Alexander Milliner, widely regarded as the drummer boy for General George Washington, is interred along with his family on the glacially swept plain of the Mt. Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. His headstone sits prominently just a few paces from a corner at the intersection of Second and Elm Streets of this necropolis. There are 80 other Revolutionary War veterans buried across the haunting expanse of this 196-acre cemetery.

Milliner stands out among the veterans resting here because of his wartime service in the Life Guard, Washington’s personal security detachment, and the battles he witnessed at White Plains, Brandywine, Saratoga, Monmouth, and Yorktown. He served for over six years and was wounded in action at Monmouth in 1778.

After the war, Milliner said he “wandered ‘round” about the country until 1799, when he married Abigail Barton, 20 years his junior. He claimed to have served also in the U. S. Navy for five years, three of those on the U.S.S. Constitution during the War of 1812. There is, however, no record of his naval service. He and his wife made a living by farming and raised a family of nine children, just west of Rochester. The Reverand Elias Hillard interviewed Milliner at the age of 104 and included his profile along with five other living Revolutionary War vets in The Last Men of the Revolution. Milliner died in 1865. 

For a country famous for never being more than 52 kilometers from the ocean, Denmark does not lack in beaches. However, Møns Klint is a beach unlike any other.

Upon arriving, one is greeted by a thick forest of twisting tree trunks and precarious hills. The forest can only be described as ancient, it is no wonder fossils were found here. Upon descending the steep and winding staircase, visitors are greeted with a humbling view of towering chalk-white cliffs contrasted by a teal sea. The large, bleached cliffs provide a unique backdrop for a day at the beach. 

Formed by shells of millions of microscopic creatures, the chalk cliffs were formed when glaciers began to move west. They then emerged when the ice melted away. Visitors also sometimes find fossils of shellfish mixed into the rocky beach. In addition to the unique geological setting, the chalky soil makes it possible for a variety of unique plants and marshes. 

Visitors can play on the rocks littered in the shallow surf or simply sit and listen to the ineffable sound of the waves hitting the rocky beach. Other activities include camping, hiking or cycling along the tops of the cliffs, kayaking, or visiting the visitor center for information about the fossils and rocks found at the site. Møns Klint remains untouched by time and a visit here evokes that boundless feeling. 

The Westland Lysander was a British aircraft used immediately before and during the Second World War. The Suttleworth collection holds one of the few flying examples in the world in the form which made it famous, the RAF’s flying spy taxi.

The first Lysanders entered service in June 1938, equipping squadrons for army co-operation and were intended for use for message-dropping and artillery spotting.

Five squadrons that had been equipped with Lysanders were attached to the British Expeditionary Force by May 1940. When Germany invaded France, it was discovered that their performance in the intended role was so poor they made very easy targets for the Luftwaffe even when escorted by fighters. Of a total deployment of 175 Lysanders, 118 were lost in or over France and Belgium in 1940, including those lost dropping supplies during the Dunkirk evacuation.

Though found unsuitable for the army co-operation role, the aircraft's exceptional Short Take Off and Landing (STOL) performance made it very suitable for clandestine missions using small, unprepared airstrips behind enemy lines to place or recover agents, particularly in occupied France and largely in cooperation with the French resistance.

In August 1941 a new squadron, No 138 (Special Duties) was formed to undertake missions for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the organisation set up by Churchill to “Set Europe Ablaze.” For this role the Lysanders were fitted with a fixed ladder over the port side speed up entry and exit to and from the rear cockpit and a large ventral auxiliary fuel tank was attached. These special duties Lysanders were painted matte black. The aircraft took part in these special duties until the liberation of France in 1944.

The pilots flew without any sophisticated navigation equipment and would land on short strips of land marked out by a few flashlights. Sometimes, to avoid having to land, the agent took advantage of the very low stall speed of this aircraft and, wearing a special padded suit, stepped off the ladder at very low altitude and rolled to a stop on the field. Lysanders were originally designed to carry one passenger in the rear cockpit, but for SOE use the rear cockpit was modified to carry two passengers. Clearly this was never comfortable and on outgoing flights  even  when only one was in the rear cockpit advantage was usually taken to load up the spare space with arms and explosives. During WW2 the pilots of Numbers 138 and 161 squadrons transported 101 agents to and recovered 128 agents from Nazi-occupied Europe.

The aircraft in the Shuttleworth collection never actually took part in special duties. It joined the Shuttleworth Collection in 1998, painted in standard RAF camouflage. While examples of Lysanders are relatively common, including at least three in the U.S., flying examples are very rare.

The Shuttlworth has an extensive collection of old and replica aircraft including some which were used in the movie, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. There is also an extensive collection of cars and motorcycles.

In a region of Mississippi rich with grandiose antebellum homes, one in particular stands out from the rest. Billed as the largest octagonal home in the United States, Longwood comprises six levels including the basement and an observatory. Cotton created the fortunes of Natchez's elite, but Dr. Haller Nutt ambitiously desired to surpass his fellow planters in extravagance. The mansion was to contain 32 rooms, with every bedroom opening to its own outside balcony, and it was crowned by a large and exotic onion-shaped dome.

Construction did not begin until 1860, and the architect, Philadelphia's Samuel Sloan, specially hired craftsmen from the same city to go south and work on the emerging edifice. However, with the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861, the workmen abruptly abandoned their tools and their jobs, worried for their lives and those of their loved ones, hurrying back north and never to return. Only Longwood's exterior and the first or basement level were completed. The rooms in the basement area became the living quarters of the Nutt family. Adequately skilled local labor could not be found and recruited to replace the departed workers and continue the building project. The war also devastated Dr. Nutt financially. Even after the hostilities ceased, work on the upper levels never resumed.

Driving onto the premises after passing through the security checkpoint (where admission is paid), you are engulfed on both sides by massive trees eerily draped with Spanish moss, until the home finally comes into view. It feels like you are entering into another world, or perhaps traveling back in time. Unlike other Natchez surrounded by the hustle and bustle of modern life, Longwood is secluded amidst a vast tract of wooded land. To this very day, the upper floors remain incomplete, although a spire was added to the top of the onion dome in 1993. Presently owned by the Natchez Pilgrimage Garden Club, the home can be toured daily except for Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Visitors on the guided tour will have an opportunity to go to the second level where one can look above to see the massive inner shell of the rotunda. The unfinished state is purposely maintained as a reminder of the cost of war, and one man's unfulfilled dream.

The death of Vincent van Gogh in the early morning of July 29, 1890 has always been, and still is after more than 120 years, subject to speculation. Did the troubled painter kill himself or was he shot? While the answer to this question may never be known, the room where his mysterious death occurred, at Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, has remained untouched and unchanged ever since.

Van Gogh rented the small room after a long struggle with his mental health and a year spent in an asylum. In the first weeks of his stay he expressed concern in letters to his friends and family about his mental state. But then the tone of the letters changed, and Van Gogh wrote to a relative that he had completely recovered and made plans for the future and new projects. Right before he died, his letters become more gloomy again.

On July 27, 1890, the artist left his boarding house after breakfast with his painting equipment. The Ravoux family, knowing that Van Gogh was a man of routine, started to worry about him when he did not return by dusk. Around nine o'clock that evening van Gogh returned to the inn seemingly ill. When the inn keeper checked on his guest, Van Gogh showed him a gunshot wound in his stomach and explained that he tried to kill himself. The doctor, who came later, did not stay very long and declared that nothing could be done. 

Van Gogh's brother, Theo, was called to the scene and arrived the next afternoon and stayed with his brother until the end. Van Gogh told his brother, too, that he tried to kill himself. It is a sentence uttered to the police that makes some people suspicious to this day: "My body is mine and I am free to do what I want with it. Do not accuse anybody, it is I that wished to commit suicide."

In a biography of Van Gogh published in 2011, authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith question the suicide story. They claim that it is much more possible that somebody shot Van Gogh. They are not the first to think so. As proof they point to the plans for new projects that Van Gogh announced only days before he died, plus the angle that the bullet entered the body. They also question how a man so badly wounded could walk the mile from where he said he was to the inn, and they point out that Van Gogh's painting equipment was never found. Making matters more curious, a French businessman admitted in 1956 that he bullied Van Gogh on that day, but said he did not kill him. 

