There is a seafood place near Halifax Harbour that was once home to the city’s oldest mortuary. It’s now the Five Fishermen Restaurant, but was once Snow & Company Undertakers, who tended to the bodies of not one, but two major tragedies of the early 20th century.
In the morning hours of April 15, 1912, 350 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, the R.M.S Titanic went down. Rescue operations took place out of Halifax, the largest nearby port, and many of the recovered bodies were brought to Snow's funeral home, including John Jacob Astor IV, the richest of the ship's passengers.
Five years later on the 6th of December, 1917, the Halifax Explosion, at the time the largest manmade explosion in history, claimed nearly 2,000 lives when a French munitions ship struck another vessel in the Harbour. Again, Snow & Co. was overwhelmed with bodies, with a photo running in the newspaper showing the funeral home with coffins stacked high in the street.
The building was originally constructed as a school house in 1817, right across from St. Paul's Anglican Church, the oldest building in Halifax. In 1883 the building was sold to John Snow, and the family’s mortuary occupied the space until 1973. They are still a Halifax business today.
There are many claims that the Five Fishermen Restaurant is haunted, but don't let this deter you. Their food is apparently to die for.
Among the world’s plants, the nightshade family is one of most prolific and most useful. Among its 2,500 species are some of the humanity’s favorite foods (potatoes, peppers, eggplants, tomatoes) and distractions (petunias, tobacco). This family of plants was thought to have diverged from the morning glory family somewhere between 49 and 67 million years ago, but that was something of an educated guess: their delicate fruits rarely fossilize, and archaeologists had only ever found a few seeds linking the present-day plants to the past.
In a new paper in Science, though, a team of scientists reports on the discovery of two small fossils of ancient nightshades of the physalis genus, which includes tomatillos, ground cherries, and husk tomatoes. These two specimens, with their delicate husks preserved around them, are about 52 million years old and show that the nightshade family is much, much older than previously realized.
The fossils were found in Laguna del Hunco in Patagonia, Argentina, an area that scientists have been studying for about a decade. Of the more than 6,000 fossils found there, these are the only ones from the physalis genus and, according to Peter Wilf, the lead author of the Science paper, “the only two fossils known of the entire nightshade family that preserved enough information to be assigned to a genus within the family.”
The scientists identified features on the fossils that clearly placed them in the same genus as today’s tomatillos: they named the ancient species Physalis infinemundi, after its place “at the end of the world,” in Patagonia.
Before this discovery, molecular dating had indicated the the physalis genus was only about 9 to 11 million years old. The fossil indicates that it evolved about 40 million years earlier than that. Since these husky plants are on the recent end of nightshade evolution, the discovery also indicates that nightshades as a family are likely older than anyone had imagined.
During the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s, traditional performances like the Peking opera were denounced as bourgeois and classist. In their place, Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, introduced "Eight Model Operas." These new performances that were intended to replace the old and promote the ideology of the young People's Republic. One of them was 1964's communist ballet, The Red Detachment of Women.
The ballet tells the story of a peasant girl, Wu Qinghua, who escapes from slavery on Hainan Island to join the Red Army and form a new China. In this scene, she stumbles upon the army's camp after surviving a brutal beating at the hands of the vicious "Tyrant of the South." Wu is given a rifle and warmly accepted into the ranks of the Women's Detachment, who plan to rescue the other peasants from the oppressive landlords.
The Red Detachment of Women, which was adapted from a 1961 film of the same name, was based on the true experience of an all-female Special Company of the Red Army during the Chinese Civil War. They survived a brutal attack on Hainan Island while their male counterparts did not, and were honored by Mao himself. Perhaps because of the heroic, proto-feminist tale, or maybe just because it was good entertainment, the ballet became intensely popular. This version of the ballet was filmed in 1971, and a performance was staged for Richard Nixon during his landmark visit to China in 1972.
Even for all of its political camp, The Red Detachment of Women remains a favorite in the ballet world for its music and choreography, both of which take from Chinese folk traditions. Watching the ballet in its entirety, it's hard not to be moved by the melodrama of the many tableaus in which the youthful rebels raise their fists to a distant horizon—an image straight off a propaganda poster.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Emailella@atlasobscura.com.
