At Green-Wood (Photo: katherine weil/Flickr)

Late in October of 1987, the psychological thriller author Patricia Highsmith took a car over the Manhattan Bridge and through Brooklyn to Green-Wood Cemetery, a sprawling, park-like expanse of crypts and tombstones. The New York Times had commissioned her to write a detailed account of the place, and it seemed like a natural assignment. When she was a teenager, Highsmith had written that “the morbid, the cruel, the abnormal fascinates me,” and that proclivity had come out in her novels, in which tense plots followed strange people, most famously The Talented Mr. Ripley, through obsessions that usually led to murder.

The essay that Highsmith wrote about Green-Wood was never published. The only way to read it, right now, is to travel to the Swiss Literary Archives, in Bern, where Highsmith’s papers went after her death, or—as Atlas Obscura did—request a copy of the unpublished manuscript.

In the account, Highsmith, who had a reputation for being an unpleasant person who preferred snails to humans, is a sharp but empathetic observer of Green-Wood’s “dead and buried.” These were people, she observes, who “want to be remembered, not only by family...but by the public.”

It’s an essay with haunting moments—most of all when Highsmith sticks her hand into the warm furnace where dead bodies are burned to ashes. While she's in the cemetery, the aging writer, fixated her whole career on subjects most would find creepy, considers the lingering results of fame, accomplishment, and death. It also happened that she wrote the essay not long after she had directly faced the possibility of her own death, twice.

Patricia Highsmith, appearing on After Dark in 1988 (Photo: Open Media Ltd./Wikimedia)

The year before Highsmith got the assignment, a doctor had found a malignant tumor on her lung, which, she wrote, “sounds like a death sentence to me, taken out or not.” She was only 65. Not long before that, she had spent nearly a week in the hospital, after a hemorrhage caused her to lose so much blood that the lifelong heavy drinker feared she might die alone, behind a closed door.

There was no particularly strong reason to send Highsmith to Green-Wood in 1987. The year before, the Museum of the Borough of Brooklyn had put on an exhibit featuring the art of people buried there. But in late 1987, Highsmith, who had lived abroad in Europe for years, had a new novel coming out, this one set in New York City. 

She was a famous enough novelist that magazine editors wanted her non-fiction, too, and though she had written about less gothic subjects—her cats, her first job, Greta Garbo—many of her essays had covered the same macabre ground, of murderers like Jack the Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer, and children who kill, that her novels did.

Perhaps the author and the subject just seemed to fit together. “Because of her status of the “Mistress of Suspense” (to borrow the name of a British TV series made from some of her short stories) she was often commissioned to write about death and murder,” says Andrew Wilson, the author of Beautiful Shadow, a biography of Highsmith.

At Green-Wood (Photo: Mike Steele/Flickr)

Green-Wood is a rambling place, designed in the 1830s, when garden cemeteries had become both a practical and pleasant solution to the problem of urban burial. These tree-filled cemeteries were some of America’s first city parks, and in the 1850s, when Central Park was still under construction, Green-Wood was one of the most popular tourist attractions not just in New York City, but in the entire country. Through the 19th and 20th centuries, many of New York’s luminaries were buried there, some beneath elaborate monuments to their accomplishments.

“The interesting thing about Green-Wood Cemetery is that it was an immediate ‘success,’” Highsmith wrote in her essay. “Surely the Victorians had of necessity a very realistic attitude toward death...Death was King in a sense, and if you can’t lick him, why not join him? Even throw a party?”

The subtitle of Highsmith’s essay was "Listening to the Talking Dead," and from the beginning, she is in an empathetic state of mind. On the way to the cemetery, she imagines a family of mourners making the same journey; she notices a truck of trash that’s headed to its own burial ground, “some cemetery or incinerator for garbage,” she wrote. “Its apparently inexhaustible drip of squashed vegetable matter or leftover orange juice reminds me of human mortality, with its attendant ugliness, stench and inevitability.”

Highsmith was accompanied by a Times researcher—Phyllis Nagy, who would go on to become a screenwriter and whose film adaptation of Highsmith’s second novel, Carol, will be released later this year—but as they drive together through the cemetery with an enthusiastic young guide, Highsmith’s focus is on the monuments they pass. She notes that an “eye-catching tomb shows a female figure in stone, life-sized, collapsed on the stone steps which lead to a block of rough marble surmounted by a rugged cross” and that “angels of all sizes weep gracefully everywhere.”

There’s no real structure to the essay; in the draft, Highsmith simply recreated the journey she had taken through the grounds. The most dramatic moments comes about three-quarters of the way through, when Highsmith goes to the crematorium. She’s a little bit shy, here: “I would like to see the interior of the building, first of all, and I don’t know how far I dare ask to see,” she wrote, but she’s guided to down to the row of five industrial furnaces. She puts her hand inside one of them.

“The warmth of that retort, even though it may have come from a pilot flame, brought home death to me as none of the stone monuments above ground had,” she wrote. “There I go in a few years, I thought, as cremation is my preferred way, ashes to be scattered any old where that is permitted. So my head is a bit light as we walk on via a near-by hall to the elegant Columbarium…”

After that brush against the thought of mortality, she visits the walls of urns, considers the price of various burial options, and walks past a few more grave sites. Her overall impression, she wrote, was “a cheerful one.”

“Go out in style, and with as much dignity and grace as possible,” she wrote. As she passes back through the cemetery gates, she considers that “the dead can still live in the memory of those who loved them, or of those who may learn to respect them. That was the last message to me conveyed by Green-Wood."

The gates of Green-Wood (Photo: katherine weil/Flickr)

The piece never ran. "I do think the editors simply did not care for the piece," Nagy wrote in an email.

Highsmith lived another seven and half years after that trip to Green-Wood. Although by the end of her life, she was famous in Europe, where she had lived since the early 1960s, in America, she was still something of a cult classic. Her first book, Strangers on a Train, had become a Hitchcock film; European directors had adapted Ripley for the screen, and in 1988, the New Yorkerhad reviewed her work favorably, calling her books “the queasiest fun imaginable” and “fiction too abandoned to care what it’s called, literature or trash, that celebrates restlessness and volatility.” But when Highsmith died, she didn’t even have an American publisher.

“Towards the end of her life she became increasingly misanthropic—one person I interviewed told me she was ‘an equal opportunities offender’—she offended everyone!” says Wilson. “But those who knew her loved her, despite or because of her quirks and flaws. During the course of my research, I became quite fond of her too, of her black humor, her grumpiness, her unsentimental perception of the world, and her honesty.”

It’s funny how memory works. When Nagy recalled her first ride with Highsmith, she described it to Wilson as “a completely silent, miserable journey to the cemetery except for the three occasions when Pat spoke to me.” But in the essay, the perspective is turned, and Highsmith describes Nagy (although not by name) as “my rather taciturn companion from the Times.” The two later came to be close friends.

In all accounts, though, Highsmith comes across as a sometimes difficult person to be around, but an easy one to respect. “It was a brave step for her to undertake the commission to write about Green-Wood,” Wilson says. In her private notebooks, the author had written of her intention not to fear dying alone, that she’d “always known death was an individual act, anyway.” But, as Wilson recounts in his book, the cancer in her lung frightened her. When Highsmith first heard the news, she took out a flask of whiskey, right in the doctor’s office, to take a drink, and later told friends that the operation had scared her. She quit smoking, a lifelong habit. When the results came, eventually, that the cancer had not regrown, she wrote that “it is like a reprieve from death.”

This is the context in which she visited Green-Wood and stuck her hand into crematory furnace. “The ovens were still warm,” Nagy told Wilson, “and you could hear the bones being grated in this huge blender. It was pretty gruesome."

An early edition of the King James Bible (Image: Private Collection of S. Whitehead/Wikimedia)

In 1604, King James I gave six groups of translators a very important task: produce a definitive English translation of the Bible for the Church of England.

The King James Bible, as it came to be called, was finished in 1611. Translated from the original Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, it was intended to be an alternative to earlier Puritan translations, which the king found seditious.

Only three copies of the translators' drafts were known to exist. But now Jeffrey Alan Miller, an assistant professor at Montclair State University, has found the earliest known draft of part of the King James Bible, he reports in the Times Literary Supplement.

The draft is also, writes the New York Times, "the only one definitively written in the hand of one of the roughly four dozen translators who worked on it."

Like so many historically important and valuable objects, the manuscript was just sitting in an archive. It was in the papers of Samuel Ward, one of the translators, who went on to become the master of the University of Cambridge. For many years, his papers were uncatalogued; when they were organized in the 1980s, the draft was logged as a "verse-by-verse biblical commentary."

When Miller was researching a book about Ward, he found the document, "an unassuming notebook about the size of a modern paperback, wrapped in a stained piece of waste vellum," says the Times. When he examined it more closely, he began to realize that the book contained Ward's notes on an existing English translation of the Apocrypha. He considered word choices, looked at the original Greek and jotted down possible alternatives—some of which made it into the final King James translation.

Part of what makes the draft so interesting is that it shows how the translators worked. They were supposed to work collectively on their translations, instead of assigning out certain parts to individual translators. But the notebook indicates that the Cambridge group at least began by assigning out sections. It appears that Ward finished his, and then picked up slack from another translator by starting work on a second section. This backs up an account from another translator, describing a similar system of work.

The translation decisions were made more collaboratively, though. As Miller writes in the Times Literary Supplement, not all of the suggestions that Ward jotted in his notebook made it into the final translation. He was, after all, a young Fellow of the college at the time: even if he was entrusted with some of the work of translation, King James' instruction had been clear. No one person was to be the translator of any section of the Bible.

With these newly discovered manuscripts, we know understand that much better how the scholars assigned this task created the book that would be one of the most influential in the world for centuries to come.

Bonus finds: Ancient mammal with spiky hair, ancient human teeth that could rewrite migration history, aliens?

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Photo: Vlastimil Juricek/WikiCommons

Some people like their Airbnb host to be friendly and welcoming. Others prefer one that points them to the bathroom and then gets out of the way. And still others would like six million Airbnb hosts who are all dead.

If you fall into the last category, you're in luck, because Airbnb is offering up the gothest date night ever: dinner for two, a private concert, and a cozy evening tucked away under Paris with millions of skeletons. The Paris catacombs, opened in the late 18th century to handle the overflow from the city's crowded cemeteries, are lined with stacked skulls and femurs; originally part of a network of quarry tunnels, these ossuaries now represent a veritable "Empire of the Dead" (as declared on the sign over the entrance). Over 500,000 tourists visit every year, but none of them get to sleep over. Until now.