Whatever was the reason, Vincent van Gogh, the ingenious painter of, despite his troubled soul, remarkably peaceful and harmonious paintings, died of a gunshot wound, around 1:30 in the morning in his room at the Auberge Ravoux, at the age of 37. During his short time in Auvers-sur-Oise Van Gogh painted around 70 paintings, inspired by the small town and it's surroundings. You can visit the inn today, which has also not changed it's interior since Van Gogh's fateful stay.

In 1147, the Moorish forces in southwestern Iberia surrendered a key piece of defensive real estate to the Christian forces led by Afonso Henriques: Castelo dos Mouros, or Castle of the Moors.

Long considered siege-proof and undefeatable, the peaceful conquest of the defensive outpost by Henriques was one of the main turning points in the European’s efforts to remove the ruling North African Moors from the continent, and set Portugal on the road to its own independent history throughout the next near millennia.

Built some 300 years prior, the Castle of the Moors stood on one of the highest points in the area, safeguarding the important trade town of Sintra, and the largely agricultural region around it, from attack. After its capture by Portuguese forces, the fort remained a seat of power in the region for several hundred years before being partially abandoned and reinhabited by the local Jewish population. They were eventually forced out of the structure and it was completely abandoned by the early 16th century where it gradually fell into disrepair and decay through fire, earthquake, and general neglect.

In 1840, King Ferdinand II began repairs on the ancient fortress, as to add to the expanding palatial gardens of nearby Pena Palace. Walls and towers were restored and the surrounding hills were planted with trees, vines, and shrubs while paths and gardens were additionally incorporated into the renaissance styled romantic landscape that the King envisioned. Further restoration work continued into the mid-20th century and archeological digs began excavating ruins from the time of the mountain's original owners, from 5,000 BC to today.

Today, the fortress is once again majestic in it’s stately splendor, impossible to miss from every angle in the magical and venerable town of Sintra. It is open nearly every day of the year for a small fee to visitors willing to explore the stabilized ruins and take in the jaw-dropping (and stomach-dropping) views of the region below. Cobblestone paths through enchanting mountain mist lined with moss covered boulders guide the way as plaques and guide posts inform tourists of the excavation work, original purposes of the remaining buildings, and insight into life within the castle walls.

Slime molds may be more intelligent than you think. At least that’s what scientists are discovering in labs at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. These single-celled, yellow blobs seen above don’t have brains or neural networks, yet they creepily crawl over decaying vegetation in search for food.

“This thing is literally jelly making smart decisions,” New Jersey Institute of Technology researcher Simon Garnier says in the video filmed and produced by bioGraphic.

Slime molds are known for their sluggish, congealing movement patterns. Just to observe a few centimeters of movement, the scientists have to record the slime molds for up to two days. If you place the organism in a nutrient-deprived environment, you’ll find that it grows little fingers that find food in a seemingly intentional manner. Experiments have shown slime molds navigating through mazes to reach a bounty of food, each of the extensions communicating with the rest of the organism.

Garnier and his research colleague Greg Weber want to find out how this simple organism is able to make complex decisions. Using time-lapse footage, they were able to see that the slime molds membrane inflates and deflates, oscillating about once per minute. At the 2:00-mark you can see the yellow membranous network wiggle and pulse. The group then uses a machine to poke the slime mold membrane and see if they can manipulate its direction.

These clever slime molds really make you wonder “what we mean by intelligence,” Garnier says.

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.

“All the world that is still free marvels at the composure and fortitude with which the citizens of London are facing and surmounting the great ordeal to which they are subjected, the end of which or the severity of which cannot yet be foreseen.”

Winston Churchill broadcast these words from a secret underground command center in central London on September 11, 1940, just after Garmany began bombing the city. Now known as Churchill’s War Rooms, the complex was situated beneath Whitehall and, for the next five years, would serve as the center of wartime operations.

The site contained numerous important functions including the Map Room, for charting the course of the war, a broadcasting room and, most crucially, the Cabinet Room. With tables laid out in a horseshoe configuration, this is where the heads of Army, Navy and Air Force would meet with Churchill. It was, in Churchill’s words, “the room from which I’ll direct the war.” 

These inner workings are the subject of a new book by Jonathan Asbury, Secrets of Churchill’s War Rooms. The book provides fascinating details of life in this top-secret, subterranean space, such as the portable sun lamp used by staff who spent long hours underground; the specially designed gas masks that would allow switchboard operators to continue working even in the event of an attack; and the top-secret Transatlantic Telephone Room, which was given a toilet-stall style lock so staff presumed it was just Churchill’s own private lavatory.  

After the war, the Churchill War Rooms were left abandoned until 1984, when they were re-opened to the public by the Imperial War Museum. Secrets of Churchill’s War Rooms draws from personal accounts of staff, archival photographs and images of the restored rooms to provide a behind the scenes look at this once-secret space. AO has a selection of images.

Ever since the release of the 2002 movie Panic Room, in which Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart play a mother and daughter taking refuge in their home's specially designed safe room during a burglary, the idea of a secret, impenetrable home bunker has quietly seeped into the popular consciousness. But what exactly is a panic room, and where are they being installed?

In recent years, stories about the domestic safe rooms of the rich and paranoid have been popping up all over. From the New York Times to the New York Post to the Daily Mail, the story is the same: real panic rooms have become a necessary amenity for high-end homes, but for the most part, they are no longer the secret closet most people have in mind.

“The hidden room, the ‘Jodie Foster Panic Room,’ that’s a thing of the past,” says Tom Gaffney, CEO of Gaffco Ballistics, a company specializing in creating high-end safe rooms. Gaffney, who is frequently quoted about the state of the panic room, has been creating safe spaces for decades, starting in the 1980s. He began by designing secure check-cashing stores in New York's South Bronx, before moving on to banks and corporate spaces. Gaffney now works mainly in ultra-high-end residential spaces, which he, for one, didn’t see coming. “Ninety percent of our work is high-end residential, 10 percent is corporate," he says. "Our residential work tends to be the true one percent of society. Very high net worth individuals. ... If you told me what I’d be doing 20 years ago, I’d say you’re mad."    

Gaffney sees the decline of the secret safe room stemming from two main factors. For one, with real estate at a premium in most spaces, and especially in New York City, where the majority of his business comes from, no one has the square-footage to hide an extra room. On top of that, there is a practical element. If you have a little safe room hidden away that you never use, you don’t really know how to use it in the case of an actual attack. Now, the trend in residential safe rooms is to turn a regular use space in the home, often the bedroom, into a possible fortress.

All of the panic rooms Gaffco builds are outfitted with a satellite phone so that they can never lose communication with the outside. Increasingly, they integrate the robust interconnectivity of standard smart homes so that all the rooms outside the reinforced one can be monitored. The levels of protection vary somewhat, however.

The main concern in creating panic rooms can vary from region to region, depending on the likely threat. “People in Palm Beach don’t have as much concern over a dirty bomb as people in New York City would,” says Gaffney. “People in San Francisco wouldn’t have the same concern as people in Los Angeles.”

Most safe spaces Gaffco builds focus first on preventing damage from ballistic attacks like guns or even rockets, and making forced entry impossible. They do this by building defenses right into the building itself. Walls can be reinforced with steel barriers and seemingly standard wooden doors can conceal a layer of military-grade polymer. If there are windows, those too will be made of bullet-resistant glass. And it’s all seamlessly integrated into the normal architecture.

“We’ve got glass that looks like normal glass, it doesn’t have a green tint to it, so you can’t even tell it’s bullet resistant," says Gaffney. "Doors are high-end wood doors that look exactly the same as the doors in the rest of the residence. All of the security hardware concealed so you don’t even know it’s there."

A step up from ballistic protection are the safe rooms that provide their own air filtration systems to help protect people from chemical, nuclear, and other airborne threats. Surprisingly, Gaffney says that the home movie theaters of the very wealthy, which are often located underground, make the perfect spot for such safe rooms.

“The idea of the movie theater is that in the case of a dirty bomb attack, you’re underground to begin with,” he says. “It’s a fallout bunker because it’s underground, but as it’s a movie theater, that’s usually equipped with food and water anyway. It has communication, it has air filtration, it has the air conditioning unit. It’s usually soundproofed, too.”

In addition to the ever-expanding residential market, Gaffney says that it is becoming increasingly standard for corporate spaces to have a safe room built into their offices. Usually this will be the board room, but it can also be places like a bathroom—anywhere employees can hide and wait for the authorities, in the case of an attack. This is in response to an increase in what Gaffney describes as “active shooter policies,” put in place to direct an employee’s response to an attack by a gunman.

