speakers are perceived as dumb or uneducated.
Partly that’s due to stigmatization of the groups that created them.; “There's always the underlying thought that something from the South might be somewhat lesser, or something from African-Americans might be somewhat lesser, because of the history of our nation,” says Reed. The same thing colors our national reaction to you’uns (it comes from poor rural areas), youse (poor urban areas) and yinz (Pittsburgh).
And this is all ridiculous, if difficult to change. Y’all is not wrong or dumb; it’s a solution to a problem endemic to the “correct” dialect. “People that we would consider non-mainstream speakers kind of led the way,” says Reed. “They filled the gap that standard language, however we want to define it, left. And their language can be considered richer from that viewpoint.” Y’all is a beautiful word. It’s “you guys” that’s the problem.
Within a minute, early in the morning of January 17, 1995, Kobe fell down.
The earthquake, magnitude 7.3, twisted railroads and knocked down highways. It collapsed older buildings, made with tiled roofs that could withstand tsunamis, but flimsier walls that could not stand up to the shift of the earth. Fires spread, and wooden houses that made it through the quake burned down. More than 6,400 people died, mostly in collapsed buildings. More than 530,000 houses were partially destroyed or damaged; another 100,000 were completely destroyed.
Kobe wasn’t an obvious place for an earthquake. The fault where the earth slipped was not well known at the time, and today, if you visited the seaside city in central Japan, you’d hardly notice that just two decades ago it was in shambles. “You really have to know what you’re looking for to find signs of the earthquake,” says Robert Olshansky, a professor of urban planning at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
If you do know what you’re looking for, though, you can see both the wounds from the quake, now scarred over with new development, and the hidden measures the city has taken to prepare for the next one.
In Kobe today, the most apparent mark of the 1995 earthquake might be the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Memorial, a caged glass cube building on the city’s waterfront. In one of the city's parks, there’s a tree with one side that still shows damage from the fire, and in the less wealthy part of the cities, there are a few tracts of land that are still vacant, never recovered from the earthquake’s effects. In December, the annual display of lights commemorates the disaster.
For the most part, though, to see the impacts of the earthquake, you’d have to look at the new construction—the apartments buildings, roads, and parks built in the years after.
Disaster recovery has a lot in common with urban redevelopment; it’s just sped up. After a disaster, “essentially everything that urban planners do is happening in a time-compressed environment,” says Laurie Johnson, an urban planner and disaster recovery consultant. “It’s a fascinating aspect of urban planning because it happens really fast.”
Johnson and Olshansky spent 10 years studying Kobe's recovery over the long term. The urban planners have worked together for years to understand how cities are resurrected after disasters: in a report released this summer by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, they highlight Kobe as one of six examples of places that improved their resiliency as they recovered from disaster.
Before 1995, stretches of Kobe were still filled with wooden houses and narrow streets, which were intimate and charming places to live but vulnerable to fire and other dangers. Even before the earthquake hit, these areas were slated for redevelopment; during the disaster, these were among the areas that were most heavily damaged.
One, Shin-Nagata, was an industrial center for shoe manufacturing. In this neighborhood, Johnson and Olshansky report, the earthquake completely destroyed buildings on about half of the land. So many people were without homes that a group of Vietnamese immigrants spent two years in “a small squatter settlement” in a local park.
When this area was rebuilt, like many places in the city, it changed. The buildings were taller and more stable. A commercial area was transformed into “Shoes Plaza,” to draw attention to the shoe industry there. Shin-Nagata also has new parks—some of which double as a disaster prevention areas.
A disaster prevention park in Kobe. (Photo: Laurie Johnson)
These “disaster prevention parks” are wide open green spaces. But they have other hidden purposes, too. They’re meant to serve as gathering places in disasters—parks help break the path of fires, there are fewer structures to collapse, and they can fit many people.
In another neighborhood, Rokkomichi, the park has a tank designed to resist earthquakes and filled with water for fire-fighting. There are emergency bathrooms, and a center that’s equipped with the supplies people need after disasters. Adjacent to the park, there are evacuation routes heading north and south.
Many of the changes to Kobe after the earthquake were influenced by input from the communities that had been displaced from their homes. After the first six months of recovery, officials encouraged neighborhoods to form community groups, machizukuri, to participate in the planning process. These groups offered their own visions of the housing that should be built and pushed back on the details of the redevelopments. How big should a park be, for instance? By the end of 1995, there were 100 of these groups.
The groups didn’t get everything they wanted, but they did help shape the city into its new form. Today, a visitor wouldn't notice these impacts, but a longtime resident would see how the new version was built over the old. Just passing through one of the disaster prevention parks, you might have no idea that it was designed to lead a double life, as a community space and disaster response center. But the people who live there know: if there's another earthquake, this is where we go.
It's exactly what it sounds like, and yet it's so much more.
Geologically speaking, the Giant Rock, located in California's Mojave Desert, is roughly seven stories high and covers almost 6,000 square feet. Some say it is the largest freestanding boulder in the world.