Photo: Joe DeSousa/WikiCommons

Airbnb is offering couples (or friends willing to share a bed) the opportunity to submit a 100-word essay on the topic of "why you think you have the courage to sleep in the catacombs of Paris." The best entry wins an unforgettable and possibly slightly uncomfortable Halloween night. (The catacombs are deep underground and it's chilly, plus, of course, all those skeletons will be staring at you.) Entry rules stipulate that pets are not allowed, but "there will already be a monster under your bed." You are also reminded to bring your toothbrush and pajamas, "especially if they glow in the dark."

Photo: Janericloebe/WikiCommons

Some members of the city council oppose the competition, considering it disrespectful to the dead. But this is hardly the first time the Paris catacombs have been host to something besides sober contemplation. In 2004, Parisian police exploring an area normally off-limits to tourists found a stocked bar and restaurant and a fully functional movie theater. 

Sadly, those are no longer available to serve this Halloween's overnight guests, but those who stay will get a meal, a concert, and a spooky bedtime story—and breakfast, if they survive the night.

Photo: Joe DeSousa, WikiCommons

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

Best friends. (Photo: artvintage1800s.etsy.com/flickr) 

It can be hard to look at a modern dog breed and see any sort of use for it other than a snuggle buddy. Dog breeds have been systematically manipulated by humans to exemplify certain traits which may or may not have any relation to the purpose that type of dog originally served.

What, in short, is the point of a pug?

Almost every single dog we love today once had a real purpose—and the ones that didn't are sometimes the most fascinating. We surveyed the first 20 breeds of dog recognized by the American Kennel Club, and delved into their histories and earliest uses. 

A 19th-century pug, by Carl Reichert. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Looking into dog breeds shows a huge variety, but not necessarily a very long history. Research indicates that domesticated dogs originated in Asia and spread to Africa somewhere between 9,000 and 34,000 years ago. (That same research indicates that the theory that dogs were descended from grey wolves may not be totally accurate; some DNA testing leans in the direction of the two having a common ancestor, meaning they're more like evolutionary siblings.) 

Dog breeds, though, are a tougher subject to pin down. Most loosely, we can define a breed as a group of dogs with very similar sets of physical and behavioral traits, which may have occurred naturally or from human intervention. DNA testing can sometimes help figure out these lineages; in many cases closely monitored breeds of dog exhibit a great deal of similarity amongst themselves and differences with other breeds. Various dogs have been claimed as “ancient breeds” at different times, and depictions of canines resembling greyhounds, for example, have been found in Egyptian tombs dating back to 5,000 years.

However DNA evidence suggests that a good deal of these “ancient breed” assertions are totally false. A 2004 study looked at genetic similarities between dog breeds and found distinct groupings corresponding to eras of intense human intervention into the bloodlines of dogs. By Roman times, rough groupings of dogs had begun to coalesce around specific purposes: guard dogs, herding dogs, and hunting dogs.

Puppy love. (Photo: artvintage1800s.etsy.com/Public Domain/flickr)   

But the obsession with very specific physical and behavioral traits of dogs emerged in the Victorian era, from 1830 to 1900. In the latter part of the period, the American Kennel Club began recognizing specific dog breeds and rewarding them for purity. (That’s despite none of these breeds being very old at all.) England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales became something of a hotspot for dog breeds; many of today’s most popular ones come from this time and those places.

Still, even if they only date back a century or two, dog breeds ended up the way they are for a reason. Until recently, dogs were more popular for specific tasks than as companion animals. It can be fascinating to see which traits emerged for which reason, in which parts of the world.

We researched the first 20 dog breeds recognized by the American Kennel Club (omitting some close relatives for the sake of keeping things moving). Where do these dogs come from? Why do they look or act the way they do?

Pointer (accepted by the AKC in 1878)

Sometimes known as the English Pointer to differentiate it from other pointers like the German Shorthaired Pointer, the Pointer was one of the first dogs recognized by the AKC. It’s an English breed, probably bred specifically in the 17th century from “gun dogs” brought to England from Spain.

Its name spells out why it was a successful breed: the English Pointer has a behavioral quirk that compels it to find prey animals, but instead of hunting them it stops and aims its muzzle at its quarry. This was a very useful trait for wealthy English hunters, tromping through moors in, presumably, fancy custom-made hunting gear in search of pheasants. It’s now become the hunting dog of choice in the southern United States, where it’s often referred to as a “bird dog.” In the U.S., it’s often used to hunt quail rather than pheasants, but still retains its bizarre and noble desire to locate, but not hunt, birds.

An Irish setter illustration from "The Book of Dogs; An Intimate Study of Mankind's Best Friend", published in 1919. (Photo: artvintage1800s.etsy.com/flickr) 

Irish Setter (1878)

A longer haired, reddish dog, the Irish Setter is, like the Pointer, a gun dog with an instinct to point at prey. There are references to “Setters” in literature from the 16th century, but the Irish Setter is an excellent example of how the desire for old breeds can sometimes create a wildly inauthentic dog. With the increased movement around the world that arrived in the last couple of centuries, dog populations that had once been isolated found themselves anything but. That’s good for a breed’s health—more genetic diversity always means a healthier dog—but bad if you want to keep a dog looking like it did two hundred years ago.

In the 1940s, the Irish Setter was nearing “extinction” (that word, being, of course, sort of fanciful; there’s no such thing as extinction amongst dog breeds, and saying a breed is extinct is like saying humans with the first name “Maximus” are becoming extinct). So to “save” it, some Irish Setter enthusiasts began crossing some purebred Irish Setters with English Setters, to create a breed that looks and acts like a traditional Irish Setter, though of course now it’s a hybrid. Very controversial, in the breeding world. 

Cocker Spaniel (1878)

The best guess of dog breed historians is that the Cocker Spaniel originated in Spain, hence its name, but the spaniel group is widespread and there are many competing theories about where it comes from. The “cocker” part is much easier: the breed was a rich man’s hunting dog meant to help with the hunting of woodcocks, a small game bird in the British Isles and, to a lesser extent, Europe. A small dog, it’s very good at scrambling into brush to scare a woodcock into taking flight, whereupon a hunter can shoot it. It also has a strong retriever instinct to bring the bird back to its owner. Useful! 

A Beagle and Basset Hound, (Photo:  Internet Book Archive/Public Domain/flickr)

Basset Hound (1885)

The Basset Hound is a ridiculous-looking dog, short-legged and with droopy...everything. The history of the breed is better-known than most; this type of hound dates back to a collection of dogs owned by St. Hubert, a Belgian monk. It is a hunting dog, with a keen sense of smell, and gained fame in France for its ability to hunt rabbits and badgers and other ground prey.

The reason for its short stature is kind of weird; a study from 2009 that examined the history of short-legged breeds states that breeders wanted the dog to have shorter legs so people could more easily keep up with it during hunting sessions. (Of course, short-legged dogs are now prone to many muscular and spinal issues arising from that trait.)

Beagle (1885)

The modern Beagle dates back to the 1830s, in Essex, England; a pack owned and bred by a Reverend by the name of Phillip Honeywood is believed to be the origin of most modern Beagles. Honeywood’s beagles, though, probably had genes from a whole mess of other dog breeds, now mostly gone. Greyhound? Sure, maybe! The same Belgian dogs that eventually gave us the Basset Hound? Why not!

The Beagle is a hunting dog, a fairly slow runner but still pretty good for hunting hares, rabbits, and pheasants. It’s a good dog for hunters who prefer the hunt over the kill; other dogs are much better hunters, but the Beagle is a very nice companion.

A bloodhound. (Photo: Internet Book Archive/Public Domain/flickr) 

Bloodhound (1885)

This one probably also originated from those St. Hubert hounds, but its particular behavioral characteristics led it to be used for other tasks. Its sense of smell is legendary, and was used to track deer and wild boar, but it turns out the Bloodhound has a particular gift for tracking individual humans, which makes it a favorite of police forces and detectives.

Bull Terrier (1885)

A spectacularly weird-looking, muscular dog with a sort of egg-shaped face, the Bull Terrier is a mix of Bulldog and a now lost line of terriers. It’s a British breed with a darker history than most; by the mid-19th century, “blood sports” were highly popular in England, including ratting, bear-baiting, badger-baiting, and straight-ahead dogfighting. The Bull Terrier was ideal for these situations; placed in a ring, it’s a strong and tenacious fighter against rats, bears, badgers, or other dogs. No surprise, it can be a difficult do to train, and doesn’t get along well with other animals.

Collie (1885)

There are many breeds in the Collie family, from the Border Collie to the Shetland Sheepdog to the Australian Cattle Dog. Collies originated, probably, in northern England and Scotland, and are herding dogs, with strong instincts to control populations of stupider animals like sheep and ducks. This might seem a weird thing for a dog to do. After all, dogs are predators, so why in the world are they acting like parents?

It turns out herding is actually a predatory behavior that can become productive. Herding dogs are trained to keep groups of animals in specific spaces, and to obey commands to move the animals to specific places.

Dachshunds. (Photo: Internet Book Archive/Public Domain/flickr) 

Dachshund (1885)

As its name suggests, the weiner dog originated in Germany. It was bred specifically for its skill at hunting badgers, whether in the wild or in badger-baiting events in arenas. It was also often used for hunting any kind of small terrestrial game—hares, rabbits, foxes.

There’s a wide discrepancy about when this breed came into being. It’s a mixture of a bunch of other hounds into one small strange package.  

Mastiff (1885)

Mastiffs, of which there are several varieties, are enormous,  often shaggy dogs that arose from any mountain where their services were needed, from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas. This is a broader category of several specific breeds, rather than a single breed that comes from a single place; dogs called Mastiffs all share a common ancestor in the Molossus, a Greco-Roman dog that no longer exists, but show variations in the thousand years or so that individual Molossus populations have been isolated. They are guard dogs, a variant of a herding dog that doesn’t control the herd so much as protect it from predators like wolves and coyotes.

Pug (1885)

An unusual one: the Pug is in the mastiff family, but very tiny, which makes it terrible as a guard dog. (Pugs are unlikely to strike fear into any predator’s heart.) They originate from royal China, where they were bred as companion dogs, a trait they retained when they were exported to Europe in the 16th century and later to North America. It’s one of the very few breeds that was originally bred to be a pet. 

