Two weeks ago, a lonely musk ox named Brutus wandered far from his herd in Sweden and stole the country's heart. Brutus was hoping to find a mate, but his roaming took him so far afield that there were no females within miles. Local and national news organizations covered his plight. Myskoxe.se, a Swedish website dedicated to musk oxen, is keeping detailed track of his journey, posting brief updates and paparazzi-style photos. "Brutus is out hiking," they wrote on September 12. "What he has in mind—it is not known."
Sweden loves Brutus because he's big, shaggy, and lovelorn, with the limpid eyes and curved horns of a classic Hollywood bad boy. But they also love him because he's living proof that, 45 years ago, the country got one over on one of their neighbors. Brutus is the descendant of a group of oxen that defected from Norway in 1971, defying all convention and providing Sweden with some measure of closure after decades of musk-ox related strife.
The story of the Great Scandinavian Musk Ox Rivalry begins about 11,000 years ago. Up until that point, musk oxen ranged throughout the Northern Hemisphere, munching on grass and lichen and standing around looking stately in the snow. But as the Ice Age slowly ended, thaws and hungry humans drove them out of much of their habitat. By the 1900s, the world's only musk ox herds were in Northern Canada and Greenland.
A small herd of musk oxen in their homeland, Northeast Greenland. (Photo: Hannes Grobe/CC BY-SA 2.5)
Also in Greenland were a number of Norwegian hunters, taking advantage of their country's claim on the eastern half of the land mass. These hunters killed enough musk oxen that Denmark, which had claimed the western half, got angry with them, saying they were on track to drive the animals to extinction. Hoping to save face, in the 1920s, a polar researcher named Adolf Hoel made a suggestion: why not bring some musk oxen to Norway, a place which, given its climate and general superiority, they might like even better than Greenland? "These measures to translocate muskoxen will partially disarm [this] criticism," Hoel wrote. "We will show with it that we don’t only slaughter, but that we too support cross-border idealistic cultural work."
Hoel's case was bolstered by a couple of fossilized musk ox vertebrae that had been uncovered during the digging of the national railroad. "In the minds of people in the 1920s and '30s, there was this idea that the musk ox was a Norwegian animal," says Dolly Jørgensen, an environmental historian at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. "Because Norway claimed East Greenland, and there were musk ox in East Greenland, that means the musk ox are Norwegian." Hoel, then the head of what would become the Norwegian Polar Institute, began fundraising, writing to shipping companies, chocolate factories, and the Crown Prince. Over the course of a couple of decades, he and his successors managed to bring dozens of musk ox calves into Norway, letting them loose in Svalbard, and in the Dovre mountains, near the border with Sweden.
For years, the musk oxen wandered around Norway, munching and multiplying and frightening the occasional hiker. Then came the winter of 1952. Maybe the herds were hungry, or maybe they were just bored. For whatever reason, a small group crossed the frozen swamps on the Norway-Sweden border and ended up in Kiruna, where they were spotted by some Swedes.
A musk ox distribution map. Red represents the species' natural range, while blue denotes introduced populations. Note the broad swath of red in Greenland, and the small blue dots in Sweden and Norway. (Photo: WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0) Norway tried to be understanding, but they were crushed. The wandering "must be condemned as disloyal," wrote John Giæver, a researcher with the Polar Institute, even if "it is in principle totally natural." His interlocutor, from Denmark, razzed him a bit, replying that "it isn’t unreasonable that the musk oxen are dissatisfied with the situation in old Norway, when you consider that they are condemned to live in seclusion." But Giæver stood firm: the crossing was "a sorry end to this experiment," he wrote.
Sweden, meanwhile, was overjoyed. The country had their own history with musk oxen—in 1899, a geologist named Alfred Gabriel Nathorst had imported dozens of them, hoping to establish a domestic population and leave the country flush with meat and musk ox wool, which is hypoallergenic, waterproof, and very soft. That experiment had been a failure on all counts—the kidnapped calves didn't take well to farm life, and were constantly raging in their pens, butting their owners and succumbing to various livestock diseases. By 1904, they were all dead.
Now, 50 years later, the musk oxen were coming over of their own accord—and from Norway, the country that had asserted such a strong claim on them in the first place. It was a sweet, musky victory. Within five days of the oxens' crossing over, the Swedish government declared them officially and legally protected. They even rubbed it in a bit, writing to the Polar Institute that "the musk oxen’s appearance in Lapland is very pleasing, and [we] will do everything in our power to promote the Scandinavian musk ox population’s growth."
Lapland, Sweden, nary a musk ox to be seen. (Photo: SteenJepsen/CC0)
But even this wasn't enough for the fickle beasts. By the spring of 1953, the herd had crossed back into Norway. Now it was Sweden's turn to pine. "Having the musk oxen, for even such a short time, whet the appetite of Swedes for the animal," writes Jørgensen. They asked Norway if they could buy some calves from them, but Norway refused. It hardly mattered: by the late 1950s, that whole herd was dead, too.
Determined to stick to their plan, Norway kept importing calves, building up new musk ox herds throughout the mountains. And driven by who knows what plan of their own, some of these musk oxen once again defected. In 1971, a five-strong herd decided they had had enough of Norway, and wanted to see what the grazing was like over in Härjedalen, a small mountain town in Sweden.
Once again, the oxen spent the winter accidentally crossing a boundary they were totally unaware of. And once again, Sweden freaked out. "Such a tourist attraction is something one could not even have dreamed," one local paper enthused. Another published an editorial cartoon in which a muskoxen shouts "Ah! Cloudberries!" while excitedly prancing across the border. A mere two days after the herd was sighted, a Swedish hotel called Hamrafjället began advertising day tours to the nearby mountains, which they had already rebranded as Muskoxen Land. "There were lots of people trying to see them, these five animals," says Jørgensen. "It really didn't work very well, because it was difficult to figure out where they were."
Also once again, Norway wasn't having any of this. Norwegian patrons of the hotel were peeved, insisting "It is [Norway] which is 'Muskoxen Land.'" The country's press was also skeptical, referring to the oxen as "emigrants," and asserting that they were "visiting the border." "What you kind of get is this language about, 'Well, yes, they may stay in Sweden," says Jørgensen. "'But if they don't like it there—which may very well happen—they can find their way back to [Norway] in the summer.' The overall message is like 'Huh, that's kind of weird. They don't really belong there.'"
A musk ox goofs around at the Swedish captive breeding facility. (Photo: Dolly Jørgensen)
Unconcerned with patriotism, the little group of musk oxen carved out happy lives in Sweden. At one point, the refugee herd numbered a respectable 30, and the environmental ministry considered separating it into two herds, to properly spread the newcomer around the country. In 1984, Sweden put a musk ox on a postage stamp, as part of a mountain-themed collector's set. "In 1971, the musk ox came back [to Sweden]," explained the accompanying press release. "The occasion can be seen as a return to the fold."
The musk oxen of Sweden and the musk oxen of Norway have almost everything in common—but because they are citizens of different nations, they lead different lives. "This animal, who has no nationality one way or another, is instantly given one by the people around them," says Jørgensen. These days, if you're a Norwegian musk ox, you're a beloved tourist attraction, the centerpiece of the country's many "musk ox safaris." You're also protected, so long as you stay within a certain boundary. (If you go outside of it, you're shot, and served as an appetizer at a state-owned hotel.) In other words, you're a wild animal, part of a national heritage that, although constructed, now seems totally natural.
If you're a Swedish musk ox, things are a little different. Maybe you live in the captive breeding facility, which boasts a gift shop full of wool clothing, and a viewing platform to accommodate the many curious human visitors. Or maybe you're one of the wild ones—in which case, even though there are only 11 of you, you aren't listed as endangered. As Jørgensen says, "the musk ox doesn't count as Swedish under the rules."
Or maybe you're Brutus, and you just want to find love. That guy was last spotted in Sonfjället, which means he's inching further and further west. Maybe he has headed back to Norway.
Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Known all over Europe for her astonishing beauty, Lady Hamilton accomplished many things in her lifetime. She was considered a key figure in the arts, a muse and patron, and her political influence saved the King and Queen of Naples. As if that wasn’t enough, she also—along with the spread of democratic ideas in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and the discovery of Pompeii—revived the neoclassical style that marks the Regency Period (1795-1825).
But to understand the influence she held over Europe, one must follow the trajectory of her life. Born in poverty and employed as a maid in her teenage years, her astonishing beauty and irresistible charm earned her the heart of many powerful men. Though scorned by her first two lovers, she eventually became the inamorata (and subsequent wife) of Sir William Hamilton, the English ambassador in Naples.
It was from this city, foreign though it was to her, that Lady Hamilton would make the world kneel at her feet.
Her journey to renown began with the warm welcome she received from the aristocracy in Naples. Despite being Sir William’s mistress, Lady Hamilton did not face scorn, derision, or persecution. Indeed, rather than focus on her status as a mistress, the nobles learned to appreciate her many virtues, among which stood out her cleverness, beauty, and high-spirits.
In time her company was sought after by many. Dukes and princes threw banquets in her honor. Noblemen wooed her. The King himself paid respects to her.
This portrait of Lady Hamilton as The Magdalene by George Romney was commissioned by the Prince of Wales himself (Photo: Sotheby's New York/Public Domain)
Even peasants were receptive to her charms. James Thomas Herbert Baily tells us in his biography of Lady Hamilton that “the country people fell down on their knees before her, asking favours from her in the name of the Blessed Virgin in whose likeness the good God had made her.”
Artists came from all over Europe to paint Lady Hamilton’s portrait. When they could not see her in person, they used for reference sketches drawn by George Romney, the first artist for whom she was a muse. The Lady Hamilton mania was so intense that in her lifetime she was the most painted woman in the continent, surpassing empresses and queens.
Portrait of Emma, Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (Photo: Public Domain)
Eager to please the nobles whose world she now inhabited and anxious to showcase her talents, Lady Hamilton searched for novel ways to charm and entertain the many guests that visited her house. To that end, and capitalizing on her naturally classical looks, she developed an art form of her own invention called "Attitudes". It consisted in giving performances where she would drape herself in simple cloth and strike, in graceful succession, a variety of poses modeled after classical themes.
Though it may be difficult for the modern reader to imagine that such a spectacle would appeal to anyone’s taste, European society couldn’t get enough of Lady Hamilton’s Attitudes. One of the best descriptions of the enchanting effect she had on her audience comes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In his work Italian Journey, he describes a performance at the Hamiltons’ household as follows:
"She wears a Greek garb, becoming to her to perfection. She then merely loosens her locks, takes a pair of shawls, and effects changes of postures, moods, gestures, mien, and appearance that make one really feel as if one were in some dream [...] successively standing, kneeling, seated, reclining, grave, sad, sportive, teasing, abandoned, penitent, alluring, threatening, agonised. One follows the other, and grows out of it. She knows how to choose and shift the simple folds of her single kerchief for every expression, and to adjust it into a hundred kinds of headgear.”
In her daily life Lady Hamilton wore garments similar to those she used in performance, simple white robes with colorful sashes fastened to make a high waist. In this she would not remain alone. Eighteenth century Europe was by then obsessed with the classical age, and Lady Hamilton’s fashion choices both exemplified and mobilized the continent's burgeoning trends. She became Europe’s preeminent trendsetter.
Her most lasting contribution to fashion might be the robe a la grec.
The clothing of the mid-1700s was characterized by intricate dresses assembled with layers upon layers of skirts and decorated with symmetrical shapes that contoured the waist. It reflected a society obsessed with Rococo style, which favored opulence and ornament.
Regency looks were a stark contrast to this. Like the garments worn by Greek goddesses, modern robes were simple. Instead of stacking countless layers upon each other, the new trend favored dresses that combined only three pieces of clothing: the corset, the chemise, and the gown. The gowns, like those we see in classical paintings, featured mostly light colors, and they were loose fitting, with the waistline set just below the bosom. Following Lady Hamilton’s natural look, hairstyles also became simpler. Even the French ditched the massive wigs that had adorned the heads of the executed rulers.
High waists, simple robes, and classical hairstyles characterized Regency fashion. Picture from "The Five Positions of Dancing" by T. Wilson 1811 (Photo: Public Domain)
What Lady Hamilton did, society was eager to follow. It was thus that she contributed to the revival of Europe’s obsession with ancient Greece.
But not everyone loved or approved of her, and she was often the victim of malicious gossip and satire. Her luck turned when she became the lover of Admiral Nelson, England’s most beloved naval hero. She fell out of favor with the general public after she began to openly live with Nelson and Sir Hamilton in what is often considered the first publicly known menage-a-trois of the modern world. At the time of her death at the age of 49, with both her husband and her lover deceased, she had found herself destitute and alone.
But however unglamorous her end might have been, in life Lady Hamilton was a blazing torch. After all, how many people can boast of having defined the style of an entire era?
Visualizing change over time can be incredibly difficult. Which is why in a new Phaidon book entitled Evolution: A Visual Record, Robert Clark’s vivid and compelling photographs serve as an ode to Charles Darwin’s scientific breakthrough.
Beginning with text by David Quammen and Joseph Wallace about Darwin’s The Origin of Species, it is filled with photographs and facts about evolution, some of them startling. While there are rough estimates for the number of species of mammals on Earth (around 5,000) and birds (around 10,000), insect species estimates lie anywhere between 1 million to 30 million. And there continues to be discoveries, such as this giant amphibious centipede.
