Earlier this October, at a ceremony at the Royal Courts of Justice, London paid its rent to the Queen. The ceremony proceeded much as it had for the past eight centuries. The city handed over a knife, an axe, six oversized horseshoes, and 61 nails to Barbara Janet Fontaine, the Queen’s Remembrancer, the oldest judicial position in England. The job was created in the 12th century to keep track of all that was owed to the crown.

In this case, the Remembrancer has presided over the rent owed on two pieces of property for a very long time—since 1235 in one case, and at least 1211 in the other. Every year, in this Ceremony of Quit Rents, the crown extracts its price from the city for a forge and a piece of moorland.

No one knows exactly where these two pieces of land are located anymore, but for hundreds of years the city has been paying rent on them. The rate, however, has not changed—the same objects have been presented for hundreds of years.

The Ceremony of Quit Rents is not well-publicized or much talked about: news services have covered it occasionally over the years, but the only official references I could find to this year’s ceremonies were a notice about a city-sponsored essay contest where the prize includes the privilege of attending the ceremony and an off-hand reference by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales.

But each fall, usually in October, the city and the crown perform the same exchange, for no particular reason other than that they always have.

The older rent is paid on a piece of land that’s supposed to be in the county of Shropshire, far from London. Known as “the Moors,” its exact location was lost long ago (although UPI reported in 1980 that London’s then-mayor Peter Gadsden picked a piece of land in the area and declared it the Moors in question).

The rent on the Moors is a billhook—a knife-like tool used in agriculture—and an axe. The billhook is supposed to be dull: one early instruction said it should “bend in green cheese,” Copley News Servicereported in 1972. About three centuries after this rent was first recorded, though, the standard had changed: the billhook should be in such a condition that it could strike a one-year-old hazel stick and make “little or no mark.”

The axe, on the other hand, is supposed to be sharp. The current version of the ceremony tests both: First, the city representative uses the billhook to hack away at a pile of sticks. After that tool is proved ineffective, the axe gets its turn—and swipes cleanly through the same wood. “Good service,” the Remembrancer says.

The second rent is for a piece of land closer to home. In the neighborhood of what’s now the Royal Courts of Justice, back in the 13th century, the king held a tournament during which the knights needed help repairing their armor; the man who stepped up to do the work was then given a lease on the land to create a forge. (In a different version of the story, his job was to reshoe the horses of the Templar Knights. It's possible both stories are true, since with the Temple Church just down the street, those knights would have been the farrier’s most obvious customers.)

The forge is long gone, but the rent remains the same—six horseshoes and 61 nails. The horseshoes, which are themselves centuries old, are giant. When presented with the horseshoes and nails, the Remembrancer says, “Good number.”

These two “quit rents” are not the only ones owed to the crown. London also owes a yearly token rent of 11 pounds on the “town of Southwark,” now a high-end area where Shakespeare’s Globe and the Tate Modern are located. Outside of London, landowners are on the hook for a variety of quit rents: a bucket of snow on demand, three red roses, a small French flag, a salmon spear. Some rents only kick in only if the king or queen visits: the renter must provide the crown with a bed of straw, in one agreement, and in another, the renter must offer a single white rose.

One landholder keeps his place only on the condition that, if the monarch shows up, he must “ride his horse into the sea, until the water reached the saddle girths, to meet his sovereign,” the Southam News Service reported. Another has to fight anyone the king wants him to. Possibly the best quit-rent ever conceived is this one: “three glasses of port on New Year’s Eve for the ghost of the King’s grandmother.”

For the most part, quit rents are relics of medieval agreements, but there was at least one quit rent agreement that was forged in the past century, in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. It started when the city imported a bridge from London—one which had spanned the Thames river and was auctioned off in the late 1960s. Robert McCulloch, Lake Havasu City's founder, bought the bridge, and by the early '70s, the bridge had been reinstalled in Arizona.

As a gift to London, during the dedication ceremony, McCulloch offered an acre of Arizona land, reports the Havasu News, and years later, when the city wanted to use that land for a visitor's center, London agreed to lease it back to Lake Havasu. They settled on a token quit rent: a Kachina doll, a carved Hopi figure representing an immortal being.

Less than ten miles north of the Tampa International Airport, on an unassuming side road that rolls through the flat terrain and lush vegetation typical of Florida's bay area, an architecturally distinctive building bursts suddenly above the treetops. Built to serve the needs of a growing Indian community, the Hindu Temple of Florida is unique among its suburban environs.

Completed in 1996, the building is characterized by its prominent pyramid structure, which forms an entrance tower situated atop an exterior staircase that conducts worshippers to a rooftop courtyard and pooja room. After the building's completion, a process of "Indianization" began to adorn the exterior in the florid architectural details seen today.

The Hindu Temple of Florida is available for weddings, birthdays, and various public and private poojas, and is attended by priests who conduct services primarily in Sanskrit. Consistent with the non-canonical nature of Hinduism—the oldest religion in the world—the temple has no prescribed days or times for services, nor required donations or methods of worship.

For the uninitiated, steampunk is a branch of science fiction/fantasy that imagines an alternative industrial future that diverged from our past somewhere in the Victorian era, at the height of steam-powered technology. In this retro future, cogs and gears power aether machines and zeppelin is the preferred method of air travel.

Perhaps the single best place to experience the imagined steampunk world is in the small coastal town of Oamaru, New Zealand. Oamaru boomed economically during the 1800s, and so its buildings serve as the perfect setting for a steampunk playground with bountiful neoclassical and Victorian style architecture. It's here you'll find Steampunk HQ, located in an 1883 grain elevator.  

It's hard to say exactly what the headquarters are. The massive warehouse contains exhibits that are equal parts art show and haunted house-style walkthrough. A locomotive and an old blimp act as Steampunk HQ signs outside the building. One exhibition, called "The Portal," introduces visitors to time-and-space travelers and their copper, pipe-laden vehicles. A piece of equipment called the "Metagalactic Pipe Organ" allows people to play extraterrestrial sounds picked up by the HQ officers on their time jumps. 

There are also short films played at Steampunk HQ, as well as events and parties. Next door is The Libratory, an extension of Steampunk HQ. It's a library and art gallery dedicated to the history of steampunk, where artists show their wares and model their designs. Not only does it connect past and present, but it connects the whole Oamaru community. It's become an entire steampunk town.

Let's take a moment to explain the picture above. In 1978, the town of Scarfolk, in northwest England, cut its police budget in half. This drastic measure was followed by a wave of violent crime. To deal with the influx of dead bodies, the remaining police did the obvious thing—they teamed up with the "Keep Britain Tidy" campaign, and encouraged citizens, especially children, to pick up "victim debris" themselves. 

If this sounds too grotesque to be true, don't worry—it is! There were never any smiling, appendage-finding kids in Scarfolk, because Scarfolk never existed. But the town's online presence is meticulously detailed and impressively creepy. For three years, graphic designer Richard Littler has been using his design skills and bone-dry wit to write a whole history of Scarfolk, a fictional, supernatural-tinged town that finds humor in dystopia, and is closer to today's world than we might like to think.