 Greyhounds. (Photo: Internet Book Archive/Public Domain/flickr)  

Greyhound (1885)

Dogs that look an awful lot like the Greyhound, with the distinctive barrel chest, narrow waist, and long snout, show up in depictions in Egypt from thousands of years ago, and so the Greyhound has often been considered a very ancient breed. But DNA evidence suggests this is just a coincidence, that Greyhound-type dogs (called sight hounds) popped up all across Europe sometime around the medieval period.

Greyhounds are used as hunting dogs but not for their keen nose, as Bloodhounds are: they’re most prized for their eyesight and foot speed, which allows them to pursue fast-moving prey like deer without losing it.

St. Bernard (1885)

Another mastiff type, the St. Bernard is a monstrously large and slobbery dog that comes from the Swiss Alps. They were bred originally for a unique purpose: their strong bodies and coarse fur makes them ideal search-and-rescue dogs in the snowy mountains of the Alps. These days, the St. Bernard has been crossbred with other mastiffs like the Newfoundland, reducing the differences between the various mastiff breeds.

Yorkshire Terrier (1885)

The tiny, cute Yorkshire Terrier originates in Yorkshire, in northern England, and dates back, as so many breeds do, to the mid-19th century. As Yorkshire was a manufacturing center, there was a need for a breed of dog that could take care of a necessary evil that comes with manufacturing: rats. The Yorkie is an ideal ratting dog, with a small stature and short legs to allow it to chase small prey.

Bulldog (1886)

The Bulldog, in its oldest form, was bred for use in blood sports, specifically bull-baiting, in Victorian England. A bull would be chained to a post, giving it maybe 20 or 30 feet of movement, and the dogs would be loosed nearby. They’d stoop low to the ground before attempting to deliver bites to the nose and face of the bull. (Bulls would often kill multiple dogs before succumbing.)

After blood sports were outlawed in England in 1835, it stopped making sense to breed this weird dog, but a few decades later, dog fanciers began breeding various dogs to emulate the physical traits the old Bulldogs had. From those newer Bulldogs come our modern ones.

Great Danes. (Photo: Internet Book Archive/Public Domain/flickr)  

Great Dane (1887)

The Great Dane is in the same mastiff family as the St. Bernard, but its origin is a little strange. The legendarily huge (but also very sweet) dog may or may not originate from Denmark, as its name would suggest; certainly there are very large dogs in the history of Denmark, but similar stories and depictions can be found in Germany and France.

These dogs are hunting dogs, but as anyone who’s met one can attest, they’re not much good at tracking or killing prey. Instead they were trained to use their massive size to hold down deer, boar, and other large game once it’s they’d already been caught by another dog, so the hunter could finish it off.

Different types of poodles (Photo: Internet Book Archive/Public Domain/flickr)  

Poodle (1887)

A very intelligent, active breed, the Poodle originated in Germany under the very good name Pudelhund. It served a similar purpose as the Retriever does in England: it’s competent in water and has a firm retrieval instinct, so it’s ideal for fetching waterfowl. It even has webbed toes to help it swim.

The Poodle quickly became popular in France, the country with which it’s still often associated, and, even though it’s a capable working dog, is now often thought of as a frou-frou lap dog. 

A dalmation. (Photo: Internet Book Archive/Public Domain/flickr)  

Dalmatian (1888)

The famous firehouse dog is confirmed by most sources to have originated in Croatia, with the first discernible depictions dating to the early 17th century. (“Dalmatia” is a coastal region of Croatia.) Early uses of the dog varied; it seems the first Dalmatians were all-purpose dogs, sometimes used for hunting, sometimes for guard dogs, sometimes for companions.

Their use as firehouse dogs emerged in the 19th century in the U.S., where it was discovered that Dalmatians have a natural affinity with horses. Fire engines at the time were horse-drawn, and Dalmatians proved very capable of trotting alongside and in front of the engines to clear a path and find the way to a fire.

Pomeranian (1888)

The Pomeranian, a tiny fluffy purse dog, is actually in the Spitz family, a category of dogs that includes dogs as varied as the Alaskan Malamute (huge, sled dog), the Akita (traditional Japanese companion dog) and the Welsh Corgi.

Though it originally comes from a family of dogs around the Germany/Poland border, Queen Victoria of England is largely responsible for the Pomeranian. She continually bred smaller and smaller Pomeranians, eventually creating the standards that define the breed now.

What’s it good for? Well...not much. Other Spitz dogs serve a variety of purposes, from sled dogs to hunting dogs, but the Pomeranian, as soon as it became recognizable as such, was never anything other than a companion dog.

Golden Retriever (1925)

America’s dog if ever there was one, the Golden Retriever dates back to the Scottish elite in the mid-19th century. True to its name, the Golden Retriever is, first of all, gold, and second of all was bred for its instinct to go retrieve things. Originally, that was waterfowl: the rich Scots liked to stand at the sides of ponds and shoot ducks and geese, and the dog would do the hard work of swimming out into the pond to retrieve the bird where it had fallen.

Interestingly, there are three distinct types of Golden Retrievers, one from the UK, one from the U.S., and one from Canada. The UK Retriever is more muscular and with a broader face than the classic American dog. The Canadian version is like the American except slightly taller.

Sure being an astronaut is hazardous and lonely and often stressful, but damn if Scott Kelly isn’t making it look fun.

When NASA recently tasked him with testing out their new RED Epic Dragon (real name) HD camera aboard the International Space Station, he turned it into a demonstration that might have come from your fun high-school chemistry teacher.

A video shows Kelly mucking about with a simple floating ball of water, which, in space, is amazing enough on its own. Then he starts to change the color of the ball like some magic trick by injecting it with dye from a dropper. Once it has changed from a clear glob of water to a green space ooze, Kelly tosses a fizzing antacid tablet into it, causing bubbles to spark off edges of the undulating sphere, and pockets of gas to form inside of it.

Again, this was all in service of the new Epic Dragon camera, which NASA says can provide six times the detail that other cameras on the ISS have been able to achieve. First delivered in January of 2015 (thanks SpaceX), the camera is in fact the same model Peter Jackson used to film The Hobbit movies, providing a clarity and depth that many people found a little too real. And it seems to work just fine up in space, as tiny particles of water can be seen floating off towards the walls as they explode from the antacid bubbles.  

NASA hopes that the hi-def camera can provide both unparalleled views of life on the space station and a clarity to operations in space that will allow ground support to better understand what is happening. As NASA puts it:

The camera's ability to record at a high resolution as well as up to 300 frames per second made it the ideal recording device to capture dynamic events like vehicle operations near the station, such as docking and undocking. The higher resolution images and higher frame rate videos can reveal more information when used on science investigations, giving researchers a valuable new tool aboard the space station.

But for us stuck on Earth, it’s more of an awesome Hobbit camera for recording space hijinks. See more HD fun with space bubbles below.

Billy the Kid, on the left (Photo: Kagin's, Inc.)

Five years ago, Randy Guijarro spent just a couple of dollars on some old tintype photos he found in Fresno, California. When he looked at one of them under a magnifying glass, he was surprised—one of the men in the photo, leaning on a croquet mallet, looked an awful lot like Billy the Kid.

Now, Kagin's, a California-based numismatics firm, has authenticated the picture. It is, the firm says, the second known image of the famous outlaw.

Billy the Kid lived in the second half of the 19th century. He worked as a ranch hand in the southwestern United States, developed a reputation as an able gun man, and ended up killing at least eight people. (Though, according to legend, it was more than 20.) He was part of a gang called the Regulators, and toward the end of his life, a price was put on his head. He was killed by a sheriff in 1881. 

The photo, though, shows a quieter scene—Billy the Kid and another man are playing croquet, at a wedding. Some of the other people pictured are thought to be members of the Regulators. The tintype is just four inches by five inches, and, according to Kagin's, could be worth $5 million.

The tintype (Image: Kagin's, Inc.)

Bonus finds: a Jefferson-era chemistry lab at UVA, animations deleted from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Detroit by night. (Photo: Ed Schipul/flickr)

Some call it Mischief Night, others Cabbage Night but the night before Halloween, with its long history of pranks escalating into chaos and destruction, is perhaps best known as Devil’s Night. Halloween tricks are nothing new, but Devil's Night in Detroit has historically brought out some of the worst vandalism and arson.

Residents in the areas hardest hit by Devil’s Night decided that trying to rein in the worst excesses was not enough. Instead they have rechristened the eve of All Hallow’s Eve as Angels' Night, returning the focus of the lead-up to festivities to pumpkin carving and costume planning and away from acts that are harmful to communities.

Devil’s Nights first got out of hand in Detroit in the 1970s. For many years they grew more and more chaotic. Author Ze’ev Chafets recalled in the New York Times how local boys would characterize the pre-Halloween festivities in the 1980s: “People try to burn down their own neighborhoods,” they would tell him.

Replacing a fire hydrant in preparation for Angels' Night. (Photo: City of Detroit/flickr)

Every year more destruction in the name of pranks occurred on October 30th. In 1984 the city saw one of its most riotous nights in recent memory. On that Devil’s Night, local hooligans set a total of 810 fires. The police and firefighters needed backup from suburban departments—the first time in years—and at least two firefighters were injured in the chaos.

Most of the fires happened in abandoned lots and dumpsters, but the sheer number of unattended blazes caused an outcry. “Flames from fires in abandoned buildings leaped to occupied houses,” the Associated Press reported on Halloween, 1984. Many residents were reminded of the 1967 Detroit riots, which resulted in more than 2,000 destroyed buildings.

It was clear the city needed to respond. The following year, Detroit officials tried to take precautions to keep the disorder to a minimum. B.J. Widick, in his book Detroit: The City of Race and Class Violence, reports that in 1985, coordinated efforts by police and firefighters saw the fires reduced to 479. The next year, a dawn-to-dusk curfew was imposed on youths under the age of 17, while 5,600 police and city employees and 5,000 local volunteers helped to patrol Detroit that night. 

"This building is being watched." Putting up a sign on a vacant home in Detroit for Angels' Night 2014. (Photo: City of Detroit/flickr)

Soon it became a local imperative to fight these annual outbursts of anarchic behavior. Professor Adam Brooke Davis of Truman University described the initial patrols by citizens as a way to regain control: “Of course, they weren't taking back the streets,” he wrote. “They had no intention of doing anything with the streets the rest of the year. They just wanted the fires to stop, and to be allowed to watch TV behind locked doors in peace.”

