1899 poster for the magician Zan Zig (via Wikimedia) 

The first magic tricks were recorded as far back at 2700 BCE, with the (possibly fictional) magician Dedi’s conjuring tricks in ancient Egypt. But despite magic’s lengthy history, it still remains a field shrouded in mystery. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, a magician stumps you with the eternal question of, "how the hell did he do that?"

The home base of the professional magician used to be their local magic shop, once an exclusive gathering place for magicians to hone their craft while stocking their supplies. Unfortunately, with the popularity of internet retail, many of the world’s magic shops have closed up their doors and gone online. However, there are some magic shops that are just too exceptional to do anything but thrive. These incredible shops continue to mystify professional magicians and amateurs alike.

TANNEN’S MAGIC
New York, New York

Tannen's Magic (photograph by Michelle Enemark/Atlas Obscura)

New York City has a rich and long history with the modern magic movement; the city is even home base to the Society of American Magicians, the oldest magic society in the world. However, only one shop in New York has earned bragging rights as the city’s oldest magic emporium and that’s Tannen’s Magic. Situated in a dimly lit office building on Herald Square, the shop’s modest exterior belies a charming interior where supplies are conveniently organized by type of magic: coin, dove, cigarette, and knife, to name just a few.

Serving magicians since 1925, the shop has seen its share of famous names come through its doors. However, for the novice magician, the store’s knowledgeable staff will gladly demonstrate any of the store’s copious tricks and products. In addition to its impressive supplies and staff, the store also hosts several lectures and workshops throughout the year, as well as a full-fledged magic camp, which has been frequented by several professionals including master illusionist David Blaine.

DAVENPORTS
London, England

Vintage photograph of Davenports (via Davenports Magic)

Founded by Lewis Davenport in 1898, Davenports Magic has earned the unique distinction of being the oldest family-owned magic shop in the world. Currently run by Roy Davenport, who, like his great, great grandfather, is a professional magician, the shop’s current location is in the Charing Cross Underground arcade. Along with an impressive array of tricks, tools, and illusions the store has a private theater that can be accessed from inside.

This magic studio not only serves as a base of operations for Davenports' acclaimed magic school, but also as a meeting place for the London Society of Magicians.

DENNY AND LEE’S MAGIC STUDIO
Baltimore, Maryland

After retiring from a lucrative career performing at cooperate events across the United States, master magician Denny Haney became disillusioned by the commercialization of the modern magic shop. Yearning for the stores of his youth where real magicians would convene and learn the tricks of the trade, he founded Denny and Lee’s Magic Studio in 1990. The shop takes a no-nonsense approach to magic (gag gifts and novelty items are strictly prohibited) and caters exclusively towards a clientele with a true interest in learning the craft.

In addition to carrying a comprehensive stock of tricks and tools, Denny and Lee’s Magic Studio also hosts several classes and workshops to train the upcoming generation of magicians. Haney’s purist approach to the modern magic shop has been surprisingly successful and the shop has since opened a Las Vegas location based on the same values.

THE MAGIC APPLE
Los Angeles, California 

The Magic Apple (photograph by Brent Geris)

In a city built on entertainment and the real life illusions of the film and television industries, it’s no surprise that Los Angeles is filled with its share of magic shops. However, the shop most renowned by professional magicians isn’t occupying a glitzy spot on the Sunset Strip or Hollywood Boulevard — it’s in an unassuming strip mall in Studio City.

The Magic Apple is a store with serious magicians in mind. While admittedly, the store’s number one seller is the rubber chicken, the main offerings are in traditional magic fare: cups, balls, silks, cards, coins, all with elusive secret tricks that only a skilled magic practitioner can unlock. As owner Brent Geris states, “there hasn’t been a magician in town that hasn’t come through here,” and with the shop’s traditionalist approach to magic, it seems to be true.

ECLECTICA
Rome, Italy

Magic scene (via Eclectica)

Located in the heart of Rome, walking distance from the Pantheon, is Italy’s oldest magic and curiosity shop: Eclectica. The store truly lives up to its name, carrying not only the latest in magic tricks and props, but also a bevy of quirky vintage goods and antiques. In Eclectica’s eccentric atmosphere, it is not uncommon to find garden gnomes and vintage bicycles alongside rope tricks and invisible ink.

The juxtaposition of campy antique treasures and top-of-the-line magic supplies give the shop an otherworldly charm not to be found elsewhere.

MAGICLAND
Tokyo, Japan

Unlike other cities where magic is performed in comedy clubs or theaters, Japan has a thriving magic bar scene that has sprung an entire subculture of magicians and practitioners of “close-up” magic. Typically owned by magicians, Japan’s magic bars offer an intimate venue where magic and magic alone is the only entertainment on the menu. Ton San Onosaka’s delightfully ramshackle MagicLand serves as both the unofficial hub and supply house for this thriving magic bar movement. Onosaka is a master magician with over 40 years of experience, his card tricks are legendary, and his shop is very much geared towards the magic insider.

Located in the business district of Nihombashi, the shop is small and difficult to find, but once inside it’s hard to deny the shop’s chaotic charm. The ceiling is plastered with photos of famous magicians who have visited the shop and the walls are filled to the ceiling with props and tricks. Onosaka’s wife, who is known as Mama-san, presides over the shop and demonstrates tricks to prospective customers, giving a familial air to this cluttered gem.

TAM SHEPHERD’S TRICK SHOP
Glasgow, Scotland

Tam Shepherd’s Trick Shop (photograph by Jordanhill School D&T Dept/Flickr)

Originally opened in 1886 by Tam Shepherd and later purchased by Lewis Davenport (of Davenports London fame) in the 1930s, Tam Shepherd’s Trick Shop has delighted would-be magicians and tricksters for over 100 years. The shop has stayed in the family, and is currently owned by Davenport’s great, great granddaughter Jean and her husband, world-renowned magician and creator of the “card warp,” Roy Walton. Still housed in its original location on Queen Street, the store is small, but packed with hidden treasures: props, tricks, masks, gags, and a series of mysterious boxes under the counter that house the latest in magic.

While the shop is part of the ultimate in UK magic pedigree, it still never takes itself too seriously; requests for fake dog poop are treated with the same gravity as the latest illusion. It’s this cheerful, laissez-faire attitude towards magic that has made the shop a favorite among children for generations.

MAYETTE MAGIE MODERNE
Paris, France

Paris is a truly bewitching city with a deep history in magic, so it’s hardly surprising the city is home to the oldest magic shop in the world. Mayette Magie Moderne, which translates to Mayette Modern Magic, was originally opened in 1808. It has also earned the distinction as the first magic store in the world to sell magic tricks and tools to the public, opening up the world of magic to generations of non-professionals.

This magic for everyone attitude is still prevalent in the shop today, which has tricks and supplies for everyone from the magic loving novice, to the seasoned professional. Located in the heart of Paris, the store is still chock full of historical charm and whimsy. 

Discover more magic destinations and history on Atlas Obscura >

Aerial view of the Berlin Wall (image via US Military / Wikimedia)

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the 28 years of the wall's existence, thousands of citizens of East Berlin attempted to escape from the repressive regime, despite the numerous terrifying ways to die while crossing the wall and its associated "death zone." Tragically, hundreds were killed in the attempt, but that did not prevent people from devising increasingly ambitious and desperately creative ways to get across. Here's a roundup of the most unique and ingenious ways people made it across the wall — under, over, through, or around.  

Under the Wall

A member of the state railway inspects the Wollankstraße tunnel (image via Peter Heinz Junge / Wikimedia)

In the early days of the wall, tunneling underneath it was the most popular way through. Some tunnels were dug under basements; others through the sewers. A dozen people escaped through Der Seniorentunnel ("the Senior Citizens Tunnel"), which began at a chicken coop and was constructed by a group of elderly citizens led by an 81-year-old man. Another ingenious access point turned out to be in the Pankow Municipal cemetery, where students turned a well-kept gravestone into a hidden tunnel doorway. More than twenty people were able to escape through this tunnel before the Stasi discovered it and sealed it off.  

Over the Wall

East German border guard Conrad Schumann leaps into West Berlin over barbed wire on August 15, 1961 (image via Peter Leibing / Wikimedia)

East German border guards had shoot-to-kill orders, so going over the wall meant almost certain death. But many attempts were still made, including one man who successfully climbed over the nine-foot steel-mesh fence using meat hooks. In 1983 Holger Bethke constructed an elaborate zip line to take him over: Pretending to be electricians, he and a friend snuck into an attic with wires and cables hung around their necks, and in the middle of the night they shot an arrow strung with 200 meters of fishing line into West Berlin, where another friend was waiting to secure it to a chimney. They strung a thicker fishing line along the first, fed a steel cable over that, and then careened down the cable on wooden rollers. Another famous airborne escape occurred in 1979: Hans Strelczyk and Gunter Wetzel constructed a homemade hot-air balloon and sailed over the wall with their wives and children — eight people in all. Working together over many months, the escapees pieced together bits of fabric from many different sources (umbrellas, tents, bed linens) to stitch the balloon, welded a basket frame out of found pieces of steel, and built a DIY gas-fired burner out of old propane cylinders. Their ingenious but harrowing escape later inspired the movie Night Crossing. 

Through the Wall 

An Eastern guard speaks to a Westerner through a broken seam in the wall (image via Sharon Emerson / Wikimedia)

Going through the wall could be sly or brazen. Many people hacked automobiles: enlarging the fuel tank, constructing a fake double floor to conceal a person beneath, even modifying a seat to squeeze someone into. In a much more audacious car hack, in 1963 Heinz Meixner removed the windshield of his tiny convertible and, when the border guards attempted to detain him at the checkpoint, he ducked down, floored the accelerator, and sailed through under the barrier to the West. In a much less thought-out plan, that same year Wolfgang Engels stole a tank and attempted to smash through the wall. He didn't quite make it and was shot while trying to scramble over the remaining barbed wire, but West Berlin guards came to his aid and brought him to safety. Similar escapes were made with a bulldozer and even a train.