The adaptive skills of insects is seen in the above photo. According to the book, color and shape of both the dead leaf mantis (genus Deroplatys, left) and true leaf insect or "walking leaf" (family Phylliidae, right) changed over the years.
From insects to humans, Clark’s photographs capture a sense of wonder over life on earth. As Darwin described at the end of The Origin of Species: "…whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
Here is a selection of Clark’s photographs and accompanying text from the book.
"The hands of a gorilla. Despite the fact that humans are bipedal and gorillas usually walk on all four limbs, the two species’ hands are closer in proportion to each other than to those of any other ape, including Homo sapiens’ closer relative, the tool-using chimpanzee."
"'The combination of good sedimentary conditions and the fact that animals, including hominids, like to be near a source of water,' the great paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey says, helps explain why the remains of human ancestors—and many other creatures—are so often found near the shores of lakes. These beautiful human footprints, about 120 thousand years old, were discovered south of Lake Natron, Tanzania."
"Unsurprisingly, given their fragility and lack of any skeletal structure, jellyfish are rarely preserved in the geologic record. That makes some recent finds of spectacularly well-preserved specimens in Utah’s Marjum Formation (dating back to the Middle Cambrian Period around 505 million years ago) especially important. Helping clarify the origins of the Cnidaria—the phylum that also includes corals, and other aquatic invertebrate animals —these discoveries indicate that jellyfish may have evolved as long as seven hundred million years ago."
"The five-toed foot and long, powerful tail of a saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus). The first crocodylomorphs (the group that included the early crocodilians and their now-extinct relatives) included animals such as Erpetosuchus, which was small, terrestrial, and possibly bipedal. But after appearing in the Late Cretaceous Period, the true crocodiles have survived while hewing largely to the form we see today. Why have crocodilians endured so long without evolving into dramatically different forms? Like other big, aggressive predators (such as great white sharks), crocodilians rely on their size, strength, and sharp teeth to overwhelm their prey. This hunting technique is simple and effective, as its great longevity demonstrates."
"Not so long ago, it was a controversial theory, but now it’s widely accepted: Birds aren’t just dinosaur-like; they are in fact living dinosaurs. That’s true of everything from sparrows to eagles to Darwin’s finches—but it’s rarely more obvious than when looking at a southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius), the flightless bird native to Australia and New Guinea that at five feet tall and over one hundred pounds is one of the largest and heaviest birds on Earth. The steely gaze, the leathery crest, and the powerful beak all call the ancient dinosaurs to mind, as do the cassowary’s fearsome three-toed feet, which (much as Velociraptor and other birdlike dinosaurs must have done) it can employ as weapons."
"The result of evolutionary adaptation can be startlingly elegant. Case in point: protective coloration or camou age in the Indian or Malayan leafwing butterfly (Kallima paralekta). (Despite its common name, the species is actually endemic to Sumatra and Java in Indonesia, where Alfred Russel Wallace encountered and wrote extensively about it.) The upper surface of the male’s wing features a relatively straightforward pattern of blue and orange — but when its wings are closed, it suddenly resembles an ordinary brown leaf."
"Since mutations are selected for the survival advantages they provide to a species, it’s no surprise that the ability to fly has evolved repeatedly during the history of life on Earth, and in very different groups of animals. This phenomenon is known as convergent evolution. In ancient times, the reptiles known as pterosaurs—including such giants as Quetzalcoatlus, whose wingspan may have exceeded fifty feet—acquired active flight, a skill that persists in nearly all birds and bats, as well as a myriad of insects."
"Diversity among birds isn’t found only in size, shape, habitat, plumage, and behavior. It begins far earlier. This collection of eggs (in the Great North Museum: Hancock, Newcastle upon Tyne, England), demonstrates some of that diversity as well. In nature, birds’ eggs can range from those of the bee humming- bird (the size of a pea) to the 2.5-pound monstrosities laid by the ostrich."
A warning: the video above contains imagery of medical experiments conducted on animals that some might find disturbing.
In 1940, Soviet scientists reanimated a dead dog.
Dr. Sergei Brukhonenko had done pioneering work in blood transfusion several years earlier, a procedure which still remains essential in modern hospitals. But if you can move life-giving blood from one individual to another, why stop there?
While the Americans experimented on primates, the Soviet scientists experimented on dogs. Brukhonenko was able to isolate individual organs and maintain them in working order: a heart would keep pumping blood, lungs breathed on their own.
But those pieces, while important to life, do not a life make. The next step was to reanimate an entire head, brain, face and all, by pumping oxygenated blood through the arteries with the help of a contraption called the "autojektor." With a blood supply to the brain, the head reacted to stimuli as it would in life, twitching its ears and eyes at pokes and prods. It even licked a substance off its own nose.
Next, another dog, this one completely intact, was given a clinical death, then brought back to life with the autojektor. "After the experiment," the narrator of Experiments in the Revival of Organisms says over triumphant music, "the dogs live for years, they grow, they put on weight, and have families."
Some have suggested that the whole thing is a hoax, an elaborate scheme to intimidate American scientists, but no evidence of fakery has been revealed. A contemporary video shows a puppy surgically attached to the torso of another dog, and images of a robot suit piloted by a dog's head and brain have surfaced online. The only reason these experiments haven't been recreated since is that the blatant animal abuse and disregard for modern standards of medical ethics would turn stomachs even more that this 1940 video does.
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.
Last September, following a particularly heated Republican primary debate, Fox News commentator Rich Lowry described then-nominee Donald Trump as having been, shall we say, gelded by another candidate.
Trump was not happy, and called on the FCC to fine Lowry.
Incompetent @RichLowry lost it tonight on @FoxNews. He should not be allowed on TV and the FCC should fine him!
Nighttime in Transylvania is as atmospherically spooky as you would hope it would be. During the winter, a thick, low-lying mist covers thick forests of pine trees and firs. Above the fog, you can see the silhouetted turrets and spires of ancient castles and fortified churches. Many of the old homes there still burn wood fires, adding to the smoky air, while the towns are filled with gothic and baroque buildings that were once beautiful, but are now marked by peeling paint and crumbling facades.
It is common at night to hear howling in the forests, either from stray dogs or wolves. It’s easy to see why Bram Stoker chose this part of Romania to be a setting for his most chilling creation, Dracula.
The first section of Stoker’s gothic horror masterpiece takes the form of a travel journal, written in shorthand by a young English solicitor, Jonathan Harker, who is traveling across Europe to help conduct a land purchase on behalf of a noble client. Harker keeps a detailed diary of his journey from Munich to Transylvania, where he plans to meet the mysterious Count Dracula in his castle.
"We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England...and there shall be to you, many strange things." - Bram Stoker, Dracula. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
My plan was to follow in the footsteps of the fictional Harker, taking the same train routes—where possible staying in the same cities, towns and hotels—and ending my journey at the home of Vlad the Impaler, the real-life inspiration for Dracula. Partly encircled by the Carpathian mountains, Transylvania is still largely unexplored, despite its beauty and wealth of fascinating, centuries-old sites.
What better way to see Transylvania than by investigating if the novel that made it famous could be used as a travel guide today?
When Dracula was published in 1897, Munich’s Hauptbahnhof was just half a century old. It opened in its current location in 1848, with a glorious red and yellow brick grand hall designed in the style of the Italian Renaissance. It was largely destroyed by American bombers during World War II, but regained its status as Bavaria's principal train station after the war.
In the book, Harker’s journey by steam train from Munich in the 1890s took the better part of 12 hours. Today Vienna can be reached in just under four, courtesy of the high-speed rail.
3 May. Bistriz - Left Munich at 8:35 P.M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. - Jonathan Harker’s journal
With more time at my disposal than Stoker’s young protagonist, I stopped in Vienna to visit a macabre landmark. St. Stephen’s Cathedral, over 700 years old, is one of Vienna’s most notable landmarks. Mozart was married here, and Joseph Haydn sang as a choir boy in the ornately carved stalls. But deep underneath the cathedral is something much more gruesome: catacombs filled with the bones of over 11,000 victims of the bubonic plague.
Walking through the cold depths of the cathedral surrounded by skeletons is eerie enough. That is until you reach the crypt. For here, in rows of sealed bronze jars, rests the hearts and viscera of 72 members of the Hapsburg royal family. It seemed a suitably gothic beginning to my journey.
From Vienna I booked a place on the evening train to Budapest, the snow falling as we headed east through Hungary. On the four-hour journey I thought of Harker’s diary entry:
The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.
It's important to note, while following in the footsteps of Stoker’s protagonist, that the author never actually set foot in Romania. The Transylvania that provides such an ominous backdrop in Dracula was entirely imagined, although the Dublin-born Stoker almost certainly studied the region and its folklore at the British Museum in London.
While staying in the small English town of Whitby, Stoker came across a book in the town library called An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, written by a William Wilkinson in 1820. Stoker’s notes about the book contain a mention of a historical figure: Dracula.
Over the course of seven years, Stoker researched Transylvanian folklore and superstitions surrounding the Strigoi, the evil souls of the dead. But to these he married an actual historical figure, that of Vlad the Impaler.
Vlad III was the ruler of Wallachia (now part of Romania) at various times between 1456 and 1476. He was born in Transylvania to the House of Draculesti, and as a Voivode (the equivalent of a nobleman), defended his county against invading Turks. He was given the chilling nickname of Tepes, Romanian for Impaler, for his predilection for mercilessly impaling his enemies, and raising them aloft for all to see in the town squares.
The archetypal Transylvanian scene; old town below, forests covered in mist, the spires of medieval churches and castles looming above. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
In reality, Vlad the Impaler was not much worse than many other feudal rulers in Europe, and in Romania he was even celebrated for defending the area’s Christian way of life against the invading Turks. In doing so, Vlad Tepes built a line of imposing castle fortresses, including Poenari and Bran Castle.
According to historian Benjamin Hugo Leblanc, Vlad Tepes’ reign brought prosperity; “crime and corruption ceased, commerce and culture thrived, and many Romanians today view Vlad Tepes as a hero for his insistence on honesty and order.” Indeed, it is entirely possible that had Bram Stoker not chanced upon his name researching Dracula in Whitby library, that Vlad the Impaler would remain little known today outside of Romania.
For Bram Stoker, Vlad Tepes of the House of Draculesti, son of Vlad Dracul, provided a suitable character on which to hang his research on vampire legends. It also helped that in modern Romanian, Dracula means the son of the devil.
Although Bram Stoker never set foot in Transylvania, its medieval setting in the mountains proved a perfect backdrop for his tale. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
My first stop on the vampire trail was meant to be the Hotel Royale, where Harker stayed the night in the old city of Klausenburg. But looking at an atlas today, there is no city by that name.
Located roughly halfway between Budapest, Hungary, and Bucharest, Romania, the city shed the name Stoker knew it by after World War I, when Transylvania became part of the Kingdom of Romania. Today it’s known as Cluj-Napoca, and it’s a bustling, bohemian university town.
The Hotel Royale doesn’t exist today, and maybe it never did. But nestled near the train station is an historic inn that claims to have been the inspiration for Bram Stoker. The Hotel Transilvania, located on Ferdinand Street, is one of the oldest in the city, and has been an inn since the Middles Ages.
When the Klausenburg railway station was built in 1870, the venerable old hotel went by another name, the Queen of England—perhaps a regal sounding inspiration for a Hotel Royale. Harker’s diary reads:
We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh. Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good... I asked the waiter, and he said it was called "paprika hendl," and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians.
These days, the Hotel Transilvania in Cluj-Napoca isn’t shy about drawing on its possible legacy. The owners have a number of plans in development to emphasize the connection to Stoker and his masterwork.
“We would like to follow the book in creating a suite that resembles the era that the journey was told in the novel through painting, pictures, albums, old movies, items and furniture,” explains Adriana Sava, the hotel’s general manager. “Our project is extensive and complex.”
The hotel owners are also planning to open a restaurant that serves dishes from the era. “We feel that this will attract visitors who have a longing to travel back in time and follow the footsteps of Jonathan Harker,” Sava says. Perhaps soon it will be as easy to find that paprika-spiced chicken as Harker's waiter promised.
From Cluj Napoca, Harker headed further east in the direction of Bistriz, today known as Bistrita. Nearly 120 years after Dracula was published, I did the same.
I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika...
To Victorian readers, the depths of Transylvania would have sounded as remote and mysterious as to seem possibly made up. As I headed deeper into the Carpathian mountains, there was a definite sense of entering a still wild and sealed off part of Europe. The trains are indeed as unpunctual as Harker described, and most are elderly relics from the Cold War.
Looking down from Castle Bran. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
Before I set off, a Romanian friend in New York gave me the following advice: Beware of stray dogs (they bite) and of people in general. Don’t trust anyone, authorities or the train employees. I noticed on the longer train journeys through Romania, that many people in the sleeper cars would lock themselves in with bicycle locks. My carriage was empty apart from a woman in a black cloak who decorated our compartment with religious icons, tucked her legs under her, and spent the hours with her rosary beads.
The train journey passed without incident, however, and the snow covered scenery looked nearly identical to what Bram Stoker imagined:
All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods...
Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country.
