On the outskirts of Prague, a decaying mansion was home to an egalitarian project that could only come out of a socialist mindset: a cooperative art workspace and squat kingdom known as Squat Milada.
Villa Milada was privately owned until 1988, when it was badly deteriorated and slated for demolition. Disputes between the original owner and the Czech government delayed this process though, and the house remained standing as skyscrapers were built around it. It didn't stay deserted for long.
By 1997 the villa had become known as Squat Milada because it was a popular haven for those seeking shelter. The 19th century mansion's many floors and cavernous rooms offered comfort and respite to those who needed a place to spend the night. Because of the bureaucratic battle the house was trapped in, Squat Milada went unbothered by authority for years after all the other Prague squats had been evacuated or demolished. For this reason, too, it became the go-to spot for squatters around Prague.
It wasn't just a no-man's land though. Squat Milada was a functional hive, buzzing with artistic and community activity. The squatters regularly hosted concerts, art workshops, and film screenings, some of which were attended by hundreds of people. The inhabitants shifted, as squatters are wont to do, but in 2008 it was reported that at least 15 people and 6 animals were living there full time.The house sits nestled between several universities, from which it siphoned water and electricity. Despite its illegality, it was regarded by its neighbors as a "social and cultural institution."
It wasn't all rosy though. Squat Milada was often noisy and dirty, causing neighbors to complain. One police raid came away with two giant bags of marijuana. At one point, some of the dogs living in the villa escaped, broke in the Trojan Zoological Gardens, and killed several sheep. Police intervened to vacate the squat several times, leading to violent altercations with chainsaws, battering rams, and crowbars. The squatters fled to the roof, but were eventually arrested, in spite of protests from human rights advocates.
In 2012, Squat Milada had been vacated for the last time and again stood empty and decaying. Prague authorities have made further destructive alterations to the house, like ripping out its roof and several walls, to keep more squatters from moving in. Along with a tall fence surrounding the property, serious local lore about Squat Milada has bloomed around Prague. It's likely the house hasn't seen the last of its concert-hosting, art-making days as a squatter's paradise.
A recelluarized heart. (Photo: Bernhard Jank, M.D., Ott Lab, Massachusetts General Hospital)
For decades now, there's been an image of human regeneration being a few cells dividing in a petri dish, hopefully growing into a shiny new organ. But the truth is that scientists' work is a bit more macabre. To make a new organ, it helps to be working from a dead one.
That goes for hearts, too. A little more than a decade ago, Dr. Harald Ott, now a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, developed a procedure that could rinse an organ of its cells, leaving behind an empty structure that can be repopulated with new ones. In the lab, Ott and his colleagues have taken ghostly hearts and resurrected them as new ones. Shocked with electrical pulses, those new hearts have even started beating again.
These regenerated organs are not yet strong enough to be subbed in for the originals in the human body. But that’s the goal of this research: to be able to use a person’s own cells to grow new body parts that can replace broken ones.
People have imagined saving failing bodies with replacement organs for centuries, but doctors have only been performing transplants successfully since the 1950s, when they began to understand exactly how the body’s immune system would reject a foreign organ. In the first successful organ transplant, doctors removed a kidney from one identical twin and gave it to the other—the recipient’s body accepted the kidney only because it came from his twin’s. Today, to stave off organ rejection, anyone who receives a transplanted organ has to take drugs that suppress their immune system for the rest of their lives.
If an organ were to be grown from the body’s own cells, though, the immune system would accept it. When Ott started working on tissue engineering, in the mid-’00s, scientists already had shown that was possible to coax stem cells into growing into particular tissues—they could grow heart muscles in a petri dish, essentially. But replicating the structure of a whole organ was exponentially more complicated. For instance, the heart tissue grown in a lab didn’t have a delicate system of blood vessels laced through it.
The technique that Ott developed to decellularize organs got around part of that problem. In every organ, around the cells, there is a structure of water, proteins and other molecular compounds that support the actual cells—it’s like a house the cells live in, or scaffolding that keeps them in place. But Ott discovered that, with the right combination of detergents, it’s possible to slowly wash the cells out of this “extra-cellular matrix.” Here's the process cleaning the cells out of a rat's limb:
What’s left is like an outline of an organ, complete with the spaces for tiny blood vessels and other key features of the original. The next step is to repopulate it with cells that have not yet settled on an identity—usually adult cells that have been reprogrammed into stem cells. It’s not as simple as just pumping cells back into the empty organ shell, though. Some combinations of different types of cells give better results than others, and they need very specific conditions to grow: the regenerating organs have to live in “bioreactors,” which are basically specialized jars with customized solutions inside and carefully balanced pressure. Under these conditions, Ott’s lab has regrown hearts and set them to beating again.
These organs are still shadow versions of fully grown organs. They contain only a portion of the hundreds of millions of cells needed, and they’re not strong enough to replace originals. Even if researchers do succeed in creating a fully grown organ, there are still questions to be answered: What are the dangers, if any, of putting these organs into a person’s body? How long will they last? Even at this still-early stage, though, these resurrected organs do seem like a partial miracle: a piece of dead flesh, regrown and reanimated.
Last summer, Colleen Boll was doing some work around the house when she heard her dog barking from a different room. "It was an interesting kind of bark," she says, "so I looked out." Right smack in her yard, pacing around inside her chain link fence, was an enormous, glossy black bear.
Boll watched the bear puzzle out how to hop the fence. "Eventually, it grabs the trunk of a tree and climbs over," she remembers. "And I see the pipe at the top of the chain link fence bend way down under the weight of this huge bear. And then I realize, oh—that's what all those little bends are, in all my fences all around my house."