Around the Wall

Berlin Wall death strip, 1977 (image via George Garrigues / Wikimedia)

If you couldn't find a way over, under, or through the wall, the only thing left to do was figure out a way around it. In the early days of the wall, many people swam across the Spree River, but in 1965 metal spikes were set into the water just under the surface, providing a very strong deterrent. That left taking the oceanic route out of Germany altogether. In November 1986 Dirk Deckert and Karsten Kluender made it to Denmark by surfing through the frigid ocean for six hours. The following year, an unidentified man paddled from East to West across the Baltic Sea on an air mattress. Much earlier, in 1967, Bernd Böttger, a chemical worker who had been expelled from engineering school, spent a year constructing the first mini-submarine with an internal-combustion motor. Once he completed the sub in 1968, he rode in it for 16 miles — at 3mph — and escaped to Denmark. 

Panorámica de Teotihuacan (image via José Luis Ruiz / Flickr)

Archaeologists may be a bit closer to solving one of the greatest ancient Mesoamerican mysteries: Who ruled the ancient city of Teotihuacán, and where are they buried? Small remote-controlled robots have led the team excavating the ruins to a cache of around 50,000 objects — from intricately carved sculptures to obsidian blades to jewelry — in a tunnel underneath the Temple of the Plumed Serpent that is now believed to lead to the royal tombs.

One of the feathered serpent heads that decorated the Temple of the Feathered Serpent (image via Jami Dwyer / Wikimedia)

Although Teotihuacán was once one of the largest cities in the world, with an estimated 125,000 residents at its peak, little is known about it. It was established around 100 BCE and is believed to have lasted until the 7th century CE, when it was abandoned. The city was an industrial hub and achieved great wealth as a center for the obsidian trade, and the ruins now cover 32 square miles of temples, pyramids, and residences. It is not known what the city was called by those who built and lived in it; the Aztecs gave it the name Teotihuacán, which means something like "The Place Where Men Become Gods." 

The city's main thoroughfare is called the Street of the Dead, which is bound on one end by an enclosed courtyard that contains the Temple of the Plumed Serpent, a six-level pyramid. The 330-foot tunnel runs 40 feet beneath the temple and was intentionally sealed 1,800 years ago, its entrance covered with rocks and the tunnel itself filled with debris, including the remains of hundreds of sacrificial bodies. The existence of the tunnel and its chambers was not discovered until 2003, and excavations have barely begun. Last year the robots were deployed at the site for the first time, and hundreds of orbs covered in pyrite, also known as "fools' gold," were discovered.

The remote-controlled Tlaloc II-TC (image via INAH Mexico)

The remote-controlled robots, called Tlaloc-II after the Aztec god of rain, are small vehicles equipped with lasers, scanners, and a video camera to take measurements and relay images above ground. So far the team, led by archaeologist Sergio Gomez of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, has excavated only two feet into the chamber, but they're confident this is the royal burial site they've been searching for. "It can’t be in any other place,” Gomez said. “We’ve been able to confirm all of the hypotheses we’ve made from the beginning.”

A mural of a scene from Mughal-E-Azam in Mumbai, created for the Bollywood Art Project (all photographs by the author)

Walls in India are hardly ever bare; it’s a difficult task to find a wall in the country that isn’t covered in fly-posters, paan spittle, or colorful graffiti. But one Indian suburb is taking this latter example to an extreme.

Bandra, a suburb located in West Mumbai, was originally developed as a trading post for the Portuguese in the 16th century, but today is known for its diverse street art. In the streets surrounding its array of unique restaurants and hip cafes, it is impossible to visit without stumbling across the work of talented artists living and working within the area. However, Bandra hasn’t always been Mumbai’s street art capital.

In 2008, four artists from the National Institute of Design started the Wall Project. The initiative aimed to add a bit of color to Bandra by turning its dull and vacant walls into vibrant pieces of art, thereby rejuvenating several areas that had long been in ruin. Over the last few years they have given the suburb a terrific makeover — one that reflects the diverse range of people and perspectives within the community, whilst transforming its damaged and decrepit walls.

Creators from all over the world are coming to Bandra to paint, as shown by this piece by French artist "Rock"

The project has helped develop unused walls into canvasses for aspiring artists, and also promoted Mumbai as a city for foreigners to create and curate their own work. This has led to artists from all over the world having their work on the walls within the suburb, putting Bandra on the map for its street art. One example of this "art tourism" is the above eye-catching piece by the French artist "Rock," which can be found on Chapel Road. Just around the corner from this piece visitors can find another mural portraying two Bollywood actors embracing. The scene (shown at the top of this post) is taken from the film Mughal-E-Azam and is joined by another mural paying homage to the legendary Bollywood actress Madhubala nearby.

These were created by Ranjit Dahiya as part of the Bollywood Art Project, which aims to turn Mumbai’s walls into a living memorial to classic Indian cinema. This project has a particular significance for Bandra, as the suburb is home to the famous Mehboob Studio, a Bollywood production company responsible for several successful Indian films.

A more recent addition to Bandra’s walls of late is a collection of murals developed for Polaris 2014, Wilson College’s media festival. These are situated on Hill Road and cover topics like social change and environmentalism. They extend alongside a major road that dissects the suburb, meaning they are almost unavoidable to any persons who may pass by.

Detail of the Polaris wall

Section of the Polaris wall

In many cases, the places being redecorated belong to small businesses and homeowners. It is these individuals who grant permission to have their walls painted, often encouraging the artists by supplying basic equipment, such as ladders, for them to work with. This exchange has helped over the last few years to repair numerous walls within the suburb, including those that residents couldn’t afford to maintain themselves. 

But perhaps the most impressive element to the street art scene in Bandra is its inclusivity. Both young and old are getting involved, developing ideas, and executing their plans to improve the suburb. Street art in India is booming, with many exceptional artists producing extraordinary work within several different Indian cities, including Bangalore, and parts of Uttar Pradesh, such as Delhi and Varanasi.While the Wall Project started with humble aspirations, it’s clear it has started something tremendous in the country, contributing inspiration and color to many major cities in India. With similar initiatives such as the Bollywood Art Project also gathering support and press attention, India’s future is certainly bright.

 Image of Madhubala on Chapel Road, produced as part of the Bollywood Art Project

A 2013 march against drones (photograph by Debra Sweet/Flickr)

Drone. The word itself inspires dread. Despite passionate defenders, the unmanned craft has become the great symbol of civilian casualties in a war with no end and no clear enemy, prosecuted from an antiseptic distance. So provocative is the term “drone” that when Jeff Bezos suggested delivering packages for Amazon with drones, many reacted with a mixture of panic and ridicule. The company quickly became a late night punch line.

The connotation of “drone” has become so negative that many of the engineers, scientists, and artists pursuing positive uses for the technology prefer to call their craft UAV or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Moreover, those positive uses are many and far in scope and have potential benefits far beyond parcel delivery. Here are just a few examples:

Art & Performance

Quebec’s acrobatics juggernaut Cirque du Soleil recently teamed up with a company called ETH Zurich and their offshoot production studio Verity Studios to produce a stunning video called "Sparked," in which a performer dances with “magic” flying lampshades. Each colorful and illuminated shade hid a small drone, which had been meticulously pre-programmed. The widely distributed video captured only a taste of what kind of performances and visual imagery might come from the technology, and the Cirque organization reportedly hopes to be able to use drones in live shows.

Meanwhile, camera operators and special effects crews have begun to use the unmanned craft to obtain complicated, previously cost prohibitive aerial shots for movies and television shows. International projects like Skyfall and the Harry Potter films have used drone technology without running afoul of authorities, while American filmmakers have thus far had to go guerrilla. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street contains several aerial shots that were obtained by a camera mounted to an octocopter, which might not have been quite legal given FAA red tape. Fortunately for these American filmmakers, the FAA recently granted permission for six special effects companies to use drone technology to shoot film and television.

Visual artists have also begun exploring uses for drone technology. The graffiti artist KATSU has developed a spray-painting drone, ideal for the acrophobic street artist looking to decorate high up and otherwise inaccessible surfaces. With permission, obviously. For photographers, Live Science recently wrote about a group of scientists at MIT are working on a tiny drone that would contain flashes for the purpose of assisting photographers in lighting their subjects, whether they be human or animal, animate or inanimate. 

News Gathering

The Fresno Bee was one of the many news organizations to begin testing drone technology as a means of news gathering, though they were also treated to a cease and desist letter from the FAA. The Bee argued that the cost of the drones, from $600 to $1,200, was far cheaper and more environmentally friendly than the use of a standard helicopter.

Local television stations and national networks like CNN are also interested in the technology, especially now that the FAA is moving toward making such craft legal. Recognizing that there are plenty of ethical implications to using this technology — picture tiny, flying paparazzi crashing George and Amal’s wedding — the University of Missouri’s journalism program has begun to formally study the use of drones in news gathering, and will hopefully come up with ethical guidelines that will balance privacy and air traffic safety with freedom of the press. 

Drone in the forest (photograph by Sam Beebe/Flickr)

Environmental Conservation 

Since drones are cheaper, quieter, more maneuverable, and have an all around lower footprint than standard aircraft,  it follows that cash-strapped, sustainability conscious environmental groups and scientific organizations would make use of them. Conservation Drones has the mission of using UAVs to save the planet, designing and repurposing military grade drones for green projects. So far, their craft have been used to track down threats to endangered animals such elephant poachers and whaling vessels, as well as monitor the location and number of animals ranging from birds to great apes.

Scientists in Massachusetts are using drones for several oceanic research purposes, including tracking sea life and mapping the ocean floor. China uses drones to track polluters, while in the in the USA, NASA uses a military surplus drone to study dangerous storms like hurricanes. 

Fire and Rescue

Fire departments and other first responders across the United States are also researching drones of various sizes to aid in search and rescue and firefighting. One fire department in Alabama has obtained a small drone and it hopes will help search burning buildings for those in need of rescue, sparing firefighters the risk that comes with searching hazardous structures.

Drones can also help by searching large or inaccessible areas, such as oceans and mountain ranges. In Nova Scotia, a group of lost hikers were found and rescued with the assistance of a small drone. Larger drones are being developed to actually fight fires by spraying water and foam, and also to carry heavy equipment to remote areas. 

