Twenty-three years ago, in 1993, Gregoire Alessandrini was a student living in New York City. As a new arrival from France, he found the city to be an intoxicating mix of constant surprises—ones that he photographed whenever possible. Halloween in particular was an event that caught his attention: "Halloween in New York is such a treat. It feels like everything is permitted and that everyone has the right to be who they want to be…whatever it is!"

But on Halloween in 1993, Alessandrini, rather than film the parade, decided to walk around the West Village.  It was "where the real show was!” Shooting with an old Contax camera and flash, Alessandrini captured an atmosphere he recalls as one of “happiness, tolerance and eccentricity.” 

Some of the photos also hold clues to the time period: in one image, a reveler wears a Ross Perot costume. What’s also striking about the photographs is what we don’t see: no-one is checking their smartphones or posing for selfies.

From 1991 to 1998, Alessandrini captured New York scenes across different seasons and different neighborhoods, some of which have now changed almost beyond recognition. His online archive, New York City in the 1990s, currently has around 1,500 images of New York, all scanned from negatives and slides that he had stored for years in an old suitcase.

Ahead of Halloween weekend, Atlas Obscura takes a look back at how New York celebrated in 1993.   

To enter Russian territory, travelers typically need to show a valid passport, fill out various forms, and carry a Russian migration card from place to place. But there is just one piece of Russian territory where this rule is violated and it is technically possible enter the country without completing a single piece of paperwork. Welcome to the Saatse Boot.

In 1944 in the former Soviet Union, a new border line was drawn between Estonia and Russia. In this new border, a half mile wide Russian peninsula jutted into Estonian land, lying directly in between the Estonian towns of Lutepää and Sesniki. Since both Estonia and Russia were united under the Soviet Union at the time, there was no issue with building a road directly through Russian territory to link the towns together. 

But, when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and its lax interregional borders were made strict, this 900-meter stretch of road suddenly became a geopolitical anomaly known as the Saatse Boot.

Thinking on its feet, Russia decided to allow passersby to cross through the Saatse Boot into Russian land without showing any form of documentation on the three conditions that they don’t walk, don’t pick wild mushrooms, and that their car never stops moving. If your car breaks down or runs out of gas while passing through the boot, you have violated these laws, and if caught by one of the Russian spy towers installed at the border, you could be subject to arrest.

Although an alternative route was recently constructed between Lutepää and Sesniki without traveling through Russia, it’s a 25-minute detour compared to the two-minute direct route through the Saatse Boot. Although a plan was laid out in 2005 and again in 2014 to return the Saatse Boot to Estonia, it is yet to see fruition in the real world, and the “No Pedestrians” and “No Stopping For One Kilometer” roadside signs are still in place.

There is a small museum in Prague, not far from the Vltava River, that is truly a celebration of “form follows function.” In its collection of historical chamber pots and toilets there is a wide array of forms, all for one bodily function (or maybe two).

The unusual collection features more than 2,000 pots, seats, thrones, loos, lavs—and just about anything else you can think of out of the water closet. That includes artifacts of some pretty famous people, which might not otherwise have such a scholarly place of exhibit.

There is an Abe Lincoln (traced back to his actual White House bedroom), a Napoleon (made for the Emperor when he was in exile, although it got rejected at the last minute), and one belonging to a Chinese emperor from the Qing dynasty. There’s even one from the Titanic.

It started in 2003 with a collection that, at the time, consisted of only two things: one stone privet and one dry toilet, both with some impressive provenance. They were saved from a trip to the scrap heap by the team that now runs the museum, when they were working to renovate the historic Třebotov fortress outside of Prague. The two pieces so interested them, they started hunting for more in antique shops, thrift stores, auctions and flea markets.

Now you'll find mini chamber pots for dolls, unusual urinals and bedpans, and other toilettes and pots de chambre traceable to important or historic events among the collection. Other pieces are simply average, everyday examples of how we’ve managed to get rid of our waste over the course of history. Many are beautiful and elegant in their simplicity, and others are ornate and flashy in design and materials. But they all share one thing: They carry with them a shitload of our most human past. 

Driving along the highways of the southeast, all the souvenir shops, truck stops, and fireworks stands you see will start to blend together. Outside Hardeeville, South Carolina though, you might do a double take for two life-sized elephants outside Papa Joe's Fireworks.

They are nicknamed Thelma and Louise and they're a well known landmark on US 17. Papa Joe himself purchased the pair in Alabama and had them shipped all the way to South Carolina. The two matching elephants, one pink, the other gray, regularly receive new coats of paint so they can beckon road trippers to Papa Joe's wares. 

Like a big pat on the back, the Victorious Fatherland War Museum is devoted to remembering all the victories in North Korea's struggles against its imperialist enemies, the Japanese and the Americans. 

There are exhibits devoted to conquests such as the USS Pueblo captured in 1968—its shattered glass and large bullet holes are on display, and visitors can board the ship and listen to dramatic accounts of how it was taken (omitting accounts about the torture the crew endured for months d). Within the building there is a 360-degree diorama of the Battle of Daejon, and you can find accounts of how America caused the two halves of Korea to become parted, and hopes for a successful reunion.

The building and outdoor complex are on the vast, grand scale that one expects of North Korea. Visitors are guided through the museum by the military as well as their own guards.

It’s raining geese on Canada’s Sunshine Coast. According to the Coast Reporter, tired geese have been dropping out of the sky, and landing in people’s yards, simply too tired to continue flying.