The cuckoo clock in Triberg-Schonach chimes twice an hour. Each time, the call comes from pipes 13 feet long.
This is the world's largest cuckoo clock, a distinction its held since 1997. It has become the main draw of Germany's Eble Uhren-Park.
Local clockmakers Ewald and Ralf Eble showcased their mastery of the craft in the creation of this massive cuckoo clock. They followed century-old blueprints to build a clock using traditional Black Forest craftsmanship—but 60 times the size. The dimensions are impressive: The clockwork is 15 feet tall and weights 6 tons. The cuckoo itself weighs 330 pounds, and the swinging pendulum is 26 feet long.
Just like the smaller traditional models, the world's biggest cuckoo clock has one weight to drive the pendulum and another to drive the cuckoo. Constructing the giant timepiece required a great deal of precision and mastery. Given its unprecedented size, every piece needed to be custom made. Visitors are able to walk inside the clock to see the impressive mechanics in action.
The world's largest cuckoo clock was completed in 1994 after five years of construction. It earned a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records three years later and has held the title ever since.
Built in 1915, this gigantic schoolhouse was originally christened as Public School Number Four, but was renamed Annie Lytle Elementary in 1957 in honor of a former principal. Unfortunately, the school only got to live under its new name for a few years before it was shuttered and abandoned.
When the highway system was constructed in Jacksonville in the 1950s, I-95 and I-10 intersected a mere hundred feet from Annie Lytle Elementary. The school became isolated and inconvenient to get to, and the sound of traffic would drown out classes on the second floor.
It closed for good in 1960 and was used as storage space for Duval County for some time before being officially condemned. A fire in 1995 caused part of the roof to cave in, and now nature has taken over the building. The school was almost demolished in 1999 and turned into condominiums, but multiple historic societies pressured the county to designate it a historic landmark. Annie Lytle Elementary received this honor in 2000, and dedicated volunteers have attempted to keep the grounds neat in the hopes that the property will someday be bought and repurposed. But nearly two decades later the school remains derelict and empty aside from the urban explorers who trespass there.
As with any abandoned place, the school has its fair share of ghost stories (everything from psychotic janitors to schoolkids who perished in a boiler room explosion). Jacksonville police assure that all crimes in the building occurred after its abandonment, in particular graffiti and squatting.
In late 2015, photographer Marcel Heijnen was walking around his new neighborhood of Sai Ying Pun in Hong Kong. Although a long-time resident of the city, he was new to this particular area, and he noticed a cat perched the counter of a small local shop. A year later, his portrait of the cat, whose name is Dau Ding, ended up as the cover to Heijnen’s new book Hong Kong Shop Cats.
Heijnen regards the small stores where the cats lounge and doze as “beautiful photogenic subjects in their own right." They are places where, says Heijnen, “time seems to have stood still, devoid of branding and all the other modern-day retail trickery we’ve grown accustomed to”.
The Hong Kong cats are regarded as lucky, Heijnen notes in his book, and from his photos, they clearly provide companionship. In one image, a cat sits close to his owner, mirroring him, in a room of textiles. In another, a cat looks sleepily away as his owner dozes behind him.
AO has a selection of Heijnen’s unique portraits of Hong Kong’s shop cats.
A balanced breakfast is an important meal in just about every society in the world, but not many of them require a blood sacrifice. If that is the sort of thing you’re looking for, though, feast your eyes on the “blood pancake.”
The traditional dish, known asveriohukainen in Finnish and blodplättar in Swedish, is exactly what it sounds like: a flapjack made with a healthy helping of blood.
Such pancakes originate from more of a utilitarian background than from a Twilight message board. Today, blood from the butchering process, at least in most large slaughterhouses, is treated as a waste product, or used in fertilizer, fish food, and even cigarette filters. But blood can be as hearty, and usable, part of an animal as many of the meatier parts.
Blood can be found in a number of traditional recipes, most famously in European blood sausage and black pudding. There are also lesser-known dishes such as Germany’s schwarzsauer, a soup made of blood, spices, and vinegar, or China’s blood tofu, which is just blood that has been allowed to congeal into a soft consistency.
