When thinking of the origins of Vampire literature in the Western world, chances are you think of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This chef-d'oeuvre has defined the genre ever since it was published more than a hundred years ago.
But years before Stoker was obsessively researching for his book, another vampire story was written in Ireland. Carmilla, a novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, could be called the original vampire novel of modern Europe.
Written in 1871, the novella is a first person account from Laura, a young English woman who falls prey to a beautiful vampire. In some detail, Laura tells us of a curious incident that brings Carmilla, a stranger, into her home.
At first, she is scared of the newcomer, who looks exactly like a specter she had seen in a nightmare when she was a child. But these feelings quickly subside and are replaced by an ardent relationship that blossoms with intensity.
In the meantime, panic arises as maidens from nearby towns are afflicted by a mysterious illness that causes their deaths. Eventually, Laura herself becomes ill, and has recurring nightmares of a giant cat that attacks her at night.
As a strange twist of fate, a general who has lost his niece to the illness comes to visit Laura's father. He is now aware of the reality of vampires, and is on the hunt for Millarca—as he knew Carmilla. When the two unexpectedly come face to face, a fight ensues and Carmilla, now exposed, flees.
After the incident, Laura is taken back and guarded by several people. Meanwhile, her father, the general, and a vampire hunter find Carmilla’s hidden tomb, drive a stake into her heart, decapitate her, and burn her remains. Laura recovers her health, but never fully, and continues to be haunted by the memory of Carmilla for the remainder of her short life.
Most scholars agree that Carmilla heavily influenced Dracula, as elements of the first appear in the latter, though modified or amplified. The aesthetic of the female vampire, for example, is very much the same in both stories. They have rosy cheeks, big eyes, full lips, and almost irresistible sensuality. There is also the vampire hunter who comes to the rescue and imparts his knowledge of the obscure on the confused victims. Even the narrative frame of Stoker’s masterpiece is quite similar to Le Fanu’s; first person accounts from the victims.
But what makes Carmilla so endearing are not its similarities to other works of the genre, but its distinct differences. Most notably, the fact that the story is centered around two female characters, whose complicated relationship is colored by thinly veiled lesbian undertones.
The novella was written during the Victorian Era, a period known for its strict moral laws and sexual repression, so no wonder vampire novels rose into prominence. The premise of these novels is that even the most pure of hearts cannot resist the supernatural seduction. This idea was extremely attractive for the Victorian upper class, especially women, whose desires have always been rigidly restricted.
However, powerlessness does not mean redemption or absolution, as these powers are understood to be evil and tied to devilish forces. In almost every vampire story, the women who are preyed upon meet their deaths, unless the men in their lives come to their rescue. As such, the vampire trope simultaneously provided an outlet for repressed sexual desires and a moral lesson on the danger of succumbing to such desires.
In this sense Laura is the perfect victim of vampire literature. She is at once repulsed and drawn to the vampire, both wishes to succumb to and withdraw from her feelings for the strange and beautiful creature. And the fact that the beautiful creature is an irresistibly lovely woman only makes her feelings more confusing.
“I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. [...] I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence.”
Laura isn’t alone in her feelings. While we are given to understand that most of her victims are of no importance to her, Carmilla is genuinely enamored of a few of them. She seems to have fallen for her victim.
“With gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, ‘You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.’”
In these moments of frenzied rapture, she implies that for them to become one, Laura must die. To drink Laura’s blood was to become one with her forever. As it stands, Carmilla is the antithesis of the heteronormative and male-centered world to which vampires were constricted to after Dracula. It has inspired several remakes as well as a plethora of lesbian vampire tales, including a Canadian web series of the same name.
Given the historical context, it is not surprising that the novella did not gain much attention when it was initially written. Now that it’s been 145 years, it is time for Carmilla to rise from the grave.
For Daniel Erenberg, it’s gas masks. For John Kozik, it’s old Ouija boards. These are just some of specialties of the 18 collectors that are profiled in the new book Morbid Curiosities:Collections of the Uncommon and the Bizarre. The title is apt: these are collections of items that would make many people recoil.
However, for the collectors, whether they are drawn to taxidermy or early medical photography, the relics are as appealing as gemstones or priceless stamps. “I know the origin and pathology of all of my pieces,I know the story behind them" says collector Nicole Angemi about her collection of human and animal specimens, "I don’t just collect body parts; this is my career, my livelihood, and, of course, my passion.”
Many of the collections featured in Morbid Curiosities have not been previously made public. With detailed photographs and portraits, the book is a glimpse into whole worlds of strange and rare collections. Here is a selection of images from the book.
Jessica Fleming was 12 years old when she met the goose who would change her life.
She was living with her parents and grandparents in a former naval ammunitions depot in the small city of Hastings, Nebraska, and she never quite knew what would be going on there when she returned from school. "I got home after a brutal day of junior high," she says. "I looked out the window, and I could see my grandpa holding a leash. So I walked out to see what he was up to, because he was always up to something."
Jessica's grandpa, Gene Fleming, was an inveterate tinkerer. He had made his fortune in manufacturing, and it was he who had transformed the ammunition depot into apartments, complete with a rec room and chicken hutches. That day in 1988, he had been visiting his sister-in-law's farm when he saw something that got his heartstrings tugging and his wheels turning: a two-year-old goose who had been born with no feet, struggling to follow his fellow geese across a gravel road.
"Because I'm a Shriner," Gene later told People magazine, "my natural instinct was to help him." First, he tried making a fowl-sized skateboard, figuring the goose the could push along with one stump while balancing on the other, but no dice. The goose was patient, though, and Gene soon hit on a solution: a pair of patent leather baby shoes, size 0 and stuffed with foam rubber. By the time Jessica got home from school, the goose was running pell-mell around the yard, tugging at the other end of the leash. Soon, they were calling him Andy.
At the time, Jessica wasn't necessarily impressed. "I was at the age of being constantly embarrassed by my family," she says. She couldn't have predicted Andy's meteoric rise and devastating fall—that the Footless Goose would become first an international superstar, then the victim of a brutal murder, then the subject of a mysterious cover-up. She couldn't have known that 25 years later, she would be the Fleming who took up the mantle, fighting through a web of mystery and intrigue to bring Andy to justice.
Andy's Rise to Fame
Twelve-year-old Jessica may have been over Andy, but Gene's friend at the Chicago Tribune, Gary Johansson, saw the goose's potential. He wrote up a few lines, and almost overnight, Andy went 1980s-viral. "We had newspapers from all over the world contacting us and wanting to do stories," says Jessica. He got on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where he shared billing with Isabella Rossellini and Martin Short. Reader's Digest did a profile, and Peoplesplurged on a photo spread. When Nike learned that Andy preferred their brand of baby shoes, they sent him a crate, making him almost certainly the first goose to get a major sponsorship deal.
Andy's hometown was quickly enamored, too. Gene gooseproofed the passenger seat of his bright orange Triumph TR7, and he and the star toured around, putting in appearances at libraries, schools, county fairs, and parades (they particularly liked speaking and honking at disability awareness events). Tourists flocked to see the Fleming homestead, and Gene even drummed up an Andy Fan Club, which issued official certificates signed by him and his wife, Nadine. "Hastings is known now for Kool-Aid," says Fleming. "But before they really promoted that cause, it was Andy the Goose. It put the town on the map."
Even beyond the shoes, Andy was a special goose. "He was very sweet-natured," says Jessica. "Just literally a nice bird." He seemed, she says, downright grateful to her grandfather—loyal to him despite the temptations of fame, and patient when he tried to switch out his Nikes for high-tops or to see if he could ride a bicycle. When Gene picked him up, Andy would nestle into the crook of his caretaker's arm, his shoes dangling like a kid's from a high chair. "He's a one-man goose," Gene told People.
A Brutal Crime
But it couldn't last. On October 19, 1991, Gene and Nadine got the kind of phone call every goose owner dreads. "Is Andy OK?" asked an anxious voice on the other end. A couple of Hastings residents had been out metal detecting in a local park, and had found a dead goose sporting telltale sneakers. The Flemings rushed out to the hutch. There were fresh footprints in the dirt, much bigger than size 0. Andy and his mate Paulie were nowhere to be found.
Andy's killing was national news. A story about a community that rallies around a footless goose has almost everything—add a murder mystery, and you've got a truly all-American tale. Reporters pulled no punches, veering from grisly to maudlin in mere paragraphs. "He was found in a heap, decapitated and skinned, near the town baseball diamond," wrote People, before quoting a local first-grader with spina bifida: "He was my favorite goose because he had no feet. Why'd they do it?" The case even made the tabloids. "SICKO COMMITS FOWL DEED!" screamed Weekly World News, alongside stories about penile enhancement and a woman who was convinced her Dalmatian was Clark Gable reincarnated ("I can just tell it's Clark," she said).
When it came down to it, though, Andy was a local goose. Long after the glitzy reporters left town, long after the tide of sympathy cards trickled to a stop, the people of Hastings kept pushing for answers. The Chamber of Commerce set up a reward fund, and raised somewhere around $10,000 (the previous record for a reward was $100). Reporter Ron Grossman of the Chicago Tribunereturned to the town in June of 1993 to see how everyone was getting along. He quoted sheriff Gregg Magee saying "Andy's case is still open," and promising that his department followed up on every tip. "They were still feeling the shock of a murder," Grossman remembered in an email.
