Until 1913 the town Giessen, Germany had one special profession. It was the "Schlamp-Eiser," the men who walked the city and collected the feces of the citizens of town.
Relatively early in the Middle Ages Giessen came up with a latrine innovation: They built small wooden boxes on the outside of the walls of the houses which included a pit latrine connected to a wooden pipe, which led feces down into a wooden bucket placed in the small spaces between the houses.
When the buckets were full, the feces had to be brought somewhere, but the spaces in between the houses were extremely narrow and it was hard to reach the buckets. Hence the Schlamp-Eiser was born. Using a long bent iron bar, men pulled out the filled buckets, collected the feces in a large cart, and transported the waste to the Rodtberg outside the town.
Word of the strange innovative waste system spread fast and spiteful onlookers started calling the citizens of Giessen "Schlammbeiser," which roughly translates to shit-eater.
In 1904, a sewer system was built in Giessen and the Schlamp-Eisers went to work in the sewers, cleaning blockages. The last Schlamp-Eiser, Eberhard Blaurock, retired in 1913 after 55 years collecting waste buckets.
Normally the old-fashioned profession would be forgotten by now, if it wasn't for the obnoxious nickname the profession brought to the citizens of Giessen, which stuck up until today. For decades people were unhappy with the insulting term, but over more recent years citizens came to embrace the nickname, and today the Schlammbeiser name is used in cultural facilities, clubs and other places around the town. There is even a statue dedicated to the old Schlamp-Eiser. The bronze statue, built in 2005, is located right in the city center in front of the house where the last Schlamp-Eiser lived.
In the heat of the summer in 1890, Vincent van Gogh stumbled into his boarding house in rural Auvers-sur-Oise, outside of suburban Paris. He was bleeding, clutching his torso. He made it upstairs to his spartan room, took to his bed, and died two days later.
Only 37 years old, he had shot himself in the chest, ultimately succumbing not to the initial wound, but to the resulting infection from the lodged bullet. His suicide was a surprise to some, having spent the previous months madly spitting out canvas after canvas of the bucolic countryside. He was buried, the day after he died, in the village public cemetery.
Van Gogh’s grave is as modest as his reputation was at the time, befitting an artist who had sold only one painting during his too-brief life. But his influence as a transformative modernist was more widely known and admired in Impressionist circles in Paris, and his burial was attended not only by his devoted brother Theo and villagers who had grown fond of him, but by a small cohort of the Parisian art community as well—including painters Lucien Pissarro, Charles Laval and Émile Bernard, and the well-known art dealer Julien Tanguy.
Six months later, Theo—who is thought to have been suffering from syphilis—died at the age of 33. He was buried in Utrecht, about 50 miles from where the brothers were born in Zundert, Netherlands. His body stayed in Utrecht until 1914, when the family had it exhumed and transported to join his brother, and they were reunited.
Many of van Gogh’s paintings from his time in Auvers are as bold and dramatic as any of his greatest works. Wheat and corn fields, farm cottages, expressive blue skies—all of the scenes that surround the quiet country cemetery where he’s laid to rest with his dear brother Theo, Vincent’s champion in life and art, by his side.
This is no Everything Is Terrible manipulation of found footage. That shrill whistle is actually emanating from this man's torturously pursed lips.
In 1984, the Detroit public access show Kelly & Company hosted a crowd sourced variety show and the clear winner was Ralph "Whistler" Giese's rendition of "Georgia On My Mind." The contestants' talents were varied (the man right before Giese tries and fails to stack a tower of bowling balls), but Giese's birdly whistle wins over the audience.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
In the mountains outside Sárospatak there was once a stone mine operation that employed many locals up until it was closed in 1907. After that the mine was abandoned and left to be reclaimed by nature.
The industrial site was quickly grown over with dense foliage, and rainwater trickled down the mountainside to fill in the 210-foot deep gorge. Now the quarry looks like a fantasy location. The towering surrounding rock walls create a strange multi-segmented cavernous form. Walking trails along the cliffs make it a popular hiking spot, and offer lovely views of the pool below. From inside the gorge, the sky is framed by the forest fencing in the cliff paths.
The Tengerszem Mine was declared a nature reserve in the 1970s. Swimming is not recommended but that doesn't seem to stop people. The mine is beloved enough that in 2011 Tengerszem Nature Reserve was declared most beautiful place in Hungary.
If you've ever wanted to see Pee Wee Herman's famous bicycle, or the largest collection of the all-fiberglass Bowden Spacelander bikes, this repurposed Pittsburgh industrial warehouse has you covered.
A 1863 Boneshaker at the entrance kicks off the world's largest bicycle museum, Bicycle Heaven. For bike enthusiasts, this place lives up to its name. Craig Morrow's sprawling collection of over 3,000 bicycles and bike memorabilia spans two floors in the warehouse shop, displaying rare and famous specimens, many models of antique bicycles dating to the 19th century, and paraphernalia like horns, oil lamps, and sirens.
The bike from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is on display next to a rare Columbia Double Eagle, a small bicycle built for two. Some donated bicycles also have placards wrote by those who donated them, telling of their history and the joys of those who owned and rode them. Also on display are very rare Bowden Spacelanders, fiberglass frame bicycles built by British automotive engineer Benjamin Bowden. Only 544 were made, just over 30 are known to exist. Craig has collected 17, and eight of these are on display at the museum.
Bicycle Heaven is also a working bike shop. Here in the company of such rarities, anyone can bring their own beloved bike in for a tune up.
Every summer, when a big group of whales—several dozen, perhaps—are spotted off the coast of the Faroe Islands, an autonomous country within Denmark, residents sound the alarm: it's time to begin what's known as the Grind, in which dozens of whales are driven into shallow harbors and slaughtered.
The practice dates back centuries, but has grown controversial in recent years, as mass whaling has been severely curtailed across the world. The Faroese, however, have continued unbidden, claiming that it's an important part of their culture and past. And while years of activism haven't done much more than put a dent in the annual culling, an increasingly prevalent threat might: health concerns, primarily over mercury and other chemicals found in the whales, which in turn can cause a raft of problems for eaters, like Parkinson's disease and neural damage in children.