No matter the venue, in designing their panic rooms, Gaffney says they follow the general example set up by U.S. embassies, which is to create layers of safety, with the safe room at the core. “The embassies are designed so that every area you fall back to, the security gets stronger,” he says. “The marines move backwards to the ambassador’s office which is a pure safe space within itself. We build to their specifications.” Most embassies, like many of Gaffco’s current safe rooms, also hide their defenses just under the surface of the building’s facade, when they are built up to the correct standard.

Panic rooms as we tend to think of them may no longer be around, but demand for them seems to be as great as ever. Gaffney told us that his company’s revenue doubled over the last year, working mainly on the homes of the very rich. And he for one, doesn’t see their increased interest in high-level safety precautions as panicky. “I really don’t think they’re paranoid, I don’t think they’re expecting the worst,” he says. “I think they’ve got a higher sense of the lack of security in the world today, based on events that are happening every day of the week.” Whether or not that’s true, his clientele definitely have a safe space to ponder it.

The legend of Sigurd is a core component of both Norse and Germanic mythology (with the figure known as Siegfried in the latter), and is included in texts from the Poetic Edda to the Niebelunglied to Beowulf. Elements of the story has been incorporated, in whole or in part, into modern epics such as Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Dating from the Viking Age, the Sigurd Stones are a group of runestones in eastern Sweden that provide the earliest Norse depictions of the legend of Sigurd the dragon slayer.

The Sigurdsristningen (which translates to Sigurd Carving but is commonly called the Ramsund Carving) is unique among the Sigurd Stones in that it is the only runic carving in the group etched into a rocky outcrop, rather than a standing stone. Moreover, it was apparently commissioned to help a loved one's soul reach Christian heaven.

Carved sometime around 1030 CE, the Sigurdsristningen provides a pictorial account of the heroic feats of Sigurd the dragon slayer. As a displaced youth, Sigurd was fostered by a smith name Regin. Regin had a score to settle with his brother Fafnir, who murdered their father Hreidmar and stole the gold paid to their family as a settlement after the trickster god Loki killed their brother Ótr. The main hurdle for Regin was that Fafnir had subsequently turned into a dragon, thanks to a curse attached to a ring in the treasure horde.

The good and impressionable Sigurd was enlisted to the cause, and armed with a magic sword forged by Regin. He killed Fafnir, cut out his heart, and, in the course roasting it, licked a bit of dragon blood from his fingers, which gave him the ability to speak with birds. Some nearby birds told him that Regin, also corrupted by the ring, was planning to betray and kill Sigurd, so Sigurd instead killed Regin and made off with the loot—carried on the back of a steed descended from Odin's own horse—to engage in further adventures of similar grimness and complexity.

This is the tale that the Sigurdsristningen tells in visual vignettes, showing Sigurd slaying Fafnir, tasting the dragon's blood, talking to birds, killing Regin, and his horse laden with treasure, while Ótr hovers over the proceedings. However, the runic inscription in Fafnir's body describes the carving as a "bridge" made by a woman named Alríkr for "the soul of Holmgeirr." This is significant because, as Scandinavia became Christianized, Fafnir became interchangeable with Satan, and bridge-building projects were funded by the Church to gain local support as well as to represent the bridge they offered to the afterlife, which fit neatly in a culture accustomed to reaching the afterlife by boat.

On March 12th, 1950, a 23-year-old Air Force Lieutenant named William M. Guinther found himself in a tricky situation. He had just flown out of Otis Air Force Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and his engine started sputtering. After a few minutes, it died completely.

Luckily, the young pilot thought fast. "Guinther pushed the 'panic button,' was ejected, cockpit and all, from the plane, and 'chuted down onto a cranberry bog," the Pottstown Mercury reported the next day. "The plane crashed into the sea."  

These days, when someone mashes the panic button, they're usually acting metaphorically—overreacting, letting emotion trump logic, and generally freaking out. But for a little while, Air Force pilots like Guinther were equipped with actual panic buttons, a last-ditch option during dangerous flights. It's thanks to their sense of humor that this useful phrase is in the modern lexicon today.

According to a 1956 oral history compiled by Lieutenant James L. Jackson, the first planes equipped with so-called "panic buttons" were B-17s and B-24s used during the Second World War. Under regular conditions, bomber pilots would communicate with their crews via an intercom. But if a plane sustained enough damage to break the intercom, they had a backup system—a set of bells which, sounded in a particular way, meant "prepare to abandon" and then "jump."

This was the original "panic button," and it was generally rung instead of pushed.

By the time the U.S. entered the Korean War, in 1950, new planes were in play, equipped with brand new panic possibilities. F-84 Thunderjets had a button that jettisoned the "tip tanks"—extra fuel tanks held on the ends of the wings—in case the plane had trouble flying or taking off. Some models had controls that would shoot extinguishing fluid into a flaming engine, or that would deploy ejector seats like Guinther's. And almost all planes had "feathering buttons," which reconfigured the propellers into a more aerodynamic shape in case of engine failure. According to Jackson, all of these were referred to as "panic buttons."

Sticking a bunch of young men together in a stressful situation is great for slang, and at some point during the war, pilots repurposed the panic button as an opportunity to make fun of their agitated comrades, and then of most wartime situations. "[It is] a joking expression used to cover almost everything," wrote correspondent H.D. Quigg in 1951. "When an outfit moves, wags will remark, 'Somebody hit the panic button.' Some guys in the rear areas even have a well-labeled panic button on the wall by their desks."

Quigg and other reporters latched onto the free and easy use of this joke as a sign that the fighters were in good spirits. As enemy forces marched towards American camps in the capital, "signs reading 'panic button' were shortly found on light switches throughout Seoul," reported another 1951 article.

"It's always uttered as broad humor," Quigg wrote in a different dispatch that same year, adding that its new status as a joke boded well for the troops' position: "The days of panic are gone," he wrote. "Experience and confidence have taken over."

The phrase also began appearing in Air Force slang guides—a popular genre in the 1950s, as people at home became increasingly curious about what, exactly, the soldiers in this relatively new wing of the military were getting up to. In August of 1950, it showed up in The Pegasus, a magazine for aspiring pilots, explained as a "state of emergency when the pilot mentally pushes buttons and switches in all directions."

Quigg included its jokier definition in his own 1951 lexicon, along with a few other new coinages, including "hassel" [sic] and "no sweat." The New York Times, behind as usual, stuck it in a 1954 sidebar, called "Jet-Stream of Talk," right between "hangar rats" and "hawk it." They defined it as "get excited." Such a clearly relevant saying quickly made the jump to civilian usage. A New York Times archive search reveals that over the course of the next decade, the metaphorical panic button was either pushed or considered by the television industry, the New York Yankees, and a teen displeased by an unwanted kiss from a sailor.

These days, as the general rate of panic seems to climb higher and higher, real panic buttons still exist—usually as a way to quickly contact police or security companies. But the phrase, with its cooling-down influence, has stuck around as well, working itself into stock tips, sports analysis, and (of course) political discourse. So next time you find your finger inches away from your own personal panic button, thank those feisty Korean War soldiers, who taught us to save the ejecto-seats for when we really need them.

In 1977, Tish and Snooky Bellomo opened a store at 33 St. Marks Place, in New York's East Village. It was called Manic Panic, and as far as anyone knows, it was the first punk store in America. The Bellomo sisters were singers themselves, but they'd always had enviable style, too. At their tiny store, they sold stilettos, sunglasses, gloves with a bit of glam to them, the vintage clothes that they loved—or tore up until they did, and the product they'd become famous for, hair dye.

Almost 40 years later, to visit Tish and Snooky, you have to head to Long Island City, in Queens, where Manic Panic has been headquartered since 1999, in a warehouse-like building sitting along Newtown Creek. "We've always been underground," says Snooky—a sort of "secret society."

The headquarters still has that vibe: inside the 14,000 square foot space where boxes upon boxes of extra bright and bold hair dye are stacked, there's a tiny, hidden boutique, about the same size as the original store, full of hair dyes, rainbow-colored hair extensions and eyelashes, lipstick in pink, orange, purple, blue, and green, and the rest of their iconic line.