But in 1994, another disturbing Devil’s Night occurred. Despite active around-the-clock patrolling from police and firefighters, as many as 300 fires were recorded on October 30th. A one-year-old died that night in a blaze, although it was never determined if it was due to Devil’s Night activities. The police chief at the time called it“one of our worst nights since I have been on the job.”

Residents of Detroit deemed this a wakeup call. What started as a perceived necessity from the police in the ‘80s transformed into a grassroots community-organized event in 1995. The first official Angels’ Night was born. Community leaders and city officials began to join forces to recruit as many volunteer Angels as possible. They enlisted as many as 50,000 civilians to help patrol and surveil the streets during the days leading up to Halloween, according to the Michigan-based community website Awesome Mitten. The city asked people not only to volunteer to patrol the streets, and take note of anyone disobeying the six p.m. curfew, but also to keep their lights on at night.

This has remained the tradition for the past 20 years. Since 1994, there have been fewer fires and reports of vandalism on October 30th. There was a culture shift as well, at least in terms of nomenclature. Instead of focusing on the mischief caused by Devil’s Night, calling it Angels’ Night magnified a community-focused volunteer event. Residents obliged because they too were tired of the fires and chaos.

Neighbors around Detroit are committing to watch vacant homes in their neighborhood for Angels' Night 2014. (Photo: City of Detroit/flickr)

Now, if you even refer to it as Devil’s Night, some may find that “politically incorrect.” One Detroit native, when asked about their experience with past Devil’s Nights, joked in an email reply, “It's not called Devils Night in Detroit.... it's 'Angel's Night'!!!!!”

Whatever the name, the rebranding seems to have stuck. Every year at the beginning of October, the city of Detroit issues an official call for volunteers. The city sets up a hotline for anyone interested in patrolling the streets. The mayor has even been known to personally knock on doors to help in recruiting. Some think the idea of militarizing civilians to defend against anti-authoritarian activities is counterintuitive, but even with opposition, Angels’ Night persists.

The mischief appears to have subsided too. Last July more fires broke out on the Fourth of July than on the previous Devil’s Night. Detroit residents no longer fear for their property on the night before Halloween. Whether it’s the presence of Angels or merely the coalescing of a community, the night seems to have changed. And if you talk to Detroit residents from way back when, they’d tell you how necessary that change was. 

Burj Al Arab in Dubai, currently the world's tallest building by 70 feet. (Photo: Donaldytong/WikiCommon CC BY-SA 3.0)

Between now and 2018, if all goes according to plan, New York City will be home to 33 new skyscrapers. Builders will soon unveil the MoMA tower, a supertall sliver of glass right next to the museum, and 432 Park Ave, which will be the tallest residential building in the hemisphere. 

Elsewhere in the country, cities from San Francisco to Philadelphia are going tall—residents of Washington, D.C. are even calling for a repeal of the Height of Buildings Act, a century-old piece of legislation that constrains new structures to about 12 stories. Globally, newly powerful cities like Dubai and Taipei have taken to announcing their arrival on the scene with megatall triumphs, while the old guard works hard to keep up (as of this spring, London has 270 skyscrapers in the works).

Such heights may be unprecedented, but the concept of the skyscraper is surprisingly ancient. Twelve thousand years ago, before people had invented pottery, farming, writing, or the wheel—before anyone had even thought to settle down from a life of nomadic wandering—a group of 500 or so hunter-gatherers living in what is now southeastern Turkey got together, limbered up, and did something brand new: built a tall structure. They carved huge chunks of stone out of nearby quarries, carried them up a hill, stacked them into tall T-shapes, and arranged them in a series of circles around pairs of even taller pillars. They filled out the circles with walls and stone benches, and filled many of the surfaces with elaborately carved animals—stately birds, bandy-legged scorpions, toothy lions, crouching boars. Some of the central pillars were inscribed with arms, hands, and clothing, as though meant to represent larger-than-life human figures.

Since it began to be unearthed in 1995, the site, named Göbekli Tepe, has captured the imaginations of archaeologists worldwide. Its carved animals imply "a highly complicated mythology," and the tall, T-shaped humanoids "clearly belong to another, transcendent sphere," site archaeologists wrote in 2012. Not only that, but scattered within the circles were "incredibly large numbers of animal bones," Jens Notroff, a member of the excavation team, wrote in an email. "The bones we found stem from the most meaty parts of the animals, and are cut and broken," he wrote, and "their number hints at huge feasts." Adjacent rectangular rooms were used for cooking, and maybe even to brew beer. In contrast, there were no signs that anyone lived there full-time. Göbekli Tepe was only for feasting, dancing, and symbolic appreciation—it was a monument.

The ruins of Göbekli Tepe, its tall pillars and circular design still visible. (Photo: Teomancimit/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

For a long time, experts assumed that agriculture predated things like symbolic systems and organized religion. As Elif Batuman wrote in The New Yorker in 2011, "The findings at Göbekli Tepe suggest that we have the story backward—that it was actually the need to build a sacred site that first obliged hunter-gatherers to organize themselves as a workforce, to spend long periods of time in one place, to secure a stable food supply."

"Intellectually, [the people who built Göbekli Tepe] were not different from us," Notroff says. "They were as curious and eager and capable as we are today." In fact, they were about to become even more similar—"they were adapting to a changing world," Notroff says, living through a transitional period that would leave their descendants leading settled lives of farming and husbandry. When faced with these changes, they didn't get straight to work, or put stylus to tablet. They put big rocks on top of each other. They built.

A leaping fox carved into a Göbekli Tepe pillar. (Photo: Zhengan/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the millennia since, many other civilizations have marshaled massive amounts of resources to build structures that are big for the sake of being big. Stonehenge was built and refined over thousands of years. The Aztecs built their pyramids over a 200-year period, enlarging them to mark political, military, and religious events. The ancient Egyptian architect Imhotep, whose pyramid design allowed the entombed to climb to heaven, was so important to his countrymen that he was later deified, and the Romans invented the dome in order to create larger structures.

These days, it doesn't take us quite as long to stack stones on top of stones. We tend to venerate old religious monuments over new ones, and even the powerful have relatively human-sized tombs most of the time. Over the past century and a half, we have channeled our large-scale building instincts into a very different kind of monument—the urban skyscraper.

Chicago's Home Insurance Building, now considered the first official skyscraper. (Photo: Chicago Architectural Photographing Company/Public Domain)

"The skyscraper was born out of fire," says Kriston Capps, an architecture writer at CityLab. On October 8th, 1871, someone in Chicago knocked over a lantern, and three square miles of the city went up in flames. Hundreds of people died, and 17,500 buildings were destroyed. In the following weeks, Frederick Law Olmstead blamed the scope of the catastrophe on the city's "weakness for big things" and "great showy buildings." Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune promised, in tall caps, "CHICAGO WILL RISE AGAIN."

It did, to an unprecedented degree. When the Chicago blaze leveled the city, it "made it not just possible, but necessary, that they rethink and replan—and they did it vertically," Capps explains. The first official skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building, was finished 14 years after the fire, in 1885. It was only five stories tall, but it represented "a soaring leap," Capps says. The new steel and iron framework, developed for its fire resistance, also enabled unprecedented height, and by 1888, people were calling these stretched-out buildings "skyscrapers," a word previously reserved for exceptionally high-altitude horses, hats, and birds.

Hugh Ferriss' 1930 drawing of the New York Daily News building. (Image: Hugh Ferriss/Public Domain)

A decade later, in "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," architectural father of modernism Louis H. Sullivan asked, "What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building?" and then answered his own question: "It is lofty ... it must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation." In "The Skyscraper As Symbolic Form" in 1982, Stuart Cohen recounted architects' various arguments over how exactly to achieve this, from A.W. Pugin's veneration of Gothic styles (with their "vertical line[s] illustrative of the great mystery of the Resurrection") to Hugh Ferriss' Romantic designs, which imitated mountain peaks. He ended with a diagnosis of "the skyscrapers of corporate America"—"no more and no less than an abstract expression of their verticality."

This brings us back to the current lofty skyscraper boom, which Capps says is fueled by "the incredible wealth being generated and accumulated by a very elite sector of society." In New York especially, with its new trend of skinny buildings topped by individual penthouses, skyscrapers are "bastions of privilege"—he compares them to the Egyptian pyramids, themselves less a symbol of togetherness than of sheer elite power. "They're awesome, many of them are beautiful," Capps says of the new buildings. But when he looks at them, he sees not just pure, untrammeled verticality, but "incredible income inequality." This elitism is familiar: some archaeologists have suggested that even Göbekli Tepe was built at the behest of a caste of elite priests.

The Singapore skyline, circa 2009. (Photo: Merlion444/WikiCommons Public Domain)

About 4000 years after it was built, Göbekli Tepe was backfilled into oblivion—piled high with gravel, tools, and animal bones, the very things that had been used to construct it and to celebrate within it. No one knows why the site was buried, but whoever filled it did so "in a hurry," experts say.

The recent skyscraper boom is, practically speaking, a response to fiscal and residential growth. But with all the extra spires and parapets—enough that the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat recently revised their method of judging height—there's no denying that skyscrapers have retained a pronounced symbolic aspect. At a recent panel at MIT, Annalee Newitz of io9 spoke of the rise of urbanization—as of 2014, for the first time in history, more than half of the world lives in cities. Such a shift, she argued, could be considered on par with the switch from nomadism to settled life, one jarring enough that we don't just need tall buildings to house us, we want them in order to feel connected to our culture. As the ground shifts under that culture, it remains to be seen whether our monuments will shift, too.

John Atkinson Grimshaw’s 1897 painting "Spirit of the Night”. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

More than 50 years ago, the Fairy Investigation Society was all but destroyed by a fairy sex scandal of sorts. Now, it's back, and it's aiming to complete the world's first global fairy census.

The FIS was founded in 1927 by Quentin Craufurd, a naval officer who claimed to have invented the wireless telephone. Craufurd had an ongoing interest in spiritualism—he was attempting to contact the spirit world using wireless technology—and one of his friends gave him a copy of artist Bernard Sleigh's novel The Gates of Horn: Being Sundry Records from the Proceedings of the Society for the Investigation of Faery Fact & Fallacy. The novel described the inner workings of a fictional fairy research organization. Craufurd was so taken with the idea that he contacted Sleigh, and the two founded the FIS together.