If the sight of a deep cut is the type of thing that can make you pass out, then blood foods probably aren’t for you. But if you can stomach the idea of eating cooked blood, it’s actually quite healthy. Like eggs, blood is high in protein, making it a simple source of the nutrient. In addition, blood is extremely high in iron, which can help stave off anemia (although it also gives it that metallic aftertaste). In addition to its health benefits, blood makes an excellent replacement for eggs in cooking, acting as a binding agent, and easily whipping up into a dense foam. Perfect for things like pancakes!
Blood pancakes seem to have originated from Finland and spread across Scandinavia, especially to Sweden. There are a number of variations on the recipe, but the core ingredients are generally the same: milk, flour, sometimes even an egg, and blood. Usually the preferred blood used in the recipe is pig’s blood (available from the butcher), but people have also used their own blood, and more specifically, menstrual blood.
On their own, blood pancakes end up being a savory dish, so many recipes call for enhancing the natural flavor by adding things like onions, spices, bread crumbs, and molasses. The only other body-fluid-specific requirement is to strain the blood to remove any clots that may have formed. Which really hammers home that you’re cooking with blood, in case you forgot.
Once the batter is prepared, the pancakes can be cooked just like any other flapjack. No matter the color of the batter, the cakes usually take on a dark, nearly black color as the blood cooks. They are often described as a bit denser than your standard fluffy pancakes, and definitely retain the metallic tinge that often turns people away from blood-based foods.
The pancakes are often served with lingonberries, or lingonberry jam, which can help cut the coppery flavor. Or, as the Nordic Food Lab suggests, you can add rye sourdough starter to the mix, which also helps hide the taste of blood.
While consumption of blood-based foods is not as popular as it once was, blood pancakes are still a fairly common dish in Finland and Sweden. There are brands that sell sleeves of already-cooked blood pancakes—a sanguine alternative to Eggo waffles.
The first suspended climbing space of its kind, the Infinity Climber is a cantilevered climbing space of 64 petal-like platforms encased in 19 miles of hand-threaded wire mesh suspended 35 feet above the floor.
Luckey Climbers' structures blends play structures and sculptural works of art, working with scientific principles. The Neural Climber in Philadelphia, for instance, mimics the synaptic connections of the mind.
The Infinity Climber has minimal head room and no reach greater than 20 inches. This restriction keeps you crawling or crouching, which actually eliminates the chance of falling. Its sinuous pathways, which were reportedly based on differential calculus, deviate and merge to offer many ways for both kids and adults alike to explore the concept of relativism within a given space.
A museum in Tel Aviv discovered that it had been hiding a 90-year-old grenade that was still active.
The Haganah museum tells the story of the Jewish underground army that became the Israel Defense Forces. The museum is located in a house built in 1923 that served as the secret headquarters of the Haganah.
Recently, the staff found a very old grenade just sitting in a cupboard. It was created in a “private arms factory,” according to the Times of Israel. (The Jewish Press calls it a “underground lab.”)
The museum called the bomb squad. Here they are taking the bomb away:
The plan is to neutralize it and return it the museum as an example of the type of munitions used in the pre-state conflict that ended in the creation of Israel.
A hidden gem tucked beyond Boston’s downtown parks, the James P. Kelleher Rose Garden dates back to 1931 and features over 1,5000 roses behind its tall green yew hedge in the Back Bay Fens. Despite its long and storied history just minutes from Fenway Park, it is largely unknown to tourists and residents and retains a “secret garden” feeling.
The English-style garden was commissioned by infamous Boston Mayor James Michael Curley and designed by Arthur Shurcliff, a noted Boston landscape architect. Years earlier, Shurcliff had worked under Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed the Fens as well as New York’s Central Park.
When the garden opened in 1932, it won the Massachusetts Horticultural Society award for excellence, but many Bostonians blasted it as a gaudy intrusion on Olmsted’s understated, wild park design. Over the years, sentiments on the garden softened, and it became a Boston fixture.
George Swanson loved his 1984 Corvette so much, he made a promise with his wife that he be buried in it. In the historic Brush Creek Cemetery near Irwin, Pennsylvania, Caroline Swanson made sure that promise was kept.