While the rock has been a Native American spiritual site for thousands of years, the modern back story of the boulder begins in the 1930s, when a German immigrant and miner named Frank Critzer met a pilot named George Van Tassel. They became friends and Van Tassel loaned Critzer 30 dollars to buy mining equipment. Critzer then dug out a 400 square foot home for himself directly beneath the the giant rock. This made the locals think he was crazy but since he was known to point a shotgun at those who approached his underground home, no one inquired further. In addition to being a notoriously gruff customer, Critzer was also a radio enthusiast, and is said to have set up a radio antenna on top of the rock for better reception.
Unfortunately, his German origin and radio antenna led to suspicions of his being a spy during World War II and a police raid was made on his cavern. While his exact cause of his death is still unknown, legend holds that when authorities attempted to extricate Critzer by shooting tear gas canisters into his cave, one accidentally ignited a small store of explosives (for mining) and blew the peculiar loner to smithereens. As it turns out, Critzer was not a spy after all, but just what he seemed: an eccentric who wanted to be left alone to live, quite literally, under a rock.
Something about Critzer's death resonated with his friend Van Tassel. Upon hearing of his friend's death, Van Tassel, a high school dropout who had become a pilot, went to the boulder and reopened an old airfield at the Giant Rock in the 1950s, naming it Giant Rock Airport. Van Tassel's war friend Howard Hughes, for whom Van Tassel was a test pilot, is said to have flown there just for a slice of Van Tassel's wife's pie.
In addition to being an aviator, Van Tassel was also a believer in alien life. In 1952 Tassel began holding meditation sessions in Critzer's old home under the Giant Rock. Here, Van Tassel believed he was receiving vital information from alien sources for the construction of a fantastic machine. The body, Van Tassel learned from his alien sources, was an electrical device, and aging was caused by a loss of power. Van Tassel claimed to have even been transported an alien space ship, where he met a wise group of aliens known as the "Council of Seven Lights." Tassel said this extraterrestrial meeting, along with ideas from scientists such as Nikola Tesla, inspired the construction of a building/device which was to be a "rejuvenation machine." It was dubbed "The Integratron."
Van Tassel held popular UFO conventions known as the "Giant Rock Spacecraft Conventions" on his property for over 20 years to help raise money for the Integron's construction. The domed structure, built without nails over a period of 34 years, was said to be capable of collecting up to 50,000 volts of static electricity from the air in order to charge the human body. Unfortunately, Tassel suffered a heart attack before its "final" completion, giving rise to a host of conspiracy theories. There were plans to turn the Integron into a Disco, but instead today it is a tourist attraction which gives visitors a relaxing "sound bath."
Long before Van Tassel or Frank Critzer were around, the Giant Rock was also a spiritual site for thousands of years, used by Native American tribes in ceremonies and prophecy. Hopi shamans have suspected since the 1920s that the future of the 21st century would be foretold at the Giant Rock, based on how the rock cracked. In February 2000, a giant chunk of the rock did indeed break off. Spiritual leader Shri Naath Devi interpreted the break in a positive light: "the Mother had opened her arms to us, cracking open her heart for the whole world to see." It is speculated the break was the result of fires burned under the giant rock in what was once Frank Critzer's underground home.
We explored the Giant Rock on Obscura Day - March 20th, 2010. Photos, stories and more here
Inside the property at 24 Brentwood Drive, Connecticut. (Photo: Courtesy Zillow)
“Unique one of a kind finishing completed by a professional!” reads the Zillow listing for 24 Brentwood Dr., Avon, Connecticut. But as you page through the listing’s 40 pictures, you begin to wonder: a professional what?
The house isn’t just overdecorated. It’s grotesque. Every surface is festooned with blood-like sprays of paint, intestinal squiggles of shiny pink and copper, ghostly tattered cheesecloth, and the occasional rudimentary face. The overall effect is like you’ve walked into a haunted pancreas.
But the house isn’t a murderer’s lair, a horror set, or a Hellmouth. In fact, it’s a work of art.
The house was designed by artist Nikolay Synkov. (Photo: Courtesy Zillow)
As with any work of art, opinions may vary on whether it’s any good. But the truth is, 24 Brentwood Dr.—or “Brentwood, no. 24,” which is the name of the work—is both the headquarters of Fermata Arts Foundation and its first project.
Fermata Arts Foundation, founded in 2008 by artist Nikolay Synkov, says that its mission is “to aid in the preservation of peace” through “the synthesis of art, architecture, philosophy and poetry.” The group has branches in Ukraine and Georgia (the country), and partners with other organizations in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Projects include a proposed Center for the Arts in Latvia and an art exchange between schoolchildren in Bulgaria, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Ukraine.