Manic Panic is going through a bit of renaissance right now, as pop stars from Rihanna to Katy Perry decide to dye their hair bright blues, red, pinks, greens, and more. Tish and Snooky talked to Atlas Obscura about the place where the company got its start—the store on St. Marks Place.

How did you first even get into music and decide you want to be singers?

Tish: That was easy. We just decided it, and we were.

Snooky: Yeah, we were sisters, we would always sing and dance and put on little shows for our mother, make her watch our shows.

Tish: And for the neighbors and stuff.

Snooky: Oh, yeah, we put on puppet shows.

Tish: We did puppet shows, and then during intermission, we would sell Kool-Aid.

Snooky: We made all the money on the concession stand.

Tish: Yeah, the show was free. But the concession was separate. We’d make Kool-Aid, and we’d sell it. We’d make it in all different colors, very similar to Manic Panic colors.

Snooky: And Tish would make the snacks which was...was it rice?

Tish: I would take rice, and it was all in the presentation. All it was, was white rice. I was five or six, so for some reason, my mother would allow me to cook rice. And then I learned this little trick. You could take a glass—I would take a shot glass—and butter it, put the rice in, and dump it upside-down, so you’d have this perfect little shape, this little pyramid-type shape. It would be garnished with jujubes, these multi-colored little candies. So, it would be rice with jujubes. It was all like Manic Panic colors. The Kool-Aid, the jujubes.

Snooky: So we were always singing and dancing…

Tish: And playing with glitter…

Snooky: Putting on shows, playing with glitter, and selling stuff. We’re still doing that.

How did you get into more punk music?

Snooky: We were on the scene…

Tish: First hanging out at Max’s..

Snooky: Yeah, going to Max’s Kansas City [a punk and glam-rock club in New York]...and it was at the tail end of the glitter-glam era. We were just out and about all the time. So we knew all the bands, we’d go to all the shows. Then we got into a show. We heard a friend of ours...a guy who became a friend of ours, this guy Gorilla Rose, we were in the room—I’ll never forget, it was the dressing room of Town Hall…

Tish: I thought it was the stairway.

Snooky: I thought it was the dressing room, because the Miami…

Tish: It was their dressing room, but I thought it was outside the dressing room door, a little bit, and we were sitting on the stairs, because we were all smoking.

Snooky: Well, I wasn’t. He was talking about this show he was going to be in, the Palm Casino Review, and he was going to play a talking portrait on the wall. He said, I’m going to do this act called Gorilla Rose and the Gutter Rats, and I need two backup singers to be my gutter rats. And Tish tugged on the tails of his clear plastic tuxedo, and said...we’re backup singers.

Tish: We’re your gutter rats. 

Snooky: So then we were in the show.

Tish: That was ‘73?...’74? We became involved in this huge production, the Palm Casino Review, with all these drag queens, who taught us so much about make-up. And all these fabulous people, who basically just wanted to be on stage. A lot of them were very talented; a lot of them were not.

Snooky: Everybody loved putting on a show...

Tish: Everybody had great style.

Snooky: ...being divas.

Did you live down in the East Village?

Snooky: No, we lived in the Bronx. We would take the train from the last stop in the Bronx, all the way downtown, putting on our make-up the whole way, and by the time we got downtown, which was over an hour ride…

Tish: And it was usually around midnight. We would go out pretty late, come back when it was getting light.

Snooky: But we were obsessed with the downtown scene. We just thought it was so exciting and glamorous, and it was. You’d see David Bowie out at Max’s...you know, Lou Reed and all these people…

Tish: Oh, you know, I think one of the things, even before we started hanging out heavily at Max’s, didn’t we go to England first?

Snooky: I know when we came back from England, we really started going to Max’s. Yeah, because we had gone to England, where we went to these fabulous clubs, one of which was Speakeasy, where we saw, all these glam rock icons, just hanging out, all in one night.

Tish: Led Zeppelin…

Snooky: Jethro Tull…

Tish: Yeah...it was amazing.

Snooky: One-stop shopping.

So you were singing mostly, and then you got the idea to start the store.

Tish: We were in the Palm Casino Review, and the guys from Blondie, Debbie and Chris, were friends with Tomato and Gorilla and all our friends in the Palm Casino Review, so they decided we could try out to be back-ups in the Blondie band.

Everybody loved the way we dressed, so after we were out of the band, we decided to open a store with our friend Gina, because rents were so cheap.

How did you dress? What did people like?

Snooky: It was like a...mixture

Tish: It was glammy, punky...glam-punk...I guess.

Snooky: We’d go thrift shopping with Debbie Harry [the lead singer of Blondie], and find stuff from the ‘50s and ‘60s, just anything we felt was cool. If it wasn’t, we’d trash it up to make it cool.

Tish: I guess it was “glunk,” glam into punk.

When did you first realize that you were someone that other people looked at and thought, I like what they’re doing, I’m going to copy them—that you had your own style?

Tish: Just throughout life.

Snooky: In high school, we started wearing stars in our hair, and then other people started wearing stars in their hair. We got so mad.

Tish: We’d get so annoyed that people were copying us.

Snooky: People were always asking us where we got our outfits.

Tish: And I went to fashion design school for a short period of time, but it interfered with my nightlife too much, so I gave it up. But I had the desire to design, and I was making stuff for people here and there. I did some work for Dr. John, like rhinestoning and glammy stuff like that.

Snooky: Then we opened the first punk store in America. It was just what we loved. We always sold what we loved, and always did what we loved. So we got so much attention because we were the first punk store in America, we realized we were onto something. It was a good thing.

How did you find the first storefront?

Tish: I think someone told us about it.

Snooky: St. Marks wasn’t cool then. It was a wasteland. It was like this battle zone, there were all these empty store fronts. No one was shopping there.

Right, because it was before the ‘80s art scene in the East Village.

Together: It was ‘77.

So, post-Beatnik, pre-’80s art scene.

Tish: Yeah, we used to call St. Marks a dead hippie block.

Snooky: It was lots of junkies…

Tish: Homeless people…

Snooky: It was not a pleasant place to be, but it was cheap. It was $250 rent, and between me and Tish and our ex-partner, Gina, we’d come up with the rent.

We made stuff and brought stuff down from our rooms in the Bronx...and we’d go shopping with Debbie Harry at this basement on Reade St. that had all these unused leftover vintage stiletto-heeled shoes from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Cleared them out. And we’d find leftover lots of sharkskin suits, and just whatever we found, and we’d invest any money we made back in the business. Little by little, we built it.

If I had come during the first couple of years, how would the store have been? How had it changed five or seven years in?

Tish: In the very beginning, we hardly had anything to sell.

Snooky: Hardly anyone came in.

Tish: We were just living on this press we kept getting because we were the first punk boutique in America, and people would call us and ask us to mail them things. One of the most impressive products we had was our hair color, which we were bringing in from England. And you know, we’d have vintage sunglasses, and gloves, and all sorts of unused vintage.

We had a cat that used to swat at people.

Snooky: Cranky cat.

Tish: She was a polydactyl, so she had lots of extra toes in the front and the back. And sometimes she’d be sleeping on the boxes behind the clothes racks, and she’d just start batting at people...it would scare people.

Snooky: It was kind of a dump, because it was a couple steps down from street level, and the dirt would always come in. It was really hard to keep clean. In the beginning, it would just be Tish or me or Gina in the store…

Tish: Or Howie Pyro.

Snooky: Our first employee, he was, what, 14 or 15?

Tish: He needed extra credit for school.

Snooky: All we could pay him was $5 a day, but it was more than any of us made. Sometimes not one person would come in all day. Sometimes we’d make 50 cents, but luckily we were living at home with our very patient, understanding mother.

Did you imagine it would grow into a business?

Tish: I think we hoped it would, but we never had any kind of business training, and everything we had to do on such a shoestring budget. We couldn’t afford—we had really crappy looking floors, so we just painted it black. I think we did the same thing with the ceiling because it was so ugly. We drilled holes in the wall…

Snooky: We couldn’t afford a shoe rack.

Tish: We just drilled holes in the wall. Actually, Snooky’s boyfriend drilled holes in the wall. We put the heels in the holes.

When did it first feel like it was starting to work?

Snooky: It wasn’t that long... I think it was Christmas or Halloween. We were just amazed. We had gotten so much publicity. I remember Gina saying...we’re sitting on a gold mine here.

Tish: That was...we opened somewhere around April, but our official opening was in July. So if it was around Christmas, we were already doing well. Or mostly.