Scarfolk is perpetually stuck in the 1970s, and repeats the decade on loop. On his blog, "Scarfolk Council," Littler presents the town's story through materials from the council's "archive": posters, pamphlets and packaging that reveal aspects of everyday life. Carefully Photoshopped and inspired by real source material, Littler's creations pack a punch—with their pastel, large fonted bombast, they could easily be mistaken for actual '70s artifacts.

But look closely, and each has a macabre twist. A public service leaflet warns that "People are dangerous," and instructs "if you know any people, report them at once to the authorities." A toy called "Mr. Liver Head" is exactly what it sounds like. A Scarfolk "Pelican Science Book" looks just like the real thing—but instead of physics or chemistry, teaches you "How to Wash a Child's Brain."

Scarfolk's creative creepiness didn't come out of nowhere. Littler grew up in the 1970s, in suburban Manchester, where he remembers being "always scared, always frightened of what I was faced with." Everywhere he turned, he recalls, was more evidence that the world was terrifying. Flip on the TV, and you might be treated to a popular public service announcement, in which children playing on train tracks are run over, one by one. Open a newspaper, and you'd be informed about botched surgeries and vengeful ghosts.

"Paranormal subjects were treated as fact by the media," he says. "There were unsettling reports of violent poltergeist haunts in suburban homes… as a child, there seemed to be—to me at least—scant difference between the natural and the supernatural."

In Scarfolk, the line between reality and sci-fi is erased. National security initiatives include thought-detector vans, dream recording, and "specially crossbred, telekinetic child-owls," which perch in people's homes and screech at misbehaving families. An entity named "Charlie Barn," which has a baby's head and spider legs, hypnotizes toddlers through television programs. Doctors surgically implant music boxes into the chests of riled up children, which pop out when they are about to misbehave.

Not everything is quite so unbelievable, though. Recently unearthed Scarfolk posters and initiatives seem strikingly applicable to current events. Last week, Littler put up a set of "Foreigner Identification Badges," which require all immigrants to publicly identify themselves as "Foreign Cuisine Infiltrators" or "Believers in Non-English-Speaking Deities"—clear satire of a certain strain of anti-immigration rhetoric.

The Council once set up a "Human Rights Lottery," which required citizens to each "win the right to be acknowledged as a human being." Another time, they outlawed facts, "due to their infrequency of use and diminished practicality."

"It had not been my intention at the outset to toy with the boundary between the 1970s and present day," says Littler. "I thought it might be interesting to mirror/juxtapose modern day events using ephemera of the 1970s—a decade the values of which we are supposed to have transcended."

But over the past year or so, "world events and politics have slid away from the suggestively dystopian towards the blatantly and unashamedly dystopian," he says. Sometimes people mistake his satire for real material, which he loves. "Not a day goes by without some political event or figure rivaling the absurdity of anything a satirist can create."

Now the Scarfolk universe is expanding—Littler has written a book, Discovering Scarfolk, and he's working on a television show. His fans add their own magic, too. Beneath a post about the Horned Deceiver—a large, shaggy beast with a pentagram attached to his forehead—commenters join in on the world-building fun, adding characters and "recalling" strange happenings. The final comment on the post about the Horned Deceiver comes from a reader who would rather look the other way: "I've a pretty clear recollection that this never happened at all."

Perhaps it didn't—or maybe he's just adhering to the party line. After all, the thought-detector vans could drive by at any moment.

Below are some of our favorite items from the Scarfolk Council archives:

On August 16,1942 something very strange happened in Daly City, California, a quiet suburb near San Francisco. Around 11:30 a.m. a sagging Navy blimp descended from the sky and headed for Bellevue Avenue.

“It looked like a big broken weiner,” a fireman recalled for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1979.

It perched fleetingly on a rooftop before drifting off and snagging in a tangle of power lines. The blimp sheared through the wires and sent arcs of electricity into the air before coming to rest on the ground. The engines were smashed into the pavement, one of them clogged with earth. The propellers were bent. Gasoline poured into the street. 

Chaos reigned on Bellevue Avenue. People ran from their homes and raced to the scene. The crowds were met by police and firemen who held them back and rushed to save the crew.

But there was no crew to save.

To the rescuers’ befuddlement, the gondola of the blimp was unmolested. The pilot’s parachutes were tidily put away in their normal spot, the lifeboat remained. The cap of one of the pilots still sat on the instrument panel. The blimp was in perfect working order, down to the radio. There was even a bomb still attached to the blimp, and naval officials would later assure everyone that there was never any danger because it would only detonate in water. (This is fortunate, because a second bomb did not remain attached—it tumbled from the blimp and landed on a golf course near San Francisco.) 

A photographer snapped a photo of the crash, an incongruous image of the blimp gondola jutting into the air from a city street, flanked by crowds, cars, and houses, its deflated gas bag drooping like a cape behind it. The image was reproduced in newspapers nationwide, most often with the tantalizing caption: “Mystery Surrounds Blimp Crash at Daly City”.

Search parties were dispatched—Naval servicemen hunted for the men by land, air and sea. A Navy spokesperson told the United Press that they were completely without clues. Where was the missing crew and what had happened to them?

The U.S. had entered World War II in 1941, and the Navy deployed blimps to do routine submarine patrols along the coast. This blimp, called the L-8, belonged to the Navy and had departed from Treasure Island, a manmade naval outpost in the San Francisco Bay, early that morning. It was piloted by two men, Lieutenant Ernest DeWitt Cody and Ensign Charles E. Adams, both men with years of experience aboard lighter-than-air ships. They were in good spirits and health on the morning of the 16th, a colleague reported at an inquest just days after the incident.

Earlier that day, a short message was radioed from the blimp to Treasure Island: “Am investigating suspicious oil slick—stand by.” An oil-slick could be a tell-tale sign that a submarine was in the area. It was the last message the crew would send.

Even though the gondola was eerily intact, there were a few odd things about the state of the blimp (aside from the fact it was crewless and run aground in a city street). The door was open and fixed by a latch to the outside of the car to keep it open. Typically, this door would never be opened during flight and it could only be opened from the inside by the crew. The engines were stopped, which suggested that maybe the pilot wanted to slow the blimp down. On every flight, the crew would bring a weighted briefcase of classified documents with them, and in case of emergency, they were to hurl these overboard. The briefcase remained, which suggested there was no emergency or that whatever had happened took place so quickly that the men couldn’t react. (There were also two life-vests missing, but it was common for men to wear these when sailing over water.)

The L-8 did not go unobserved before it plunked down on Bellevue Street. Civilians and officials spotted the ship, including a member of the Navy’s Armed Guard Unit, who was aboard the cargo ship Albert Gallatin. During the inquest, he told his interviewer that he had watched the blimp circle nearby waters above two flares (which the Navy determined had been dropped by the blimp)—behavior consistent with investigating an oil slick.

“We figured by that time it was a submarine,” said Wesley Frank Lamoureux. “From then on, I am not too positive of the actions of the dirigible except that it would come down very close over the water. In fact, it seemed to almost sit on top of the water.”

Believing there might be a submarine nearby, the Albert Gallatin sounded their general alarm, manned their guns and sped away from the scene. The last Lamoureux saw of the blimp, it had pulled its nose up from the water, apparently preparing to ascend.