On May 25, 1994, George, a local beer distributor and World War II veteran, was laid to rest in his beloved white muscle car. The urn with his ashes was placed in the driver’s seat, his favorite song—Engelbert Humperdinck's "Release Me"—was cued up on the cassette player, and a crane lowered down the man and his machine for its final spin.
To make burial possible for a car the size of an ’84 ‘Vette, George had bought up multiple adjoining plots at Brush Creek. And keeping the health and safety of his future neighbors in mind, he and Caroline made sure that all the fluids would be drained from the car before interment.
George is buried along with his first wife, Geraldine (whose grandchildren gave her a lovely send-off too), and there is a space for Caroline when the time comes. On the simple Swanson family headstone, the engraving of a Corvette is the only sign that there is the ultimate car lover buried underneath.
In 1803, when the United States bought New Orleans, along with the rest of the land in the Louisiana Purchase, the city had only about 8,000 people living in it. Planned on a tight grid, the city stretched just eleven blocks along a curve of the Mississippi River and six blocks back from the levee, to Rampart Street.
A little more than three decades later, New Orleans had become a world port, and in 1836 edged out New York City as the busiest export center in the United States. The population had grown to more than 60,000 people—many of them Anglo-Americans who, to the alarm of the city’s Francophone natives, had flocked to the port to make their fortunes.
Today, New Orleans trades on the languid charm of its French and Spanish past to lure visitors to its historic center, but in the early 19th century, American newcomers to the city had no patience for Louisiana's old guard, known as creoles, whom they saw as Catholic, corrupt, and overly permissive to the city’s large population of slaves and free people of color.
But in New Orleans, the American upstarts lacked the political power to change the city’s ways as fast as they would like. Instead, in 1836, the city’s Anglo-Americans convinced the state legislature to split New Orleans into pieces—three semi-autonomous municipalities divided along ethnic lines. For more than 15 years, the city was divided, while the Americans consolidated their power and re-shaped the city to their own ends.
The idea of dividing New Orleans between the Francophone old guard and the Anglophone newcomers first came up in the 1820s, when rival military factions would challenge each other’s authority, edging towards but never quite exploding into violent conflict. In his book Louisiana in the Age of Jackson, Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., the Louisiana historian who has studied this period most closely, tells how American-led sections of the militia would refuse to follow orders from foreign French officers who still held military positions. When Americans held command, the French would reciprocate.
At times, different factions of the militia would march through the streets, showing off their defiance and power, and it was during one such conflict that a local American editor, R.D. Richardson, started calling for the city to be split along ethnic lines. A rival French editor, who had fought for Napoleon, responded by offering five dollars to anyone who’d give Richardson a good whap over the head.
There were two main areas in which the entrenched French creoles made the incoming Americans crazy. The first was infrastructure: when the U.S. bought the Louisiana territory, New Orleans had no paved roads, no street signs, and no colleges. Much of the population was illiterate, and justice was dispensed according to the French legal code: Tregle calls the place “a colonial backwash of French and Spanish imperialism.”
The second was the permissive culture: Sunday in New Orleans means sitting at a café and going out dancing or perhaps to a horse race. In this city, black and white people mingled more freely than elsewhere in America, and even slaves had more leeway to move freely than in other cities.
All this shocked the Protestant, Puritan-minded American settlers, many of whom came from places in the South where the movement of black people was highly restricted and regulated. (Meanwhile, the native creole population was appalled by the crude Americans, who they called Kaintucks and vulgar Yankees.) The Anglo-American settlers tried to change everything from the city’s laws to the looser culture, but even as they gained power of New Orleans’ commercial life, they did not have enough political power to mold the city as they would have liked.
After the conflicts of the 1820s, the newcomers kept trying to split the city—if they couldn’t fix the whole place, at least they could control part of it. About a decade later, in 1836, Anglo-Americans finally got their way. New Orleans was divided into three municipalities, one Anglophone and two Francophone.
The three sections of split New Orleans roughly correspond to the today’s Central Business District, French Quarter, and Marigny neighborhood. The Second Municipality, which the Americans controlled, began at Canal Street and went upriver, past the place where the Pontchartrain Expressway cuts through the city today. The First Municipality included all of the French Quarter, from Canal to Esplanade Avenue, and the Third Municipality stretched downriver from there, through the Marigny towards today’s Bywater neighborhood. Each municipality had its own police force, its own schools, its own infrastructure, and services. In the First Municipality, English was the language of commerce and government; in the other two, French dominated.