Snooky: We realized then it was a business that we had, that no one else had. Since we were the first. We were the only ones selling that style in all of America. And so we had the jump on everyone. Then all these other “punk stores” started popping up on St. Marks. Stores that had been vintage turned punk, but...we were the only punk “owned and operated” store.

Tish: We were the only ones who were entertainers as well. So we knew everything about makeup. We had a full line of not only extreme make-up but theatrical make-up, so people would come from all over to buy our cosmetics.

Snooky: And Halloween, there would be like, a line out the door. We had to let people in in little bits, because otherwise we would get ripped off. We were known for being the best store to rip off because we were just two women…

Tish: It was terrible layout, too. The door was at that end, and it was long and narrow. It was a little bit wider than this. But it was just really hard to control. Even though we had 5 or 6 people working different stations, you just couldn’t help everybody. So we had to have a doorman, and let people in like that, and we had to have them checking all the bags. It was really, you know...

Total crazy.

Snooky: It was. But we just figured everything out as we went along. We started out with one little candy box as our cash register, a Louis Sherry vintage candy box. And we knew we really made it big when we had to get a second candy box for our register in the back. And then Tish found a giant one.

Tish: So then we had three.

Snooky: Then we finally got a real cash register but it didn’t really work. It was just this big piece of metal that didn’t do anything but basically what the candy box did, just have the money in it. It didn’t add or subtract, or give you a receipt, but it looked like a cash register, so we were thrilled.

Tish: Yeah, and you could lock it.

Was it the sort of thing where you always had to be there?

Tish: Most of the time, unless we were out foraging for more stuff.

Snooky: We were almost always there. And we’re almost always here.

Sometimes we would sleep there. When the blackout happened in ‘77, we had to sleep there, to make sure we didn’t get ransacked.

Tish: People were looting, so we just slept over, like we were going to do something, other than get murdered.

Snooky: When we were closing the store, we were sleeping there. Because the apartment above us, where Tish had been living was empty, and we’d hear people…

Tish: Squatters.

Snooky: ...living there, and I think we heard through the grapevine that they were planning on breaking in.

Tish: And there was a big hole in the floor, too, wasn’t there?

Snooky: Oh god, what a nightmare.

Tish: So we’d sleep there, guarding.

Snooky: And it was so cold on the floor, and we had these giant cardboard, packing boxes, I guess they were, and we’d sleep inside of them, like homeless people. And thought, homeless people have the right idea, the cardboard is really warm. But it was scary.

I remember the cat knocking something over, and we were sure the burglars were coming in, and we were like, trying to get out of our boxes.

You had that great sign—where did it come from?

Snooky: Oh, Tish made it.

Tish: The original sign...there was a lightbox, and it had a broken piece of plastic in it. We measured it; Gina and I went down to Canal Street, got a new piece of plastic, I remember coming back with it on the train, and us laughing because we were like, in rush hour, with this thing on the 6 train, and it was huge. It was 6 or 7 feet wide. We got a can of red paint, and I just sat there on the sidewalk, painting our sign.

We had figured we wanted to call the store Manic Panic, our mother had thought of the name, and I just thought, ok, Manic Panic, this is what it looks like to me. I just did the shatter-y logo, that didn’t exist back then. Then it became a font. I just did it by hand. It was a little sloppy, but...it was alright. So, that was our sign.

I don’t know what ever happened that. It went into storage and then it disappeared.

Snooky: We’ll probably have to find on eBay, and we’ll have to pay to get it back.

People now often talk about the ‘80s as one of the St. Marks heydays. Did it feel like something special was happening at the time?

Snooky: It did.

Tish: That whole area was like, the place to be. When people came from other areas, they’d be really nervous, like, a friend of ours said, “Oh, I was so scared when I walked in your store, and you were there and you were Blondie’s back up singers, and you were in the Sic F*cks, and you did this and that, and God, I was so scared, but you were so nice to us.”

They were really surprised, because you went into the other stores, with no one who had anything to do with the scene, except maybe hanging out, and they would give everybody attitude, and be bitchy to everyone and make them feel uncomfortable and unfabulous. We were the store that wasn’t like that.

It never has been our way of doing business—we’ve always felt like especially the people who were a little...not so fabulous, they should feel fabulous, if they want to.

Snooky: It’s just the way our mother brought us up was, to be nice to people, and not be mean.

Tish: We can’t be mean to anyone. Unless, you know, they do us wrong.

Snooky: Then forget it.

Tish: Forget it. Hell hath no fury like a Bellomo scorned.

Snooky: But we did know, from early on, at the dawn of punk, we knew it was such a special thing, and such a special scene to be a part of. And it was like, a turning point in the history of music. We felt it and we knew it, and it was just so much fun to be there at the beginning of it. There’s never been anything like it, and there never will.

That’s about having taste, too—recognizing when something special is happening.

Tish: It attracted a group of people that I think felt just different from everybody else. It was sort of like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where all the different people from all over the world are, like, playing with mashed potatoes and they end up at the giant mountain. It was sort of like that. Everybody who kind of felt like a misfit or like they didn’t belong anywhere, they would feel at home at CBGB at night and Manic Panic during the day.

Snooky: Because everyone was a misfit. Everybody in a punk band was a misfit. We all banded together, and the rest of the world wanted to be misfits with us.

Tish: A lot of them were the same people who laughed at us, all of a sudden wanted to be part.

Snooky: We were tortured for the way we looked.

Tish: It’s the same thing with our hair color. When we first started doing beauty shows, people would laugh at us, and now we’ve got a hundred competitors, and they’re acting like it’s something new or they discovered it, or something. They’re the same people who laughed at us.

What kind of hair shows?

Snooky: We would go all over the world, to like trade shows, and conventions. These companies exhibits show their wears. The head honchos at the biggest convention, CosmoProf wanted to ban us because they said our booth looked like a bordello, you know we made the show look trashy, or something. Then the next year, everyone’s stand looked like a bordello.

How did you end up leaving the original store?

Snooky: Our landlord bought the building and didn’t renew our lease. So we were month by month.

Tish: This was his introduction. He walked in, he was like the third landlord. No one would ever tell us they were selling the building, even though we kept asking, because we wanted to try to buy it. He walked in, and said, I’m your new landlord, and I suppose you’re going to guess that I’m not going to renew your lease. That was his introduction. We had maybe a year left, or less.

Snooky: We just like didn’t know what to do or where to go. I guess we were in denial, that we would ever have to leave St. Marks. When it finally happened we were kind of caught off guard, and we just put everything in storage. At that time, we had started doing wholesale, for hair color. We continued doing the wholesale out of my then-boyfriend, now-husband’s studio apartment. It was a walk-up apartment in the West Village.

So, tiny, probably.

Snooky: It was a studio, one room, with hair dye up to the ceiling.

Tish: I don’t think it was any bigger than this room. It was a different shape but..

Snooky: It might have been smaller…but you know, we’d get these hair dye deliveries.

Tish: Oh, the UPS guy hated us.

Snooky: Oh, he did. We were just doing it ourselves. Answering the phone, taking the orders, packing the orders, rolling the boxes down the stairs, and putting them into my car, driving up to UPS, sometimes trying to find boxes to pack the stuff in on the way, and Tish would be in the backseat, packing the orders, while I’d be driving like a madwoman so we could get to UPS before they closed.

Tish: And they were usually pretty accurate. I didn’t screw up the orders.

Snooky: Yeah, we didn’t get many complaints! So then, after a year of that, we happened to be talking to someone we knew who had a chain of exercise studios—Crunch! I saw him at a party, and we knew him. And I said, we have all this stuff in storage from our old store, we’re doing wholesale out of my boyfriend’s studio apartment. He said, oh, well, I’m moving onto St. Marks Place, and opening a Crunch, and there’s this little office space that I’m not using, and you could have your store there and sell off your stuff and do your wholesaling over there. And so we moved in there.

Tish: And it wasn’t much bigger than this…the same size as this.

Snooky: Yeah! It was. It was a little basement. We were literally underground.

Tish: But at least we were still on St. Marks Place, and we were still down the block from our old space. But the guy upstairs, from Kim’s Video, kept throwing our sign away.