The "silent pollution of the oceans will one day end up on the dinner table in some communities, and our children are paying the price," Pal Weihe, a doctor in the Faroese Hospital System, recently told Deustche Welle.
The government, for their part, have yet to act on any whaling ban, instead adopting recommendations that say that islanders should just eat whale less. But even those recommendations hint at the severity of the problem, with the government advising residents that they can only safely eat whale once a month.
High levels of mercury in seafood have been a known issue for decades, owing, scientists say, to humans' pollution of ocean waters. But mercury levels are much higher in larger, longer-living animals—like pilot whales, which can weigh up to two-and-a-half tons and live as long as 60 years.
The so-called 'silent poison’ hasn't been good news for a Faroe Islands tradition that has been documented for over five centuries, though likely has gone on for hundreds of years more. In the hunt, islanders drive pilot whales into shallower waters where others slaughter them with knives, creating a bloody spectacle that this year began in July with the killing of dozens of whales.
The practice itself isn't usually undertaken by professional fisherman but rather islanders with day jobs, as the Faroese wait in the summer for whales to approach the shore then, quickly, put out a call for boaters hit the seas and steer the whales shoreward.
After the whales are dead, their corpses are distributed to residents, who are responsible for butchering the whales themselves.
"That's a skill that people are expected to have—the ability to cut up an animal into meat," Russell Fielding, an academic who studies the killings, told National Geographic in 2014. "It usually takes an hour or two for all the animals to get butchered."
Since the 1980s the vigilante group Sea Shepherd, whose boats are now banned from Faroe Islands waters, has been trying to stop the killings, clashing frequently with the Faroese government. (Fourteen of Sea Shepherd's volunteers were arrested in 2014.)
But their activism, and the outcry of others, hasn't done much to slow the killings, or convince many islanders.
"It’s good food," one islander told Deustche Welle. "It’s not our fault that one has to be careful about what one eats."
On April 27, 1982, members of the California Assembly's Consumer Protection and Toxics Committee gathered in Sacramento to hear Robert Plant endorse Satan. This was not a straightforward testimonial. For one thing, the Led Zeppelin frontman wasn't actually in attendance. Also, his pro-devil paeans could only be heard when you played "Stairway to Heaven" backwards.
After circulating pamphlets with the "backward masked" declarations spelled out, that's precisely what Assemblyman Phillip Wyman and panel witness William H. Yarroll II did. The relevant portion of the eight-minute classic was first played forward for committee members and then reversed. Here's what Wyman claimed could be heard: "I sing because I live with Satan. The Lord turns me off. There's no escaping it. Here's to my sweet Satan." Yarroll, who identified himself as a "neuroscientist," noted that a teenager need only listen to "Stairway to Heaven" three times before these backward messages were "stored as truth."
It wasn't just Plant reverse-singing Satan's praises, either. According to Yarroll, bands ranging from Styx to the Beatles also had secret backmasked messages hidden in their music—messages that, in the words of legislative proposal A.B. 3741, had the power to "manipulate our behavior without our knowledge or consent and turn us into disciples of the Antichrist."
As the bill's sponsor, Wyman wanted mandatory warning labels on all rock albums containing these morally dubious backward messages. "Suppose young people have heard 'Stairway to Heaven' two or three hundred times and there has been implanted in their subconscious mind pro satanic messages or incantations?" he told Terry Drinkwater the following day on a CBS Evening News segment. Indeed, this was the truly insidious part of backmasking. Even though you had to play records in reverse to decipher the occultic messages, they could still subliminally imprint themselves upon young teen minds when played in the standard direction.
During the same news segment, Yarroll described how the brain unscrambles a backward masked message: "We have it stored in the unconscious as a truth image," he said, "and as the creative unconscious side of the brain does, it goes through scanning the unconscious brain to go about and bring those truth images to the surface and make them reality for us."
After calling the issue "exciting and interesting," committee chairman Sally Tanner (D-El Monte) delayed an official vote until the music industry and band members could weigh in on the matter. That day never came. But the national panic surrounding subliminal satanic messages in rock music was about to reach fever pitch.
In the early '70s, backmasking—or the practice of recording vocals and instruments backwards and then reinserting them into the forward mix of a song—was something a music savvy (and possibly stoned) Beatles fan might bring up. A decade later, it had become a cause célèbre for conservative religious leaders, school teachers, parents, and even politicians. Whether it was the reversed voice of Freddie Mercury declaring "it's fun to smoke marijuana" on "Another One Bites the Dust" or Styx imploring Satan to "move through our voices" on "Snowblind," there seemed to be mounting evidence that rock music was literally becoming a mouthpiece for the devil.
Believers held record-smashing parties, appeared on popular TV talk shows, wrote books, formed watchdog groups, and, perhaps most importantly, called their government representatives to warn them.
By 1982, state and federal legislation was being introduced at a steady clip to combat rock and roll's hidden satanic agenda. Two weeks after the California Assembly hearing in Sacramento, California congressman Robert Dornan introduced H.R. 6363 to the House. Also known as the "Phonograph Record Backward Masking Labeling Act," the bill aimed to do the same thing as Wyman's A.B. 3741, only on a national level.
While it would ultimately be shuffled off to the Subcommittee on Commerce, Transportation and Tourism to die, other bills—including one in Arkansas a year later—were passed unanimously by both house and senate members (then-Governor Bill Clinton ultimately vetoed that one).
For its own part, the music industry responded with a bemused skepticism. Styx's James Young called the whole idea of satanic backmasking a hoax perpetrated by religious zealots, and refused to attend any meeting or hearing where the topic was discussed. Then there was Bob Garcia of A&M Records, who declared, "it must be the devil putting these messages on the records because no one here knows how to do it." A spokesman for Led Zeppelin's record label, Swan Song Records, issued just one statement in response to the "Stairway to Heaven" satanic allegations: "Our turntables only rotate in one direction."
Taken as a whole, these reactions only stoked the righteous (and possibly entrepreneurial) fires of religious leaders like pastor Gary Greenwald, who started holding backmasking seminars all over the country. Soon, books like Backward Masking Unmasked, Dancing With Demons, and The Devil's Disciples: The Truth About Rock, were exposing "the sinister nature of rock and roll music," while watchdog organizations like Parents Against Subliminal Seduction (P.A.S.S.) tried to block rock concerts at various venues.