The FIS was composed mainly of self-described psychics and “fairy seers,” people who reported some encounters or even ongoing experiences with fairies. But the “investigation” part of the Fairy Investigation Society was not purely passive. In his history of the FIS, historian and current group leader Simon Young described some of Craufurd's more experimental dealings with fairies:

There is a memory of Craufurd challenging fairies to open flower buds in his garden. Then, in his 1957 retrospective, Craufurd also recalls some experiments he undertook ‘from 1927–32’ with unnamed visitors to his house and with a group of nine marsh fairies. The experiments are not well described. They appear to have involved a fairy seance with a radio set and automatic writing. The fairies would use words from English and Old English and tell their human interlocutors where to look for archaeological remains, which sometimes they even found.

The pre-WWII archives of the FIS are lost, apart from references in Craufurd's published works. (Craufurd blames “enemy action,” which may mean the London bombings, or perhaps sabotage from the religious groups he claims opposed the society's work.) But in 1950, the FIS appointed as its secretary Marjorie Johnson, a “fairy seer” and collector of accounts of fairy experiences. With Johnson recording fairy experiences, doing outreach, and generally running things, the society bloomed to around 100 members. Walt Disney was listed on the membership rolls, but it's unlikely he would have attended meetings on the other side of the Atlantic. Other members included June Kynaston, author of the now-lost book, Nude Dancing for Health.

Charles Sims’ painting "...and the fairies ran away with their clothes". (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The current FIS fairy census has its roots in an unfinished project from this period. In the mid-1950s, Johnson and Scottish folklorist Alasdair Alpin MacGregor started circulating letters requesting accounts of fairy encounters, to be collected in a book. They eventually disbanded their collaboration—MacGregor wanted to travel. The first fairy census, such as it was, was abandoned, but they had already collected plenty of letters detailing personal encounters with fairies. Johnson planned to publish these in a collection called Fairy Vision, which would be a comprehensive discussion of fairies and the people who could see them.

But the first incarnation of the FIS was scuppered by salacious rumor-mongering. A 1960 article about Marjorie Johnson in the Sunday Pictorial announced: “She Does A Kinsey On Fairies.” Fairy Vision, the article claimed, would cover fairy sex, love, and reproduction, including the shocking news that “fairies are bisexual and polygamous, sharing each other's wives, husbands and children.” More innocently, the book also revealed that fairies don't get pregnant, but rather reproduce via “wishful thinking.” “It has taken me years of study to win their friendship and discover the secrets of their sex life,” Johnson was quoted as saying. “Anyone who is admitted to the circle of fairy friendship is very fortunate."

Johnson, whose interest in fairies was not at all prurient, wrote a letter to the editor accusing the paper of “false reporting.” The Sunday Pictorial (now called the Sunday Mirror) is a fairly scurrilous tabloid, so this is probably true—but it didn't make much difference. The article went the 1960 equivalent of viral. It was syndicated in newspapers worldwide, and journalists started badgering Johnson for interviews. The sensitive and retiring Johnson retreated from her role in the FIS, perhaps unable to cope with all the mocking scrutiny.

British historian Leslie Shepard officially took over as secretary, but without Johnson to run it, the FIS was functionally kneecapped. In her last draft of Fairy Vision—which was eventually published, in 2014, under the name Seeing Fairies and minus any mystical pansexuality—Johnson declared the society “defunct.” That was in the mid-1990s, when she would have been about 85 years old.

An illustration from the 1916 book "Elves and Fairies". (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Now Simon Young, the Fairy Investigation Society historian, is bringing the FIS back, but with an academic twist. “The old FIS was really a theosophist organization, in that to belong you had to believe,” says Young, a folklore researcher who teaches history at the Umbra Institute in Italy. “Today, the big difference is that we are a society of those interested in fairy lore, which includes believers but also many who are not believers.” (Young has described himself as “by nature skeptical about paranormal events.”)

This fairy census, as a project of the new, less dogmatic FIS, isn't intended to prove the existence of fairies. Rather, it's meant to collect the reports and experiences of those who believe they've encountered one. And there are hundreds of people willing to tell those tales. When Italian folklorist Sabina Magliocco put up her own fairy survey, the reaction was so enthusiastic that she reached her goal of 500 responses in less than a week. Young told me that his census has had hundreds of responses already; he's aiming for 2,000 by the time the survey closes in 2016.

The census form guarantees contributors that their accounts won't be published outside the FIS, but subscribers to the newsletter can see a selection of responses. The fairies described there vary greatly in size, aspect, and dress: Four inches, dressed like Robin Hood. Ten inches, wearing Oxford commoners' gowns. Ten to twelve feet high with a flame-like aura and a pyramid-shaped head. Three feet square and matte bluish-white, like a pillowcase. Twice human height and made of sticks. Pure white light the size of a dragonfly. Blue and Gollum-like, with webbed hands. Six and a half feet tall, with six fingers on each hand. Dark grey hair and skin, black flowered dress, and floating a few feet off the ground. Three feet tall, looking like Santa Claus but with white horns and a bright red face and tail. Tall and thin with a pointed head and wreathed in glowing green mist. A blue horse the size of a dog.

Most of the encounters happened in childhood, but the survey respondents have no apparent doubt about what they've seen. They write “I saw,” not “I thought I saw,” and occasionally head off potential objections ahead of time: “I know it wasn't a dream.” Even the writer who saw butterfly-like iridescent fairies after a series of strokes doesn't imagine that the experience could have been some kind of neural misfiring. That story concludes: “I believe they healed me from the stroke effects.”

If the census respondents believe in fairies, they're certainly not alone. There's also a yearly assembly for fairy believers near Twisp, Washington. Since 2001, the Fairy and Human Relations Congress has been gathering“flower essence specialists, animal and plant communicators, shamanic practitioners and herbalists, wildcrafters, fairy seers, intuitives, geomancers, Bards and Druids, and Native American storytellers” for three days of music, dancing, and group meditation. Marjorie Johnson and the original Fairy Investigation Society would surely approve.

Even with his scholarly and skeptical bent, Young approves too—he wrote in one of the FIS newsletters that he hoped to attend the Congress one day. As a folklorist, Young is interested in the anthropology of fairy beliefs and fairy encounters. “We measure not just the fairies, but the people seeing the fairies,” he told me.

But Young wants to collect many more responses before weighing in on what, if anything, can be said about the people seeing the fairies. If you've encountered little men, pyramid-headed giants, dog-sized horses, or anything else out of the ordinary, or know someone who has, consider contributing to the fairy census. You'll be helping the cause of fairy scholarship, not to mention the legacy of an embattled nearly 80-year-old organization that once attracted the likes of Walt Disney.

 

A photo posted by Exploring Chiapas (@exploringchiapas) on Aug 19, 2015 at 7:57am PDT

In 1966, when the Grijalba river in Chiapas, Mexico, was dammed up, a church that had been standing for 400 years, since 1564, was submerged under the water of the Nezahualcoyotl reservoir. But this year, a drought in the region caused the water levels of the reservoir to drop about 80 feet, and the church re-emerged from the water. 

 

A photo posted by Exploring Chiapas (@exploringchiapas) on Aug 18, 2015 at 9:02am PDT

For a few weeks now, the church has been accessible by boat, and local adventure-seekers have been ferrying out to explore the ruin. The church is about 200 feet long and its walls are 30 feet high, although the tower reaches about 48 feet. The building was abandoned in the 1770s, after the plague hit the area, the AP reports.

 

A photo posted by Marcelino (@marcelino_champo) on Sep 18, 2015 at 8:08am PDT

 

A photo posted by De Telegraaf Nieuws 📰🆕 (@telegraafinbeeld) on Oct 19, 2015 at 3:27am PDT

 

A photo posted by Exploring Chiapas (@exploringchiapas) on Aug 19, 2015 at 7:57am PDT

 

A photo posted by Jacob García (@jacobgarciafoto) on Oct 15, 2015 at 8:48am PDT

Shrinking reservoirs regularly reveal the crumbling buildings in once-inhabited valleys. This church was visible, as well, in 2002; another church, in Venezuela, re-appears from time to time. But in recent years, this phenomenon has been happening frequently all over North and South America as drought brings down the water level in reservoirs.

A shrinking reservoir (Image: NASA Earth Observatory/Dylan Thuras)

Bonus finds: Rare and poisonous sea snake, a lost letter from Malcolm X about going to Mecca

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Denver International Airport, home to many conspiracy theories. (Photo: David Rutledge/flickr)

Things have been a little chaotic at Denver International Airport (DIA) in recent weeks, after a breakdown in Southwest Airlines' computer system caused long lines to snake through the terminal. For most travelers, it was an annoyance.

For those more focused on DIA's ongoing weirdness, it was all part of the conspiracy.

Built at $2 billion over budget and unveiled in February 1995—16 months behind schedule—Denver Airport has been attracting controversy since construction began. The airport is 53 square miles, making it the second-largest in the world by area, behind King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. The layout of its six runways is, to some, swastika-like. (According to an airport spokeswoman quoted in the Telegraph in February 2015, "[a]ll of DIA's runways support the largest jets currently flying. We think the shape looks like a pinwheel.")

An aerial of the airport in winter. (Photo: ashleyniblock/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

The "swastika" runway is just one piece of one of the most outlandish theories attached to Denver International Airport—that it was actually commissioned by the New World Order (aka the New Nazi Party). The stone dedication marker for a time capsule buried under an American flag at the south end of the terminal actually mentions the "New World Airport Commission." Furthering speculation, its design features the square and compasses symbol associated with the Freemasons. 

The strangest thing about this is that the New World Airport Commission doesn’t exist. Conspiracy theorists argue that the New World Airport Commission really refers to the New World Order. According to that same Telegraph article, "[It's] actually the New—World Airport Commission," according to the airport. "It was designed by a planning and advocacy group consisting of local business and political leaders. The group had absolutely no association with the 'New World Order'."

The time capsule marker. (Photo: Devon Hollahan/flickr)

The Denver International Airport uses a series of underground tunnels to run a passenger train from concourse to concourse, which is currently functional. What’s not functional, and was part of the delay in the original opening of the airport, is an automated baggage system. It failed from the first try and was never fixed, leaving empty tunnels under the airport that leave people wondering where they might lead.

Pair that with the rumor of buried buildings under the airport, and you have the perfect setting for a conspiracy about an underground bunker or eventual underground city. The Denver Post spoke with DIA Communications Director Stacy Stegman about the possibility of a hidden city: “I think people would be very disappointed if they were to actually spend some time under DIA," Stegman said. “We are under the footprint of 53 million people. It would be pretty difficult to hide any covert activity with the thousands of workers that are down here every day."