Boll doesn't live deep in the woods. She lives in Asheville, the 11th most populous city in North Carolina, and increasingly well-known as both a hip travel destination and a great place to live. Over the past decade, Asheville has racked up all kinds of accolades: according to one list of fawning headlines, it's "Fantastically Yoga-Friendly," "One of America's 12 Greatest Music Cities," "The Biggest Little Culinary Capital in America," "#1 Beer City USA," and "America's #1 Quirkiest Town."
A black bear hanging out in Colleen Boll's front yard in Asheville, North Carolina. (Photo: Colleen Boll)
Somewhat more quietly, it's also one of America's Best Cities for Bears. They hang out near the local hospital, and at the storied Grove Park Inn. Mailmen regularly run into them on their routes. Last August, a bear broke into an Asheville man's home and stole a stick of butter out of his kitchen trash. As part of its pre-show, the Fine Arts Movie Theater, in downtown, shows a photo of a curious black bear reading its marquee from across the street. "I never saw a black bear until I moved to the city," Boll says. "Now, I'll be driving and I'll go, 'There's a bear in someone's yard!' or 'Look at that bear, knocking over that trash can and taking the bag!'"
When we talk about urban wildlife, we're usually referring to small, deft creatures—squirrels, pigeons, or other standbys that mind their own business and fade into the background. Your average city-dweller might catch a deer in their headlights every once in a while, or spot a raccoon digging through the trash. A bear is something of a different story. A male can weigh 600 pounds. That's not the kind of creature you get used to seeing on your commute.
Somewhere around 8,000 black bears range around western North Carolina, and many of those make Asheville itself part of their meandering. According to the Urban-Suburban Bear Study, an ongoing project by the state's Wildlife Resources Commission and North Carolina State University, these bears are very healthy, often well-fed enough to have twice as many cubs as your average scrappy mountain bear, and confident enough to den right outside of town.
After a couple of years of study, the researchers—along with most of Asheville's humans—are wondering exactly how many bears the city can hold.
Black bears and North Carolinians have tussled over space for centuries. While traveling through the western part of the state in 1774, naturalist William Bartram complained about them in his journal, writing "the bears are yet too numerous." American pioneers hunted them for food and for sport, often to excess—when trapper "Big Tom" Wilson died in Asheville in 1908, his obituary bragged that he had killed 110 bears (his son, Adolph, claimed 90). All of this barely dented their numbers.
Starting in the 1920s, though, development and deforestation began taking their toll. When a midcentury bout of chestnut blight came along and decimated the bears' food supply, they were already struggling. By 1970, there were only about 1,500 bears left in the state, and North Carolina conservationists began setting aside protected land to try and bring their numbers up. The species began a slow recovery, but things still looked grim. "People wondered if they would disappear," Mike Carraway, a biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, told the Asheville Citizen-Times in 2014.
Then came the 1990s, and the housing boom. New developments meant more room for people—but, as residents and scientists soon learned, they were also perfect safe spaces for bears, full of food and birdseed and free from hunters. As Asheville grew into a thriving metropolis, the bears stuck around and thrived, too, lumbering between the sprawling Smokey Mountains and the cramped yet trash-rich developments. In 1993, the Wildlife Resources Commission got 33 calls about human-bear encounters. In 2013, they got 569.
The scientists behind the Urban-Suburban Bear Study are looking at this influx from a number of angles, investigating the bear's lifestyles, travel routes, and family relationships. But they're also interested in figuring out this new habitat's "social carrying capacity"—in other words, exactly how many of these new neighbors the human residents of the city are willing to tolerate. "If the habitat can support a lot, but the public doesn't want them, we run into issues," says Dr. Chris DePerno, the study's principal investigator.
The very design of the study requires a certain amount of public support. Residents throughout the city have volunteered to host humane traps on their property. When a bear wanders in, scientists come by, attach a GPS collar, and then let the bear go. They then track the bear's movements for six months, at which point the collar automatically falls off. If they couldn't use people's backyards as bait, the whole study would be doomed. "Everything we do is on private land," says DePerno. "If we didn't have public support, we could not have done this project—but we've had a tremendous amount of support."
Of course, the reverse is also true—involving the public in the study has allowed the researchers to teach ordinary civilians about bear management, answering their questions and assuaging their fears.This makes DePerno hopeful—if city people can accept bears, maybe there's a chance that other animals driven into civilization will get a fair shake. "It goes beyond just bears in Asheville," he says. "We're hoping to educate other scientists and the public on the potential for managing other urban species."
Having bears next door does require shouldering some unique responsibilities. In bear-heavy areas, Ashevillians are asked to put their trash out the morning of pickup rather than the night before. When that's not enough, a kind of arms race can ensue, with some residents chaining their cans to trees and bolting the lids. (Boll freezes any food trash and puts her bag of used cat litter on top of it on trash day, and says it works like a charm.)
Birdfeeders are pretty much a no-go—bears will crush the whole feeder like it's one big seed, and gobble up the contents. They like to claw the covers off of hot tubs. And in Boll's neighborhood, walking at night requires a small gear kit: "You carry a light and a whistle, and you're constantly on the lookout," she says. "Not because anything that has happened that I know of—but because hello, there are bears!"
But most human residents seem to think it's worth it. "Every single bear sighting I've had has impressed me a lot, because I'm in awe of them," says Boll. She says she doesn't know anyone anti-bear, and that new residents who are confused or frightened are quickly educated by their neighbors, if the scientists don't get to them first. Researchers have extremely detailed bear whereabouts data, but they haven't released it—not because they fear vengeance against the bears, but because they've realized that people love the bears too much, and might go looking for them.
Boll doesn't need a map to tell her they're there—she can just look out her window. "Part of me would love to know that information," she says. "But I'm sort of glad they're not sharing it, because I think they're constantly behind my house."
In unassuming neighborhoods and isolated backroads all across America there are houses with histories of bloodshed and mayhem.... at least in the movies.