The problem, as you may have already guessed, was that the whole thing was a bunch of diabolical tihsllub.
Let's pause here to do something most satanic backmasking proponents never did during the controversy: distinguish between real engineered backmasking and the majority of messages people thought they were hearing during the '70s and '80s. The former is a technique that dates back to the advent of recorded music. The latter is the result of what psychologists call pareidolia (more on that in a bit), and is simply the brain's attempt to make sense of the gibberish that results from phonetic reversals.
"Recording things backwards really began when the field of sound recording began," says Alex Case, president of the Audio Engineering Society. After Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877, there was rampant experimentation both with recorded speech and music. "It's clear that part of the sales pitch when they were selling wax cylinder recorders would be to record someone speaking and then play it backwards for them," says Case. Fittingly, the phrase "mad dog" ("goddamn" in reverse) seems to have been a crowd favorite.
Real backmasking—intentional backwards music or speech in musical compositions—began to come into vogue during the 1940s with experimental composers like Pierre Schaeffer. Playing records (and later, tapes) backwards was, according to Case, a way for musicians and composers to fool around with timbre and produce new and distinct sounds.
By most accounts, that's precisely what attracted the Beatles to the practice. The band famously used backward instrumentation, including a backward guitar solo, on their 1966 album Revolver. "Rain," the B-side of "Paperback Writer," has what is believed to be the first backward masked message in a pop song. Its coda is a backwards version of the song's first line: "When the rain comes, they run and hide their heads."
Yet while the Beatles may have popularized the practice, the satanic backmasking scare of the 1980s required more than just the willful misrepresentation of a decades-old musical trend. It also needed some good old fashioned pseudoscience.
A drive-in movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey just happened to provide a perfect junk science laboratory. Over the course of six weeks in 1957, unsuspecting filmgoers were the subjects of a grand marketing experiment. Using a special high-speed projector, researcher and social psychologist James Vicary inserted the words "drink Coke" and "eat popcorn" into movies that summer. Invisible to the human eye, each message lasted for 1/3,000th of a second and was repeated in five-second intervals during films on alternating nights.
By the end of the six weeks, Vicary claimed 45,699 people had been subjected to his subliminal inducements. He also claimed that popcorn and Coke sales went up 57.5 and 18.1 percent, respectively. At a press conference held later that same year, Vicary described the results of this now infamous study to help boost interest in his new "Subliminal Projection Company," an attempt to commercialize what he called a major breakthrough in subliminal advertising. The public and press went bonkers, and not in a good way.
The first sentence of an influential op-ed responding to the press conference by journalist Norman Cousins read: "Welcome to 1984." He, like many others, wondered what such a technology could mean not just for advertisers who wanted to sell us stuff, but also for governments seeking to steer public sentiment.
For its own part, the FCC almost immediately threatened to suspend the broadcast license of any company that dared use Vicary's machine. In the years following the experiment, the CIA started looking into the "operational potential of subliminal perception" (they found it "exceedingly limited"), and authors like Wilson Bryan Key began cranking out books such as Subliminal Seduction, which claimed that sexual images (and the actual word "sex") were being hidden in hundreds of ads.
But when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation tried to replicate Vicary's claims by subliminally flashing the message "Call now" during a popular Sunday night program, there was no increase in phone calls. The station later told viewers they had inserted a message and asked them to guess what it might have been. Almost half of the roughly 500 viewers claimed to have been made hungry or thirsty during the show, which aired during dinner time.
Vicary's study was clearly on the public's mind, which was problematic because it was completely made up. From the beginning, Vicary refused to release key details about his study. Not only was there never any independent evidence to support his claims about the effectiveness of subliminal advertising, years later, Vicary admitted he had done only enough research to file a patent for his machine, and actually had collected barely any data. Even worse, his machine didn't seem to work half the time once people did try to test it.
Of course, none of that mattered by the late '70s and early '80s. Subliminal messaging was being used in self-help tapes, in department store Muzak to ward off shoplifters, and, if you believed Key, to sell the American public lots and lots of booze and cigarettes.
Fast-forward 25 years, when two psychologists from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada decided to figure out why so many of their neighbors to the south were hearing devilish incantations in their rock music. After being contacted by a skeptical local radio DJ who had attended one of pastor Gary Greenwald's backmasking talks, John Vokey and his colleague Don Read agreed to come up with a series of experiments that would directly address the idea of subliminal satanic messages.
The psychologists decided to start their study by recording a few simple passages from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky and the 23rd Psalm. They wanted to find out whether the content of backward messages had any measureable influence on a listener, consciously or otherwise. They also wanted to see if the alleged backward messages people were hearing in rock music were perhaps more about active construction on the listener's part and less about a devious satanic plan to corrupt young people.
After each passage was recorded forward in a few languages, Vokey and Read re-recording them backward and played them for 65 test subjects. They found that the participants could discern things like the sex of the speaker with 98.9 percent accuracy when the passages were played backwards. Subjects also displayed a better-than-chance ability to detect the language of the backwards messages.
But when it came to deriving any kind of meaning from the passages, things didn't go as well. Another series of tests asked subjects to categorize the content of the backwards messages as a nursery rhyme, Christian, satanic, or pornographic. The results were no greater than chance, and the meaning of the backwards messages didn’t appear to have been understood at any level, says Vokey.
In a final experiment, the two psychologists listened to the backwards passages themselves and came up with some real sounding phrases hidden within them. They found the following: "Saw a girl with a weasel in her mouth," "snatched her nips," and, to their delight, "I saw Satan." Listen below:
"It wasn't as easy as it sounds," says Vokey. "We had to drink a lot of beer to create those messages." The two psychologists also invented control messages that didn’t fit the phonological patterns of the samples. Just as Vokey predicted, when subjects were instructed to listen for the phrases, they were unable to hear the control messages but were successful in detecting the phonologically plausible ones at a rate of 84.6 percent. Mind you, this was only after the phrases had been provided to them.