Those who tweeted the Zillow link might be skeptical of the idea that it promotes peace rather than a sense of foreboding and unease. But Synkov, who designed and lived in the house, had a lofty vision for his work. Synkov describes himself as a devotee of painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky, and cites the introduction of Kandinsky’s “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” as an inspiration for “Brentwood, no. 24.” “Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions,” the introduction begins. Perhaps that’s the reason the place looks like a uterus with problems.
More from the kitchen, or "Diverse geometric forms giving life." (Photo: Courtesy Zillow)
In his portfolio, Synkov writes that he “embellished the rooms with details from his mind’s inner fantasy.” He also describes the title and inspiration for each room in “Brentwood, no. 24,” which Synkov bought in 2001 and then decorated and expanded, nearly doubling its size. The stairway to the second floor, for instance, is called “Main sheet of remembrance: there was no storm. It turned into a wind blowing some bubbles,” and is described thus: “On a breeze of memory we are blown as a leaf to rest upstairs..dreams..quiet.”
The kitchen’s title is “Diverse geometric form giving life”: “The plenty of the harvest manifests itself in the kitchen’s many surfaces.” Again, one is moved to wonder: harvest of what?
Synkov is also a poet, and his portfolio provides inspirational poems (in both English translation and the original Russian) for the rooms of “Brentwood, no. 24.” For the deck, “Land wharf of the Inoks,” he writes (in part): “Love towards your house / Will be the key to that cabinet.” On the other hand, the poem for one of the bedrooms, “Threshing accepted by the walls,” reads in part: “The laughter of Satan is walking the earth / Lots of tears and love are all gone / Fear has come for you, for myself,” which may feel more in line with the aesthetic. You can even watch a walkthrough video of the house while reading poetic source material, although the poetry collection set up to accompany the video contains different works than portfolio.
A piece called "Remembrances after the battle" or, the bathroom. (Photo: Courtesy Zillow)
Synkov has completed two other house projects, in Portland, Oregon. and Newton, Massachusetts. Both are significantly more restrained, making use primarily of his woodworking skill—which is on display in “Brentwood, no. 24” but somewhat diminished by appearing to be decorated with salami paste. Both houses have been toned down since Synkov lived in them (in the late ‘90s/early 2000s), but if the aesthetic appeals to you, his home design website is still up. (Whether it’s actually taking clients is less clear; the “client relationships” position is listed as vacant, as indeed are all the other positions.) There's also an online store hawking examples of handmade furniture reminiscent of the interior decor at the Brentwood house—though there seems to be a problem with Synkov's PayPal account, so it's impossible to actually buy these treasures.
Like many artists, it appears that Synkov is unappreciated in his own time. According to Zillow, the Brentwood house was listed at $1.4 million dollars in March 2013, and by September 2016 it was down to $339,900. Kind of pricey for a nightmare factory, but a bargain to live in a work of art.
This "little gothic castle" on the Thames sparked the Gothic revival craze of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Horace Walpole, the youngest son of the first prime minister of Great Britain, marched to the beat of his own drummer. A writer, gadfly, aesthete, and prodigious collector of curiosities, Walpole first laid his eyes on the small estate of Chopp'd Straw Hill in 1747. He bought the property, renamed it "Strawberry Hill," and embarked on a decades long project to turn the villa into a medieval style castle full of "gloomth" and wonder. He called Strawberry Hill his "little plaything...the prettiest bauble you ever saw," and sat about covering it in towers, battlements, stained glass windows, spires, gold accents, and mirrors. It soon resembled an elegant, delightful, childlike perversion of medieval buildings like Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral, which Walpole had studied.
Strawberry Hill became a tourist attraction during Walpole's lifetime, becoming one of the first of England's many estate-museums. A favorite spot for lovers was a particular bench in the lovely garden, which was carved like a giant Rocco style sea shell. Walpole complained, rather disingenuously, about this onslaught of visitors and guests:
"I have but a minute's time in answering your letter, my house is full of people, and has been so from the instant I breakfasted, and more are coming; in short, I keep an inn; the sign 'The Gothic Castle' ...my whole time is passed in giving tickets for seeing it, and hiding myself when it is seen. Take my advice, never build a charming house for yourself between London and Hampton Court: everybody will live in it but you".
The house also inspired what most scholars believe was the first Gothic novel. One night, Walpole was frightened awake by a nightmare. He dreamed that he had seen a giant armored fist on the highest bannister of the grand staircase at Strawberry Hill. This vision prompted him to write The Castle of Otranto, a runaway hit said to have inspired Mary Shelley. From its opening lines, it set in motion a romantic gothic tradition that continues into the present day:
The gentle maid, whose hapless tale These melancholy pages speak; Say, gracious lady, shall she fail To draw the tear adown thy cheek?
Today, Strawberry Hill is open to the public, and still delighting and confounding visitors from all over the world. There can be little doubt that Walpole would be pleased.
The small hamlet of Wingdale, within the town of Dover, New York, is home to the ruins of the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center.
