Edgar Allan Poe pioneered a distinctly American brand of gothic horror and romanticism, and introduced the short story to the literary tradition. Yet throughout his career he never received much fame or money. "The Raven" was his best-known work, for which he was paid $9. Poe spent his life traveling up and down the Atlantic coast, working odd jobs and performing parlor readings to make ends meet, going from one failed relationship to the next. He ultimately died with no family, raving mad in the streets of Baltimore.

As if in an attempt to rectify Poe's lack of success, numerous locations of import during his lifetime have been posthumously dedicated to him, or at least honor his presence there. Here are 10 places in the Atlas that trace the footsteps of America's master of macabre.

Edgar Poe was born to two actors in Boston on January 19, 1809, and tragedy hung over him from the start. Both of his parents died within a year of each other before he was two years old. Edgar was sent to live with a wealthy family in Richmond, Virginia, while his two siblings were sent to other homes. The Allan family never formally adopted him but did bestow their surname upon him, and thus he became Edgar Allan Poe.

Despite his brief stay in Boston, an intersection near his birthplace was named "Edgar Allan Poe Square" on the 200th anniversary of his birthday.

1. Edgar Allan Poe Square

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

Life with the Allans was comfortable. The family traveled frequently, allowing the young Poe to be educated across Europe and the American Northeast. However it seems Edgar was never able to live up to his foster father's expectations. At 17 he was engaged, but he racked up gambling debts and garnered a reputation as a drinker, and his betrothed married someone else.

Poe returned to Richmond often throughout his life, but Richmond never returned his affections. It wasn't until the 1920s brought about a revival of his work that the Edgar Allan Poe Museum opened to chronicle his experiences in Virginia.

2. Edgar Allan Poe Museum

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

In search of a purpose, Poe enrolled in the new University of Virginia to study ancient languages in 1826. Despite being a good student, he didn't find satisfaction in his studies and dropped out after just a year. He claimed his father refused to help him pay his debts.

In the 1920s, the secret "Raven Society" restored Poe's former dorm room to its 1820s conditions, complete with furniture owned by the late poet. The room functions both as a miniature museum and the site of midnight induction ceremonies to this day.

3. The Raven Room

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA

Poe's next endeavor was a military career. He was stationed at Fort Independence in Boston harbor. Though he at first seemed to enjoy the life of a cadet, he soon began to shirk his duties. Instead of appearing for drills, Poe could be found wandering along the water.

During this time he published his first book of poetry under the name of "A Bostonian." Only 50 copies were printed, which Poe is believed to have paid for himself. His fellow cadets donated 75 cents apiece to publish Poe's next book, believing it would contain the comedic poems lampooning military life Edgar had regaled them with. Instead, they were serious poems like "To Helen" and "Israfel," and were much derided by the cadet corps.

He transferred to West Point Academy, and by 1831 was dismissed from the service for "gross neglect of duty and disobedience to others." Though he was not fond of his time in the military, it seems it had some effect on him. Fort Independence is believed to have inspired the setting of the duel in "The Cask of Amontillado." 

4. Fort Independence

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

Poe's adoptive mother died while he was in the service. His father, whom he had become estranged from over mounting gambling debts, had remarried and had a son. This meant that Edgar, formerly the prospective Allan heir, was left without a proper inheritance. 

Despite his lack of success, Poe decided to pursue his career as a writer. He traveled to Baltimore to be with his biological aunt, Maria Clemm, with whom he had become close. He met her daughter, his cousin Virginia. Though she was a child, she would be the object of Poe's romantic obsession for the rest of his life. They were married in 1835, when he was 26 and she 14.

Over the following years he experienced small successes. The growing periodical journal industry was an outlet for his short stories and poems, some of which were well received. Edgar, Virginia, and Maria moved to Philadelphia, where much of the publishing industry was located.

5. Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

He held several jobs at various magazines and even a government position at the Philadelphia Customs House, but was fired from each of them after appearing at work drunk. Poe also began a number of literary magazines himself, each one a flop. It was around this time that Virginia began to show symptoms of tuberculosis, coughing up blood while she sang at the piano.

"The Raven" became one of Poe's few successes. After its publishing in the Evening Mirror he became a household name. The couple relocated to New York, where he became the editor of the failing Broadway Journal. Virginia's condition only worsened, and so did Edgar's drinking. She died at the age of 24 in their rural cottage in the Bronx.

6. Edgar Allan Poe Cottage

BRONX, NEW YORK

Poe plunged into a deep depression. He largely supported himself through speaking engagements, occasionally "nurturing friendships" with the lovely ladies who admired his work. One plaque in Massachusetts commemorates such an occasion.

7. Westford Poe Marker

WESTFORD, MASSACHUSETTS

He may have been seeking stability in a wife, or at least solace in the arms of a lover, but inevitably each of the relationships ended badly. He came closest to finding happiness again with Sarah Helen Whitman, who introduced herself to him through letters. She was his perfect match, a Spiritualist poet who wore a coffin-shaped pendant and hosted weekly seances. He proposed to her in a cemetery, and she consented on the condition that he never touch alcohol again.

Two days before their wedding, when the couple was at the Providence Athenaeum, an anonymous person slipped Sarah a note informing her that Edgar had been drinking that morning. In tears, she broke off their engagement there in the stacks, dashed home, and drowned her sorrows in ether. The two never saw each other again, and Poe would be dead within the year.