Bistrita is a small town in northern Transylvania, built around a river and surrounded by mountain villages. There is indeed a hotel called the Coroana de Aur (Romanian for Golden Crown), but this one was built in 1974, during the dark days of Romanian Communism. Inside, you can dine at a restaurant called Salon Jonathan Harker, but I wouldn't recommend it.
The home of Vlad Dracul, and birthplace of his infamous son, Vlad the Impaler. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
It was upon arriving in Bistrita that Jonathan Harker has his first contact with his mysterious client, in the form of a note left at the hotel.
My friend - Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well tonight... your friend, Dracula
Harker was to travel on the final stage of his journey by coach, through the Borgo Pass in the mountains. For the first time he encounters mounting tension and trepidation from local villagers, and notices they start crossing themselves whenever he mentions his mission.
Just before I was leaving, the old lady came up to my room and said in a hysterical way: "Must you go? Oh! Young Herr, must you go?"
If the local villagers in the novel are terrified at any mention of Dracula, there is a hotel to be found in the mountains that very much delights in it. Situated in the Tihuta Pass in the Bârgāului Mountains is the Hotel Castle Dracula, which claims to be located in the approximate spot of the book’s castle.
But while Stoker’s Castle Dracula was, “a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky”, the Hotel Castel Dracula was designed in a hulking concrete style some three decades ago, as a tourist attraction.
Faded grandeur of Brasov's Belle Epoque era buildings. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
The hotel is vampire themed, with an accompanying graveyard (not real), a bar in a tower, and Dracula’s “tomb” in the basement. While the overall effect is more theme park than Victorian, the hotel does highlight an interesting aspect of Romanian history.
It was built in 1983 during the totalitarian regime of Communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, in an attempt to lure Dracula tourists. Even though Romania was one of the most closed off countries behind the Iron Curtain, the Hotel Castel Dracula was reportedly commissioned by Ceaușescu himself. Romanians were no stranger to his follies; this was a man who bulldozed a huge section of the capital Bucharest to build the vast Palace of the Parliament, still one of the largest buildings in the world.
There were no traces of Dracula in Piatra Fântânele, the village where the hotel is located, so I headed south to find Bran Castle, just outside the city of Brasov.
If you were to search online for “Dracula’s Castle” you will invariably discover images of what the Transylvanians called Castelul Bran. An imposing fortress built on a mountainside dividing Transylvania from the region of Wallachia, surrounded by thick forests and dwarfing a small village, from the outside Bran Castle certainly looks like the kind of place where a centuries-old vampire might live.
Secret passageways inside Castle Bran. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
As the young English solicitor made his way into the mountains, each villager he passed would point two fingers at him, “a charm or guard against the evil eye”, upon learning of his destination. Boarding a rickety decades-old bus in Brasov for Bran castle, I was pleased to see that the front window was covered with half a dozen, eye-shaped religious icons hanging from red ribbons.
Bran Castle, while having little to do with either Count Dracula, or Vlad Tepes, has become known as “Dracula’s castle” mostly on looks alone. Perched high on a ridge, the castle shadows the small village below, where market vendors sell wooden crosses and plastic fangs, and closeted with thick forests and swirling mists, it retains a definite aura of mystery and spookiness.
Visiting during the quiet winter months, I was reminded of the scene where the increasingly nervous Jonathan Harker first encounters Count Dracula:
He made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed cold as ice, more like the hand of a dead than a living man.
A UNESCO landmarked site and one of the few still inhabited citadel villages in Eastern Europe, Sighisoara. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
Inside, Bran Castle contains narrow winding stairways, secret passageways, and a torture chamber. Beneath its turrets there's a fair amount of 20th century furniture, dating to the castle's days as a royal summer residence in the 1920s and ‘30s. The country’s Communist authorities turned it into a museum in 1956.
From his extensive research, it is likely that Bram Stoker would have read of Bran Castle, but Vlad the Impaler barely set foot in it, if at all, unlike Poenari castle, which is now a ruined mountain fortress.
Founded by Teutonic knights in the 13th century, nearby Brasov is a beautiful city, surrounded by the Southern Carpathian mountains, thick forests and fortified churches. Many of its streets are lined with faded Belle Epoque era buildings. Once painted in vibrant pastels of pink, yellow and teal, today they are gently crumbling, after a half century of neglect during the Communist era.
The city still retains the air of the medieval, aside from one peculiar feature: an oversized white town sign similar to Hollywood’s.
Still on Stoker’s trail, I headed further north to the ancient medieval city of Sighisoara, and the home of Vlad the Impaler. Sighisoara is one of the few intact walled citadels left in Europe. Climbing the steep cobbled streets and entering the city gates is like stepping back in time to the 1600s. Indeed, so much of Sighisoara has remained untouched that its whole historic center was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Sighisoara was one of the seven walled citadels built by the Transylvanian Saxons to defend against a Turkish invasion. Popular with visitors in the summer, in the dead of winter the mountaintop town is silent and virtually empty, its cobblestones wet with fog and snow. A steep, dark wooded covered staircase, known as the Pupils' Stairs, leads to the top of a hill.
The Scholar's Stairs of Sighisoara, leading to the mountain top school, still operating today. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
After climbing 176 steps, I came to an early 13th century basilica, known as the Church on the Hill, where it’s possible to see the coffins of Sighisoara’s noblemen—Transylvania's sole church crypt. It's one of the most haunted-looking churchyards I’ve ever seen. Shrouded in mists, with the ever-present howling of dogs in the surrounding forest, the tumbled down gravestones and mausoleums could certainly be home to the undead.
Wandering around the citadel square, where witch trials and public executions were carried out, I came across an ochre colored home, with a wrought iron dragon hanging above the entrance. A plaque noted that the Romanian ruler Vlad Dracul had lived there between 1431 and 1435. His son, Vlad Tepes, was born there.
The medieval house is also a well appointed bar, where I tried the traditional Carpathian spirit palinka. The fruit brandy is so strong that there is a pot of lard on the bar, a dab of which is used to coat the tongue before sipping the fiery spirit. After visiting the bar, you can enter the first home of Vlad the Impaler, suitably draped in red velvet curtains and lit by candelabras, with a chilling oil painting of Vlad enjoying his breakfast in front of a forest of impaled prisoners.
Overgrown cemetery in Sighisoara. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
Stoker was 50 years old when Dracula was published, in 1897. At the time, he was the business manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre, working under the celebrated actor, Sir Henry Irving. Irving was well-known for his dramatic portrayals of gentleman villains, and is thought to have been an important inspiration for Dracula's mannerisms.
The novel went on to become the classic example of vampire lore, yet Stoker himself never enjoyed the financial success that its many film versions later enjoyed. By the end of his life, Bram Stoker was so destitute that he applied to the Royal Literary Fund for compassionate grants.
Although the author never saw Transylvania for himself, I was surprised by how evocatively he captured the beguiling landscape. In a country where horse drawn carts can still be seen on the Communist-built motorways, and where medieval fortresses are seemingly always emerging from the fog, Jonathan Harker's journal proved to be as accurate a guide book as a Victorian Lonely Planet.
Bram Stoker may have drawn heavily from ancient legends, but the actual physical route taken by Harker can still be followed today.
In 1895, paleontologists digging at Wombeyan Caves in New Zealand came across an unusual set of rodent bones. Because the fossils didn't resemble anything familiar, the experts named the poor creature the Mountain Pygmy Possum, declared it long extinct, and kept digging.
But 70 years later, a live Mountain Pygmy Possum showed up outside a ski lodge in Victoria—tiny, adorable, and very much alive. The world of full of such "Lazarus species:" animals and plants that disappeared on us, only to resurface years, centuries, or entire epochs after their supposed extinctions.
Whether for it or against it, everyone knows about bullfighting. But how many people have heard of bull leaping—bullfighting’s more likable and interesting cousin?
Bull leaping, or recorte, is the art of confronting a bull without any weapon besides your own agility and wit. In it, recortadores—the bull-leaping equivalent of the matador—simply evade the bull by turning their waists, side-stepping, or leaping over the bull. And yes, we do mean that literally.
This short video on bull leaping, produced by Great Big Story, takes us into the world of Jose Manuel Medina, a recortador. Along with countless other people in Spain, Medina dedicates his life to facing bulls in the ring with nothing to defend himself, and no intention of harming the animal.
“Everyone knows that a bull can kill you," Medina says in the video. "But I don’t see it that way. I think it’s the opposite. The bull gives me life." As he turns seconds before the bull pierces him with its horns, and performs acrobatic leaps over the massive animal, it is easy to understand this contradiction.
Several animal rights groups that oppose bullfights support bull leaping, with the argument that this tradition causes no physical harm to the animal. Others believe that the emotional stress that the animal endures is cruel, and that this practice—along with similar ones like American rodeo—should be banned.
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.
Worshippers at the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, one of the many churches Wigglesworth visited. (Photo: Public domain)
After Smith Wigglesworth died in 1947, doctors are said to have found that some of the bone on each of Wigglesworth's knee caps was missing. Later, in his house, others found two indentations, about a foot apart, on the wooden floor of a corner room.
Wigglesworth, it was surmised, had spent a lot of time there knelt in prayer.
Is this story true? Who knows. But it belongs to the pantheon of Wigglesworth stories, a man who is said to be responsible for countless healings and the raising of 14 people from the dead.
A former plumber who traveled the world preaching, Wigglesworth was among the key early preachers of the Pentecostalism, whose practitioners are known in some circles as "holy rollers", so named for the behavior of early adherents, some of whom literally rolled on the ground in spiritual ecstasy. Today, Wigglesworth remains an important inspiration for the modern Pentacostal movement, and nearly an entire cottage industry exists selling Wigglesworth writings and biographies. He helped define one of the most iconic aspects of the religion, namely, speaking in tongues.
It might surprise some to know that practice, seemingly endemic to the American South, was in part popularized by a Brit. Or that Wiggleworth's laying-on-of-hands had a surprise element: his healings could be incredibly violent.
Wigglesworth was born in 1859 in Yorkshire, England to a poor family, later training to be a plumber and marrying Polly Featherstone in 1882. According to at least one account, one of his first healings was of himself. Tired of taking salts to ease his hemorrhoid problem, he anointed himself with oil and prayed on it. The hemorrhoids disappeared.
In 1907, he said he spoke in tongues for the first time, and spent the next six years establishing a church in Yorkshire known as the Bowland Street Mission. In 1913, his wife Polly died. Wigglesworth traveled to the U.S. for the first time the following year, launching his international ministry that eventually took him across the world.
However, Wigglesworth's real calling card was something that's all but lost in the modern Pentacostal faith: healing, which, for him, was a combination of prayer and violence. Wigglesworth believed that any sickness was actually the Devil inside of you, which meant that prayer was needed, but also, frequently, a physical assault. There are many such stories: the time Wigglesworth punched a sufferer of stomach cancer in the stomach, the times he violently shook those on their deathbeds, or, more commonly, the times in front of crowds when healing was in part dependent upon delivering a good hard slap.
"His notion of praying for the sick as an act of spiritual warfare helps account for his rough handling of people in his earlier ministry," the Pentacostal scholar Gary B. McGee has written. "He thought of striking a person where they hurt as actually hitting the devil. Although some reported healing as a result, others thought it best to avoid identifying the location of their pain."
Take this account from the Foursquare Crusader, an early Pentacostal periodical, which described Wigglesworth at a service at the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, when he visited in July 1927.
When this man prays for the sick he gets right down to business. He rips off his coat and rolls up his sleeves. Lifting his hand to heaven he cries. “Are you ready!” If assent is given, he “lays hands upon the sick” and prays: then, with a cyclonic movement of the hands over the afflicted part or a resounding slap that can be distinctly heard) throughout the auditorium, he declares that they are “free,” and commands them to stoop and bend over or to run up and down the aisle, as the case may be. His methods are spectacular, strenuous, and often humorous, but the results seem to justify the means, for at the close of the service when he asks all those who have been healed to stand, literally hundreds leap to their feet.
Here's another account, which happened in December 1934 in Washington, D.C., published inRedemption Tidings:
Just before the meeting began, we had noticed that a young girl, with crutches, was coming in. She was assisted by a man and woman. Her legs absolutely dangled, with the feet hanging vertically from them. From her waist she seemed to be limp and powerless. Room was made for her in the front row. When the invitation to be saved was given, she attempted to go forward aided by her assistants. Brother Wigglesworth, on seeing her start, said, “You stay right where you are. You are going to be a different girl when you leave this place.” When the rest had been dealt with Brother Wigglesworth turned to the girl and, having been told her trouble, said to the people, “This girl has no muscles in her legs; she has never walked before.” He laid his hands on her head and prayed and cried, “In the name of Jesus Christ, walk!” Looking at her, he said, “You are afraid, aren’t you?” “Yes,” she replied. “There is no need to be. You are healed!” he shouted. “Walk! walk!” And praise God she did – like a baby just learning! Twice she walked, in that characteristic way, the length of the platform! Glory to God! When we left the room, her crutches were lying on the seat, and on reaching the sidewalk we saw her standing, as others do, talking with two girl friends.
Often, the healings were too common to go into that level of detail. Take this description in the Pentecostal Evangel, from 1935.
A man with cancer on his face and hands was healed almost instantly. A woman with hernia of 17 years’ standing was completely delivered. A man with asthma of 8 years’ standing was saved and healed instantly. A lady was healed of deafness and afterwards heard clearly.