Despite its proximity to New York State Route 22, the stunningly beautiful property has been shrouded in mystery for decades. In 1924, The Harlem Valley State Hospital opened its doors to the public. Later to be renamed the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center, the hospital was chartered “for the care and treatment of the insane” and included infrastructure that had previously constituted the Wingdale Prison.
Over the course of 70 years of operation, the facility treated thousands of patients who had been deemed mentally ill. Sprawling across almost 900 acres and encompassing more than 80 buildings, the hospital had its own golf course, bowling alley, baseball field, bakery, and a massive dairy farm that supported an in-house ice cream parlor. At its peak, the facility housed 5,000 patients and 5,000 employees.
Over the years, the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center adopted numerous experimental methods of treatment of the mentally ill. In the 1930s, the facility joined several other institutions on the vanguard of a new insulin shock therapy for the treatment of patients with schizophrenia and other compulsive disorders. Later, when the method of electro-shock therapy was created, the hospital was again a pioneer in implementing the method as a treatment for its patients in 1941. When neuropsychiatrist Walter Freeman developed a new method for treating a wide range of psychological conditions that became known as a lobotomy, the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center was the preeminent institution for frontal lobotomy in the state of New York.
As with most mental health institutions in New York and across the country, the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center saw a gradual decline in enrollment upon the introduction of psychotropic drugs such as thorazine. When the hospital closed its doors in 1994, it had been on a trajectory of decline for a number of years. For the better part of 20 years, the once-busy campus slowly deteriorated. Visited only by night-watchmen and would-be vandals, the buildings sat unused and the grounds slowly grew unkempt. Ghost stories and whispers grew alongside the weeds of the property.
In 2013, a new chapter in the strange history of the Wingdale property began. A company called Olivet Management. L.L.C., representing Olivet University, an evangelical Christian college in California, acquired 503 acres of the property for $20 million—with an option to purchase the rest of the property at a later date. Olivet University, founded by a Korean-American pastor named David Jang, is a member of the Evangelical Assembly of Presbyterian Churches of America, a small conservative religious offshoot that is not affiliated with the main U.S. Presbyterian Church.
Upon acquiring the property, Olivet immediately began pruning back the unruly growth on the property, creating a new soccer field, and removing asbestos from inside of the buildings. Representatives of the school said they plan on repurposing the existing buildings to create dining halls, dormitories, and classrooms.
The renovation attracted attention from regulatory agencies, and late in 2013 the Occupational Health and Safety Administration of the Department of Labor imposed fines on Olivet for exposing workers to unsafe quantities of asbestos and lead. In March 2016, OSHA announced a settlement with Olivet—now called Dover Greens LLC—that required the company to maintain "enhanced safeguards" for workers renovating the campus and imposed $700,000 in fines.
Until plans for creating this new school come to fruition, the remarkable structures that formerly composed the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center will remain objects of intrigue for travelers along the eastern border of New York State.
A grave marker is how people will remember you long after everyone you know has passed, so you'd better make it good. When done well, it can provide a sense of one's style in life. The epitaph should be pithy, the shape and style memorable. You could go for the classic granite slab, or, like these deceased, opt for something a little more memorable.
John Paul Jones was the father of the American Navy, best known for shouting, "I have not yet begun to fight!" in response to a request for his surrender during a Revolutionary War battle. Less well known is the fact that for over a century after his death, the location of Jones’ body remained a mystery. Following his victories with the American Navy, Jones soon found his employment opportunities in America running dry. He joined up with the Russian Imperial Navy for a time, until he retired to Paris. Jones died there and was buried in a cemetery belonging to the French royal family. This property changed hands and Jones was forgotten. It wasn’t until 1905 that Jones’ remains were rediscovered by America’s Ambassador to France and returned to the United States.
Today, Jones rests in a extravagant sarcophagus below the chapel of the United States Naval Academy. The incredible coffin is covered in sculpted barnacles and is held up by bronze dolphins. The whole thing is sculpted out of a black and white marble that makes it look as though it has been weathered by untold ages beneath the waves—not so far from the truth.
The Davises were a simple but highly successful Kansas farming family. When Sarah Davis passed way in 1930 her burial site was marked with a simple headstone that reflected the quiet life she and her husband had led, despite the vast wealth they had accrued. But soon after Sarah had been placed in the ground, John had her stone removed and replaced with a marble statue, which was just the beginning. Over the next decade John installed 11 total marble or granite statues, many of which depicted Sarah as a young woman, an old woman, and even as an angel. There was also a statue of John resting in comfortable armchair next to an identical, empty armchair. All of these are arranged in a haphazard manner, facing in all different directions.
The cost of the memorial became astronomical, which upset a great number of Hiawathans suffering under the poverty of the Great Depression in a small town that did not even have a hospital. Many believed that John was simply trying to squander his fortune so that Sarah's family, who had always hated the man, could not touch it. Still others believed that he was simply an eccentric with a permanently broken heart.