8. Providence Athenaeum

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

He was living in Richmond in September 1849, when he left for New York. He never arrived and no one heard from him for a week. On October 3rd he was discovered sick and wearing a stranger's clothes outside the pub and pop-up polling place Gunner's Hall. He was taken to Washington College Hospital and treated by a Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass.

Poe was delirious, too far gone to explain how he had found himself in these circumstances. He continually asked for someone named "Reynolds" and his wife in Richmond (he was not married at the time) before dying alone on October 7. The cause of his death remains unknown: Historians and scientists have proposed everything from rabies to syphilis to being drugged by election riggers.

Washington College Hospital no longer exists, and the formerly seedy avenue where Poe was discovered is now a developed and polished neighborhood. However, Baltimore ghost tours still claim Lombard Avenue is haunted by the unfortunate poet's specter.

9. Site of Edgar Allan Poe's Death

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

Poe was buried toward the back of the graveyard in a cheap casket with no headstone. His funeral service lasted all of three minutes, and was attended by a handful of relatives as well as his doctor. The sexton elected not to deliver a homily because the crowd was so small.

In the 1870s, a poet visited Poe's grave and wrote an article lamenting its neglected condition. A Baltimore public school teacher raised funds for a fitting monument to Poe, which was placed at the front of the churchyard. Poe was exhumed, and the diggers were said to have recognized his distinct features in his skull. He was reburied underneath his new marble monument along with Virginia and her mother.

10. Edgar Allan Poe's Grave

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

Edgar Allan Poe's writings influenced generations to come, but so did his person. His tragic life was riddled with melancholy, from loves lost to works rejected. Perhaps in order to right these disappointments, Poe's modern-day admirers have hoisted him onto a pedestal scarcely rivaled by other writers. Not to mention the fact that mundane items which belonged to him are now priceless treasures: The Edgar Allan Poe museum proudly displays a pair of his socks, while strands of his hair can go for thousands of dollars. The raven that inspired his most famous poem is on display at the Philadelphia Free Library.

Poe-lovers have a personal relationship with their author, whose personal torments seep through his writing. Nowhere is this bond better evidenced than in the mysterious Poe Toaster. From the 1930s until 2009, a dark figure in a wide-brimmed hat appeared at Poe's grave every January 19 to wish him a happy birthday. The figure arranged three roses on the monument, raised a glass of cognac, and left without a word, as if straight off the pages of "The Masque of the Red Death."

On September 30, 1785, Thomas Hutchins, the first and only Geographer of the United States, set out to divide the country’s Western lands into neat, square parcels. He was supposed have a team of 13 men, one representing each new state, but only eight had shown up. At least three had an ulterior motive—they were allied with private investment companies eager to scout out land that would soon put up for sale.

The project Hutchins and his team were embarking on was innovative and massively ambitious, but it began in a small way, at a wooden post staked on the north bank of the Ohio River, at the western border of Pennsylvania. With a couple of simple measurement tools and a compass, the men started their work, measuring and marking out a line due west into Ohio. It took them more than a week to work over four miles, and that was it for the year. Hutchins was not willing to travel farther west and risk running into the violent conflict with the Lenape, which had sparked after a Pennsylvania militia massacred 96 people.

That four-mile line was the beginning of the Public Land Survey, which divided all public land in the United States into parcels six miles square. The project that began that day on the Pennsylvania border was so tremendous that it is still going on and now includes close 1.5 billion acres.

Though it’s taken for granted today, the systematic division of land in the United States still defines the country’s geographical fate. In its early stages, the survey pit Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton against one another, with their competing visions of who should own and profit from America’s land, and it enabled America’s great land grab from the native people of the continent’s Western reaches. More than 230 years later, the same system still governs distributions of mineral rights on public lands and underlies digital mapping systems. If you know what to look for, you can still find its legacy in the physical markers that dot the land today, in the neat divisions of the Western states, and particularly in Ohio, where a not-yet-perfected survey system created messy, irregular divisions that still hash the state.

The Public Land Survey System was created because, in the 1780s, the new United States of America needed money. The Revolutionary War had left the federal government with debts, and its leaders planned to raise funds by selling off land where American colonists had yet to settle.

They knew they would have buyers, as C. Albert White writes in A History of the Rectangular Survey System, a delightful and comprehensive account of land divisions in the U.S. “The land-speculating companies began early to petition the Congress for land grants,” writes White, who worked for years as a cadastral surveyor for the Bureau of Land Management. “Wealthy and influential men held stock in these companies and also held large amounts of continental currency and treasury notes.” They’d buy up the land and later resell it to settlers—at a gain, of course.

There were divisions, though, among the country’s politicians about how to sell the land. Alexander Hamilton, who was working around this time to create the Bank of New York, and John Jay, who came from a wealthy New York family, favored selling to large land companies. But their political opponents, Thomas Jefferson, most notably, wanted to divide the land into small parcels and sell them off to individuals—the farmers that Jefferson thought so crucial to democracy.

The two factions also had different ideas about how to divide the land. Jefferson and his allies wanted to use an innovative system of land division, which would use meridians and other abstract geographical reference points to measure out uniform parcels of land. Hamilton and his allies thought that would take too long. As long as settlers had been grabbing up land in America, they’d operated according to a principle of free settlement—essentially, first-come, first-serve. Hamilton wanted to divide up the land using the more traditional “metes and bounds” system, in which landmarks and other features of a piece of land are used to describe its borders.