Over the past week, at least three snow geese have been brought into the Gibsons Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre, having been found mysteriously grounded. While tests have not yet been conducted to see whether there is some internal reason for their unexpected landings, representatives of the rescue center speculate that the birds were simply too tired to keep going.

The Sunshine Coast, in British Columbia, lies along the 3,000 mile migratory path of the snow geese as they travel from Russia to the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary where they will spend the winter months in the company of friends and relatives.

No reason was given as to why these birds might have become too tired to fly, although it could have to do with a lack of food along some leg of the journey, forcing them to land at random intervals to search for sustenance anywhere they can.  With luck this small epidemic of falling fowl is just an anomaly, but hey, it’s been a long week. We’re all tired.

In 1991, entrepreneur and art collector Alan Gibbs purchased a piece of property on New Zealand’s North Island that has now come to be known as Gibbs Farm. Immediately following his purchase, Gibbs knew that the property would eventually grow to become the world’s ultimate meeting place of giant sculptures and rolling farmland.

Over the past 25 years, Gibbs has hired 22 renowned sculptors from around the world to construct towering abstract sculptures atop the rolling hills of the 1,000 acre plot. Every month, the farm is open to the public for one day, in which visitors will have the ultimate chance to witness the unique adaptation of innovative sculptures to an outdoor environment.

Perhaps one of the most famous sculptures on Gibbs Farm is Neil Dawson’s “Horizons,” which resembles a giant piece of corrugated iron atop a hill. While it may appear to be a computer-generated cartoon, astoundingly, Horizons is a real sculpture made of welded and painted steel, and it fits in perfectly with the cow-filled agricultural landscape of the farm.

Also found on Gibbs Farm is Sol LeWitt’s “Pyramid,” a cluster of concrete blocks that form a perfect staircase for the sheep of the property. Anish Kapoor’s “Dismemberment” sculpture is a humungous tube with open ends on both sides, nestled in a slight dip in the farm’s rolling hills. Perhaps one of the most ingenious creations found at Gibbs Farm is the Electrum, the world’s largest Tesla coil, standing at four stories tall.

On a leisurely walk through Gibbs Farm, visitors will be treated to an array of multi-story paper clips, a forest of 100 giant vertical lights, a bridge made out of cubes, a field of multi-colored squares, and even a life-sized, incredibly-realistic giraffe. Although Gibbs Farm is rarely open to the public and is little-known worldwide, it is truly one of New Zealand's best-kept secret gems.

On the 30^th of October, every clock in the United Kingdom will be celebrating a centennial milestone. In the midst of the First World War, Parliament passed the Summertime Act of 1916, creating what’s come to be known as British Summer Time. So when the timepieces of the nation “fall back” one hour, Roman and Maz Piekarski will be very busy brothers.

The Piekarskis are the owners, proprietors, and restorers-in-residence of Cuckooland, home to a collection of over 700 cuckoo clocks. This year, on the one hundredth anniversary of British Summer Time coming to a close, the two horologists (a fancy name for clock masters) will once again be resetting the time on all the working clocks in their vast collection. 

The brothers have been studying clocks and watches since they were teenagers. They soon began collecting these fanciful and elaborate clocks, honing an expertise in their history and mechanics. Since 1970, their collection has grown to nearly 700 examples of some of the finest and rarest ever made, all from the one true home of the cuckoo clock – the Black Forest region of central Europe.

It took about 20 years of clock-chasing, but eventually the breadth and depth of the Piekarski’s collection left them no choice but to spread the gospel of the cuckoo to the public, opening their doors in 1990.

Cuckooland is not just clocks, and one piece in particular might even drown out the cacophony of several hundred chiming at once: a German keyless concert organ. Also known as a fair organ, it’s what you’d hear accompanying carrousels and fair rides, made specifically loud enough to hear over the crowds.  

Cuckooland doesn’t keep regular hours, but call or email to set up a visit or a tour. They’ll be happy to hear from you (if they can hear you over the cuckoos and the organ).

Algae kaleidoscopes were among the many creatively biological ways that Victorian scientists entertained themselves. Using the end of a piece of hair, they moved tiny single-celled algae known as diatoms on a slide, arranging them into beautiful, symmetrical patterns that amused wealthy amateur naturalists at social gatherings.

Now, one artist in England, Klaus Kemp, continues this Victorian art of diatom arrangement.

“The first time I saw a diatom, I was 16,” Kemp says in the video by Matthew Killip. “It was love at first sight.”

Kemp spent eight years researching how to create these microscopic masterpieces. He spends much of his time hunting for diatoms in bodies of waters, from horse troughs, ditches, and gutters. Kemp takes samples of the algae and cleans them in his studio before he starts the arduous process of arranging each single-celled organism.

At the 2:28-mark, we get a rare glimpse at his method. Unlike the Victorians who use hair, Kemp's technique uses a precise needle. He patiently moves the circle-shaped diatom across the slide, each nudge just microns of movement, he says.

The glass shells of the diatoms gleam under the lens, Kemp's careful hand creating stunning brightly colored patterns. It’s hard to believe that such delicate and extravagant pieces are made from organisms dwelling in murky puddles of water. 

In most middle-class British households in the 18th and 19th centuries, you would find a booklet filled with recipes collected and curated over generations. But these guides were more than the cookbooks or housekeeping guides you’d find in today’s bookstores. Tucked between recipes for roast goose and apple dumplings were instructions for making medical remedies—everyday ingredients whipped into salves for bruises and syrups for coughs.

"People mostly, especially people of modest means, didn't go to the doctor if they could help it," says Arlene Shaner, historical collections librarian at the New York Academy of Medicine. "These are kind of home family guides with directions of how to take care of common ailments." 