It's fitting that Jules Verne, father of science fiction, would have a dark, otherworldly gravestone. Two years after his death a sculpture entitled “Vers l'Immortalité et l'Eternelle Jeunesse” (“Towards Immortality and Eternal Youth”) was erected atop his marker. Designed by sculptor Albert Roze, and using the actual death mask of the writer, the statue depicts the shrouded figure of Jules Verne breaking his own tombstone and emerging from the grave.
The effigy has become iconic enough that in first issue of seminal science fiction magazine Amazing Stories (first published in 1926) and for many years thereafter a drawing of his tombstone appeared as part of the masthead.
Willet Babcock was a furniture and casket maker by trade, and ended up in Paris, Texas where his factory and downtown store put him squarely in the center of respected Parisians. Before he died, in 1881, he ordered himself an impressive memorial from a master-stonecutter, a German immigrant named Gustave Klein, who carved some of the more ornate markers at Evergreen. Along with some typical memorial elements—carved wreaths, a cross, an angelic figure in robes—Babcock gave his final presentation to the world a little Texas twang. Jesus is sporting cowboy boots.
There is debate about whether it really is Jesus. Some say the face is too feminine (there is no beard) and he (she?) appears to be leaning on the cross rather than carrying it. But whoever the angel in robes was intended to represent, the memorial has long since been dubbed “Jesus in Cowboy Boots.”
The Ancient Lycians believed that their dead were carried to the afterlife by angels from the heavens. To facilitate this ascent they placed their honored dead in geographically high places, like this cliffside. The tombs, many of which date back to the 4th century, are guarded by massive entryways adorned with tall Romanesque columns and intricate reliefs. The oldest tombs are often no more than unremarked holes dug into the rock. Despite the external grandeur, the interior of the tombs are spare chambers cut into the rock with a simple monolith inside to display the body. The rooms are otherwise empty from hundreds of years of looting.
In November 1912, the remaining members of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition were searching for their leader. Scott and his party had vanished into the snows the previous year, never returning from their quest for the South Pole. One of the group saw "a small object projecting above the surface" of the snow. It was part of a tent. They had discovered the final resting place of Scott and two of his men, Henry "Birdie" Bowers and Edward Wilson. Scott lay between them, his diary recording their final days: "It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more," the last entry ran, "For God’s sake look after our people."
The bodies of Scott and his men were not brought back to Britain. Instead, wrote Cherry-Garrard, who had been part of the search party, "We never moved them. We took the bamboos of the tent away and the tent itself covered them. Over them we built the cairn." This tomb of snow, topped with a stark cross, was all that marked the remote spot in the Antarctic emptiness which has not been seen for over 100 years. The grave site was quickly buried in drifting snow, while the tent and bodies have been migrating downward into the ice under the weight of accumulating snow and seaward with the ice shelf toward the Ross Sea. A more permanent monument to Scott and his men was erected on Observation Hill near McMurdo Station, but given time, it is likely that, encased deep within an iceberg, the bodies of Scott, Bowers, and Wilson will slowly drift away out to sea.
Lampa is a small colonial town with all the provincial charms of a 16th century Peruvian town, but what stands out the most is its enormous church, the Iglesia Santiago Apóstol. Connected to the church is Enrique Torres Belón's freaky mausoleum, a silo of bones capped by an aluminum replica of Michelangelo's Pietà.
Belón, an engineer and architect, designed and built the tomb in the mid-20th century so that he and his wife could rest in peace surrounded by the earthly remains of the city's forbearers. The otherworldly tribute is lined with hanging human skeletons and hundreds of skulls exhumed from the town's cemetery and the crypts beneath the church. At the bottom is a black marble cross, whose lighting exaggerates the eerie shadows cast by the macabre wall hangings. The dramatic grave makes Belón seem very important—all Lampa's founders are looking upon him for all eternity.
Early polar exploration was a lonely business where sailors would be stuck on their ships for months, subsisting on barely edible rations among some of the world's most inhospitable climates. However, the Shackleton expedition was made just a bit brighter by the presence of the ship's cat, Mrs. Chippy. Harry McNeish was a carpenter on Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition to Antarctica, as well as a member of the long journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia. He was also the primary caretaker of Mrs. Chippy, the cat that accompanied the men until the Endurance became trapped in pack ice. Unfortunately Mrs. Chippy was shot along with the sled dogs once the team became trapped in the ice. To honor the brave, beloved kitty, the New Zealand Antarctic Society added a bronze statue of Mrs. Chippy to McNeish's grave in 2004.
The Big Top-shaped headstone for the victims of the circus train wreck. (Photo: Atlas Obscura user mom0ja)
The Con T. Kennedy Carnival Show had just wrapped up an unusually successful Harvest Festival week in the center of Atlanta. On the early morning of November 22, 1915, the 28-car Kennedy show train pulled out of the station with the entire company on board. Just a few hours later the show train collided with a steel passenger train. The crash was so powerful that the two engines fused together. While no one was killed on the sturdier passenger train, the Kennedy performers were not so lucky. "I saw those poor fellows pinned in their sleeping wagons and they could not get out," one eyewitness recalled.