As Vokey and Read noted in their now famous article about the study, "Subliminal Messages: Between the Devil and the Media," this suggested you really could induce people to hear messages that weren't there so long as they were plausible-sounding interpretations.
How was this relevant to the satanic backmasking scare? Well, for one critical reason: Believers were almost always providing the alleged backward masked phrases before having others listen to them. It's what happened at the 1982 California Assembly hearing, and it was the MO for religious leaders like Greenwald.
In what has become a staple of modern Intro to Psych perception lectures, professors will often play these backmasked songs or similar garbled and distorted messages. When students aren't given any guidance, almost all of them struggle to make sense of the gibberish. Once supplied with a phonetically plausible phrase, however, suddenly they can't hear anything but that phrase.
This is what psychologists call pareidolia. For the same reason some of us see faces on Mars and Jesus in toast, we also can be led to hear things that aren't there. Our brains are exceptional pattern recognition machines, particularly when comes to sound and vision. Often, all it takes is a little priming to get things rolling.
As many have noted, one of the many delicious ironies of the '80s backmasking panic is that it actually helped rekindle the practice in popular music. As rock bands began to regularly get accused of hiding secret satanic messages in their records, they figured: why not start putting real messages in them? Many of these were sarcastic rebuttals to the backmasking controversy itself.
On ELO's fifth studio album, Face the Music, you can find this tongue-in-cheek message at the start of the song "Fire on High": "The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back, turn back, turn back."
Pink Floyd had some fun on The Wall's "Empty Spaces," as well. When played backwards, you can hear Roger Waters say: "Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to old pink, care of the funny farm."
Although the moral panic started to subside by the end of the '80s (less because of the scientific discrediting of subliminal messages and more because records and cassettes gave way to CDs), musicians continued to play around with backward masking throughout the ‘90s and early aughts. Today, perhaps because most of us stream the music we listen to, hiding backwards messages in songs seems both quaint and pointless.
Yet while Satan abandoned his plans to corrupt America's youth through rock and roll, a devil-may-care attitude towards science is keeping the belief in subliminal messages alive and well. Earlier this fall, author and journalist Ahmet Altan and his brother were arrested in Turkey. The charge? Sending out "subliminal messages suggestive of a coup attempt" during a TV appearance. Both men will stand trial "for trying to overthrow the government or prevent it from carrying out its duties."
Backwards music may have fallen out of fashion, but backwards thinking is alive and well.
Two Welsh villages, two miles apart, claim to be the spot where Amelia Earhart touched down to become the first woman to complete a transatlantic flight. Both villages have monuments to the historic day in June of 1928. But can they both be right?
Of the two, Pwll (yes, the spelling is correct) has the official blue plaque used in Britain to mark important places, people, and events. The counter claimant, Burry Port, has gone a different route—erect more plaques, and make them bigger.
The controversy seems to stem from the fact that the aircraft, called "Friendship," was a sea plane. Taking off from Newfoundland on June 17th, 1928 and headed for Southampton, England, Earhart and the two pilots who shared flying duties touched down in the Loughor Estuary, an inlet in south Wales off the Bristol Channel. Locals claim that Earhart opened the window and shouted to shore to ask where they were. The answer came back “Pwll inlet!”
Burry Port, the larger of the two villages, makes a different claim. Since the plane was towed into Burry Port Harbour with Earhart and the pilots still on board, when they stepped out and touched the ground, this is the place, so say the Burry Portians, where the famous aviator actually “landed.”
Both places are keen to hold onto the legitimate claim to Earhart, hoping to attract tourist pounds and dollars. Since she landed in the water, there should be plenty of glory to sprinkle around.
Dive into the underwater paradise of Raja Ampat in Indonesia with this visually captivating video. Shot by underwater photographer and videographer, Nu Parnupong, Squadron of Hope showcases breathtaking scenes of migration in some of Indonesia’s most beautiful islands.
Raja Ampat is an archipelago that constitutes more than 100 islands and is part of the Coral Triangle—the world’s most biodiverse marine habitat. The triangle boasts three-fourths of the world’s coral species and marine animals like long-horned pygmy devil rays, which appear in the video attacking a group of silverside fish.
The archipelago was once a hub for shark poachers and, as such, was under constant threat. Thankfully, it is now a Marine Protected Area, which means that its wonderful biodiversity, and scenes like the ones captured in the video will stick around for a while longer.
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.
A group of fifteen such explorers ventured to the storied island a few weeks ago. The excursion, sponsored by CLIF BAR, required both physical and psychological stamina.
Upon arrival, guests clambered over the guano-slick rocks, careful to step over piles of sun-bleached bones. (The lighthouse’s custodians swore these remains had been discarded by scavenging seagulls.) The island itself smelled damp and sour, even with the healthy salt winds coming off the Sound. The explorers were invited to enter the keeper’s quarters, which were built in 1867 but have been unoccupied since the 1970’s when the light became automated. Ghost sightings have long been rumored in the house. Looking at the mouldering structure, it’s easy to understand why.
After passing through a series of darkened corridors and up a spiraling staircase, guests stepped out onto the tower’s deck to take in the lonely island’s surroundings. From this point, you could just make out Hart Island, New York’s potter’s field, where almost a million bodies, many still unidentified, have been buried since the end of the 19th century.
Following their descent, the guests launched kayaks off the island and were able to experience the sensation of the pulling tides for themselves. Strong currents tilted the boats towards the dark rocks and waves broke over prows, soaking paddlers as they navigated around the craggy shore.
The wet and weather-beaten guests disembarked their kayaks and boarded a larger chartered boat where they dried off and reenergized with Spiced Pumpkin Pie CLIF BARs, a fitting seasonal complement to their eerie trip.
As the boat left the island, a few guests stood shivering on the deck, watching the lighthouse fade back into the fog. Though hardly as harrowing, a few lines from "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" seemed like a fitting close to the ghostly adventure:
I closed my lids, and kept them close, And the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky Lay dead like a load on my weary eye, And the dead were at my feet
In 1975, artist Joseph Young was commissioned to build a sculpture near Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. Once commissioned, Young decided to turn what would’ve been an ordinary sculpture into something much more otherworldly.
