In 1908, the U.S. suffered its first outbreak of a horrendous disease called pellagra. The nation’s first response? Arguing about cornbread recipes.

The pellagra outbreak was confined to the South, which happened to be the only region of the country where people ate large quantities of cornmeal. Those two facts were thought to be related, and suspicion fell quickly upon cornbread as a vector of disease.

Southerners grew defensive. Corn itself wasn’t the problem, they said: Pellagra emerged instead from faulty ways of growing corn, or grinding meal, or mixing dough. Most important of all, they said, was who did the baking.

Like so many problems in America, the pellagra epidemic was tangled up with slavery, racism, and poverty. Unlike most of those problems, its solution was thought to lie in fingerprints embedded in the crust of corn bread.

Allow me to explain. According to the USDA, in the first half of the 20th century, families in the North, whether rich or poor, ate just a few ounces of cornmeal per week. By contrast, the poorest farm families in the South consumed as much 12 pounds of cornmeal a week, while the richest consumed 8 or 9 pounds.

How do we account for this? For the most part, the reason was poverty. Incomes in the South were far lower than those in the North: In the richest state, New York, the average worker earned $929 a year. In the poorest, Alabama, he earned $321. To stretch that income, you bought corn. In 1909, 25 cents would buy you 7 pounds of wheat flour—but 10 pounds of cornmeal. Why was the South corn-fed? Because cornmeal was cheap, and most Southerners were very poor. Many subsisted of a diet consisting of little more than cornmeal and molasses.

So let’s refine the question: Why did wealthy Southerners eat cornmeal?  

A clue lies in a dreadful, anonymous poem called “The Cornbread Country,” first published in the Baltimore Sun and then widely reprinted across the South:

Oh, for the cornbread country,
The jasmine land I see,
Down there in the dreams of Jackson,
Down there with the friends of Lee.

Indeed, for the past two centuries, the North has recognized the South, and the South has recognized itself, as the land of corn-eaters. I speak not of corn-on-the-cob but of the many items made from ground corn: corn pone, corn pudding, corn dodgers, corn cakes, cracklin’ bread, johnny cakes, hoe cakes, grits, hasty pudding, and spoon bread. Southerners in the U.S. have long embraced corn-eating as a matter of identity. In doing so, they even occasionally weaponized cornbread for use in ideological battle.

The skirmish I’m referring to took place in 1909, just after pellagra was first diagnosed in the U.S.

It is a terrible disease: a blistering rash followed by diarrhea, dementia, and death. It had first been identified nearly two centuries earlier—first in Spain, then in Italy—and it was most common in areas where people survived on a diet of corn. In the U.S., pellagra likely killed 100,000 people and sickened 3 million in the early 20th century.

We know now that pellagra is caused by a dietary deficiency of niacin, which is absent from cornmeal but found in fresh meat, milk, eggs, and nuts. But pellagra’s true dietary origins weren’t widely accepted until the late 1920s. When the disease first emerged in the U.S., most doctors believed that it was somehow caused by the cornmeal that was central to the Southern diet. According to one newspaper, “the panic has reached such a stage that … corn pone and corn cake have gone out of fashion.”

Most Southerners, though, weren’t ready to give up their cornbread. They had their own theory about the disease. In Americus, Georgia, a grocer told the Times-Recorder, “Practically every bushel of meal sold here … is ground from Western corn.” By Western he meant what we would call Midwestern—the Corn Belt. Georgians once grew their own corn, but now they planted cotton right up to their doorsteps, and bought cheap imported corn. On its journey from the West to the South, the corn spoiled and became toxic, and those who ate it developed pellagra. So went the theory, at least. As the New York Sun put it at the time, Southerners saw diseased corn as “a sectional conspiracy against the South.”

By 1909, Southerners had absorbed some hard lessons about sectional conflict. Rather than retaliate with force, they looked inward. By buying Midwestern corn, they had despoiled their heritage. How could Southern culture cure itself? By returning to the old ways.

And thus news articles about the horrors of pellagra soon seamlessly transformed themselves into lifestyle pieces about the proper techniques for making cornbread. The MontgomeryAdvertiser in Alabama insisted that badly made cornbread “may produce pellagra or anything else. It is not cornbread.” A writer in the CharlotteDaily Observer agreed. “Corn meal … mixed up with milk, eggs and soda with a spoon and baked in a stove … ought to cause just such ailments as is charged to it. It is a clear case of retribution on the part of the bread.” Proper cornbread contained meal from a local mill, salt, and spring water—nothing more.

And the loaves must be shaped by hand: “The prints of the fingers are left in longitudinal corrugations,” according to the Montgomery Advertiser. “The absence of finger marks is just grounds for suspicion.” The Daily Observer agreed that the cook must carefully shape the pones, “leaving fingerprints on each.”

Those fingerprints served as evidence of who was missing: The cooks of the Old South. The Macon Daily Telegraph explained that real cornbread required “a hickory wood fire, an iron skillet and lid, and an old negro mammy. … She will mix the meal and water, fashion it into pones in her hands, drop the pones into the hot skillet, [and] pat them with her hands.”

The Civil War, by freeing enslaved cooks, had deprived white Southerners of proper bread. And it wasn’t just the cook who was missing—it was an entire social fabric, imagined through a fanciful vision of antebellum racial harmony known as the “Lost Cause”—the belief that Southern ideals had been sanctified by the blood of the fallen, that slavery civilized the enslaved, that God had ordained white supremacy.

In 1909, the same year Southerners panicked about pellagra and cornmeal, the NAACP was founded—a response to, among other crimes, the lynching of more than 900 black men over the previous decade. Racial order in the South was enforced through terror, and justified through storytelling. When newspaper editors celebrated old-fashioned cornbread and lamented the disappearance of enslaved cooks, they buttressed the myths of a happy antebellum South.

Those myths obscured violence—the overt violence of lynching, and the quieter violence of economic exploitation through the sharecropping and tenant farming systems. Poor families spent 40 to 50 percent of their income on food—at least when they had income. Spikes in pellagra tracked the years of economic troubles and crop failures—1909, 1915, 1921, 1930. In 1922, the Charlotte Chronicle noted that tenant farmers had been “compelled to return to … corn bread and molasses for most meals.” The result was yet another pellagra epidemic. As newspaper editors lamented the loss of black cooks, the children and grandchildren of those cooks died of malnutrition.

Eventually, the U.S. halted pellagra. The cure didn’t require the return of black cooks or corn pones decorated with fingerprints. It did, however, involve a new recipe for bread—just not the antebellum-style corn pone editorialists has promoted. The key, instead, was a new ingredient: State and federal laws required that niacin be added to commercial meals and flours, so the pellagra-preventing nutrient was baked into every loaf. (When you buy “enriched” bread today, you are eating a legacy of the pellagra epidemic.)

Through public health laws, the U.S. wiped out pellagra. But we left in place a social system that makes people vulnerable to a new array of nutritional diseases. Eventually, the same quality that made corn an ideal crop for so many generations of Americans—abundant harvests—made it the perfect crop for industrial agriculture, where it yielded raw materials for processed foods. By the late 20th century everyone in America—and many others around the world—started eating a great deal of corn, not as cornbread but as corn-fattened beef and pork, corn oil, and corn syrup. We are all corn-fed now, and the result is an entirely new set of nutritional challenges.

The World Health Organization recently called on nations to tax sugary drinks and subsidize fresh fruits and vegetables. The symptoms of our current malnutrition are not dermatitis and dementia but hypertension and heart disease. The costs—in medical expenses, lost productivity, and human misery—are enormous, and they are borne disproportionately by the poor.

America is a wealthy country, with plenty of food to go around, but the bounty has never been shared. Pellagra, like scurvy or beriberi, is known as a “deficiency” disease—you get it from the lack of a certain dietary nutrient. But the root cause of public health disasters, then and now, is not the lack of certain nutrients. It is a deficiency of justice.

Dr. Joseph Goldberger, the New Yorker who solved the mystery of pellagra in the 1910s and 1920s, once examined an asylum in Milledgeville, Georgia, where pellagra was epidemic among patients—but nonexistent among staff. Doctors earlier had ruled out diet as a cause because staff and patients ate at the same cafeteria. Goldberger noted, though, that the staff ate first. The fresh meat and milk disappeared before the patients dined. It took an outsider to point out that the common meal was not equally distributed.