A New Twist?
Gene buried Andy quietly in his backyard, the site of their first romp together. "Not long after that, he started showing signs of Alzheimer's," says Jessica. "In retrospect, I think it was Andy who had kept him here with us for a lot longer." Gene agitated for a bronze memorial, but it never came to pass—although a local granite company did donate a carved headstone, which sits at the old Fleming homestead to this day. Gene passed away in 2000, at a nursing home in Grand Island, New York. "He definitely did not get closure," Jessica says.
A few years ago, though, Jessica Fleming, now Jessica Korgie, found herself thinking more and more about Andy. She began combing through her grandparents' piles of documentation—fan mail, crime scene photos, her grandmother's meticulously kept notebooks. She called around to key players. Intriguing inconsistencies began to emerge, particularly around the case's status as "unsolved." "Some people said that the [perpetrator] was found after so many years," she says.
A recent call to former Chamber of Commerce president Don Reynolds confirmed this: "About two years [after the murder], someone from the sheriff's department called and said, well, we found out who did it, but we can't tell you, and we don't want to have any news release about it," he said over the phone yesterday. "We didn't know what to do. finally we donated the reward to our community foundation, which used it for kids' projects." The department, he said, had told him that Andy's killer was "somebody that was not responsible"—suggesting that they were perhaps mentally disabled, or otherwise not in control of their actions. (Sheriff Magee did not respond to a request for comment.)
We can't know for sure what Andy the Goose would have wanted, but it probably wasn't to cast undue scrutiny or blame onto a disabled person. Jessica, who is working on a documentary about Andy's life and death, agrees: "I'm not interested in the name of the person anymore," she says. "I wouldn't want retribution against the person or their family."
"I just want to know why."
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.
My manager, Joe, emerged from the darkness, surrounded by fog. His towering frame was draped in distressed coveralls, his face transformed into a horrific, demonic skull. He offered me a clementine from his pocket.
Joe’s job was to watch over the monsters of Night Watch, the very last zone within Terror Behind the Walls—the haunted house inside Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. My job was to be a monster, at least as far as thousands of visitors were concerned.
Upon its opening in 1829, Eastern State Penitentiary became one of America's most expensive facilities. The grounds included 450 cells on 11 acres of land, with plumbing and heating—luxuries that not even the White House had at the time. Then as now, the outside of the building is a striking display of cold, gothic architecture meant to be intimidating to those who enter the property.
Walls that tower over 30 feet high and eight feet wide guard the prison, while several watchtowers line the perimeter. The blueprint of the penitentiary is relatively simple – seven original cell blocks connecting to one central point, the Rotunda. From here, guards could have a clear view down each cellblock, with 30-foot barrel vaulted hallways with windows throughout. Eventually, mirrors would be added as a security tool for the guards so they could watch their backs from the Rotunda.
After the construction of the penitentiary, over 300 prisons worldwide were based on its plans. Over the next 142 years, Eastern State Penitentiary housed approximately 75,000 male and female prisoners who had been convicted of a number of crimes, some of them never making it out alive. When it closed in 1971, it had 15 cellblocks with 980 cells. In 1994, the penitentiary became an official historic site.
Eastern State Penitentiary still stands today, but it’s now surrounded by a series of shops, cafes, and bars in what has become a trendy part of Philadelphia—but don’t let this fool you. City residents have long believed the penitentiary to be haunted, with the first reports dating back to 1940. Although most of the staff at Eastern State do not believe there are spirits, there are many people who claim to have had paranormal experiences, including the gang from Travel Channels’ Ghost Adventures and SyFy’s Ghost Hunters.
With such an unnerving reputation, Eastern State turned to hosting a haunted house to raise money for repairs in 1991. In its early days, the event included short performances and accounts of prison violence. In 1995, the event was rebranded as Terror Behind the Walls and became a full-on haunted attraction. The house specialty is the startle scare, typically a fast, simple scare intended to be powerful.
One of my favorite startle scares, and where I dropped my first body (a term in the haunt industry meaning to scare someone so severely that they lose control and drop to the ground), was the Spinning Barrel. To do it, I stood inside of a metal barrel that was equipped with a sliding pocket door on either side, giving me the opportunity to pop out and startle those who entered my area. I dropped dozens of bodies, teenagers and parents alike, and even had one girl scoot away on her butt, unable to walk.
While a run-of-the-mill haunted house is typically held at an amusement park or cornfield, Terror Behind the Walls is held inside a place where the residue of pain, torture, and repentance is still fresh. With alleged punishments like The Water Bath, a practice in which an inmate would be dunked in a bath of water then hung from an exterior wall to freeze overnight; and The Mad Chair, where prisoners would be tightly strapped for days, sometimes until circulation stopped, making amputation necessary; it’s no wonder many people believe the building still houses tortured souls. Reports range from hearing voices to seeing faces, shadows, and even full-body apparitions.
A few years after my first visit to Eastern State, I attended an open casting call for the haunted house and later auditioned in a group. After that, I was lucky enough to secure a spot for the 2012 season. The haunt is divided up into several zones, each with their own zone manager, and a theme that changes every few years.
The entire cast and crew, totaling over 200, attends orientation in the Rotunda—a few feet away from Al Capone’s cell and the very space prison guards stood— to get a rundown of the rules and learn more about how the haunt works. We learned that above all else, we were to respect the grounds and the history of the building, and instructed to never break character unless it was an emergency.
After being assigned our zones, we were trained on several types of scares and how to perform in a way that was both frightening and fun. We learned startle and “intimidation” scares, how to “scare forward” to keep the lines moving, and even some phrases in a different language that we used to communicate with colleagues to accommodate guests in wheelchairs or walkers without breaking the reality we’d so carefully created.
Halloween season at Eastern State officially begins when the gargoyles known as Frank and Carson are set up. Their installation signifies the opening of one of America’s top haunted houses, which runs for about six weeks with movie-quality set decor and elaborate special effects. Thousands of people attend Terror Behind the Walls each year and all of the profits go toward restoration of the prison so it can continue to serve as a museum.
Each zone has several rooms, its own specific set of costumes and makeup, as well as a call time. Once you arrive for your shift, you’re greeted by the Philadelphia Police, who are stationed outside each night, as well as the Street Team; this group is responsible for entertaining the people waiting in line. Finally, the Artistic Director and Zone Manager kick off the night with a call and response chant of “What time is it?” “Terror time!”
After entering through the very doorways the prisoners did more than a century ago, I got into my monster costume and went off to makeup, where professional cosmetologists apply SFX makeup and masks to all of the actors. I’d then hit my assigned space and wait to scare people, surrounded by fog and a soundtrack of ghostly dogs barking, a wailing prison siren signaling an escape, disembodied voices pleading for help, and guards making demands.
I was decked out in a denim jumpsuit complete with diseased bulbous lumps, blood stains, and sludge. Our makeup changed throughout the season, though I only wore latex once—after breaking out in a red, itchy rash we discovered I had a latex allergy. I primarily wore a combination of airbrush makeup and blood applied nightly, but I was envious of my rash-free colleagues who were able to wear disturbingly realistic prosthetics.
Shannon Brown in her make-up for her part in Terror Behind the Walls. (Photo: Courtesy Shannon Brown)
I started out as a scene actor in the haunt’s final room. Here, I played an employee who was witnessing a stunt gone wrong as my coworker was “electrocuted”. The biggest scare I achieved in this room was when a man wrapped his arm around my waist, thinking I was his wife. As we made eye contact, I could see the color drain from his face while he grabbed his son, called for his wife, and bolted for the door.
But in our claustrophobia room, an area where the guest has to squeeze through a room surrounded by walls closing in on them as actors swoop down from above, some even hanging from the ceiling—it was difficult for me to see through the thick fog and the laser lights well enough to accurately time my scares. I hit my stride when I was given my own room, where I could utilize hidden windows and creep through doors to startle those who passed me.
Through my time there, I never lost sight of the fact that I was working in a prison where people were incarcerated, kept away from their families and isolated from other inmates. I leaned against walls and sat upon floors where men and women were locked up, likely in areas where bloody fights broke out and murderous souls stewed; even the restroom made available to the cast was original to the prison.
During any given shift, you see hundreds of people. Cast members didn’t leave until the last person in line had finished the haunt, which some nights meant you clocked out well after midnight. After getting changed back into my human clothes, I’d hit the makeup stations with my fellow monsters to remove my makeup with a combination of men’s shaving cream and baby wipes.
Over the season, I dropped bodies, had people scream prayers and loudly sing Christmas carols to deter me from scaring them, and learned how to use a flint stick. The flint stick was my favorite tool to use, as a simple strike released a shower of sparks that while modest, terrified the guests. I used it most often when I was at the beginning of the zone with another actor, John.. I was the distraction before John would come sliding in, sending audience members screaming through to the next room.