Whether they were the scene of grisly slasher murders, or haunted by vengeful demons, or designed to cause pain and terror, these are the homes (and some hotels) that have come to define the horror genre.
Whether it's Nancy's house from A Nightmare On Elm Street, the oft-haunted house of The Amityville Horror, or the Sandin's suburban fortress from The Purge, these famous facades were often created using actual buildings. Many of them are still around.
There are spooky spots in many states, but it's worth zooming in on Los Angeles—it's ground zero for horror houses.
The movies with homes on the map include:
1408 A Nightmare on Elm Street Don't Breathe Halloween House House II: The Second Story House of 1,000 Corpses House on Haunted Hill Insidious Paranormal Activity Pet Sematary Poltergeist Rosemary's Baby The Amityville Horror The Birds The Conjuring The Evil Dead The Exorcist The House of The Devil The People Under The Stairs The Purge The Shining The Texas Chainsaw Massacre You're Next
Though this reads like the lines of a religious hymn, it is actually from a Vallenato song—a musical genre that originated on the Caribbean coast of Colombia in the early 20th century.
The song is famous throughout the country, not just because of its catchy rhythm, but because of the strange story that inspired it. After all, it’s not every day that someone shows up to their own funeral and gets to write about it.
Landscape of the Magdalena Department, where Villa was born (Photo: Ledpup/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Abel Antonio Villa, the writer and protagonist of the song, is one of the most celebrated Vallenato singers in Colombia. Born in 1924 in the Magdalena department, he was part of those first devoted Vallenato singers who would play for the love of the music, despite its lack of commercial value.
Today, Vallenato is considered Colombian cultural patrimony, and there can hardly be a festival, party, or family reunion without it. But back then few people outside the region paid attention to it.
Vallenato players at a festival (Photo: Public Domain)
With time, he would be part of the musical revolution that swept the nation and brought Vallenato to the heart of every Colombian. But before he did this he had to die and come back from the dead—at least in the minds of the people who loved him.
The famed incident took place in 1943, and, like most hilariously tragic stories, was a simple misunderstanding. As a young man who had just finished his obligatory military service, Villa decided to take the long way home and party his way through every pueblo (small provincial town) he crossed. The road less traveled was apparently filled with enough booze and Vallenato to keep him occupied for a couple of weeks.
While he was busy filling his heart with the sound of the accordion and his mouth with aguardiente, another young man named Abel Antonio was killed in a nearby pueblo. News of the murder soon reached the musician's home, leaving his family torn apart with grief. They dealt with the pain in the only way that made sense: by throwing a gigantic funeral party to honor his life.
As was often the tradition in small towns at the time, the wake was set to last for nine days. After five days of mourning, drinking, and dancing, the party was cut short when, as if straight out of a biblical scene, Abel Antonio Villa showed up. Presumably with a massive hangover, but very much alive.
It is safe to assume that this apparition shocked and frightened those who had mourned him for almost a week. But the music was ready, the food served, and the alcohol abundant. If his funeral party had been exuberant, it was nothing compared to the celebration of his being alive.
Villa's “death” changed his life. After that day, Villa wore white for the rest of his life as a way to commemorate his resurrection. He also asked that the last four days of mourning be tacked onto his second, and final, funeral. Most famously, he wrote a song titled “The Death of Abel Antonio” in which he retells the story of the most captivating moment of his life.
Villa passed away in 2006 in Barranquilla, a city known for its parties and festivals (Photo: Public Domain)
Villa would go on to become an international star, and record several iconic songs. None, however, compare to the song that immortalized the event in the collective memory of the country. At any given festival, you might hear the story—accompanied by the sound of the accordion and the bitter taste of aguardiente—of the Vallenato singer who crashed his own wake.
Photographer Charles Fréger's new book Yokainoshima: Island of Monsters might be named after an imaginary island, but its subjects are the very real performers that dress up as spirits and ghosts for local festivals. Yōkai, broadly speaking, refers to supernatural creatures that exist in Japanese folklore, from deities to demons, although Fréger acknowledges that it's a difficult term to define. "In Japanese, Yōkai does not mean 'monster' in the strict sense of the word," he writes. "It refers generally to the imaginary creatures which populate Japanese culture. They may be ghosts as well as demons, or even objects."
Over a period of two years, Fréger travelled to Japan five times to capture the participants and rituals of local festivals. The idea of an island of Yōkai arose as, Fréger recalls, "throughout the project I always thought about being on an imaginary territory. We visited 20 islands, and we didn’t know what we would find on each."
In the book, which features essays from experts in Japanese culture and folklore, there is a guide to these local characters. In the Kagoshima Prefecture, for example, Fréger photographed individuals dressed as a garappa, a version of the water spirit the kappa. (Atlas Obscura has previously reported on the long history of kappa in Japan.) As part of the Yokkabui Festival in the Kagoshima Prefecture, participants perform a garappa dance for the god of water.
Here is a selection of photographs from Fréger’s compelling series.
On April 3, 1898, the Palm Sunday Avalanche struck the Chilkoot Trail, which lead ambitious prospectors from the Gold Rush port of Skagway to the Klondike gold fields. The catastrophe caught countless "stampeders" by surprise; those who perished were interred in what is now the only cemetery inside the Klondike Gold Rush National Park.
The Palm Sunday Avalanche was actually a series of multiple, successive snow slides that struck the area north of Skagway. Despite spring weather conditions conducive to avalanches—prompting vocal concern locals and seasoned veterans alike—eager gold hounds failed to heed the warnings. Once the slides began, those trapped in the danger zone found it difficult to escape.
Due to the spotty records available in Gold-Rush-era Alaska, the death toll ranges from 48 to almost 100; the identities of the deceased varies almost as wildly as the body county. What is known, those victims who were discovered among the 30-foot-deep, ten-acre avalanche found their final resting place in a new cemetery in Dyea Township, colloquially known as the Slide Cemetery.