On a street in Beijing, an elderly Chinese man blows into a hollow lump of hot, melted sugar. A minute or two later, he holds a bunny. Or a giraffe. Or a goldfish. All are shaped via the traditional art of sugar blowing, an increasingly rare sight on the streets of China.

Like glass blowing, the sugar version involves inflating a molten blob into a bubble, then shaping it before it cools. Sugar blowers tend to make animals, with creatures from the Chinese zodiac—dragons, rabbits, pigs, and monkeys—being especially popular. Though the finished creations are edible, they are considered to be art rather than food.

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

In the 1950s, Japanese women seeking a new life in America had to learn about more than just visa requirements. They also had to learn how to cook hamburgers, entertain neighbors, and confidently walk in high heels. Eyeliner application was, apparently, a vital skill.

These immigrants weren’t just any women. They were the “war brides” of American G.I.s, and some of them learned these lessons at the American Red Cross, which ran schools designed to prepare them for domestic life in the United States.

The American Red Cross Bride Schools sprang up in response to the wave of marriages between American soldiers and Japanese citizens following World War II. Thousands of G.I.s were stationed in Japan during the postwar Allied occupation, which led to several romances with local women. Although the statistics vary, scholars estimate somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 such marriages took place through the 1950s.

Getting hitched was a headache, considering the stack of documents any Japanese woman had to provide to wed an American soldier. The complicated process took some couples over a year to complete—and it was especially hard on the women. Military officials thoroughly investigated them and their families for any trace of“Communism, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, or anything that would label her as undesirable.” The husband merely needed to prove he was single, a U.S. citizen, and willing to provide financial support.

But the paperwork wasn’t the only problem. Most war brides had little to no concept of what the United States was like. What they did know came from movies and whatever their husbands told them. So the American Red Cross offered lessons on what women could really expect in the U.S. These “bride schools” opened in cities like Tokyo, Sendai, and Yokohama beginning in 1951.

The instructors were usually American wives of stationed military men. Their lessons covered cooking, baby care, etiquette, and everything in between—but despite the educational intentions, the schools took on an unmistakably patronizing tone. “The war bride schools are a great vehicle for neatly encapsulating what we thought of ourselves as Americans at that time and place,” says Lucy Craft, a co-director of the documentary Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides. “We won the war and decided that not only had we won the war, but that everything about us was superior to every other civilization, particularly the people who lost the war.”

This superiority complex is evident in a 1952 Saturday Evening Post article reporting on the American Red Cross Bride Schools. The story is full of anecdotes about clueless Japanese students wearing too many slips under their dresses and slapping raw fish right on the stove. “They’ve been children in a nation’s defeat, have gone hungry, have cared for smaller brothers and sisters with the aid of a couple of old kimono sleeves in contrast to the dozens of diapers they’re now given for their own children,” the Post wrote. “Some are quick, some stupid, many average.”

In order to teach their pupils how to be Americans, the instructors had to emphasize the country’s gender roles. And as so many disappointed Rosie the Riveters learned after V.E. Day, America wanted its women back in the home. These Japanese war brides were destined to be housewives, just like their instructors. A typical class might include a tutorial on washing machines, or how to get crisp hospital corners when making the bed. Topics like U.S. history were covered. But cooking was perhaps the biggest part of the curriculum.

“I have a Japanese war bride mother and I grew up with a culinary repertoire of Sloppy Joes, pineapple upside-down cake, spaghetti, and tuna casserole,” says Elena Creef, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College. “It’s kind of hysterical. How did my mother learn to master these really basic, slightly awful all-American dishes? Well, she was trained. I guess those lessons were taught very well.”

Classes typically ran for three to six weeks, ending with a graduation ceremony during which students received diplomas. It’s difficult to gauge exactly how many Japanese women completed the American Red Cross Bride School training. In a 1956 article, Ebony reported that “more than 2,000” had enrolled. Japanese scholar Shigeyoshi Yasutomi put the number at 4,500 to 5,000 graduates in 2015. Either figure would constitute just a small fraction of the total number of Japanese war brides. In the absence of the Red Cross classes, they turned to texts (like The American Way of Housekeeping), their husbands, or their eventual American neighbors.

So did these women actually learn from the bride schools, or was it all paternalistic nonsense? Creef insists that, although her mother recalls the classes “with a great deal of laughter, because of the insulting irony,” the American Red Cross was “fulfilling a need.” Craft says the few bride school students she interviewed had positive experiences, while noting that her war bride mother “had zero interest in it.”

The American Red Cross replicated this model across the world to aid all kinds of war brides in their move to the United States—even the ones who already spoke the language. But few crystallized the problems of the postwar globe as clearly as the schools in Japan. The war brides there left believing they’d have more opportunity in America than their economically depressed, spiritually defeated nation could offer. Yet as Craft notes, “Going to a new country just meant that instead of using a broom to clean your house, you got to use a vacuum cleaner. That was your option, not choosing whether to work inside or outside the home.”

It's easy to miss the ghost-white plaster hand that rests under a plexi-glass box at D’Arcy McGee’s in Ottawa, Canada, where it sits at the top of a small flight of stairs that constitutes the bar’s entrance. The "death hand," as it is known, frequently goes unnoticed among the swarms of politicians and government workers drinking pints after a long day on Parliament Hill.

But the hand itself is no random curiosity; it’s a re-creation of the hand of the pub's namesake, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, an Irish-revolutionary turned a Canadian father of the confederation. It was cast after his assassination in April 1868, just months after Canada officially became a self-governing dominion under British rule, which he had helped lay the foundation for.

By the time of McGee’s killing, death-masks had become common in the Victorian era to either commemorate the dead or help solve crimes, serving, in many cases, the same function as crime-scene photography. But McGee was shot in the head, making his face unrecognizable, forcing castmakers to cast the next best thing: his hands.

The one at D’Arcy McGee’s is actually a copy; the original sits, not far away, at the Bytown Museum, which took possession of it in 1920. Which is fitting in its own way, as D'Arcy McGee's itself isn't very old, having been established in 1996, with the entire bar designed and built in Ireland, before it was sent to Canada to be refabricated, not unlike McGee himself.

McGee was born in Ireland in 1825, later coming to the United States as a teenager and first making his name as a newspaper editor. In 1845 he returned to his homeland, only to flee again after a warrant was issued for his arrest following his involvement in the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848.

Back in the U.S., McGee again took up writing and editing, before moving to Canada in 1857, where he became a Canadian nationalist, and, eventually, member of Parliament.

But just a year after he was elected into office, on April 7, 1868, he was assassinated. An Ottawa journalist named Patrick J. Whelan was later convicted and hanged for the crime, with several witnesses saying that Whelan had professed his hatred for McGee, and had planned to one day kill him over political disagreements. Whelan, for his part, admitted to being present at the assassination but denied pulling the trigger. He was hanged on February 11, 1869, before a crowd of thousands.

McGee’s wife considered him ugly by the standards of the time, which he made up for with his pen, as a prolific writer and poet. That also makes McGee's hand, and not his face, an appropriate legacy, even if most drinkers at D'Arcy McGee's may not notice it at all. 

In the Wan Chai District of Hong Kong Island, a chorus of smacking shoes reverberates against the underpass of the Canal Road Flyover. Here, people take vengeance on their villains by seeking a group of primarily elderly women known as the "villain-hitters."

The villain-hitters of Hong Kong have been placing curses on rivals and foes for more than 50 years. Deriving their actions from a centuries-old folk religion in southern China, the villain-hitters are paid to perform an enemy-hexing ritual that requires beating a long strip of paper called "villain paper" with an old slipper or shoe of a client.  

"I don't really 'hit' people, I just scare away petty spirits and other nasty things," said the villain-hitter, Grandma Yeung, in the South China Morning Post video above. 

While rituals vary, generally the villain-hitter will chant a series of incantations, burn incense, throw divination blocks, and make tributes and prayers to different gods. A client can write down the name or information about the targeted villain on the paper effigy. Some even bring a photo of the person they want punished—whether that's an ex-lover or a political leader. Clients can also pay to curse general villains and drive away evil spirits, explains South China Morning Post. The villain paper is pounded until nothing but scraps is left.