Jefferson, though, headed the committee that created the plan to deal with the land. Jefferson had spent time in the surveying trenches, measuring out Virginia, and may have written the first draft of the committee's plan himself. It called for the territories in the West to be divided into regular squares, along lines that ran north/south and east/west and, originally, for the land to be sold by township, each measuring seven miles square, or 4,480 acres. By the time the law was passed, though, the Jefferson faction had managed to reduce the unit of sale to just 640 acres.

All that remained was for those lots to be measured out. Today, surveyors have tools that help them do the job with precision. But for the men engaged in this line of work in the 1780s, drawing straight lines would require trial and error—a lot of error, as it turned out. 

Hutchins and his team returned to Ohio the next year, and they kept working west. After six miles was measured out, one of the surveyors started a new line, this one running south. As the “Geographer’s Line” ran west, one of the other surveyors would start running a line south every six miles. At each corner, the surveyors would select a physical signal—either a wooden post or a tree—to mark the boundary. By the end of the season, they had marked out four townships; by June 1787, they had finally finished measuring out the first seven townships under the new system.

There were some issues. “In retrospect, the system of numbering the townships was very confusing and cumbersome,” White writes in his book. More importantly, though, the lines the surveyors drew weren’t quite straight. When they measured out a six-mile side of a township, they’d mark a corner, at a right angle to the other side. But, as White writes, “The surveyors were apparently all individuals with individual concepts of how to comply with the 'six miles square' and 'right angle' requirements.” Often, the person running the east-west line and person running the north-south line would each mark a corner, whether or not that measurement agreed with any previous one. In some places, a single corner had multiple markers, "anywhere from one to four corners supposedly standing for what in theory should have been a common corner of all four townships," writes White.

Those problems, though, were small compared to the errors in the next large surveys of land. Congress sold two large tracts of Ohio land to land companies. The first, the Ohio Company, did a decent job surveying its land, according to the principles set out by law, although the company used its own unique and confusing numbering system. But the second private company botched the job. The private surveyors running the lines did such bad work that a person buying a lot of 640 acres might end up with 100 acres less than he paid for, according to White. The results of these experiments can still be seen in Ohio today, where the land is divided up without the regularity of plots farther west.

At that point, the government turned back to Alexander Hamilton, who had been appointed Treasury Secretary. Hamilton’s new idea was to create a new government agency, the General Land Office, to oversee land sales and surveys. Within the next few years, as boundary disputes multiplied, Congress took up part of his recommendation and created land offices to keep track of who owned what. It took another decade of disputes before the government finally got a federal land office to oversee the whole process.

The Public Land Survey System was haunted by problems with private surveyors for years: in 1966, the BLM was still working to correct fraudulent surveys done in California in the 19th century. But over decades of work, the Surveyor General and his legions of surveyors improved the accuracy and technique of dividing up land. In the 1890s, after decades of requests, the survey system got funding for more permanent markers—they used iron posts to mark each township corner and small stone “monuments” in corners marking smaller tracts.

By the time White published his book in the 1980s, there were still some unresolved mysteries of the survey and work to be done to correct the earlier, wilder measurements. Even today, the survey’s not entirely finished: there are large swaths of Alaska that have never been marked out. (It really is that giant.) But those early efforts are still evident in the mish-mash grid of Ohio, and the system that Jefferson championed, of dividing land using precise and scientific tools, stuck. That revolutionary idea from the 1780s remade the way the government understood every bit of land it would buy, seize, occupy, and claim as its own.

Along the Palisades skyline in Alpine, New Jersey, are the ruins of a once opulent mansion built in 1911 on a 25-acre cliffside property overlooking the Hudson River.

The Cliff Dale Manor was built as a summer home by a wealthy businessman named George Zabriskie. The property was then purchased in 1930 by J.D. Rockefeller, Jr., who donated the property two years later after the Palisades commission decided to return the skyline to its natural terrain.

Plans for the demolition of the two-story stone mansion were set forth, but the demolition didn't go as planned. The top part of the structure was demolished, but the large bottom portion still stands today, looking much like the remains of an old castle. Today the large ruin, including parts of the garden and a few stairways leading nowhere, can be seen on a nice hike in Palisades Park.

Check out this video for more exploration of Cliff Dale Manor.

A fitting testament to the city it depicts, the San Francisco Fountain portrays a city “both real and unreal which anyone can enter at will.”

After two years of work, world-renowned San Francisco sculptor Ruth Asawa finished this intricately detailed monument to San Francisco in 1972, featuring whimsical bas-relief scenes of the city. The large circular fountain is comprised of 41 individual bronze panels overflowing with San Francisco landmarks—all arranged relative to their location to Union Square—along with fantastical fictional characters.

The fountain was originally commissioned by the Grand Hyatt on Union Square. Asawa, a champion of folk art, recruited friends, family, visitors, and over one hundred area children to sculpt all the scenes for the fountain panels in common baker’s clay, which were then cast in bronze for the finished fountain. The San Francisco Fountain has long been a favorite of locals and tourists drawn to myriad details.

However, the fountain was deemed in need of treatment and restoration work by the Smithsonian’s Save Outdoor Sculpture survey in 1992, and was relegated to use as a planter. With the 2013 construction of Apple’s new flagship store on the site of the fountain, the old Hyatt fountain was at risk of becoming another casualty of redevelopment.