A drone's eye view of Pevensey Castle in East Sussex, England (photograph by Vicki Burton/Flickr)

Archaeology

Because brick and stone emits different energy than dirt, archaeologists can use a technique called thermography to discover buried structures without disturbing the ground around them. Drones have also proved incredibly useful as they can cut imaging time down from weeks and months to days. This technique recently uncovered an ancient Pueblo burial site, with minimal cultural disturbance. In addition to aerial thermography, drones can be employed to cost effectively and efficiently create detailed maps of archeological sites. 

Toys

Of course, sometimes the best purpose of technology is no purpose at all. All sorts of toy drones are in development, positioned as the next generation of remote control airplanes. One company is now offering a camera-equipped drone to follow you around like a flying puppy. Then again, maybe a puppy won't be such a hassle, if you can get your drone to walk it.

A drone meets a cow (photograph by Mauricio Lima/Flickr)

 Ganges riverbank in Varanasi (image by Jeeheon Cho / Wikimedia)

The Ganges is the largest river in India, providing water to more than 500 million people. It also has extremely important religious significance in Hindu culture — personified as the goddess Ganga, Hindu faith holds that bathing in the river can absolve one's sins, and that anyone who is cremated on the river's banks, or whose ashes are submerged within it, will achieve salvation. 

Devotees taking holy bath during festival of Ganga Dashara (image by gbSk / Wikimedia)

The Ganges is also one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world. In 2012 it was estimated that nearly 89 million liters of raw, untreated sewage is dumped into the river from the 12 different towns along its banks. There are also 150 industrial plants along the river releasing effluents into the water, not to mention the vast unquantified agricultural runoff that enters the river during monsoons. And then there's the "necrotic pollutants": hundreds of human and animal corpses a day are released into the river, as well as up to 50 tons of ash from crematoria. 

Funeral on the Ganges (image by Steve Hicks / Wikimedia)

Back in the early 1990s, the government hit upon a strange and novel solution for the problem of the corpses: flesh-eating turtles. This unusual plan was made easier by the fact that Trionyx gangeticus, a soft-shelled species found in and around the Ganges, had already demonstrated a taste for deceased flesh by raiding extinguished funeral pyres. In addition, turtles also have religious significance, so it was culturally acceptable for people to imagine the final fate of their physical selves as food for the aquatic creatures. 

Ganges soft-shelled turtle (image by gnozef / Flickr)

Some $32 million was spent on the program, and about 25,000 turtles were released into the Ganges over a decade. The animals were bred on a governmental farm in nearby Banares, raised on a diet of exclusively dead fish so that they wouldn't develop a taste for the living as well. "They eat everything — everything except the bones," said a worker on the farm back in 1992. Ten adult turtles could consume an entire human body in two days. 

So what happened? Well, the plan didn't really work. It was plagued by corruption and mismanagement, and though plenty of forethought was put into raising the turtles, not so much attention was paid to seeing that they survived in the wild after their release, and as a result, they were poached and killed in large numbers. As Richard D. Connerney wrote in his book The Upside DownTree, "In lieu of effective policies that would prevent the dumping of half-burned bodies into rivers and streams, India had turned to this innocent turtle to solve its problems." Ultimately, thousands of turtles died or disappeared, and the Ganges remains a toxic soup today.

Mummy case hands in the "Handbook of archaeology, Egyptian - Greek - Etruscan - Roman" (1867) (via Internet Archive Book Images)

In October of 2000, Pakistani authorities heard that a Karachi resident was trying to sell a mummy on the black market for $11 million. When the police interrogated the seller, he told them he got the mummy from an Iranian man, who supposedly found it after an earthquake, and the two agreed to sell it and split the profits. The seller eventually led them to where he was storing the mummy, a region that borders Iran and Afghanistan.

Pakistani authorities brought the mummy to the National Museum in Karachi, where museum officials inspected the remains and its sarcophagus. Museum officials announced that a mummy wrapped in an Egyptian style had been recovered in a wooden sarcophagus with cuneiform inscriptions, the written language of ancient Persia, and carvings of Ahura Mazda, a Zoroastrian deity. The mummy had a golden crown, mask, and a breastplate that proclaimed, "I am the daughter of the great King Xerxes. Mazereka protect me. I am Rhodugune, I am.” This meant that this mummified body potentially belonged to a Persian princess and was 2,600 years old.

The mummy of the Persian Princess generated a lot of international interest because no remains of the Persian royal family had ever been found and mummies are not generally found in Iran. At one point the mummy caused diplomatic tensions between Iran and Pakistan because both countries claimed ownership. But months later, after examinations by experts in ancient Persian script, CT scans, chemical testing, and carbon dating, the mummy was not only declared a fraud, but there was also evidence that she may have been a modern murder victim.

Scholars grew suspicious of the mummy’s authenticity when experts in ancient cuneiform examined the mummy’s breastplate and determined that someone “not well familiar with Iranian script,” had carved the inscription.

This mummy hoax began to unravel after subsequent testing.

CT scans revealed that the mummy belonged to an adult woman who was about 4 feet 7 inches tall and was older than 21 years old when she died. The scans also showed that all of her internal organs had been removed, and her abdominal cavity had been filled with a powdery substance. An autopsy exposed that the cause of death was a broken neck caused by blunt force trauma to the cervical vertebrae. But a forensic pathologist could not determine if the woman’s neck had been broken deliberately.

Chemical analysis indicated her body and hair had been bleached and her abdomen had been filled with modern drying agents, like bicarbonate of soda and sodium chloride. The results of carbon dating on bone and tissue revealed that the remains belonged to a woman who had died in 1996.

Investigators believe that the perpetrators of this fraud obtained a fresh corpse from grave robbers who looted a burial from the area between Pakistan and Iran. The forgers then removed the corpse’s internal organs and covered the body with chemicals to dry the body over the course of months. This was an intricate forgery that took months to execute and had to involve scholar(s) and someone familiar with anatomy.

The evidence of the broken neck caused Pakistani police to open a murder investigation for which they re-interrogated the middlemen involved with the black market sale. They hoped to identify the woman and her murderer, but so far this remains a cold case.

Mummy cases & sarcophagi from "Handbook of archaeology, Egyptian - Greek - Etruscan - Roman" (1867) (via Internet Archive Book Images)

For more fascinating stories of forensic anthropology visit Dolly Stolze's Strange Remains, where a version of this article also appeared. 

Morbid Mondays highlight macabre stories from around the world and through time, indulging in our morbid curiosity for stories from history's darkest corners. Read more Morbid Mondays>

References:

Hill, B (Interviewer), Ibrahim, A (Interviewee), and Professor Milroy, C (Interviewee). (2001). The Mystery of the Persian Mummy [Interview transcript]. Retrieved on November 14, 2014 from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/persianmummytrans.shtml

Koenig, R. (2001). Modern Mummy Mystery. Retrieved on November 14, 2014 from: http://news.sciencemag.org/2001/06/modern-mummy-mystery

Romey, KM and Rose, M. (2001). Special Report: Saga of the Persian Princess. Retrieved on November 14, 2014 from: http://archive.archaeology.org/0101/etc/persia.html

Inside the clock tower at 346 Broadway (all photographs by Allison Meier/Atlas Obscura)

A clock tower that survived over a century in the tumultuous terrain of New York City is in limbo as its landmarked home goes private.

The Clock Tower Building, formerly the New York Life Insurance headquarters, at 346 Broadway (or 108 Leonard Street, depending on the entrance) in Tribeca was sold by the City of New York last year. Now the Peebles Corporation and Elad Group intend to transform the 19th-century building into luxury condos. For years, the totally mechanical clock tower has been regularly wound by New York's Clock Master Marvin Schneider with fellow retired city worker Forest Markowitz (the two are shown below). In the 1980s, Schneider, then a novice at clockworks, voluntarily restored the mechanism with coworker Eric Reiner on their lunch breaks.

Tomorrow, the future of their weekly winding ritual may be decided. As David W. Dunlap wrote last week for the New York Times: "How much longer either of them will be involved is a mystery that may be cleared up Nov. 18, when the project arrives at the landmarks commission for a hearing." 

Last December, the Atlas Obscura team met up with Schneider and Markowitz (having previously met them in Flushing, Queens, to explore a clock tower on the U-Haul building that is undergoing restoration) to attend one of these morning windings. By then, the Clocktower Gallery that had been in residence on the floor below the clock was gone, leaving the long hallway to the winding staircase ghostly and empty. Yet, where the space below was a void, awaiting its future presumably as a penthouse, the smaller clock tower above was as animated as it was over a century ago when it was first installed. In a small wood structure in the center of the room, frosted 12-foot clock faces on four sides with the giant ticking hands and Roman numerals outside in silhouette, the duo used a massive crank to raise the 1,000-pound weight that then descends over the following week to power the machine. The 5,000-pound bell hanging above no longer tolls, but we climbed up a metal ladder and looked up into its broad, metal maw; it was like connecting directly with the city's history, distilled into a single moment. 

Since 1928 the building had been used by the city for things like the Summons Court, yet it still managed to maintain much of its old world magnificence. Constructed by the architecture firm McKim, Mead & White, the firm took over a design by Stephen Decatur Hatch and gave the 270 feet of the building an Italian Renaissance Revival glamor, right up to the stone eagles gazing down at the streets from the highest balcony. The clock tower was added during construction in 1897, built and installed by E. Howard Watch and Clock Company. 

It's rare for one of these clocks to still be in its original space, complete with its winding mechanism, even rarer to still be operating. (For example, the Jefferson Market Library clock in Manhattan, like many others in the city, is now electric.) Back in the 1980s when Schneider worked on its restoration, it had been dormant for around 20 years. As Schneider explained to the Tribeca Trib last month, to go there now "is to see a piece of history working in its original place and a tribute to American technology."

Below are more photographs from inside the Clock Tower Building. While there may be some changes to how the clock continues to tick into the coming years, the work that Schneider and Markowitz have done to keep it operating, marking steady time through the fast paced mania of New York development, has at least assured it can't be ignored in the building's transformation. 

The bell for the clock tower

Tower clock oil

One of the original gears

View from the balcony outside the clock tower

Looking over the balcony outside the clock tower

Exterior of the clock tower

One of the clock tower eagles covered

 
View from the staircase up to the clock tower

Click here to see a video of the clock tower in action on the Atlas Obscura Instagram. 