What's going on here? A complicated placebo effect in many cases, to be sure, but also old-fashioned marketing. Most all of the early publications that tracked Wigglesworth's exploits (and the three quoted from above) were written to attract new believers to the then-emerging Pentacostal movement, which would became more familiar to Americans decades later in the form of televangelists like Jim Bakker, Paul Crouch, and Jimmy Swaggart. (The Jonas Brothers also grew up in the faith.)
And in the days before cell phone cameras, the plausibility of faith healing was only limited by your imagination. Was Smith Wigglesworth a specially-anointed agent of God? It was hard to say, exactly, but there wasn't any evidence proving that he wasn't.
Faith healing could also be a powerful draw. Wigglesworth eventually took his act to Australia, India, Switzerland and Finland, among a rash of other places, often greeting crowds of hundreds. His legend followed him, too, though his gatherings were mostly ignored by the mainstream press, which meant few objective observers were along for the ride. The best accounts of Wigglesworth's life are his own and that of Stanley Frodsham, a friend and eventual biographer, whose Smith Wigglesworth: Apostle of Faith, published in 1948, is the foundational text for the Wigglesworth legend.
Wigglesworth ministering to a woman. (Photo: Public domain)
Since then, there have been numerous accounts, though many have engaged, as one scholar put it, in "blatant and unashamed acts of embalmment."
Wiggleworth was not able to heal all of those around him. In the early years, swaths of Pentacostals rejected modern medicine, instead entrusting their health to God, and Wigglesworth was no different. Perhaps as a result, there were several maladies in his life that no amount of prayer seemed to be enough for, like his daughter's deafness and his own battle with kidney stones.
He also, of course, couldn't prevent his own death, at the age 87, passing on March 12, 1947, in England, while attending the funeral of a close friend. Or that's at least according to the myth.
There is perhaps no greater argument that American English is a deeply flawed, infuriating, and difficult language than the simple phrase “you guys.”
“You guys” is the most common way Americans refer directly to a group of people; it is a de facto pronoun, duct-taped together. If you remember your high school linguistics, you might also remember that this pronoun would be the second-person plural. (First person is “I,” second person is “you,” third person is “he/she".) The need for a pronoun to directly refer to a group of people is not a small one, or one that can simply be brushed aside; this is one of the most basic elements of language.
In “standard American English,” meaning, essentially, schoolroom English, the second person pronoun is “you,” for either singular or plural. Talking to your spouse? Use “you.” Talking to your spouse and his or her entire family, at the same time? Use...well, also use “you.” It is a huge, strange weakness in American English: when someone is talking to a group of people, we have no way of indicating whether the speaker is talking to only one person or the entire group. Peeking your head out from the kitchen at a dinner party and asking, “Hey, can you get me a drink?” is likely to score you a look of confusion. Who are you talking to, exactly?
“Why would we have one word for something as fundamental as singular and plural? That just screams 'fix this,'” says Paul Reed, a linguist at the University of South Carolina who, as a native Southern linguist, spends a lot of time thinking about the second-person plural pronoun. “And dialect speakers have.” In place of any standardized second-person plural pronoun, English speakers around the world have been forced to scramble to make something up. You’ve heard the solutions: y’all, youse, you guys, yinz, you’uns.
These are widely seen as incorrect, or nonstandard. The most famous, of course, is y’all. So what’s the history of y’all? How did such an amateur linguistic fix become a pillar of everyday speech?
Ancestral varieties of English do, strangely, have words to distinguish between second-person singular and plural pronouns. Sara Malton, a professor at Canada’s Saint Mary’s University, has a great essay on the strange transition in pronouns from Old to Middle to Modern English. The basic history is thus: Old English, which would sound to modern ears more like German than English, did in fact have singular/plural distinctions.
Even crazier, they not only had basic one/many distinctions, but got even more granular: Old English had a third category, for dual pronouns, used for talking about or to a group of specifically two people. Old English’s nominative second person—nominative refers to the subject, like the “you” that is doing something—is þū. As for pronunciation: that first letter is pronounced with something dental (like a “t” or “th” or “d,” dental meaning a consonant that’s made with the tongue pressing against the teeth) followed by a high-back vowel (high-back referring to the position of the tongue within the mouth, like “oh” or “ooh” or “uh”).
For plural, the Old English version of “you” was gē, pronounced something like “yih.” And the dual form, which was completely thrown in the garbage by the transition to Middle English, was git, pronounced like “yit.”
Following the Norman Conquest in 1066, heavy influence from French speakers began to quickly change the nature of English, marking the move to Middle English. That dual form vanished, and the singular and plural forms changed. Within a couple of centuries, the dominant singular version of “you” was “thou,” and the plural was “ye.” Those each had their own families of related pronouns, like “thy” and “thine” and, interestingly, “you” and “your.” (The former is singular, the latter plural.)
The first page of the Peterborough Chronicle, one of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, originally written in Old English which did have singular and plural distinctions for "you". (Photo: Public Domain)
Thou and ye is a perfectly fine arrangement of second-person pronouns, and we’d all be better off if they’d stuck around, but they didn’t. Nobody exactly knows why, but scholars have focused on the mid-17th century work of Shakespeare to help tell us how people were talking to each other and what pronouns they were using.
What changed around this point is that the singular/plural division between thou and ye became, we think, less important than the formal/informal divide. Thou became informal, and ye became formal. The general belief is that this change came from the French, thanks to the Norman Invasion: French has and had a firm formal/informal divide in its pronouns. “As is often the case in Middle English, English speakers like to say, ‘we have the French to blame,’” says Malton. If you remember your classroom French, you’ll remember the formal/informal pronouns: tu is informal, vous is formal.
Because of that rising influence of French, English began to show some formal/informal divide as well. We can see this in Shakespeare’s work, when he sometimes used it as a subtle dig: in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare has a noble refer to another noble with “thou,” which would have been a sign of slight but clever disrespect.
The formal/informal thing is also why “thou” makes so many appearances in the King James Bible, as in “thou shalt not (do anything).” “When you’re talking to God you want it to be this intimate thing, so that’s why the authors of the King James Bible used thou,” says Reed. But as Malton notes, this is really all just a guess; it’s not that clear that Shakespeare’s dialogue was really (or even meant to be) an accurate depiction of the way people really talked. Using it as a linguistic source has it’s difficulties! But we also don’t really have much better data, so.
By the beginning of the 18th century, “thou” began exiting the language completely. “Ye” stuck around, but changed slightly to become “you.” Nobody really knows how this happened; it’s possible that nobody really wanted to use any noun that was associated with the informal lower classes, and it’s possible that the colonization of North America, and subsequent desire for separation from England, led new Americans to spurn these social hierarchy language formations. There’s also the potential that the existence of the colonies, with suddenly possible upward social mobility, left little desire to use any informal pronoun at all.
“We all aspire to ‘you,’” says Malton. But that’s really all just guesswork based on how stuff turned out. All we know is that “thou” rapidly disappeared.
As the previously plural, formal “ye” became the universal “you,” English speakers worldwide became aware pretty quickly that losing a singular/plural distinction is...bad. So around the world, solutions began popping up.
“Y’all” is easily the most famous solution. Its provenance is unclear, but certainly it comes from the American South. The two possible ancestors of y’all are the Scots-Irish ye aw, which means “you all,” and the West African/Caribbean you all (a calque, or borrowed word, from England), which means, as you might expect, “you all.” Because these two phrases are basically the same, and because something was needed to fill that gap, and because both the Scots-Irish and the newly dumped African slaves both lived in the same region, eventually the two phrases were combined and shortened. Hence: y’all.
The water tower at Florence Mall in Florence, Kentucky. (Photo: madaise/CC BY-ND 2.0)
But y’all isn’t the only solution regional dialects have come up with. Reed grew up using “you’uns,” common in Appalachia, is a slight shortening of the Scottish “you ones.” “Ones,” in some forms of Scottish English, is a plural marker, like the American “guys,” so you can say “you ones” or “we ones.”
“You’uns” gets even shorter just north of the Appalachians, where it’s been turned into “yinz” by the residents of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. Yinz, like y’all, has become a sort of emblem of the area from which it comes; Pittsburgh residents sometimes refer to themselves as Yinzers, to honor the unique pronoun native to their fine city.
A simpler version comes from the other side of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, and has also bled up to parts of New York City: “youse.” This is an understandable creation: you normally add the letter “s” to things to make them plural, right? And the word “you” needs to be plural. So, I don’t know, add an “s” to it. Youse.
Which brings us to the most popular and worst plural form: “you guys.” This solution has so, so many faults. For one thing, it’s gendered; taken by itself, “guy” refers to males, and it’s both inexact and distinctly sexist to use that word to apply to a group of people of any gender. It’s also just kind of awkward, the most transparently stapled-together solution to the second-person plural problem we have. “You, uh...guys. All the guys.” It’s informal in a way that feels, in many situations, entirely too casual. (The word “guy” in English seems to originate from the Gunpowder Plot, a failed assassination attempt, and one of its plotters, Guy Fawkes. Eventually, in England, “guy” came to refer to the effigies burned in remembrance on Guy Fawkes Night, and eventually to any male.)
A sign using "Yinz", a version of the plural pronoun found in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. (Photo: Sage Ross/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Elsewhere in the English-speaking world, solutions vary. “Ye,” somehow, actually persists in some parts of Ireland, as well as in the strangely cockney dialect of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. But it’s also changed; “ye” is now plural, and “you” is usually the singular.
In England, the most popular version is “you lot,” essentially the English version of the American “you guys,” and just as awkward.
Though Quakers are stereotyped for their use of “plain speak,” which is said to include words like “thou” and “thee,” theoretically helping them to distinguish between singular and plural, in fact very few Quakers still actually use these words. Oh well. They’re good words.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the second-person plural pronoun is what it tells us about the entire idea of “standardized” languages. Standard English doesn’t have a singular/plural distinction, and this is what’s taught in schools, drilled into our heads through newscasters and books and media. At the same time, it’s self-evidently a weakness; there is absolutely no advantage to lacking a second-person plural, and plenty of reasons to have one.
Regional dialects around the world have filled in the gaps, with y’all and youse and yinz and you lot, but due to the weird tyranny of standardized language, these aren’t seen as clever solutions to a problem we all face: they’re seen as wrong. Incorrect. Maybe the speakers are perceived as dumb or uneducated.
Partly that’s due to stigmatization of the groups that created them.; “There's always the underlying thought that something from the South might be somewhat lesser, or something from African-Americans might be somewhat lesser, because of the history of our nation,” says Reed. The same thing colors our national reaction to you’uns (it comes from poor rural areas), youse (poor urban areas) and yinz (Pittsburgh).
And this is all ridiculous, if difficult to change. Y’all is not wrong or dumb; it’s a solution to a problem endemic to the “correct” dialect. “People that we would consider non-mainstream speakers kind of led the way,” says Reed. “They filled the gap that standard language, however we want to define it, left. And their language can be considered richer from that viewpoint.” Y’all is a beautiful word. It’s “you guys” that’s the problem.
Within a minute, early in the morning of January 17, 1995, Kobe fell down.
The earthquake, magnitude 7.3, twisted railroads and knocked down highways. It collapsed older buildings, made with tiled roofs that could withstand tsunamis, but flimsier walls that could not stand up to the shift of the earth. Fires spread, and wooden houses that made it through the quake burned down. More than 6,400 people died, mostly in collapsed buildings. More than 530,000 houses were partially destroyed or damaged; another 100,000 were completely destroyed.
Kobe wasn’t an obvious place for an earthquake. The fault where the earth slipped was not well known at the time, and today, if you visited the seaside city in central Japan, you’d hardly notice that just two decades ago it was in shambles. “You really have to know what you’re looking for to find signs of the earthquake,” says Robert Olshansky, a professor of urban planning at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
If you do know what you’re looking for, though, you can see both the wounds from the quake, now scarred over with new development, and the hidden measures the city has taken to prepare for the next one.
In Kobe today, the most apparent mark of the 1995 earthquake might be the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Memorial, a caged glass cube building on the city’s waterfront. In one of the city's parks, there’s a tree with one side that still shows damage from the fire, and in the less wealthy part of the cities, there are a few tracts of land that are still vacant, never recovered from the earthquake’s effects. In December, the annual display of lights commemorates the disaster.
For the most part, though, to see the impacts of the earthquake, you’d have to look at the new construction—the apartments buildings, roads, and parks built in the years after.
Disaster recovery has a lot in common with urban redevelopment; it’s just sped up. After a disaster, “essentially everything that urban planners do is happening in a time-compressed environment,” says Laurie Johnson, an urban planner and disaster recovery consultant. “It’s a fascinating aspect of urban planning because it happens really fast.”
Johnson and Olshansky spent 10 years studying Kobe's recovery over the long term. The urban planners have worked together for years to understand how cities are resurrected after disasters: in a report released this summer by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, they highlight Kobe as one of six examples of places that improved their resiliency as they recovered from disaster.
Before 1995, stretches of Kobe were still filled with wooden houses and narrow streets, which were intimate and charming places to live but vulnerable to fire and other dangers. Even before the earthquake hit, these areas were slated for redevelopment; during the disaster, these were among the areas that were most heavily damaged.