When this story is told quickly, it’s usually said that New Orleans was a place neatly divided between old and new, French and English, a more multiracial society and a white one, with Canal Street as the clear border. But according to the work of Tregle and later historians, the divide was not initially so stark as legend might have it.
When Americans started moving to New Orleans, they moved first to the French Quarter, on the upriver side, closer to Canal Street. Only once that section of town filled up did they continue building into Faubourg Ste. Marie, the newer suburb on the far side of Canal. It was always desirable to live in the French Quarter, where by the 1830s Chartres Street had become a major commercial thoroughfare, dotted with American shops selling books, jewelry, and other goods. On the other side of Canal Street, it was common for prominent Francophone creoles to make their home in Ste. Marie, too. To the extent that there was a clear dividing line between the old and new populations, it was at St. Louis Street, close to the center of the city.
But once the city was divided in three political entities, the distinctions between the Second Municipality and the other two started to grow. Trade in the Second Municipality thrived, and bustling warehouses and insurance companies started going up on Camp and Magazine streets.
The growing economy led to a housing boom, where Greek revival architecture mixed with the brick-faced warehouses of a northeastern port city; one traveler noted that the American part of the city “lacked that mellowness of age and charm of the bizarre which set old New Orleans apart.” Whatever it lacked in beauty, though, it made up for in wealth and city services: the Second Municipality soon had a modern school system, as well as new wharves, gas lights, and paved streets.
On the other side of town, the area below Jackson Square was suffering, as poverty increased and the old French houses aged. The Third Municipality, sometimes called the “The Dirty Third,” was in particularly bad shape, since the waste of the rest of the city floated downriver to pollute its shores, air, and water. By the time the city was reunited, in 1852, its wealth had concentrated upriver: Tregle found that by 1860 the area upriver of St. Louis Street had 76 percent of the city’s taxable property.
More than any other American city at the time, New Orleans could claim to be a diverse place where people of color had more freedom than elsewhere in the South. But during the period where white newcomers divided the New Orleans, the American values and laws that were shaping both the city and the new state of Louisiana were reducing those freedoms quickly. The American values imported to New Orleans included not just an emphasis on better infrastructure and education, but on more legally encoded racism, that was strictly enforced.
“On the upper side of town...white inhabitants were often times more hostile to the very notion of free people of color,” writes Richard Campanella, a contemporary historian who studies New Orleans geography. The white Americans who were gaining power were uncomfortable with the rights that slaves and free people of color had in the city and sought to restrict their movements and freedoms. There was also a second major wave of white people coming to the city, who saw themselves as being in conflict with the black population. During the 1830s, immigrants from Ireland and Germany flocked to the New Orleans and made it a majority white city for the first time: in 1835, white workers protested black employment in certain desirable jobs.
As much as the division allowed trade to thrive and infrastructure to improve in parts of the New Orleans, it was mostly to the benefit of white, American-born people. When the city did merge back into one city, it was only because the Anglo-Americans had enough power to control not just commerce but city politics, too. With the influx of immigrants, they outnumbered the Francophone old guard. The immigrant-heavy suburb of Lafayette was incorporated into the city, becoming today’s Garden District. Only once the Anglo-Americans could shift the whole city to their own ways did they let it become whole again.
There are two unmarked stone towers on the western slope of the Capitol Grounds. Overshadowed by the Capitol dome and downplayed by blocking shrubbery, most people walk by without noticing them.
These are the end caps for two massive air ducts leading 400 feet up into the belly of the Capitol. You can see the 15-foot-wide passageways marked here in a 1961 map. The asymmetry of their layout corresponds to differences in elevation on the House and Senate side of the hill.
The air ducts date to 1928 and were part of an engineering effort to install air conditioning in the Capitol. Summer in Washington is notoriously muggy, and this unpleasantness was amplified in the crowded and windowless legislative chambers. Some Members of Congress took this really, really seriously.