“People want to weaken others through villain hitting to achieve peace of mind," villain-hitter Wong Gat-lei told The Guardian. "But it’s more about achieving peace of mind by releasing your anger.”

In addition to getting back at enemies, villain-hitters cast healing spells, help souls cross-over, and contact the deceased, reported The Guardian. Yeung, who had been a villain-hitter for 10 years, said that her clients seek jobs, have sick loved ones, are facing lawsuits, or have a cheating spouse. She even admitted that her practice is a scam, her self-taught incantations nothing but rubbish.  

"You can come to 'hit' other people, but other people can curse you too," said Yeung. "After all, it's not good to hit people." 

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.

As villains go, Fantômas is a nasty one. Created in 1911, he is a gentleman criminal who perpetrates gruesome, elaborate crimes with no clear motivation. He hangs a victim inside a church bell so that when it rings blood rains on the congregation below. He attempts to kill Jove, the detective on his trail, by trapping the man in a room that slowly fills with sand. He skins a victim and makes gloves from the dead man’s hands in order to leave the corpse’s fingerprints all over the scene of a new crime.

His creators called him the “Genius of Evil” and the “Lord of Terror,” but he remained a cipher with so many identities that often only Jove would recognize him. The book that first introduces him begins with a voice asking: Who is Fantômas? There’s no real answer:

"Nobody.... And yet, yes, it is somebody!"

"And what does the somebody do?"

"Spreads terror!"

But Fantômas was incredibly popular in his day—a now-obscure villain who helped define fictional bad guys for the 20th century. His influence shows up everywhere from surrealist paintings to Hitchcock movies and the X-Men comics. Fantômas was mysterious enough that he could be reinvented many times over. But in all those iterations, no one quite recaptured the pure, chaotic evil that defined the original character.

Fantômas was created by two writers in Paris, Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, who first started working together as journalists covering the nascent car culture of the early 20th century. They would sometimes fill space with dashed-off detective stories, which attracted the attention of a publisher trying to make it rich on mass-market fiction. He hired Souvestre and Allain to write a series of gripping novels; their contract required them to produce one a month. They invented Fantômas on the way to their meeting with the publisher and spent the next three years churning out fantastic stories about their arch-villain.

Fantômas was most easily characterized by his crimes, which were aggressively anti-social. He stole; he dissembled; he killed frequently and almost indiscriminately. In one story, a broken wall starts spewing blood from the many victims hidden there. His motivation seems to be the joy of the crime itself.

As a character, he has few distinguishing features. Even in the original books, Fantomas’ identity is malleable. He changes aliases many times over and often only Jove, the detective obsessed with him, would recognize him in his new guise. He’s so mysterious that at times it seems, as the scholar Robin Walz wrote, that Jove might have made him up or be ascribing the crimes of many men to one fabricated villain. When Fantômas does appear as himself, he’s shrouded in a black and a mask obscures his face. “At the end of a thirty-two book cycle Fantômas remains as much a mystery as at the start,” wrote film scholar David Kalat.

This shadowy villain, though, captured the hearts and minds of the French public in the early 1910s. The book series was an immediate hit, as audiences devoured the crime stories, as over-the-top as they were. Film companies battled for the production rights, and within a few years Fantômas had his first reinvention, as the subject of a series of silent films. The books were published with great success in Italy and Spain, where in 1915 Fantômas became the subject of a musical. In the years before World War I, Fantômas was everywhere.

From the beginning of his existence, Fantômas attracted unexpected fans who recruited him for their own purposes. Guillaume Apollinaire, the experimental poet, loved the series: he called it “one of the richest works that exists.” He and the poet Max Jacob started a fan club, La Société des Amis de Fantômas, the Friends of Fantômas Society. The Surrealist movement that followed in their footsteps became obsessed with Fantômas, and René Magritte once recreated the cover of the first novel as a painting. It was a crime of his own—a theft of the original art.

The Surrealists were so attracted to Fantômas in part because his world accorded with the one they were creating in their art. It followed its own logic rather that the rational and buttoned-up rules of polite society. In one Fantômas film, Jove seizes Fantômas at a restaurant, only to find himself hold a pair of fake arms—the villain had escaped! “But how come Fantômas just happened to have a spare set of fake arms with him at the time? If you need to ask questions like these, the magic of Fantômas will elude you,” Kalat wrote. The Surrealists loved it.

Because the original Fantômas series was so popular, it quickly spread across Europe, to Italy, Spain, England, Germany, and Russia, as film scholar Federico Pagello documented. He was one of the first arch-villains to make it into the movies, and the film series starring him was directed by Louis Feuillade, who pioneered the thriller genre of movies. The Fantômas series was one of his first big projects, and in it he experimented with storytelling techniques he’d use in his famous Les Vampires, which features a whole gang of Fantômas-like villains, dressed all in black. The techniques Feuillade invented influenced Fritz Lang, the director most famous for Metropolis, and, in turn, Alfred Hitchcock.

As thrillers grew as a genre, Fantômas and his imitators were spreading around the world. In Italy the character Za la Mort took up the Fantômas mantle; in England, a director created Ultus, who was meant to be a conscious copy of Fantômas. After the real-life evils of World War II, Fantômas’ extravagant villainy had less appeal, though, and he went quiet until the ‘60s, when he was revived in a French movie series, a Turkish movie, and an Italian comic book, as Diabolik. In 1975, a Spanish movie, Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires, was made in homage to Feuillard.

Even from his first reimagining, though, when the books were turned into novels, Fantômas was softened. “On the film poster, the arch-villain's kid-gloved right hand was merely a clenched fist, whereas on the cover of the novel he held a deadly dagger,” wrote Walz. The plot changed, too: in the original story, Fantômas escapes execution by having an actor play his role, and the actor is beheaded before anyone realizes the mistake. In the movie, Juve figures out the plot before the actor is killed and saves his life.

Fantomas - A l'ombre de la guillotine (1913) from George Morbedadze on Vimeo.

More often, though, Fantômas is given a valiant motivation. The director who transformed him into Ultus considered Fantômas a Robin Hood character, with noble motivations, Pagello wrote. When Fantômas came to the U.S., he was cast as more of a gentleman thief than a black-hearted nihilist. When he was revived for as the star of a series of Mexican comic books in the 1970s, Fantômas was more of a hero than a villain; in the X-Men comics, where a character named Fantomex first appeared in 2002, he tries to act as a good-hearted thief but is quickly revealed to have been created as part of a government weapons program.

Even though Fantômas was an iconic villain early in the 20th century, he was too evil to survive in his original form. Writers preferred to make their villains a little bit more knowable, a little bit more rational, and, ultimately, a little less dark.

In Arizona’s Tator Hills, the Arizona Geological Survey has located a giant fissure in the earth. It’s two miles long; according to a local news station, that’s a half mile longer than any other fissure in the area. These cracks in the ground can be dangerous and unstable, but the geological survey was able to explore the length of the fissure using a drone, which captured the footage above.

Fissures like this one first started appearing in the Arizona desert in the early decades of the 20th century. They’re created when people pump water from ground aquifers faster than the aquifers can replenish. In some places in Arizona, groundwater’s been drawn from the earth 500 times faster than the aquifer’s rate of renewal. When the water disappears, the ground subsides into the empty space, and fissures form at the edges of alluvial basins or at places where bedrock is close to the surface. In Tator Hills, fissures first appeared in 1977; there's now 11 miles of fissures in the area, according to the Arizona Geological Survey.

These fissures can be deep and dangerous to humans. They can often widen and deepen suddenly, particularly after heavy rains. They’ve ruined houses and highways, and for about a decade the Arizona government has been mandated to identify the locations of fissures and share that information with the public. Even after fissures are located, though, there’s not much to do about them, besides stay away.

In 1972, the graphic novelist Art Spiegelman was asked to draw something for an animal-themed comic book. As he brainstormed his submission, he recalled in a 2011 interview, he searched for a way to zoomorphize a seminal horror: "Nazis chasing Jews, as they had in my childhood nightmares."

He dove into all the available archives, looking for inspiration. "As I began to do more detailed and more finely grained research," he said, "I found how regularly Jews were represented literally as rats… posters of killing the vermin and making them flee were part of the overaching metaphor." In Nazi propaganda, Jewish people were rats. In Spiegelman's artwork—which eventually became the enduring Holocaust epic, Maus—they would be mice.