After the Palm Sunday Avalanche, traffic on the Chilkoot Trail vanished, and Dyea quickly turned from boomtown to ghost town. The Slide Cemetery is a remaining testament to the area's historical significance.
"Selfridgez" in Hisaronu, Turkey. (Photo: Courtesy Matthew Hopkinson)
Along a road that snakes down towards the sea in the ancient Turkish province of Mugla is the village of Kayakoy. Here, women sit on stools rolling dough for the flatbread snack, gozleme, and vacationers sip dark coffee at outdoor tables. Part of Kayakoy is known as the “ghost village” because its Greek population, fearing persecution, fled after World War I. Their houses, now in ruins, remain.
Nearby is a town quite unlike its neighbor. Built on pine tree-covered hills overlooking the white sands of Oludeniz beach on Turkey’s Aegean coastline is Hisaronu. It’s here where, for much of the year, voices from Newcastle, Liverpool or London are as common as those from Istanbul or Ankara.
Codswallop, an obscure British-slang word for nonsense, is a popular restaurant in Hisaronu. This establishment, as advertised on its Facebook page, specializes “in fish chips and mushy peas..lots of traditional English dishes including our famous english breakfast.”
If you were to list British dishes characterized as being the most stereotypical, Codswallop serves them all: roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, jam roly-poly, apple crumble, sticky toffee pudding and custard.
You’ll find Anglicized holiday resorts like Hisaronu dotted around Turkey. In these alternate versions of Britain, the food, drink and entertainment offerings are similar to those found in suburban malls in the U.K.
Travelers to Hisaronu might fancy a bite to eat under the golden arches at “McDowell’s.” Or Del Boys—an eatery named after a character from one of Britain’s most beloved television sitcoms, OnlyFools and Horses. Del Boy is a wheeler-dealer, cockney geezer from South London who drives a three wheeled yellow van.
There’s a shop called Marc Spenger, named after the department store Marks and Spencer; Nexst after the clothing brand Next, present in every shopping mall in the U.K.; and Azda, after Asda, a low-cost supermarket.
Over the years, Hisaronu has morphed into a bustling vacation town, built curiously in Britain’s image. Here, the stereotypical British abroad tourist—skin burnt red, clutching a pint of lager beer and wearing a soccer shirt—enjoys familiar-seeming pubs, restaurants and sun loungers.
It’s not to say that Hisaronu excludes all the elements of the Turkish diet and culture, but, as one regular visitor sums up, it comes close to it. “The mosque and food is the only thing truly Turkish in Hisaronu,” says Jenny Connor, who has been coming to this part of the Aegean coast for years.
Mass tourism from the U.K. to Europe for “package holidays” took off in the 1950s, when cheap, charter flights made flying affordable for working people. Until then, the only reasonably priced mode of transport was a coach, impractical for a week’s vacation on the continent. With the expansion of cheaper air travel, you could get a holiday, flights and accommodation included, for between 20 to 30 pounds.
"Nexst", after the British brand Next, and "Marc Spenger" after the department store Marks and Spencer. (Photo: Courtesy Matthew Hopkinson)
Much of the tourism boom was centered around Spain, where holidaymakers got a helping hand from an unlikely source. General Franco, the dictator of Spain until 1975, waived visa restrictions in 1959 to encourage visitors and to give a boost to the economy. A year later arrivals had increased by 500 percent.
“A country considered the antithesis of postwar European values,” writes Sasha D. Pack, became “the epicenter of one of postwar Europe’s largest mass rituals, the beach holiday.” Places like Benidorm, once a sleepy, impoverished fishing village, eventually became the epitome of a vacation hub for Brits enjoying plentiful booze, nightclubs and cheap thrills. In austere, devoutly Catholic Spain, British tourists even convinced the mayor of Benidorm to overturn a national ban on the bikini.
Back in the 1950s and ‘60s going to Europe was, in relative terms, quite an adventure. Travelers had three fears when they ventured into the unknown, says Dr. Susan Barton, a research fellow at the University of Leicester who has written about working class holidays: “Flying, foreigners and food.”
It might have been the first time you got on a plane, ordered a pint of milk in Spanish, or laid eyes on a squid. It’s why these first resorts incorporated British food and drink into the experience; to make people feel more at home.
And, as you can tell from Hisaronu, this custom never fully went away. Spain set the mold for this type of “Britain with better weather” vacation, but soon dozens of places similar to Hisaronu appeared in Greece and Turkey. By the 1980s, Turkey was viewed as a getaway destination with plentiful “sun, sea, ancient history and exotic orient” writes Arzu Ozturkmen, a historian at Bogazici University, as well as a cheaper alternative to the Spanish coast.
Some of the ruins in the nearby town of Kayaköyü. (Photo: Public Domain)
A country like Turkey may not feel as foreign as it once did to visitors, and a place like Hisaronu provides a base to travel more “off the beaten track.” Yet when it comes to food, the Brits are not always the most adventurous. According to a survey carried out by a large British supermarket chain, they still have a fondness for home cooking. In 2014, one third of Brits claimed they preferred eating their own cuisine on vacation. Another 1999 survey found that half of British tourists snub local fare in favor of fish and chips and an English breakfast.
Clutching to routine and ritual like a safety blanket extends beyond food. This same survey found, rather hilariously, that 34 percent of British tourists take an umbrella on vacation with them, and one percent take their own tea bags. (As a Brit, I can certainly attest to the last point. Tea, as every British person knows, never tastes the same beyond the British Isles.)
Hisaronu and Britain now have something else in common, beyond an affinity for the English breakfast. Soon, neither will be a member of the European Union. During the bitter “Brexit” referendum, the “Leave” side dangled the threat of Turkey joining the European Union as a strong reason to vote no. It was argued that Turks would soon be arriving at the English border seeking work. Not only is Turkey’s membership of the E.U. a distant prospect, but more Britons currently travel to Turkey than vice versa.