At the height of six stories and the weight of 60 tons, the Triforium sculpture in Los Angeles was Young’s big opportunity to create, in his own words, “the world’s first polyphonoptic tower.”
Young devised a radical, groundbreaking plan to make the Triforium track the footsteps and conversations of everyone around it. The sculpture would then convert these motions into patterns of light, which were to be displayed on the Triforium's 1,494 multicolored glass prisms. These movements would also activate the sculpture's 79-pitch carillon bell towers, which would play "everything from Beethoven to the Bee Gees."
Young also envisioned the Triforium to be an international epicenter of astronomy. Young’s visionary plan involved making the sculpture the “world’s first ever astronomical beacon,” with giant, powerful laser beams pointed towards the sky. According to his plan, the beams would spell out "Los Angeles" in Morse Code.
Unfortunately for Young, he couldn’t fit these ideas into a $925,000 budget. The laser beam proposal had to be completely abandoned, and although the Triforium’s prisms and bells were installed, they were never given the capacity to track motion as Young intended. To make matters worse, the reflecting pond beneath the Trifolium began to drain, requiring $18,000 in reparations. Pigeons began to cover the Triforium, and it became subject to ridicule throughout LA. Art critics repeatedly called the Triforium "three wishbones in search of a turkey."
The sound system was problematic from the get-go, with computer malfunctions causing the bell tower's audio to sound unpleasantly fuzzy. When Young finally got the bell tower to work, a judge from the courthouse across the street complained that the sound interfered with his trials and asked the city to take it down.
As of today, the Triforium still stands, but not as Young imagined in the slightest. Although he originally intended for his sculpture to be the “Rosetta Stone of art and technology,” today it is better known by a different name: Los Angeles’ most controversial public artwork.
Consider the difficulty of rendering Jesus' visage as an artist. You've gotta be able to sculpt or draw a head, for one thing, and then get the details of the face right. Also it's Jesus, allegedly the son of God, so the stakes are higher than usual.
Which maybe explains why, four years ago, when an elderly Spanish woman failed to restore a Jesus fresco to its former glory it set the world on fire.
Now, in Canada, something similar has gone down at a Catholic church about 250 miles northwest of Toronto, in the city of Sudbury.
There, according to the CBC, church officials had a problem. A statue depicting Jesus and Mary kept getting vandalized, specifically the head of Jesus, which was repeatedly ripped off and deposited nearby.
Parishioners often found the head and reattached it, but in a decapitation last October, the head wasn't found, leaving Jesus headless for months as church officials searched for solutions. (The church could not afford to rebuild the statue whole, which would have cost up to $10,000.)
Finally, a local artist volunteered to craft a new head, which she then spent hours sculpting out of clay before affixing it to the terracotta sculpture.
The results, as you can see, are ... interesting.
Parishioners, for their part, have responded with "hurt, surprise, and disappointment," according to the CBC, while the church's priest told the network he was "shocked" by the head—but not because of the its form, but rather its color.
Still, the priest said, it's just a start. The same artist will take another crack at it in the coming months, this time in stone. After all, in Spain, local outrage then eventually gave way to a loving embrace: that painting is, today, a major tourist attraction, and the center of its very own museum.
"It's a first try," the priest told the CBC. "It's a first go. And hopefully what is done at the end will please everyone."
The cemetery climbs ten stories up the valley wall, moss-covered gravestones lining each stair-like terrace. Plants press in, shading tombs with wide palm leaves as roots burst up through sarcophagi. Mosquitos drone. Cobras flee approaching footsteps. These are the cemeteries of Hong Kong’s Happy Valley, a historic burial district shaped by terrain, disease, history and culture. These colonial cemeteries offer a window into the city’s past and a reminder that—in the densest city on earth—even death isn’t an escape from living small.
When British forces landed at Hong Kong in 1841, Happy Valley gained a reputation as a fever swamp. The rice paddies and poor drainage proved an ideal breeding ground for mosquitos, and any force posted there quickly succumbed to malaria, cholera, and typhoid. Eventually the British developed a novel solution—they would headquarter elsewhere, but bury their dead in the poisoned atmosphere of Happy Valley.
And there was no shortage of dead in those days. Between disease, pirates, maritime accidents, and casualties from Britain’s Asian wars, 19th century Hong Kong churned through westerners. Most colonial policemen didn’t live past 31, and it wasn’t unusual for missionaries to go through three wives.
The high mortality rate and international nature of the Empire created a quilt of imperial dead—the Protestant Hong Kong Cemetery lies directly alongside Catholic St. Michael’s, and the Empire’s Indian troops had their own Hindu, Muslim, and Parsee burial grounds. Meanwhile the local Chinese, who considered graveyards spiritually polluting and inauspicious, moved out of the area. It remains an expat enclave to this day.
In 1844, the British solved the malaria problem in the most English manner possible: they drained Happy Valley to build a horseracing track. The racecourse united foreign colonials and oppressed locals in their shared love of wagering, but also placed the city’s primary gambling venue amid the unluckiest feng shui on the island. The superstitious might claim this bad omen finally caught up with the city in 1918, when a bamboo grandstand collapsed and caught fire, killing 590 people.
By World War I, the lower slopes of Happy Valley were full, and the cemeteries had nowhere to go but up. Hong Kong authorities built new terraces into the mountainside, seeding them with bodies as the decades and conflicts rolled by.
As a result, the funeral monuments reflect a cross-section of those who shaped Hong Kong. In the low-lying areas of the Protestant section, where the graves are older, you’ll find ship captains buried under anchors and obelisks dedicated to the crews of navy vessels or opium clippers. Several notable figures reside here, like Henrietta Hall Shuck, the first female American missionary in China, and Sir Kai Ho Kai, the first Chinese Hongkonger to gain a knighthood.
Perhaps the most tragic monument is a blank pillar marking the grave of revolutionary martyr Yeung Ku-wan. Yeung used Hong Kong as a safe haven to organize pro-democracy revolts against the Qing dynasty in 1895 and 1900, but that protection proved illusory. In 1901, Yeung was teaching an English class on the second floor of his home when a Qing assassin put a bullet through his head. Yeung’s monument was left blank so imperial agents wouldn’t desecrate his grave.