Throughout literary history, when asked to choose a rodent hero, humans have made their preferences clear: mice swing swords, rescue princesses, and save the world. Rats torture dissidents, kidnap cuter animals, and "bite the babies in their cradles." With some notable exceptions, the mouse's history and physiology has put him ahead of his larger cousins. And some experts say it's about time for a change. 

According to Lorna Owen, author of Mouse Muse: The Mouse in Art, mice crept into the popular literary consciousness early on. Aesop, the mysterious fabulist whose work is thought to date back to around 620 B.C., used the lowly mouse to teach all kinds of lessons about human behavior—how to take down stronger opponents, how to befriend important acquaintances, when to avoid petty fights.

This Everymouse proved popular: "Aesop's fables traveled the world [from Greece] and were reinterpreted by different cultures," says Owen. Soon, mice were rescuing elephants in India's Panchatantra, and befriending crows in the Middle East's Kalīlah wa Dimnah.

Although they didn't show up much in Aesop, ancient rats alternated between wreaking havoc and teaching life lessons. "From a cultural point of view, the rat is a highly charged figure that can warn and threaten, yet also bring salvation and good fortune," writes Jonathan Burt in Rat. In the Old Testament, rats are unclean, unfit for touching or eating. But in Ancient Greece and Rome, a group of rats was a portent, signifying joy and plenty. In India, they were considered helpful, and mythological rats would gnaw people or other animals out of tricky situations.

Rats and mice on their own are one thing, but when the two appear together, they invite comparison. "I think often, certainly in the past, these two animals lived right around each other," says Matthew Combs, a doctoral student at Fordham University who focuses on the brown rat. "One house would have to deal with both problems. You have your mice some nights and your rats some nights… it makes sense to compare them, and to turn them into characters."

In such a scenario, says Combs, mice are going to win the public opinion poll. Your average mouse eats two or three grams of food per day—a crumb-sized amount—while a rat needs 30 to 50 grams, a human portion. They also brook opposite strategies for getting this food: "I almost think about mice as these little borrowers, sort of benign," says Combs. "Rats will disassemble the container that you built to keep them out, and rip food apart." Where a mouse makes a demure mess, perhaps a neat hole in a box of crackers, a rat will leave you with an anarchic one—a ripped-up box with the crackers all gone, and a screw-you smattering of droppings.

If you happen to catch a glimpse of either perpetrator, it won't help the rat's cause. "Looking at rats makes people uncomfortable," says Combs. Where mice have proportionately large ears and heads—both of which, to humans, code for "cute"—rats have small heads, small ears, and large bodies. Combs and Owen agree that the tail is the worst part. "It doesn't really match with the body you look at," says Combs. "It almost looks like human skin, but it's much more gross." Rats, especially city rats, are also more likely to get scabby and lose their fur. "That beat-up look shows up in stories and characters," says Combs—like Ratigan, the villain of The Great Mouse Detective, who grows increasingly mangy as his evil plots advance.

When fictional mice evolve, it's often in the other direction. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in "A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse," Mickey's eyes, ears, and snout got larger and more rounded as the Disney brand became more overtly family-friendly.

These physical characteristics affect how we interpret rat and mouse behavior. If you corner a rat, it might leap at you, and take a chunk out of you with its impressive teeth. If you corner a mouse, it will scamper off and hide—objectively cowardly, but courageous in context. "There are little things they do that are actually quite brave when you consider their environment, and how low they are on the food chain," Owen points out. "They have so many predators, but they still run around." Small creatures who take risks make great role models for human children, which likely explains everything from C.S. Louis's warrior mouse, Reepicheep, to E.B. White's adventurous Stuart Little.

Of course, these hero-mice require human authors, who can amp up some of their natural characteristics while downplaying others. And rats, too, have attributes that deserve a more positive spin, says Combs. Despite loner literary rats like Templeton of Charlotte's Web, real rats are very social, he says. "They'll do lots of play-fighting and grooming and touching, and a lot of affectionate behaviors. You could cast them that way, but often that's not what we're given."

Their intelligence, evidenced by their skill at breaking into food stores and out of traps, is often spun as a sort of sinister cleverness, rather than admirable smarts. In Brian Jacques's Redwall series, for instance, Methuselah the old mouse is wise and learned, while Cluny the Scourge, an evil rat, is conniving, even insane.

But even the oldest tropes get nibbled through eventually. Combs and Owen see rodent reputations slowly changing, both in quantity and quality. Contemporary mouse storytelling is becoming, to Owens's trained eye, "a bit repetitive," while rats are swarming in to fill the void: "In 20th century literature, you have rats more than mice," she says, citing Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Orwell's 1984, and Camus's The Plague.

As the 21st century scampers on, rat heroes are moving into the spotlight. "Recently, people are a little more accepting of rats as having some good qualities," says Combs. "There's movies like Ratatouille. And there's all this research where they're using rats as models for human physiology and human medicine." A recent study shows that, when tickled, rats giggle and jump around. Although scientists could have cast this response as a malevolent cackle, they didn't—and public response was swift and positive, says Combs. Maybe there's room for the rat in the hero's seat after all. 

Over a week ago, a surfer later identified as a Japanese man named Toru was plucked from the ocean by a cargo ship, having spent 16 hours alone on his surfboard some three-and-a-half miles off the coast of Bulli, which is about 40 miles south of Sydney. 

Initially, according to the Australian Broadcasting Association, police had said that Toru's nighttime odyssey was a result of getting caught in a current, which pushed him farther and farther out to sea. 

But this week, in speaking to the media for the first time since the ordeal, Toru thought he would clear some things up. It wasn't a current, he explained, but his attraction to fear and the Moon that led him to paddle out that far. (The video above is Toru singing a song to a local reporter, who was there to interview him.)

"Scary is a very important feeling … I like to fight against scary, [to] fight against the enemy inside," he told ABC. 

Toru claims he gets by on busking, and, for now, is camping on a beach not far from where he set out paddling that night. 

He spoke freely with the media when asked about his "beautiful" experience on the water, but said that he would be sticking to day-time surfing for now.

Police also advised against trying to recreate Toru's adventure for yourself. 

"Most people that get themselves in that situation die," a police sergeant told the Illawarra Mercury.

Sometimes you head out to get some exercise, and you end up making a massive geographic art piece instead. On January 15th, David Chuljian, a dentist in Port Townsend, Washington, decided to take advantage of the cold weather. He brought his skates down to Stranger Lake, a private lake on a friend's property.

Excited to be able to cross the full lake for the first time in years, he decided to try skating a pattern. He criss-crossed north to south, and then east to west. The result was part sine wave, part chain-link fence.

Then—because he had to go on an errand to Seattle anyway—Chuljian hopped in his Cessna with his girlfriend, Susan Disman, and asked her to snap some photos from above. "From the ground, [the lines are] noticeably crooked, but from the air, it has a sort of crop circle look," he told the PT Leader.

It was good that they checked it out so soon: Within 24 hours, the ice melted again, and Stranger Lake got a little less strange.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Every year since 1947, a few dozen esteemed scientists have put their heads together and decided how close we are to the end of the world. Thursday morning, in the face of an unusually intense amount of global political upheaval, they'll take another stab at it.

Invented by former members of the Manhattan Project, the so-called Doomsday Clock isn't really a clock at all, but rather a handy way to visualize the aggregate effects of various threats to humanity: The closer the metaphorical minute hand is to midnight, the closer we are to total destruction.

The clock is overseen by the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board, along with their Board of Sponsors, which is stacked with Nobel Laureates. Each year, they consider humanity's greatest ailments and boil them down into a concrete conclusion: are we nearer to doom than we were last year?

Over its 70-year tenure, the clock has gone from a low of two minutes to midnight (in 1953, when thermonuclear tests were prevalent), to a high of 17 minutes to midnight (in 1991, after a global nuclear resolution). Since then, it has ticked steadily upward, gaining a minute or two each year.

In 2016, the board chose to keep it where it had been in 2015, at an ominous 23:57. According to the BAS's executive director, Rachel Bronson, climate change, missile-making, and "other existential threats" played into their calculus in 2016, but were tempered by "some positive news," such as the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear agreement.