Some 2.5 million British citizens travel to Turkey each year, reports The Daily Telegraph, but fewer than 200,000 Turks visited the U.K. in 2015. And despite the fact there has been a steep drop in arrivals amid security fears in Turkey—a result of bombings and a failed coup—Hisaronu appears to have a loyal following. Visitors like Conner say they will keep coming back.
Not everything in Hisaronu is Anglicized; guests can still find their fair share of traditional kebab houses and menus delivering aubergine-based delights. For the ardent shopper, there are plenty of souvenirs to be bought that can’t be found in a British department store.
Dotted along the main drag in Hisaronu, tourists can find counterfeit treasures galore. Rows of fake soccer shirts, stacks of Armani handbags, “Roy Bands” sunglasses and other sweet deals on merchandise fill shop fronts. You might buy that “Prada” purse at Selfridgez, rather than Selfridges, the London department store.
Conner, the longtime Hisaronu visitor, believes proprietors of venues like Azda or Marc Spenger name their shops after British cultural references as a joke, rather than a bald attempt to draw in visitors.
Just the name Codswallop – a frankly hilarious thing to see on vacation – is entertaining for British guests in Hisaronu. In addition to its fish and chips, the menu revives some of the summertime eating traditions normally reserved for trips to the British seaside.
As Ruth Letts, one happy Codswallop customer says, “If we were staying longer I would be trying out the afternoon cream teas too.”
The massive Juche Tower was a birthday present from North Korea to its original Great Leader.
"Juche" was the ideology Comrade Kim Il-sung structured his empire around, which roughly translates to "self-reliance." In loosest terms, it drew upon Marxist-Leninist principles and asserted that every Korean should harness their own destiny in order to make the nation great. There's much more to Juche; it has been credited with creating the cult of personality surrounding North Korean leaders. It would later become known by another name: "Kimilsung-ism."
The Juche Tower was built in 1982 on the banks of the Taedong River in celebration of Kim Il-sung's 70th birthday. As everything in North Korea is symbolic, the Juche Tower makes no exception. It's comprised of 25,550 blocks—one for every day of Il-sung's life. Some have even said that he was the architect of the grand monument to his own philosophy, but this is unlikely.
The monolithic structure is reminiscent of the United States' Washington Monument, and in fact Juche Tower is considered to be in direct competition with the famed Washington, D.C. monument, as it is exactly one meter taller than the American obelisk. This makes it one of the highest monuments in the entire world, second only to Houston's San Jacinto Monument.
The tower is a popular tourist destination, where visitors can ride to the top in an elevator to view Pyongyang from above. For the heights-avoidant, there are videos displayed at the base of the tower explaining the monument's significance to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, to the philosophy of Juche, and to Eternal Leader Kim Il-sung.
In the late 1800s in Idaho's Lemhi Valley, a group of intrepid miners worked a lead and silver mine in the tiny town of Nicholia. To operate their smelters they needed charcoal, so they went 10 miles across the valley and eventually built 16 kilns from local clay. Using local wood, the beehive-shaped kilns produced charcoal that was shipped across the valley by horse and wagon to fire the smelters.
Employing up to 200 people at one point, the operation lasted only three years. The kilns were left to disintegrate and today the remains of only four are left.
The remaining kilns were restored in the year 2000 to their original dimensions of 20 feet high by 20 feet wide. A dirt road of of Idaho State Highway 28 near Birch Creek leads to the site, which includes walkways and interpretive signage. A gaze across the valley to the site of Nicholia, now gone, provides an appreciation for the enormous amount of work involved in preparing the charcoal for the mine.
He sat in the glow of the pixelated green and black screen of his Apple IIe, exploring the dark dangerous tunnels of an ancient tomb in the 1982 adventure computer game Aztec. Instead of seeking the jade idol and escaping from the tomb, Burr found himself engrossed in dwelling deeper and deeper into the virtual abyss.
“I would always end up blasting holes and dropping down really deep into the dungeon with no way back out,” Burr says. “It just seemed like it was just part of the system—that actually what happens is you get into this space and build this nightmare where you get trapped. You get buried alive.”
Instead of trying to win the game, he found himself just getting more lost in the labyrinth. In effect, Burr created an artificial infinite dungeon—a lair where your character falls into an endless cycle of death. There is no end, and sometimes there is no goal other than to stay alive. Players continue to enter the new randomly generated space, and die ceaselessly. Now, Burr uses the concept of infinite dungeons to create pieces of artwork such as the 4-channeled immersive exhibition called Pattern Language, which he debuted this September at 3-Legged Dog Art & Technology Center in New York.
“These are games that are built upon the algorithmic beauty of nature and simulate this idea of chaos or entering this world that is in itself alive,” says Burr.
So what is an infinite dungeon? Being stuck in an infinite dungeon is like being locked in a room. You are given a toolbox, where each day the contents of the toolbox are different and must use what you have to escape the room. But, if you mess up you die.
Infinite dungeons have a complex heritage, but ultimately ties to dungeon crawling games. The 1980s is considered the era of dungeon crawling games, giving birth to the first infinite dungeons.
At the core of dungeon crawling role-playing games, you navigate a character through the digital space (a cave, a castle, a tomb or even outer space) with a set labyrinth environment and explore. The goal primary is to find loot or face a boss at the end of the dungeon, and avoid getting killed on the journey.(It's complicated because the infinite dungeon experience can be the whole game, or it can be just an aspect of it. So all infinite dungeons take place in dungeon-crawling games, but dungeon-crawling games can contain more than infinite dungeons.)
The most famous game of this style was the 1980 dungeon crawling video game Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom.