 Puzzling witness accounts found their way into the press and added to the air of mystery surrounding L-8. A telephone operator named Ida Ruby was out for a horse ride near the beach when she spied the blimp through binoculars. She told United Press that she was “quite sure” she saw three men in the gondola. An official testified at the inquest there was no possibility of a stowaway.

Just two days after the crash, on August 18, the Navy concluded that there was no good reason for the men to leave their ship voluntarily; there had been no fire, no attack, bad weather, no technical malfunction. The theory they offered was this: Perhaps the gondola door malfunctioned, allowing one of the men to fall out. Hoping to rescue him quickly, the second crewmember piloted the ship close to the water, where he also fell overboard. They both perished. This remains and theory, and the actual fate of the airmen unknown because their bodies were never found. 

Not surprisingly, this story has not satisfied everyone. Alternative theories abound: The men got in a fight and fell overboard. The men went AWOL. One man was a spy. Both men were spies. They were taken captive aboard a Japanese submarine. They were abducted by UFOs.

But the most probable theory is the most boring, which is also the most frightening. Because UFOs are exotic, but slipping and falling is not, which means death is one silly mistake away for all of us. As one reporter noted two days after the crash, “Had the two men remained in the cabin they could have stepped to the street without injury.”

In the outskirts of Leiden in the Netherlands, there rests a giant, 115-foot-tall man colored orange. Sitting on a two-story platform beside an eleven story glass building, this towering orange man welcomes you to the Corpus Museum, the world's first museum to take visitors through the entire anatomy of the human body.

The giant orange body at the Corpus Museum is cut in its center by the glass walls of the building, making it appear to be a silhouette. In reality, the orange man is a full body resting half inside and half outside of the museum. The sculpture immediately catches the eye of cars passing down Leiden’s A44 Highway, beckoning them to the unusual museum.

The Corpus Museum's hour-long tour begins with an escalator ride up the leg to the knee, where visitors will step inside an open wound. Next comes the genital area, where visitors will put on 3D glasses to witness a sperm cell fertilizing an egg. Further up the giant body come the intestines, where you can witness the digestion of a cheese sandwich before your eyes. After passing through the ventricles of the human heart, visitors reach the head. Here, adults can observe pulsing neurons in the brain, while children can jump atop a giant tongue as a burping sound erupts from a speaker system.

The museum's upper floor features multiple interactive activities and a cafeteria. As visitors eat, they can look at the giant orange man jutting through the glass walls beside them.

The Karlskirche cathedral is a unique architectural curiosity, a mix of ancient Greek and Roman elements with Byzantine, Renaissance, and Baroque styles. Commissioned by the Habsburg Imperial Court to fulfill a religious vow, its symbolic details also sought to bolster Vienna's historic claim as the temporal center of Christendom.

In the early 18th century, Central Europe was hit by the last great outbreak of the Black Plague. Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI made a vow to build a church dedicated to St. Carlo Borromeo—revered for attending to Milanese plague victims in the 16th century, and the emperor's namesake—if the city was saved. After the plague passed, the new church was officially announced in 1713.

The church was designed by court architect Johann Bernard Fischer von Erlach, whose Baroque architecture profoundly influenced and shaped the tastes of the Habsburg Empire. Von Erlach’s ambitious design is centered around a portico in the Ancient Greek temple style, flanked by two columns modeled after Trajan's Column in Rome. The twin columns reference Solomon's Temple as well as the Pillars of Hercules (a symbol adopted by Charles V to represent the Holy Roman Empire), and are together reminiscent of the Pantheon of antiquity. The columns feature reliefs crafted by the Italian sculptor Lorenzo Mattielli, and depict scenes from the life St. Borromeo. The dome recalls that of St. Peter’s Basilica, but is remarkably different in that the base is an elongated ellipsoid.

At the main alter, a scene portrays the ascension of St. Borromeo. Above the sculpture group, a circle of angels and sun rays is arrayed in front of a source of light, echoing a similiar design found in St. Peter's Basilica. The fresco of the dome was painted by Johann Michael Rottmayr of Salzburg and Gaetano Fanti of Bologna, and displays an intercession of St. Borromeo—supported by the Virgin Mary—pleading to the Holy Trinity to end the plague in Vienna.

Over the weekend, Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani made headlines after resuscitating an old political stereotype. "Dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans," he told CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday in response to a question about election fraud, bringing to mind hordes of zombie voters lurching to the polls and checking boxes for Hillary Clinton.

It's an old story, a Chicago legend, a very rare occurrence and perhaps the most seasonally appropriate way to rig an election—bringing dead voters to the polls. Just a few months ago, a local CBS affiliate in Californiafound examples of voters who had cast ballots in multiple elections despite being dead for years.

But how old is this fear, exactly? And is there actually anything to worry about?

Political parties have been at each other's throats about election rigging since way back, before the modern-day Republican Party even existed. In the early 19th century, just a few short decades after the country had agreed on a Constitution, charges of election fraud were already flying between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans.

After the Civil War, though, it took on a new life. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, protected the right of citizens to vote, and the first Enforcement Act, passed that year, enumerated all the types of voter fraud that would be punished. Dead voters were enough of a concern that Congress addressed the problem specifically. According to the act, it was a crime to “knowingly personate and vote, or attempt to vote in the name of any other person, whether living, dead, or fictitious.”

Although the Fifteenth Amendment was meant to enfranchise black voters, the Democratic Party quickly found ways to twist the law against them. After Republican Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Democrat Samuel J. Tildon by one electoral vote in 1876, Democrats cried foul. They accused their opponents of all kinds of trickery across the Southern states—in one representative example, the Democrats accused the Republicans of opening a poll in a Democrat-heavy district of Louisiana "at three o'clock in the morning at the sugar-house… three and a half miles from the public road," compromising the integrity of ballot boxes by failing to provide sealing-wax, letting convicts vote—and letting dead people vote.

One specific accusation was that a Republican supervisor in Louisiana "furnished colored men new certificates under the numbers of deceased white and colored men." There is also mention of "a large number of colored women, armed with cane-knive[s]," appearing outside a poll, and of white voter repression. (Nothing came of these accusations but bad blood: Hayes kept the White House, but Democrats called him "His Fraudulency" throughout his one-term tenure.)

But even in the 19th century, when electoral fraud (rather than voter suppression) was a real issue, dead voters were just a fraction of the fake voters who cast ballots. In 1890, in Jersey City, N.J., investigators uncovered a substantial electoral fraud, which included voters submitting ballots for “their friends and neighbors, both dead and alive,” the Chicago Daily Tribune reported. The headline: VOTED FROM THEIR GRAVES. “A widespread resurrection had prevailed in the Third Precinct,” the paper said.

In a later tallying, dead voters were only a small part of the problem. The fraudulent votes included 10 people. But that was just a small fraction of the fake votes in this district, according to the Tribune:

“...five of the voters were from house numbers that do not exist, twenty-six ballots were counted for voters living on vacant lots, sixty-six were cast on the names of men who had moved away six months before election from the places of residence given them on the poll list, fifty-three men never lived in the houses in which the poll-book represents them as living at the time of the election, five names were voted on twice...and twelve votes were down as residing in factories and railroad yards."