Obviously, a lot has happened since then. In a recent press release announcing the forthcoming update to the clock, the board cited "a rise in strident nationalism worldwide, President Donald Trump's comments on nuclear arms and climate issues... a darkening global security landscape... [and] a growing disregard for scientific expertise."

Have you voted? Take the 2017 Doomsday Clock poll: https://t.co/QUZn0DR9QSpic.twitter.com/uovSddTKSC

— BulletinOfTheAtomic (@BulletinAtomic) January 24, 2017

In just the two days since the BAS released this statement, the Trump administration has signaled its intention to proceed with building a border wall and to restart controversial oil pipelines. It has also made strides toward muzzling communication between scientific agencies and the public. China has moved ballistic missiles to the Russian border, and European Union officials are again considering building their own military force. As board member Jennifer Sims told Chicagoist, it has been "an unusual clock year."

On Thursday, we'll learn how this all shakes out into numbers. Are we still at 23:57? 23:58? Straight-up midnight? According to a poll on the BAS website, the public is not hopeful: at press time, 77 percent of respondents had indicated that the clock should "move to less than three minutes to midnight."

Check out the livestream Thursday at 10 a.m. Eastern—and as soon as we learn the doom diagnosis, we'll update this post.

Small, crumbly, with a bright yellow color and a slightly burned top, Portugal’s rustic pastel de nata—custard tart—tops is often near the top of foodies' travel guides. But the flaky pastry also has a history as its country’s unlikely savior.

In the years following the international financial crisis of 2008, the Portuguese government was desperate to repay billions of euros of foreign debt.  Years of bad investments and fraud-like negotiations had left the country’s banks highly indebted to Spain and Germany. As economists brainstormed for solutions, Álvaro Santos Pereira, the former economy minister, hit on a maverick suggestion in 2012: selling the country’s most traditional sweets to save the economy.

“Why isn’t there a well-known Portuguese custard tart franchise yet?” asked Pereira, who had visions of a global chain that would be as popular as the Nando’s Portuguese flame-grilled chicken restaurants that have expanded to 16 countries.

It was headline heaven for journalists. The small, bright yellow pastry with a slightly burned top, also known as  the pastel de nata, was somehow expected to carry the country on its flaky shoulders. The critics came out.

“The drought will end, dams will all fill-up, water will flow, and custard tarts will be exported,” wrote the satirical news website,  Inimigo Público, mimicking the minister’s positivity later on.

“People laughed in Portugal, but Santos Pereira was not being ridiculous,” says Filipe Brito, a Portuguese baker in England. “The pastel looks rustic but with a buttery, crisp pastry that hides a subtle egg custard, our tart wins over the global palates.”

Right before Santos Pereira made his plea, Brito had just opened Nata & Co, a pastry shop named after the tarts, in Cardiff, U.K. Since then, Nata & Co has opened two other branches and is going strong.

Despite the naysayers, the buzz following the former economy minister’s comment boosted small businesses with international ambitions. NATA Lisboa, a Lisbon-based franchise starting up at the time, now has stores in the UK, France, Austria and even the United Arab Emirates.

Investing in Portugal’s bakery exports is proving to be profitable, bringing in 191 million euros in 2015 according to the latest reports by market researcher Informa D&B.

But the tarts’ success should not have come as a surprise to anyone. It wasn’t the first time that the Portuguese had turned to the pastel de nata to bail it out of a financial hardship.

In the years following the Liberal Revolution of 1820, one that saw an end to religious orders and resulted in the transition to a constitutional monarchy, the Jerónimos monastery in the Belém district of capital Lisbon was shut down.

Its monks and workers were forced to look beyond their traditional vocations to sustain themselves. In an attempt at survival, someone from the monastery offered his own version of custard tarts for sale in a shop close-by. Those pastries rapidly became known as ‘Pastéis de Belém’.

Almost two centuries later, their heirs carry forward their legacy in Antiga Confeitaria de Belém, Portugal’s huge flagship bakery recommended in tourist manuals worldwide for having the best custard tarts around.

“We sell an average of 20 thousand pastéis de Belém a day," says one of the current owners, Miguel Clarinha. "The number has been growing in the past three to four years in part thanks to the rise of tourism in Portugal and, specifically, Lisbon."

MA research carried out in 2015 for Portugal’s School of Economics and Management (ISEG) on tourists’ custard tart consumption in Antiga Confeitaria de Belém shows that the visitors have often tasted some form of a Portuguese custard tart before.

“Of course, their popularity can attract tourists to Portugal, but it is also important that tourists try the tarts while they’re here so that they want to continue buying them when they return home,” said Professor José Adelino, a lecturer at one of Portugal’s top business schools, Católica Lisbon.

Macau, which used to be a protectorate of Portugal, has been selling an‘egg tart’ variation of the pastel de nata in its KFC fast food branches for over a decade. And Portugal’s now-popular NATA Lisboa franchise opened its latest branch in Abu Dhabi in 2015.

“It answers a lot of people’s questions about whether we could sell our products anywhere in the world,” said founder José Campos in an interview with Portuguese financial portal Dinheiro Vivo.

Santos Pereira may have been laughed at, but his comment allowed Portugal to realize its tart’s potential.

While things are looking grim for the sciences here in America, a team of British and Czech scientists have recently claimed to have invented the world’s most powerful "super laser." They have named it, “Bivoj.”

According to Science Alert, the "high peak power laser" was created from a joint effort by Britain’s Central Laser Facility, and a state-sponsored program from the Czech Republic known as, HiLASE (High average power pulsed laser). They say their new beam has already set a world record for highest average power output.

At only 1,000 watts, the flat power of the laser itself is nothing to scream about, but the new device can repeatedly pulse this beam for extended periods of time, unlike seemingly more intense “peak power” lasers which can only fire in short bursts. Combining power and sustainability, the new laser still needs to be confirmed by other scientists. The laser was named after a mythical Czech Hercules figure.  

Weighing in at 22 tons, the super laser probably won't be the ray gun of the future, but the technology could have a big impact on scientific research, according to Science Alert, for things like particle acceleration.

When researchers started working in 2000 on an encyclopedia of camps and ghettos from the Holocaust, they thought they would find 5,000 examples of labor camps, POW camps, military brothels, ghettos and concentration camps in Nazi-controlled Europe.

So far, they have found more than 42,500, The Times of Israel reports.

This project, initiated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, sought to fully document places of Nazi persecution. To be included in the project, each entry must be backed up by multiple witness accounts and government documents. Often, the investigation includes gathering evidence from the site itself.

In some ways, this count is conservative. Some sites includes multiple camps—a military brothel inside a POW camp, for instance. Those are counted as one site. Sites with many sub-camps are also counted as one site.

It was clear early on in the project, reports the Times, that the original estimate was too low. By 2001, researchers were estimating they would find more than 10,000 sites. But the number kept growing, thanks to work both by the descendants of Holocaust survivors and the descendants of Germans who participated in the Nazi regime.

“You could not turn a corner in Germany [during the war]… without finding someone there against their will,” Geoffrey Megargee, the project's leader, told the Times.

A lot of things are illegal in Atlantic City—underage gambling, vandalizing hedges, (probably) blowing up the chicken man. Wednesday night, lawmakers worked to add one more thing to the list: releasing helium balloons outdoors.

The Atlantic City Council voted unanimously for the ban, which would slap balloonatics with a $500 fine, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

This law isn't meant to keep balloons off the streets—it's supposed to keep them out of the oceans, say activists who pushed for it. When released balloons deflate, they often end up in the sea, where they can choke, entangle, or poison marine life. 

According to Balloons Blow, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to balloon ban advocacy, many other cities and states have laws that prohibit or limit outdoor releases. Ventnor, Margate, and Longport, New Jersey—all beach towns next to Atlantic City—already have bans in place, which means this newest one would make a large swath of the Jersey Shore a balloon-free zone.

The law now faces final passage. Meanwhile, there's trouble bussin' in from out of state: the "yes" voters were warned of possible unhappy visits from the Balloon Council. Gonna be a rumble out on the promenade.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

While the average person likely spends most of their lives trying to avoid being a villain, there are those who make it a point to get out there and unleash their inner baddie.