One, Shin-Nagata, was an industrial center for shoe manufacturing. In this neighborhood, Johnson and Olshansky report, the earthquake completely destroyed buildings on about half of the land. So many people were without homes that a group of Vietnamese immigrants spent two years in “a small squatter settlement” in a local park.
When this area was rebuilt, like many places in the city, it changed. The buildings were taller and more stable. A commercial area was transformed into “Shoes Plaza,” to draw attention to the shoe industry there. Shin-Nagata also has new parks—some of which double as a disaster prevention areas.
A disaster prevention park in Kobe. (Photo: Laurie Johnson)
These “disaster prevention parks” are wide open green spaces. But they have other hidden purposes, too. They’re meant to serve as gathering places in disasters—parks help break the path of fires, there are fewer structures to collapse, and they can fit many people.
In another neighborhood, Rokkomichi, the park has a tank designed to resist earthquakes and filled with water for fire-fighting. There are emergency bathrooms, and a center that’s equipped with the supplies people need after disasters. Adjacent to the park, there are evacuation routes heading north and south.
Many of the changes to Kobe after the earthquake were influenced by input from the communities that had been displaced from their homes. After the first six months of recovery, officials encouraged neighborhoods to form community groups, machizukuri, to participate in the planning process. These groups offered their own visions of the housing that should be built and pushed back on the details of the redevelopments. How big should a park be, for instance? By the end of 1995, there were 100 of these groups.
The groups didn’t get everything they wanted, but they did help shape the city into its new form. Today, a visitor wouldn't notice these impacts, but a longtime resident would see how the new version was built over the old. Just passing through one of the disaster prevention parks, you might have no idea that it was designed to lead a double life, as a community space and disaster response center. But the people who live there know: if there's another earthquake, this is where we go.
Inside the property at 24 Brentwood Drive, Connecticut. (Photo: Courtesy Zillow)
“Unique one of a kind finishing completed by a professional!” reads the Zillow listing for 24 Brentwood Dr., Avon, Connecticut. But as you page through the listing’s 40 pictures, you begin to wonder: a professional what?
The house isn’t just overdecorated. It’s grotesque. Every surface is festooned with blood-like sprays of paint, intestinal squiggles of shiny pink and copper, ghostly tattered cheesecloth, and the occasional rudimentary face. The overall effect is like you’ve walked into a haunted pancreas.
But the house isn’t a murderer’s lair, a horror set, or a Hellmouth. In fact, it’s a work of art.
The house was designed by artist Nikolay Synkov. (Photo: Courtesy Zillow)
As with any work of art, opinions may vary on whether it’s any good. But the truth is, 24 Brentwood Dr.—or “Brentwood, no. 24,” which is the name of the work—is both the headquarters of Fermata Arts Foundation and its first project.
Fermata Arts Foundation, founded in 2008 by artist Nikolay Synkov, says that its mission is “to aid in the preservation of peace” through “the synthesis of art, architecture, philosophy and poetry.” The group has branches in Ukraine and Georgia (the country), and partners with other organizations in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Projects include a proposed Center for the Arts in Latvia and an art exchange between schoolchildren in Bulgaria, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Ukraine.
Those who tweeted the Zillow link might be skeptical of the idea that it promotes peace rather than a sense of foreboding and unease. But Synkov, who designed and lived in the house, had a lofty vision for his work. Synkov describes himself as a devotee of painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky, and cites the introduction of Kandinsky’s “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” as an inspiration for “Brentwood, no. 24.” “Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions,” the introduction begins. Perhaps that’s the reason the place looks like a uterus with problems.
More from the kitchen, or "Diverse geometric forms giving life." (Photo: Courtesy Zillow)
In his portfolio, Synkov writes that he “embellished the rooms with details from his mind’s inner fantasy.” He also describes the title and inspiration for each room in “Brentwood, no. 24,” which Synkov bought in 2001 and then decorated and expanded, nearly doubling its size. The stairway to the second floor, for instance, is called “Main sheet of remembrance: there was no storm. It turned into a wind blowing some bubbles,” and is described thus: “On a breeze of memory we are blown as a leaf to rest upstairs..dreams..quiet.”
The kitchen’s title is “Diverse geometric form giving life”: “The plenty of the harvest manifests itself in the kitchen’s many surfaces.” Again, one is moved to wonder: harvest of what?
Synkov is also a poet, and his portfolio provides inspirational poems (in both English translation and the original Russian) for the rooms of “Brentwood, no. 24.” For the deck, “Land wharf of the Inoks,” he writes (in part): “Love towards your house / Will be the key to that cabinet.” On the other hand, the poem for one of the bedrooms, “Threshing accepted by the walls,” reads in part: “The laughter of Satan is walking the earth / Lots of tears and love are all gone / Fear has come for you, for myself,” which may feel more in line with the aesthetic. You can even watch a walkthrough video of the house while reading poetic source material, although the poetry collection set up to accompany the video contains different works than portfolio.
A piece called "Remembrances after the battle" or, the bathroom. (Photo: Courtesy Zillow)
Synkov has completed two other house projects, in Portland, Oregon. and Newton, Massachusetts. Both are significantly more restrained, making use primarily of his woodworking skill—which is on display in “Brentwood, no. 24” but somewhat diminished by appearing to be decorated with salami paste. Both houses have been toned down since Synkov lived in them (in the late ‘90s/early 2000s), but if the aesthetic appeals to you, his home design website is still up. (Whether it’s actually taking clients is less clear; the “client relationships” position is listed as vacant, as indeed are all the other positions.) There's also an online store hawking examples of handmade furniture reminiscent of the interior decor at the Brentwood house—though there seems to be a problem with Synkov's PayPal account, so it's impossible to actually buy these treasures.
Like many artists, it appears that Synkov is unappreciated in his own time. According to Zillow, the Brentwood house was listed at $1.4 million dollars in March 2013, and by September 2016 it was down to $339,900. Kind of pricey for a nightmare factory, but a bargain to live in a work of art.
A grave marker is how people will remember you long after everyone you know has passed, so you'd better make it good. When done well, it can provide a sense of one's style in life. The epitaph should be pithy, the shape and style memorable. You could go for the classic granite slab, or, like these deceased, opt for something a little more memorable.
John Paul Jones was the father of the American Navy, best known for shouting, "I have not yet begun to fight!" in response to a request for his surrender during a Revolutionary War battle. Less well known is the fact that for over a century after his death, the location of Jones’ body remained a mystery. Following his victories with the American Navy, Jones soon found his employment opportunities in America running dry. He joined up with the Russian Imperial Navy for a time, until he retired to Paris. Jones died there and was buried in a cemetery belonging to the French royal family. This property changed hands and Jones was forgotten. It wasn’t until 1905 that Jones’ remains were rediscovered by America’s Ambassador to France and returned to the United States.
Today, Jones rests in a extravagant sarcophagus below the chapel of the United States Naval Academy. The incredible coffin is covered in sculpted barnacles and is held up by bronze dolphins. The whole thing is sculpted out of a black and white marble that makes it look as though it has been weathered by untold ages beneath the waves—not so far from the truth.
The Davises were a simple but highly successful Kansas farming family. When Sarah Davis passed way in 1930 her burial site was marked with a simple headstone that reflected the quiet life she and her husband had led, despite the vast wealth they had accrued. But soon after Sarah had been placed in the ground, John had her stone removed and replaced with a marble statue, which was just the beginning. Over the next decade John installed 11 total marble or granite statues, many of which depicted Sarah as a young woman, an old woman, and even as an angel. There was also a statue of John resting in comfortable armchair next to an identical, empty armchair. All of these are arranged in a haphazard manner, facing in all different directions.
The cost of the memorial became astronomical, which upset a great number of Hiawathans suffering under the poverty of the Great Depression in a small town that did not even have a hospital. Many believed that John was simply trying to squander his fortune so that Sarah's family, who had always hated the man, could not touch it. Still others believed that he was simply an eccentric with a permanently broken heart.
It's fitting that Jules Verne, father of science fiction, would have a dark, otherworldly gravestone. Two years after his death a sculpture entitled “Vers l'Immortalité et l'Eternelle Jeunesse” (“Towards Immortality and Eternal Youth”) was erected atop his marker. Designed by sculptor Albert Roze, and using the actual death mask of the writer, the statue depicts the shrouded figure of Jules Verne breaking his own tombstone and emerging from the grave.
The effigy has become iconic enough that in first issue of seminal science fiction magazine Amazing Stories (first published in 1926) and for many years thereafter a drawing of his tombstone appeared as part of the masthead.
Willet Babcock was a furniture and casket maker by trade, and ended up in Paris, Texas where his factory and downtown store put him squarely in the center of respected Parisians. Before he died, in 1881, he ordered himself an impressive memorial from a master-stonecutter, a German immigrant named Gustave Klein, who carved some of the more ornate markers at Evergreen. Along with some typical memorial elements—carved wreaths, a cross, an angelic figure in robes—Babcock gave his final presentation to the world a little Texas twang. Jesus is sporting cowboy boots.
There is debate about whether it really is Jesus. Some say the face is too feminine (there is no beard) and he (she?) appears to be leaning on the cross rather than carrying it. But whoever the angel in robes was intended to represent, the memorial has long since been dubbed “Jesus in Cowboy Boots.”
The Ancient Lycians believed that their dead were carried to the afterlife by angels from the heavens. To facilitate this ascent they placed their honored dead in geographically high places, like this cliffside. The tombs, many of which date back to the 4th century, are guarded by massive entryways adorned with tall Romanesque columns and intricate reliefs. The oldest tombs are often no more than unremarked holes dug into the rock. Despite the external grandeur, the interior of the tombs are spare chambers cut into the rock with a simple monolith inside to display the body. The rooms are otherwise empty from hundreds of years of looting.
In November 1912, the remaining members of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition were searching for their leader. Scott and his party had vanished into the snows the previous year, never returning from their quest for the South Pole. One of the group saw "a small object projecting above the surface" of the snow. It was part of a tent. They had discovered the final resting place of Scott and two of his men, Henry "Birdie" Bowers and Edward Wilson. Scott lay between them, his diary recording their final days: "It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more," the last entry ran, "For God’s sake look after our people."
The bodies of Scott and his men were not brought back to Britain. Instead, wrote Cherry-Garrard, who had been part of the search party, "We never moved them. We took the bamboos of the tent away and the tent itself covered them. Over them we built the cairn." This tomb of snow, topped with a stark cross, was all that marked the remote spot in the Antarctic emptiness which has not been seen for over 100 years. The grave site was quickly buried in drifting snow, while the tent and bodies have been migrating downward into the ice under the weight of accumulating snow and seaward with the ice shelf toward the Ross Sea. A more permanent monument to Scott and his men was erected on Observation Hill near McMurdo Station, but given time, it is likely that, encased deep within an iceberg, the bodies of Scott, Bowers, and Wilson will slowly drift away out to sea.
Lampa is a small colonial town with all the provincial charms of a 16th century Peruvian town, but what stands out the most is its enormous church, the Iglesia Santiago Apóstol. Connected to the church is Enrique Torres Belón's freaky mausoleum, a silo of bones capped by an aluminum replica of Michelangelo's Pietà.
Belón, an engineer and architect, designed and built the tomb in the mid-20th century so that he and his wife could rest in peace surrounded by the earthly remains of the city's forbearers. The otherworldly tribute is lined with hanging human skeletons and hundreds of skulls exhumed from the town's cemetery and the crypts beneath the church. At the bottom is a black marble cross, whose lighting exaggerates the eerie shadows cast by the macabre wall hangings. The dramatic grave makes Belón seem very important—all Lampa's founders are looking upon him for all eternity.
Early polar exploration was a lonely business where sailors would be stuck on their ships for months, subsisting on barely edible rations among some of the world's most inhospitable climates. However, the Shackleton expedition was made just a bit brighter by the presence of the ship's cat, Mrs. Chippy. Harry McNeish was a carpenter on Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition to Antarctica, as well as a member of the long journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia. He was also the primary caretaker of Mrs. Chippy, the cat that accompanied the men until the Endurance became trapped in pack ice. Unfortunately Mrs. Chippy was shot along with the sled dogs once the team became trapped in the ice. To honor the brave, beloved kitty, the New Zealand Antarctic Society added a bronze statue of Mrs. Chippy to McNeish's grave in 2004.
The Big Top-shaped headstone for the victims of the circus train wreck. (Photo: Atlas Obscura user mom0ja)
The Con T. Kennedy Carnival Show had just wrapped up an unusually successful Harvest Festival week in the center of Atlanta. On the early morning of November 22, 1915, the 28-car Kennedy show train pulled out of the station with the entire company on board. Just a few hours later the show train collided with a steel passenger train. The crash was so powerful that the two engines fused together. While no one was killed on the sturdier passenger train, the Kennedy performers were not so lucky. "I saw those poor fellows pinned in their sleeping wagons and they could not get out," one eyewitness recalled.
The fire raged for hours. When the smoke had finally cleared, bodies were discovered in the wreckage. At least 50 Kennedy workers were injured. Due to the transient nature of show people, the exact number and identity of those killed has never been determined. After a mass funeral at Columbus’s First Baptist Church, there was a procession to Riverdale Cemetery where the burials took place. Since the carnival band’s instruments had been burned, local Columbians loaned them instruments so they could send their comrades off in style.