Also, a three-year-old voted.

But even then, these votes were dwarfed by “tissue ballots”—sometimes also called joker ballots or kiss ballots. These ballots were essentially sneaky duplicates. A voter would deposit what looked one ballot but what was in fact many thinner ballots stuck together. After the polls closed, conspirators would shake the ballot boxes, and the votes would multiply as they came loose. It was “perhaps one of the most widespread and ingenious methods of fraud,” writes historian Robert M. Goldman in A Free Ballot and a Fair Count, popular as a strategy for padding the Democratic vote across the South.

Dead voters remain a strange, spectral threat. They returned to haunt American elections in the 1960s, when Earl Mazo, a political reporter and Nixon biographer, became convinced John F. Kennedy had stolen the election from Richard Nixon. In Chicago, he found a “cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered and voted,” he said later.

In this century, newspapers regularly publish reports of dead people lingering on voter rolls. But the vast majority of these dead voters don’t bother coming the polls; their names are on the list only because the lists aren’t often cleaned up. As the Brennan Center for Justice has documented, when these cases are investigated, there’s no fraud found: if a dead person has voted, it’s usually a clerical error—or a case where the person cast an early ballot before they died. (And in those cases, the votes don’t count.)

In South Carolina, for instance, in 2012, the Attorney General announced that he’d found more than 900 dead voters who cast ballots in previous elections. But as the Washington Post later reported, those votes did not swing any elections. First of all, they were spread out over 74 elections over seven years. Second of all, they weren’t some coordinated fraud effort but “the result of clerical errors or mistaken identities,” the Post wrote.

There are just easier ways to win than to raise voters from the dead.

In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean off of Africa's western coast sits the island of Boa Vista, known for its marine life, traditional music, and something more unusual: a small patch of desert on the northwestern part of the island, formed by the accumulation of wandering sand grains from the Sahara.

Great volumes of sand are continuously carried from the African continent towards the sea by trade winds. Much of this sand is deposited on Boa Vista because of its proximity to the mainland and the particular shape of the terrain. The resulting desert patch makes for an unlikely landscape on the island—rolling dunes of white sands interspersed with black volcanic rocks and very sparse vegetation.

This small extension of the Sahara is protected by the Government of Cape Verde, which forbids the use of motorised vehicles and promotes the construction of stone walls to limit the movement of the sand dunes toward the coast.

Troy Hill, population 3,000, is situated on a small plateau overlooking Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It’s a historically German, but quintessentially Pittsburghian, neighborhood characterized by cozy row houses, gritty neighborhood bars, cool new restaurants, and lovingly decorated front porches bedecked with Steelers flags and flower baskets. But there is more in Troy Hill than meets the eye.

At 1704 Harpster Street sits St. Anthony’s chapel, which houses the second-largest collection of Christian relics in existence after the Vatican. Within the greige brick facade are the bones, blood, teeth, ashes, hair, and personal belongings of the holiest members of the Christian church: the apostles, saints and martyrs. There are approximately 5,000 relics in total.

Inside the church, the eye is first drawn to a ceiling painted with religious symbols and names and then to tall walnut cases displaying hundreds of metal artifacts behind glass. There are miniature metal churches, monstrances, chasses (caskets), and medallions pinned to burgundy velvet. Each ornament contains a tiny, mysterious particle, tied in red embroidery thread and sealed with wax, which can be viewed through a clear glass or crystal aperture. There are what look like fingernail slivers and jagged pieces of porous grey bone. Some hold bits of cloth stained with drops of dried brown liquid.

The word relic comes from the Latin relinquere, or “to leave behind.” The relics at St. Anthony’s are mostly first or second class, which means they are the physical body parts of a saint, an item that came directly in contact with Christ, or an item worn or frequently used by a saint or martyr. These relics are investigated and certified by the church hierarchy and thought to be genuine.

Some of the most astounding relics at the chapel include: 22 splinters of the True Cross, a thorn from the Crown of Thorns, a splinter from the table at The Last Supper, the skull of St. Theodore, a tooth from St. Anthony, and pieces of bone from all of the Apostles.

While the practice of relic collection was always a part of early Christianity, by the Middle Ages it had become an obsession. Relics were fought over and protected by monasteries, churches and the nobility—not just for spiritual reasons, but for the social prestige bestowed on their owners and the economic boost that resulted from pilgrims who travelled to see them and pray to the saints in their presence.

Relics are considered so valuable that they’re encased in protective vessels called reliquaries. Depending on the time period, owner, and region, reliquary style can be as simple as a plain oval frame or extremely complex with filigreed metal, embroidery, beadwork, and precious stones. Once sealed, they are never opened. Even a crack would cast doubt upon their venerability, explains Carole Brueckner, chairperson of the St. Anthony’s Chapel Committee and tour guide.

Most of the reliquaries at St. Anthony’s are hundreds of years old and fine examples of artistic craftsmanship in the service of religious belief.  One rare example: a gold-leafed, cathedral-shaped calendar reliquary that holds a relic of each saint on his or her holiday, one for every day of the year. 

 The largest reliquary, in the shape of an altar, holds relics from 700 venerable members of the church. According to Brueckner, this piece inspired the structure of the chapel’s own display cases. In the Catholic faith, the church is believed to be one body, and the hundreds of relics within the miniature cathedral may act as a visual corollary to this concept.

Most stories that accompany the relics are equal parts gruesome and amazing. A pair of skulls wearing elaborate golden headdresses are from the companions of St. Ursula, a group of 10 Christian virgins who accompanied the British princess Ursula on a pilgrimage to Rome in the fourth century. The legend goes that their ship landed in Cologne, Germany, just as it was being attacked by the Huns. The companions were beheaded and St. Ursula was killed by an arrow.

St. Anthony’s was built in 1880 by Father Suitbert Mollinger, a wealthy Belgian aristocrat who attended medical school before becoming a priest. He was sent by the Catholic church to Pittsburgh in 1868 at the age of 40, where he became the first Pastor of Holy Name Diocese. According to Brueckner, “It was a big culture shock for him. He was mostly placed here because he spoke German and most people were German.” Mollinger brought many gifts to the community: a campaign for child literacy, his own formulas for medicinal compounds that were dispensed free of charge at the local apothecary, and enough money to build a rectory and convent. He also brought the collection of (at that time) 2,000 relics. 

During the mid to late 1800s, the political and religious upheavals of the Kulturkampf in Germany and the Unification of Italy resulted in churches being looted and their reliquaries either smashed or sold for their precious stones and metals. Father Mollinger was given many relics to bring with him to the United States for safekeeping, and the collection continued to grow. To store the relics, which were overflowing from side rooms and the rectory, he used his private wealth to construct the chapel, a 30-by-30-foot structure in a Victorian meets Romanesque style. The reliquaries are still arranged to his specifications.