On the runway at Denver. (Photo: Paul Heaberlin/flickr) 

This particular theory is one that can really take you down the conspiracy rabbit hole. The beliefs about the tunnels range anywhere from people being annoyed about the waste of money to believing that the tunnels lead to future Nazi prisons and concentration camps to believing that the tunnels lead to underground cities populated by aliens.

According to the Denver International Airport website, the fueling system at DIA "is capable of pumping 1,000 gallons of jet fuel per minute through a 28-mile network of pipes. Each of the six fuel farm tanks holds 65,000 barrels (2.73 million gallons) of jet fuel.” This is a lot of fuel for a commercial airport—and 40 percent more than the larger King Fahd International Airport—causing some people to wonder what that extra fuel might be for.

Regardless of what's happening underground, there is plenty of weirdness in plain sight at DIA. One of the more striking sights, located beside the road leading up to the terminal, is the unsettling Blue Mustang. 

Dubbed "Blucifer" by locals, it is a 32-foot-tall sculpture of a wild, cerulean-hued horse rearing up in anger. The eyes glow red at night, but that is just one hint of its evil energy. The giant horse killed its creator, sculptor Luis Jiménez, before it was even finished being made. In 2006, a 9,000-pound section of the enormous sculpture fell on Jiménez, severing an artery in his leg and causing his death. Despite this terrible accident, Blue Mustang was installed in front of the airport in 2008.

The Blue Mustang monument. (Photo: Eric Golub/flickr) 

The strange art continues on the inside. The two murals at the airport designed by Leo Tanguma, called “Children of the World Dream of Peace” and “In Peace and Harmony with Nature,” are pretty unnerving. In the former, a gargantuan figure in flowing olive-green military garb and gas mask wields an assault rifle in his left hand and while stabbing a dove with a cutlass with his right. A line of shrouded, despairing figures cowers in his wake. It's just what you want to see before boarding an international flight.

(Photo: Donal Mountain/Creative Commons)

There are markings on the ground all around the airport, but the particular markings that are beneath the biological-warfare-themed mural include a mining cart with the initials “Au” and “Ag” on it. To some, they are clearly the symbols for gold and silver. To others, they represent an abbreviation for the “Australian Antigen,” a deadly strain of hepatitis that could be used as a weapon in biological warfare.

If you're flying into DIA, you'll find gargoyles when you go to retrieve your luggage from the carousel. Because gargoyles are supposed to watch over the area in which they are positioned, the creatures have been installed in the baggage claim area to ensure that all of the luggage arrives safe from harm. You can see the two gargoyles, which form a sculpture known as “Notre Denver” by Terry Allen, near claims 3 and 16.

Gargoyle at Denver International Airport. (Photo: Pravin Premkumar/flickr)

The terror around DIA isn't confined to its terrestrial space. In 2007, 14 planes at DIA ended up with cracked windshields. While most windshields were cracked at various places around the airport—during takeoff, taxiing at the airport, and parked at the gate—one of the planes’ windshields cracked when it was at 19,000 feet. While the official cause from National Transportation Safety Board officials was “foreign object debris”, the investigators couldn’t figure out the “precise nature” of the debris, though the airport is frequently plagued by storms, wind, and dust being blown around.

What conspiracy theorists believe really happened was the cracks were a result of an electromagnetic pulse from the nuclear testing site under the airport. Unfortunately, electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) affect electronics and would be more like to wipe out the electrical systems of the airplanes that crack the windshields.

Whether all the talk of conspiracy at DIA remains earthbound, people are definitely trying to get a closer look at what's going on from above. The biggest issue with the airport over the last few months has been the presence of unauthorized recreational drones. In one case, a drone flew within 500 feet of an aircraft. Drone users aren't supposed to fly within five miles of the airport, and no higher than 400 feet, but there have been 17 close calls in 2015, 10 of which were actually in DIA's airspace. The airport is currently creating a group to address the drone issue. No word on whether the group will meet in the secret underground city.

Infinite blue in action. (Photo: Dan90266/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Jellyfish are, with all due respect, incredibly weird. They're 95 percent water, and spend their lives being pulled to and fro by currents. They can't see or hear, they never sleep, and, in a staggering display of unrelatability, some of them don't even die. The creatures have one-way digestive systems, which means they use their mouths to eat, poop, and reproduce. The life cycle of your average jellyfish involves six stages, only one of which manifests as the tentacled bulb most of us are familiar with (another involves a baby jelly cloning itself into what looks like a stack of warty pancakes). Plus, they've probably ruined your beach day at least once.

These days, when aquariums want to teach the public about jellyfish, they turn their tanks into neon spectacles that look less like traditional exhibits and more like many-fronded, freaky-deaky dance clubs. At this very moment, interested parties can get their gelatinous groove on at jellyfish exhibits in many cities around the world. 

The Monterey Bay aquarium has "The Jellies Experience," a Hendrix-inspired special exhibit which promises kaleidoscopic displays and a "sensory extravaganza" of "psychedelic glory." There's a vaguely brothel-themed jelly gallery in Kentucky, and a neon, labyrinthine "garden" in Hong Kong. At least one couple has swapped marriage vows in front of the Georgia Aquarium's fluorescent, wall-sized tank. But how exactly did tanks full of translucent, bobbing creatures become underwater raves?

Creative types have been inspired by jellyfish for at least a century, ever since German artist-biologist Ernst Haeckel drew attention to their elegant symmetries. But the live-art revolution has all happened over the past couple of decades. "It all sort of started with the kreisel tank," explained Steve Spina, jellyfish supervisor for the New England Aquarium, during a talk last week at Le Laboratoire Cambridge.

A German marine biologist named Wolf Greve invented the kreisel tank in 1969, so that he could take his studies of Arctic jellyfish back to the lab. Unlike in more stagnant setups, the water in a kreisel tank rotates gently, helping the low-powered creatures to move around ("kreisel" is German for "gyroscope"). It's a slow flow—"you don't want it whirling around like they're in a washing machine," Spina said—but unlike in still water, where jellies would drift to the bottom, "they will stay aloft on their own."

The streamlined, minimalist design, with its separate compartment for hardware, also discourages its fragile inhabitants from smashing into the walls or getting sucked into the filter.

A kreisel tank, household-sized. (Photo: Edilbarto "Pay" Aponte/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0)

Before the kreisel, people considered it impossible to keep jellyfish in captivity. Afterwards, researchers and aficionados started rejiggering it for their own purposes, and soon the delicate animals were ensconced in lab tanks and onboard marine collection ships all over the world.

In the early 1990s, specialists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium decided to use the technology to put on the first ever large-scale jellyfish exhibit, a feat requiring biological and visual innovations. "They kind of refined the aesthetics of displaying these animals," Spina said.

They developed different tank shapes (the gently rectangular "stretch kreisel," for example) and they invented what's called "the Infinite Blue background"—that peaceful, translucent cerulean that masks the back wall of pretty much every contemporary jellyfish tank. It's just a sheet of acrylic, said Spina, but standing in front of it makes you feel like "you're looking at a slice of the ocean."

Visitors groove near the moon jelly columns at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. (Photo: Justin Ennis/Flickr)

The Monterey Bay Aquarium's 1992 show, "Planet of the Jellies," gave other aquariums that jealous sting. The experts there shared their tricks, and soon tentacled blobs were revolving mildly in front of rapt spectators across the globe. Twenty years later, the jellies haven't lost their appeal, said Spina—they regularly beat out more immediately charismatic animals, like sharks and penguins, in visitor polls. In 2012, Japan's Kamo Aquarium turned near-bankruptcy into wild success by transforming their entire building into the world's largest jellyfish collection. 

The habits and characteristics that make jellyfish so alien-seeming also allow exhibit designers to tap into a type of aesthetic that wouldn't necessarily work with other creatures. Most animals need rocks, plants, or other shelter to be happy, but jellyfish prefer austerity—after all, a single bubble can kill them. On the other hand, they're undisturbed by blacklights or strobes (in fact, the blacklights in "The Jellies Experience" allowed scientists at Monterey Bay to discover a never-before-seen life stage of a particular species).

Even as many zoos and aquariums shift towards exhibits that display multiple species, the jellies stand alone—otherwise, they'd get get eaten. But they're easy to feed, require no individual attention, and are often cultured in-house, so tens of thousands can be displayed at once. Overall, perfect disco conditions. 

A tank of disco jellies at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. (Photo: David Goehring/Flickr)

Those huge, pulsing clouds of identical jellies have another, more educational effect—they mirror the potential consequences of climate change. Jellyfish, who are as chemically hardy as they are physically delicate, are a kind of anti-canary, showing up in droves while other species die out. 

"When they start appearing in huge numbers, that’s a sign of trouble” in an ecosystem, says Spina, who adds that because of intercontinental travel and changing currents, jellies "have really invaded a lot of other places where they don’t belong.” 

Jellyfish dance clubs are great in aquariums, but if the whole ocean starts swarming with gooey ravers, that means it's time to face the music.

 A piece of the 50-ft. map on display in mid-October. (Photo: Courtesy of Manhattan Borough President's Office.)

 In 1811, Manhattan’s famous form—its grid of streets and avenues—crystallized. The three men appointed to devise a blueprint for the city’s development issued the Commissioners’ Plan, an eight-and-a-half-foot map, surveyed and drafted by John Randel Jr., that organized and foretold the future city. Yet the landscape beneath the dark overlay of right angles is washed out, dull; the map reveals almost nothing of the erratic character of the rural hilly island.

A few years later, between 1818 and 1820, Randel, with the aid of his wife Matilda, created a map that is the inverse of the 1811 plan. In it, the rocky, undulating island with its swamps, orchards, and meandering creeks is vibrantly colored, textured, animated, while the grid-to-come is lightly sketched, an idea hovering above a varied and fascinating landscape.  

Photo: Courtesy of Manhattan Borough President's Office.

This later map, called the Randel farm map, is one of New York City’s most beautiful and important—and one of the world’s most unusual. It is 50 feet long, 11 feet wide, and is comprised of 92 individual maps at a scale of 100 feet to one inch. No other city is known to have such a map at such a scale. It is “the most complete and valuable topographical record of the period that exists. It is, in fact, the only exact topographical map of the island,” wrote historian I. N. Phelps Stokes.