At the urging of local community groups, historical and arts societies, and some private citizens, Apple reconsidered its plans for the space. The day before Ruth Asawa’s memorial service in Golden Gate Park, the announcement was made that the fountain would be preserved and would remain in its historic location, in a newly designed plaza between the Apple store and the Hyatt hotel.

With the improvements made to the plaza surrounding the fountain, Ruth Asawa’s San Francisco Fountain itself was restored, and is now functioning as a proper fountain again.

In 1947, a shepherd working in the desert near the Dead Sea threw a rock into one of the area’s many caves. He heard something break, and when he went inside he discovered the first of what would be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls—ancient documents that contains drafts of the Hebrew bible and that have been key to scholars’ understanding of the Judeo-Christian past.

Now, for the first time in decades, archaeologists have found another cave connected to the scrolls.

This cave, which they suggest should be considered the 12th cave in the group, does not contain new scrolls, only the tools used to make them. A team of archaeologists found jars, leather bindings, cloth for wrapping the scrolls, and one actual scrolls, which was blank.

They also found two axe heads that date to the middle of the 20th century, leading them to believe that the cave was looted decades ago.

Still, this discovery raises the possibility that there are other, still undiscovered papers to be found.

 

Strelitzia reginae

A video posted by Daniel Barreto (@esdanielbarreto) on Feb 2, 2017 at 10:40pm PST

During dark times, following a glowing warm path can provide comfort. This is what artist Daniel Barreto found in his most recent art project series, in which he uses a flickering lighter to create endless looping, spiraling trails of fire. 

The Boston-based artist's Instagram account is filled with video posts of mesmerizing, dancing flames. The post above captures individual flames spinning around a Stretlitzia reginae, or bird of paradise, creating a beautiful orange glow on the flower. In other cases he has a person stand amidst the spirals, the flames dancing across their faces.

The loops are created with stop-motion, moving the lighter in different patterns in low light for two to three minutes, reports The Creators Project. The technique makes the individual flames look like they're floating and being pulled on a conveyor belt.  

Barreto started creating these fiery pieces while searching for a means to heal after his grandmother passed away. "The project is about solitude and losing your sight on the illusion of eternity in the infinite loops," Barreto says.   

See more of Barreto's fire spirals below and the rest of his artwork on Facebook and Instagram.

Fire spiral . 🔥

A video posted by Daniel Barreto (@esdanielbarreto) on Jan 2, 2017 at 12:34pm PST

 

Spiraling 🍃

A video posted by Daniel Barreto (@esdanielbarreto) on Jan 4, 2017 at 12:25am PST

 

Shooting light @paulaplmr

A video posted by Daniel Barreto (@esdanielbarreto) on Jan 5, 2017 at 3:05am PST

 

follow flames 🔥#ing17art @ingcreatives

A video posted by Daniel Barreto (@esdanielbarreto) on Jan 15, 2017 at 6:21pm PST

 

Cycles 🌕

A video posted by Daniel Barreto (@esdanielbarreto) on Jan 6, 2017 at 10:05am PST

 

☘

A video posted by Daniel Barreto (@esdanielbarreto) on Jan 5, 2017 at 3:15pm PST

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

In 1979, a few years after the eponymous documentary film made it famous, Sally Quinn, the writer, socialite, and wife of former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, purchased Grey Gardens for $220,000 from "Little Edie" Beale, a cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. 

Even then, the price was pretty reasonable for the neighborhood (about $730,000 today), but that was mostly because the East Hampton, New York, home, as portrayed in the documentary, was in severe disrepair. Quinn and Bradlee promptly spent $600,000 restoring the mansion, which they then proceeded to use as a summer home for over three decades.

On Wednesday, according to the Wall Street Journal, Quinn said she was finally putting it back on the market. Bradlee died in 2014, and the home, she told the Journal, "wasn't the same without him."

The list price is $19.995 million, or about 90 times what Quinn and Bradlee originally paid, which reflects both the continued resonance of the Maysles brothers' documentary as well as the realities of the Long Island real estate market. 

The home was originally built in 1897, but by the early 1970s was in derelict shape, crumbling on the outside and flea-infested on the inside. A condition of the original sale to Quinn and Bradlee was that they could not tear it down, but Quinn told the Journal she would place no such restrictions on any buyer today. 

Grey Gardens, in other words, could soon just be another piece of cinematic history that's been turned into a memory. 

Early pictorial map of Edo Castle unearthed in Matsuehttps://t.co/RjveVegYBrpic.twitter.com/SuoskR1fDQ

— The Mainichi (@themainichi) February 9, 2017

The Edo Castle in Tokyo—now part of the city's Imperial Palace—was once much grander than the buildings and walls that still exist today. That's because it was originally designed as a home for the country's shoguns, the line of dictators appointed by the Emperor who ruled Japan for centuries until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. 

The castle also changed over the years after it was originally constructed in 1457, to account for the changing tastes of its residents, the constant threat of attack, and its own occasional destruction.

Maps of the castle have been recovered in the past, but there are many years for which historians simply don't know how it might have looked, as other maps have been lost. 

But recently another map of the castle—one of the earliest found—was discovered, filling in some of the blanks and shedding light on how it looked in the early 1600s, according to The Mainichi.

The new map reveals that the castle appears to have been fortified by shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in the years before the Siege of Osaka, a major battle which took place in 1614 and 1615, when Ieyasu and his armies defeated a rogue clan.