Snooky: He hated that our sign was hand-painted. And he’d instruct his employees to take it down the street and put it in the garbage. And we’d have to take it out of the garbage every day. Then he’d take it upstairs, and they’d have to have it behind their counter, and they’d say, oh, yeah, here it is and give it back to us. Finally, he burned it or something because we never saw it again. He tortured us, he absolutely tortured us, because he hated how DIY we were.

When the Crunch moved, we had to move again, over to 9th Street, to this little basement, which had a good vibe, it was Jimi Hendrix’s old crash pad and the original La Mama theater started in that basement. We were there for three years, maybe?

Tish: That landlord was nice.

Snooky: Then we moved to Tribeca, to a big loft space…

Tish: Because it wasn’t big enough for us, that little basement.

Snooky: Yeah, we were doing lots of wholesale by then. It was a scary basement, another underground place, with these rickety metal steps that people were afraid to go down. You know, you couldn’t even see what you were going down into. It was this little dungeon.

So, our wholesale was getting bigger and bigger. We outgrew that space and moved to this big—seemingly, at the time—loft space in Tribeca, and we were there for five years, and when that lease was up, the landlord wanted to quadruple the rent, so we moved out here, in ‘99.

By this time, you were doing a lot of wholesale, mostly with the hair dye...When did it become clear that the hair dye would be the product that would come to define the company?

Tish: I think it was back in the ‘70s. When we first started wholesaling, we thought, this was it. People were coming in from all around the world.

Snooky: We were the only ones who had it.

We’d go over to England with suitcases full of stuff they couldn’t get over there, like vintage sunglasses, and whatever we found.

Tish: Biker rings.

Snooky: We’d sell all that, and with the money, we’d buy all the things they had there that we didn’t have here. One of the things was hair dye. I think we just went to beauty supplies or something, and got it.

Tish: We just started bringing it in. We were like international smugglers. We were bringing it in for our store, and people started asking us to wholesale it. We contacted the manufacturer, and we were getting it from them, wholesale and selling it here. Then we just kept getting bigger and bigger.

They weren’t supplying us properly. We had a gentleman’s agreement with them that we were an exclusive, then we would find boxes that were marked for our competitors and our customers. It got really, you know, they weren’t really nice people.

Snooky: Oh, they were horrible. It was one of the worst times of our lives.

Tish: Our mother was dying, they weren’t supplying us, they were selling to our customers and competitors.

Snooky: We were in this tiny little basement.

Tish: We thought everything was over, and we had just enough strength to go find somebody to make the dye for us. It turned out that was the guy who originally invented it, and that the guys we were buying it from had stolen the formula. They were working for the inventor at one point, and they had taken the formula and run with it. So we found the original inventor, and he was manufacturing it for us.

Snooky: He said to us, oh, I wondered when you’d be calling me. So it all worked out. Always does.

Is Long Island City a good place for you?

Snooky: It’s great.

Tish: We love it. But we know we’re out of here, too, in a few years. We’re traveling salesman. We still do our dog and pony act. We’re coming out with a professional line, and expanding our product line, and looking into licensing our name for products. So it’s just expansion.

What are the things that make you guy panic?

Snooky: Someone in the Middle East who pretended to want to carry our line and distribute our line is now using half of our name, Panic, for a line of alternative hair colors. That has put me in such a panic, and I’m just so mad.

Tish: He took one of our competitor’s packaging, the exact same packaging, but put our name on it. So it’s really like, you know, it’s so blatant.

The other things that panics us is people not getting stuff done that they’re supposed to get done. Little things like that you can’t control.

Snooky: The thought of moving puts me in a panic, because every time we’ve had to move, we’ve had a bigger and bigger space, so now we have 14,000 square feet of stuff we’ve collected over almost 40 years. So the thought of moving almost traumatizes me. It puts me in such a state of panic. I would just love to never have to worry about moving ever again, and never be in that panic mode. It disrupts your whole life, your whole business, it’s horrible. The last time we moved it was horrible. That was 17 years ago, and it was not as much stuff as we have now.

New England, winter 1923. A little girl sits alone in her room, staring through the window at the woods behind her house. She daydreams as most children do, but then she goes to her typewriter and she writes. By age 12, Barbara Newhall Follett has published her first novel—The House Without Windows—based upon the wonders of those woods. She is called a child prodigy, a literary luminary, a spirit of nature. So why have so few people heard of her or read her work?

For one, Barbara Newhall Follett disappeared without a trace when she was 25 years old. 

After The House Without Windows was published to such acclaim, the young author was in hot demand for reviews and additional books. Of course, not all the critics adored her. A few were downright dismayed that she had been published and had a taste of literary success at such a young age: “What price will Barbara have to pay for her ‘big days’ at the typewriter?” wondered Anne Carroll Moore of the New York Herald Tribune. But Barbara wasn’t particularly concerned with having a “normal” childhood. Like many children who display intellectual giftedness or precocity, she didn’t seem that interested in children her own age. When one of her playmates criticized what Barbara considered fun (her writing), she wrote them a letter explaining, “You don’t understand why I have my work to do—because, at this particular time, you have none at all.”

Throughout her teens Barbara continued to write, but she also turned her focus to what she considered the most prudent adventure of her life: to be a crewman on a ship sailing out to the Atlantic. At 14, her second book was published, The Voyage of the Norman D. During this time her father, Wilson, left Barbara’s mother for a younger woman. Barbara and her mother coped with the loss by sailing around the world, writing about their expeditions. They left Barbara’s younger sister, Sabra, behind. Don’t feel too sorry for Sabra Follett, though: she was also brilliant and went on to become the first woman admitted to Princeton’s graduate school in 1961. 

Barbara and her mother eventually came back to New York with no money, and Barbara took a job as a secretary, which made her miserable. “My dreams are going through their death flurries,” she wrote to a friend. Without her father, who had been her encourager since she was small, the work began to dwindle. She found new inspiration in a young man she’d met named Nickerson Rogers. They traveled extensively—along the Appalachian Trail and in Europe—before marrying in 1934 and settling in Brookline, Massachusetts. For the first few years of the marriage she was happy, but somewhere around 1939, the marriage began to suffer.

“On the surface things are terribly, terribly calm, and wrong,” she wrote to a friend rather ominously, .”I still think there is a chance that the outcome will be a happy one, but I would have to think that anyway, in order to live; so you can draw any conclusions you like from that!”

What happened next was, whether she intended it to be or not, the conclusion: On December 7, 1939, after she and Nick had a fight, Barbara left their apartment on foot with just $30 and a notebook. She was never seen or heard from again. Nick didn’t report her missing for two weeks, and when she was listed as missing it was under her married name, Barbara Rogers — so the press didn’t pick up on the child prodigy turned gone girl. In fact, it wasn’t until her mother published a book in 1966 that the press got wind that the former child prodigy had disappeared. She’d been gone without a trace for over 25  years and no one knew.

Except, of course, her family. Over the years no sign of Barbara ever turned up, but her father, with whom she had never reconciled, wrote a letter imploring her to come home that was published in The Atlantic.  

Today, Barbara’s half-nephew, Stefan Cooke, is the keeper of her mysteries. He’s published a book of her letters, runs farksolia.org which is dedicated to her work, and has tried to keep the spirit of Barbara Newhall Follett alive. Despite his extensive research, Stefan admits he can’t say with any certainty what happened to Barbara, though he thinks she very well could have started over again somewhere else, under a new identity. Though even that possibility, which would be true to Barbara’s dramatic and fascinating life, doesn’t sit entirely right with him:

“Whether she could have been so cruel as to not let her mother and sister and friends know whether she was living or dead is a good question,” he told me in an email, concluding “Maybe we'll never know what happened to her. Thankfully she left behind her treasure chest of letters, short stories, poems, Farksoo (her invented language), and her superb lost novel, Lost Island—and her voice rings loud and clear throughout.

Situated on a small enclosed site in the waterfront district of Causeway Bay, the Noonday Gun is a Hotchkiss three-pound artillery piece that is ceremonially fired every day at (appropriately enough) noon on the dot. While this practice is somewhat charming in its own right, the details behind the practice—such as the owner of the gun, and the purported genesis of the tradition—provide striking insight into Hong Kong's British colonial history.

The gun is owned by Jardine Matheson, a massive British conglomerate that was one of the first trading houses, or "hongs," in Hong Kong. The land that is now Causeway Bay was bought by Jardine Matheson in 1841, and was in fact the first piece of Hong Kong sold at public auction by the eager new colonial government. With its roots in Imperial China, Jardine Matheson was involved in shipping tea and cotton, but also made a great deal of money from the illegal opium trade. They built the company’s main offices and warehouses—known locally as godowns—on the newly acquired plot.