Mollinger was known internationally as a faith healer. Although he used his medical training, he prioritized the spiritual, invisible power of faith to heal illness. According to Brueckner, he “would bestow a blessing with one of the relics he had acquired. Many times the blessing turned into a healing.” St. Anthony’s offered cures for both spiritual and physical ailments. The relics, in accordance with Catholic doctrine, were not believed to possess magical powers, but were more than just mementos or remains. They were a spiritual link between life and death, and man and God. Their presence helped visitors achieve a stronger spiritual connection to the divine, in a similar way that visiting a loved one’s grave might make you feel closer to them. 

Brueckner, a lifelong resident of Troy Hill, notes the many stories of healings told by older generations. Toward the end of the 1800s, the tiny neighborhood hosted thousands of pilgrims every week; at the time, however, record-keeping was not a priority. In 1892 the original chapel was expanded to include a nave with beautifully carved life-sized statues of Christ’s walk to the crucifixion. The same day the new addition was dedicated, Molilinger collapsed. He died a few days later, on June 15, 1892 of edema.   

After his death, the private chapel was left to the parishioners, but since Mollinger was the main draw for crowds, it fell into obscurity and without the funds for maintenance, was nearly condemned in the 1970’s. It was saved by the community; parishioners and sisters from the nearby convent raised enough money to restore the chapel to its former glory.

Stories of faith healing and St. Anthony’s continue into present day. According to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, in 1999 Jill Chadwick was 24 weeks pregnant when she felt a sharp pain in her abdomen. She was going into premature labor. Chadwick’s mother visited St. Anthony’s where the pastor, in a highly unusual move, lent her a relic—a hair from the Canadian priest Frederick Janssoone. Chadwick prayed to Fr. Janssoone in the hospital, secretly holding the relic to her abdomen.

Alone later in the delivery room, Chadwick saw him sitting next to her. She notes, 17 years later, “His eyes were bright and he smiled a huge smile and gave a slight up and down nod of his head. I recall him sitting in a chair to my left, legs crossed, hands crossed in his lap ... it still brings tears to my eyes.” She also remembers a sense of well-being and quiet, despite being in a busy hospital. Her newborn baby astounded doctors with his quick recovery and soon was in good health.

You don’t have to be a religious person to believe that the line between body and spirit is opaque but permeable, which is made clear when one feels the effects of an illness or tragedy. The relics at St. Anthony’s appeal to all the senses in a concrete way, but the “eyes of faith” are what the chapel, like very few places in the world, enables: the ability to see what is in front of you and beyond, to put your trust in faith. 

Meet Gunther. He’s been at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County for over a hundred years, and most visitors never even see him.

At the far end of a long hall leading to the Museum’s Research Library there is a perfectly preserved skeleton of a Galápagos tortoise, one of a pair in the their herpetology collection (that’s reptiles and amphibians). In 1900 he was captured and transported to a ranch in Riverside, California by the well-known zoologist Edmund Heller, just a little guy at the time weighing 29 pounds (the tortoise, not Heller).

He survived in captivity for only 14 years, but in that time grew to a robust 450 pounds. His body was then donated to the Museum, and although Heller’s letter to the director called him a “very stupid” tortoise (not cool, professor!), Gunther had helped early researchers learn more about the species, and how they age and grow.

The Galápagos tortoise is actually a collection of sub-species, each one unique to its particular island. This one, named for British zoologist Albert Günther, is native to Isabela (the largest of the archipelago), and today is threatened not only by predators that have been introduced to the island (pigs, dogs, rats and cats), but by threat of an eruption from the Sierra Negra volcano. Some 20 specimens have been placed in conservation and breeding programs, to try and stem the tide of extinction.

Sadly, another subspecies, the Pinta (or Abingdon) Island tortoise, lost its last known survivor in 2012. Named “Lonesome George,” his kin were thought extinct decades ago when he was found living a solitary life in 1971. He was estimated to be around 100 years old at the time of his death, and had been living a protected life on Santa Cruz Island in the hopes of cross-breeding and repopulating his subspecies.

Johannah Barry, the President of the Galápagos Conservancy, said of George, that he “… became a symbol of the tremendous advances that can be made when science, conservation expertise and political will are aligned on a common cause.” We can only hope that Gunther’s remaining relatives stick around long enough to find out for sure.

The dry stone walls of the Aran Islands—endless, mortarless, often ridiculous, always gorgeous—are a clever and scenic solution to a tricky problem. How do you create arable land on rocky, windy islands?

The three Aran islands are essentially big chunks of rock, littered with millions upon millions of small rocks. Over centuries, islanders have created grazing land, a few square feet at a time. They cleared rocks from a small area, piled the rocks elegantly into dry stone walls, enclosing a small patch of ground. Sheltered from the wind, the small scraping of topsoil stayed in place, and began to accumulate—a process helped by the islanders drying soil-enriching seaweed on the walls. 

Today, the islands are a spectacular gray-green labyrinth, the maze of walls enclosing tiny green fields, occasionally enclosing a shaggy horse or cow. The three islands occupy only 18 square miles. According to one estimate, they contain 1,500 miles of walls.  

Author, performer, and educator Tim Arem has inhabited one of the most famous clown personas in the world. But he was one of many.

Working in and around L.A., Arem was able to not only able to perform for countless children as Ronald McDonald, but also appeared at a number of star-studded benefits and photo ops, both as Ronald and later as the short-lived, moon-headed "adult" McDonald's mascot, Mac Tonight. We were able to talk to Arem about how he became Ronald McDonald, what it took to bring the character to life, some of his wildest McDonald’s spokesperson gigs, and how being Ronald became an enriching experience.

Arem started his Ronald career after answering an ad in an L.A. casting magazine. “I applied for the job through the Drama-Logue. It’s an actor’s paper. I just kind of did it on a fluke,” says Arem. “They just said they were looking for a professional clown, and that’s all they said. They didn’t publish [that it was for McDonald’s], for obvious reasons probably.” He says that it wasn’t until about 30 minutes into the interview that he even learned that the clown he was auditioning for would be Ronald McDonald. Arem was intrigued, and with his Master’s Degree in Education, and a background in acting and clowning, he was able to smoothly pass through the audition process, including performing for a series of franchise owners and operators.

As Arem explains it, during his tenure, from 1981-1985, there were essentially three-levels of Ronald. “There’s two Ronalds, that do the TV commercials. [...] They’re professional actors. There’s the main guy and the back-up,” he says. “Then there’s the guy out of Chicago who trained all the other Ronalds. He would travel all over the world, training. He did that, plus he had his own area, Illinois.” At the time, the trainer in Chicago was the only training Ronald, and then under him were all of the other Ronalds who did live events ranging from school shows, to photo ops, to in-store birthdays. “There were a handful of full-time, and everyone else was part-time,” says Arem. “It all depended on how many owner-operators/McDonald’s there were in a specific area. They have to put money in a kitty; that’s how Ronald got paid.” Arem had scored a position as a live Ronald.

Once he had the job, Arem had to go back to school, specifically, Hamburger University. Located at the McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, Hamburger University is a training facility where store managers go to learn the McRopes. They also offer intermittent clown training to new Ronalds. “It’s real important, as with the Disney characters that are all over the world, to have training,” says Arem. “The kinds of things that we did was, we went over make-up; they brought in [magician] Harry Blackstone Jr., who in his day was as popular as David Copperfield for magic. I got to work with him; They brought in storytellers, they brought in balloon people. Kind of all the things you would want in a polished clown.”