Despite the inebriated guests, the cocky teenagers, and the protesters outside (who believe the haunt is disrespectful to those who spent time there), working as an actor at the Eastern State Penitentiary was thrilling and memorable. Dropping bodies became addictive, and working to preserve a historical site was rewarding.
My first—and hopefully last—time in prison evolved into one of my favorite jobs—and certainly the strangest. However, I will never forget being so close to misery and steps away from death row, all the while playing a monster within a reportedly haunted prison where I had the chance to scare Guillermo Del Toro and Philadelphia Eagles players.
This is no Everything Is Terrible manipulation of found footage. That shrill whistle is actually emanating from this man's torturously pursed lips.
In 1984, the Detroit public access show Kelly & Company hosted a crowd sourced variety show and the clear winner was Ralph "Whistler" Giese's rendition of "Georgia On My Mind." The contestants' talents were varied (the man right before Giese tries and fails to stack a tower of bowling balls), but Giese's birdly whistle wins over the audience.
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.
Every summer, when a big group of whales—several dozen, perhaps—are spotted off the coast of the Faroe Islands, an autonomous country within Denmark, residents sound the alarm: it's time to begin what's known as the Grind, in which dozens of whales are driven into shallow harbors and slaughtered.
The practice dates back centuries, but has grown controversial in recent years, as mass whaling has been severely curtailed across the world. The Faroese, however, have continued unbidden, claiming that it's an important part of their culture and past. And while years of activism haven't done much more than put a dent in the annual culling, an increasingly prevalent threat might: health concerns, primarily over mercury and other chemicals found in the whales, which in turn can cause a raft of problems for eaters, like Parkinson's disease and neural damage in children.
The "silent pollution of the oceans will one day end up on the dinner table in some communities, and our children are paying the price," Pal Weihe, a doctor in the Faroese Hospital System, recently told Deustche Welle.
The government, for their part, have yet to act on any whaling ban, instead adopting recommendations that say that islanders should just eat whale less. But even those recommendations hint at the severity of the problem, with the government advising residents that they can only safely eat whale once a month.
High levels of mercury in seafood have been a known issue for decades, owing, scientists say, to humans' pollution of ocean waters. But mercury levels are much higher in larger, longer-living animals—like pilot whales, which can weigh up to two-and-a-half tons and live as long as 60 years.
The so-called 'silent poison’ hasn't been good news for a Faroe Islands tradition that has been documented for over five centuries, though likely has gone on for hundreds of years more. In the hunt, islanders drive pilot whales into shallower waters where others slaughter them with knives, creating a bloody spectacle that this year began in July with the killing of dozens of whales.
The practice itself isn't usually undertaken by professional fisherman but rather islanders with day jobs, as the Faroese wait in the summer for whales to approach the shore then, quickly, put out a call for boaters hit the seas and steer the whales shoreward.
After the whales are dead, their corpses are distributed to residents, who are responsible for butchering the whales themselves.
"That's a skill that people are expected to have—the ability to cut up an animal into meat," Russell Fielding, an academic who studies the killings, told National Geographic in 2014. "It usually takes an hour or two for all the animals to get butchered."
Since the 1980s the vigilante group Sea Shepherd, whose boats are now banned from Faroe Islands waters, has been trying to stop the killings, clashing frequently with the Faroese government. (Fourteen of Sea Shepherd's volunteers were arrested in 2014.)
But their activism, and the outcry of others, hasn't done much to slow the killings, or convince many islanders.
"It’s good food," one islander told Deustche Welle. "It’s not our fault that one has to be careful about what one eats."
On April 27, 1982, members of the California Assembly's Consumer Protection and Toxics Committee gathered in Sacramento to hear Robert Plant endorse Satan. This was not a straightforward testimonial. For one thing, the Led Zeppelin frontman wasn't actually in attendance. Also, his pro-devil paeans could only be heard when you played "Stairway to Heaven" backwards.
After circulating pamphlets with the "backward masked" declarations spelled out, that's precisely what Assemblyman Phillip Wyman and panel witness William H. Yarroll II did. The relevant portion of the eight-minute classic was first played forward for committee members and then reversed. Here's what Wyman claimed could be heard: "I sing because I live with Satan. The Lord turns me off. There's no escaping it. Here's to my sweet Satan." Yarroll, who identified himself as a "neuroscientist," noted that a teenager need only listen to "Stairway to Heaven" three times before these backward messages were "stored as truth."
It wasn't just Plant reverse-singing Satan's praises, either. According to Yarroll, bands ranging from Styx to the Beatles also had secret backmasked messages hidden in their music—messages that, in the words of legislative proposal A.B. 3741, had the power to "manipulate our behavior without our knowledge or consent and turn us into disciples of the Antichrist."
As the bill's sponsor, Wyman wanted mandatory warning labels on all rock albums containing these morally dubious backward messages. "Suppose young people have heard 'Stairway to Heaven' two or three hundred times and there has been implanted in their subconscious mind pro satanic messages or incantations?" he told Terry Drinkwater the following day on a CBS Evening News segment. Indeed, this was the truly insidious part of backmasking. Even though you had to play records in reverse to decipher the occultic messages, they could still subliminally imprint themselves upon young teen minds when played in the standard direction.
During the same news segment, Yarroll described how the brain unscrambles a backward masked message: "We have it stored in the unconscious as a truth image," he said, "and as the creative unconscious side of the brain does, it goes through scanning the unconscious brain to go about and bring those truth images to the surface and make them reality for us."
After calling the issue "exciting and interesting," committee chairman Sally Tanner (D-El Monte) delayed an official vote until the music industry and band members could weigh in on the matter. That day never came. But the national panic surrounding subliminal satanic messages in rock music was about to reach fever pitch.
In the early '70s, backmasking—or the practice of recording vocals and instruments backwards and then reinserting them into the forward mix of a song—was something a music savvy (and possibly stoned) Beatles fan might bring up. A decade later, it had become a cause célèbre for conservative religious leaders, school teachers, parents, and even politicians. Whether it was the reversed voice of Freddie Mercury declaring "it's fun to smoke marijuana" on "Another One Bites the Dust" or Styx imploring Satan to "move through our voices" on "Snowblind," there seemed to be mounting evidence that rock music was literally becoming a mouthpiece for the devil.
Believers held record-smashing parties, appeared on popular TV talk shows, wrote books, formed watchdog groups, and, perhaps most importantly, called their government representatives to warn them.
By 1982, state and federal legislation was being introduced at a steady clip to combat rock and roll's hidden satanic agenda. Two weeks after the California Assembly hearing in Sacramento, California congressman Robert Dornan introduced H.R. 6363 to the House. Also known as the "Phonograph Record Backward Masking Labeling Act," the bill aimed to do the same thing as Wyman's A.B. 3741, only on a national level.
While it would ultimately be shuffled off to the Subcommittee on Commerce, Transportation and Tourism to die, other bills—including one in Arkansas a year later—were passed unanimously by both house and senate members (then-Governor Bill Clinton ultimately vetoed that one).
For its own part, the music industry responded with a bemused skepticism. Styx's James Young called the whole idea of satanic backmasking a hoax perpetrated by religious zealots, and refused to attend any meeting or hearing where the topic was discussed. Then there was Bob Garcia of A&M Records, who declared, "it must be the devil putting these messages on the records because no one here knows how to do it." A spokesman for Led Zeppelin's record label, Swan Song Records, issued just one statement in response to the "Stairway to Heaven" satanic allegations: "Our turntables only rotate in one direction."
Taken as a whole, these reactions only stoked the righteous (and possibly entrepreneurial) fires of religious leaders like pastor Gary Greenwald, who started holding backmasking seminars all over the country. Soon, books like Backward Masking Unmasked, Dancing With Demons, and The Devil's Disciples: The Truth About Rock, were exposing "the sinister nature of rock and roll music," while watchdog organizations like Parents Against Subliminal Seduction (P.A.S.S.) tried to block rock concerts at various venues.
The problem, as you may have already guessed, was that the whole thing was a bunch of diabolical tihsllub.
Let's pause here to do something most satanic backmasking proponents never did during the controversy: distinguish between real engineered backmasking and the majority of messages people thought they were hearing during the '70s and '80s. The former is a technique that dates back to the advent of recorded music. The latter is the result of what psychologists call pareidolia (more on that in a bit), and is simply the brain's attempt to make sense of the gibberish that results from phonetic reversals.
"Recording things backwards really began when the field of sound recording began," says Alex Case, president of the Audio Engineering Society. After Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877, there was rampant experimentation both with recorded speech and music. "It's clear that part of the sales pitch when they were selling wax cylinder recorders would be to record someone speaking and then play it backwards for them," says Case. Fittingly, the phrase "mad dog" ("goddamn" in reverse) seems to have been a crowd favorite.
Real backmasking—intentional backwards music or speech in musical compositions—began to come into vogue during the 1940s with experimental composers like Pierre Schaeffer. Playing records (and later, tapes) backwards was, according to Case, a way for musicians and composers to fool around with timbre and produce new and distinct sounds.