The fire raged for hours. When the smoke had finally cleared, bodies were discovered in the wreckage. At least 50 Kennedy workers were injured. Due to the transient nature of show people, the exact number and identity of those killed has never been determined. After a mass funeral at Columbus’s First Baptist Church, there was a procession to Riverdale Cemetery where the burials took place. Since the carnival band’s instruments had been burned, local Columbians loaned them instruments so they could send their comrades off in style.
In honor of his fallen employees, Con. Kennedy erected an appropriately circus-y monument in Columbus' Riverdale Cemetery, and then he and the rest of his remaining crew headed back down the long, hard, show business road.
Nestled in the quaint Lincolnshire countryside is the village of Tattershall where, according to legend, the remains of a miniature folk hero can still be found. Visitors who step inside the town’s 16th century church will find a tiny grave marker, adorned with flowers and bearing the name Tom Thumb. He was reputedly just over 18 inches tall and lived to the ripe old age of 101 when he passed away in 1620.
It's difficult to pick fact from fiction because Tom Thumb has been a common character in English folklore for hundreds of years, with the first written examples of his escapades appearing in the early 1500s. Traditionally, the character of Tom Thumb was a canny, cunning boy who used his size to trick and beguile foolish people. There are rumours that the Tom Thumb buried at Tattershall was popular with the King’s court and often visited London. Whether or not this is true and whether or not a man named Tom Thumb really is buried in that small church, it’s safe to say that his story has become forever intertwined with wider folklore. This charming little grave is now part of that.
William G. Bruce's family had deep roots in the Town of Mont Vernon. He was an avid hunter and suffered a grave wound while hunting alone in 1883. He died the same day of his accident, but not before his wife Augusta Whittemore Bruce was rushed to his deathbed. William Bruce was industrious and frugal in life and left his wife a substantial sum of money. Augusta Bruce used some of this inherited wealth to commission noted monument maker Peter Brennan to craft a fitting memorial for her departed husband.
The book Lives Once Lived Here contains a facsimile of a ledger page that reveals Mrs. Bruce paid $35.00 each for the two headstones for her and her husband and $145.00 for the granite dog (a couple thousand in today's dollars), who has remained faithfully by his master's side in perpetual vigilance as his stone guardian in the afterlife.
Miss Baker, a monkey purchased by NASA from a Miami pet shop, was the first primate to return alive from space. She and another monkey, Miss Able, were fitted with adorable little caps and jackets to wear into space and crammed into less than adorable metal monitoring capsules. Then in the wee hours of May 28, 1959, the duo were placed into a Jupiter rocket and shot 300 miles into the sky. The flight only lasted 16 minutes, over half of which consisted of weightlessness, and the rocket landed safely, for the first time, in the Atlantic Ocean.
She retired to the Naval Aerospace Medical Center in Pensacola where she was married to another monkey, Big George. Miss Baker died of kidney failure in 1984 at the age of 27, earning her the secondary honor of being the longest lived squirrel monkey on record. She has the honor of being buried in a grave outside of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Alabama and given a proper headstone next to her first husband. The grave is located in the center's parking lot, but admirers and fans of the little astronaut still come by and leave bananas on her headstone.
Jane Griffith's grave depicts a commonplace domestic scene with a tragically sorrowful ending. Charles Griffith says goodbye to his wife Jane on the footsteps of their brownstone on 109 West 13th Street. It is the morning of August 3rd, 1857, and he is about to leave for a typical day's work, starting with a commute on the 6th Avenue horse trolley which waits on the corner. When Charles returned home from work, he found his wife dead from heart failure.
The artist's detail is extraordinary, from the iron fencing to their pet dog waiting on the top step of the brownstone. Simply titled to "Jane my Wife," the monument captures poignantly the morning Charles said farewell to his wife without knowing that it was for the last time.
During the mid-1800s when much of the southwest of America was still uninhabited desert, the government decided they would deal with the terrain like the desert dwellers of the Middle East and hire camel drivers, such as Hi Jolly, to carry their goods across the arid terrain. He was born Philip Tedro in Syria, converted to Islam and changed his name to Hadji Ali, which the Americans of the U.S. Calvary pronounced as "Hi Jolly." They contracted him to be the first member of the experimental Army Camel Corps. Jolly stood out from the rest of the riders for both his ambition and his cantankerous attitude.
Eventually the camel corps was disbanded after it was found that the much larger camels spooked the native livestock and horses. Jolly remained in the states before passing away in Arizona in 1902. Today his grave is marked by a stony pyramid that is topped by an etched metal camel.