Bald Eagle painted by Peter Daverington (photograph by Camilla Cerea/National Audubon Society)

Hamilton Heights and Washington Heights in upper Manhattan might not have much resemblance to when they were the home of John James Audubon over a century ago, but a group of artists is revitalizing his connection to the neighborhoods while raising awareness for birds threatened by climate change. 

The Audubon Mural Project started this fall with five murals at 3621 Broadway, but hopes to expand to 314 — one for each North American bird cited as endangered or threatened by climate change on the Audubon Report. A collaboration between the National Audubon Society and Gitler &_____ Gallery, so far they include a Tundra Swan painted by Florida-based artist Boy Kong. By 2080, the swan might lose 61 percent of its winter habitat. There's also the Rusty Blackbird depicted by New York-based artist Taylor McKimens, which may soon be driven north out of its beloved bogs. 

All of the murals are on roll gates, meaning they're mostly visible at night when businesses close and the vibrant murals are revealed as the metal doors are pulled down. Audubon, who died in 1851, is buried not far from the mural project in Trinity Cemetery, his cross tombstone adorned with carvings of birds and other animals. Many of the birds now in danger of habitat loss and relocation are ones he painted back in the 19th century (the conclusion of an exhibition series on them is upcoming at the New-York Historical Society in March). 

More artists and business owners and landlords with roll gates are still needed to complete the Audubon Project, and you can find out how to get involved at the project site. Below is a timelapse of some of the completed work:

Rusty Blackbird painted by Taylor McKimens (photograph by Mike Fernandez/National Audubon Society)

Boy Kong working on the Tundra Swan mural (photograph by Camilla Cerea/National Audubon Society)

Tundra Swan painted by Boy Kong (photograph by Camilla Cerea/National Audubon Society)

Read more about the Audubon Mural Project and learn how to get involved.

In 2010, Joshua Foer and myself decided that as the founders of Atlas Obscura, it was time we went out to these places we'd only explored digitally.

The goal was to discover the hidden wonders of South America through stories and video for Slate.com, to prove the notion that Atlas Obscura set out to prove: that the world is rich in little-known amazements. The first plan, and rallying cry was to see "thirty wonders in thirty days." This of course proved insane, and impossible. Instead we narrowed it down to our seven favorite little-known wonders, and set out. For just over a month we visited Columbia, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. We traveled into the rainforest, through the mountains, and into FARC-controlled territory in Colombia. Four years later, it is all the clearer to us that we barely scratched the surface. 

Here are five of Atlas Obscura's hidden wonders of South America.  — Dylan, Co-Founder of Atlas Obscura

"The Caño Cristales was where we knew our trip had to begin. It was one of the first places anyone added to the Atlas Obscura that seemed so incredible we weren't entirely sure if it was real." — From the accompanying Slate article by Josh.

"But before I could stop him, Mario had fastened their tandem rope to the roller, and before Dylan could stop Mario, he had hurled the two of them over the cliff and into the 1,200-foot abyss." — From the accompanying Slate article by Josh.

"The announcement felt like it belonged to another century. A gentleman explorer sets off on a hike into the hills, and comes back to report that one of the world's greatest natural marvels had been hiding all these years just over the next ridge." — From the accompanying Slate article by Josh

"Five centuries ago, the Andes were strung with suspension bridges. By some estimates, there were as many as 200 of them, braided from nothing more than twisted mountain grass and other vegetation, with cables that were sometimes as thick as a human torso. At least 300 years before Europe saw its first suspension bridge, the Incas were spanning longer distances and deeper gorges than anything that the best European engineers, working with stone, were capable of." — From the accompanying Slate article by Josh

"Stepping onto a floating island is an unnerving sensation, like walking on a giant sponge that squishes underfoot. Though the reed mats are up to 12 feet thick, there is always the feeling that one could step right through to the cold lake below. " — From the accompanying Slate article by Josh

Statue of Chopin in Warsaw, Poland (photograph by Fran Urbano/Flickr)

Officials in Warsaw, Poland, have revealed a church-and-state secret plan to exhume the preserved heart of composer and national treasure Fryderyk Chopin — details are now surfacing months after the deed was carried out.

The great composer-pianist’s heart is the subject of one of the most astounding legends in music history. On his deathbed in Paris 1849, the story goes, Chopin whispered a final request to his sister: that his heart be removed from his body and returned to Warsaw. This not only assuaged his deep-rooted fear of being buried alive; it ensured that he would be reunited, body and soul, with his beloved birthplace (home is where the heart is, after all). He had not seen Poland for almost two decades, and it's there whence the inspiration for his mighty polonaises and delicate mazurkas flowed.

Chopin’s famous "Funeral March" was played at his own ceremony at the Madéleine in Paris before his burial in the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Meanwhile, his sister went about making his dying wish a reality, pickling the vital organ in a syrupy substance believed to be cognac. She then smuggled her precious, gory cargo back to the motherland, where it passed into the hands of various relatives before being seized by the Nazis almost a century later. Its final resting place is the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, within a pillar bearing the biblical inscription: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be”.

Monument to Chopin's heart in the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Warsaw (photograph by Markus Winkler/Flickr)

One night in April this year, long after churchgoers had departed, thirteen individuals sworn to secrecy — including the Archbishop of Warsaw, the Polish minister for culture, and two scientific personnel — gathered in the church to exhume the heart after a forensic specialist raised concerns that the liquid preservative would evaporate, leaving the heart to dry out and darken. But according to officials, all is well. Around 1,000 photographs of the organ were made (though not circulated to press to avoid a grisly media circus), but no tissue samples were taken to clear up doubts surrounding cause of death: whether the master pianist succumbed to tuberculosis, as is commonly believed, or in fact suffered from cystic fibrosis, a disease not diagnosed during Chopin’s time.

The operation was carried out in cloak-and-dagger style in order to avoid uproar in Poland, where the national hero’s heart is considered a saintly relic.

According to the Associated Press, Chopin's next check-up is scheduled for 50 years from now, 205 years after his death.

For more on Chopin's posthumous wanderings, read about his immortal hands on Atlas Obscura >

Libraries have always held a sacred privilege: the custody and delivery of information. The definition of libraries is drastically shifting as institutions eliminate books, often substituting collections of eBooks, tablets, and an entirely digitized catalog of resources.

On the other end of the scope, more libraries are experimenting with loaning out a range of non-book objects, such as fishing poles, works of art, tools, and human bones. Here's a look at non-traditional libraries that offer collections of realia — those real life objects and ephemera entirely unliterary in nature.

MATERIALS LIBRARY
London, England

Shelves full of wondrous curiosities at the Institute of Making's Materials Library (photograph by UCL News)

At the core of the Institute of Making at University College London is a glorious repository — the Materials Library — that contains over 1,500 of the most extraordinary materials on earth.

The Institute’s workshops allow students to experience the tactile pleasure of real objects by fondling the most unusual tangible substances in the world. Culled from grottoes, labs, and the human body, this cabinet of curiosities serves as a veritable playground for the raw materials fetishist. Many of the materials are futuristic or defy logic, such as a concrete that heals itself, a bioactive glass that turns cells into bone on contact, and a metal that cries like a human.

HUMAN LIBRARY
Copenhagen, Denmark

A Human Library branch in London promotes its Human Books (photograph by London Public Library)

Originating in Denmark as a movement to prevent prejudice-based violence, the Human Library has grown as a widespread institution that promotes awareness through interactions with diverse individuals.

Patrons visiting the Human Library can actually borrow and “read” a Human Book, that is, interact with a live volunteer who represents a distinctive background of age, race, sex, or culture in order to identify and eradicate stereotypes. A few of the notable books include Funeral Director, Facially Disfigured, Vegan, Redhead, and Prostitute. Increasingly, the Human Library and other living library branches are opening up worldwide, thwarting shallow assumptions one intimate dialogue at a time.

ODDMUSIC MUSICAL INSTRUMENT LIBRARY
Urbana-Champagne, Illinois

Various keyboards and a toy glockenspiel from Oddmusic (photograph by Joe Futrelle)

As part of the Urbana-Champagne Media Center in Illinois, Oddmusic is a public musical instrument library that supplies a unique assemblage of music-making resources, including a treasure trove of rare and peculiar musical instruments from around the world.

Featured in the One-Off Collection are a toy glockenspiel, a melodica (a keyboard played by blowing into a mouthpiece), and an udderbot (a bottomless glass bottle with a rubber glove on it). The library specializes in xenharmonic music, a system of tuning that deviates from the typical 12-tone equal temperament method and opts for fewer tones and a more experimental sound. Now you can play out of key on purpose!

LIBRARYFARM
Cicero, New York

Patrons can borrow a plot of land and hoe their cares away (photograph by Northern Onondaga Public Library)

The swiftly evolving concept of the library in the 21st century remains loyal to information access. Whether the data is found in books or fertilized soil, both are meant to convey an understanding, to educate, and to sustain the community.

The librarians at Northern Onondaga Public Library have transformed the library’s half-acre of land into an institution of agricultural literacy. LibraryFarm loans small plots of land to card-carrying library patrons who are free to dig in the dirt whether or not they sport a green thumb.

PUPPET LIBRARY
Brooklyn, New York

A couple of the colorful critters loaned out for free inside the arch (photograph by mulaohu)

Yes, puppets. Formerly concealed within the dank catacombs of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, the wondrous New York Puppet Library offered those in the know with access to over 100 puppets, stacked like rainbow-colored corpses, from sock creatures and giant dancing cats, to life-sized horses and 20-foot skeletons.

As part of the Puppeteers Cooperative of Brooklyn and Boston, the library’s collection holds a fantasyland of puppets employed for parades, festivals, and public loan. The resident librarian would lead visitors up a precariously narrow staircase, instructing them on the ancient art of puppetry. Due to leaks eroding the inner walls of the 80-foot Beaux-arts style triumphal arch, the Puppet Library has relocated to the Arts Lab at Roosevelt House of Brooklyn College and is open by appointment.

ART LENDING LIBRARY
Glasgow and Darlington, UK

Rolling crates filled with ready to hang works of art (photograph by Colin Gray)

In an inspired project to transform public access to the arts, collaborative artists Zoë Walker and Neil Bromwich have created an experimental pop-up lending library that is a mobile art installation within itself.