The newly discovered map als shows that in the years before battle, Ieyasu was already beginning to prepare. 

"The map is evidence that Ieyasu had a major battle in mind," one specialist told The Mainichi. "Ieyasu built what could be the strongest castle of the time."

Among the fortifications: a "quintuple-entrance structure," according to the Japan News, in addition to a series of corridors that connected the castle's keeps. 

The new map was recovered some 400 miles to the west of Tokyo, by officials conducting a survey of collections at the Matsue History Museum. Officials did not say how it ended up there. 

At 160,000 pounds and 17 feet high, these are the largest legs you'll ever see on a country road in North Carolina.

Inspired by Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, local artist Ricky Pearce created these legs and across the street a pair of heels to go with them. The sculpture is called "Reminiscing," which you can see written if you walk beneath an arch as you make your way around the legs. 

Since 1853, the 22 acres of land just south of Huntsville, Texas have been used as a burial ground for prisoners. When family members fail to come forward to claim the deceased (either because there are none, or because they cannot afford the cost of burial themselves), the bodies are interred at Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery. 

The cemetery was badly maintained and had no written records until the 1970s. In 1962, the assistant warden for the Walls Unit, Captain Joe Byrd, undertook a recording and maintenance project in the cemetery, cataloging and providing simple headstones for the graves he could identify. As of 2012 the Texas Department of Criminal Justice estimated the cemetery contained 2,100 graves, but research from Indiana State University suggested there were as many as 3,000.

Most of the graves are anonymous, wood or concrete crosses or slabs labeled with an inmate number, if anything. But a handful are well known, including the grave of Kiowa Indian chief Satanta, who committed suicide while imprisoned in 1878. Cowboy Lee Smith has the largest headstone in the cemetery, donated by fellow cowboys. Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, thought to have killed 157 people including his mother, is also buried here.

The graves of death row inmates, which make up about 2 percent of the cemetery, are indicated by a "99" number, or an "X" or "EX."

All of the upkeep and burial work for the cemetery is performed by prisoners. They dig the graves, chisel the head stones, and attend the funerals, which are led by the prison chaplain in the early morning. Scarcely a day goes by when there is no one to bury.

Hidden in the heart of the cosmopolitan district of Gràcia in Barcelona, you can visit an original Belle Epoque atelier, the private art studio of Oleguer Junyent, a Catalan genius who devoted his life to painting, writing, collecting, and stage design. 

Junyent's fame stemmed from his design work for the Gran Teatre de Liceu's operas. The most important was Parsifal by Wagner, performed in Barcelona in 1913 for the first time outside Germany. Following his success in the theatre, he decorated some of Barcelona's most luxurious bourgeois houses, including Casa Burés and Casa Cambó. He was also leader Catalonia's modernism movement, a contemporary of Ramon Casas and Pablo Picasso. 

The Junyent family still resides in the building, but they have opened Oleguer's preserved workshop to the public for scheduled viewings. The collection is a sight to behold: In addition to Oleguer's paintings, sculptures, models, and various other works, it contains one of the most complete collections of automata in the city after the Tibidabo Amusement Park. 

Its fashion collection is also incredibly robust. In addition to costumes designed by Junyent, it contains historical artifacts from the rococo, romantic, and art deco periods. Some of the paintings in the collection are masterpieces, from the medieval works by Ferrer Bassa to the avant-gardist Anglada Camarassa. The workshop also displays a series of dolls collected by Oleguer's niece.

The workshop is periodically opened for events, where guests can step back in time to the glimmering age of one of Catalonia's most famous designers. 

This self-proclaimed “largest maze complex in the world” is a quirky family attraction in Tasmania’s Promised Land, backdropped by the picturesque Mount Roland. While sometimes classified as a theme park, this description doesn’t quite fit. There are no rides; in fact, there really isn’t anything mechanical or electric at all. Tasmazia is essentially a large maze, with other mazes nestled inside. 

Aside from the Great Maze, one of the world’s largest botanical mazes, the mazes include the Hampton Court Maze, the Yellow Brick Road Maze, the Hexagonal Maze, the Cage, the Irish Maze, the Confusion Maze and the Balance Maze. 

One of the main attractions at the park is the eponymous Village of Lower Crackpot, a quaint miniature village built to one-fifth scale. The Embassy Garden is another set of model buildings and icons representing locations around the world, or, in some cases, representing other worlds in the form of the buildings dedicated to intergalactic and time travel.

A quirky, occasionally subversive, sense of humor is present throughout the park. The Village of Lower Crackpot includes the "School of Lateral Thinking" and interplanetary balloon aviation. A monument to whistle-blowers can be found in the Embassy Garden.

Other features of the park include Cubby Town (a cluster of mini-buildings that kids can enter), Lower Crackpot’s Correctional Centre (a assortment of punishments such as faux stocks and a guillotine), and the Three Bears’ Cottage. The park also includes a working lavender farm, which is in full bloom in January.

It was a stomach-turning scene as a truck filled with offal flipped on its side and blocked a small highway in Wairoa, New Zealand, the New Zealand Herald reports.

The crash occurred Friday at 7 a.m., on State Highway 2. "About three quarters of the truck's load spilled onto the road," deputy fire chief Barry Gasson told the Herald. "You are talking sheep heads and other animal remains, along with diesel and oil from the truck."

"It was all over the road," he continued. (Graphic photos from the scene, which you can see here if you're so inclined, back him up.) The driver suffered minor injuries, and was treated at the scene.