Rogue is like most dungeon games: venture through the labyrinth, find the Amulet of Yendor, and try not to be killed by monsters. However, if your character does die, the character dies for good—forcing the player to become an entirely new character and creating a sense of permanence to death, or permadeath. When the character enters the dungeon again, the layout of the space and objects that populate it are completely different. This is called procedural generation, a feature where the game algorithmically makes each playthrough a unique experience.
By adding tension with permadeath and procedurally generated layouts, Rogue brought forth a new representation of death and life, changing the state of infinite dungeon games.
Players called games of the same ilk “roguelikes,” but now use a variety of terms, explains Porpentine Charity Heartscape, a writer and game designer who is currently collaborating with Burr on a multi-part adventure game called Aria End—the larger project Pattern Language falls under. “The current vogue is to inject randomized survival elements into a lot of different games, so the genre has cross-pollinated,” Heartscape says.
Figuring out which games fall under the roguelike category is messy. Elements of infinite dungeons can be found incorporated into a level or they can be the entire premise of video game. Some passionate fans of the "crawl community" have even created a video game genre for the gameplay, called Procedural Death Labyrinth.
The game style has evolved into elaborate, and seemingly never-ending landscapes and universes. For example, the survival game No Man’s Sky released this August has gained a lot of attention for the over 18 quintillion unique planets that a player can explore. The dungeon mechanism, writ large.
Another difference with more recent games is that players can sometimes carry over advancement and earnings from earlier runs, writes video game journalist Dan Griliopoulos. "The addiction element of these games doesn't just come from the mechanics of surviving further in the main game, but from the compulsion loop of wanting to unlock more elements to improve your next run," he writes.
Some infinite dungeon games can be trivial and frustrating as players try their hardest to stay alive. But, people continue to play and enjoy seeing how far they can explore, says Heartscape. There’s a soothing simplicity to using the tools in a space to try to escape or hunt for treasure.
“I feel focused when I play games like that, and find it calming to experience a controlled microcosm of this cruel, voracious world, where death can be experienced therapeutically, not terminally,” says Heartscape. “I think recreationally dying is one of the best things about living in this century.”
Burr recently returned to the infinite dungeon in a game called Stone Soup. He found himself sucked into an endless labyrinth yet again, lured by the constantly unpredictable and shifting layout. It was his continuous demise in Stone Soup that inspired him to create his series of immersive art projects. He aims to encapsulate the feeling of getting lost in a living, mutating digital world.
“I remember when I was playing Stone Soup a lot,” says Burr, “there was something nice about when I would get deep into a game and accrue a lot of experience with this character. I would form this connection—this attachment to being in that world—that I wouldn’t get when you can just reset and start the game over.”
The bond players sometimes form with characters and avatars is intensified by the risk of death, especially games with permadeath, explains Teresa Lynch, a social scientist and doctoral candidate at Indiana University who researches the emotional phenomenon in video games. There are a variety of representations of life and death in games. In games like World of Warcraft, players spend a lot of time enhancing their characters, developing a kind of social relationship, Lynch says. Here, there is more incentive to keep the character alive. Conversely, players wouldn’t form such strong attachments with avatars in Call of Duty where death is expected to happen often.
"Just the fact that you can live and die and live again is something that is interesting,” says Lynch.
While Lynch wonders whether this may desensitize players, there have been no evidence or studies that support it. If you’ve reached an unfortunate demise in a game, pressing the reset button is usually an option if you don’t want to rebuild everything you’ve lost.
“The fact that we still want to avoid death, that we still see it as something that’s punished in the virtual world isn’t much of a shock,” says Lynch. “I think most video game worlds are communicating to the player that death is not something we should be seeking.”
But in infinite dungeons, respawning into a familiar world, but one that has been transformed creates a different idea of what death means.
“I think there’s something important about making a video game that creates this labyrinth that is generative and alive,” says Burr. “Infinite dungeons tap into a lot of really deep fears about getting lost and what it means to progress through life.”
Every day over 300,000 people pass through the Stazione Centrale, Milan’s main railway station. Many of them walk in front of a series of closed doors without every wondering what is behind them. They have no idea that those doors give access to the most luxurious and exclusive room in the building, the Padiglione Reale, or Royal Pavilion.
The station was designed in the early 1900s by architect Ulisse Stacchini and its blueprints had to be changed several times, especially after Mussolini became the head of the Italian government. In 1925 the Minister of Communications, Costanzo Ciano, suggested adding a waiting room for Italy’s royal family, the Savoias, who took the train to their countryside palace in Monza. Even though the monarchy was disestablished in Italy right after World War II, the royal waiting room is still there.
The pavilion is structured on two levels. The ground level has a couple of bare rooms (which became even emptier after some Fascist symbols were removed) and serves as an anteroom to the upper level. A sumptuous room is on the first floor, at the same level as the railway tracks: There are marble interiors in different architectural styles, sculptures of the royal emblems, elegant furnitures provided by the best interior designers of the time, and a balcony with a view on the public square below.
The main room was also planned with the idea of welcoming Hitler in one of his travels to Italy—as suggested by the swastikas subtly inserted in the wood flooring—but he never used it. A door in the main room leads to a small bathroom with a huge mirror, which hides a secret ladder behind it, leading to an emergency escape route. As far as we know, it has never been used.
The pavilion is usually closed, but it is sometimes used for special events and photo shoots. People passing through the station can only look at the doors from the outside, but if they also look up, they will see three majolica lunettes showing some events in the history of the Savoias, including a meeting between Mussolini and King Vittorio Emanuele III in the city of Vittorio Veneto—a meeting that never actually took place. The eyes of Mussolini have been removed from that picture: Rumor has it that a man with a rifle shot at the majolica soon after the fall of the Fascist regime.