Housed in expansive galleries and ancient public library spaces around the UK, the rolling geometric sculpture of detachable crates holds 60 individual works of art that can be checked out by patrons. The diverse collection of the Art Lending Library ranges from robot paintings and elephant sculptures, to bird taxidermy and sound compositions, which are detached from the structure and delivered to the patron’s home. Et voila! Instant art connoisseur.

photo by Dina Eric / Flickr

In September, the bizarre story of the Georgia Guidestones got a little stranger, with the secret addition and public removal of a new stone cube fitted into a notch at the top of one granite slab. The cube bore several inscriptions including the numbers 20 and 14, setting conspiracy theorists abuzz trying to decipher the meaning of it all. As conspiracy author Mark Dice put it, "People feared it was a clue that the Illuminati were about to greenlight their population-reduction plan."

Often called the "American Stonehenge," the 20-foot-tall Guidestones were built in 1980 by the Elberton Granite Association (proprietors of the Elberton Granite Museum), financed by a mystery man who went by the pseudonym R.C. Christian. He required all the workers on the project to sign non-disclosure agreements and to never reveal his identity or that of the group he represented, which they seem determined to honor. Octogenarian Wyatt Martin, the last man alive to have met R.C. in person, told Discover Magazine last year, "They could put a gun to my head and kill me, I will never reveal his real name."

The monoliths lay out 10 "guiding thoughts" in eight languages, and the capstone reads, "Let these be Guidestones to an Age of Reason" in Sanskrit, Babylonian cuneiform, classical Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The tenets include calls for a world court and a new language for all humanity, as well as an extreme population reduction across the world to less than 500 million, a decrease that would be impossible without some kind of apocalyptic catastrophe. There are myriad theories attempting to decode the stones, most of which feature subtle or overt links to favorite conspiracist bogeymen like the Illuminati and the New World Order. The monument is often defaced by people on all sides — from Christians to conspiracy theorists to satanists to plain ol' vandals.

photo by S A Rogers / Flickr

But conspiracy theories aside, there are genuine mysteries involving the Guidestones. The most recent saga began back in 2009, when a 6 x 6 x 6 cube of granite was stolen from the top corner of one of the stones. Four years later, in 2013, a man named William Jeremy Ellis was apprehended in the middle of the night while attempting to put the cube backonto the monument. He later explained that he had removed the stone for "personal esoteric and numerological reasons," and that he'd decided to return it because he "didn't want that weight anymore." The original cube was recovered and when we spoke by phone to Christopher Kubas, executive vice president of Elberton Granite, which is still in charge of maintaining the monument, he confirmed that he is in possession of the original cube but that the company has not yet decided what to do with it.

So since 2009, there has been a small notch at the top of one of the Guidestone monoliths. This summer a new cube suddenly appeared in the hole, featuring numbers and letters carved into its faces: MM, JAM, 16, 8, 20, and 14. Many new theories sprang up, using numerology and other esoteric disciplines to draw links between the Guidestones and all sorts of things; the most extreme involves The Simpsons, the children's book Curious George, the September 11th attacks, and the current outbreak of Ebola. However last week a man named Michael Massanelli made a video explaining that he was the one responsible: he placed the cube there to commemorate his marriage to Jennifer Anne Masanelli on August 16, 2014. Michael Masanelli happens to be a numerologist and conspiracy buff; he's also been friendly with William Ellis since they met — where else? — at the Guidestones. 

 photo by ajmexico / Flickr

So it comes as no surprise that the new cube placed by Massanelli was removed from the monument in September by local businessman Mart Clamp of Clamp Sandblasting, who took the stone down and then destroyed it with a hammer and chisel, handing out pieces to onlookers. Mart's father was one of the stonemasons who engraved the monument all those years ago, and he has been cleaning graffiti off of them for years. He explains that his interest in the Guidestones is "purely economical" — he wants to get folks interested in the Guidestones in a positive way, perhaps even starting an annual festival in the hopes of increasing tourism to Elberton.

And so the draw of the Guidestones continues. The theft, addition of the new stone, and public destruction of said stone, all feeding into the detail-obsessed logic of numerologists and conspiracy theorists. There are certainly unanswered questions about the monument's past, present, and presumably future, and each time something bizarre happens, the mystery and obsession deepens a bit more. It's a mixed blessing for Elberton, attracting fringe elements and vandals but also a steady stream of tourists to this economically depressed area. The question for Elberton citizens will be if becoming the Illuminati version of Roswell is worth it. 

A similar though much older Egyptian papyrus text (image via Jeff Dahl / Wikimedia)

Researchers in Australia have decoded an Ancient Egyptian ritual codex containing spells to cure demonic possession, treat black jaundice, and find success in business and love. The complete 20-page illustrated parchment booklet, thought date to the 7th or 8th century, contains 27 spells and "a lengthy series of invocations that culminate with drawings and words of power." The translation, by Macquarie University professors Malcolm Choat and Iain Gardner, is called "A Coptic Handbook of Ritual Power."

At the time the handbook was written, the Egyptians had become Christians; in the opening of the codex an appeal is made to Baktiotha, a mysterious divine figure that some believe was an exotic name for Christ. Choat and Garner, however, have called Baktiotha and "ambivalent figure" and believe that the codex was written by Sethians, a Gnostic sect that traced its spiritual knowledge to Adam and Eve's third son. Sethians were regarded as heretics by the church, and their invocations were eventually purged from magical texts. This codex may then be a transitional document, as other similar texts contain far more references to Orthodox Christianity.

It is not known where the codex originated or who would have used it, but the booklet was acquired by the university from a Vienna antiques dealer in 1981. The new translation is the first volume in The Macquarie Papyri series, with two further volumes planned.

Plaque marking a London zeppelin raid from 1915 (photograph by Christoph Braun/Wikimedia)

Whether it was the terrifying drone of a German heavy bomber or the near-silent hum of a zeppelin, since the beginning of WWI when bombs fell on civilian targets far from the Front, the threat of death from the skies has been very real during times of war. But the art of war is not just in the power of destruction, it also in methods of confusion and subterfuge.

From January of 1915 until the end of the First World War, German dirigibles made around 51 bombing runs against Great Britain – which led to more than 500 deaths. Although these bombings are often focused on by historians, the Belgian cities of Leige and Antwerp were both bombed in 1914, as was Paris (although Paris received more than the standard incendiary bombs, they were also bombed with leaflets, demanding the French surrender). Originally the German Kaiser, Willhelm II, forbade bombing strikes against London, as the King and Queen of England were his close relatives (he was the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria), although on seeing the immense psychological damage these raids had on the British, the Kaiser complied with the advice of his generals, and London became a target.

"It is far better to face the bullets than to be killed at home by a bomb. Join the army at once and help to stop an air raid. God save the King" (1915 poster) (via Library of Congress)

At first there was little that could be done against the silent menace of dirigibles, as the ground-based anti-aircraft weapons of the time did not have the range required to hit them, and those weapons that could be mounted on interceptor-aircraft had little effect on the flying behemoths.

Alternate methods of defense were required.

Engineers in Britain and France were redirected from the efforts of the land-war, which in itself was a victory for the German High Command, as the damage caused by the dirigible raids was, in fact, negligible. Devices such as the acoustic mirror and incendiary bullets were invented, but it was perhaps the French who came up with the most elaborate solution: an artificial Paris, designed to be built on the city's northern outskirts.

The town of Maisons-Laffitte north of Paris, was the focal point of the French military's efforts to protect Paris from German bombing runs, although three more sites were planned, surrounding the capital. It sat on a stretch of the Seine that closely resembles the river as it passes through Paris, some 15 miles to the south. Built mostly of wood and canvas, a team of artists was hired to paint the city, and the electrical engineer Fernand Jacopozzi (famous for first lighting the Eiffel Tower), was brought in to make Faux Paris more appealing to the German bombers.

A map of Faux Paris (via JF Ptak Science Books, which has more images of the "Second Paris" on their site)

Although only a small fraction of the fake city was ever completed, it had running trains, as well as replicas of the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées. It had working lights (just dim enough to convince the Germans that the French had closed their curtains to disguise the city), and industrial sectors, with a translucent paint applied to the roofs to mimic dirty glass ceilings. The partly-built city was never attacked, and quickly disassembled at the end of the war. The Germans were, apparently, developing similar plans for their industrial bases, but the war ended before those plans could be put into action.

In the Second World War, German bombing raids on England intensified. Almost nightly, the Luftwaffe's bombers droned above London, and although the anti-aircraft weapons were much more powerful than during the First World War, so too were the aircraft. The Battle of Britain raged in the skies, with more than 90,000 civilian casualties. The British authorities needed to not only protect their military assets, but also to protect the people from German bombings. They borrowed the plans of the French, whether deliberately or through convergent evolution.

Around the United Kingdom, various potential targets were identified, focused primarily on military hardware, with false tanks, aircraft, and factories constructed to fool German bombing raids. After the bombing of Coventry, however, they expanded this project with the construction of Q-sites.

Q-sites were built within four miles of potential target cities, and were laid out to simulate blacked-out towns, with fires being lit in the Q-sites after the first wave of bombs were dropped on the target towns. It is estimated that more than 900 tons of munitions were wasted on these sites. The concept of blacking-out towns across Britain saved countless lives, as in the days before reliable aircraft navigation aids and techniques, pilots and their crew needed to see their targets or local landmarks. In fact, some of the most lethal German pilots were those who had studied or holidayed in Britain before the war, as they knew both the locations of culturally important sites, and the potential psychological damage that could be inflicted through longterm bombing these places.

It wasn't only the British who got caught up in the building of fake towns After the raid on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, industrial sites along the West Coast were disguised as non-military sites. Boeing's B17 Bomber factory in Seattle, for instance, was covered with 26 acres of suburban streets, such as the charmingly named Synthetic Street. Actors were hired to walk on the rooftop, hanging laundry, and engaging in other wholesome 1930s behaviors. (Photographs can be found here.)