By most accounts, that's precisely what attracted the Beatles to the practice. The band famously used backward instrumentation, including a backward guitar solo, on their 1966 album Revolver. "Rain," the B-side of "Paperback Writer," has what is believed to be the first backward masked message in a pop song. Its coda is a backwards version of the song's first line: "When the rain comes, they run and hide their heads."
Yet while the Beatles may have popularized the practice, the satanic backmasking scare of the 1980s required more than just the willful misrepresentation of a decades-old musical trend. It also needed some good old fashioned pseudoscience.
A drive-in movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey just happened to provide a perfect junk science laboratory. Over the course of six weeks in 1957, unsuspecting filmgoers were the subjects of a grand marketing experiment. Using a special high-speed projector, researcher and social psychologist James Vicary inserted the words "drink Coke" and "eat popcorn" into movies that summer. Invisible to the human eye, each message lasted for 1/3,000th of a second and was repeated in five-second intervals during films on alternating nights.
By the end of the six weeks, Vicary claimed 45,699 people had been subjected to his subliminal inducements. He also claimed that popcorn and Coke sales went up 57.5 and 18.1 percent, respectively. At a press conference held later that same year, Vicary described the results of this now infamous study to help boost interest in his new "Subliminal Projection Company," an attempt to commercialize what he called a major breakthrough in subliminal advertising. The public and press went bonkers, and not in a good way.
The first sentence of an influential op-ed responding to the press conference by journalist Norman Cousins read: "Welcome to 1984." He, like many others, wondered what such a technology could mean not just for advertisers who wanted to sell us stuff, but also for governments seeking to steer public sentiment.
For its own part, the FCC almost immediately threatened to suspend the broadcast license of any company that dared use Vicary's machine. In the years following the experiment, the CIA started looking into the "operational potential of subliminal perception" (they found it "exceedingly limited"), and authors like Wilson Bryan Key began cranking out books such as Subliminal Seduction, which claimed that sexual images (and the actual word "sex") were being hidden in hundreds of ads.
But when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation tried to replicate Vicary's claims by subliminally flashing the message "Call now" during a popular Sunday night program, there was no increase in phone calls. The station later told viewers they had inserted a message and asked them to guess what it might have been. Almost half of the roughly 500 viewers claimed to have been made hungry or thirsty during the show, which aired during dinner time.
Vicary's study was clearly on the public's mind, which was problematic because it was completely made up. From the beginning, Vicary refused to release key details about his study. Not only was there never any independent evidence to support his claims about the effectiveness of subliminal advertising, years later, Vicary admitted he had done only enough research to file a patent for his machine, and actually had collected barely any data. Even worse, his machine didn't seem to work half the time once people did try to test it.
Of course, none of that mattered by the late '70s and early '80s. Subliminal messaging was being used in self-help tapes, in department store Muzak to ward off shoplifters, and, if you believed Key, to sell the American public lots and lots of booze and cigarettes.
Fast-forward 25 years, when two psychologists from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada decided to figure out why so many of their neighbors to the south were hearing devilish incantations in their rock music. After being contacted by a skeptical local radio DJ who had attended one of pastor Gary Greenwald's backmasking talks, John Vokey and his colleague Don Read agreed to come up with a series of experiments that would directly address the idea of subliminal satanic messages.
The psychologists decided to start their study by recording a few simple passages from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky and the 23rd Psalm. They wanted to find out whether the content of backward messages had any measureable influence on a listener, consciously or otherwise. They also wanted to see if the alleged backward messages people were hearing in rock music were perhaps more about active construction on the listener's part and less about a devious satanic plan to corrupt young people.
After each passage was recorded forward in a few languages, Vokey and Read re-recording them backward and played them for 65 test subjects. They found that the participants could discern things like the sex of the speaker with 98.9 percent accuracy when the passages were played backwards. Subjects also displayed a better-than-chance ability to detect the language of the backwards messages.
But when it came to deriving any kind of meaning from the passages, things didn't go as well. Another series of tests asked subjects to categorize the content of the backwards messages as a nursery rhyme, Christian, satanic, or pornographic. The results were no greater than chance, and the meaning of the backwards messages didn’t appear to have been understood at any level, says Vokey.
In a final experiment, the two psychologists listened to the backwards passages themselves and came up with some real sounding phrases hidden within them. They found the following: "Saw a girl with a weasel in her mouth," "snatched her nips," and, to their delight, "I saw Satan." Listen below:
"It wasn't as easy as it sounds," says Vokey. "We had to drink a lot of beer to create those messages." The two psychologists also invented control messages that didn’t fit the phonological patterns of the samples. Just as Vokey predicted, when subjects were instructed to listen for the phrases, they were unable to hear the control messages but were successful in detecting the phonologically plausible ones at a rate of 84.6 percent. Mind you, this was only after the phrases had been provided to them.
As Vokey and Read noted in their now famous article about the study, "Subliminal Messages: Between the Devil and the Media," this suggested you really could induce people to hear messages that weren't there so long as they were plausible-sounding interpretations.
How was this relevant to the satanic backmasking scare? Well, for one critical reason: Believers were almost always providing the alleged backward masked phrases before having others listen to them. It's what happened at the 1982 California Assembly hearing, and it was the MO for religious leaders like Greenwald.
In what has become a staple of modern Intro to Psych perception lectures, professors will often play these backmasked songs or similar garbled and distorted messages. When students aren't given any guidance, almost all of them struggle to make sense of the gibberish. Once supplied with a phonetically plausible phrase, however, suddenly they can't hear anything but that phrase.
This is what psychologists call pareidolia. For the same reason some of us see faces on Mars and Jesus in toast, we also can be led to hear things that aren't there. Our brains are exceptional pattern recognition machines, particularly when comes to sound and vision. Often, all it takes is a little priming to get things rolling.
As many have noted, one of the many delicious ironies of the '80s backmasking panic is that it actually helped rekindle the practice in popular music. As rock bands began to regularly get accused of hiding secret satanic messages in their records, they figured: why not start putting real messages in them? Many of these were sarcastic rebuttals to the backmasking controversy itself.
On ELO's fifth studio album, Face the Music, you can find this tongue-in-cheek message at the start of the song "Fire on High": "The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back, turn back, turn back."
Pink Floyd had some fun on The Wall's "Empty Spaces," as well. When played backwards, you can hear Roger Waters say: "Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to old pink, care of the funny farm."
Although the moral panic started to subside by the end of the '80s (less because of the scientific discrediting of subliminal messages and more because records and cassettes gave way to CDs), musicians continued to play around with backward masking throughout the ‘90s and early aughts. Today, perhaps because most of us stream the music we listen to, hiding backwards messages in songs seems both quaint and pointless.
Yet while Satan abandoned his plans to corrupt America's youth through rock and roll, a devil-may-care attitude towards science is keeping the belief in subliminal messages alive and well. Earlier this fall, author and journalist Ahmet Altan and his brother were arrested in Turkey. The charge? Sending out "subliminal messages suggestive of a coup attempt" during a TV appearance. Both men will stand trial "for trying to overthrow the government or prevent it from carrying out its duties."
Backwards music may have fallen out of fashion, but backwards thinking is alive and well.
Dive into the underwater paradise of Raja Ampat in Indonesia with this visually captivating video. Shot by underwater photographer and videographer, Nu Parnupong, Squadron of Hope showcases breathtaking scenes of migration in some of Indonesia’s most beautiful islands.
Raja Ampat is an archipelago that constitutes more than 100 islands and is part of the Coral Triangle—the world’s most biodiverse marine habitat. The triangle boasts three-fourths of the world’s coral species and marine animals like long-horned pygmy devil rays, which appear in the video attacking a group of silverside fish.
The archipelago was once a hub for shark poachers and, as such, was under constant threat. Thankfully, it is now a Marine Protected Area, which means that its wonderful biodiversity, and scenes like the ones captured in the video will stick around for a while longer.
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.
How did Execution Rocks– a dreary little island with a crooked little lighthouse precariously perched on top – get its sinister name? Well, it depends on who you ask. There’s the straightforward explanation: that during low tide, the island’s rocky perimeter makes it particularly dangerous for passing boats making their way in and out of the Long Island Sound. And then there’s the more haunting tale: that during the Revolutionary War, British soldiers would chain captured rebels to the jagged outcrops. According to legend, villagers on the distant mainland could hear the prisoner’s desperate pleas as they were slowly drowned by the rising waters.
Whatever the truth may be, the island’s spooky mythology doesn’t usually inspire tourism. That is, unless you’re a particular kind of adventurer.
A group of fifteen such explorers ventured to the storied island a few weeks ago. The excursion, sponsored by CLIF BAR, required both physical and psychological stamina.
Upon arrival, guests clambered over the guano-slick rocks, careful to step over piles of sun-bleached bones. (The lighthouse’s custodians swore these remains had been discarded by scavenging seagulls.) The island itself smelled damp and sour, even with the healthy salt winds coming off the Sound. The explorers were invited to enter the keeper’s quarters, which were built in 1867 but have been unoccupied since the 1970’s when the light became automated. Ghost sightings have long been rumored in the house. Looking at the mouldering structure, it’s easy to understand why.