By 1928, Members of Congress were genuinely concerned about their ability to work under such conditions. Several Representatives announced that 202 of their colleagues had died in office in the previous 35 years, and suggested unhealthful air in the House Chamber as a contributing cause. A study of the Capitol’s ventilation was commissioned and recommended air conditioning the chamber. The House jumped at the prospect. In May a call went out for a new system, and within months the Carrier Corporation had designed and installed its “Manufactured Weather,” with air that would “guard the Health, assure the Comfort and inspire the Achievement of the Nation’s representatives.”
The Senate watched this with envy and quickly moved to install their own AC system. Posted notices served to reassure elderly Senators that the cool air was nothing to be frightened of.
The system worked by drawing in air from the towers on the Western Front park. A fan the size of a ship's propeller blasted the air through a dense radiator-like array of pipes containing cold water. Then it passed through the humidifier room where a spray of water restored an appropriate level of moisture. Thence, up into the Senate and House, where it entered the chambers through grates in the floors.
The Carrier Corporation—perhaps excessively—predicted that the AC would have "a profound effect upon our governmental system! Congress may voluntarily remain in session throughout the summer, in order that our Congressmen may be protected from the intolerable discomforts and dangers of the ordinary outdoor weather!”
Those air duct towers deserve a plaque befitting their impact on our great democracy.
At first glance, the unfamiliar alphabet above, pressed into the page beneath our own, seems a bit opaque. With its streamlined swoops, angles and dashes, it appears to belong elsewhere—like writing from the past, or the future, or a different planet.
Put it a little time, though, and you'll find it's not so hard to figure out what's going on. This isn't a cipher, meant to leave people out—it's a system, invented to let people in. This is Moon Code, a reading language for the blind which, although overshadowed by Braille, has given a specific population the chance to read again for hundreds of years.
Moon Code was invented by Dr. William Moon, a bookish lawyer and teacher from a village in Kent, England. As a young man, Moon had wanted to be a priest. But an early bout of scarlet fever left him blind in one eye, and, as the years went on, his remaining sight slowly eroded. By the time he was 22, he couldn't see at all.
Moon had already learned several of the existing reading systems for blind people. At the time, there were various species of "embossed letters," which were ordinary Roman letters that stuck out of the page, sometimes printed in italics or uppercase for increased ease of touch. There was James Hatley Frere's "Frere system," a phonetic alphabet made up of various shapes and symbols, with each based on a particular sound. And there was the still-familiar Braille, which had been introduced a few years earlier.
Although Moon continued his studies after going blind, he found his immediate priorities were changing. He began sharing his knowledge, opening a school in his home to teach other vision-impaired people how to use these existing systems.
But in the classroom, he found problems with each of them—especially when he tried teaching them to adults. Embossed Roman letters were too confusing, due to their "numerous lines and intricate forms," he wrote later, in The Consequences & Ameliorations of Blindness. The Frere system, while simpler, was "burdened with numerous contractions," and encouraged incorrect pronunciation. Braille, "although useful to children, is also found unsuitable for the adult," especially "if he be accustomed to rough manual labor"—calloused fingers found it hard to distinguish the dots.
In 1845, in response to these frustrations, Moon took matters into his own hands. He invented a new method, which he called "Moon's System of Embossed Reading," but which soon became known as "Moon Type," or "Moon Code." The Moon System is also based on Roman type, but each letter is simplified into a basic set of lines or curves: "A" is an inverted V, "B" is a simple fishhook, and "S" is a forward slash. By removing excess strokes, the shapes are left, in Moon's words, "open and clear to the touch."
In a strategy borrowed from Frere, pages of text were arranged in "ox-ploughing succession"—the first line is printed left-to-right, the next right-to-left, and so on. Instead of returning to the beginning of the page each time, and potentially losing her place, the reader can move her hand continuously, like an oxen marching up and down rows.
Early experiments were promising. "Many who for years had made futile attempts to learn by other systems, have easily accomplished this," he wrote. "Many of those who could read before losing their sight, have learnt it in one lesson." The rugmakers and basket-weavers, whose calloused fingers he originally had in mind, could manage it easily. Even better, both blind and sighted people could pick it up extremely quickly, and teach others in turn.
With the help of some friends, Moon had Moon Code printing plates made up, and began publishing a monthly magazine from his house. He soon moved on to the Bible, which he printed in chunks. He kept up his teaching, which gave him more and more ideas—after meeting a blind girl who thought that horses walked upright on two legs, he started embossing illustrations, and he also issued music, maps, and geometry lessons.