Although Buddhism is the most widespread practiced religion in Mongolia, Shamanism is alive and well. Often, the two religions blend into one, and landmarks throughout Mongolia testify to this. The Eej Mod or "Mother Tree" in Shaamar is one stand-out example. Its fame spread beyond Mongolia and worshippers from Japan, Korea and China come from afar to pay homage to the Mother Tree.
Those who practice Shamanism believe that shamans communicate between the human and spiritual worlds, and the Mother Tree became seen as a gateway to the spirits after it was struck by lightning. Now worshipers will travel to the tree to make an offering in hopes of having their prayers answered.
Until 2015, the Mother Tree was an actual tree, around which a ger (aka yurt) had been built. Following a practice that thousands of others had done before, one worshipper in 2015 lit an incense stick by the tree, but this time, the tree caught fire and it was all but destroyed. The stump was salvaged from the fire and placed in the outside compound. Today, the ger is still in its place, and the ground where the Mother Tree once grew is the object of people's veneration.
The stump, alongside a number of nearby trees, is shrouded in ceremonial scarves, mostly blue, and drenched in milk and vodka. The fence around the compound is "fortified" by tea bricks. In an adjacent compound, another tree has been elevated to the status of Holy Tree in recent years by an eminent Mongolia shaman.
A video posted by Evie Alexander (@scienceinnyc) on
When a worm can wriggle no more, its body begins to decompose and wither away. But through a microscope, one can see that the death of a worm attracts a fantastic feeding frenzy. In the short compilation clip above, microbes such as Coleps, Paramecia, and Spirostromum devour and break down the remnants of a dead worm.
The clip is summed up perfectly by New York City-based science teacher Evie Alexander: "Ah, death."
Alexander posts a variety of videos and pictures of microscopic organisms to the Instagram account @scienceinnyc. Scrolling through the feed, you’ll come across slides of pig lung and menacing-looking hydras. This video captured by one of Alexander’s students shows a close-up look at the cycle of death—organic matter becoming a delicious meal for decomposer microbes.
The brown barrel-shaped Coleps weasel through the tissue, nibbling away, while a thin Spirostromum (which ironically looks and moves like a worm) roams in the dead wasteland. The feeding scene is a typical one found among decomposer microbes and demonstrates the interconnected relationships within ecosystems.
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.
Tucked away in the heart of Midtown—only a few blocks from its sister park, Greenacre—lies the beautifully minuscule refuge that is Paley Park. Dubbed a "vest-pocket" park, it's just 4,200 sq ft., and serves as a retreat from the daily grind of the urban world that exists just outside of its borders.
Paley Park’s most significant feature is the 20-foot waterfall that reaches across the entire back of the small space, creating a soothing buffer of sound that helps to drown out the bustle of the surrounding city. The white noise combined with the encompassing ivy-covered walls and the shelter of honey locusts provides a convincing illusion of privacy and seclusion, fostering an atmosphere of tranquility in the city that never sleeps.
Commissioned and financed by the William S. Paley Foundation, and finished in 1967, Paley Park is a privately owned public space. William Paley, a former chairman of CBS, was very involved in the conception and design process of the place. He named Paley Park in honor of his father, and commemorated his efforts with a plaque that reads, “This park is set aside in memory of Samuel Paley, 1875–1963, for the enjoyment of the public," near the entrance.
In William H. Whyte’s 1980 text and subsequent film,The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Paley Park’s social environment and relationships were analyzed. Whyte wished to understand what made places like Paley Park successful, and what drew people to spontaneously enter. He concluded that despite creating an atmosphere of solitude, Paley Park is still very much an urban space: Midtown is still very visible from the entrance, and the sidewalk just below Paley’s stoop is heavily traveled. This dichotomy works in the park's favor. People are drawn into the park off the busy sidewalk, coaxed away from their routines, if only for a few moments, to go sit in Paley with the din of the waterfall all around them.
On the northern part of the island of Boa Vista you'll find the wreckage of a Spanish cargo ship that ran ashore in the fall of 1968. The M/S Cabo Santa Maria was on its way to Brazil and Argentina loaded with a variety of cargo and a number of gifts—sports cars, machines, china, medicine, clothing, food and beverages—from the government of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco to give to his supporters.
Unfortunately, in the early morning hours of September 1, the ship ran aground on the coast of Boa Esperança. A tugboat was sent from the island of São Vicente to try to dislodge the ship, but to no avail. Thankfully, the crew was able to escape the scene unhurt. That left just one thing to deal with, and it was no small feat.
A good part of the population of Boa Vista, including children as well as public employees and machine operators from the other islands, were mobilized in order to remove the cargo of the ship. They used mules and donkeys to carry the cargo to the nearby capital of Boa Vista, Sal Rei. The unloading of the ship was carried out for nearly a year.
Today, the ship is slowly crumbling. After almost 50 years of battering by the wind and constant waves, much of the deck and hold have disappeared and only a rusty shell remained for the time being… but visibly not for long. Over the decades the shipwreck has become a symbol of the island and a source of inspiration for artists.
Among the secluded homes of the rich and famous in Topanga Canyon stands a home left unfinished, the reason hotly debated. Officially, the structure lies on a floodplain that prevented permits from going through, halting construction indefinitely. But urban legend gives us a more supernatural explanation: It is said the untimely death of a member of the “27 club” haunts the area to this day.
On the eve of September 3, 1970, behind the private residence of Bob Hite of the band Canned Heat, fellow bandmate Alan Wilson slept under the stars. By dawn, he was dead. Autopsy reports listed his cause of death as accidental acute barbiturate intoxication; he had overdosed. Wilson joined the ranks of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in the “27 club”, a term used for famous musicians whose lives were cut short at the age of 27. It is unclear whether his death was intentional; while he had a history of attempted suicide and depression, no suicide note was left at the scene.
Bob Hite’s home would eventually be swept away in a flood. The unfinished structure that now resides on the property wasn’t built until 1990, but construction was stopped mere months in, again because of flooding.