After passing through a series of darkened corridors and up a spiraling staircase, guests stepped out onto the tower’s deck to take in the lonely island’s surroundings. From this point, you could just make out Hart Island, New York’s potter’s field, where almost a million bodies, many still unidentified, have been buried since the end of the 19th century.
(Photo: Rose Annis)
Following their descent, the guests launched kayaks off the island and were able to experience the sensation of the pulling tides for themselves. Strong currents tilted the boats towards the dark rocks and waves broke over prows, soaking paddlers as they navigated around the craggy shore.
The wet and weather-beaten guests disembarked their kayaks and boarded a larger chartered boat where they dried off and reenergized with Spiced Pumpkin Pie CLIF BARs, a fitting seasonal complement to their eerie trip.
As the boat left the island, a few guests stood shivering on the deck, watching the lighthouse fade back into the fog. Though hardly as harrowing, a few lines from "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" seemed like a fitting close to the ghostly adventure:
I closed my lids, and kept them close, And the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky Lay dead like a load on my weary eye, And the dead were at my feet
Consider the difficulty of rendering Jesus' visage as an artist. You've gotta be able to sculpt or draw a head, for one thing, and then get the details of the face right. Also it's Jesus, allegedly the son of God, so the stakes are higher than usual.
Which maybe explains why, four years ago, when an elderly Spanish woman failed to restore a Jesus fresco to its former glory it set the world on fire.
Now, in Canada, something similar has gone down at a Catholic church about 250 miles northwest of Toronto, in the city of Sudbury.
There, according to the CBC, church officials had a problem. A statue depicting Jesus and Mary kept getting vandalized, specifically the head of Jesus, which was repeatedly ripped off and deposited nearby.
Parishioners often found the head and reattached it, but in a decapitation last October, the head wasn't found, leaving Jesus headless for months as church officials searched for solutions. (The church could not afford to rebuild the statue whole, which would have cost up to $10,000.)
Finally, a local artist volunteered to craft a new head, which she then spent hours sculpting out of clay before affixing it to the terracotta sculpture.
The results, as you can see, are ... interesting.
Parishioners, for their part, have responded with "hurt, surprise, and disappointment," according to the CBC, while the church's priest told the network he was "shocked" by the head—but not because of the its form, but rather its color.
Still, the priest said, it's just a start. The same artist will take another crack at it in the coming months, this time in stone. After all, in Spain, local outrage then eventually gave way to a loving embrace: that painting is, today, a major tourist attraction, and the center of its very own museum.
"It's a first try," the priest told the CBC. "It's a first go. And hopefully what is done at the end will please everyone."
The cemetery climbs ten stories up the valley wall, moss-covered gravestones lining each stair-like terrace. Plants press in, shading tombs with wide palm leaves as roots burst up through sarcophagi. Mosquitos drone. Cobras flee approaching footsteps. These are the cemeteries of Hong Kong’s Happy Valley, a historic burial district shaped by terrain, disease, history and culture. These colonial cemeteries offer a window into the city’s past and a reminder that—in the densest city on earth—even death isn’t an escape from living small.
When British forces landed at Hong Kong in 1841, Happy Valley gained a reputation as a fever swamp. The rice paddies and poor drainage proved an ideal breeding ground for mosquitos, and any force posted there quickly succumbed to malaria, cholera, and typhoid. Eventually the British developed a novel solution—they would headquarter elsewhere, but bury their dead in the poisoned atmosphere of Happy Valley.
And there was no shortage of dead in those days. Between disease, pirates, maritime accidents, and casualties from Britain’s Asian wars, 19th century Hong Kong churned through westerners. Most colonial policemen didn’t live past 31, and it wasn’t unusual for missionaries to go through three wives.
The high mortality rate and international nature of the Empire created a quilt of imperial dead—the Protestant Hong Kong Cemetery lies directly alongside Catholic St. Michael’s, and the Empire’s Indian troops had their own Hindu, Muslim, and Parsee burial grounds. Meanwhile the local Chinese, who considered graveyards spiritually polluting and inauspicious, moved out of the area. It remains an expat enclave to this day.
In 1844, the British solved the malaria problem in the most English manner possible: they drained Happy Valley to build a horseracing track. The racecourse united foreign colonials and oppressed locals in their shared love of wagering, but also placed the city’s primary gambling venue amid the unluckiest feng shui on the island. The superstitious might claim this bad omen finally caught up with the city in 1918, when a bamboo grandstand collapsed and caught fire, killing 590 people.
By World War I, the lower slopes of Happy Valley were full, and the cemeteries had nowhere to go but up. Hong Kong authorities built new terraces into the mountainside, seeding them with bodies as the decades and conflicts rolled by.
As a result, the funeral monuments reflect a cross-section of those who shaped Hong Kong. In the low-lying areas of the Protestant section, where the graves are older, you’ll find ship captains buried under anchors and obelisks dedicated to the crews of navy vessels or opium clippers. Several notable figures reside here, like Henrietta Hall Shuck, the first female American missionary in China, and Sir Kai Ho Kai, the first Chinese Hongkonger to gain a knighthood.
Perhaps the most tragic monument is a blank pillar marking the grave of revolutionary martyr Yeung Ku-wan. Yeung used Hong Kong as a safe haven to organize pro-democracy revolts against the Qing dynasty in 1895 and 1900, but that protection proved illusory. In 1901, Yeung was teaching an English class on the second floor of his home when a Qing assassin put a bullet through his head. Yeung’s monument was left blank so imperial agents wouldn’t desecrate his grave.
Move up the terraces and the Victorian urns give way to the uniform white graves of World War I soldiers killed in the siege of German Qingdao, and those who fell during the 1941 Japanese invasion. This sparse military style contrasts with the intricate statuary of the Catholic cemetery next door, where monuments include heroic busts, angels and figures kneeling in prayer.
But the most stylistically interesting graves are those that blend western and Chinese imagery. More than a few local tombstones have incense burners, so Chinese Christians can make offerings to their departed family members. One striking monument includes a traditional Chinese name tablet—believed to house part of the soul after death—set into the upright axis of a cross. This melding of Christian iconography and Chinese folk religion is quintessentially Hong Kong, a city where even death is a cross-cultural experience.
But population density is increasingly rendering these luxurious graves impractical. Put simply, the city’s running out of burial space. As far back as the 1960s, the squeeze prompted the government to champion cremation over traditional earth burials, leading to a boom in P.O. box-like mausoleums where ash jars sit in covered niches. But those too are full.
In a mirror of the housing market, private niches now go for as much as $100,000, while the wait time for a public spot exceeds four years. The government has started promoting ash scattering, but it’s not going well. Hongkongers recoil at the thought of dumping relatives off a ship or throwing them in the dirt. So as gravestones themselves increasingly recede into history, the tiered Victorian burials of Happy Valley become an even more striking, and unusual, relic of the city’s past.
Can you speak to the dead? Can they speak to you? After attending an official modern day seance, I have no idea, but that doesn’t mean it was totally bogus. In fact, it was pretty relaxing.
In the City of New York, there are a handful of seance ceremonies available to anyone looking to commune with the dead, but only one of them is held in a church. The Spiritualist Church of New York City (SCNYC), the only Spiritualist church in the city, is a modern evolution of the Spiritualist beliefs popular during the Victorian era. At its core, Spiritualism espouses the belief that death is not the end, and that communication with the spirits of the deceased is not only possible, but a vital and beneficial way of learning about this life and the next. And this communication is made possible via the good old-fashioned seance.
In their heyday, around the turn of the 19th century, Spiritualist seances looked much more like the traditional spirit-talking ceremonies you might see in the movies, with a small group of people holding hands around a table while a medium conjures up ghosts. Today, many of the classical trappings are still a part of the church’s ceremonies, but Spiritualism as a whole has moved towards the New Age world of healing energies and guided meditations.
The Spiritualist Church of New York City was founded in 2007, establishing itself as a separate entity from the larger National Spiritualist Association of Churches, creating an independent congregation based on a belief in reincarnation.
In a phone call, Reverend Seiko L. Obayashi, one of the founders of the church, describes the rebirth cycle to me. “As we spend some earthly time here as a human, we learn, we make mistakes in this physical reality, and we go back home. To God or whatever you call it,” she says. “And we go back and forth between physical life and non-physical life.” Her church also places a strong emphasis on bringing other faiths to the Spiritualist fold. “We are very progressive in terms of an interfaith approach. We eventually want to invite rabbis and priests to our church.”
And every Sunday, after their service, they hold a seance.
The services are held on 35th Street in Manhattan, in a Swedenborgian church (a Christian sect that follows the teachings and visions of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg) building from the mid-1800s. The SCNYC rents out the space on Sunday nights. On the night I attended the church to try to take part in the seance, a healing service was taking place.
Handed a Spiritualist hymnal on entering, I joined the 20-some other people in attendance, sparsely littering the pews. The hymnal was filled with songs about light and forgiveness, and included the nine declarations—think, commandments—that have been adapted and adopted by the church. Among them are “We believe the existence and identity of the individual continue after death,” and “We affirm that the precepts of Prophecy and Healing are Divine attributes proven through Mediumship.” Calm New Age tunes were in the air.