In honor of his fallen employees, Con. Kennedy erected an appropriately circus-y monument in Columbus' Riverdale Cemetery, and then he and the rest of his remaining crew headed back down the long, hard, show business road.
Nestled in the quaint Lincolnshire countryside is the village of Tattershall where, according to legend, the remains of a miniature folk hero can still be found. Visitors who step inside the town’s 16th century church will find a tiny grave marker, adorned with flowers and bearing the name Tom Thumb. He was reputedly just over 18 inches tall and lived to the ripe old age of 101 when he passed away in 1620.
It's difficult to pick fact from fiction because Tom Thumb has been a common character in English folklore for hundreds of years, with the first written examples of his escapades appearing in the early 1500s. Traditionally, the character of Tom Thumb was a canny, cunning boy who used his size to trick and beguile foolish people. There are rumours that the Tom Thumb buried at Tattershall was popular with the King’s court and often visited London. Whether or not this is true and whether or not a man named Tom Thumb really is buried in that small church, it’s safe to say that his story has become forever intertwined with wider folklore. This charming little grave is now part of that.
William G. Bruce's family had deep roots in the Town of Mont Vernon. He was an avid hunter and suffered a grave wound while hunting alone in 1883. He died the same day of his accident, but not before his wife Augusta Whittemore Bruce was rushed to his deathbed. William Bruce was industrious and frugal in life and left his wife a substantial sum of money. Augusta Bruce used some of this inherited wealth to commission noted monument maker Peter Brennan to craft a fitting memorial for her departed husband.
The book Lives Once Lived Here contains a facsimile of a ledger page that reveals Mrs. Bruce paid $35.00 each for the two headstones for her and her husband and $145.00 for the granite dog (a couple thousand in today's dollars), who has remained faithfully by his master's side in perpetual vigilance as his stone guardian in the afterlife.
Miss Baker, a monkey purchased by NASA from a Miami pet shop, was the first primate to return alive from space. She and another monkey, Miss Able, were fitted with adorable little caps and jackets to wear into space and crammed into less than adorable metal monitoring capsules. Then in the wee hours of May 28, 1959, the duo were placed into a Jupiter rocket and shot 300 miles into the sky. The flight only lasted 16 minutes, over half of which consisted of weightlessness, and the rocket landed safely, for the first time, in the Atlantic Ocean.
She retired to the Naval Aerospace Medical Center in Pensacola where she was married to another monkey, Big George. Miss Baker died of kidney failure in 1984 at the age of 27, earning her the secondary honor of being the longest lived squirrel monkey on record. She has the honor of being buried in a grave outside of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Alabama and given a proper headstone next to her first husband. The grave is located in the center's parking lot, but admirers and fans of the little astronaut still come by and leave bananas on her headstone.
Jane Griffith's grave depicts a commonplace domestic scene with a tragically sorrowful ending. Charles Griffith says goodbye to his wife Jane on the footsteps of their brownstone on 109 West 13th Street. It is the morning of August 3rd, 1857, and he is about to leave for a typical day's work, starting with a commute on the 6th Avenue horse trolley which waits on the corner. When Charles returned home from work, he found his wife dead from heart failure.
The artist's detail is extraordinary, from the iron fencing to their pet dog waiting on the top step of the brownstone. Simply titled to "Jane my Wife," the monument captures poignantly the morning Charles said farewell to his wife without knowing that it was for the last time.
During the mid-1800s when much of the southwest of America was still uninhabited desert, the government decided they would deal with the terrain like the desert dwellers of the Middle East and hire camel drivers, such as Hi Jolly, to carry their goods across the arid terrain. He was born Philip Tedro in Syria, converted to Islam and changed his name to Hadji Ali, which the Americans of the U.S. Calvary pronounced as "Hi Jolly." They contracted him to be the first member of the experimental Army Camel Corps. Jolly stood out from the rest of the riders for both his ambition and his cantankerous attitude.
Eventually the camel corps was disbanded after it was found that the much larger camels spooked the native livestock and horses. Jolly remained in the states before passing away in Arizona in 1902. Today his grave is marked by a stony pyramid that is topped by an etched metal camel.
Joseph Palmer began wearing a beard in the 1820s, in spite of the fact that beards had been out of fashion for nearly a century. Palmer was considered by most all in his small town to be slovenly and ungodly. He was even criticized by his local preacher for communing with the devil, famously responding to the accusation, "...if I remember correctly, Jesus wore a beard not unlike mine."
In May of 1830, Palmer was attacked by four men outside of a hotel in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Armed with razors and scissors, the men attempted to forcibly shave Palmer's face, but the bewhiskered man stabbed two of his attackers with a pocketknife, and was subsequently arrested for assault. He could have avoided jail by paying a fine and court fees, but Palmer refused, maintaining his innocence, and more importantly his right to a glorious beard. He was subsequently jailed for 15 months, including time in solitary confinement.
Upon leaving prison, Palmer joined the Fruitlands utopian community in nearby Harvard, Massachusetts after being influenced by his friendship with fellow Fruitlander, Louisa May Alcott, who wrote a character based on him. Palmer died in 1865 and his tombstone displays a portrait of him with a long beard, a final act of rebellion.
The Merchant family were prominent industrialists in Ohio, and when they erected this massive sphere in 1896 to mark the grave of Charles Merchant it matched the style and fortitude of the clan. The giant granite ball was placed atop a stone plinth and polished and stained to a fine shine, except for the circle where the ball rested on its stand. Within a few years of its installation the sphere had mysteriously begun to slowly rotate on its pedestal, eventually revealing the bald spot.
The estimated 5,200 pound ball had not been secured to the base, thinking the huge amount of friction would have simply held it in place. Several times, the Merchant descendants have attempted to right the sphere, once oven securing it with tar. Despite all this, the stone has managed to continue spinning on its pedestal. No one is quite sure why the sphere keeps moving, be it from imperceptible vibration or ghostly intervention as some would have it. But no matter the cause, the Merchant ball rolls on.
There are plenty of pyramid tombs, but most date to the 19th century and earlier. This one is not only modern, but empty. Actor Nicolas Cage purchased a plot in the famous St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and erected a stark, nine-foot-tall stone pyramid for himself. There is no name on the pyramid yet, but it is emblazoned with the Latin maxim, "Omni Ab Uno," which translates to "Everything From One." The actor himself has chosen to remain silent about his reasoning for the flamboyant tomb. Some speculate it's an homage to the "National Treasure" movie franchise. Others think the pyramid is evidence of the strange actor's ties to the probably-fictitious secret Illuminati society. The more paranormally minded suggest that the pyramid is where Cage will regenerate his immortal self.
Whatever his reasons, the Cage pyramid has already become an iconic part of the cemetery, much to the chagrin of many locals who are furious that he was able to obtain a plot in the cramped graveyard. Many have even accused the tomb of damaging or removing other centuries-old burials to make room.
Harry Collins was a lifelong magic lover, and even performed in jazz musician Bob Crosby's traveling USO show, "This Is The Army Show" during World War II. After serving, Collins returned to the United States, moved to the big city, and got a job as a salesmen at Frito-Lay, the purveyor of many a fine snack food. For the next twenty years, he was a Frito-Lay man by day and "Mr. Magic," Louisville's most popular magician, by night. He was so dedicated to both professions that the magic word for every one his tricks was "Frito-Lay!"
In 1970, Frito-Lay named Mr. Magic their official corporate magician. He traveled across the country and world, performing magic tricks and paying homage to corn chips. Now his effigy stands atop his grave, extending an arm to welcome visitors into his world of corn chips and wonder.
Its formal name is McMillin Mausoleum, named for John S. McMillin, Freemason, Methodist, and lime works businessman. He combined all of these devotions when he constructed the epic mausoleum that would house the remains of he and his family's remains, Afterglow Vista, the name which is actually placed on the stone arch leading to the burial site.
The so-called "mausoleum" is actually an open air rotunda with a huge limestone table in the middle. Around the table are thick stone chairs not only representing the members of the McMillin family, but actually containing their ashes and acting as headstones. This was meant to represent the family dinner table that the McMillins would rather around. There seems to be an empty space at the table and it is said that this was meant to represent the McMillin son who turned away from God. The table is circled by a six Roman columns and a single broken column which is said to represent the unfinished nature of man's life. The columns were originally going to hold a brass dome over the table, but in the end the family opted to leave the site exposed to the elements. Even the steps leading up to the monument were numbered with Masonic significance to represent the stages of life.
Bucksport's founder, Colonel Jonathan Buck, had a witch executed in the town's early days. Before she died, she cursed Buck to always bear the mark of that deed. One story says that while she was burning at the stake, her leg fell from her body and into the crowd, and this stain has appeared to remind everyone of the gruesome event. Whatever the story, Bucksport is left with a pointy stocking-shaped stain on an obelisk of granite in a hilltop graveyard on Main Street, dedicated to the founder of the town. It hangs right below his name like a stocking on a fireplace.
In sleepy Valley View Memorial Park there is a treasure the first of its kind in Utah. Hidden in the Southwest corner of the cemetery is an onyx-colored plaque in the ground that is hard to ignore. It reads, "Steven Allan Ford April 7, 1980-September 7, 2010 MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU–ALWAYS." This is no overzealous fan, but indeed the resting place of someone remarkable: Steven Ford, the first ordained Jedi priest in the predominantly Mormon state of Utah.
This might look like a small, private cemetery within Maplewood Cemetery, but it is actually the grave of just one man, Colonel Henry G. Wooldridge. It was built over the course of seven years until Wooldridge's own death in 1899, and commemorates family members and other loved ones Wooldridge lost over the course of his lifetime. The figures include his mother and sisters and his horse named Fop.
Prompted by no one but his own aching heart, the man spent his last years pouring his fortune into immortalizing all that was irretrievably lost in stunning fashion. After more than a century of visitation by a public fascinated by the spectacle, the site has acquired an unofficial, completely disconcerting name: "The Strange Procession Which Never Moves."
Tucked into the scrubby woods near Estonia's Ämari Air Base is a pilot's graveyard where Soviet airmen are buried beneath the fins of the very aircraft they likely died in. While some of the graves are crude and simple affairs, the graves of the many of the military pilots are topped with actual tail fins from Russian aircraft. These are dedicated to pilots who flew and died when Estonia was part of the Eastern Bloc until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The stark opposition and funereal atmosphere turn the site into a haunting memorial not just to the fighting men buried at the site, but for Estonia's past as well.
Perhaps the most famous statue at Lakeview Cemetery is "The Angel of Death Victorious" seated on the marble gravestone of one Francis Haserot. The life-size bronze angel holds an upside-down torch, a symbol of life extinguished. Perhaps its most unsettling feature, however, is how the statue appears to be weeping black tears at all times. These "tears" formed over time, an effect of the aging bronze combined with the impressive sculpting work of the piece itself. This lacrimal feature attracts a number of visitors and tourists each year.
Victor Noir was a 19th-century political journalist shot in a duel by Prince Pierre Bonaparte in 1870. He became a symbol of the imperial injustice and a martyr for the Republic. More than one hundred thousand people came to his funeral, where frenetic weeping was mixed with calls for insurrection. After the downfall of the Second Empire, Victor Noir’s remains were transferred to the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and a bronze effigy was commissioned.
Noir was depicted as an elegant man, lying dead on the floor after the impact of the lethal bullet, his top hat tipped over on his side. Dalou chose to represent Noir in a very realistic way, his face having the detailed quality of a cast death mask. However, another detail of Noir’s anatomy would soon get more attention than the sober realism of the memorial bronze.
Victor's grave remains one of the most popular at Père Lachaise, but not because of his political symbolism. Generations of women have come to kiss his lips and rub his bulge, believing it will bring good luck. After a century and a half of this action, Victor Noir’s lips and groin are shiny and nickel-clean, while the rest of his body presents the greenish tone of oxidized bronze.
It's not his name, but rather his profession. Rope Walker was a peg-legged tightrope walker who died in 1884, when he fell from a rope stretched across one of the town’s main streets with an iron stove strapped to his back. He asked for a rabbi as he was dying, but he did not reveal his name. Using the scant information they had about his, the townspeople buried him as “Rope Walker" in the Hebrew Cemetery of Corsicana.
Life-sized monuments are not so uncommon, but this one is half of a statue friendship. In 1920, Charles M. Higgins, an Irish immigrant and local history buff built an altar on Battle Hill to the long-slighted Revolutionary War Battle of Long Island, the first major battle after the Declaration of Independence. He chose to top the monument with a statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. As if to communicate between past and present, Minerva's outstretched arm reciprocated exactly 3.5 miles away by the Statue of Liberty's raised torch. Their friendship has stood the test of time (and condo development) and their line of sight to each other remains unobstructed.
In unassuming neighborhoods and isolated backroads all across America there are houses with histories of bloodshed and mayhem.... at least in the movies.
Whether they were the scene of grisly slasher murders, or haunted by vengeful demons, or designed to cause pain and terror, these are the homes (and some hotels) that have come to define the horror genre.
Whether it's Nancy's house from A Nightmare On Elm Street, the oft-haunted house of The Amityville Horror, or the Sandin's suburban fortress from The Purge, these famous facades were often created using actual buildings. Many of them are still around.
There are spooky spots in many states, but it's worth zooming in on Los Angeles—it's ground zero for horror houses.