Joseph Palmer began wearing a beard in the 1820s, in spite of the fact that beards had been out of fashion for nearly a century. Palmer was considered by most all in his small town to be slovenly and ungodly. He was even criticized by his local preacher for communing with the devil, famously responding to the accusation, "...if I remember correctly, Jesus wore a beard not unlike mine."
In May of 1830, Palmer was attacked by four men outside of a hotel in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Armed with razors and scissors, the men attempted to forcibly shave Palmer's face, but the bewhiskered man stabbed two of his attackers with a pocketknife, and was subsequently arrested for assault. He could have avoided jail by paying a fine and court fees, but Palmer refused, maintaining his innocence, and more importantly his right to a glorious beard. He was subsequently jailed for 15 months, including time in solitary confinement.
Upon leaving prison, Palmer joined the Fruitlands utopian community in nearby Harvard, Massachusetts after being influenced by his friendship with fellow Fruitlander, Louisa May Alcott, who wrote a character based on him. Palmer died in 1865 and his tombstone displays a portrait of him with a long beard, a final act of rebellion.
The Merchant family were prominent industrialists in Ohio, and when they erected this massive sphere in 1896 to mark the grave of Charles Merchant it matched the style and fortitude of the clan. The giant granite ball was placed atop a stone plinth and polished and stained to a fine shine, except for the circle where the ball rested on its stand. Within a few years of its installation the sphere had mysteriously begun to slowly rotate on its pedestal, eventually revealing the bald spot.
The estimated 5,200 pound ball had not been secured to the base, thinking the huge amount of friction would have simply held it in place. Several times, the Merchant descendants have attempted to right the sphere, once oven securing it with tar. Despite all this, the stone has managed to continue spinning on its pedestal. No one is quite sure why the sphere keeps moving, be it from imperceptible vibration or ghostly intervention as some would have it. But no matter the cause, the Merchant ball rolls on.
There are plenty of pyramid tombs, but most date to the 19th century and earlier. This one is not only modern, but empty. Actor Nicolas Cage purchased a plot in the famous St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and erected a stark, nine-foot-tall stone pyramid for himself. There is no name on the pyramid yet, but it is emblazoned with the Latin maxim, "Omni Ab Uno," which translates to "Everything From One." The actor himself has chosen to remain silent about his reasoning for the flamboyant tomb. Some speculate it's an homage to the "National Treasure" movie franchise. Others think the pyramid is evidence of the strange actor's ties to the probably-fictitious secret Illuminati society. The more paranormally minded suggest that the pyramid is where Cage will regenerate his immortal self.
Whatever his reasons, the Cage pyramid has already become an iconic part of the cemetery, much to the chagrin of many locals who are furious that he was able to obtain a plot in the cramped graveyard. Many have even accused the tomb of damaging or removing other centuries-old burials to make room.
Harry Collins was a lifelong magic lover, and even performed in jazz musician Bob Crosby's traveling USO show, "This Is The Army Show" during World War II. After serving, Collins returned to the United States, moved to the big city, and got a job as a salesmen at Frito-Lay, the purveyor of many a fine snack food. For the next twenty years, he was a Frito-Lay man by day and "Mr. Magic," Louisville's most popular magician, by night. He was so dedicated to both professions that the magic word for every one his tricks was "Frito-Lay!"
In 1970, Frito-Lay named Mr. Magic their official corporate magician. He traveled across the country and world, performing magic tricks and paying homage to corn chips. Now his effigy stands atop his grave, extending an arm to welcome visitors into his world of corn chips and wonder.
Its formal name is McMillin Mausoleum, named for John S. McMillin, Freemason, Methodist, and lime works businessman. He combined all of these devotions when he constructed the epic mausoleum that would house the remains of he and his family's remains, Afterglow Vista, the name which is actually placed on the stone arch leading to the burial site.
The so-called "mausoleum" is actually an open air rotunda with a huge limestone table in the middle. Around the table are thick stone chairs not only representing the members of the McMillin family, but actually containing their ashes and acting as headstones. This was meant to represent the family dinner table that the McMillins would rather around. There seems to be an empty space at the table and it is said that this was meant to represent the McMillin son who turned away from God. The table is circled by a six Roman columns and a single broken column which is said to represent the unfinished nature of man's life. The columns were originally going to hold a brass dome over the table, but in the end the family opted to leave the site exposed to the elements. Even the steps leading up to the monument were numbered with Masonic significance to represent the stages of life.
Bucksport's founder, Colonel Jonathan Buck, had a witch executed in the town's early days. Before she died, she cursed Buck to always bear the mark of that deed. One story says that while she was burning at the stake, her leg fell from her body and into the crowd, and this stain has appeared to remind everyone of the gruesome event. Whatever the story, Bucksport is left with a pointy stocking-shaped stain on an obelisk of granite in a hilltop graveyard on Main Street, dedicated to the founder of the town. It hangs right below his name like a stocking on a fireplace.