Rev. Susan West gave a sermon on the importance of unconditional love, and there was a short break during which everyone was encouraged to get up and introduce themselves to each other. Pretty standard church stuff. Then there was a chair healing. The lights were dimmed and Rev. Nilsa Ocasio walked everyone through a guided meditation. We were invited up to one of a series of chairs near the front, behind which stood a spiritual healer. I sat down in one of the chairs and the healer asked me if she could touch me. I said sure and she proceeded to lightly lay her hands on various parts of my body, channeling healing energy to and around me. It was somewhat uncomfortably intimate.
After the service, about 10 people stuck around for the seance (which runs $20 a session), which took place in an upper room of the church. The smaller room had shelves of old books lining the walls. A ring of stackable rental chairs was set up around a small table where an electronic tea light flickered. Most of the people seemed to have been to similar seances, and casually chatted as though we weren’t about to attempt to breach the barrier between the living and the dead. One of the mediums that would be communicating with the dead that night joked that she didn’t mind seeing spirits, but didn’t like seeing “orbs” (manifestations of spirits as floating balls of light) on her personal time.
When the seance began, all of the lights were turned out save for the central tea light, and the small crowd was told to sit with our palms up in our laps to show the spirits that we were ready to receive their calls. The session was led by Rev. Ocasio and another medium, both of whom were certified seance leaders through the church’s sister organization, the Holistic Studies Institute. The mediums would be receiving and interpreting the spirits’ messages, but assured us that they would not convey messages of “doom and gloom.”
Once again Rev. Ocasio led us through a guided meditation, asking us to envision negativity leaving our body, and light replacing it. It was pretty relaxing.
We were asked to think of deceased people we would like to hear from, with the idea being that this would induce their voices to come forward among all of the talkative dead in the air. The way the mediums talked about hearing the dead was almost like they were experiencing a busy, ghostly party line, where they had to focus to locate souls with messages for people in the room. I found it very quiet.
When the mediums received messages from the dead, they would take turns addressing someone in the circle, giving them a dispatch from beyond. Each time they would start by saying, “May I give you a message?” Then would come lengthy, seemingly stream-of-thought readings. At one point during the first reading, something at the back of the room fell to the floor, marking the last sign I saw of possible supernatural activity.
Like many psychics, the mediums would circle certain topics, moving from vague generalities to more specific details. For example, one woman was given a message from a deceased loved one about focusing on her joy, which was eventually narrowed down to baking. The message made her weep. Sometimes the mediums would describe seeing figures standing over someone’s shoulder, or lights swirling around them.
When it came time for my message, Rev. Ocasio said that someone in the spirit world was encouraging me to overcome an obstacle. The message revolved around wanting to let me know that I had the skills to do something I’ve been thinking of doing, but have been avoiding because I thought it was too hard, or was afraid of failing. Try as I might I had trouble relating the message to anything that had been pressing on my conscious, but I nodded in understanding all the same. When my message was over, Rev. Ocasio asked, as the mediums asked everyone at the end of their message, “Can I leave you with that?”
At the end, a few of the assembled who felt that they too had burgeoning psychic abilities communicated a couple of messages to people in the circle. Unfortunately none of the spirits had anything else to say to me. It took almost two hours for everyone to receive their messages from beyond, and, unfortunately, by the end I was more acutely aware of how uncomfortable the chair was than of any spirit presence.
Then the lights came up and everyone shuffled out into the night. While I can’t say that I found any great spiritual connection to the events of the seance, many of the people seemed to connect with the spirit messages they’d received, likely able to map some of their very real concerns to the messages coming from the mediums. Maybe it makes their problems easier to organize or deal with. Or maybe it was dead people. You’d have to try it, and decide for yourself.
You probably know of voodoo dolls, the witch doctor Facilier in Disney's The Princess and the Frog, perhaps the controversially named Voodoo Donuts. But beneath this cultural runoff, Voodoo is a complex, albeit dark... religion? Culture? Maybe both.
Voodoo combined pieces of Roman Catholicism (the religion foisted upon colonized nations by Italy, Spain, and Portugal) with traditional local belief systems, including, in some cases, witchcraft. Traits of Catholic saints and ideas from syncretic religions are mixed together in the form of loas, who act as intermediaries between the human world and the Supreme Creator.
Physical charms, herbs, amulets or "gris-gris" in American Voodoo, could be imbued with spiritual power to protect oneself or harm one's enemies. It focuses heavily on death because that's what it was born out of—the brutality of colonialism and the slave trade. Much academic discussion has drawn parallels, in particular, between stories of zombies and people cursed to toil mindlessly under a master for all eternity.
Though Americans might be most familiar with Louisiana Voodoo, other variations of the religion include West African Voudon, Dominican or Cuban Vodú, Haitian Voudou, or any other local denomination depending on what part of the African Diaspora it originated from. These all traveled with slaves taken from West Africa to the Caribbean, South America, and the southern United States, branching into their distinct sects.
Louisiana Voodoo, in particular, became an business of superstitious sideshow performances, exploiting the tourist industry that came to gawk at exotic rituals. But some of it is real—that is, some of it is a treasured cultural tradition of great import to its practitioners. These places are no exception. Some of them are essentially mall kiosks with plastic skulls and beads, there for the entertainment of tourists, while others are seriously sacred sites. Others are both.
You can see Voodoo's intersection of Catholicism and local beliefs quite literally at this mysterious monument in Haiti, where Voodoo originated. There is little consensus on the monument's origin story, but most people believe this Catholic cross was erected by missionaries sometime around the early 19th century to claim the hill for God. And anywhere between a week and a century later the cross was struck by lightning and locals came to believe this to the gods reclaiming the hill for themselves and their people. It's been a Voodoo pilgrimage site for prayer and sacrifice ever since.
The Akodessewa Fetish Market, or "Marche des Feticheurs," is a kind of super supply where you can find anything from leopard heads and human skulls to Voudon priests who bless fetishes, predict the future, and make medicines to heal whatever ails you. Voudon, which begat Voodoo, is one of the most popular religions in the area, which is obvious given the outdoor market's location is right in the heart of the capital. Here you can find talismans and charms good for treating everything from the flu or infertility to removing the blackest of curses.
These waterfalls became a holy place after it was widely believed that the Virgin Mary had appeared nearby on a palm tree. For over a century, Haitians have trekked from miles around on the feast day of Our Lady of Carmel to ask the Virgin Mary (or the closely associated Vodou loa, Erzulie Dantor) for her blessings.
The palm tree was chopped down by a French priest who was rightly concerned that the cultural significance of the tree would foster superstition, but the action was futile, and the area itself became sacred despite his efforts. The sick and the needy let the water of the falls wash over them as they perform various rituals of both Voodoo and Catholicism in a three-day-long religious festival.
Marie Laveau was born in the French Quarter of New Orleans around 1801, the illegitimate daughter of a Creole mother and a white father. She was a hairdresser by trade but was better known as the most powerful of the city's Voodoo practitioners. She sold charms and pouches of gris gris, told fortunes and gave advice to New Orleans residents of every social strata. Some said Laveau even had the power to save condemned prisoners from execution. An 1874 ritual Laveau performed on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain drew a crowd of over 12,000 people.
Laveau died in 1881, and is said to be buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, in the tomb of her husband's family, the Glapions. Amateur occultists, Voodoo practitioners, French Quarter tourists flock here in equal measure. They scribble Xs on the whitewashed mausoleum in hopes Laveau will grant their wishes.
Marie Laveau's daughter (confusingly also named Marie Laveau) learned Voodoo and Voudon from her mother, and their stories are often conflated together. History is unclear on who exactly did what, but it is known that both of the powerful women gained quite a following among 19th century New Orleans' uniquely multi-racial, multi-religious community.
It was in this house that Marie Laveau II lived out the last of her days with her family. Now it is a museum and tourist attraction. Visitors can leave offerings at an altar, and spiritual items and books from around the world for sale. In a back room spiritual readings, spells and Tarot card readings are held. The Voodoo Queen's ghost is said to appear back there from time to time.
The Soul of Africa Museum is not, in fact, in Africa. It's in a small apartment in Essen, Germany, belonging to one Henning Christoph, a photographer, ethnographer, and collector. He has worked with and studied voodoo among different tribes for a long time and has documented these practices extensively. The rooms are packed with figurines from different groups. There include an altar to Mami Whata, a water spirit, where you can bring sacrifices for the goddess, as well as elaborate costumes used in ancestral worship rites. In addition to the extensive collection of religious artifacts, there is a good portion of the site that is devoted to the Atlantic slave trade, displaying rare historical artifacts including a brutal pair of iron shackles.
For just about anything that ails you, there's a solution in the Sonora Market, the largest esoteric market in Mexico and a must-see for those interested in mysticism. Local vendors have an answer to any of life's daily troubles in the form of a magic soap, holywater spray, or a ritual pamphlets.
It's not just Voodoo sold at Mercado de Sonora; there are a number of other vernacular religions represented there, such as the cult of la Santa Muerte and Brujeria. A number of these beliefs are practiced by people alongside their Catholic faith, or even mixed into it.