Over the years, these all-purpose guides, which were published throughout Europe and in the United States, went through different iterations and included more recipe and how-to categories. Alongside stews and pies, the books also describe how to carve, pickle, make ink, brew beer, manage bees, and heal sprains. The treasured volumes, passed from generation to generation, give a window into the concerns, common illnesses, activities, and interests of middle-class modern homes.

“Sometimes they were called a cabinet or a Queen’s closet,” says Shaner. “It’s this idea that this is a little bit of a secret, a trade secret that someone shares with you that you wouldn’t be able to get from another place.”

Gathering medical information in short, concise recipes has a long tradition stretching from the ancient period to the late 19th century, writes Elaine Leong a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. “Historians of medicine see the early modern home as one of the main sites for medical intervention and health promotion. Householders were not only quick to combine self-diagnosis and self-treatment with commercially available medical care but many also produced their own homemade medicines.”

Catered more towards people of modest means, these books were written mainly by women, but there were some popular cookbooks also penned by men. One popular English cookbook, The Prudent Housewife, or Compleat English Cook, by Lydia Fisher in 1800 had at least 24 editions.

Reading through The Prudent Housewife, some medical treatments sound whimsical while others appear dangerous. For a sprain, The Prudent Housewife advises a soak in warm vinegar, and then applying a paste of stale beer grounds, oatmeal, and hog’s lard every day until the pain and swelling go away. Hiccups call for a tasty sounding syrup of liquid cinnamon on a lump of sugar, while heart burn requires a glass of water or chamomile tea with scraped chalk. To rid of giddiness, people would drink 20 drops of castor oil mixed in water, and “the smoke of tobacco blown into the ear is an excellent remedy” for an ear ache.

While it’s clear today that some of the ingredients listed in the medical recipes would not be safe to ingest, people at the time used the items and knowledge they had access to, Shaner explains.

“There are some of these remedies that you read that are distressing a little bit,” says Shaner. “If you find a recipe for a cough remedy that has syrup of poppies in it, you can guess whether or not it’s going to work.”

In the appendix of some of the books, like The Prudent Housewife, there are a list of standard base ingredients that all households should have. These would be added into different remedies, such as opodeldoc, a popular lotion or soap that was used to relieve rheumatic and arthritic pain.

Families often chose one notebook to record and annotate recipes, and add other bits of practical knowledge, writes Leong. On some of the cookbooks, autobiographical notes, confessions, and spiritual meditations are scribbled in the margins or inscribed in the blank pages left at the end of some of the books. Recipes were shared within circles of friends and books were kept within families. In some cases, writes Leong, they "were considered worthy enough to be mentioned in wills and bequests alongside other household objects of value."

These antique cookbooks were cherished items that also serve as useful pieces of history. Some scholars even consider it the first genre of women’s medical writing, and a mark of a shift away from male dominance within the household, Leong explains.

Today, large comprehensive housekeeping guides exist, but few if any also contain medical remedies. The all-in-one books of yore are still of value, but more for their historical intrigue than their medical utility. Leeches behind the ears will not, in all likelihood, cure your headache.

There are a couple of artifacts in this small museum’s collection that might be described as idiosyncratic. Maybe even eccentric. At the Pioneer Heritage Museum in the city of Hurricane, Utah you’ll find some reverently preserved 1907 fruit cake, and a slab of 1945 bacon that’s holding on for dear life.

While fruitcake has a well-deserved reputation for survival of re-gifting year after year after year, this example probably takes the cake. It was originally the top two tiers of a four-tier wedding cake. In 1907 Emily Wood married Joe Scow, and Mrs. Maria Ballard over in Grafton baked them a fruitcake and covered it in dewy pink flowers.

As was the fashion back then, the family held onto some as a keepsake, and while the frosting and pink flowers were slowly snacked on by the newlyweds growing family, the rest of it was kept on the mantle for the next 83 years. In 1990, the desiccated marvel was donated to the museum by the couple’s granddaughter, where it can still be viewed on its cake stand pedestal.

The bacon comes from a different Hurricane Valley pioneer: Grace Wright Jepson—local midwife, nurse, mother of seven, and cured meat wizard. The slab was put away in the family drying shed sometime around 1945, hanging up in some sackcloth. Mrs. Jepson passed away in 1958, and everyone forgot about the bacon until it was rediscovered and donated to the museum by her son Woodrow in 1996. It’s held up remarkably well, maybe due to Grace’s secret saltpeter, brown sugar and pepper recipe.

On a recent Friday between 2:00 a.m. and 9:30 a.m., Anthony Vasquez wound his truck through midtown Manhattan, making 40 stops to deliver milk for Bartlett Dairy. New York City is America’s largest, most complex dairy market. A bodega or deli might order a few quarts; Starbucks might need a truckload of gallons. The range in the scale of customers, the congestion, and the confounding parking regulations all contribute to the market’s eccentricities.

Delivering milk has always been hard work because time is critical and milk is heavy. In New York City it also requires strategic thinking. As Vasquez wheeled stacks of 50-pound crates on a handcart or lugged them up and down stairs, he fine-tuned his route for maximum efficiency and minimum parking tickets. (He only got one that morning, his first in a week.) And he reflected on an upheaval in the city’s dairy market that will affect the route he has been driving for 12 years: Elmhurst Dairy, New York City’s last milk processing facility, will be shutting down for good this weekend.

“It is going to have a big impact on our small business,” Vasquez said. “I think it is going to hurt a lot.”