By 1875, Moon had printed, in his own words, "37 volumes of Religious Works, 53 Biographies, 49 volumes of Tales and Anecdotes, 27 of Poetry, [and] an Atlas of the Stars." He spent the rest of his life traveling the world, teaching his system at various schools and societies. By his death in 1894, groups everywhere from England to Norway to Syria taught Moon Code, and circulated books.
Although Moon Code was, at one time, one of the world's more popular reading systems, it was quickly surpassed by Braille, which, with its all-dot format, is much easier to print and produce. Moon Code "is almost never offered as an alternative format for items such as household bills, bank statements, and restaurant menus," writes the Royal National Institute of Blind People. But the group still encourages its use, especially among the audience Moon originally envisioned: people whose lives have left them with less sensitive eyes and fingers, who still want to make their way across the page.
In the "Land of Lincoln" stands one of the world's tallest Lincoln statues. He stands at an impressive 72 feet tall, towering over nearby trees and buildings.
While Abraham Lincoln was a tall, thin man in life, this representation of him is particularly skinny, apparently so his manufacturer didn't have to transport a wide load when the statue was shipped from Minnesota. The statue has earned the title of "World's Tallest and Ugliest Lincoln."
Perhaps because of this derision, the statue has been the subject of much vandalism over the years. He is riddled with bullet holes, and his extended index finger has been blown off several times.
The statue was dedicated for the surrounding park in 1969, but the developers soon ran out of money and the park project was abandoned. The park and the Lincoln statue have been renovated and repurposed several times. First, it was as Spring Haven campgrounds, then as the Lincoln Springs Resort, both of which closed. Most recently the park was "Lincoln Gardens," where numerous chainsaw-hewn sculptures depicting the 16th president at different points throughout his life stood scattered around the tallest of them all.
Built into a cliffside in southern Tasmania, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is a four-story collection of some of the most crude and bizarre sculptures and machines imaginable. MONA is often referred to as the “Temple of Weird” and dubbed “subversive adult Disneyland” by the museum’s founder David Walsh.
Nearly every exhibit at MONA is bizarre or controversial. This peculiar art includes a suicide bomber made out of chocolate, molds of female genitalia of real women, a 250 million-year-old sandstone wall used by Walsh to promote evolution and atheism, and a “rain-painting machine” that uses 128 computer-controlled nozzles to spell out a daily-selected phrase with water.
An oddly placed tennis court leads to the museum’s mirror-covered entrance. As visitors approach the museum, they hold their noses and complain of a fecal smell, asking if there was a sewage leak at the museum. They’ll soon find out, after entering the museum, that the smell is from MONA’s cloaca machine, named after the excretory opening found in many animals. Known as the “shit machine,” the ingenious contraption dumps piles of food into a funnel and passes it through six giant tanks to mimic the process of digestion. In the end, the cloaca machine produces a stinky heap of fecal matter, making it the most hated exhibit in the entire building.
For those who love the Museum of Old and New Art, however, the "Eternity" membership package would be of great interest, offering visitors not only lifetime admission but the after-death opportunity to display their ashes in urns for all to see.
The ice in the Copenhagen Zoo's Arctic Ring is cold, but the gossip is hot: as the Local reports, one of Denmark's sexiest polar bear couples is breaking up. Ivan and Noel, two of the exhibit's main attractions, will soon be going their separate ways, the Zoo recently announced.
The two have made it work since 2007, when Ivan left the Moscow Zoo to move in with Noel. But in recent months, things have fallen apart. "They simply don't like each other," zoo spokesman Bengt Holst told a local broadcaster, who added that Noel "often swims back and forth in the enclosure because she is stressed."
Ivan will soon pack his things and move to the Scandinavian Wildlife Park in Djursland. Among his welcoming party is a female named Nuno, who, insiders say, is single and ready to mingle.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Driving along one of many county roads in the miles of Illinois cornfields, a gravel road will lead you to the town of St. Omer, or what's left of it at least: its cemetery. The ghost town might have been forgotten if not for the strange Barnes monument, the subject of a local witch legend.