Arem learned the Ronald face make-up, an essential part of the character that makes a Ronald instantly recognizable. “The nose was painted on. It wasn’t a real focal part of the face, because the nose can be kind of scary,” says Arem. “All the features were pretty refined. For example, in acting if you do your eyebrows to point, that’s scary. If you do them kind of round, that’s happy, so our eyebrows were somewhat round, our mouths weren’t huge."

"The face wasn’t scary, it had a lot of history to it. I would just kind of walk onstage and the kids would freak out, in a good way. It was that powerful.”

During training, Arem says that they were also instructed in the psychology of working with kids. “You don’t want to scare the crap out of them,” he says. ”Getting down low, getting to their level and talking to them. You look at them and if they’re kind of scared, and you can tell right away, just like if you were a regular adult with a young child, you don’t get closer, you back off. Those sorts of things I learned through that.”

As to what the character himself should be like, Arem indicated that they were given a surprising level of autonomy, so long as they maintained Ronald’s core childishness. “For example there were Ronalds that were really good storytellers, and in my case it was magic and education, and juggling, and I could ride a unicycle, and those type of things,” he says.”[W]e didn’t talk about product, we didn’t talk about the brand, it was, ‘Hey, Ronald’s a kid, and he’s gonna hang out with the other kids.’ Ronald’s just like a big kid.”

With Arem’s prior experience as an actor and clown, he advanced through training in just a few weeks, and went to work appearing as Ronald McDonald all over L.A. His area was one of the largest McDonald’s regions in the country, so Arem travelled up and down California, five to seven days a week, bringing Ronald to the people. During the week days, he would travel to various schools doing educational presentations that he himself would create, on topics ranging from earthquake safety to the Olympics. According to Arem, the only direct marketing came from the image of Ronald.

“In the school shows, because McDonald’s is commercial, Ronald doesn’t say anything about hamburgers to kids, but the brand and the marketing is so strong, that when you see the kids, you know where they’re going to go out to dinner sometime that week.”

On the weekends Arem would hop in a special truck with a stage built on the back, and drive around doing performances in parking lots for crowds averaging a thousand people. Then there were the special and private events where he got to experience some unforgettable moments as Ronald. “I got to throw out a pitch at Dodger Stadium for 50,000 people, because it was McDonald’s night,” he says. “I got to be the first, outside of the Disney characters, to perform at Disneyland, because it was McDonald’s Night at Disneyland. I’ve been on airplanes, blimps, helicopters. I’ve got to ride horses with people like Richard Chamberlain.” Some of his favorite memories of performing as Ronald include the charitable performances he got to do at places like Ronald McDonald Houses, which provide lodging for families of people in the hospital, and Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times, which caters to children with cancer.

And because it was L.A, he even got to do some strange adult parties. Describing one benefit he was invited to as Ronald, Arem says, “They had a ton of celebrities, and they had seals swimming in the pool. It was just one of those Hollywood ‘La-La’ things.”

After four years as McDonald’s' official clown, Arem stepped away from the character to pursue other character opportunities, but his time with McDonald’s wasn’t up yet. In 1985, McDonald’s created a character aimed at the adult market, named Mac Tonight. The character was a 1950s- inspired piano crooner, with a crescent moon for a head. The character originated in a series of popular television commercials, and eventually Arem was tapped to appear as Mac in a series of live performances.

Giving him a giant moon-head and costume, Arem as Mac would hop in a vintage car and show up to different events, often hosted by radio personalities. During his brief, month-long tenure as the moon man, Arem got to meet some of his personal heroes after being invited to host a benefit event by rock star Dave Mason. “Roy Orbison was there, Stevie Nicks, both of them performed. Van Halen was there. Plus there were entertainers in the audience. And they asked me to MC it!”

After his stint as Mac Tonight, Arem left McDonald’s behind, but continues to perform as a fitness educator. 

When asked how he reconciles the more mercenary aspects of acting as the McDonald’s spokes-character with his edutaining goals, Arem feels that Ronald is uniquely suited act as a clown first, and a corporate symbol second. “There’s a difference between a mascot and a spokesperson. A mascot does not speak, a spokesperson does,” he says. “As the spokesperson of Ronald, when I go into schools, all the school shows I wrote were educational. I knew in my heart, ‘Yeah, I’m there to sell hamburgers, and if it weren’t for McDonald’s who paid my mortgage, I would not be doing that.’ It allowed me, with my teaching background, to be in the moment, and teaching fun stuff with circus arts. I was really fine with all of that."

The focal point of Saratoga Springs' Congress Park is the fountain featuring two mermen using marble conch shells as water guns.

The fountain was commissioned for the Canfield Casino in 1903, when Saratoga Springs was branded as the "American Monte Carlo," a city for gambling and relaxation. An Italian sculptor built the romantic fountain, which was brought to Saratoga two years later. 

The sculptures depict two Tritons, or mermen, shooting streams of water from puffed cheeks. This led townspeople to nickname them "Spit and Spat," a moniker which sticks to this very day. They were the focus of the Italian sculpture garden, which featured satyrs, bacchantes, and other figures of classical myth.

The casino folded when gambling was outlawed in 1911, but the sculpture garden was too beautiful to be torn down. The city purchased it, and after much refurbishment, opened it to the city as part of Congress Park. The sculptures are beloved enough that when the city closed the park in 2005 for restorations, not a day went by without someone wondering aloud about how Spit and Spat were doing.

About 75 miles north of Frankfurt, Germany is a reservoir called the Edersee. During normal weather the manmade lake covers over four and a half square miles, but these last few seasons have been anything but normal. It’s been so dry, the banks have receded to reveal parts of villages that had long been lost to watery memory.

During the driest months crowds have come to the Edersee to poke around the old village streets and foundations that have reemerged, and to try to find the remains of a small church—a church that was never there in the first place.

In 1914, the tiny village of Nieder-Werbe became a little bit famous. Although it is a mile or so north of the reservoir, part of the village was flooded to make way for two overflow basins. In addition to the few farms and homes that were lost, there was a small wood frame and stucco church in the water’s path. Several newspaper articles about the Edersee included a picture of this little church, with its steeple left behind and peeking out of the water.

When people came to see the new reservoir they wanted to see the little “church in the lake” too, but it had been misidentified as being in the Edersee rather than in the overflow basin to the north, leaving most people on a wild goose chase. A lucky few managed to find it over in Nieder-Werbe, and so the story of the steeple continued to grow. Today, more than a century later, people still search for it in the reservoir.

To celebrate the anniversary of the Edersee, and to finally set the record straight, the village of Nieder-Werbe decided they’d give the people what they wanted. Although the timbers and stucco of the original church didn’t last long underwater, they still knew where it had been. They went to work building a replica and placed it in the basin, thereby recreating a curious image from over a century ago.

Now, when visitors to the Edersee ask “where’s the church? where’s the steeple?”, there’s a good answer for them. It’s right where it always was. Just not here.