Based in Jamaica, Queens, Elmhurst supported a unique network of distributors, like Bartlett, provided about 270 manufacturing jobs in a city where such jobs are scarce, and was the sole supplier of more than 110 million half-pints annually to public schools. Its closure, which seemed inevitable to some observers and has shocked others, is rippling out across the city and state. Such disruption is nothing new—New York City’s dairy industry has been undergoing disruption since it was born. Its peculiarities have shaped aspects of national dairy policy and its goings-on have sometimes been at odds with milk’s wholesome image: poison, death, violence, and Pete Seeger all appear in its two-century history.

But the forces contributing to Elmhurst’s closure are hardly local. Nationwide, the story is the same. Cows are producing more, consumers are drinking less—much as they did in the past, before the ascendancy of milk. Elmhurst’s demise represents a kind of coming full circle, in New York City and across the country.  

Cows’ milk first came of age as a consumer product in New York City in the mid-19th century. Before then, by and large, urbanites ate durable dairy: cheese and butter. And urban babies drank mother’s milk. Pace University sociologist E. Melanie DuPuis, author of Nature’s Perfect Food, points to many reasons nursing was outsourced to the cow—among them, middle class women’s expanding roles outside the home. Cows provided a degree of liberation.

As the city’s population grew, pasture dwindled. Remaining herds were packed in small quarters where disease spread and where the nearest, cheapest feed was distillery or brewery mash—a nutritious slop that rendered milk blue, redolent of alcohol, and clumpy. Chalk, magnesia, or plaster were often required to transform the milk into a substance that looked like milk. The contaminants and the bacteria thriving in the unsanitary dairies contributed to skyrocketing infant mortality. Two of today’s federally required tests, for water and for fat content, are a direct legacy of this era. “New York City was a pioneer and innovator in solving problems,” said Andrew Novakovic, an agricultural economist at Cornell University. “Sometimes it was solving stuff that New York shouldn’t be proud of. But that is part of the story.”

By the early 20th century, temperance advocates and public health activists had made “swill milk” illegal in New York City and pasteurization was the new cause. Nearly all the city’s milk came via train or truck from upstate, restoring milk’s rural, wholesome image. As was true in other regions, this flow was described in the same terms as the flow of water: as a milkshed.

The industry’s reputation soon regressed. Farmers, squeezed by low prices set by growing conglomerates, began striking in upstate New York. In a famous 1933 essay Edmund Wilson described law enforcement’s brutal response—employing “sub-machine guns, gas bombs and riot sticks”—to one strike. A later strike had vocal support from Pete Seeger and his troupe, the Vagabond Puppeteers. Industrialization was also up-ending consumers’ bucolic image of rustic farms and ambling cows; the Rotolactor, an iteration of the mainstay of mechanized milking today, had been recently invented. At the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, Borden—one of the conglomerates—introduced its wide-eyed mascot, Elsie the Cow, in an effort, according to historian Anna Thompson Hajdik, to recoup some pastoral cred.

The doyenne of what was to become the Elmhurst Dairy was at that fair too, dropping by to demonstrate how to milk a cow by hand. Dora Krout ran one of the last dairy farms in the city and although the cows ultimately had to go, she and her relatives merged their various dairy companies, focusing on processing and distribution. Her son-in-law and, then, her grandson, Henry Schwartz—the dapper, 82-year-old chief executive officer of Elmhurst—steered the family business through many other disruptions—including regulatory changes as well as regional and global milk-market restructuring that, respectively, opened the city’s dairy companies to outside competition and led to a decline in U.S. milk prices overall.

In the 1980s, many city processors began to fold. Some of their related distributors, including Bartlett, moved their offices and trucks onto the Elmhurst compound, which covers 15 acres in a neighborhood rich in automotive repair shops. “I don’t know any place in the world that had the system Henry had,” Novakovic said. Those sub-dealers “were part of the ecosystem of the Elmhurst plant and allowed him to stay alive.” As many as 20 tankers a day would travel from upstate to unload milk to be separated, homogenized, pasteurized, packaged, and then delivered by city-savvy drivers, like Vasquez, who could handle narrow streets, unruly traffic, and an eclectic clientele.

Many observers thought Elmhurst would survive because it was the last plant standing. But Americans have been drinking less milk and increasingly consume dairy in other forms—just as they did before the 19^th century—with many opting for organic, this era’s pastoral icon. And milk prices, long volatile, have plummeted recently. “It finally got to a point where it didn’t make sense to continue any longer,” Schwartz said, “and so I have had to reluctantly decide to close this business.”

The ecosystem Elmhurst cultivated has come apart. It owned the city’s only N-8s—elegant, mesmerizing machines that fill half-pints—and the Department of Education now will be getting half pints from several distant plants—one in Buffalo. Bartlett intends to build its own milk processing facility with half-pint capability near JFK airport by 2020. But for now, it will no longer deliver to all public schools, only to those in Queens and Staten Island. “I’ve got one little school; the lady likes her milk before 8:00,” Vasquez said. He parked the truck, unpacking what would be one of his last deliveries at a public school in Chelsea: two crates of Elmhurst half pints, light blue cartons for skim, purple for one percent. “I love my job,” he said. “I love my route.”

If going on adventures with Tom Sawyer was one of your childhood dreams, let this video crush your eight-year-old fantasies.

This 1985 claymation clip is part of an animated film called The Adventures of Mark Twain, directed by Will Vinton. The excerpt is an adaptation of The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain’s last unfinished novel that follows the chronicles of No. 44, or Satan. Characterized by its heavy social critique, the novel zeroes in on the hypocrisy of religion and the futility of human existence. Cheery!