Claiming to be the "largest Occult, Spiritual, New Age and Religious supplier worldwide," Saydel wears its unique interests on its sleeve. Immediately upon entering the surprisingly utilitarian store, customers are greeted by a life-size statue of Papa Legba, the Orisha deity recognized by both Voodoo and Santeria as the go-between twixt gods and humans. Reflecting the diverse backgrounds of their customer base from the Caribbean, Mexico, and further afield, the shop carries a blend of African, Meso-American, and Roman Catholic items such as candles, oils, and effigies. However, despite the rare and esoteric beliefs represented in the shop, the shelves have the look of a tidy suburban pharmacy with rows of identical loa statues lined up next to tight formations of pre-fab prayer candles.
If Voodoo can be tied to the history of any one city, it's New Orleans. Founded in 1972 by Charles Massicot Gandolfo, a local artist with a passion for all things Voodoo, the small museum has been inducting its visitors into the mystical melting pot of African, Creole, and American Southern culture that created New Orleans Voodoo since it opened in the 1970s. Among the more unusual services that the Historic Voodoo Museum offers are psychic readings. Prognosticating, or fortune telling, is an art that is deeply ingrained within the fabric of Voodoo culture.
In the middle of Main Street Cambridge's Central Square, squished between a UHaul and a pan-Asian restaurant, sits an anonymous, foreboding building. Its walls are graying and dingy, and its windows are covered from the inside. No signs identify its purpose. It doesn't seem like a great neighbor.
But several times a week, as the sun sets over the city, the building begins releasing a sweet, chocolatey-mint scent. As it turns out, it's home to a branch of the Tootsie Roll Company—specifically, the one that churns out Junior Mints.
The Tootsie Roll Factory is the last bastion of what was once a burgeoning Cambridge candy scene. With the rise of huge candy conglomerates like Hershey's and Nestle in the mid-20th century, neighborhood confectionaries became more and more rare. More recently, sugar prices have driven many factories overseas—we lost the Jolly Rancher plant, which "almost always smelled like grape," to Mexico in 2009.
But there's still plenty of opportunity for good stateside sniffing. Pennsylvania churns out everything from Kit Kats to Peeps. The Blommer Chocolate Company has cast a perpetual cocoa cloud over the east side of Chicago. And if you're out West, there's California's Jelly Belly Factory, which offers up as many different smells as it does beans.
Enjoy this nosewitness view of the country—and if you live near an aromatic candy factory, let us know, and we'll add it to the map.
As a literary genius and master of wit, Oscar Wilde has fascinated the world since he first started writing. There is one area of his life, however, which remained in obscurity until the 1940s, and which continues to be a mystery: The horrifying death of his half-sisters.
The existence of Emily and Mary Wilde, the illegitimate daughters of Sir William Wilde, was kept hidden from most of the world. However, they still enjoyed considerable social standing and were often invited to events by Ireland’s high society.
On October 31st 1871, the sisters were enjoying themselves at one such event. The Hallowe’en party was hosted by a man named Andrew Reid at the Drumacon House in Ireland. Everything was a success right until the end of the party when the host asked one of the sisters—most likely Mary—to one last dance around the ballroom. In a dark twist of fate that turned a night of joy into a tragedy, Mary got too close to the candlesticks and her dress caught on fire.
Panic ensued. The remaining guests screamed in wild terror as Emily dashed to her sister in an attempt to put out the fire. The attempt did not only prove futile, but also deadly, as Emily’s dress also caught on fire.
Here, accounts vary. Some say that Reid put his coat around the sisters and pushed them down the stairs, then made them roll around in the snow until the fire was out. In other accounts, he carried the sisters outside to the snow, and yet in others, they fled down the stairs themselves and rolled onto the dirt (which is much more feasible than there being snow in November). The facts remain that the fire was put out, but not before both sisters had acquired third degree burns in large portions of their bodies.
After the incident, the sisters endured prolonged extreme physical and psychological pain. Little could be done to save their lives, but their injuries took weeks to bring about their inevitable death. Mary died on November 9th and Emily on November 21st.
Now, if the story had died there, it would have merely been a gruesome tale of an unfortunate incident. But the accident was hushed and kept in obscurity for around 70 years, covering it with an irresistible shroud of mystery.
There was only a small death notice on the Northern Standard in its November 25th, 1871 edition:
DIED
At Drumaconnor, on the 8th inst. Mary Wilde
At Drumaconnor, on the 21st inst. Emma Wilde
Such a tiny notice was not customary for well-to-do families of the time, but its discreteness succeeded in not drawing attention to the events.
When it comes to investigating the case, however, one detail does draw attention—the change of Emily’s name to Emma. One could probably chalk this up to a simple mistake if the names of the sisters weren’t repeatedly changed on other official records.
Luckily, some dedicated scholars and authors have investigated the matter. In her book Wildefire, written in 2002, Heather White details the life and death of the sisters. Her investigation organized the scattered accounts of the events.
A year later, Theo McMahon shed more light onto the tragedy in his 2003 report for Clogher Record. In it, he provides details of the coroner’s report on both deaths, revealing that their last names had been changed to Wylie. Their first name was not just changed, but completely omitted, as they are simply called Miss M Wylie and Miss L Wylie. One could guess that the M refers to Mary and the L refers to Emily. However, the report would then contradict the death notice and parish records, which list Mary as having died first. On the coroner’s report, Miss M Wylie died on November 22 (another contradiction) from injuries sustained from helping her sister, so this had to be Emily.
The real question is, why would the coroner willingly change facts in two official reports? And why would an official report not require the first name of a victim? The answer, it seems, lies on Sir William Wilde himself. As a prominent doctor with a reputation to upkeep, he did not want the news of his illegitimate children and their ghastly death to spread.
We do not even know whether Oscar Wilde ever knew of his sisters’ existence. What we do know, however, is that Sir William Wilde wrote a note to the constable to ask him not to tell Emily of her sister’s death, so as to not aggravate her already fragile state. He also convinced him not to make an inquest on to the affair, and merely make an inquiry—a shorter investigation that required no witness statements. It could be stipulated, then, that he might have also asked the constable to change both of the names, as well as his own.
It seems as Sir William’s efforts to keep the affair private—even from his family—were worth it, given the obscurity which shrouded the events for decades. The next mention we find of the incident is in T.G. Wilson’s biography of William Wilde published in 1942. In it, there are details of a 1921 letter by J.B Yeats, W.B Yeat’s father. He knew of the incident because he had once been told the story by an old friend.
The tragedy had by then become part of the oral history of Dublin society, and had evolved into multiple accounts. Add this to Sir William’s active efforts to confuse information, and it is no wonder that so much of the story is elusive and contradictory.
To bring even more intrigue into the story, several accounts claim that for years after Mary and Emily’s death, a mysterious woman cloaked in black would visit their graves. No one ever knew who she was, and she would disclose nothing except her being intimately close to the victims. This mysterious woman in black also appears on Oscar Wilde’s personal writings as the enigmatic figure who visited his father on his deathbed. This elusive piece in the puzzle may or may not be an embellishment of oral history.
We may never have the small details right, but by bringing the story to light, people seem to think, we honor the sisters in their death. Perhaps this is why years later an epitaph was erected at the graveyard of St. Molua’s church in Drumsnat in their honor. It reads:
Architect Raymond Hood, once described as a “brilliant bad boy,” is celebrated for designing the Rockefeller Center, the Daily News Building and Chicago’s Tribune Tower, among others. But what about his designs that only ever remained as blueprints and drawings? Can we admire how a city might have looked?
This question is central to Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin’s new book Never Built New York. It’s an intoxicating look at the designs for New York that, either through bureaucracy, budget or bad luck, never came to pass. Hood’s “Skyscraper Bridge” proposal, pictured above, joins a plethora of other eye-catching and intriguing never-built designs.
With a desire to ease New York’s intense congestion – by 1925, the metropolis had surpassed London as the world’s largest city – Hood proposed a series of bridges over Manhattan’s rivers, lined with skyscrapers 50 or 60 stories high. There would be amenities on the bridges—shop and theaters—and elevators to the river for water sports. In total, Hood envisioned over a dozen bridges fanning out from Manhattan.
While Hood’s vision never came to pass, it certainly hasn’t been the only plan to utilize Manhattan's waterways. In 1946, Wallace K. Harrison and William Zeckendorf proposed X-City, a vast complex on the East River, which included curved skyscrapers and a landing facility for helicopters and light aircraft.
Over a decade later, Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Key Project” would turn Ellis Island into a mini-city, with apartments, hotels, theaters, hospitals—and even a planetarium and a yacht club.
Atlas Obscura has a selection of the dazzling designs for a New York that never came to be.
The videos all start out the same way, with a shaky, grainy image of a group of musicians in uniform. The audience coughs and shuffles their programs until the conductor makes an announcement in Portuguese. Then, the familiar strains of Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” begin to play.
In more than a dozen YouTube videos shot all over Brazil, the song remains a bizarre constant. Whether it’s a police brass band in Minas Gerais or a youth orchestra in the city of Campo Grande, the arrangement is always the same. The only variables are just how off-key the woodwinds are, and whether the sax player struts into the audience to wild applause.