Move up the terraces and the Victorian urns give way to the uniform white graves of World War I soldiers killed in the siege of German Qingdao, and those who fell during the 1941 Japanese invasion. This sparse military style contrasts with the intricate statuary of the Catholic cemetery next door, where monuments include heroic busts, angels and figures kneeling in prayer.
But the most stylistically interesting graves are those that blend western and Chinese imagery. More than a few local tombstones have incense burners, so Chinese Christians can make offerings to their departed family members. One striking monument includes a traditional Chinese name tablet—believed to house part of the soul after death—set into the upright axis of a cross. This melding of Christian iconography and Chinese folk religion is quintessentially Hong Kong, a city where even death is a cross-cultural experience.
But population density is increasingly rendering these luxurious graves impractical. Put simply, the city’s running out of burial space. As far back as the 1960s, the squeeze prompted the government to champion cremation over traditional earth burials, leading to a boom in P.O. box-like mausoleums where ash jars sit in covered niches. But those too are full.
In a mirror of the housing market, private niches now go for as much as $100,000, while the wait time for a public spot exceeds four years. The government has started promoting ash scattering, but it’s not going well. Hongkongers recoil at the thought of dumping relatives off a ship or throwing them in the dirt. So as gravestones themselves increasingly recede into history, the tiered Victorian burials of Happy Valley become an even more striking, and unusual, relic of the city’s past.
Can you speak to the dead? Can they speak to you? After attending an official modern day seance, I have no idea, but that doesn’t mean it was totally bogus. In fact, it was pretty relaxing.
In the City of New York, there are a handful of seance ceremonies available to anyone looking to commune with the dead, but only one of them is held in a church. The Spiritualist Church of New York City (SCNYC), the only Spiritualist church in the city, is a modern evolution of the Spiritualist beliefs popular during the Victorian era. At its core, Spiritualism espouses the belief that death is not the end, and that communication with the spirits of the deceased is not only possible, but a vital and beneficial way of learning about this life and the next. And this communication is made possible via the good old-fashioned seance.
In their heyday, around the turn of the 19th century, Spiritualist seances looked much more like the traditional spirit-talking ceremonies you might see in the movies, with a small group of people holding hands around a table while a medium conjures up ghosts. Today, many of the classical trappings are still a part of the church’s ceremonies, but Spiritualism as a whole has moved towards the New Age world of healing energies and guided meditations.
The Spiritualist Church of New York City was founded in 2007, establishing itself as a separate entity from the larger National Spiritualist Association of Churches, creating an independent congregation based on a belief in reincarnation.
In a phone call, Reverend Seiko L. Obayashi, one of the founders of the church, describes the rebirth cycle to me. “As we spend some earthly time here as a human, we learn, we make mistakes in this physical reality, and we go back home. To God or whatever you call it,” she says. “And we go back and forth between physical life and non-physical life.” Her church also places a strong emphasis on bringing other faiths to the Spiritualist fold. “We are very progressive in terms of an interfaith approach. We eventually want to invite rabbis and priests to our church.”
And every Sunday, after their service, they hold a seance.
The services are held on 35th Street in Manhattan, in a Swedenborgian church (a Christian sect that follows the teachings and visions of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg) building from the mid-1800s. The SCNYC rents out the space on Sunday nights. On the night I attended the church to try to take part in the seance, a healing service was taking place.
Handed a Spiritualist hymnal on entering, I joined the 20-some other people in attendance, sparsely littering the pews. The hymnal was filled with songs about light and forgiveness, and included the nine declarations—think, commandments—that have been adapted and adopted by the church. Among them are “We believe the existence and identity of the individual continue after death,” and “We affirm that the precepts of Prophecy and Healing are Divine attributes proven through Mediumship.” Calm New Age tunes were in the air.
Rev. Susan West gave a sermon on the importance of unconditional love, and there was a short break during which everyone was encouraged to get up and introduce themselves to each other. Pretty standard church stuff. Then there was a chair healing. The lights were dimmed and Rev. Nilsa Ocasio walked everyone through a guided meditation. We were invited up to one of a series of chairs near the front, behind which stood a spiritual healer. I sat down in one of the chairs and the healer asked me if she could touch me. I said sure and she proceeded to lightly lay her hands on various parts of my body, channeling healing energy to and around me. It was somewhat uncomfortably intimate.
After the service, about 10 people stuck around for the seance (which runs $20 a session), which took place in an upper room of the church. The smaller room had shelves of old books lining the walls. A ring of stackable rental chairs was set up around a small table where an electronic tea light flickered. Most of the people seemed to have been to similar seances, and casually chatted as though we weren’t about to attempt to breach the barrier between the living and the dead. One of the mediums that would be communicating with the dead that night joked that she didn’t mind seeing spirits, but didn’t like seeing “orbs” (manifestations of spirits as floating balls of light) on her personal time.
When the seance began, all of the lights were turned out save for the central tea light, and the small crowd was told to sit with our palms up in our laps to show the spirits that we were ready to receive their calls. The session was led by Rev. Ocasio and another medium, both of whom were certified seance leaders through the church’s sister organization, the Holistic Studies Institute. The mediums would be receiving and interpreting the spirits’ messages, but assured us that they would not convey messages of “doom and gloom.”
Once again Rev. Ocasio led us through a guided meditation, asking us to envision negativity leaving our body, and light replacing it. It was pretty relaxing.
We were asked to think of deceased people we would like to hear from, with the idea being that this would induce their voices to come forward among all of the talkative dead in the air. The way the mediums talked about hearing the dead was almost like they were experiencing a busy, ghostly party line, where they had to focus to locate souls with messages for people in the room. I found it very quiet.
When the mediums received messages from the dead, they would take turns addressing someone in the circle, giving them a dispatch from beyond. Each time they would start by saying, “May I give you a message?” Then would come lengthy, seemingly stream-of-thought readings. At one point during the first reading, something at the back of the room fell to the floor, marking the last sign I saw of possible supernatural activity.
Like many psychics, the mediums would circle certain topics, moving from vague generalities to more specific details. For example, one woman was given a message from a deceased loved one about focusing on her joy, which was eventually narrowed down to baking. The message made her weep. Sometimes the mediums would describe seeing figures standing over someone’s shoulder, or lights swirling around them.