The excerpt shows Twain take Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Becky Thatcher to meet a mysterious stranger who turns out to be Satan. Following the fallen angel, the three children enter a levitating land that seems to have broken off from a planet. At first, Satan seems friendly and calm, producing the children’s favorite fruit (Becky’s is, of course, the apple). But his mask constantly morphs and twitches, foreshadowing the lurking of something underneath.

As the story progresses, he invites them to create a land of living clay people. Though innocent and fun in the beginning, this quickly spirals into a horrific ending where Satan shows his true form and the audience is left to ponder anguishing philosophical questions. 

We won’t tell you what happens to the clay people. For that, you’ll have to watch the video. We will, however, leave you in this Halloween with a harrowing thought pronounced by Satan:

“Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists save empty space. And you... and you are but a thought.”

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.

If you’re worrying about the state of your mortal soul, this handy graphic by François Georgin could help you.

Published in 1825 in Jean-Charles Pellerin’s print shop in France, 3 Roads to Eternity alludes to Matthew 7:13-14. The biblical passage describes the different roads a soul can take:

“13 Enter at the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who are going through it, 14 because small is the gate and narrow is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”

Framed by a large doorway, the wide path to hell is crowded with people from all walks of life. From mothers who bring their small children with them to perdition, to aristocrats, to peasants, to musicians. The damned are oblivious to their fiery fate and sport light-hearted smiles and joyous faces.

To emphasize this point, Georgin provides us with an inscription underneath the path:

“Look, here is the large door, always open to every newcomer; each one enters without obstacle. Those who wish to become rich are hasty to enter. Thousands have already passed, hungry for honour and fortune: For sensual delight and ambition, there is no other road; singing, dancing, and music scort passengers through; young and old, poor and rich, all believe, as they follow this path, that they are heading to the bosom of Abraham.”

Once they have reached the threshold of hell, a demon drags them into the flames, where they are tortured until the end of time. 

There are two other roads for a person to take, only one of which leads to eternal life. The middle one does not appear in Matthew’s description, but rather seems to be an invention of Georgin. This path stems from the path of the righteous.  We see a member of the French Royal Army standing in front of the two paths, clearly choosing which one to follow. In a Goldilocks and the Three Bears fashion, the middle doorway and its path are mid-sized. There are still quite a few people on it, but the number has decidedly shrunk. Allegedly, there are the people who have strived to follow the path of the Lord, but who have strayed from it.

Next to two of these unfortunate souls, is an allusion to the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25:1-13. In the parable, five wise and five foolish virgins set out to meet their grooms at night but the foolish ones are unprepared and must buy more oil for their lamps. When they return, the doors of the church have been shut and they are forsaken. Such is eternity, Matthew tells us, “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.”

And unprepared indeed are the people on the middle path. Unlike the utterly oblivious souls of the lower path, the faces of these pilgrims show that they become more and more aware of their mistakes as their hour approaches. Even before death takes them with its scythe, they realize their inevitable end and approach it with horror as they exclaim “We thought we had taken the righteous path but we have missed it.”

As for death, it is neither cynically joyous nor scary. If anything, it seems resigned. Its depiction seems to echo the description Georgin placed next to the downward spiral towards hell:

“So speaks the Lord: I take no pleasure in the death of a sinner, but I desire that he converts and lives.”

Of course, life and death don’t refer to the end of the mortal body, but to the soul. To live, according to Roman Catholic tradition, is to be in heaven with the Lord.

And for this there is the last path. Its golden doorway to eternal life is adorned by a Crucified Christ. An inscription tells us:

“He who wishes to partake in the cross of Jesus Christ must carry his own with resignation: and since here the door narrows, many pass it on the side.

Children of Sion, rejoice, you will be part of the Kingdom of Heaven.”

The people on the third path are shown carrying their crosses with tranquil smiles on their face. These saints are received with open arms by the Holy Trinity, and thus enter the Celestial Jerusalem, where angels await them.

What makes the map interesting, besides its delightful graphics, is the historical context that surrounds it, as it was printed during the Bourbon Restoration, which took place from 1814 to 1830. At this time,  Louis XVI’s brothers, Louis XVIII and Charles X, restored the French monarchy after overthrowing Napoleon and the First Empire.

During the French Revolution (1789-1799) there were heavy efforts to dechristianize France. Churches were closed, and members of the clergy were killed, arrested, or turned out. Though under Napoleon, the Catholic Church gained some of its power back, it was during the Restoration period that it once again gained recognition as an institution of power.

The illustration, then, comes at a time when Catholics were coming back from persecution, and probably felt righteous against the “infidels.” This would explain why Georgin decided to include a third path for those who had started out on the “path of  righteousness” but had been lost. It could have very possibly been a warning to those who had strayed of where they would inevitably end up.

More than a pious depiction of how to reach eternal life, this map might just be a very elaborate religious burn.

You’re sitting in the movie theater; it’s pitch black except for the dim glow on-screen. Nothing scary has happened yet—but you see a person walking, alone. You feel an overwhelming sense of dread. A slow, growing hum murrs over footsteps, and you know the person isn’t safe. You, perhaps, feel you aren’t safe watching.

You wait for the inevitable conclusion, fixed on what you might see, listening for the cue that a killer or monster is ready to attack—though nothing on screen hints at this. The source for your anxiety is elusive, but it was carefully crafted through hidden audible elements that play on human emotions, causing your hairs to stand on end. This is the brilliance of what music does in a horror film.