For live-action role-players (LARPers) who choose to walk the path of darkness, playing the villain isn’t just fun, it’s a good way to learn more about themselves.

LARPing allows players to get together IRL and act out whatever fantasy scenario the organizers dream up. For the majority of LARPers, whether the setting is a high-fantasy kingdom, or a gritty supernatural underworld hidden among city streets, the characters they play tend to fight for the side of good as a matter of narrative expectation.

But those heroes need people to quest against, and that’s where players like Rob Davies and Stuart Edwards come in. Davies and Edwards, Englishmen both, have each been participating in LARPs for over 20 years, and are the co-founders of LARPBook, a website and podcast catering to LARPers. They also like to play the villains.

Being a bad guy, whether it is a cold-blooded hitman or a brutish orc chieftain, takes a special kind of person. “I find it very easy to put things in a box,” says Edwards. “If I want to become a complete and utter bastard, I become a complete and utter bastard.” (Edwards is "a lovely, cuddly, happy, soft guy, normally.”)

An imposing physicality doesn’t hurt. Davies, described by Edwards as “quite a broad chap” with a lot of upper-body strength and long hair that can be collected into an assassin’s ponytail, is often approached to play villains due to his look. But he doesn’t seem to mind. “If you’re playing a mean, nasty, villainous character, it helps if you can physically intimidate the other characters a little bit,” he says.

It’s also important to them that their villains have goals to inform their actions. “Whether or not they are willing to kill children, whether they are willing to eat everyone around them, whether or not they are after complete and utter global domination,” says Edwards.

It is, in part, this clarity of purpose that makes playing villains so attractive. As Davies says, when portraying a hero, you are almost always reactionary, acting within a somewhat rigid moral code, as a result of the villain’s plan. But when you get to be the villain, you’re the one in the know, acting for your own reasons. Most people have less power over their daily lives than their villain characters, and it can be empowering to give in to a little selfish, fictional evil for a weekend.

When you’re playing a villain, you also get to act out all those darker impulses that you know you can’t indulge in your real life. “Logic says that it can’t feel that good to be that bad. But we all like getting away with stuff,” says Edwards. “I feel really naughty when I get away with not paying for a five-pence carrier bag.”

Talking about one of the most memorable villains he ever had the chance to play, a menacing heavy in a modern-day psychological horror LARP, Davies recalls the sense of confidence and power he felt. “It was that willingness to not listen to people and to say what I wanted. To point guns at people a few times. To pull the trigger a few times. Obviously in character.” It might sound extreme, depending on your views about consenting adults engaging in fake violence, but the cathartic feeling of exercising power without the requisite responsibilities is entirely relatable.

Of course all of this villainous behavior, as fulfilling as it might be for the participants, does have its downside, sometimes to the other LARPers, who can take you for the villain you played in the game. “You have to be ready, willing, and capable of not making any friends that day,” says Edwards. “‘Remember me? I was the one who pushed you into the tank of sharks.’”

At the end of the game, for Davies and Edwards, the act of becoming a villain is about more than the simple pleasures of being evil. As with any other fulfilling pastime, they’ve also found that it’s able to enrich their daily lives. Through their villain play, they are ironically able to remind themselves why it’s better to be a nice person in their daily lives. “Everyone is playing a game, and everyone knows everyone is playing a game, but there’s also always an element of a real reaction,” says Davies. “You do rechannel those characters in a positive way.”

For Stewart’s part, he sees the benefits as a way of inoculating himself somewhat to life’s daily annoyances. “It’s a release. Because we go through or daily lives seeing that person who just stole that parking space, that guy who’s just cut in line at the cinema ... knowing that what you want to do in that moment is something bad to that individual, but can’t do it. But in a LARP scenario, you get to, and in fact they encourage you to.”

If today’s complicated dating world disturbs you, imagine being a young woman in love in 17th-century Wales. You can’t wait to begin your life with your beau, but first, you need to prove to your parents that you’re ready to marry—by being bundled up in a sack and put to bed.

This unusual courtship ritual had a standard format. Step one: invite your date home to meet your parents. Step two: watch in horror as your mother ties you up from feet to waist in a heavy sack. Step three: get into your parents’ bed fully clothed next to your date under the watchful eyes of your parents, who place a thick wooden board between you and tuck you in for the night.

This practice would generally keep today’s young person from ever dating again, but bundling seems to have been popular in Ireland, the rural United Kingdom, and the New England colonies from the 16th into the 18th century. William Bingly in his travelogue North Wales described how the “lover steals, under the shadow of the night, to the bed of the fair one, into which (retaining an essential part of his dress) he is admitted without any shyness or reserve.”

In the heyday of bundling, ideas surrounding marriage and bedrooms were far removed from the privacy we currently hold dear. Bedrooms were semi-public spaces until roughly the late 18th century, and were used for anything from giving birth to entertaining guests. Bundling, which usually involved adolescents, just added one more ritual to the bedroom’s list of uses.

When two teens were interested in one another, if both sets of parents approved, the girl’s parents invited the boy to the home, often on Saturday nights, and bundling process began. The bundling bag, a readily available, makeshift chastity device, was normally tied around the lower half of the girl’s body, though some accounts claim that each young person was placed into a bundling bag up to their necks, if possible.

But not everyone was in favor of letting their kids sleep in a bed with the opposite sex. Bundling drew ire from contemporary religious leaders and later from historians in Victorian England. In the 19th century, Henry Reed Stiles writes in his history of Connecticut that bundling “sapped the fountain of morality and tarnished the escutcheons of thousands of families,” though in Holland, where a similar practice was called “queesting”, it was hardly ever abused.

Contemporary preacher Jonathan Edwards outwardly spoke against bundling as a risky practice teetering on the edge of dangerous promiscuity, writing that this seemingly new sexual awakening of common people would “ruin a person's reputation and be looked upon as sufficient evidences of a prostitute" had it happened in any other country; he also worried about pregnancies preceding wedlock.The latter was probably a legitimate fear; pregnancies following bundling weren’t unheard of, and one in 10 of every first child born in colonial America was born eight months after marriage. One poem of the time, reprinted by Stiles, serves as a cautionary tale:

A bundling couple went to bed
With all their clothes from foot to head;
That the defense might seem complete
Each one was wrapped in a sheet
But oh, this bundling’s such a witch
The man of her did catch the itch,
And so provoked was the wretch
That she of his a bastard catch’d.

If this happened, of course, the family knew who the child’s father was, and a marriage was often secured immediately to save the daughter’s reputation. In Tudor England’s lower economic classes in particular, premarital sex was less of a social issue; simple contracts signed by the betrothed fathers, along with the town’s general acceptance of the union, was usually enough to officiate marriage.

According to the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1811, bundling also was “an expedient practiced in America on a scarcity of beds, where, on such occasions, husbands and parents frequently permitted travelers to bundle with their wives and daughters.” More than likely, the head of the household would share his bed first; some people made or bought beds with an easily inserted bundling board so they could rent out half a bed to travelers with ease.

The origins of bundling may have come, as Stiles suggested, from a simple lack of fuel and cash in the cold winter months. Others believe its use as a legitimate marriage bolster originated from the story of Boaz and Ruth in Judeo-Christian religious texts, as social historian Yochi Fischer-Yinon described in his article The Original Bundlers. In the story, wealthy landowner Boaz and maiden Ruth spend a night getting to know one another on a thatched floor by talking and sleeping only, before committing to a happy marriage.

Bundling became so attractive to some parents in the 1960s that it was briefly revived, and was used in religious Christian communities including Amish culture. A tongue-in-cheek article of Christianity Today in 1969 described a student group called “The Society to Bring Back Bundling”, and according to Fischer-Yinon, bundling was seen as “a nostalgic attempt to provide a warm, safe and ‘decent’ alternative to the sexual encounters of young couples taking place in parked cars or deserted places.”

But bundling was a more revolutionary approach to love than it looks to modern couples. Historian Lucy Worsley points out that bundling “was a step along the way towards your spouse being a matter of personal choice rather than someone picked out for you by your parents.” Bundling meant that the virtues of the young couple were maintained, but they could experiment with one another, talk late into the night, and learn what it would be like to spend hours with just one person, waking up next to them in the morning.  