A soldier with an inflatable three-ton lorry in WWII (via Imperial War Museums)

An inflatable Sherman tank from WWII (via Imperial War Museums)

During the Second World War, the Allies deployed the so-called Ghost Army to France in the wake of the D-Day invasion. The Ghost Army (or, officially, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops) was an Allied unit that moved through France sowing misinformation and generally confusing the enemy. Made up primarily of actors, artists, engineers, and advertisers, they operated near to enemy lines, and deployed inflatable tanks, dummy airfields, troop emplacements, and artillery formations. Alongside these visual props were recordings of troops and vehicles rumbling, and the Ghost Army filled the airwaves with false radio chatter, as well as imitating other Allied units' insignia and ranks to further deceive the Germans.

Even earlier in the war, particularly in North Africa, British forces employed deception as a tactic against the famous General Rommel, building fake railway stations and supply columns — these efforts led directly to Operations Bodyguard, Titanic, and Glimmer, which in turn convinced the German military that the Normandy landings were the deception, and diverted a significant portion of German manpower away from the landing sites at Normandy for a staggering seven weeks.

Dummy paratrooper used in D-Day, which included machine gune fire simulators & self-destroying charges (photograph by Pajx/Wikimedia)

During the Vietnam War, fought from the early 1960s until the fall of Saigon in 1973, the Viet Cong were also known to make use of artificial villages to protect their tunnel complexes, and false tunnels, to distract American and Australian soldiers and consume valuable operations time. These tunnel complexes could be, well, incredibly complex, with some of the larger ones not only featuring bunkers and weapons depots, but also political re-education schools, command centers, hospitals, and even theaters (for the production of politically educational plays, no doubt.) The most elaborate of these tunnel systems ran for miles, and often needed to be flushed out by the so-called "tunnel rats," men who were often the physically smallest soldiers in their units, who crawled through the underground passages armed with only pistols and flashlights.

Although WWI saw the first mass production of artificial cities to confuse the enemy, there are also the (alleged) historical example of Grigory Potemkin, who built artificial villages in the 18th century to fool his Empress. After the Russian conquest of Crimea in the 1780s, Tsarina Catherine the Great appointed Potemkin as the region's governor, tasked with rebuilding the shattered countryside. Although the story may be apocryphal, it is said that Potemkin's men assembled villages along the river where Catherine's barge drifted, and acted out the roles of peasants until the Tsarina passed along. The village would be quickly disassembled, and rebuilt further downstream to continue the deception.

North Korea's Kijong-dong, aka "Propaganda Village" (photograph by Don Sutherland, U.S. Air Force)

Possibly the most famous "Potemkin village" in the world is that of Kijong-dong, in North Korea, which, according to the North Korean government, is home to a collective-farm, worked by 200 families, as well as the world's third largest flagpole(!). The rest of the world disagrees, and observation through telescopic lenses reveals that the city is uninhabited, and that none of the buildings are anything more than concrete shells, with automated lighting systems and cultivated fields around the site striving to add to the illusion.

In 2010, it was reported that the Russian government had purchased a large number of inflatable planes and tanks, in order to disguise the deployment of its military hardware. Even though we live now in a world where it seems that everything is observed and under question, at least two countries think we can still be fooled through such simple deceptions.

The foundation of Atlas Obscura is contributed by intrepid users around the world, out exploring the places no one else is noticing, or delving into history that's been all but forgotten. Here we are highlighting five of our favorite recent additions to the Atlas. Have a place we've missed? Create an account and become a part of our community.

ROYSE CITY FUTURO HOUSE
Royse City, Texas

photograph by amboy

Finnish architect Matti Suuronen had a dream of affordable prefab housing that could roam from beach to mountain, and since he was designing this in the 1960s, his dream home looked like a UFO. Unfortunately with the oil crisis of the 1970s making plastic expensive, and maybe people not ready for extraterrestrial living, less than 100 Futuro Houses were built, and now less than 50 survive. One Futuro House in Royse City, Texas, added with great photographs by Atlas Obscura user amboy, has been left to retrofuture ruin as if it crash landed and its aliens moved on. 

LEVON'S DIVINE UNDERGROUND
Arinj, Armenia

photograph by littleham

In 1985, Levon Arakelyan's wife asked for a potato cellar, and he spent until his death in 2008 constructing a labyrinth of caves instead. Levon's Divine Underground in Arinj, Aremenia, added with subterranean photographs by littleham, stretches 70 feet beneath the house above with stunning halls and interlaced rooms embedded with small shrines. 

FAIRY POST OFFICE
Orinda, California

photograph by Mallory Pickett

When the Fairy Post Office, added with whimsical photographs by Mallory Pickett, was placed in a hollow of a tree in a park in Orinda, California, in 2013, its creators expected the tiny letter depot to be an ephemeral installation. Instead, the miniature post office expanded, with visitors adding trinkets and wall maps, and exchanging letters with fairies and field mice. 

VAN GOGH BICYCLE PATH
Eindhoven, Netherlands

courtesy Studio Roosegaarde

Added by Thom101, the Van Gogh Bicycle Path unveiled this month in Eindhoven in the Netherlands is a swirling tribute to Van Gogh's "The Starry Night." Designed by Daan Roosegaarde as part of a greater project to make glow-in-the-dark infrastructure a reality, its thousands of stones take in sun during the day and emit it as a celestial pattern to guide bikers at night. 

WRIGHT COMPANY FACTORY
Dayton, Ohio

photograph by mdw

When an automobile plant was torn down in Dayton, Ohio, the oldest aircraft factory in the world was revealed impressively intact. Added by Atlas Obscura user mdw, the Wright Company Factory was constructed by the famed Wright Brothers in 1910, then forgotten for 80 years. Now it's being restored by the National Aviation Heritage Alliance and the National Parks. 

Thanks to our intrepid users for uncovering these wondrous places, and we look forward to more! Help us show how incredible and curious the world is by adding your own discoveries. 

20 Fenchurch Street, aka "The Fryscraper" (photo by Luc Mercelis / Flickr)

Last September, Londoners experienced a pretty unusual architectural phenomenon: One of the city's newest luxury towers, the half-finished 525-foot-tall skyscraper at 20 Fenchurch St., began inexplicably shooting a "parabolic death ray" hot enough to melt cars. The massive building's glass façade with its unusually wide top was concentrating sunlight to the point that it created a reflected hotspot of up to 230ºF — much higher than the boiling point of water. In addition to the roasted Jaguar, the "Fryscraper" set a barber shop's carpet on fire and shattered a restaurant's slate floor tiles. It also, naturally, became a tourist attraction, with people gathering in the unseasonably warm afternoons to fry eggs and toast baguettes in the glare. 

Surely the building's designer was mortified by the results of his creation, right? Well, no. When architect Rafael Viñoly was questioned about his flawed design, he heartily deflected, blaming consultants, global warming, cost-cutting developers, and the sun's elevation. This was an especially galling disavowal of responsibility because the science of solar reflectivity analysis has been gaining traction for several years. There are many tools, firms, and even apps available to architects and developers to help avoid just this problem. Especially damning for Viñoly is that the "death ray" issue was not actually unprecedented. And the last time a high-profile building had had problems of this nature, it was also one he'd designed. 

Vdara Hotel in Vegas (photo by brx0 / Flickr)

In 2010 guests at the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas began complaining that sometimes the sun got so hot on the pool deck that it melted plastic cups and bags. One man even attested that it scorched his hair. Hotel staff was already aware of the problem, which they had dubbed the "Vdara death ray," though management insisted on calling it "solar convergence phenomenon." 

This too was a design issue: the building's energy-efficient windows, which are meant to reflect sunlight to cut cooling costs, were the culprit. Vdara's designers, led by Viñoly, had been aware of the potential problems this could cause, and the windows of the hotel had been preemptively covered with a custom film to reduce the sun's effects by 70 percent. But it wasn't enough. The problem was difficult to correct with easy fixes like strategically placed shrubbery and umbrellas, because due to the earth's rotation, the "death ray" hit a different spot each day. Eventually the Vdara's pool was overhung with a large sail-like shade. 

 Museum Tower towering over the Nasher Sculpture Center garden (photo by Justin Cozart / Wikimedia)

Viñoly's buildings are not the only ones that have had these issues. Sometimes it happens in private homes — from Boston to Minnesota there have been reports of people blaming their neighbors' windows for melting their vinyl siding. Earlier this year in South London a house fire was traced to sunlight refracting off a crystal doorknob, which set a nearby dressing gown ablaze, resulting in thousands of pounds worth of damage. And in Dallas, a bitter battle is still raging between the Nasher Sculpture Center and the nearby 42-story luxury high rise, Museum Tower, the glare from which has destroyed art pieces, like James Turrell's "Tending, (Blue)," and jeopardized grass and trees. 

More than the energy-efficient windows or the various materials used to make the buildings, the physics behind solar convergence happens when the surface of the building curves inward, causing it to “act as a solar cooker,” reflecting concentrated sunlight onto neighboring objects or surfaces. Particularly in non-urban environments, this can also be harnessed for good, like at the world's largest solar furnace at the Odeillo commune in the Pyrenees mountains, which uses 10,000 concave mirrors to focus the sun's rays, heating up to 5,430 degrees Fahrenheit.

Solar Furnace at Odeillo Font-Romeu, France (photo by Florian / Flickr)

But in cities, as development booms and skylines continue to become ever more dense and buildings climb higher and higher, the science of solar reflectivity analysis is going to become more and more critical. Otherwise, we might all become so many ants under an endless series of enormous mirrored microscopes.

In January of 1661, King Charles II of England ordered the exhumation of the corpses of Henry Ireton, John Bradshaw, and Oliver Cromwell. He arranged to have the bodies hanged and beheaded because the three men presided over the trial and execution of his father, King Charles I.

The corpses were hanged at the Tyburn gallows, and their bodies were left there until the afternoon. The corpses were then decapitated and buried under the gallows. According to tradition, it took eight blows to separate Cromwell’s head from his corpse.

The heads of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were impaled on 20-foot spikes through the base of the skull then displayed on the roof of Westminster Hall. Cromwell’s head stayed on the spike for more than 20 years before it disappeared.

 Drawing of Cromwell's head, from Pennant's 'London' (1790) (via Wikimedia)

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) is considered an enigmatic and contentious historical figure. He became a Puritan, committed to carrying out God’s plan following a spiritual crisis in the 1630s. He started out as a Member of Parliament during the reign of King Charles I (1600-1649), but became Lord Protector after the execution of the king.