The way composers make the most out of their musical tools to induce fear is both an art form and a science. Since horror movies rely on music, movie score composers carefully consider how to use familiar sounds in unusual ways;  this distortion of reality unsettles us even if what we’re hearing is, in many ways, obscured.

“The sound itself could be created by an instrument that one would normally be able to identify, but is either processed, or performed in such a way as to hide the actual instrument,” says Harry Manfredini, whose music score for Friday the 13th was cemented in the thrasher film genre of the 1980s.

The sounds that do this to us aren’t always unusual; but their deep rumblings or high-pitched squeals signal danger almost (if not actually) instinctively. Distressed animal calls, women screaming and other nonlinear sounds, which are irregular noises with large wavelengths often found in nature, were used in The Shining and other movies to create an instinctual fear response, as recorded in the test subjects of a 2011 study at the University of California. Often these sounds are buried in the complex movie score or, sometimes, as subtle sound waves that give an adrenaline rush like a mini, internal roller coaster.

Taking a sound out of one normal context and then placing it into a new, scarier one can do this. While some of these sounds are subtle, others stick out so much they become characters themselves. People who have seen Friday the 13th learned that a specific sound (a human vocal noise described as “ki ki ki ma ma ma” by Manfredini) means that the killer, Jason Voorhees, is lurking nearby with his machete, even if he isn’t shown on screen. Just knowing that Jason might be in the room with us heightens our senses, and even though the sound is vocal, it’s unlike one any that a person would normally make. When Jason’s sound is isolated, you hear breathiness in an echo; but the surrounding music and bloody visuals work together, bringing the noise to a functionally creepy place.

One unsettling and hidden “sound” that is given credit for freaking out an audience is infrasound—a low-frequency sound that cannot be heard, but literally unsettles human beings down to our bones. Infrasound, which exists at 19 Hz and below, can be felt, but human ears begin to hear sound at 20 Hz. Infrasound exists in nature, and is created by wind, earthquakes, avalanches, and used by elephants to communicate over long distances. At a high enough volume, it may be possible for humans to perceive sound as low as 12 Hz, but even common objects can emit infrasound, something some horror movie music composers use to their advantage.  

Filmmaker Gaspar Noe admitted in an interview that he intentionally used sound that registered at only 27 Hz, just above the 20 Hz limit for infrasound, in his 2002 film Irreversible. The movie is technically an avant-garde thriller, rather than classic horror—but the intense violence, raw camera angles and disturbing images and content have made it dip into the horror movie category. The characters embody the monster-side of human behavior and indulge; you’re bombarded with disturbing images of sexual violence, which understandably caused controversy, and the soundtrack intensifies this.

“You can’t hear it, but it makes you shake,” Noe told Salon. “In a good theater with a subwoofer, you may be more scared by the sound than by what’s happening on the screen.” In Irreversible, deep rumblings and a swaying, otherworldly grinding sound increases in volume, causing the viewer to feel dread just before extremely disturbing imagery begins. The 2002 movie Paranormal Activity was also rumored to use infrasound, though even if the deep rumblings in the film are above the 20 Hz threshold, they seemed to to a good job of unsettling audiences anyway.

Steve Goodman, in Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, says that while the ways sound in media cause these responses in human perception are under-theorized, it likely has its place, especially with a source-less vibration like infrasound. “Abstract sensations cause anxiety due to the very absence of an object or cause,” he writes. “Without either, the imagination produces one, which can be more frightening than the reality.”

Sometimes using altered noises from everyday objects to get an infrasound-like effect can even save on production costs. Christian Stella, who mixed the score of the 2012 zombie film The Battery on a low budget, revealed on Reddit that he “ended up using recordings of power transformers, air conditioners, etc, that I modulated to make deeper.” Another part of the production team layered music on top of this to create the full movie score.

To manipulate the audience, Manfredini’s process begins with viewing a complete or at least near-complete film. To help the visual narrative along, he remembers the actions, objects or colors that reappear and creates audial themes around the visuals. Later, he overlays tones, rhythms and stand-out sounds to evoke something we’ve seen, sometimes using sounds as cues, to drive home the otherworldly narrative we find ourselves in while we clutch our seats. In a sense, he’s fooling the audience into believing that what we’re seeing is logical to the story we’re immersed in, and that we drew that conclusion first. 

When he sees a scene where he thinks a special effect sound would work best, he works with the sound effects artist; then, he balances the effect sound with his score. “If his sound is a low sound, I might go high, and vice versa. Visually if I see something very large the logical choice would be a low sound, and if it is small, a high one,” Manfredini says. This is a departure from the horror movies of the 1940s and ‘50s, which relied on orchestral scores to fill in the silence. Horror movies today are more atmospheric, making the movie seem more plausible and causing a more direct sense of danger.

When we watch horror movies, we’re not meant to be simple spectators; we become passive participants. While immersed, we become convinced on some level that we’re there with the characters, walking around a dark corner or opening a door to a place we are definitely not meant to be. We might be safe in our living room while the monster approaches in the shadows, but the movie makes us believe otherwise. It’s just a trick of the ear, though, obviously. Hopefully.

On November 4, 1818, Scottish chemist Andrew Ure stood next to the lifeless corpse of an executed murderer, the man hanging by his neck at the gallows only minutes before. He was performing an anatomical research demonstration for a theater filled with curious students, anatomists, and doctors at the University of Glasgow. But this was no ordinary cadaver dissection. Ure held two metallic rods charged by a 270-plate voltaic battery to various nerves and watched in delight as the body convulsed, writhed, and shuddered in a grotesque dance of death.