Thomas Edison seated in his laboratory, c. 1904. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-USZ62-55339)

In the late 1920s, not long before his death, Thomas Edison reportedly gathered with other scientists in a secret laboratory to record the voices and presence of the dead. They used “speakers, generators, and other experimental equipment,” Modern Mechanix magazine alleged after the fact, in October of 1933.

The magazine article describes Edison’s machine, in which a “tiny pencil of light, coming from a powerful lamp, bored through the darkness and struck the active surface,” which could detect the smallest particle. These particles would be proof of the afterlife, physical bits of human personality left in the atmosphere, waiting to be discovered. Unfortunately, after “tense hours” spent watching the delicate instruments, nothing happened; which was, the magazine adds, why no one had heard of this experiment before.

Full disclosure: that specific account might have been a spooky fantasy for the magazine’s October issue. But, while it’s unclear if that exact scene occurred, there’s ample proof that Edison was interested in speaking to the dead using technology. In 1920, the inventor shocked the public when he told American Magazine: “I have been at work for some time, building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” 

Edison, who was known for having hundreds of patents of inventions and creating an efficient version of the light bulb, added that this new invention would not function by “any occult, mystifying, mysterious, or weird means, employed by so–called "mediums”, but by scientific methods. I am engaged in the construction of one such apparatus now, and I hope to be able to finish it before very many months pass."

An image from a seance held by medium William Hope, c. 1920. (Photo: Public Domain)

Edison’s idea became known as a “spirit phone”, and caused a media storm. For years many historians believed the invention to be a joke or a hoax; no blueprints or prototypes of a spirit phone could be found. But while he may not have actually contacted the dead, there is evidence he experimented with the idea. In 2015 the French journalist Philippe Baudouin found a rare version of Edison's diary in a thrift store in France.

This version includes a chapter that was not printed in the widely known 1948 English edition, called the Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. This missing chapter was dedicated to his theory of the spirit world, and how it might be possible to contact it. Baudouin re-published the French edition as Le Royaume de l'au-delà.

A century ago, however, the wider world was somewhat less receptive to the revelation that the great inventor was working on a spirit phone. The resulting media circus was summed up in an editorial note in American Medicine, which said “the press have failed to deal with proper dignity and respect an announcement from the great man who has produced so many modern miracles.”

As magazines regurgitated the story, Edison’s somewhat pragmatic approach to the spirit world morphed into evidence that he was (or soon could be) regularly chatting with ghosts.  A French cartoon from the time depicted a depressed husband being pestered by his mother-in-law beyond the grave via Edison’s spirit phone.

An illustration of Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence J Blake's ear phonautograph. (Photo: Internet Archive/Public Domain)

That a well-respected scientist who greatly influenced modern technology could try to contact spirits might seem unlikely to the public now. But when Edison spoke of his idea in 1920, spiritualists were still going strong in the United States—some even called themselves “phone-voyants,” and claimed that they could harness the electric signals in conventional phones to interpret spirits.

For many, the spirit phone’s unbelievable promise invoked technologies like the telegraph and air flight, which were both seen as impossible until proven otherwise. The public was, for example, aghast at Edison’s phonograph when it was new in 1877, an invention many felt “could turn the ancient dream of immortality into reality, in an attempt to cheat death,” Baudouin notes in the documentaryThomas Edison & the Realms Beyond.

At the time, communicating with spirits didn’t seem much more impossible than harnessing electricity. Other similarly eerie ideas appeared during this time too. Thomas Watson, the well-regarded assistant of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, also dabbled in the idea of a spirit phone; while an invention by Bell and ear specialist Clarence J. Blake, the “ear phonautograph,” recorded sounds using a stylus attached to a human ear and skull.

During Edison’s lifetime, science and technology advanced at a rapid clip, giving us the gas-powered car and the theory of relativity. These unexpected advancements seemed endless, and the possibility of a physical spirit seemed plausible. Edison mused to American Magazine that scientists studying electricity would probably be the first people to review his device. “It would cause a tremendous sensation if successful,” he said. Yet if his device failed, he added, our belief in the spirit world would wane significantly.

A photograph of Edison from a 1920 issue of Scientific American, which included an interview "regarding his attempt to communicate with the next world." (Photo: Public Domain)

Speaking to loved ones beyond the grave may have appealed to the public, but for Edison this was a matter of strict science. Edison believed that life was indestructible, and that the “quantity could never be increased or decreased.” He theorized that like our bodies, our personalities have a physical form, made of tiny “entities” similar to our current view of atoms. He thought these entities might exist after humans passed away—a personality-based residue of loose memories and thoughts, containing part of who a person was during life.

If these particles existed, he reasoned, they could collect together in the ether around us. Possibly they could be amplified by his device like a human voice could be amplified and recorded by a phonograph.

According to Baudouin, Thomas Edison wrote plans and theories for these devices, though whether he actually built and tested one, and to what extent, is still unknown. He never named the machine, and referred to it as a “valve,” which was highly sensitive to vibration. Later sketches of Edison’s spirit phone by magazines depicted phonograph-like parts, including a fluted horn containing an electrode, thought by some to have been dipped in the conductive potassium permanganate. This horn was attached to a wooden box containing a microphone, which was would pick up the vibrations of these entities because of its extreme sensitivity.

Edison’s idea became mixed in with occult studies in short order. Literary Digest’s circulation analysis for 1921 included “Edison's Spirit Phone” in its list of articles on psychology, along with “Dreams”, “Mind Reading”, and “Why People Laugh.” Edison wasn’t keen on this grouping, though. In his interview with American Magazine, Edison criticizes the unscientific qualities of a psychic medium’s methods, which he called crude and childish. Some people, he said, “permit themselves to become, in a sense, hypnotized into thinking that their imaginings are actualities.” 

From an article in Modern Mechanix magazine, about Edison's experiments to "lure spirits from beyond the grave". (Photo: Public Domain) 

Since Edison's death in 1931, ghost-communicating hopefuls have been looking for blueprints to build and test the spirit phone; or at least to approximate it. In 1941, researchers tried to replicate the spirit phone and call the inventor up, after they believed they were instructed to do so by Edison’s spirit via a medium. “Alas, the contraption did not seem to successfully transmit any life units,” Stephan Palmié writes in the anthology Spirited Things.

People still want to use technology for detecting and communicating with ghosts, though the preferred gadgets have evolved into electronic voice phenomena (EVP) recorders and geophones. Some cost-minded ghost hunters use ghost-detecting apps, converting their smartphones into portable spirit phones. In 2002, the late Frank Sumption claimed ghosts could speak, just as spiritualists hoped for with Edison’s invention, using a special radio called Frank’s Box; spirits tune in, directing the frequencies to form words from the world beyond.

Although a finished spirit phone never joined his many patents, Edison at least achieved the first half of his goal, which was “to give the scientific investigator—or for that matter, the unscientific—an apparatus which, like the compass of the seaman, will put their investigations upon a scientific basis,” as he wrote in his published diary.

While we don’t know if Edison was correct in his theory that our personalities inhabit physical “entities”, nor if he could hear them on his spirit phone, at least the inventor's idea of using technology to speak beyond the grave lives on.