The English Civil War (1642-1651) started when King Charles I and members of Parliament couldn’t agree on reforms that would check the King’s power. Cromwell fought on the side of the Parliamentarians against the Royalists and commanded successful military engagements that led to their surrender.

Cromwell played a decisive role during the trial of King Charles I, and was one of the people who signed his death warrant. In 1653, he was sworn in as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland for life. Cromwell died in 1658 at the age of 59 from an infection of his urinary tract or kidneys. During a post-mortem examination, Cromwell’s cranium was cut open so his physician could study his brain, then his body was embalmed and buried in Westminster Abbey.

Charles II returned to England after Cromwell’s death and made sure all of the signatories to King Charles I’s death warrant were punished.

Oliver Cromwell's death mask at Warwick Castle (photograph by Terry Robinson/Flickr)

While the whereabouts of the heads of Ireton and Bradshaw have drawn little interest, the Lord Protector’s remains have attracted considerably more attention.

In 1875, Dr. George Rolleston examined two heads that were reported to belong to Cromwell, and compared them to Cromwell’s death mask. The first was a skull from the collection at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Rolleston believed this skull didn’t belong to Cromwell because the damage around the hole in the parietal bone indicated that a spike entered from the top of the head, not the bottom. Also, there was no flesh left on the skull and no evidence that it had been embalmed.

Rolleston then compared a second head, known as the “Wilkinson head,” (pictured here and here) to Cromwell’s death mask. He considered this to be the best candidate for Oliver Cromwell’s head.

According to Wilkinson family legend, Cromwell’s head came into their possession thanks to a powerful gust of wind that blew it off the roof of Westminster Hall during a violent storm in 1688. A guard found the head and took it home where he hid it in his chimney and kept it a secret. As the guard lay dying he told his family about the head, and soon after his death his daughter sold it. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, it passed through the hands of museum owners and collectors who displayed the mummified head for money.

In 1815, the head was sold to Josiah Henry Wilkinson, and stayed in the Wilkinson Family until it was buried in 1960. The Wilkinson family allowed scientists to study the head, including Dr. George Rolleston in 1875 and Karl Pearson and Geoffrey Morant in 1935. Pearson and Morant examined the head for their book, The Portraiture of Oliver Cromwell With Special Reference to the Wilkinson Head. They determined the head belonged to a man who was about 60 years old when he died, and argued that the cranial measurements corresponded to portraits of Cromwell. The skullcap showed evidence of having been removed and then reattached with embalmed skin, which corresponded to historical reports. Pearson and Morant concluded that this was likely the mummified head of Oliver Cromwell.

The Wilkinson Family decided to give the mummified head a proper burial in 1960. They contacted Cromwell’s college, Sidney Sussex, and interred the head in an unmarked grave.

Sidney Sussex College, where Cromwell's supposed head is now buried (photograph by Ardfern/Wikimedia)

Plaque for Cromwell's head at Sidney Sussex College (photograph by Doctorpete/Wikimedia)

For more fascinating stories of forensic anthropology visit Dolly Stolze's Strange Remains, where a version of this article also appeared. 

Morbid Mondays highlight macabre stories from around the world and through time, indulging in our morbid curiosity for stories from history's darkest corners. Read more Morbid Mondays>

References:

Howorth, H.H. (1911). The head of Oliver Cromwell. The Archaeological Journal, volume 68. Retrieved from: http://books.google.com/books?id=4aE8AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA241&lpg=PA241&dq=george+rolleston+cromwell+skull+ashmolean&source=bl&ots=k5Ue5JWrpQ&sig=UwKP7GSHf0-4uDqkVrksmjtVZio&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QTlpVMCAPK33igK58ICYDA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=george%20rolleston%20cromwell%20skull%20ashmolean&f=false

Kennedy, M. (2009). Oliver Cromwell’s grave comes back to life for summer at Westminster Abbey. Retrieved from: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/aug/02/cromwell-grave-westminster-abbey

Lovejoy, B. (2013). Rest in Pieces: The curious fates of famous corpses. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Smyth, D. (1996, August 11). Is that really Oliver Cromwell’s head? Well . . . LA Times. Retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/1996-08-11/news/mn-33204_1_oliver-cromwell

Earlier this year, the metal façade of the American Folk Art Museum was dismantled and taken into storage as the Museum of Modern Art absorbs the institution's former home. The loss of the fortress-like architecture on West 53rd Street is just the latest in the merging and destruction of New York City's museums. These vanished museums — either closed completely or now invisible inside another, larger museum — all contributed to the cultural landscape of the city today, even if many of their names are mostly forgotten. Below are ten of these lost museums. 

SCUDDER'S AMERICAN MUSEUM
Broadway and Ann Street, Manhattan

Scudder's American Museum, in the former NYC poor house (via NYPL)

One of the first museums to draw the crowds in Manhattan was Scudder's American Museum, which ran from 1810 to 1841. First lodged in the city's former almshouse, it was started by John Scudder with the acquisition of some smaller museum collections, including the Baker's American Museum. Eventually it relocated to a five-story building at Broadway and Ann Street, where patrons could pay a small price to see an 18-foot live snake, taxidermy dioramas, a two-headed lamb, magic lantern slides, bed sheets from Mary, Queen of Scots, and some macabre curios like a wax figure cut by a guillotine. It was even open until 9 pm, to wander by candlelight.

As P. T. Barnum wrote in 1869: "People in all parts of the country had sent in relics and rare curiosities; sea captains, for years, had brought and deposited strange things from foreign lands; and besides all these gifts, I have no doubt that the previous proprietor had actually expended, as was stated, $50,000 in making the collection." In fact, Barnum was so impressed with the museum, he decided to buy it and transform it into the greatest spectacle the city had known. 

BARNUM'S AMERICAN MUSEUM
Broadway and Ann Street, Manhattan

Barnum's American Museum in New York (19th century illustration) (via columbia.edu)

When Barnum bought Scudder's American Museum in 1841, he turned the building at Broadway and Ann Street into a billboard blaring a jubilee of entertainment, from sideshow fakes like the Feejee Mermaid (really a monkey and fish sewn together) to living wonders like the Siamese twins Chang and Eng. A gargantuan Lecture Room hosted theatrical and educational events, and real animals as exotic as beluga whales delighted massive crowds.

Imitators sprung up all over the Bowery with dime museums, but Barnum was uncontested, at least until a devastating fire in 1865 that burned the whole place to the ground. Some reportedly cheered at the destruction of the sometimes banal and grotesque museum, but most were horrified at the loss of the city's major cultural destination. Barnum tried again with another location, but that, too, burned down in 1868, so instead he went on the road with the circus that still has his name. 

PEALE'S MUSEUM
252 Broadway, Manhattan

Peale's Museum (1825 watercolor) (via Museum of the City of New York)

A rival of Barnum was Rubens Peale, son of naturalist and Baltimore and Philadelphia museum creator Charles Wilson Peale. Peale set up his own New York museum in 1825, like Barnum offering a mix of natural and sensational wonders on Broadway, although a little more refined. As the Bowery Boys explain in their thorough post on the museum, Rubens "was sensitive to some of the cheap ploys of [his father's] Philadelphia Museum (live animals, displays of human deformities) and tried to keep his New York museum a dignified affair, although today we would find its use of waxworks and flashy lectures rather silly."

Eventually he rechristened the Peale's Museum as the New York Museum of Natural History and Science, but séances and mesmerism were still known to take place within the walls. Unfortunately, Peale's wunderkammer was wrecked by the Panic of 1837, and the impossible competition from Barnum. 

PALEOZOIC MUSEUM
Central Park, Manhattan

Sketch for the proposed Paleozoic Museum (1870s) (via Wikimedia)

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins had caused a sensation in England with his concrete dinosaurs at the Crystal Palace in 1851, so in 1868 the Central Park commissioners asked that he make an American version. This Paleozoic Museum was planned as a looming iron and glass building at Central Park West and 63rd Street, where concrete extinct animals would mingle beneath skylights.

Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the Central Park designers, set out the foundations, but Hawkins made a crucially bad enemy by speaking out against the corrupt Boss Tweed. Tammany Hall in turn sent its thugs to the Hawkins workshop in 1871, and smashed everything to bits. The shattered dinosaurs are believed buried beneath Central Park. 

NAVAL LYCEUM
Brooklyn Navy Yard

19th-century stereoscopic photograph of the Lyceum building at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (via NYPL)

Not to be left out, Brooklyn had its own 19th-century curiosity cabinet at the Navy Yard. Established in 1833, the Naval Lyceum was a mix of nautical history and materials like model ships and publications, with wonders amassed by sailors around the world. As one visitor described in 1839: "Handsome cabinets of shells and minerals, elegantly arranged; many rare birds, in a perfect state of preservation, with a large and valuable collection of natural and artificial curiosities from every quarter of the globe, are among the first objects, on entering, which salute the eye."

Waning support brought the museum to a close in 1889, and its objects were given to the Naval Academy in Annapolis. 

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF PUBLIC RECREATION
Coney Island, Brooklyn

Carousel animals in the American Museum of Public Recreation (via Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection)

Down in Coney Island in 1929, rides inventor W. F. Mangels — responsible for such innovations as leaping carousel horses — decided the American amusement park needed its own museum. The American Museum of Public Recreation honored, as he told the New York Times, "human reaction to play as expressed through play facilities man has created and developed."

The museum with its carousel animals, ride models, and entertainment engineering displays didn't last long, however, and Mangels sold his collection in 1955. But some of it still survives in the city, and a tollhouse sign once used by tourist carriages that was part of this collection is going on display at the Coney Island History Project in 2015.

MUSEUM OF FAMOUS PEOPLE
133 West 50th Street, Manhattan

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire diorama at the Museum of Famous People (via authentichistory.com)

Before there was a Madame Tussauds in New York, there was the Museum of Famous People on West 50th Street. With around 50 dioramas of vinyl mannequins (a "dramatic advance over traditional wax museums," they claimed), the museum highlighted often harrowing New York history alongside global celebrities. This included the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the buying of Manhattan from the American Indians, Peter Stuyvesant with his peg leg, villains from Tammany Hall, and Houdini escaping from a trunk underwater.