“When the one rod was applied to the slight incision in the tip of the forefinger,” Ure later described to the Glasgow Literary Society, “the fist being previously clenched, that finger extended instantly; and from the convulsive agitation of the arm, he seemed to point to the different spectators, some of whom thought he had come to life.”

Ure is one of many scientists during the late 18th and 19th centuries who conducted crude experiments with galvanism—the stimulation of muscles with pulses of electrical current. The bright sparks and loud explosions made for stunning effects that lured in both scientists and artists, with this era of reanimation serving as inspiration for Mary Shelley’s literary masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. While most scientists were using galvanism to search for clues about life, Ure wanted to see if it could actually bring someone back from the dead.

“This was a time when people were trying to understand the origin of life, when religion was losing some of its hold,” says Juliet Burba, chief curator of the exhibit “Mary and Her Monster” at the Bakken Museum in Minnesota, which will open October 29. “There was a lot of interest in the question: What is the essence that animates life? Could it be electricity?”

In 1780, Italian anatomy professor Luigi Galvani discovered that he could make the muscles of a dead frog twitch and jerk with sparks of electricity. Others quickly began to experiment by applying electricity to other animals that quickly grew morbid. Galvani’s nephew, physicist Giovanni Aldini, obtained the body of an ox, proceeding to cut off the head and use electricity to twist its tongue. He sent such high levels of voltage through the diaphragm of the ox that it resulted in “a very strong action on the rectum, which even produced an expulsion of the feces,” Aldini wrote.    

People outside of science were also fascinated by electricity. They would attend shows where bull heads and pigs were electrified, and watch public dissections at research institutions such as the Company of Surgeons in England, which later became the Royal College of Surgeons.

When scientists tired of testing animals, they turned to corpses, particularly corpses of murderers. In 1751, England passed the Murder Act, which allowed the bodies of executed murderers to be used for experimentation. “The reasons the Murder Act came about were twofold: there weren’t enough bodies for anatomists, and it was seen as a further punishment for the murderer,” says Burba. “It was considered additional punishment to have your body dissected.”

Lying on Ure’s table was the muscular, athletic corpse of 35-year-old coal miner, Matthew Clydesdale. On August 1818, Clydesdale drunkenly murdered an 80-year-old miner with a coal pick and was sentenced to be hung at the gallows. His body remained suspended and limp for nearly an hour, while a thief who had been executed next to Clydesdale at the same time convulsed violently for several moments after death. The blood was drained from the body for half an hour before the experiments began.

Andrew Ure, who had little to no known experience with electricity, was a mere assistant to James Jeffray, an anatomy professor at the University of Glasgow. He had studied medicine at Glasgow University and served briefly as an army surgeon, but was otherwise known for teaching chemistry. “Not much is known about Ure, but he was sort of a minor figure in the history of science,” says Alex Boese, author of Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments. One of Ure’s main accomplishments was this single bizarre galvanic experiment, he says.  

Others, such as Aldini, conducted similar experiments, but scholars write that Ure was convinced that electricity could restore life back into the dead. “While Aldini contented himself with the role of spasmodic puppeteer, Ure’s ambitions were well nigh Frankesteinian,” wrote Ulf Houe in Studies in Romanticism.

Ure charged the battery with dilute nitric and sulphuric acids five minutes before the police delivered the body to the University of Glasgow’s anatomical theater. Incisions were made at the neck, hip, and heels, exposing different nerves that were jolted with the metallic rods. When Ure sent charges through Clydesdale’s diaphragm and saw his chest heave and fall, he wrote that “the success of it was truly wonderful.”

Ure’s descriptions of the experiment are vivid. He poetically noted how the convulsive movements resembled “a violent shuddering from cold” and how the fingers “moved nimbly, like those of a violin performer.” Other passages, like this one about stimulating muscles in Clydesdale’s forehead and brow, are more macabre:

“Every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expression in the murderer’s face, surpassing far the wildest representations of a Fuseli or a Kean,” wrote Ure, comparing the result to the visage of tragic actor, Edmund Kean, and the fantastical works of romantic painter Henry Fuseli. He continued: “At this period several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted.”

The whole experiment lasted about an hour. “Both Jeffray and Ure were quite deliberately intent on the restoration of life,” wrote F.L.M. Pattinson in the Scottish Medical Journal. But the reasons for the lack of success were thought to have little to do with the method: Ure concluded that if death was not caused by bodily injury there was a probability that life could have been restored. But, if the experiment succeeded it wouldn’t have been celebrated since he would be reviving a murderer, he wrote.

Mary Shelley was aware of the types of scientific experiments researchers were toying with at the time. “Science was something that the public paid attention to,” says Burba. “There was a lot of crossover, so there were poets who knew a lot about science and scientists who wrote poetry.”

Two years before Ure conducted the experiment, Mary Shelley came up with the story of Frankenstein, and published the novel in 1818, the same year as Ure’s experiment. By sheer coincidence, Victor Frankenstein also brought the monster to life “on a dreary night of November.” However, unlike Ure, the scene of the creature’s resurrection is brief and vague, with no mention of the word “electricity.” Shelley wrote that Frankenstein “collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”

Some historians have hypothesized that Shelley was inspired by other medical procedures being studied at the time, including blood transfusion and organ transplants. It isn’t until later in her introduction of the 1831 edition of the book that Shelley mentions galvanism: “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”

It’s unclear whether Frankenstein further encouraged Ure or others to dapple in galvanic experimentation, or if Shelley was particularly struck by any one experiment. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and these galvanic experiments happened in tandem, Burba explains, pointing out that the language in the novel reflects that of scientists of that era. “Both of these things were happening within a cultural milieu where there was great interest in electricity as well as the effects of electricity on bodies—whether electricity might be the ‘spark of being’ that animates life.”  