In mid-October in 2016, the trees might be near peak fall foliage, but the temperatures are not dropping. In fact, the high in New York City is forecasted to top 80 degrees. In North America, since at least the early 1800s, people have called these autumn spells of warm days and hazy skies "Indian summer."

Think about that phrase just a little bit, and there are a few questions that come up. First, why do we call this Indian summer? Second, should we? And, if not, what else can we call it?

The undisputed authority on "Indian summer" is Albert Matthews, a Bostonian who spent 12 years in the late 19th century gathering together dozens of the earliest uses of the phrase. He searched through texts about American weather and climate going back to the 1600s; he wrote to The Dial, The Journal of American Folklore, The Nation, and other publications, asking others to send him an examples he could find; he borrowed from other dedicated searchers, until in 1902 he could say with confidence exactly when it came into common use.

The earliest use of the term that Matthews found was in the 1790s; researchers for the Dictionary of American English later discovered an earlier example, in Letters from an American Farmer. The French immigrant J. H. St. John de Crèvecoeur, who farmed in the Hudson Valley wrote that, in the fall, the severe frost "is often preceded by a short interval of smoke and mildness, called the Indian Summer."

But the phrase didn't become popular until at least the 1810s. "Many writers previous to 1800 neither employed the term nor recognized the season," Matthews wrote in his extensive study, published in the Monthly Weather Review. "But by 1798 use of the term spread to New England and "to New York by 1809, to Canada by 1821, and to England by 1830."

In his extremely thorough research, though, Matthews never discovered a convincing explanation for what the phrase meant. Why associate Native Americans with warm days in fall? There were plenty of ideas floating around: Native Americans had predicted the warm spell to settlers; they used that time of the year to extend their harvest; a tribe's mythology connects the weather to the sigh of the personified southern wind. "Indian summer" may have had a tinge of colonial nostalgia to it, too. Some of the examples Matthews found argued that by the 1800s "Indian summer" had disappeared. "This short season of mild and serene weather, the halcyon period of autumn, has disappeared with the primitive rest," wrote one 19th century author. “It fled from our land before the progress of civilization; it has departed with the primitive forest."

As the current high temperatures show, the weather that characterizes "Indian summer" has definitely not disappeared. But that quote offers a hint that the phrase's growing popularity could have been connected to the absence of native people, rather than any real native practices. Matthews (rightly) dismisses all of the explanations he found as "vague and uncertain."

So, after 200 years, we may want to use a term with less colonial overtones. There are many other options of what to call these late-breaking days of autumn warmth.

In Europe, streaks of warmth in autumn are often named after saints whose feasts fall around this time: This one could very accurately be called by a British name, St. Luke's summer—the saint's feast day is on October 18. Other countries associate these warm spells with other saints. In Finland, there's Pärttylin pikkukesä, associated with Pärttylin, Saint Bartholemew. In Spain, there's Veranillo de San Miguel or Veranillo de los Arcángeles, the little summer of St. Michael or of the Archangels, San Miguel, San Rafael and San Gabriel. Earlier in October, Bridget of Sweden has her feast day, and Swedes sometimes call warm spells brittsommar. In France, there's also l’été de la Saint-Denis, and in Britain and other countries, All Saints' or All Halloween summer, if it falls around Nov. 1.

In many European countries, a November warm spell is called St. Martin's summer—his feast day in November 11th.

But the possibilities do not end there. In Germany, the Netherlands and Eastern Europe, warm autumn streaks are called "old wives' summer"—it's Altweibersommer in German, oudewijvenzomer in Dutch, babie lato in Polish, babí léto in Czech, babje ljeto in Russian and so on. Many European countries also have names for this phenomenon which are connected to nature. Spain can have a veranillo del membrillo, a quince summer, because it's around this time of year that quince finishes its ripening. Sweden can have a grävlingssommar, a "badger summer," when badgers have one last chance to replenish their stocks for the winter. In Brittany, they call this "the summer of ferns," which have turned colors already, and in Dutch the kranenzomer, or crane summer.

The word "gossamer" is also associated with late autumn warmth—it either comes from "goose summer" or "go-summer," a Scottish word that plays on the passing of summer, and is associated with the glossy spider webs that can be found in the fields of this season. Sometimes those webs are also connected to the "old wives' summer"—they're supposed to be reminiscent of old women's hair. In Turkey, they call this time of year "pastirma summer" because the mild weather of early November is perfect for making the cured, salted meat called pastirma (which gave pastrami its name but is its own delicious thing).

Or there are simpler options. Latvians calls this atvasara, and the Dutch also use nazomer, both of which mean "late summer." In English, before Indian summer came into vogue, sometimes we called this "second summer." There's a strong case to be made for badger summer, pastrami summer, or quince summer as an alternate name for Indian summer, but perhaps simple is best. Enjoy these second summer days, before the frost of fall really sets in.

Before Donald Trump's moniker was stamped all over New York City, there was another super-rich surname that dominated Manhattan real estate, and another bizarre story attached to it. 

Around the turn of the 20th century the Wendels were one of the most powerful real estate families in New York, owning 150 properties in Manhattan, worth about $1 billion today. But they certainly didn't act the part. The six Wendel siblings—five of whom were women—lived together in a mansion on 5th Avenue and barely ever set foot outside the house. The four-story, 40-room red brick brownstone became known as the “House of Mystery," where “the Weird Wendels” lived like hermits.

John G. Wendel, the one male, was eccentric at best, tyrannical at worst. He refused to allow his sisters to marry, worried that any children they had would dilute the family fortune. He gave them few opportunities to socialize with others, and lived like a recluse stuck in his ways. The house, built in 1856, was lit by gaslight up through the 1920s, eschewing modern amenities like electricity or telephone. Decades went by without any updates made to the musty furniture or decor, or the Wendels' clothing—they wore outdated Victorian garb and traversed the city in an old carriage instead of a car on the rare occasion they went out.

The last of the Wendel siblings, Ella, passed away in 1931. She left the Wendel home to Drew University requesting it remain as a memorial to the family in its current state (such that it was). The university maintains a memorial room on campus, but the prized site on 5th Avenue was razed in 1934 and gave way to commercial properties like the rest of the formerly residential avenue.

Today there are a few reminders of the Wendel empire, outside a vault at Trinity Cemetery in lower Manhattan, and a bronze plaque the size of a door at the site of the former Wendel home on 5th Avenue.

Macy's Herald Square is famous for a lot of things: Its animatronic window displays are the talk of the town, and it is the site of the "Miracle on 34th Street" as well as home to the world's top Santas. The store pioneered the department store model, but perhaps the best preserved piece of its history lies right underneath shoppers' feet.

When the flagship store underwent massive renovations in 2015, it swapped many of its old-world features for more modern accoutrements. However, 20 wooden escalators stayed put.

They were built between 1920 and 1930 by Otis Elevator Company, which pioneered the machinery. They're made of sturdy oak and ash, wood that's traditionally used in hardwood flooring. The mechanical parts have, for the most part, been updated, and modern safety measures have been put in place. 

They might be updated, but the nearly century-old escalators aren't going anywhere, despite how much they might creak.