Today, this cartographical masterpiece is unfamiliar to most New Yorkers. The maps are housed in the Manhattan Borough President’s office, where an occasional historian or surveyor consults them. And two dozen or so were featured in the Museum of the City of New York’s Greatest Grid exhibit. But the maps—recently digitized for online exploration—have never been assembled in their entirety and displayed to the public.

Until last Saturday, for six hours.

Photo: Courtesy Manhattan Borough President's Office.

As part of Open House New York, the maps were placed in mylar covers, set on black-clothed tables and arrayed contiguously across a brightly sun-lit mezzanine at 1 Center Street, courtesy of Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and her staff. From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., hundreds of New Yorkers studied the gorgeous maps, wandering up the West Side and down the East, reveling in the rocks, the swamps, the fences, fishermen’s houses, forts, quarries, inlets, bays, ponds, and the many hills. Manhattan residents traveled back in time to see the 19^th century life of their block; some discovered that they live atop a former marsh, others that they live in what were the waters of the Hudson River. Many noted how much is gone, but also how much remains.

Photo: Courtesy of the Manhattan Borough President's Office.

“I love seeing what has morphed into today,” said visitor Katherine Bradford. “I love that there are still these bits of the old island. It is like mitochondrial DNA. It just keeps going, despite the mixing and the generations. Who knew it was still there.”

For those who missed this map experience, the good news is, you’ll get another chance. The bad news is that the next public viewing of these city gems might not get a chance until next fall’s open house event. 

What will you name this moth? (Image: Western National Parks Association)

The right to name a newly discovered species generally goes to the person who made the find, but one entomologist has decided to open the floor up...to eBay users. 

As the Herald Review reports, in 2007, Eric H. Metzler discovered a unique little moth. Smaller than an inch in length and weighing less than an ounce, the little bug(ger) was a completely new species. Of course, proving a news species takes years of scientific research; only now that it has been verified are the researchers ready to give the new moth a name. 

The bug hunter put the naming rights up on eBay, allowing any old joe to bid for the right to name the new moth. But this cute trick is not just for Metzler’s personal enrichment. All proceeds from the auction will go to the Western National Parks Association, which has funded some of his research.

There are around 160,000 species of moths in the world. It may be time to name one of your own. Our suggestion: atlas obscuricus.   

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

The Berjaya Times Square mall in Kuala Lumpur, where Borders is still going strong. (Photo: Davidlohr Bueso/flickr)

When bookstore megachain Borders filed for bankruptcy in 2011, it had completed its journey from corporate nightmare to free market victim—instead of killing independent bookstores, the mall staple found itself killed by more Internet-savvy competitors like Barnes & Noble and Amazon. But still, bookworms mourned its passing—present company included. Borders was where, as a kid growing up in the suburbs, I’d nurtured my childhood love of books. I found myself feeling surprisingly sentimental about its demise.

A few days before its final closing, I visited my local Borders location in Chicago to say goodbye. It already felt like a ghost town. Bargain hunters had picked over the remaining books, leaving the shelves half-empty and gap-toothed. Marked-down tchotchkes from the gifts section lay scattered on dirty carpeted floors. It was a depressing sight—a far cry from the well-stocked suburban Borders of my youth. A few months later, Borders was officially no more.

So imagine my surprise when, a year later, I spotted the familiar red Borders sign across the atrium of a huge shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It was after-hours, and the store was closed—but clearly not permanently. Behind the metal grille you could just see the sparkle of shiny new paperbacks, ready to be sold when the mall reopened the next day. It was like seeing an old friend raised from the dead. How was this possible?

It turns out that to bring a bankrupt chain back as a zombie, you didn’t need a voodoo ritual or a reading from the Necronomicon. All you needed was a franchise agreement.

A legal spell to raise the retail dead

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, still home to Borders bookstore. (Photo: Andrea Schaffer/flickr)

When a company files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation, as Borders did, its creditors start selling off the company’s assets to pay its debt. Within the U.S., where all Borders locations were directly owned by the company, Borders’ creditors could sell off the physical stores themselves. Not so in Malaysia, where Borders is a franchise operated by Berjaya Books Sdn Bhd, a subsidiary of a large local conglomerate.

In most franchise agreements, the franchisor provides its franchisee with operating support in the form of contacts with vendors, training for employees, marketing support, and the like. But the franchisee usually has to invest their own money to buy equipment, insurance, business licenses, and rent, among other expenses. They also usually have to pay a one-time franchising fee and yearly royalties for the use of the franchisor’s logo. That’s why opening a humble Burger King location costs an average of $2.2 million.

Another zombie chain in effect. Roy Rogers Restaurant in Westminster, Maryland. (Photo: Jonesdr77/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

It’s also why when a franchisor goes belly-up, the franchisee may still own enough resources to stay in business on their own. Some may decide to register a new trademark and launch their own independent business. But some may decide to stay in business under the name of their original brand.

Here’s where it gets tricky. The franchisor’s creditors now own its trademarked brand. They can continue to let the franchisees use them in exchange for royalties—or they might decide they can find a better deal somewhere else. Experts suggest franchisees in this situation band together to buy the trademark if possible—and if it’s worth it.

In Malaysia, Berjaya had good reason to stay in the brick-and-mortar books business. Amazon, which is often blamed for killing Borders in the U.S., hasn’t made as many inroads abroad, where customs regulations and taxes can make shipping expensive and difficult. And books in Malaysia are still pricey—a luxury good. As a 2013 article in English-language newspaper The Star pointed out, a single book in Malaysia costs on average more than four times the hourly minimum wage. (In the U.S., that ratio is between two and one.)

It makes sense, then, that Berjaya found the cost of operating Borders in Malaysia worth it—even if it had to be a zombie. At bankruptcy auction in 2011, it narrowly outbid Barnes & Noble to acquire Borders’ trademarks, country-specific domain name, and intellectual property in Malaysia for $825,000. Another winner at the same auction was Al Maya International Ltd., Borders’ main franchisee in the Middle East, which purchased Borders trademarks in five different countries for $500,000. Al Maya still operates Borders zombies in Oman and the United Arab Emirates to this day.

How to raise a zombie-chain army

Borders isn’t the only franchise that’s survived past its corporate parent’s demise. Three-quarters of new franchise systems fail within 12 years, leaving zombies scattered behind them.

Woolworth, one of the first five-and-dime-store chains, closed its last U.S. locations in 1997, after much more than 12 years in business—almost 120, in fact. Its zombies live on in Germany and Mexico, where former franchisees now own the Woolworth trademark, and continue selling the inexpensive toys, clothes, and other consumer goods that the brand was known for. 

Bennigan's restaurant in Florida. (Photo: Phillip Pessar/flickr)

A little closer to home, a group of franchisees of Roy Rogers, a declining mid-Atlantic fried chicken fast-food restaurant (and another sentimental memory of my youth), negotiated for three years with former owner Imasco before finally buying the Roy Rogers trademark from them in 2002. Today they’ve spearheaded a revitalization of the brand, with new locations up and down the East Coast.

In some cases, the creditors who take over a franchisor’s brand will actively work to maintain connections with franchisees, as part of an effort to overhaul and resuscitate its brand. This is the case with Bennigan’s, the casual-dining chain that filed for Chapter 7 liquidation in 2008. Today, its redesigned website features 14 franchised locations in the U.S., with more on their way soon.

RIP Borders in Birmingham, Alabama. (Photo: Mark Hillary/flickr)

But most zombie franchises do face some challenges as they seek to draw upon their existing brand recognition. As the Bennigan’s Franchise Operators Association president told the Wall Street Journal,“A lot of people thought we were closed.” Freshly resurrected zombies may need to set aside money for a marketing campaign just to let consumers in their local area know that they still exist.

Borders’ expat zombies seem to have less trouble with that. (Perhaps news of brand bankruptcy doesn’t spread as quickly across international waters.) Borders Malaysia is still going strong, with nine locations across the country, four in Kuala Lumpur alone. And in September 2015, Al Maya opened a brand-new 16,000-square-foot Borders in Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates, which is less well known for zombies or books than it is for its indoor ski resort. We might not have an Evil Dead–style apocalypse on our hands yet, but for now, at least, it looks like the zombie chains are here to stay.

Zombies! (Image: Night of the Living Dead)

In the 1960s, when George Romero was making the classic zombie movie Night of the Living Dead, one nine minute chunk—supposedly "the largest zombie scene in the film," the A.V. Club says—was cut. 

But now, Romero has found the footage, he told the audience at the Monster Mania convention earlier this month. He came across a 16mm print that included the cut footage, and it could be included in an upcoming re-release of the film. 

Of course, by that time, we could all be more worried about actual zombies. There was that strange incident in which a man bit people on a plane and then died. And in South Carolina, a woman found a gravestone just lying in the road…but the person that it belonged to already had a gravemarker on his grave site. How did it move? Where did it come from? No one knows.

It's all very mysterious…and a little bit spooky.

Bonus finds: Proust's madeleines were originally toast, concentration camp currency

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

A Chinese tomb guardian. (Photo: Fordmadoxfraud/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Three people in China's Shanxi province were recently arrested for attempting to dig up a young female corpse, iCrossChina reports. Why did they want a young female corpse? To make up the bridal half of a ghost marriage, of course.

Ghost marriages are a Chinese custom designed to allow families to maintain the patrilineal order and maximize their ties to each other, even through tragedy. In their most basic form, they involve digging up a dead, unmarried woman, holding a ceremony, and reburying her next to her new husband (also dead). 

This has been against the law since 1959, and many have found ways to practice the tradition within legal bounds—using a "flour bride," for example, which is wheat paste molded to look like a woman and decked out in wedding makeup. But others find there's no substitute for the real thing, so there remains an underground market for corpses that, in life, were young, unmarried females. Sometimes parents will sell the bodies of their deceased daughters to other families seeking a match for their deceased sons.

In this particular case, the suspects attempted to marry off a corpse that was not theirs to hustle. When the alleged ringleader, a 72-year-old man named Hou, heard of the death of a young woman in a nearby province, he and his accomplices posed as the women's relatives and negotiated with a buyer. After settling on a sale price of 25,000 yuan (about $3,900), they tried to raid the tomb on Saturday night, but were interrupted by locals and detained by police. 

The Tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, a safe place to be buried in Shaanxi Province. (Photo: Bill Tyne/Flickr)

According to the Guardian, the unmarried-female-corpse black market is booming around Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces thanks to an influx of coal money, which has left "a newly wealthy but superstitious demographic suddenly... able to afford high prices for desirable postmortem mates." In 2013, four men were sent to jail after they exhumed 10 Shaanxi-area corpses, cleaned them up, doctored their medical records "to boost their prices," and sold them to the families of dead bachelors. In 2012, one dead woman was sold twice—once by her family, and shortly afterwards by a graverobber. Men have also murdered women for this purpose.