No actual scientific knowledge or data came from Ure’s experiment, yet he still enthusiastically lectured about his experience. He wrote up the results in a pamphlet, which was seen as “publicity of the crudest kind,” W.V. Farrar wrote in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. “This rather ‘Gothick’ experiment, reported in such appropriate literary style, no doubt made Ure’s name better known.”

These animated and horrifying displays eventually went out of style as sectors of the public began to view them as evil and “satanic in nature.” Electricity's first rudimentary experiments on the body did make way for resuscitation technologies such as defibrillation, but the focus is now on saving lives, not reanimating a long-dead corpse.

“Traditionally, we overlook horrors in the name of science,” says Boese. “We have codes of what’s acceptable behavior in normal everyday life, but people put on a lab coat and there are totally different codes of conduct that seem to apply. These scientists in the early 18th century were gentleman, upstanding members of society, yet they’re doing these things that seem totally sociopathic and bizarre.”

Some of their experiments on non-human animals have stood the test of time, however. Students in biology classes still conduct Galvani’s famous frog muscle experiment today.

In Bolivia's Reserva Nacional de Fauna Andina Eduardo Abaroa, there is a surreal, barren, wind-swept swath of land that has been frequently compared to a Dalí painting.

Salvador Dalí was a Spanish painter best known for dreamy, sometimes eerie, nonsensical images against a minimalistic backdrop, the most well known examples of which include The Persistence of Memory and The Elephants. 

Though Dalí never painted this particular Bolivian reserve, the arid, stark desert horizon coupled with strange rock formations strike a strong resemblance to the famous surrealist's work.

In particular, the Árbol de Piedra, or Stone Tree, could be one of Dalí's disturbing subjects. The base of the rock has been weathered away by wind and time, while the top remained intact. The seemingly impossible structure stands 23 feet tall and casts its shadow even longer across the flat sandy desert.

If you're walking through the Dalí Desert and find yourself peeking over your shoulder for melting clocks or flying cats, don't chalk it all up to surrealism. It might be heatstroke.

Located in the very heart of Salem, Massachusetts' central tourist district is this so-called "museum" that doesn't so much educate visitors about the area's history of witch hunts as it does walk them through a low-budget TV movie about it.

This aging attraction is just one of a number of tourist traps in Salem that are still capitalizing on the fear-mongering witch hunts of 17th century New England which saw countless innocent women (and men) burned, drowned, and worse. The tour through the facility begins with a live reenactment of a witch trial, acted out by local thespians. This kangaroo court is watched over by a jury of unblinking wax mannequins that are showing their age.

After the trial concludes, visitors are led into the basement which is said to be a recreation of an actual witch dungeon that supposedly existed nearby at one point. Should this be true, then the witches of the day probably had about as much to worry about as a teenage couple walking through a haunted house run by their local youth group. The dungeon is equally populated with sagging dummies who are flogged and pressed with all the realism of a puppet show while the previously convicted witch appears for some shrill jump scares along the way.

Throughout, the tour, the veracity of the events presented is assured, implying that many of the girls and women were faking. The general atmosphere seems to promote the concept of witches as those most regularly seen on Halloween candy wrappers, as opposed to the demonized victims of fear and superstition that actually lost their lives in the town.

All historical pedantry aside, the Witch Dungeon Museum could likely be a kitschy good time for fans of haunted houses, and moreover an interesting example of how history, no matter how dark or troubling, can be morphed and shifted into the popular entertainment of tomorrow.

This single family home launched Michael Myers' murder-spree that has continued through one of the longest running horror franchises of all time.

Near West Hollywood, on a quiet street just north of Sunset Boulevard, called Orange Grove Avenue, you’ll find an unassuming house in the middle of the block that has become infamous as one of the murder houses from John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic, Halloween. This is the house where Annie (Nancy Kyes) is babysitting. Her friend Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) was babysitting at another nearby location, 1530 North Orange Grove Avenue.

Most of the action of the film takes place at 1537. Michael’s first victim is the family dog. Then he kills Annie inside the car in the garage behind the house. Soon after, a pair of amorous friends arrive at the empty house and take the opportunity to “get busy” in an upstairs bedroom, but Michael has other plans for them. All this takes place as Laurie watches from across the street, growing increasingly suspicious, trying in vein to reach her friend by phone. The only thing to do is to walk over and investigate for herself, and we all remember how that turned out.

Today the house is still a private residence, assumedly with a great deal less murder.

If, for whatever reason, you happen to find yourself at the ExxonMobil gas station in Georgetown where M Street becomes Canal Road, you might notice an exceptionally long, steep staircase wedged between a stone wall and a brick warehouse.

For some, these stairs might look like little more than a daunting climb, but fans of the 1973 horror movie The Exorcist will likely recognize the site of the climactic final showdown between the self-sacrificing priest and the demon who possesses twelve-year-old Regan.

The stairs themselves, which provide a shortcut between Prospect Street NW above and Canal Road NW below, are made somewhat inherently creepy by their narrow dimensions and ivy-covered walls. The payoff upon reaching the top is minimal, revealing a rather bland concrete pathway leading to the steps. Still, it's a worthwhile stop for movie buffs or anyone looking to incorporate a touch of spookiness into their daily workout.