When it came time for my message, Rev. Ocasio said that someone in the spirit world was encouraging me to overcome an obstacle. The message revolved around wanting to let me know that I had the skills to do something I’ve been thinking of doing, but have been avoiding because I thought it was too hard, or was afraid of failing. Try as I might I had trouble relating the message to anything that had been pressing on my conscious, but I nodded in understanding all the same. When my message was over, Rev. Ocasio asked, as the mediums asked everyone at the end of their message, “Can I leave you with that?”
At the end, a few of the assembled who felt that they too had burgeoning psychic abilities communicated a couple of messages to people in the circle. Unfortunately none of the spirits had anything else to say to me. It took almost two hours for everyone to receive their messages from beyond, and, unfortunately, by the end I was more acutely aware of how uncomfortable the chair was than of any spirit presence.
Then the lights came up and everyone shuffled out into the night. While I can’t say that I found any great spiritual connection to the events of the seance, many of the people seemed to connect with the spirit messages they’d received, likely able to map some of their very real concerns to the messages coming from the mediums. Maybe it makes their problems easier to organize or deal with. Or maybe it was dead people. You’d have to try it, and decide for yourself.
A stark, white-tiled pyramid stands out against the red desert of Papago Park. It's not an Egyptian homage, but rather the grave of Arizona's first governor, George W. P. Hunt, who served between 1912 and 1933.
Known for his mustache, bald head, and impressive girth (he weighed nearly 300 pounds at the height of 5'9"), he was referred to as "Old Walrus." He's almost ubiquitously seen as a good man, even by modern standards. He was a proponent of women's suffrage, as well as the abolition of child labor. He did all the grocery shopping for his household in an era when this was an uncommon chore for men, and knitted scarves for soldiers abroad during World War I.
Like most powerful men of the period, Hunt was a freemason. So it follows that he designed his own burial marker after the masons' favorite symbol, the pyramid. Hunt was interred in it in 1934, one year after he left office. His wife's remains, as well as her parents' and her sister's, are buried here too.
The pyramid sits atop a steep hill overlooking Papago Park. The hill provides a scenic view of the desert and the Phoenix Zoo, as well as a couple benches upon which visitors can sit and provide their respects to one of Arizona's founding fathers.
The Solovetsky Islands on Russia's White Sea are isolated and fantastical, with beautifully sparse landscapes and a population of only a couple hundred. Bolshoi Zayatsky Island, in particular, looks straight out of a fantasy novel, due to the mysterious labyrinths of ancient origin dotted across its grounds.
The island is less than one square mile in total, but is covered in dozens of labyrinths. They have been dated as far back as 30,000 B.C. but have remained surprisingly intact. Some are made of stone heaps, while others have been built into the landscape in the form of earthen mounds.
Archaeologists have been unable to pin down the exact purpose of the labyrinths, but the consensus appears to be that they were for mystical use. Suggestions for their purpose include a portal to the underworld, a trap for evil spirits, or the altar of a ritual ceremonies. It's clear that Bolshoi Zayatsky Island was once a place for magic, though we may never know exactly what kind.
You probably know of voodoo dolls, the witch doctor Facilier in Disney's The Princess and the Frog, perhaps the controversially named Voodoo Donuts. But beneath this cultural runoff, Voodoo is a complex, albeit dark... religion? Culture? Maybe both.
Voodoo combined pieces of Roman Catholicism (the religion foisted upon colonized nations by Italy, Spain, and Portugal) with traditional local belief systems, including, in some cases, witchcraft. Traits of Catholic saints and ideas from syncretic religions are mixed together in the form of loas, who act as intermediaries between the human world and the Supreme Creator.
Physical charms, herbs, amulets or "gris-gris" in American Voodoo, could be imbued with spiritual power to protect oneself or harm one's enemies. It focuses heavily on death because that's what it was born out of—the brutality of colonialism and the slave trade. Much academic discussion has drawn parallels, in particular, between stories of zombies and people cursed to toil mindlessly under a master for all eternity.
Though Americans might be most familiar with Louisiana Voodoo, other variations of the religion include West African Voudon, Dominican or Cuban Vodú, Haitian Voudou, or any other local denomination depending on what part of the African Diaspora it originated from. These all traveled with slaves taken from West Africa to the Caribbean, South America, and the southern United States, branching into their distinct sects.
Louisiana Voodoo, in particular, became an business of superstitious sideshow performances, exploiting the tourist industry that came to gawk at exotic rituals. But some of it is real—that is, some of it is a treasured cultural tradition of great import to its practitioners. These places are no exception. Some of them are essentially mall kiosks with plastic skulls and beads, there for the entertainment of tourists, while others are seriously sacred sites. Others are both.
You can see Voodoo's intersection of Catholicism and local beliefs quite literally at this mysterious monument in Haiti, where Voodoo originated. There is little consensus on the monument's origin story, but most people believe this Catholic cross was erected by missionaries sometime around the early 19th century to claim the hill for God. And anywhere between a week and a century later the cross was struck by lightning and locals came to believe this to the gods reclaiming the hill for themselves and their people. It's been a Voodoo pilgrimage site for prayer and sacrifice ever since.
The Akodessewa Fetish Market, or "Marche des Feticheurs," is a kind of super supply where you can find anything from leopard heads and human skulls to Voudon priests who bless fetishes, predict the future, and make medicines to heal whatever ails you. Voudon, which begat Voodoo, is one of the most popular religions in the area, which is obvious given the outdoor market's location is right in the heart of the capital. Here you can find talismans and charms good for treating everything from the flu or infertility to removing the blackest of curses.
These waterfalls became a holy place after it was widely believed that the Virgin Mary had appeared nearby on a palm tree. For over a century, Haitians have trekked from miles around on the feast day of Our Lady of Carmel to ask the Virgin Mary (or the closely associated Vodou loa, Erzulie Dantor) for her blessings.
The palm tree was chopped down by a French priest who was rightly concerned that the cultural significance of the tree would foster superstition, but the action was futile, and the area itself became sacred despite his efforts. The sick and the needy let the water of the falls wash over them as they perform various rituals of both Voodoo and Catholicism in a three-day-long religious festival.