Despite its possible benefits and in part because of its definite weirdness, bundling fell out of fashion at the turn of the 19th century. Victorian sensibilities disapproved of premarital bed-sharing for couples, bedrooms became more private spaces, and better heating erased the need for body warmth.

While professional cuddlers have taken up the mantle for public bed-sharing these days, as a business model and cultural practice it's a far cry from the weird dating world of yore. Most of the modern U.K. and U.S. probably don’t mourn the loss, preferring to find their true loves sans bag and board—but for those of you who wish to get back to the good old days of dating, you could always give this style of authentic courtship a try.

Say it's 1820 and you're an uneducated, lower-class chap with nights and weekends free who needs to pick up a few extra quid. You might consider the profitable, if criminal, profession of body snatching.

In the early days of surgery, dissecting a corpse was seen as a heinous defilement of the body, akin to cannibalism in its vulgarity. But the growing field of surgical science demanded bodies for study. The gallows were the only place surgeons could get cadavers. Executed criminals were fair game to slice and dice, as were suicide victims, but not regular law-abiding corpses. Even in the crime-riddled streets of London and Edinburgh, there weren't enough bodies to train the new classes of young surgeons in the growing field.

So intrepid anatomists determined to educate their students would hire a body snatcher. It was a simple case of supply and demand. The surgeons needed bodies to dissect, and out-of-work men knew just where to find them: cemeteries, of course. 

People had been robbing graves practically since humanity began burying its dead, usually for jewelry or money, but never had the corpse itself been so valuable. A league of "resurrection men" (so called because they "resurrected" the dead) took to the streets in the dead of night. In middle class cemeteries a watchman could be given a cut to look the other way. In the graveyards of the less prosperous where there was no such guard snatching was considerably easier. Fresh bodies were obviously preferable, so they would browse funerary announcements to find out where the newly dead would be buried.

The resurrectionists would dig a small hole near the head of the coffin then drag the body out with a rope. Clothing and jewelry were left behind; stealing those could be considered a felony, but if they were caught stealing a body it was only a misdemeanor. The grave would be filled back in and mourners might never know a grave was empty.

In The Diary of a Resurrectionist, dated January 13, 1812, a resurrection man details his work over the course of a night:

"Took 2 of the above to Mr Brookes & 1 large & 1 small to Mr Bell. Foetus to Mr Carpue. Small to Mr Framton. Large small to Mr Cline. Met at 5, the Party went to Newington. 2 adults. Took them to St Thomas’s."

"Large" here refers to adults, while "small" refers to children. Clearly, no grave was safe from the body snatcher's shovel. In fact, anatomists would have been glad to receive bodies that were not adult men. Bodies of children and women, particularly pregnant women, were a rare and desirable (if macabre) commodity. 

Other entries from the resurrectionist's diary include reference to selling just the extremities of a body to places like St. Thomas' and St. Bartholomew's reputable hospitals, whose body purchases were done on the sly. Their operating Surgeons would meet the grave robbers in back doors and alleyways to buy the stolen corpses in the wee hours of night. The operating theatres at St. Thomas and St. Bart's, where stolen cadavers would have been dissected for anatomy lectures, now operate museums dedicated to this crime-enabled medical history.

Saint Thomas Operating Theatre

LONDON, ENGLAND

Saint Bartholomew's Hospital Pathology Museum

LONDON, ENGLAND

Body snatchers were the lowest of low criminals. Practically every entry in The Diary of a Resurrectionist ends with, "all got drunk." They were disreputable characters known to congregate in the seedy end of London. One of these sites was commemorated as early as the 1660s in an inscription under the city's Golden Boy statue. 

The Golden Boy at Pye Corner

LONDON, ENGLAND

But it wasn't until the infamous Anatomy Murders that grave robbers were labeled as a public menace that had to be stopped.

William Burke and William Hare lived in Edinburgh in 1828. Burke made his money hawking secondhand clothes to paupers, Hare made his by renting his rooms out to lodgers. When one of his tenants was found dead, the pair decided to compensate for the lost wages from the dead lodger by selling his body to the anatomists at Edinburgh University's Surgeon's Square. The esteemed Dr. Robert Knox, father of modern anatomy, paid them £7 for the body. The two resurrectionists were told the surgeons "would be glad to see them again when they had another to dispose of."

Burke and Hare took Knox up on his offer. When a subsequent lodger showed symptoms of cholera, Hare and his wife agreed it would be unseemly to allow her to stay on the premises with other guests. He and Burke smothered the woman and brought her body to the Royal College of Surgeons. This time they were paid £10, and Dr. Knox commended them on the freshness of the body.

Their killing spree went on like this. Burke and Hare would murder unsuspecting lodgers and drifters in their sleep, sometimes sedating them with liquor first, then they would bring them to Dr. Knox. The bodies were used in anatomy lectures, where on more than one occasion students' claims that they recognized the deceased were waved away. 

Eventually another lodger found the undelivered body of Burke and Hare's final victim hidden in a haystack. Their business was traced back to the Royal College of Surgeons. Knox claimed innocence of the murders and was exonerated. Burke and Hare were tried and convicted for the killing of 17 people, the former receiving the death sentence while the latter was merely jailed temporarily. 

In an ironic twist of fate, Burke's body was donated to the Royal College of Surgeons, supplying the institution one final time. He was dissected before a sold-out lecture, a letter was written in his blood, his skeleton put on display, and his skin was used to bind a book and a wallet.

Surgeons' Hall Museum

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND

A media firestorm ensued. Newspapers ran with the salacious story of the two murderers supplying the vicious field of surgery. Copycats followed: The "London Burkers" were arrested in 1831 for a series of similar murders. Mysteriously, just a few years after the Anatomy Murders two young boys discovered dolls depicting Burke and Hare's victims hidden in a park. Who made the dolls or why is still unknown.

Burke and Hare Murder Dolls

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND

The public was terrified by these increased reports of grave robbery. Death rites were sacred for the Georgians, as evidenced by the highly specific mourning customs that evolved over the 19th century. To have your loved one's ceremonious wake and funeral capped off by a disgraceful dismemberment was the ultimate affront to class and society, not to mention just disrespectful and icky. Families feared that body snatchers were coming for their dear deceased, and funneled even more money into funerary costs to protect against grave robbing. These measures included installing permanent mortsafes, giant metal cages atop the graves. An example can still be seen at Greyfriars Cemetery in Edinburgh.

Greyfriars Cemetery Mortsafes

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND

In Scotland two popular solutions arose. One was morthouses, circular buildings in graveyards where coffins would be stored until the bodies inside were too rotten to be of any use to anatomists and their hired snatchers. The second solution was to hire a watchman, either for one specific grave or the entire burial ground. The round, squat buildings constructed to protect the watchmen from the elements are still visible in some cemeteries. The manor cemetery at Boleskine House, for one, features a watchman's shelter, which is linked to the house cellar by a mysterious underground tunnel.

Boleskine House

FOYERS, SCOTLAND

A more unbelievable (and sadly, more difficult to find) anti-grave robbing mechanism was the cemetery gun. It was a spring-loaded revolver, trip wired to shoot at anyone trespassing in a cemetery when they shouldn't be. An example of this rare cemetery gun is on display at the Museum of Mourning Art in Pennsylvania.

Museum of Mourning Art

DREXEL HILL, PENNSYLVANIA

Though the phenomenon of grave robbing is most often linked to the United Kingdom, it certainly occurred in the United States. Human remains believed to be stolen have been found in medical institutions from the Medical College of Georgia to Harvard University. While corpses stolen in the U.S. were more often snatched from black cemeteries and potters' fields, there was at least one occasion of body snatching at the cemetery St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery and another from New York's historic Trinity Churchyard. Both of these, unsurprisingly, caused a greater stir than the theft of any poor person of color's body.

Trinity Churchyard

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

A crackdown on body snatching came in the wake of the Burke and Hare murders and London Burkers. British Parliament enacted the Anatomy Act of 1832, loosening restrictions around the procurement of bodies for anatomy courses. In addition to bodies of the executed, bodies of prisoners, orphans, and unclaimed corpses from the morgue were all fair game for anatomy lessons. Additionally, several doctors put out a call to their aging brethren to donate their own bodies to science. A few took up the challenge. Graves were no longer violated in the name of medical progress.