Among the manic displays housed in underground passages was one of the Aaron Burr vs. Alexander Hamilton duel, which, as Fred W. McDarrah's 1967 Museums in New York describes, was "complete with birds chirping overhead and crickets down below." The museum closed in the 1970s, the fates of its plastic figures unclear. 

MUSEUM OF PRIMITIVE ART
15 West 54th Street, Manhattan

The Museum of Primitive Art (via Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Some of the collections currently inside New York's major institutions were once their own organizations, including the Museum of Primitive Art on West 54th Street. The rather insensitively named and organized museum focused on the art of "primitive" societies, which was a convenient and dismissive way to at once group indigenous art from the Americas, Oceania, and Africa, both ancient and contemporary.

The museum was opened in an Upper West Side townhouse in 1957 by Nelson A. Rockefeller, but closed in 1976, and its collections went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

SPORTS MUSEUM OF AMERICA
26 Broadway, Manhattan

Sports Museum logo (photograph by Americasroof/Wikimedia)

A recent brief flame was the Sports Museum of America, which shut down after just nine months in 2009. It had high hopes to be the country's first museum exploring both the history and culture of every type of sport, and started strong hosting prestigious events like the Heisman Trophy presentation.

However, the recession and the inability to bring in the expected million visitors a year cut the dream short. 

THE GALLERY OF MODERN ART
2 Columbus Circle, Manhattan

Before and after for the Gallery of Modern Art, now the Museum of Arts and Design (photographs by Renate O'Flaherty & Beyond My Ken)

Sometimes a lost museum is hiding in plain sight. The Gallery of Modern Art, opened in 1964, once stood in a marble, modernist tower on Columbus Circle. Owned by George Huntington Hartford, it housed his collection, which was mostly concentrated on American and European paintings from the 20th century, its centerpiece being a painting by Salvador Dalí commissioned just for the museum called "The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus." 

Hartford rather hated the direction of American culture, particularly Abstract Expressionism which he derided for instigating an "ice age of art." The museum designed by Edward Durell Stone was his own statement of what art should be. It closed after only five years.

When the Museum of Arts and Design moved in, the redevelopment did away with the stern, porthole-pocked stone exterior and replaced it with more playful, if less visually striking, glass and terra-cotta. Now only the ghost of the previous museum is remembered in the current institution's silhouette.

Devoured by a monstrous worm or boiled nude in a vat of searing pus — what sort of extraordinary agonies await you sinners in the afterlife? Mythological and religious concepts of death and the afterlife are loaded with convolution, ambiguity, and speculation. Many cultures embrace a trial of judgment after death, whereupon their souls are either salvaged or pitched into eternal damnation. Here we will look at five representations of hell, and what transpires during that final judgment.

Chinese Mythology: Diyu

Fengdu Ghost City, which was built to represent Diyu (photograph by Robin/Flickr)

In Chinese mythology the concept of Diyu, or "earth prison," meshes the combined afterlife variants of Confucianism, Taoism, folk tales, and the Buddhist hell realm of Naraka. Diyu serves as a temporary zone in which the dead are brutally smited until their tenderized souls are ready for reincarnation. Originally consisting of over 90,000 hells, various interpretations have reduced the number to ten courts or 18 levels, each dealing with a different atonement.

King Yama, wrathful ruler of Diyu, oversees the punishment of all the dead and administers a formidable yet temporary, atonement that directly correlates to the severity of their sins. Perpetrators may be sawed in half, trampled and penetrated by a horned beast, deep fried in a wok, or be forced to climb mountains barbed with knives.

For mortals who want to get a taste of Diyu before their judgment day comes, they may visit Fengdu, the Chinese "ghost city" modeled after the nether world and its daunting trials.

Torture in the afterlife in Fengdu City (photograph by GS3/Wikimedia)

Woman being put in a cauldron of blood & skulls in Fengdu Ghost City (photograph by GS3/Wikimedia)

Man being sawed in half in Fengdu Ghost City (photograph by GS3/Wikimedia)

Norse Paganism: Niflheim

Nidhogg at the Wodan Timbur Coaster (photograph by Jérémy Jännick)

As one of the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology, Hel, or Helheim, is the kingdom of souls for the common civilian who did not earn his death through battle. Eponymously named for this underworld, Hel was also the guardian of the realm, a hulking beast of a woman with a half-blackened face of corpse-like beauty. In the 13th century, Poetic Edda and Icelandic poet Snorri Sturlson’s Prose Edda, suggest that Hel and its even icier netherworld Niflheim ("World of Fog") were places of the blackest, bitterest, frigid dread.

In the depths of Niflheim, the lowest roots of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, stretch down for nourishment from Hvergelmir, a boiling cauldron of a well. Nidhogg (meaning “malice striker,” or “striker in the dark”), a 30-foot, carrion-obsessed worm gnaws on the roots of the tree while she waits for delectable corpses of perjurers, adulterers, and murderers to wash up on Dead Man’s Shore. Before Christian influence brought focus to individualized punishment for one’s moral standing, the pagan concept envisioned a neutral destination of rot and renewal. Like worms in a compost bin, the messengers of death in the Norse underworld act to encourage rebirth. Old branches die off so that new ones grow stronger. As is true for the Earth itself, the living can only flourish with the existence of decay.

To experience Niflheim while you’re still mortal, take a ride on the Wodan Timbur Coaster, a massive wooden coaster at the Europa-Park theme park in Rust, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. Passengers queue up inside the nine enchanting worlds of Norse mythology, including the chilling, primordial, frost cave of Niflheim, where the scornful Hel herself reigns supreme.

Wodan Timbur Coaster (photograph by Jérémy Jännick)

Wodan Timbur Coaster (photograph by Jérémy Jännick)

Mayan Xibalba

Skull in Actun Tunichil Muknal, Belize (photograph by Antti T. Nissinen/Wikimedia)

According to Mayan mythological texts, including the seminal Popol Vuh, the Mayan underworld Xibalba, translated as “a place of fear,” is an underworld ruled by 12 lords. Hell-bent on human suffering, the Lords of Xibalba, with names like Pus Master and Bloody Claws, wield their weapons of fear, pain, and starvation in various houses full of treacherous obstacles, from rivers full of blood, pus, and venomous insects, to trials of personal humiliation.

In the 16th century, the physical entrance to Xibalba was believed to be the Candelaria Caves in Cobán, Guatemala. Actun Tunichil Muknal (Cave of the Crystal Sepulchre), a cave structure in the Tapir Mountain Nature Reserve of Belize, is also believed to be the passageway to Xibalba. Access to the cave requires a laborious trek with extensive hiking, underwater swimming, and hours of wading through a cold river. Inside the cave, vaulted ceilings display dripping outcrops of stalactites between bored holes of nesting bats.

Skeletal remains from ritual sacrifices and ceremonial ceramics containing “kill holes” to release the spirits of the deceased line the cave floor. The most famous skeleton in residence is the “Crystal Maiden,” the calcified remains of a teenager who may have been sacrificed to a Mayan god nearly 1,000 years ago.

The "Crystal Maiden" in Actun Tunichil Muknal (photograph by Peter Andersen/Wikimedia)

Persian Zoroastrianism: House of Lies

Drawing of the Zoroastrian "Towers of Silence," where bodies are picked by the vultures (via Wellcome Images)

The ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism once reigned over the land that is now Iran. Still followed today by 2.5 million, the Zoroastrian belief is that your soul will be judged harshly upon death. Traditionally, this sect believed that a dead body was unclean and susceptible to demon contamination. Bodies were positioned within the concentric rings atop a Dakhma, or Tower of Silence, where they were washed by the elements, picked clean by vultures, and then tucked into the ossuary to decompose until the remaining substances flowed into the sea.

But what becomes of their souls? After a person dies their soul is believed to suffer some separation anxiety, so it lingers for a few days before its final judgment at the Chinvat Bridge. There stands a woman who reflects the soul of the dead person. If she appears as a beauty, the person is sent to the House of Song for heavenly exaltation. If she is a wretched hag, the wicked soul is cast into the House of Lies, where a dark and fetid wasteland awaits with punishments that fit the crimes.

Inhabited by demons, she-beasts, witches, and noxious animals, Ahriman's underground kingdom provides unspeakable torture, pain, grief, and a palpable stench you can cut with a knife. Each soul endures their punishment utterly alone, sustaining themselves on a continuous force-fed diet of festering fluids and venomous reptiles.

Yazd Towers of Silence (photograph by Taranis-iuppiter/Wikimedia)

Ancient Egyptian Religion: Duat

Weighing of the heart in the judgement of Osiris, from the Book of the Dead (via British Museum)

Picture it: Egypt, 2000 BCE. Osiris was dominating as far as deities go, and for a few hundred years he remained the undisputed ruler of the underworld, Duat. He was the only deity to earn the coveted “god” title. Egyptian religion had pragmatic and intuitive motivation, as they favored moral balance over total piety. As with many other religions that reinforce a balanced life, the Egyptian vision of hell functioned as a place to end one life and begin another. The ancient Egyptian concept of hell may have influenced the Christian, Islamic, and Judaic versions.

The deceased could give a “Negative Confession,” where they bring attention to all the horrible deeds they did not commit, such as causing pain to the multitude, purloining the cakes of the gods, catching fish with bait of their own bodies, and other shameful acts that repulsed the deities. In the Books of the Netherworld — ancient Egyptian funerary texts inscribed on walls and objects — spells and rituals illustrate instructions for the dead. In the final judgment called “The Weighing of the Heart,” the heart of the deceased is weighed in the scale of Ma’at, goddess of truth, balanced with a single feather. If a man’s good deeds outweigh the evil, his heart will balance with the feather.

One offense too many and he is ravaged by Ammit, “Devourer of the Dead,” a phantasmic gluttonous amalgam of crocodile, lion, and hippopotamus parts. The process is vividly illustrated in the Book of the Dead, which survives in scraps of papyrus in museums around the world, and etched on tombs.

Weighing the Heart, from "Osiris and the Egyptian resurrection" (1911) (via Internet Archive Book Images)