Marie Laveau was born in the French Quarter of New Orleans around 1801, the illegitimate daughter of a Creole mother and a white father. She was a hairdresser by trade but was better known as the most powerful of the city's Voodoo practitioners. She sold charms and pouches of gris gris, told fortunes and gave advice to New Orleans residents of every social strata. Some said Laveau even had the power to save condemned prisoners from execution. An 1874 ritual Laveau performed on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain drew a crowd of over 12,000 people.
Laveau died in 1881, and is said to be buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, in the tomb of her husband's family, the Glapions. Amateur occultists, Voodoo practitioners, French Quarter tourists flock here in equal measure. They scribble Xs on the whitewashed mausoleum in hopes Laveau will grant their wishes.
Marie Laveau's daughter (confusingly also named Marie Laveau) learned Voodoo and Voudon from her mother, and their stories are often conflated together. History is unclear on who exactly did what, but it is known that both of the powerful women gained quite a following among 19th century New Orleans' uniquely multi-racial, multi-religious community.
It was in this house that Marie Laveau II lived out the last of her days with her family. Now it is a museum and tourist attraction. Visitors can leave offerings at an altar, and spiritual items and books from around the world for sale. In a back room spiritual readings, spells and Tarot card readings are held. The Voodoo Queen's ghost is said to appear back there from time to time.
The Soul of Africa Museum is not, in fact, in Africa. It's in a small apartment in Essen, Germany, belonging to one Henning Christoph, a photographer, ethnographer, and collector. He has worked with and studied voodoo among different tribes for a long time and has documented these practices extensively. The rooms are packed with figurines from different groups. There include an altar to Mami Whata, a water spirit, where you can bring sacrifices for the goddess, as well as elaborate costumes used in ancestral worship rites. In addition to the extensive collection of religious artifacts, there is a good portion of the site that is devoted to the Atlantic slave trade, displaying rare historical artifacts including a brutal pair of iron shackles.
For just about anything that ails you, there's a solution in the Sonora Market, the largest esoteric market in Mexico and a must-see for those interested in mysticism. Local vendors have an answer to any of life's daily troubles in the form of a magic soap, holywater spray, or a ritual pamphlets.
It's not just Voodoo sold at Mercado de Sonora; there are a number of other vernacular religions represented there, such as the cult of la Santa Muerte and Brujeria. A number of these beliefs are practiced by people alongside their Catholic faith, or even mixed into it.
Claiming to be the "largest Occult, Spiritual, New Age and Religious supplier worldwide," Saydel wears its unique interests on its sleeve. Immediately upon entering the surprisingly utilitarian store, customers are greeted by a life-size statue of Papa Legba, the Orisha deity recognized by both Voodoo and Santeria as the go-between twixt gods and humans. Reflecting the diverse backgrounds of their customer base from the Caribbean, Mexico, and further afield, the shop carries a blend of African, Meso-American, and Roman Catholic items such as candles, oils, and effigies. However, despite the rare and esoteric beliefs represented in the shop, the shelves have the look of a tidy suburban pharmacy with rows of identical loa statues lined up next to tight formations of pre-fab prayer candles.
If Voodoo can be tied to the history of any one city, it's New Orleans. Founded in 1972 by Charles Massicot Gandolfo, a local artist with a passion for all things Voodoo, the small museum has been inducting its visitors into the mystical melting pot of African, Creole, and American Southern culture that created New Orleans Voodoo since it opened in the 1970s. Among the more unusual services that the Historic Voodoo Museum offers are psychic readings. Prognosticating, or fortune telling, is an art that is deeply ingrained within the fabric of Voodoo culture.
Just steps away from the Vietnam Memorial, Federal Reserve and State Department, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has some of the most respectable real estate in Washington, D.C. It also has one of the District's most beloved statues, unveiled in 1979 to celebrate the 100th birthday of Albert Einstein.
The statue is triple-sized, cast in bronze, and oh so inviting to sit on. Created by sculptor Robert Berks, the head is modeled on a bust that the artist sculpted at the scientist’s home in Princeton in the 1950s. The giant bronze genius is relaxed, holding a tablet that sketches out three of his most important scientific contributions: the photoelectric effect, the theory of general relativity, and the equivalence of energy and matter.
Einstein was elected to the NAS in 1922, a year after he won the Nobel Prize in physics. His citizenship at the time is a little complicated (he was naturalized Swiss but German-born, and also claimed by the Weimar Republic), and since only U.S. citizens can be elected as full members, he entered as a “Foreign Associate.” In 1940 he became a citizen of the United States, and two years later was elected as a full member, serving the NAS mission until his death in 1955.
The NAS is a private, nonprofit organization of scientists, engineers and doctors, created to provide “independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology.” It’s fitting that it is also within sight of the Lincoln Memorial—the agency was created by congress in the middle of the Civil War, in an act signed by President Lincoln himself.
Union Terminal in Cincinnati is one of those happy examples of a defunct historic building finding a new life. Rather than meeting with a wrecking ball, the art deco building now houses multiple museums and features a priceless Rookwood tiled ice cream parlor.
When Union Terminal first opened in 1933, it wasn't so different from modern-day airports. The rail hub offered shopping, eateries, and even a barber shop. The beautiful cafe originally was a tea room, though it soon served as USO headquarters during WWII. It was covered in pastel tiles from the historic Cincinnati ceramic company, Rookwood, which also tiled New York's subway stations. Rookwood's founder, Maria Longworth Nichols Storer, modeled her first designs on Japanese pottery.
At first Union Terminal was a hub of activity, but when railroad travel waned in popularity in favor of air travel, Union Terminal was abandoned. In 1972, the terminal was shuttered. Today, it has been successfully operating as Cincinnati Museum Center for almost 25 years, and the Rookwood Ice Cream Parlor serves local favorite Graeter's Ice Cream. Much of the shop has been modeled after the original cafe's art deco style, with a retro illuminated clock and formica top tables. From the tiles to the ice cream to the building itself, it's all an immersive celebration of Cincinnati history.