In sleepy Valley View Memorial Park there is a treasure the first of its kind in Utah. Hidden in the Southwest corner of the cemetery is an onyx-colored plaque in the ground that is hard to ignore. It reads, "Steven Allan Ford April 7, 1980-September 7, 2010 MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU–ALWAYS." This is no overzealous fan, but indeed the resting place of someone remarkable: Steven Ford, the first ordained Jedi priest in the predominantly Mormon state of Utah.
This might look like a small, private cemetery within Maplewood Cemetery, but it is actually the grave of just one man, Colonel Henry G. Wooldridge. It was built over the course of seven years until Wooldridge's own death in 1899, and commemorates family members and other loved ones Wooldridge lost over the course of his lifetime. The figures include his mother and sisters and his horse named Fop.
Prompted by no one but his own aching heart, the man spent his last years pouring his fortune into immortalizing all that was irretrievably lost in stunning fashion. After more than a century of visitation by a public fascinated by the spectacle, the site has acquired an unofficial, completely disconcerting name: "The Strange Procession Which Never Moves."
Tucked into the scrubby woods near Estonia's Ämari Air Base is a pilot's graveyard where Soviet airmen are buried beneath the fins of the very aircraft they likely died in. While some of the graves are crude and simple affairs, the graves of the many of the military pilots are topped with actual tail fins from Russian aircraft. These are dedicated to pilots who flew and died when Estonia was part of the Eastern Bloc until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The stark opposition and funereal atmosphere turn the site into a haunting memorial not just to the fighting men buried at the site, but for Estonia's past as well.
Perhaps the most famous statue at Lakeview Cemetery is "The Angel of Death Victorious" seated on the marble gravestone of one Francis Haserot. The life-size bronze angel holds an upside-down torch, a symbol of life extinguished. Perhaps its most unsettling feature, however, is how the statue appears to be weeping black tears at all times. These "tears" formed over time, an effect of the aging bronze combined with the impressive sculpting work of the piece itself. This lacrimal feature attracts a number of visitors and tourists each year.
Victor Noir was a 19th-century political journalist shot in a duel by Prince Pierre Bonaparte in 1870. He became a symbol of the imperial injustice and a martyr for the Republic. More than one hundred thousand people came to his funeral, where frenetic weeping was mixed with calls for insurrection. After the downfall of the Second Empire, Victor Noir’s remains were transferred to the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and a bronze effigy was commissioned.
Noir was depicted as an elegant man, lying dead on the floor after the impact of the lethal bullet, his top hat tipped over on his side. Dalou chose to represent Noir in a very realistic way, his face having the detailed quality of a cast death mask. However, another detail of Noir’s anatomy would soon get more attention than the sober realism of the memorial bronze.
Victor's grave remains one of the most popular at Père Lachaise, but not because of his political symbolism. Generations of women have come to kiss his lips and rub his bulge, believing it will bring good luck. After a century and a half of this action, Victor Noir’s lips and groin are shiny and nickel-clean, while the rest of his body presents the greenish tone of oxidized bronze.
It's not his name, but rather his profession. Rope Walker was a peg-legged tightrope walker who died in 1884, when he fell from a rope stretched across one of the town’s main streets with an iron stove strapped to his back. He asked for a rabbi as he was dying, but he did not reveal his name. Using the scant information they had about his, the townspeople buried him as “Rope Walker" in the Hebrew Cemetery of Corsicana.
Life-sized monuments are not so uncommon, but this one is half of a statue friendship. In 1920, Charles M. Higgins, an Irish immigrant and local history buff built an altar on Battle Hill to the long-slighted Revolutionary War Battle of Long Island, the first major battle after the Declaration of Independence. He chose to top the monument with a statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. As if to communicate between past and present, Minerva's outstretched arm reciprocated exactly 3.5 miles away by the Statue of Liberty's raised torch. Their friendship has stood the test of time (and condo development) and their line of sight to each other remains unobstructed.
Located over 1,000 meters above sea level, Dong Van Karst Plateau consists of narrow valleys alternating with rocky mountain ranges in the north of Vietnam. Over 80 percent of the surface is covered with limestone, including a high concentration of rocky peaks sitting over 2,000 meters above sea level. The rock of Dong Van is believed to contain fossils from 400 million to 600 million years ago.
This geological anomaly—recognized by UNESCO in October 2010 as one of just 77 geological parks in the world—spreads over the districts of Meo Vac, Dong Van, Yen Minh and Quan Ba, encompassing a total area of 2,300 square kilometers. At the center of the plateau is Dong Van Town, located 150 kilometers from the center of Ha Giang Province.
The plateau is not only a fascinating landscape but also a extraordinary piece of history. Archeologists have carried out excavations in the Quan Ba and Yen Minh districts on Dong Van Plateau and discovered many stone tools from the Son Vi Civilization, dating back 10,000 to 30,000 years. This is important evidence that prehistoric men resided on the rock plateau. Excavations in Can Ty Commune, Quan Ba District have found nearly 200 farming tools of prehistoric men.