Brazil is known for its rich musical heritage, so a divorcecore ballad from the ‘80s may seem like an odd choice for a concert. Brass band performances of Bee Gees hits and the theme to Flashdance may look just as unusual to American eyes.
But public brass band performances are as firmly rooted in Brazil’s history as Jobim’s bossa nova—and so vital that the Brazilian government pays to train new musicians to carry on the tradition.
In order to figure out how those bands ended up playing Phil Collins, however, we must first start with another famous, diminutive man with a similar hairstyle: Napoleon Bonaparte.
In 1807, the Grande Armée invaded Portugal in the first act of what would become the Peninsular War. Shortly before Napoleon’s troops arrived, Portugal’s royal family fled Lisbon for Brazil—then a Portuguese colony—establishing a court-in-exile in Rio de Janeiro from 1808 to 1821. As befit a royal court in those days, a few musicians came along.
“The court eventually went back to Portugal and Brazil eventually became independent, but it sowed the seeds of military bands,” says DePaul University professor Katherine Brucher. She would know: Along with Suzel Reily, Brucher literally wrote the book on the history of brass brands in Portugal and its former colonies.
Brazil’s military bands played upbeat marches called dobrados to keep soldiers motivated during a brutal war with Paraguay that took place between 1864 and 1870.
Once the war finished, however, the army never collected its instruments. The musicians brought them home, and that’s how the tradition of municipal bands started.
“Essentially, you have a lot of men who have learned to play wind instruments, and to play in bands, and they bring this tradition back to their villages,” Brucher says.
Over the years, those bands became the accompaniment for political rallies, social events, and—most importantly—religious celebrations.
“There’s a tradition of having processions for Holy Week and for Saints Days,” Brucher says. “The music and the procession is part of the spectacle.”
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Brazilian towns often supported two or three bands. As the number of religious festivals fell, however, the stature of brass bands eventually diminished.
“They were actually dwindling—partly because the church wasn’t having as many processions and they didn’t have as many events to perform at,” says Reily, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Campinas in Brazil.
How they rebounded—and why they're now playing Phil Collins—is all thanks to a unique government program.
In 1976, Brazil’s national arts foundation—the Fundação Nacional de Artes, better known as Funarte—created a nationwide program to support municipal bands out of concern for the tradition of brass bands.
Called the Projecto Bandas de Música (Music Bands Project), it continues to this day with a goal of training musicians and supporting performances throughout Brazil. Today, there are 2,455 bandas playing across Brazil, with the majority in the state of Minas Gerais. Funarte has given out around 40,000 instruments in the past 40 years.
According to Funarte’s Marcelo Mavignier, the band project is also designed to reach young people in high-risk areas, with performances that benefit the musicians as well as the communities they come from.
“They usually present in public squares, theaters and auditoriums,” he says. “The target audience is the population.”
And this explains how the bandas ended up playing Phil Collins.
Instead of competing against each other, as school bands tend to do in the U.S., Brazilian bands play at friendly events called encontros, or meetings. After a day of playing old favorites and dobrados, Reily says, the bands host an evening concert to entertain the audience—and each other.
That’s when the bands show off by playing popular music, like “Against All Odds.” According to Brucher, that particular song checks a lot of boxes that would make it popular in an encontro.
“If you’re a band with a proficient saxophone soloist, it’s a big way to feature them,” Brucher says. “It’s a radio hit, it’s very melodic, it’s one of those songs—the lyrics are pretty simple, it’s really universal, and even if you didn’t speak English, you still could sing along.”
More importantly, she says, the arrangement isn’t too complicated. “The rest of the band can still play it.”
But how did that arrangement end up in the hands of so many conductors? Reily says that in the spirit of the encontro, it’s common for bands to share their work. “A new song comes up, and the band director will create an arrangement, and they pass them from one to the other.”
Mavignier says that some arrangements come directly from Funarte, while others come from the bands themselves. One of the YouTube videos attributes the “Against All Odds” arrangement to Ibanez Dutra Munhoz, whose sheet music credits a recording by the Phil Collins Big Band.
Munhoz’s arrangement was originally written for a military police band in Mato Grosso do Sul. Brucher says that isn’t surprising, as military and civilian bands trade musicians all the time. “If you come up through your community band and you’re a good musician, one of the professional avenues is to join a military band,” she says.
With all that history in mind, those grainy videos look less like weird outliers and more like a modern interpretation of a grand tradition.
“As an American, you have preconceived notions about where you would expect to hear a Phil Collins song,” Brucher says. To the bandas, however, a song’s provenance matters less than the overall performance. Musicians don’t get paid, so a successful encontro is when both the audience and the musicians have fun. Indeed, in most of the videos, you can hear the crowds singing along.
Brucher recalled an encontro she attended that paired a Russian folk song with the theme from Oklahoma!—and the crowd loved it. “They both have a good melody, so of course they go together.”
Halloween is just 10 days away, which means more homes are sporting pumpkins, tombstones, spider webs, and other creepy decorations. But the elaborate maze of ghoulish décor at this house in San Marcos, California will be hard to beat.
Unofficially named the “Best Decorated Halloween House 2015,” the property in San Marcos certainly embraced the Halloween spirit. Trick-or-treaters were amazed by the house’s LED lights, fog machines, animated skeletons, and terrifying lunging cats (check it out at the 4:44-mark). There’s even a soaring ghost that greets visitors. The wired rig sends the ghost between the haunted house to the neighbors across the street.
The whole front yard is transformed into a cemetery filled with tombstones that project skeleton heads, and an animatronic monster tree terrorizes the gateway. People can take a gander inside the garage where there’s a whole miniature Halloween town and mad scientist’s laboratory. There are projections in the window, and the homeowners put a skeleton in the passenger seat of their car.
At the 1:55-mark you can hear a youngster exclaim, “I’m scared.” We don’t blame you, kid.
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.
At last night's Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner—a strange electoral tradition where presidential candidates razz each other to benefit Catholic charities—Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton each got a few laughs. But the real surprise came at the end of the night, when the festivities were nearly over. At that point, NPR says, Clinton and Trump decided to shake hands. "The development was announced from the stage, to applause," the outlet reports.
In most situations, a political handshake would barely merit acknowledgement, let alone applause. But this race is different, because increasingly, the candidates and their families have been keeping their hands to themselves. At the second debate, the families of the nominees planned their entrance choreography so that handshakes would be impossible. Wednesday evening, at the third and final debate, the candidates themselves didn't shake at all.
After examining footage going back to the first televised debate, in 1976, the Miami Herald found that this was unprecedented. Every set of nominees, from Carter and Ford through Obama and Romney, has always taken a moment to lock hands before attempting to rhetorically eviscerate each other.
It's strange, but undeniable: even in this age of ceaseless, high-pitched discourse, a handshake—or the lack thereof—speaks volumes. How did this silent action become such an important part of political rhetoric?
Handshaking is such a simple gesture, it's difficult to say exactly who came up with it. According to the Assyria Times, the ritual dates back at least to 1800 B.C., when Babylonian kings would clasp the hand of a statue of a god, in order to allow the god to "hand over" his authority—ensuring, in other words, a peaceful transfer of power. Ancient Greek monuments feature carvings of gods, soldiers, and couples shaking hands. Greek and Roman handshakers also used the gesture to shake each other down for hidden weapons, and to prove they weren't carrying any themselves.
Leaders in the Middle Ages had a slightly different way of signaling good intentions—the "Kiss of Peace," taken from the Bible and generally performed lip-to-lip. "They didn't use handshakes," political scientist Tanisha Fazal told the National Postin 2012. "Sometimes there was an exchange of hostages, but most often the kiss of peace was used."
There's something informal about a handshake, and George Washington also didn't like shaking hands with his guests, preferring instead to bow. Thomas Jefferson was the first American politician to bring the handshake to the White House proper, using it to take the office slightly down to earth. Since then, American politicians have made the handshake a campaign staple, bringing it both out to the streets and into diplomatic chambers. Lyndon B. Johnson supposedly shook so many hands that he'd finish out the day with swollen, bruised fingers.
The assumption that everyone deserves a handshake has led to a number of minor political scandals. During his 1963 campaign for District Leader, Ed Koch refused to shake hands with opponent Carmine De Sapio after De Sapio accused him of committing voter fraud by registering dead people. Adlai Stevenson may have lost his campaigns partly due to a palpable distaste for the emptiness of gladhandling. "Perhaps the saddest part of all this is that a candidate must reach into a sea of hands, grasp one, not knowing whose it is, and say, 'I'm glad to meet you,' realizing that he hasn't and probably never will meet that man," he told a friend in 1952.
And then there are the many, many bungled political handshakes, each of which seems to suggest some kind of communication breakdown—Raul Castro gripping Barack Obama's bent wrist like a trophy, the Obama/Trudeau/Nieto three-way shown above, John Kerry and Francois Hollande ending up in a kind of swing-dance posture after being unable to decide which greeting was most appropriate.
There are a lot of ways for a handshake, or a non-handshake, to go wrong. But when both people choose to stay away from the gesture, it's not really a snub—more a mutual decision. At the very least, it's something they can agree on.