On Facebook, Wairoa Police praised local drivers, who they said showed extreme tolerance as they waited for cranes to clear the road. Nothing like seeing a bunch of severed heads to keep your own problems in perspective.

The animals in the image above are elephants. They were drawn sometime around the 13th or 14th century in a medieval bestiary, a type of book that described animals large and small, real and fantastic. But to a modern eye the line between the real and the imagined is often blurred. Unicorns and two-legged centaurs were listed alongside lizards, weasels, pelicans, and panthers, and in the stories these books told, griffins carried away oxen and dug for gold in mines, while dragons fought with elephants that looked as unreal as any mythical beast.

In England and France, these bestiaries were most popular during the Middle Ages, but they had their origins in the ancient Mediterranean, when scholars in Egypt drew from the works of Aristotle, Pliny, and their like to create the first of these books. Bestiaries were supposed to describe the natural world, but the world they depicted is often hard to recognize. Even the very real animals could be made into unrecognizable beasts, like the elephants above.

Elephants in medieval bestiaries came in all shapes and sizes, few of which resembled real-life elephants. They might have horse-like legs and tails and misshapen feet or look more like pigs. Sometimes their ears were missing; sometimes their trunk was so long it would drag on the ground. The trunks and the tusks were most often twisted into surprising shapes and angles: One very memorable elephant looked like a dog with the tusks of a boar and a strange, long nose.

Look at a series of these images, and sometimes patterns emerge. For instance, while the trunks of elephants rarely looked like they do in real life, they often looked like trumpets. Could that be a clue to these unusual images? Why did so many artists copy that detail, when so many other features were left the imagination? 

One of the mysteries of the bestiary form is what the first one looked like. The tradition is usually traced back to the Physiologus, a book that no longer exists. It’s thought that it was written around the 2nd century A.D., in Alexandria, by a scholar working in Greek, and much of what’s known about it is derived from later translations into Latin. It would have contained the descriptions of a selection of animals, perhaps 50 or so, and relied on the standard works of natural history of the time, including Aristotle’s History of Animals and Pliny’s Natural History.

But the Physiologus did not follow the rules of scientific observation, as we understand them today. Its author described a world created by a Christian God, where the scientific and religious observations were not neatly divided. It was “a compilation of pseudo-science in which the fantastic descriptions of real and imaginary animals, birds, and even stones were used to illustrate points of Christian dogma and morals,” wrote Florence McCulloch in Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries, a foundational text in the modern study of medieval natural history. As Ann Payne, a curator at the British Library put it, the author’s “purpose was to analyze the habits of beast and to elicit from them what they were supposed to tell him about the ways of God, of Man and of the Devil.”

Elephants, for instance, starred in a story about sex. The bestiaries’ fascination with elephants’ sex lives had both a naturalist and a religious angle to it. Bestiary writers appeared to be genuinely trying to theorize about how elephants procreated: They were just so large and heavy! How did the male avoid crushing the female?

But the bestiaries’ accounts of elephants’ love life also focused, in more detail, on their relative chasteness. Elephants were said to have no desire to have sex, or to be slow to sexual arousal. In these stories, elephants had one mate and stayed true to that partner. To reproduce at all, the elephant couple would have to go east to the garden of Eden, where the female would pick the fruit of the mythical mandrake, a sort of human-plant hybrid, and offer it to the male elephant.

Were medieval people really meant to believe that’s how elephants mated? According to bestiary scholars, they were not as gullible as us modern, post-Renaissance people would like to believe. As McCulloch explained, back in 1962, the bestiaries’ audience understood these were didactic stories. They didn’t believe that elephants had to eat human-plant hybrids in order to do it.

In the 21st century, though, people are all too willing to believe that medieval artists and writers were doing their best to document natural history, using limited information. Images from bestiaries are often framed as efforts “based on hearsay” or “descriptions of travelers.” King Louis IX of France gifted King Henry III of England an elephant in 1255, and the elephant came to live at the Tower of London, which at the time was used as a castle and residence rather than a gloomy prison. It’s often said that after that, British artists were able to draw the elephant more naturalistically. 

But the trunks portrayed as trumpets hint that this judgment isn't quite right. There are plenty of written descriptions of the elephant’s trunk, and none of the ones I found describe it as “shaped like a trumpet.” Aristotle explained that the elephant’s trunk “is capable of being crooked or coiled at the tip, but not of flexing like a joint, for it is composed of gristle.” Hexameron of Ambrose, writing in the fourth century A.D., noted that an elephant has a hollow, “projecting trunk” that it uses to suck up huge quantities of water and pour them down its throat. One medieval writer said it is “like a snake, fortified with a wall of ivory.”

The only reference I could find connecting an elephant’s trunk to a trumpet was Aristotle’s note that though an elephant makes a sigh-like sound using its mouth, “if it employ the trunk as well, the sound produced is like that of a hoarse trumpet.”

There’s more evidence, too, that bestiary artists were making a choice when they drew elephants in these less-than-naturalistic ways. In her book Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology, Debra Hassig (now Debra Strickland, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow) details how the naturalism of elephant images in bestiaries has little relationship to the appearance of that very real elephant in the Tower of London.