The Noonday Gun has it roots in a 21-pound gun that Jardine Matheson set up on the waterfront of their commercial fiefdom. According to the commonly related story, the company's private militia would fire the gun in salute whenever the head of the company (or, in some versions, whenever one of the company's ships) sailed into or out of the harbor. In 1860, a senior officer of the Royal Navy, new to town and unfamiliar with the practice, found this offensive, as typically only government dignitaries or military officers receive such treatment. As a reprimand, Jardine Matheson was ordered to henceforth fire the gun every day at noon, providing a service in the form of a public time signal.

The probable kernel of truth in this story is the gun's role as a public time signal. This was a common practice in many harbors in the 19th century, allowing all ships within auditory range to correctly calibrate their onboard clocks, which they used on voyages to calculate longitude. Thus, the Noonday Gun is most likely a practical measure that became so common to daily harbor life that it morphed over time into local tradition.

The original gun was dismantled by the occupying Japanese Imperial Army in 1941. A new gun was donated by the Royal Navy after Hong Kong was liberated in 1945; this gun (humorously enough) received noise complaints, and was replaced by the current, smaller gun in 1947. This gun has a history of its own, having seen action in the Battle of Jutland during the First World War.

The Noonday Gun was immortalised in the popular (and cartoonishly racist) song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" written by Noel Coward. The song was first performed by Beatrice Lillie in a musical revue called The Third Little Show at the Music Box Theatre in New York, on June 1, 1931. In 1968, Coward visited Hong Kong and was allowed to fire the gun that he made famous with the lines, "In Hong Kong, they strike a gong, and fire off a Noonday Gun / To reprimand each inmate who's in late," going on to observe, "But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun!"

Nature is getting ready for an epic snowball fight, and it looks like they’re stocking up ammo in Arctic Russia. According to the Siberian Times, villagers near the Gulf of Ob seem to have started finding accumulations of perfectly rounded snowballs created by a rare coastal phenomenon.

Located above the Arctic Circle, the small village of Nyda, with a population of just over 2,000, sits on the Gulf of Ob, a freezing arm of the Kara Sea. Just over a week ago members of the village started noticing that at one spot on the coast, fields of giant snowballs had begun to spontaneously appear. Ranging from the size of a tennis ball to the size of volleyballs, the icy spheres came from seemingly nowhere, but have an uncanny uniformity.

Anyone for a snowball fight? Nature makes its own collection of snowballs on the Arctic shore of the Gulf of Ob https://t.co/sona6DeNr4pic.twitter.com/9gtG9foJKb

— The Siberian Times (@siberian_times) November 4, 2016

Even the older generation in the village say they have never seen anything like it, but a village spokesperson quoted in the article seems to have found the answer. Apparently as the tide came in, it contacted a layer of frost, covering the beach in ice, and then as the water slowly receded, it left bits of ice that spun on the wet sand creating spheres. The odd phenomenon was confirmed by a representative of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, quoted in the Siberian Times story.

Whatever the cause, the citizens of Nyda look like they are set for the best snowball fight of all time.

The Pembrey airfield operated between 1937 and 1957 as a base for RAF Flying Training Command as well as Polish Hurricanes and Spitfires during World War II. But its greatest claim to fame came in 1942 when the airfield played an important role in maintaining the RAF's air superiority over the German Luftwaffe, when a enemy Focke-Wulfe 190 aircraft landed there in error after action over the Bristol Channel.  

The pilot, Oberleutnant Armin Faber had been forced north beyond Exeter, and mistook the Bristol Channel for the English Channel. Short on fuel, he landed at Pembrey believing it to be a Luftwaffe airfield in France. The Pembrey Duty Pilot grabbed the only available weapon, a flare pistol, and ran from the control tower and jumped onto the wing of the aircraft as it taxied in, capturing the aircraft and pilot.  

Faber was flying the latest enemy fighter, the Focke-Wulf 190A-3, a type the RAF had only ever seen flying over France and were finding it superior to the Mk V Spitfire in use at the time. Fighter Command dispatched pilots to photograph and return the aircraft to the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, where they were able to compare with it against the Hawker Typhoon which had been under development for some time and, importantly, against the Spitfire Mk IX.

The Mk IX aircraft had been hurriedly developed by Rolls Royce from the Mk V in response to the F-W 190 appearing in France and was rushed into service four months before the the Mk VIII (which actually outperformed the Mk IX ) which required extensive airframe development. So good was the Mk IX that it remained in service until the end of the war. 

Today part of RAF Pembrey has been converted to a so-called “International Airport,” but remarkably it can only be used at weekends except with permission from the RAF who use parts of the old air station to control aircraft using the Pembrey Sands Air Weapons Range in the estuary. Another part of the airfield has been converted in a motor racing circuit. The airfield is also the site of one of only five Dome Training Facilities (for training gunners) left in the UK.

The megalithic complex at Stanton Drew in Somerset consists of three stone circles and a three-stone group known as "The Cove," dating back as far as 2000-3000 BCE. Although this is the third largest complex of prehistoric standing stones in England, it is surprisingly little known. There are however several local traditional stories about the ancient megaliths—the best-known being the wedding party that was turned to stone.

As the legend goes, the party was held throughout Saturday, but a man clothed in black—the Devil in disguise—arrived after midnight and started to play his violin for the merrymakers, continuing into holy Sunday morning. When dawn broke, everybody had been turned to stone by the Demon. In this interpretation, the stone circles are the dancers, the avenues are the fiddlers, and the cove is the bride and groom with the drunken churchman at their feet. They are still awaiting the Devil, who promised to come back someday and play for them again.

The largest circle at Stanton Drew, the Great Circle, is 113 metres (370 feet) in diameter, making it one of the largest stone circles in the country. It has 26 surviving upright stones. Yet recent surveys have revealed that the circles and cove were just part of a much more elaborate and important ritual site than previously imagined.

New Orleans is no stranger to paranormal activity and or classic Creole fare. Muriel’s Jackson Square just happens to serve a generous helping of both.

At this French Quarter restaurant, patrons dine amongst the spirits of New Orleans' past. Before serving up plates of goat cheese crepes, the building was believed to have served as a holding facility for slaves being put up for auction in the early 1700s. Then in 1788, The Great New Orleans Fire struck and partially destroyed the original building. The new owner, Pierre Antoine Lepardi Jourdan, spent several years restoring the property and transforming it into a home for his family. In 1814 he lost his beloved home in a game of poker and before being forced to vacate the premises, committed suicide on the second floor of the house.

In the year 2001, after several changes in ownership, Muriel’s Jackson Square opened its doors to the public maintaining the original design of the building. After experiencing much paranormal activity (particularly on the second floor where Jourdan had taken his own life) the restaurant converted the second floor into a séance room where the ghost of Jourdan is believed to spend most of his time.

Patrons and employees of Muriel’s have reported seeing objects being moved around the room, sudden shattering of glasses and unidentified voices on the second floor. The owners of the establishment maintain that the spirits present in the building are completely harmless and even entertaining. They welcome the spirits of the building to dine with them harmoniously and even reserve a table for the spirit of Mr. Jourdan every night, complete with an offering of wine and bread.

Early Sunday morning on January 27, 2013, the band Gurizada Fandangueira was playing to a packed house at the Kiss nightclub in Santa Maria, Brazil. Hundreds of people, including many university students, were dancing to the group's upbeat country pop music on the last weekend of Brazil’s summer break. The band shot sparkler columns up into the air, a dazzling display that audiences expected at every Gurizada Fandangueira show. But as one of the guitarists was getting ready for the sixth song of the set, he saw embers float down.

Flames quickly engulfed the acoustic foam insulation on the ceiling. Hot ash fell over the band members and dancers and the venue filled with thick smoke. The approximately 2,000 people inside the Kiss nightclub (1,000 over the building’s capacity) fled towards the only windowless exit. At first security guards thought patrons were trying to leave without paying and blocked exits, trapping victims inside. 

Many patrons ran towards the restrooms. Some were following the flow of people and mistook the restrooms as exits, while others went to the small space to hide. Black smoke impaired vision. The narrow hallway that led to the exit became clogged. Pushing and shoving ensued. One person fell, causing another, and another. 