The movies with homes on the map include:
1408 A Nightmare on Elm Street Don't Breathe Halloween House House II: The Second Story House of 1,000 Corpses House on Haunted Hill Insidious Paranormal Activity Pet Sematary Poltergeist Rosemary's Baby The Amityville Horror The Birds The Conjuring The Evil Dead The Exorcist The House of The Devil The People Under The Stairs The Purge The Shining The Texas Chainsaw Massacre You're Next
Last summer, Colleen Boll was doing some work around the house when she heard her dog barking from a different room. "It was an interesting kind of bark," she says, "so I looked out." Right smack in her yard, pacing around inside her chain link fence, was an enormous, glossy black bear.
Boll watched the bear puzzle out how to hop the fence. "Eventually, it grabs the trunk of a tree and climbs over," she remembers. "And I see the pipe at the top of the chain link fence bend way down under the weight of this huge bear. And then I realize, oh—that's what all those little bends are, in all my fences all around my house."
Boll doesn't live deep in the woods. She lives in Asheville, the 11th most populous city in North Carolina, and increasingly well-known as both a hip travel destination and a great place to live. Over the past decade, Asheville has racked up all kinds of accolades: according to one list of fawning headlines, it's "Fantastically Yoga-Friendly," "One of America's 12 Greatest Music Cities," "The Biggest Little Culinary Capital in America," "#1 Beer City USA," and "America's #1 Quirkiest Town."
A black bear hanging out in Colleen Boll's front yard in Asheville, North Carolina. (Photo: Colleen Boll)
Somewhat more quietly, it's also one of America's Best Cities for Bears. They hang out near the local hospital, and at the storied Grove Park Inn. Mailmen regularly run into them on their routes. Last August, a bear broke into an Asheville man's home and stole a stick of butter out of his kitchen trash. As part of its pre-show, the Fine Arts Movie Theater, in downtown, shows a photo of a curious black bear reading its marquee from across the street. "I never saw a black bear until I moved to the city," Boll says. "Now, I'll be driving and I'll go, 'There's a bear in someone's yard!' or 'Look at that bear, knocking over that trash can and taking the bag!'"
When we talk about urban wildlife, we're usually referring to small, deft creatures—squirrels, pigeons, or other standbys that mind their own business and fade into the background. Your average city-dweller might catch a deer in their headlights every once in a while, or spot a raccoon digging through the trash. A bear is something of a different story. A male can weigh 600 pounds. That's not the kind of creature you get used to seeing on your commute.
Somewhere around 8,000 black bears range around western North Carolina, and many of those make Asheville itself part of their meandering. According to the Urban-Suburban Bear Study, an ongoing project by the state's Wildlife Resources Commission and North Carolina State University, these bears are very healthy, often well-fed enough to have twice as many cubs as your average scrappy mountain bear, and confident enough to den right outside of town.
After a couple of years of study, the researchers—along with most of Asheville's humans—are wondering exactly how many bears the city can hold.
Black bears and North Carolinians have tussled over space for centuries. While traveling through the western part of the state in 1774, naturalist William Bartram complained about them in his journal, writing "the bears are yet too numerous." American pioneers hunted them for food and for sport, often to excess—when trapper "Big Tom" Wilson died in Asheville in 1908, his obituary bragged that he had killed 110 bears (his son, Adolph, claimed 90). All of this barely dented their numbers.
Starting in the 1920s, though, development and deforestation began taking their toll. When a midcentury bout of chestnut blight came along and decimated the bears' food supply, they were already struggling. By 1970, there were only about 1,500 bears left in the state, and North Carolina conservationists began setting aside protected land to try and bring their numbers up. The species began a slow recovery, but things still looked grim. "People wondered if they would disappear," Mike Carraway, a biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, told the Asheville Citizen-Times in 2014.
Then came the 1990s, and the housing boom. New developments meant more room for people—but, as residents and scientists soon learned, they were also perfect safe spaces for bears, full of food and birdseed and free from hunters. As Asheville grew into a thriving metropolis, the bears stuck around and thrived, too, lumbering between the sprawling Smokey Mountains and the cramped yet trash-rich developments. In 1993, the Wildlife Resources Commission got 33 calls about human-bear encounters. In 2013, they got 569.
Nick Gould, the Urban-Suburban Bear Study's project lead, shows Asheville children how to age a bear. (Photo: Nick Gould)
The scientists behind the Urban-Suburban Bear Study are looking at this influx from a number of angles, investigating the bear's lifestyles, travel routes, and family relationships. But they're also interested in figuring out this new habitat's "social carrying capacity"—in other words, exactly how many of these new neighbors the human residents of the city are willing to tolerate. "If the habitat can support a lot, but the public doesn't want them, we run into issues," says Dr. Chris DePerno, the study's principal investigator.
The very design of the study requires a certain amount of public support. Residents throughout the city have volunteered to host humane traps on their property. When a bear wanders in, scientists come by, attach a GPS collar, and then let the bear go. They then track the bear's movements for six months, at which point the collar automatically falls off. If they couldn't use people's backyards as bait, the whole study would be doomed. "Everything we do is on private land," says DePerno. "If we didn't have public support, we could not have done this project—but we've had a tremendous amount of support."
Of course, the reverse is also true—involving the public in the study has allowed the researchers to teach ordinary civilians about bear management, answering their questions and assuaging their fears.This makes DePerno hopeful—if city people can accept bears, maybe there's a chance that other animals driven into civilization will get a fair shake. "It goes beyond just bears in Asheville," he says. "We're hoping to educate other scientists and the public on the potential for managing other urban species."
Having bears next door does require shouldering some unique responsibilities. In bear-heavy areas, Ashevillians are asked to put their trash out the morning of pickup rather than the night before. When that's not enough, a kind of arms race can ensue, with some residents chaining their cans to trees and bolting the lids. (Boll freezes any food trash and puts her bag of used cat litter on top of it on trash day, and says it works like a charm.)
Birdfeeders are pretty much a no-go—bears will crush the whole feeder like it's one big seed, and gobble up the contents. They like to claw the covers off of hot tubs. And in Boll's neighborhood, walking at night requires a small gear kit: "You carry a light and a whistle, and you're constantly on the lookout," she says. "Not because anything that has happened that I know of—but because hello, there are bears!"
But most human residents seem to think it's worth it. "Every single bear sighting I've had has impressed me a lot, because I'm in awe of them," says Boll. She says she doesn't know anyone anti-bear, and that new residents who are confused or frightened are quickly educated by their neighbors, if the scientists don't get to them first. Researchers have extremely detailed bear whereabouts data, but they haven't released it—not because they fear vengeance against the bears, but because they've realized that people love the bears too much, and might go looking for them.
Boll doesn't need a map to tell her they're there—she can just look out her window. "Part of me would love to know that information," she says. "But I'm sort of glad they're not sharing it, because I think they're constantly behind my house."
A recelluarized heart. (Photo: Bernhard Jank, M.D., Ott Lab, Massachusetts General Hospital)
For decades now, there's been an image of human regeneration being a few cells dividing in a petri dish, hopefully growing into a shiny new organ. But the truth is that scientists' work is a bit more macabre. To make a new organ, it helps to be working from a dead one.
That goes for hearts, too. A little more than a decade ago, Dr. Harald Ott, now a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, developed a procedure that could rinse an organ of its cells, leaving behind an empty structure that can be repopulated with new ones. In the lab, Ott and his colleagues have taken ghostly hearts and resurrected them as new ones. Shocked with electrical pulses, those new hearts have even started beating again.
These regenerated organs are not yet strong enough to be subbed in for the originals in the human body. But that’s the goal of this research: to be able to use a person’s own cells to grow new body parts that can replace broken ones.
People have imagined saving failing bodies with replacement organs for centuries, but doctors have only been performing transplants successfully since the 1950s, when they began to understand exactly how the body’s immune system would reject a foreign organ. In the first successful organ transplant, doctors removed a kidney from one identical twin and gave it to the other—the recipient’s body accepted the kidney only because it came from his twin’s. Today, to stave off organ rejection, anyone who receives a transplanted organ has to take drugs that suppress their immune system for the rest of their lives.
If an organ were to be grown from the body’s own cells, though, the immune system would accept it. When Ott started working on tissue engineering, in the mid-’00s, scientists already had shown that was possible to coax stem cells into growing into particular tissues—they could grow heart muscles in a petri dish, essentially. But replicating the structure of a whole organ was exponentially more complicated. For instance, the heart tissue grown in a lab didn’t have a delicate system of blood vessels laced through it.
The technique that Ott developed to decellularize organs got around part of that problem. In every organ, around the cells, there is a structure of water, proteins and other molecular compounds that support the actual cells—it’s like a house the cells live in, or scaffolding that keeps them in place. But Ott discovered that, with the right combination of detergents, it’s possible to slowly wash the cells out of this “extra-cellular matrix.” Here's the process cleaning the cells out of a rat's limb:
What’s left is like an outline of an organ, complete with the spaces for tiny blood vessels and other key features of the original. The next step is to repopulate it with cells that have not yet settled on an identity—usually adult cells that have been reprogrammed into stem cells. It’s not as simple as just pumping cells back into the empty organ shell, though. Some combinations of different types of cells give better results than others, and they need very specific conditions to grow: the regenerating organs have to live in “bioreactors,” which are basically specialized jars with customized solutions inside and carefully balanced pressure. Under these conditions, Ott’s lab has regrown hearts and set them to beating again.
These organs are still shadow versions of fully grown organs. They contain only a portion of the hundreds of millions of cells needed, and they’re not strong enough to replace originals. Even if researchers do succeed in creating a fully grown organ, there are still questions to be answered: What are the dangers, if any, of putting these organs into a person’s body? How long will they last? Even at this still-early stage, though, these resurrected organs do seem like a partial miracle: a piece of dead flesh, regrown and reanimated.
Though this reads like the lines of a religious hymn, it is actually from a Vallenato song—a musical genre that originated on the Caribbean coast of Colombia in the early 20th century.
The song is famous throughout the country, not just because of its catchy rhythm, but because of the strange story that inspired it. After all, it’s not every day that someone shows up to their own funeral and gets to write about it.
Landscape of the Magdalena Department, where Villa was born (Photo: Ledpup/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Abel Antonio Villa, the writer and protagonist of the song, is one of the most celebrated Vallenato singers in Colombia. Born in 1924 in the Magdalena department, he was part of those first devoted Vallenato singers who would play for the love of the music, despite its lack of commercial value.
Today, Vallenato is considered Colombian cultural patrimony, and there can hardly be a festival, party, or family reunion without it. But back then few people outside the region paid attention to it.
Vallenato players at a festival (Photo: Public Domain)
With time, he would be part of the musical revolution that swept the nation and brought Vallenato to the heart of every Colombian. But before he did this he had to die and come back from the dead—at least in the minds of the people who loved him.
The famed incident took place in 1943, and, like most hilariously tragic stories, was a simple misunderstanding. As a young man who had just finished his obligatory military service, Villa decided to take the long way home and party his way through every pueblo (small provincial town) he crossed. The road less traveled was apparently filled with enough booze and Vallenato to keep him occupied for a couple of weeks.
While he was busy filling his heart with the sound of the accordion and his mouth with aguardiente, another young man named Abel Antonio was killed in a nearby pueblo. News of the murder soon reached the musician's home, leaving his family torn apart with grief. They dealt with the pain in the only way that made sense: by throwing a gigantic funeral party to honor his life.
As was often the tradition in small towns at the time, the wake was set to last for nine days. After five days of mourning, drinking, and dancing, the party was cut short when, as if straight out of a biblical scene, Abel Antonio Villa showed up. Presumably with a massive hangover, but very much alive.
It is safe to assume that this apparition shocked and frightened those who had mourned him for almost a week. But the music was ready, the food served, and the alcohol abundant. If his funeral party had been exuberant, it was nothing compared to the celebration of his being alive.
Villa's “death” changed his life. After that day, Villa wore white for the rest of his life as a way to commemorate his resurrection. He also asked that the last four days of mourning be tacked onto his second, and final, funeral. Most famously, he wrote a song titled “The Death of Abel Antonio” in which he retells the story of the most captivating moment of his life.
Villa passed away in 2006 in Barranquilla, a city known for its parties and festivals (Photo: Public Domain)
Villa would go on to become an international star, and record several iconic songs. None, however, compare to the song that immortalized the event in the collective memory of the country. At any given festival, you might hear the story—accompanied by the sound of the accordion and the bitter taste of aguardiente—of the Vallenato singer who crashed his own wake.
Photographer Charles Fréger's new book Yokainoshima: Island of Monsters might be named after an imaginary island, but its subjects are the very real performers that dress up as spirits and ghosts for local festivals. Yōkai, broadly speaking, refers to supernatural creatures that exist in Japanese folklore, from deities to demons, although Fréger acknowledges that it's a difficult term to define. "In Japanese, Yōkai does not mean 'monster' in the strict sense of the word," he writes. "It refers generally to the imaginary creatures which populate Japanese culture. They may be ghosts as well as demons, or even objects."
Over a period of two years, Fréger travelled to Japan five times to capture the participants and rituals of local festivals. The idea of an island of Yōkai arose as, Fréger recalls, "throughout the project I always thought about being on an imaginary territory. We visited 20 islands, and we didn’t know what we would find on each."