“There are very naturalistic renderings of elephants in some of the earliest English manuscripts, and very non naturalistic examples in some of the later ones,” she wrote. “The degree of naturalism found in a given image must have been the result of the artist’s decision, even in the wake of direct observation of a live specimen ... In the bestiaries, fidelity to living creatures was not necessarily the artist’s goal." In other words, the bestiary artists were making choices, and they sometimes chose not to depict the elephant in the most naturalistic way possible. Instead, they followed a different set of guidelines, focused on the story the image might tell rather than its fidelity to what the eye might see.

Is it possible that the artists drew the elephants’ trunks as trumpets to symbolize the sound the trunk made—to communicate the sound as part of the image? If bestiary stories were meant to be allegorical, if the images are already telling a story, if they were making those choices on purpose, perhaps this detail is just one more part of that system. Medieval artists might not have been working with the exact same information that we have now, but that’s not why their drawings look strange to us. They were communicating facts and ideas using a language we no longer understand.

Salvador Andreu, better known as "Dr. Andreu," was the wealthiest physician in Barcelona in the 1920s. He used the great fortune he accumulated by a pharmaceutical invention to purchase large plots of land, and catering to the growing wealthy Catalan bourgeoisie class, developed Tibidabo Avenue, an elegant avenue running along the city's highest peak.

The broad, tree-lined avenue was modeled off European cities, and unlike any urbanized area in Barcelona at the time. Park spaces were parceled off for the enjoyment of the upper crust, who built majestic estates with beautiful panoramic views of the city along the avenue.

These modernist architectural gems still stand today, including the Andreu family's own residence, which was at No. 17 Tibidabo Avenue, built in 1926 by the architect Enric Sagnier. But Dr. Andreu died in 1928, and eight years later the Spanish Civil War broke out. The empty residence was repurposed as the Soviet Union's consulate in Barcelona, home to Soviet Ambassador Vladimir Antonov.

The Soviet Union, under Stalin, was aiding the Republican forces fighting General Franco's Nationalists. At this time bombings by the Italian fascist air force were frequent and the Soviet embassy was an obvious target. So in 1937, a bunker was built on the property.

The Soviet bunker was unique in that it was not just an emergency refuge but also built to be a place for the diplomats to continue their work during bombings. It had all the necessary amenities, including a kitchen, toilettes, an electricity generator, which is still visible. There was a thick iron door and an emergency exit to the garden. 

Stalin had a special interest in controlling Catalonia, where the anarchists and Trotskyists had great strength. When the Soviets gained control of Barcelona, agents of the NKVD (the political police) they used the top floor of the Andreu mansion as a communications center. According to the book The Barcelona Underground by Mireia Valls, the palace of Dr. Andreu was connected by tunnels to the nearby Tamarita house, where there was a prison used by the Soviets.

After the war, the Andreu family sold the building to private companies, and it is currently owned by Mutua Universal. Visitors can arrange guided tours of the bunker. 

Tucked away in a small, unassuming building in the town of Hólmavík, in Iceland’s Westfjords, is a museum that holds some truly gruesome displays of 17th century sorcery. There are pants made of human skin, which are said to give the wearer unlimited wealth; you can see magical sigils called staves, thought to offer powers ranging from the ability to see ghosts to making someone fall in love; and strange two-headed snake creatures that are born to steal goat’s milk.

While all of this arcane weirdness could be viewed as little more than an out-of-the-way collection of oddities, for both the curator of The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, and the town of Hólmavík itself, the exhibitions here are an important reminder of a darker time in local history. Oh, and they're also really great at bringing in tourist dollars.

The museum was established in 2000 by a group of people from the town aiming to drive tourism to the area, led by the impish Sigurður “Siggi” Atlason. During the 17th century, Iceland experienced what Atlason calls a “witch craze,” not unlike the early American persecution of so-called witches in Salem. While there were examples of alleged sorcerers being hunted down all across Iceland, a great many of the reported cases stemmed from the Westfjords. Ever since, the whole region has maintained the air of a place steeped in magic and folklore.

“It's the landscape, it's the history, it's the tales from this area,” says Atlason. “People from other parts of the country, they always believe that people here in Strandir, which is the east coast of the Westfjords, they have knowledge of occult. [The people in these remote locations] are supposed to be strange, and have some knowledge that nobody else has.”

As a way of both embracing this local history, and highlighting an evocative sliver of Icelandic culture, the group landed on the idea of a sorcery museum. The concept presented the museum's creators with a few unique challenges. For starters, focusing on the rituals and witchcraft of 17th century Icelandic sorcerers meant finding a way to create an exhibition of occult artifacts of which there are no surviving examples. It took them over two years researching annals, grimoires, priest books, and judge’s papers from the time to put together a collection of the strangest and most bizarre workings they could find.

"This actually could have been something else," says Atlason. "This small museum could have been a research center about whales, or whale-watching, or hiking paths, or whatever, but the dozens [of locals] that were involved, including me, we have all been quite interested in history, especially myth and folklore."

To bring these centuries-old rituals and symbols to life, the group employed a team of designers who had experience working in film and television. Working from historic descriptions, they were able to recreate such gruesome sights as a pair of necropants (the fleshy translucence and realistic hair are even more disturbing up close), and an undead skeleton bursting through the concrete floor (a ritual for creating a zombie is another highlight of the museum).