The Barnes gravestone is a ball atop a pyre. While many of the other graves in this cemetery are oriented east to west, this one curiously faces north and south. Four people are buried there, Marcus Barnes, his parents Granville and Sarah, and his wife, Caroline, whose stated date of death could never have happened: February 31, 1882.
The prevailing lore is that Caroline Barnes was a witch, or at least was accused of being one. She was hanged (or, depending on who you ask, burned or even buried alive) for her magical crimes. The sphere atop her tombstone is actually a crystal ball, which is said to glow on moonless nights. The impossible date is actually a preventative measure: The witch would rise again on her death date, but if her death date never came she wouldn't reappear.
People also claim that film photographs of the Barnes' grave won't develop (though digital seems to do just fine), and that secret rituals are carried out there in the dead of night. That last claim may have some credence to it, given that the ball has repeatedly been found with melted white candle wax dried atop it.
In reality, there are few facts to back up accusations of witchery. Local lore seems to have sprung out of the weird anomalies surrounding the tombstone. There is, however, some tragic history surrounding the Barnes family. Marcus Barnes died in a sawmill accident in 1881 and was buried with his parents. Just two months later Caroline would die of pneumonia at the age of 23. Her actual death date was either the 26th or the 28th of February. "February 31st" was likely just a typo too expensive to fix, not to mention that there was no one left in the Barnes family to mend the error.
In fact, there wasn't even anyone in town. The town of St. Omer only held about 40 to 50 families, a post office, a blacksmith's, and a general store. By the time the Barnes family had died off, the town had done the same. Now, fittingly, all that remains of St. Omer is its cemetery.
Aside from the mysterious monument, the remote and serene cemetery has many other old grave markers worth perusing. It's a brief walk through history that Caroline Barnes is somewhat responsible for keeping alive.
Most beaches in Italy are distinctly Mediterranean, featuring darker water and rocky cliffs, but on the western coast of the country there lies a stretch of white sand alongside a bright hue of turquoise water. Unlike most of the Italian coastline, this idyllic beach appears to perfectly resemble that of a pristine Caribbean resort—that is, with the exception of the giant smokestacks looming behind it.
You’d expect that this tropical haven of white sand, known as Spiagge Bianche, or “White Beaches,” would be a popular hotspot for tourists, but the beach is unlikely to be found in most Italian guidebooks and travel websites. That’s because the white sand and light blue water of Spiagge Bianche are artificially created, and unintentionally so.
Easily visible to beachgoers at Spiagge Bianche is an expansive factory run by chemical company Solvay that manufactures sodium carbonate, which is used in glass, detergent, and soap. To make the chemical, the Solvay plant discharges thousands of tons of toxic wastewater every year into the Mediterranean Sea. This discharge contains a mixture of limestone and calcium chloride, which tints the water light blue and gives the sand its dazzling white color.
Although the water and sand may look clean, Spiagge Bianche has been listed by the United Nations as one of the 15 most polluted areas on the Mediterranean coast. In addition to limestone and calcium chloride, the Solvay plant’s wastewater also contains heavy metals like mercury, arsenic, and lead, which have reportedly increased mortality rates in the adjacent town of Rosignano. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of sunbathers and kite surfers at the beach are locals.
Unfortunately, there are no signs at Spiagge Bianche warning beachgoers about the dangers of the deceiving white sand, and activists have had little success in getting Solvay to regulate its chemical wastewater.
This house was built in 1825, by George W. Bourne, a prominent 19th-century shipbuilder who constructed his vessels on the Kennebunk River directly behind the home. It has won the distinction as the most photographed house in Maine, but is better known as the Wedding Cake House, for its frilly Gothic-inspired architecture, as well as the romantic folklore surrounding it.
The legend of the house is that shortly after his wedding Captain Bourne had to ship out to sea. To apologize to his bride, he built the house as a wedding gift that would keep on giving.
This story is apparently apocryphal, but Bourne and his wife did live in the home just after their marriage. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that the skilled ship builder constructed the entire house with his own two hands.
The home, which is sometimes open to the public (often as a fundraiser for a charitable cause) was occupied by three generations of Bournes before being sold outside of the family in 1983. It remains a strong tourist attraction, even if just to drive past to view the architecture.