The tragic scene investigators and survivors described was nightmarish and chaotic. Two hundred and forty-two people perished in the tragic Kiss nightclub fire, and another 630 were injured. When emergency responders arrived at the scene at 3 a.m., people said the Kiss nightclub looked “like a war zone.”

“There were lots of casualties and a lot of people who ran to the restrooms,” says computer scientist Sharad Sharma, who has recreated a simulation of the Kiss nightclub fire at the Bowie State University Virtual Reality Laboratory in Maryland. “According to the data, there were 180 victims [in the restroom] and it’s really surprising how 180 people can fit in a small space.”

Researchers investigate these kinds of disasters to understand when crowded events turn dangerous and why they spread. When studying crowds, many different factors come into play, from the behaviors of individuals, the social group behaviors, the disaster (if there is one), to the design of the space. Computer scientists try to incorporate all these variables in models of the movement patterns that ripple through the masses. Taking the information from past events, they also create virtual simulations and technologies in the hope of preventing future disasters.

Defining crowd disasters is complex. In large mass gatherings, the mere shifting of hundreds and thousands of bodies filed in the confines of a space can lead to confusion, and sometimes a disastrous crowd collapse. Whereas, in the case of the Kiss nightclub tragedy, the fire initiated an evacuation which sent hundreds fleeing towards the exit. Many were crushed and trampled in the evacuation process.

Many media outlets referred to what happened as a “mass panic” or a “stampede.” But such terms are not appropriate to the situation, according to John Drury, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex.

“People follow others when they perceive these others as relevant, so it is not mindless,” Drury says. “The problems come when the others don’t take the danger seriously enough. People more often die in emergencies through not evacuating quickly rather than through haste.”

Stampeding is a primitive, instinctive behavior of herd animals, and panic implies a rashness or irrationality in response to a real or perceived danger, Drury writes on his academic blog. But crowds shouldn't be compared to unintentional, mindless mobs. Instead Drury refers to these events as progressive crowd collapses.

Cultural connections and social groups, such as being Chicago Cubs fans or sharing the same religion, can influence the behavior of a crowd, he explains. “Assuming that the crowd is simply made up of individuals who behave like particles or billiard balls in a mass doesn’t account for a number of features of crowds," Drury and his colleague wrote in The Conversation. “Some physical crowds could contain many different psychological crowds, or groups with different social identities.”

Computer scientists try to factor in the psychological variables. There are artificial intelligence and logic algorithms, such as the "fuzzy logic" model, that account for unpredictable factors and emotional behaviors, or “fuzzy” characteristics, such as stress, anger, and panic. Still, the variability of emotions remains a challenge to compute. In the Megacity collaborative virtual reality environment, Sharma was able to program different agents or roles with hostile, selfish, altruistic, and leadership behaviors. Users who participate in the scenarios can be assigned a behavior to help make the simulation more lifelike.

“Some researchers argue that there is no panic in models because it’s too difficult to quantify panic,” says Jian Ma, an evacuation dynamics and pedestrian traffic researcher at Southwest Jiaotong University in China. “Without a definition or a computation, you cannot say that panic induced this mass fleeing.”

Ma instead describes the “spread of panic” as a spread and flux in pressure. When crowds reach a critical density, a certain amount of force, push, or a fall can cause a domino effect, he says. This spread of movement causes different kinds of patterns within the crowd.

In 2014, hundreds of thousands of people were shuffling on a small ramp at Chen Yi Square on the Bund riverfront in Shanghai to get a good view of the New Year’s Eve light show. So many people were crammed on the narrow passageway that linked the upper and lower levels of the deck that they were at a standstill. Yet, those with obscured views continued to push forward, causing a problematic counter flow movement.

As the density of people continued to build, the counter flow behavior triggered the crowd collapse, says Ma. Thirty-six died and 50 were injured.

“This situation is quite common in other disasters,” Ma says. “It’s very important to control the flow direction and to avoid counter flow situations.”

The ramp in Chen Yi Square that was at the root of the New Year’s Eve disaster has since been remodeled, Ma says. The passage is much wider and slopes in a more optimal fashion.

Often times people cannot see how much congestion there is at the head of the crowd, Drury writes. People also commonly try to escape from the place in which they entered. This can cause clogging at the doors, a kind of heart pumping, push-and-pull behavior, Sharma explains. In the case of a fire, evacuees may not see through the smoke or be able to get to the exit closest to them.

In Germany, 21 people died of suffocation at the Love Parade musical festival in 2010. Ma obtained the video footage of the crowd mobbed inside a compact tunnel—the only passageway into the venue. The underpass had been closed by police who said there were already 1.4 million attendees inside, which left the people stuck in the tunnel with nowhere to turn. Over loudspeakers, people inside the festival were instructed to exit, which caused even more congestion.

There were as many as 11 people crammed into a square meter, unleashing a kind of “special earthquake” in the frozen crowd, Ma explains. The pressure release caused a "crowd turbulent flow movement", which is much like a stop-and-go traffic wave. There hasn’t been another Love Parade festival since the horrific event. 

“There are some design features that make successful evacuation more likely,” says Drury. “Knowing the building layout and fire exits is also important.” However, this can be a challenge if those exits are obstructed from view.  To help people in real-time, Sharma and his research lab have been working on an augmented reality phone app that pinpoints a person on a floor map of the building, guiding them to the best possible exit.

The team ran a test with the blueprint of Bowie State University’s library and used Wi-Fi bay stations to help triangulate a person’s location. The app is placed in front of a marker that projects the floorplan and visually shows the exits. Sharma hopes the lab can further develop the app so that they can find where everyone is in a building and provide escape routes. “If you have a known location of all the people, you can give users specific instructions on what exit to take, what exit not to take, and how to respond to the situation,” he says.

Other real-time crowd management tools have been deployed during mass religious gatherings. In response to the 2015 crush during the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, this year the Saudi Ministry of Hajj gave pilgrims electronic bracelets with individual tracking GPS and vibrating alert systems to inform when they should slow down. Additionally, Sharma’s Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR virtual reality simulations of subways, airplanes, college campuses, and urban environments are being further developed to serve as training grounds for emergency responders.

While they may be painful to relive, researchers take the data from these catastrophic events to try to prevent them from happening again—spinning alternate scenarios to be better prepared for the unexpected future. Simulating evacuation situations in a virtual space gives more flexibility, and provides more opportunities to grab better data.

“Humans and the factors of these events are so unpredictable,” says Sharma. In these studies “you can come up with these lessons from different behaviors and learn how to prevent chaos.”   

Tucked away near the gigantic Victoria Hospital in the Westminster Ponds lies a forgotten gem of the London Health Sciences Center: a quaint village made just for the rest and recuperation of war-weary veterans.

Built in 1946, the Western Counties Health and Occupational Center served as a rehabilitation center for World War II veterans, not only as a physiotherapy center where tired vets could recuperate, but as training grounds to re-enter civilian life. In an era in which nature was seen as an effective remedy to many ailments, the center was built on 400 acres of what now lies the Westminster Ponds Conservation area.

At its height, the center consisted of eleven buildings (all named after Southwestern Ontario Counties: Wellington, Middlesex, Elgin, Bruce, Essex, Huron, Kent, Waterloo, Lambton, Oxford, and Perth) and housed 196 patients. In this era, it was believed that patients who had active interests would have shorter recovery times, thus the center bustled with a strange energy. Within the main pavilions lay an automobile shop, a darkroom, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, a radio lab, and a print shop.

Nature was considered to aid recovery, so the nearby Walker Pond was routinely stocked with fish, two baseball diamonds were constructed nearby, and a golf course was constructed in 1956 on what now are the grounds of Parkwood Hospital. Eventually, in 1947 the center was combined with co-existing operations for tuberculosis treatment, however tuberculosis treatment ceased in 1950. Over time, the patient population began to dwindle, and by 1984, patients were moved to the new facilities at Parkwood Hospital. The grounds were briefly used by the Board of Education before becoming completely abandoned by 2000. 

In its current state, the center consists of four standing buildings; the rest has been demolished, their foundations left bare. The remains of the Elgin, Lambton, Kent, and Oxford pavilions can be seen along the pathways overlooking Walker's Pond. The foundations, hearths and fireplaces can all be seen, though they are now overgrown with wild grasses. The Wellington Administrative Building is perhaps the jewel of the ruins, a grand beauty covered in ivy.