Even with the logistics of the place sorted out, some people in the area were not exactly enchanted by the idea of a witchcraft museum. In addition to a negative response from some conservative Christian opponents, many locals in the tiny communities around the Westfjords still felt the pain that the witch craze had brought to their ancestors hundreds of years before. “We are talking about family, and friends, and therefore, there were people in this area that really disliked this idea,” says Atlason. “We had to go do some radio interviews, and confront some very strict conservatives. And we lost all the debates there, because you don't want to start to be unreasonable and start to speak about stupid things.” Despite the vocal opposition, when the museum finally opened, Atlason says his opponents realized that it was neither blasphemous nor insensitive to the memory of those who had died during the witch craze. The museum became a hit.

Five years later, they were able to expand to a second location in the Westfjords, called the Sorcerer's Cottage. Atlason would like open a third exhibition in still a different town in the area, stressing the need to lure tourists to neighboring small towns. “This project is about supporting the tourism. Not only in Hólmavík. Hólmavík is part of the area, and the coast is quite long. And that is why we did not build one big one here in Hólmavík.”    

Today, The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft draws regular crowds to Hólmavík, who come to see the necropants or the “Invisible Boy.” But for all the popularity of the more sensational aspects of the museum, Atlason still sees it as a reminder of the hard lessons of witch hunts past.

These days, visitors to the museum who catch one of Atlason's talks might hear him compare Iceland’s 17th century witch craze to the modern rise of Islamophobia. He's not shy about the fact that much of the sorcerous artifacts on display, and the violence that accompanied them, were a direct response to the complicated class and power systems at play in 17th century Iceland. He sees that same fear-mongering and social control at play today. “We just have to have more sense, because this is happening now. Same thing. It is a kind of witch craze, it is a witch craze against them. It is sad, because we have seen it so many times. We are always talking about this.”  

We have successfully created a new World record of tallest sand castle which is 48ft.8 inch for #GuinnessWorldRecord at Puri beach of india pic.twitter.com/j2EJKw4c3i

— Sudarsan Pattnaik (@sudarsansand) February 10, 2017

Beachside sculptors, eat your hearts out—Sudarsan Pattnaik just built the tallest sandcastle in the world, on a beach in India.

Pattnaik's creation, which is themed around world peace, is 48 feet tall. It features doves, scalloped edges, man-sized turrets, and a massive sand portrait of Gandhi.

The sculpture was unveiled today at Puri Beach in Orissa, India, after four days of gritty construction work, the Times of India reports. The folks from the Guinness Book of World Records were on hand to give Pattnaik the award, previously held by American Ted Siebert.

Heartily thank all well wishers, art lovers for their encouragement in my making to the #GuinnessWorldRecord TallestSandCastle at Puribeach pic.twitter.com/ALde1JpTgj

— Sudarsan Pattnaik (@sudarsansand) February 10, 2017

Pattnaik, who broke Siebert's record by 3.75 feet, is a professional sand sculptor. He has a school, the Sudarsan Sand Art Institute—30 of his students helped him with this sculpture—and over his career, he has taken home 27 championship prizes in international competitions. Three years ago, he received the Padma Shri, one of India's highest civilian honors.

This is his first Guinness World Record, though. In the photograph of him receiving it, both he and the award are dwarfed by the scale of his creation. Hey, you're not crying—that's just sand in your eye.

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.

80-year-old SC woman did not know her cane contained hidden sword, TSA says https://t.co/8lusTtOC9Fpic.twitter.com/G8QZSS0BWK

— WYFF News 4 (@wyffnews4) February 10, 2017

While passing through airport security recently, an 80-year-old South Carolina woman submitted her cane to be screened.

Inside, a TSA official said Thursday, they found a hidden sword, according to WYFF.

The woman, who was not named, apparently knew nothing about it, and was let go, while the cane was confiscated, Mark Howell, a TSA spokesman, told the station. Howell added that the incident was a reminder that hidden swords in canes might be more common than you think. 

That's because they are frequently purchased secondhand, officials said, which means that there could be thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands—or even millions?—of cane users worldwide, who are, quite possibly unwittingly, armed for battle. 

An idiosyncratic pyramid arch towers at the end of a tree-lined carriage road in a Wentworth field. Like all follies, it serves no real purpose, but some 300 years ago it helped an aristocrat retain his honor.

Mason John Carr built this 46-foot-tall pyramid under the instructions of the Marquis of Rockingham around 1730. According to legend, the Marquis bet a friend that he could drive his horses through the eye of a needle. He had this standalone "needle" constructed exactly wide enough for a small carriage to pass through expressly to win his wager.

The bet was allegedly only £10, massively less than the cost of building the folly.

One side of the arch is pockmarked by musket balls, which has led some to believe it was the site of an execution by firing squad. This is unsubstantiated and it is more likely it was used for target practice.

First built in 1930, this set of six natural red clay public tennis courts in the East End of Pittsburgh is one of the first of its kind in the United States. Situated on the edge of the 644-acre Frick Park, the historic courts remain among the most unique tennis complexes in the country. 

The Frick Park Clay Courts are made of a natural red clay base and crushed red brick surface, using bricks crushed locally in the Pittsburgh area. True natural clay courts are rare because they take two to three days to dry, and the tennis complex at Frick Park is one of the few such courts open to the public in the U.S..

Frick Park opened in 1927 after a bequest of 150 acres to the city upon the passing of noted steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, and the clay tennis courts were built three years later.

Today the courts are in use seven days a week during the summer and fall, hosting tournaments, lessons and tennis leagues. They are free and open to the public. However, you might want to bring an old pair of shoes, as they will likely end up with slight tinge of red after a few sets.