In the book, which features essays from experts in Japanese culture and folklore, there is a guide to these local characters. In the Kagoshima Prefecture, for example, Fréger photographed individuals dressed as a garappa, a version of the water spirit the kappa. (Atlas Obscura has previously reported on the long history of kappa in Japan.) As part of the Yokkabui Festival in the Kagoshima Prefecture, participants perform a garappa dance for the god of water.
Here is a selection of photographs from Fréger’s compelling series.
"Selfridgez" in Hisaronu, Turkey. (Photo: Courtesy Matthew Hopkinson)
Along a road that snakes down towards the sea in the ancient Turkish province of Mugla is the village of Kayakoy. Here, women sit on stools rolling dough for the flatbread snack, gozleme, and vacationers sip dark coffee at outdoor tables. Part of Kayakoy is known as the “ghost village” because its Greek population, fearing persecution, fled after World War I. Their houses, now in ruins, remain.
Nearby is a town quite unlike its neighbor. Built on pine tree-covered hills overlooking the white sands of Oludeniz beach on Turkey’s Aegean coastline is Hisaronu. It’s here where, for much of the year, voices from Newcastle, Liverpool or London are as common as those from Istanbul or Ankara.
Codswallop, an obscure British-slang word for nonsense, is a popular restaurant in Hisaronu. This establishment, as advertised on its Facebook page, specializes “in fish chips and mushy peas..lots of traditional English dishes including our famous english breakfast.”
If you were to list British dishes characterized as being the most stereotypical, Codswallop serves them all: roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, jam roly-poly, apple crumble, sticky toffee pudding and custard.
You’ll find Anglicized holiday resorts like Hisaronu dotted around Turkey. In these alternate versions of Britain, the food, drink and entertainment offerings are similar to those found in suburban malls in the U.K.
Travelers to Hisaronu might fancy a bite to eat under the golden arches at “McDowell’s.” Or Del Boys—an eatery named after a character from one of Britain’s most beloved television sitcoms, OnlyFools and Horses. Del Boy is a wheeler-dealer, cockney geezer from South London who drives a three wheeled yellow van.
There’s a shop called Marc Spenger, named after the department store Marks and Spencer; Nexst after the clothing brand Next, present in every shopping mall in the U.K.; and Azda, after Asda, a low-cost supermarket.
Over the years, Hisaronu has morphed into a bustling vacation town, built curiously in Britain’s image. Here, the stereotypical British abroad tourist—skin burnt red, clutching a pint of lager beer and wearing a soccer shirt—enjoys familiar-seeming pubs, restaurants and sun loungers.
It’s not to say that Hisaronu excludes all the elements of the Turkish diet and culture, but, as one regular visitor sums up, it comes close to it. “The mosque and food is the only thing truly Turkish in Hisaronu,” says Jenny Connor, who has been coming to this part of the Aegean coast for years.
Mass tourism from the U.K. to Europe for “package holidays” took off in the 1950s, when cheap, charter flights made flying affordable for working people. Until then, the only reasonably priced mode of transport was a coach, impractical for a week’s vacation on the continent. With the expansion of cheaper air travel, you could get a holiday, flights and accommodation included, for between 20 to 30 pounds.
"Nexst", after the British brand Next, and "Marc Spenger" after the department store Marks and Spencer. (Photo: Courtesy Matthew Hopkinson)
Much of the tourism boom was centered around Spain, where holidaymakers got a helping hand from an unlikely source. General Franco, the dictator of Spain until 1975, waived visa restrictions in 1959 to encourage visitors and to give a boost to the economy. A year later arrivals had increased by 500 percent.
“A country considered the antithesis of postwar European values,” writes Sasha D. Pack, became “the epicenter of one of postwar Europe’s largest mass rituals, the beach holiday.” Places like Benidorm, once a sleepy, impoverished fishing village, eventually became the epitome of a vacation hub for Brits enjoying plentiful booze, nightclubs and cheap thrills. In austere, devoutly Catholic Spain, British tourists even convinced the mayor of Benidorm to overturn a national ban on the bikini.
Back in the 1950s and ‘60s going to Europe was, in relative terms, quite an adventure. Travelers had three fears when they ventured into the unknown, says Dr. Susan Barton, a research fellow at the University of Leicester who has written about working class holidays: “Flying, foreigners and food.”
It might have been the first time you got on a plane, ordered a pint of milk in Spanish, or laid eyes on a squid. It’s why these first resorts incorporated British food and drink into the experience; to make people feel more at home.
And, as you can tell from Hisaronu, this custom never fully went away. Spain set the mold for this type of “Britain with better weather” vacation, but soon dozens of places similar to Hisaronu appeared in Greece and Turkey. By the 1980s, Turkey was viewed as a getaway destination with plentiful “sun, sea, ancient history and exotic orient” writes Arzu Ozturkmen, a historian at Bogazici University, as well as a cheaper alternative to the Spanish coast.
Some of the ruins in the nearby town of Kayaköyü. (Photo: Public Domain)
A country like Turkey may not feel as foreign as it once did to visitors, and a place like Hisaronu provides a base to travel more “off the beaten track.” Yet when it comes to food, the Brits are not always the most adventurous. According to a survey carried out by a large British supermarket chain, they still have a fondness for home cooking. In 2014, one third of Brits claimed they preferred eating their own cuisine on vacation. Another 1999 survey found that half of British tourists snub local fare in favor of fish and chips and an English breakfast.
Clutching to routine and ritual like a safety blanket extends beyond food. This same survey found, rather hilariously, that 34 percent of British tourists take an umbrella on vacation with them, and one percent take their own tea bags. (As a Brit, I can certainly attest to the last point. Tea, as every British person knows, never tastes the same beyond the British Isles.)
Hisaronu and Britain now have something else in common, beyond an affinity for the English breakfast. Soon, neither will be a member of the European Union. During the bitter “Brexit” referendum, the “Leave” side dangled the threat of Turkey joining the European Union as a strong reason to vote no. It was argued that Turks would soon be arriving at the English border seeking work. Not only is Turkey’s membership of the E.U. a distant prospect, but more Britons currently travel to Turkey than vice versa.
Some 2.5 million British citizens travel to Turkey each year, reports The Daily Telegraph, but fewer than 200,000 Turks visited the U.K. in 2015. And despite the fact there has been a steep drop in arrivals amid security fears in Turkey—a result of bombings and a failed coup—Hisaronu appears to have a loyal following. Visitors like Conner say they will keep coming back.
Not everything in Hisaronu is Anglicized; guests can still find their fair share of traditional kebab houses and menus delivering aubergine-based delights. For the ardent shopper, there are plenty of souvenirs to be bought that can’t be found in a British department store.
Dotted along the main drag in Hisaronu, tourists can find counterfeit treasures galore. Rows of fake soccer shirts, stacks of Armani handbags, “Roy Bands” sunglasses and other sweet deals on merchandise fill shop fronts. You might buy that “Prada” purse at Selfridgez, rather than Selfridges, the London department store.
Conner, the longtime Hisaronu visitor, believes proprietors of venues like Azda or Marc Spenger name their shops after British cultural references as a joke, rather than a bald attempt to draw in visitors.
Just the name Codswallop – a frankly hilarious thing to see on vacation – is entertaining for British guests in Hisaronu. In addition to its fish and chips, the menu revives some of the summertime eating traditions normally reserved for trips to the British seaside.
As Ruth Letts, one happy Codswallop customer says, “If we were staying longer I would be trying out the afternoon cream teas too.”
He sat in the glow of the pixelated green and black screen of his Apple IIe, exploring the dark dangerous tunnels of an ancient tomb in the 1982 adventure computer game Aztec. Instead of seeking the jade idol and escaping from the tomb, Burr found himself engrossed in dwelling deeper and deeper into the virtual abyss.
“I would always end up blasting holes and dropping down really deep into the dungeon with no way back out,” Burr says. “It just seemed like it was just part of the system—that actually what happens is you get into this space and build this nightmare where you get trapped. You get buried alive.”
Instead of trying to win the game, he found himself just getting more lost in the labyrinth. In effect, Burr created an artificial infinite dungeon—a lair where your character falls into an endless cycle of death. There is no end, and sometimes there is no goal other than to stay alive. Players continue to enter the new randomly generated space, and die ceaselessly. Now, Burr uses the concept of infinite dungeons to create pieces of artwork such as the 4-channeled immersive exhibition called Pattern Language, which he debuted this September at 3-Legged Dog Art & Technology Center in New York.
“These are games that are built upon the algorithmic beauty of nature and simulate this idea of chaos or entering this world that is in itself alive,” says Burr.
So what is an infinite dungeon? Being stuck in an infinite dungeon is like being locked in a room. You are given a toolbox, where each day the contents of the toolbox are different and must use what you have to escape the room. But, if you mess up you die.
Infinite dungeons have a complex heritage, but ultimately ties to dungeon crawling games. The 1980s is considered the era of dungeon crawling games, giving birth to the first infinite dungeons.
At the core of dungeon crawling role-playing games, you navigate a character through the digital space (a cave, a castle, a tomb or even outer space) with a set labyrinth environment and explore. The goal primary is to find loot or face a boss at the end of the dungeon, and avoid getting killed on the journey.(It's complicated because the infinite dungeon experience can be the whole game, or it can be just an aspect of it. So all infinite dungeons take place in dungeon-crawling games, but dungeon-crawling games can contain more than infinite dungeons.)
The most famous game of this style was the 1980 dungeon crawling video game Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom.
Rogue is like most dungeon games: venture through the labyrinth, find the Amulet of Yendor, and try not to be killed by monsters. However, if your character does die, the character dies for good—forcing the player to become an entirely new character and creating a sense of permanence to death, or permadeath. When the character enters the dungeon again, the layout of the space and objects that populate it are completely different. This is called procedural generation, a feature where the game algorithmically makes each playthrough a unique experience.
By adding tension with permadeath and procedurally generated layouts, Rogue brought forth a new representation of death and life, changing the state of infinite dungeon games.
Players called games of the same ilk “roguelikes,” but now use a variety of terms, explains Porpentine Charity Heartscape, a writer and game designer who is currently collaborating with Burr on a multi-part adventure game called Aria End—the larger project Pattern Language falls under. “The current vogue is to inject randomized survival elements into a lot of different games, so the genre has cross-pollinated,” Heartscape says.
Figuring out which games fall under the roguelike category is messy. Elements of infinite dungeons can be found incorporated into a level or they can be the entire premise of video game. Some passionate fans of the "crawl community" have even created a video game genre for the gameplay, called Procedural Death Labyrinth.
The game style has evolved into elaborate, and seemingly never-ending landscapes and universes. For example, the survival game No Man’s Sky released this August has gained a lot of attention for the over 18 quintillion unique planets that a player can explore. The dungeon mechanism, writ large.
Another difference with more recent games is that players can sometimes carry over advancement and earnings from earlier runs, writes video game journalist Dan Griliopoulos. "The addiction element of these games doesn't just come from the mechanics of surviving further in the main game, but from the compulsion loop of wanting to unlock more elements to improve your next run," he writes.
Some infinite dungeon games can be trivial and frustrating as players try their hardest to stay alive. But, people continue to play and enjoy seeing how far they can explore, says Heartscape. There’s a soothing simplicity to using the tools in a space to try to escape or hunt for treasure.
“I feel focused when I play games like that, and find it calming to experience a controlled microcosm of this cruel, voracious world, where death can be experienced therapeutically, not terminally,” says Heartscape. “I think recreationally dying is one of the best things about living in this century.”
Burr recently returned to the infinite dungeon in a game called Stone Soup. He found himself sucked into an endless labyrinth yet again, lured by the constantly unpredictable and shifting layout. It was his continuous demise in Stone Soup that inspired him to create his series of immersive art projects. He aims to encapsulate the feeling of getting lost in a living, mutating digital world.
“I remember when I was playing Stone Soup a lot,” says Burr, “there was something nice about when I would get deep into a game and accrue a lot of experience with this character. I would form this connection—this attachment to being in that world—that I wouldn’t get when you can just reset and start the game over.”
The bond players sometimes form with characters and avatars is intensified by the risk of death, especially games with permadeath, explains Teresa Lynch, a social scientist and doctoral candidate at Indiana University who researches the emotional phenomenon in video games. There are a variety of representations of life and death in games. In games like World of Warcraft, players spend a lot of time enhancing their characters, developing a kind of social relationship, Lynch says. Here, there is more incentive to keep the character alive. Conversely, players wouldn’t form such strong attachments with avatars in Call of Duty where death is expected to happen often.
"Just the fact that you can live and die and live again is something that is interesting,” says Lynch.
While Lynch wonders whether this may desensitize players, there have been no evidence or studies that support it. If you’ve reached an unfortunate demise in a game, pressing the reset button is usually an option if you don’t want to rebuild everything you’ve lost.
“The fact that we still want to avoid death, that we still see it as something that’s punished in the virtual world isn’t much of a shock,” says Lynch. “I think most video game worlds are communicating to the player that death is not something we should be seeking.”
But in infinite dungeons, respawning into a familiar world, but one that has been transformed creates a different idea of what death means.
“I think there’s something important about making a video game that creates this labyrinth that is generative and alive,” says Burr. “Infinite dungeons tap into a lot of really deep fears about getting lost and what it means to progress through life.”