Anatomy labs are no longer the leering event they were in the 19th century. Civilians, as well as dedicated scientists, today donate their bodies after death, and modern med schools frequently include a funeral service to honor the anonymous body on their slabs. 

On a cold January night in 1924, a young woman flaunting a stylish bobbed haircut slinked into the Thomas Roulston grocery store in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. She was dolled up in a fine sealskin coat, beaded gray dress, black shoes, and stockings. Just as the male clerk was wrapping up her order of a dozen eggs, she suddenly whipped out a .25 automatic pistol from her fur coat and shouted: “Stick ‘em up! Quick!”

“Then up they went, both arms together, like one of those monkey’s you buy on a stick with a string at the ten cent store,” the woman would later recount. “I thought, ‘Gee, that would make a pretty toy for my baby.’”

The grocer and five other clerks had become the first victims of the eventually infamous "Bobbed Haired Bandit"—a now-forgotten criminal who was an icon of liberated women in 1920s New York. For three and a half months in 1924, married couple Celia and Edward Cooney embarked on a series of armed robberies around Brooklyn, inspiring tabloid news stories, satirical cartoons, and political and cultural agendas. Depending on what paper you read, the Bobbed Haired Bandit was a ruthless libertine, a heroine of the lower class, a weak woman controlled by her husband, or a trailblazer of the feminist movement.

The “Bobbed-Haired Bandit and Her Tall Companion” can be thought of as an early iteration of the 1930s gangsters Bonnie and Clyde, says Andrew Mattson, co-author of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York. Ultimately though, it was Celia’s five-foot frame, fashionable 1920s style, and “baby automatic” that stole newspaper headlines.

“She became such a big sensation in the papers because she was a woman with a gun driving a fast car, and that was exciting, that was titillating,” says Mattson. “She was a bobbed-haired woman in the 1920s, so she became a symbol of everything that was wrong with ‘women these days.’”

The era of Prohibition in the early 20th century was a period marked by poverty, deep schisms in social class, gangs, and high crime rates. While it wasn’t uncommon for women to be involved in an array of criminal activities, they were almost always accomplices to men. A woman might carry and conceal a gun, but the male gangster would usually be the one doing the shooting. And yet, according to witnesses and victims, the Bobbed Haired Bandit seemed to be in charge, says Mattson.

“This was a narrative that was attached to a lot of the fears of the era,” he says. “This was the era of the flapper, women smoking, women getting the vote, women driving cars, and doing nontraditional jobs. [Robbery] was another nontraditional job that women were moving into.”

Some New Yorkers saw her as a celebration of female empowerment, while others saw her as a symptom of the corrupted modern woman. But while the newspapers drew up their own picture of the Bobbed Haired Bandit, Celia Cooney never intended on being a bold figure for women’s rights.

Celia was born in a basement in a New York City apartment. She and her eight older siblings were neglected by their parents. Both parents were uneducated, and their father drank heavily. According to reports at the time in The New York Times and New York World, the children were sent out to beg on the streets and were eventually placed under the care of their aunt.

At the age of 16, Celia became independent and began her career as a laundry worker in 1919. She married Ed Cooney on May 18, 1923. The 20-year-old bride and 25-year-old auto repairman were maintaining a mediocre but happy lifestyle in a small room in Bedford, when Celia became pregnant. She dreamed of providing a well-furnished home for her husband and family—the kind she saw in the movies, magazines, and shop windows.

Celia later revealed that “this was something she was doing not because she was a female bandit queen,” says Mattson. “She was stealing money so she could buy a bedroom set and a dine-net set for her home. She very much saw herself as a traditional wife and mother-to-be.”

The Cooneys targeted mostly smaller victims—drug stores, groceries, and markets in Brooklyn. Each job was orchestrated in a similar manner: Celia would be the first to draw her weapon as Ed stood menacingly at six-feet-tall near the back of the shop with two guns. Ed collected the money from the cash register (usually amounting to a few hundred dollars) and drove them off in a mad dash. The papers usually played up Celia’s role in the robberies, while Ed took the side seat.

The Bobbed Haired Bandit became a local celebrity and household name. Iterations of “Bobbed Bandit” and “Gun Girl” were plastered in headlines of almost every local paper from the Daily News, New York Post, Brooklyn Eagle, and New York Times. She was even worked into vaudeville routines, songs, and poems, such as this one published in the Brooklyn Standard Union:

Still she progresses.
The girl with the bob 
Is right on the job
And, in the Holdup Clan
She has proven that she
The equal can be
Of any bandit man

“How Celia was portrayed had less to do with her and more to do with the presumed biases of the audience of the papers and the editor’s and reporter’s attitudes about gender,” says Stephen Duncombe, co-author of The Bobbed Haired Bandit.

Some of the papers even used her to mock how the city’s mayor and police force were powerless and ineffective in controlling a crime-ridden New York. Faced with such ridicule, police set up a massive hunt for the Bobbed Haired Bandit, placing roadblocks and arresting and stopping all bobbed-haired women who looked suspicious. The singer Ella Fitzgerald, who sported the popular bob and drove a car, was even stopped on 59th Street and accused of being the infamous bandit, says Mattson.

“The police would claim they had caught the Bobbed Haired Bandit, only to have it turn out it was another woman [criminal],” says Duncombe. The police even imprisoned one Helen Quigley for a month and a half, causing Celia and Ed to leave behind a note at their next stint that mocked their failed efforts:

“You dirty fish-peddling bums, leave this innocent girl alone and get the right ones, which is nobody else but us, and we are going to give Mr. Hogan, the manager of Roulston’s, another visit, as we got two checks we couldn’t cash, and also ask Bohack’s manager did I ruin his cash register. Also I will visit him again, as I broke a perfectly good automatic on it. We defy you fellows to catch us.”

The Cooneys’ robberies came to an alarming halt on April 1, 1924, at the National Biscuit Company's payroll office. The cashier there tried to make a grab for Celia, who stumbled back and fell over a chair. Thinking she had been struck or cut, Ed fired two shots, injuring the cashier (many of the papers incorrectly stated at first that Celia had been the shooter). It was the first and only time anyone had been hurt in one of their robberies.

The pair fled in a panic, leaving behind $8,000 in an open safe. They moved to Florida, where Celia gave birth to Katherine. However, the baby became ill and died eight days after she was born. The Cooneys were eventually identified and caught after the police searched maternity wards in Florida.

They both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in prison. Paroled after seven years, Ed and Celia had two sons, Patrick and Edward Jr., who would not learn of their mother’s bandit past until her death on July 13, 1992. She had kept her and Ed’s string of robberies a secret for 50 years.

“It was a terrible, terrible shock,” her son Ed told Mattson and Duncombe. “I mean I just never dreamed that any of this had taken place.”

When the Bobbed Haired Bandit and Her Tall Companion were at last captured, the mystery and allure of their tale quickly vanished. Celia Cooney had been portrayed as a vicious, gun-bearing woman overturning moral convention, but in reality she'd taken up robbery so she could live a middle-class life as a mother and wife. She later outwardly rejected the idea that she was a gender revolutionary, says Mattson. Unintentionally, Celia and the Bobbed Haired Bandit became a lightning rod for debates of the time.

“We really liked Celia Cooney. It’s really hard not to fall for her,” says Mattson. “She really is both a character and a heroine. While she was breaking the law, she was the little person of the working class who you could identify with.”

If a burglar is on the loose, what better way to catch them with a gun that launches a hundred square-foot nylon net? At least, that's what one inventor thought in 1969.

In the video above, archived by British Pathé, an inventor by the name of Colin Brown shows how his device "net-a-thief" can easily capture a robber who had stolen five penny stamps from the post office. At the pull of a trigger, the projectile instrument, or net gun, launches four weights that are attached to the netting. When the net traps the robber, the weights swing around the victim's body, rendering him immobile.

"It's not as easy as it might seem to get out of a hundred square-feet of nylon netting," says the narrator.

While you certainly can catch an adult human with a net gun today, the devices are not typically used to entrap robbers. Rather, they are a popular option to humanely trap animals, and even drones hovering in zones they shouldn't be in. 

It may be "simple, cheap, and effective," but net guns sadly never caught on as a primary way to capture criminals. 

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