There are conflicting stories on whether the alleged suicide of Alan Wilson happened on the property so often attributed to it. Some believe Wilson’s death occurred behind another house further up the canyon, but no research has been done to confirm or deny the stories. Nevertheless, visitors to the crumbling concrete house continue to honor Wilson’s memory, despite the possibility their respects might be misplaced.
In the 1960s NASA invented a new liquid called ferrofluid to be used as rocket fuel for spaceships. As this video suggests, its purpose has shifted quite fluidly into other fields.
In fact, ferrofluid has found a place in electronics, mechanical engineering, medical science, and—unexpectedly—art.
Working with the unique properties of the substance, which changes form when exposed to a magnetic field, Japanese artist Sachiko Kodama has made it into one of her preferred mediums.
This video captures one of Kodama’s most beautiful installations. Titled Morpho Tower/Two Standing Spirals, this piece was created in 2007. It consists of two spiral towers standing on a large plate filled with ferrofluid.
As music plays, the magnetic field around the fluid changes, causing it to form incredibly beautiful shapes around the spirals. The spirals, in turn, affect each other and engage in a sort of dance that is truly captivating.
Kodama’s work has been exhibited in museums around the world, including the National Art Center in Tokyo and the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid.
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.
Fairy tales and nursery rhymes are some of the most world's powerful stories. They have survived through the ages, retold and repurposed, but always leaving an impression in the memories of our childhood.
In this 1930 map titled The Land of Make Believe, Jaro Hess brings to life some of the most beloved nursery rhymes and fairy tales to have populated children’s imaginations. Here, all the fantastic characters whose lives and misfortunes so entertain us live in one world, all together. Much like they do in our minds.
Interestingly enough, we catch some of the characters in the middle of their adventure: Tom Tom the piper’s son is running away with the pig, the three bears are about to enter the house where Goldilocks sleeps, and Hanzel and Gretel have just found the gingerbread house.
Others, like Humpty Dumpty, have not yet met their tragic fates. And still others are off the page, presumably having adventures outside of the map, or hidden somewhere within it. Peter Pan, for example, is nowhere to be seen, but we know he’s part of the world because Hess is kind enough to have indicated the forest where he lives. The same goes for sleeping beauty and Bluebeard, though given the tragic end of all of the latter's unfortunate wives, this is actually a relief.
There are also general characters without which the map would not be complete. What would the Land of Make Believe be without mermaids who splash water around, strange fish that threatened ships, and fairies dancing in the forest?
Besides characters, we see fictional places that have often been the object of our fantasies. The Emerald City, for example, sparkles in the Northwest, and the City of Brass leaves the pages of Arabian Nights to adorn the skyline of the Land of Make Believe.
Born in Prague in 1889, Jaro Hess was a man of many interests. Throughout his adult life he worked in such diverse fields as horticulture, engineering, chemistry, steel work, parapsychology, and painting. Migrating to the United States when he was 21 years old, he lived through the Great Depression and, inexplicably, settled down permanently in Michigan.
His background is evident in the map. Tales from all over Europe, even those not well known to the Anglophone world, appear. The Glass Mountain, for instance, is a Polish fairy tale about a princess who -of course- is locked away in a tower. Grandfather Know-All, comes from Slovakia. Likewise, the Old fisher who catches the golden fish is a tale by the Russian writer Alexandre Pushkin.
The map is also indicative of the year it was drawn. The 1930s were the years of the Great Depression in North America. What better way to illustrate the juxtaposition of dreams and tragedy than with fairy tales and nursery rhymes?
Like many children's stories that describe horrible events in light mannered ways, so the map splashes some hints of tragedy throughout it seeming cheerfulness. We stand powerless as the blackbird swoops down to pick off the maid’s nose, see Jack and Jill falling down the hill, and find the tomb of the babes who died in the woods and were covered with leaves by sparrows.
What’s strange about these scenes is that, to the unknowing eye, they seem almost joyous. Someone who doesn’t know the story of the Pied Piper would think that he’s leading the children to a party rather than to their deaths. Likewise, the old woman who lives in a shoe surrounded by her many children could be a beautiful domestic scene. On closer inspection, however, we see in her hand what could be the rod that she uses to beat them.
Perhaps the most powerful symbolism, however, is the long and winding road that circles around the map. Though it gives the impression of leading to a thousand different places, if we follow it, we can see that Hess is right when he describes it as “the path that leads to no place eventually.”
Like the world in which Jaro Hess lived, the Land of Make Believe is full of traps and dangers. Strangely, that just makes it more endearing.
In summer of 1969 farmhands were digging on Egypt Plantation in Cruger, Mississippi when the backhoe operator felt a crunch. Just three feet beneath the topsoil, he had hit a very, very old coffin—made of cast-iron and glass. The body inside was visible.
It was a young woman wearing a red velvet dress, white gloves, and square-toed boots from sometime in the previous century. The body wasn't decomposed, as one might expect for a corpse in such antiquated garb. The coffin had been filled with preservative alcohol and sealed, and the woman inside looked almost as she did the day she died, her hair a bright auburn and her skin pale white. The glass had shattered when the backhoe hit it, and the alcohol seeped into the ground around it, exposing the body to the elements after a century of rest.
Local historians have attempted to source the woman's identity without any luck. Clues from her clothing and the coffin she was found in indicate she died before the Civil War. She was reburied in Lexington's Odd Fellows Cemetery with a marker dating her estimated birthdate as 1835 and her death date as 1969, the year she was discovered.
No one is sure about who the Lady in Red was or why she was buried in a shallow, unmarked grave. Some speculate that the coffin might have fallen off a wagon and never reached its final burial site. Others predict that she was a passenger on a paddleboat who died while traveling the nearby Yazoo River. Her identity may never be discovered, but if anything that's only fueled the intrigue surrounding the Lady in Red.