As Atlas Obscura reported earlier this year:

"According to Chinese custom, older sons ought to marry before their younger brothers. If an older brother should die unmarried at a young age, however, there is a solution that keeps the social order intact: ghost marriage. In China, and among the Chinese in Taiwan and Singapore, ghost marriages are performed to address a variety of social and spiritual ills. Chief among these are the desire to placate the restless spirits of those who go to their grave unmarried."

As for the restless spirits of those whose eternal sleep is interrupted by shovel-wielding thieves—everyone knows they're more likely to show up in horror stories than rom-coms.

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

Crystal Palace Park dinosaur, designed by Benjamin Hawkins. (Photo: Gareth Williams/flickr)

Besides the daily contributions of water bottles and cigarette butts, the ground beneath Central Park contains multitudes—layers of ancient schist, deposits from vast glaciers, and caches of long-dead fossilized creatures. But perhaps the most intriguing rumored underground items are the bone-white remains of a museum that never was—the casts and models of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beings constructed by the brilliant sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, supposedly dreaming a shattered sleep somewhere beneath the park as the tourists stroll above.

That’s right: Despite evidence to the contrary, people believe that fake dinosaur bones are buried in Central Park.

The legend is repeated in the delightful children’s book by Barbara Kerley, The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins; on Wikipedia; and in some New York Times articles. Understanding it requires going back to the earliest days of paleontology, before anybody really knew what a dinosaur looked like. Hawkins made the first models, creating the blueprint for every natural history museum and dino-park in the world. The story of the Manhattan dinosaur museum that could never quite get built and the models that were then jettisoned still haunts the city.

 Dinosaurs, as a concept, are fairly new. Famed paleontologist and zoologist Richard Owen coined the term “dinosauria” (terrible lizard) in 1842. Hawkins worked with Owen on the Great Exhibition of 1851—a world-changing event in which thousands of exhibitors from across the British Empire and the US introduced a huge range of technological and artistic goods to the masses, paving the way for today’s expos and public museums. The Great Exhibition was housed in the Crystal Palace, a greenhouse-like building featuring interchangeable glass and steel components that became a symbol of Victorian engineering.

When the Exhibition ended, the Crystal Palace moved to Sydenham, a suburb of London, in 1854, when it was graced by the world’s first dinosaur models.

Dinosaurs at Crystal Palace Park. They were classed as Grade II listed buildings from 1973. (Photo: Loz Pycock/flickr)

Some historians say Prince Albert was a fan of Owen’s work, and that it was the prince who wanted the Crystal Palace surrounded by life-sized models of ancient creatures. Owen was made the scientific consultant on the project, and Hawkins—who had once sketched plates of fish and reptiles for Darwin’s Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle—was given the task of constructing life-sized replicas of the prehistoric beasts. 

When they were completed, Hawkins’ models of Iguanodon, Megalosaurus, Hylaeosaurus and other ancient reptiles stood atop three specially-made islands encircled by an artificial six-acre lake. The hunched, snarling forms—constructed of stone, wire, clay and cement—were surrounded by lush vegetation and perched atop rocks meant to resemble the fossils in which their blueprints had been found. Though woefully inaccurate by today’s standards, the models became an immediate sensation. The park was swarmed with 40,000 visitors on its opening day of June 10, 1854, and Hawkins’ reputation was made. (The models have survived until today, outlasting the Crystal Palace itself—and are scheduled for renovation, according to just-announced news.)

Hawkins didn’t stay long at the Crystal Palace. His contract ended the following year, perhaps because scientists were already starting to critique the dinosaurs’ re-constructions, or perhaps because the project was too expensive. Hawkins decamped to America (after a brief flirtation with France, in which he unsuccessfully tried to convince Napoleon III to build a fountains in the shape of a mastodon), where he embarked upon a successful tour as a lecturer on natural history. In Philadelphia, he also mounted the first-ever articulated skeleton of a dinosaur, a Hadrosaurus that had been recently discovered in a New Jersey clay pit.

Hawkins' conceptual drawing of the Paleozoic Museum. (Photo: Wikicommons/Public domain)

In 1868 Hawkins arrived in New York, where he gave several well-attended lectures and told Edward Livingston Youmans, founder of Popular Science magazine, of his intention to “reconstruct the American monsters in Central Park.” Word of Hawkins’ desire reached the man who was then the comptroller of Central Park, Andrew Green, and after brief correspondence, Hawkins was assigned the task of making models for a planned “Paleozoic Museum.”

The details of the museum are somewhat sketchy, but it seems that it was supposed to be modeled in part on the much-admired cast-iron-and-gleaming glass structure of the Crystal Palace. A great arched roof was planned to stretch over models of North American dinosaurs, as well as mastodons, mammoths, and other prehistoric creatures. The museum was to unite “the earliest periods of animal life with the earliest evidence of man’s existence,” in the words of a parks commissioners’ report from 1869, and constitute “a complete visual history of the American continent from dawn of creation to the present time. 

Richard Owen photographed in 1879 next to the largest of all moa, Dinornis maximus (now D. novaezealandiae), while holding the first bone fragment he had examined 40 years earlier. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public domain)

In their paternalistic way, the commissioners hoped the museum would enrich and uplift the masses, whom they felt were in dire need wholesome, scientific entertainment. They also hoped it would tap into a then-booming interest in paleontology, “a branch of natural history of almost romantic interest,” as the commissioners put it in one report.

The dinosaur area at Crystal Palace Park. (Photo: Nick Richards/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

“For thousands of years men have dwelt upon the earth without even suspecting that it was a mighty tomb of animated races,” they wrote. “Only in very recent times, which men still remember, was the discovery made that the earth has had a vast antiquity. Huge fishes, enormous birds, monstrous reptiles, and ponderous uncouth mammals had possession of a world, in which man, if there, had not yet established a record of his pre-eminence.”

 Hawkins was the one charged with breathing new life into these ancient forms. But almost from the beginning, the project was plagued with setbacks and delays. After starting work in the Arsenal Building, he was moved to a temporary shed, where he worked on creating models of the Hadrosaurus and Laelaps (now called Dryptosaurus), plus other ancient mammals. He had hardly gotten going when he was asked to turn his attention to designing a layout for the new zoological gardens, which interrupted his work. He’d returned to substantive work in January 1870, when in June, an administrative change doomed the project for good. 

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

The administrative shake-up involved Boss Tweed, perhaps the most corrupt politician New York has ever seen. In the summer of 1870—toward the end of Tweed’s reign, but while his grip was still firm—the administration for all parks in New York City was collapsed into one board, helmed by two of Tweed’s henchmen: Peter B. Sweenyand Henry Hilton. Tweed’s men seized upon the Paleozoic Museum as an expensive and ungodly project dreamt up by a foreigner, and vowed to squash it.

By then, Hawkins had become aware of murmurings about the museum’s cost ($30,000 just to build the foundations, according to one account), and wrote to Hilton on Sept 5^th 1870, offering modifications to make the project cheaper. On December 22, he received a reply saying his services had been terminated.

Hawkins expressed his severe disappointment with this turn of events a meeting of the Lyceum of Natural History on March 6, 1871—telling the whole story of the museum from the beginning to its sputtering, soul-crushing end.

But if he was hoping for some kind of reinstatement or reconciliation, his words had the opposite effect.

 On May 3, vandals armed with sledgehammers and orders from Hilton broke into Hawkins’s workshop and smashed all of his work, including two giant plaster skeletons. The vandals also destroyed all of Hawkin's molds and sketch models, telling Hawkins, according to an 1875 article in the North American Review,  "he should not bother himself about 'dead animals,' when there were so many living ones to care for." According to the Times, the fragments were buried in an area known as Mt. St. Vincent—once a convent, and now home to Central Park’s composting operation.

The idea that some of the fragments remain persists in some scholarly articles. But Carl Mehling, an enthusiastic Hawkins historian who works in the Paleontology Division of the American Museum of Natural History, thinks it’s unlikely there’s anything left to find. “All I can say is that the truth can't stop an irresistible rumor … it’s a Bigfoot story,” he says.  

The dinosaur models under construction at Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' studio in Sydenham, c. 1853. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public domain)

Mehling points to early articles in the New York Times and other sources saying the fragments were dug up not long after their burial and found to be “worthless.” One 1872 Times article says some of the sculptures were dug up by Hawkins himself, “with what feelings may be imagined.”

Some paleontologists say it’s better that the Paleozoic Museum was never built, since its models would have been almost instantly inaccurate given the rapid rate of paleontology discoveries in that era. The museum also might have competed with the American Museum of Natural History, which began around the same time. Yet there’s something undeniably poignant about the project—it’s an extinct museum commemorating extinct creatures, a stone skipped twice along the surface of the past.

As for Hawkins, he eventually became a recluse at Princeton before returning to England in 1874. But he may yet have left a bit of his work beneath Manhattan’s feet. According to Mehling, there is evidence that the fragments were crushed and used to pave paths in the park.

Project coordinator João Carlos Nunes Batista shows Ululupuene villagers how you can access the internet. (Photo: © 2015 Amazon Conservation Team)

For three days in August, Waura villagers in Ulupuene, a tiny settlement in the Xingu Park in Monto Grosso Brazil, celebrated late into the night. They hauled in fish from the Batavia river, seasoning them with “Indian Salt”—a tangy mix of peppers and salt they extract by roasting water hyacinths—and feasted on watermelons, squash and fresh Colombian coffee. Under the coconut trees and moonlight, people played music and danced.

The Waura, who are one of 14 tribes who live on the Xingu reserve, and one of 40 ethnic groups within the larger Xingu River basin, weren’t celebrating a rite of passage, nor one of the many mammals they revere as sacred kin. They were honoring something much newer: the arrival of the internet.

Now, after traveling 18 hours by truck and canoe, a large satellite dish and two silver laptops sat humming inside a pair of thatched ocas that looked 500 years old, even though they too were newly installed. Transmitting yet tranquil, the combined presence of thatch and wires seemed full of potential, but not without some risks.

 A satellite dish that travelled for 18 hours by truck and canoe. (Photo: © 2015 Amazon Conservation Team)

For indigenous tribes of the Amazon, contact has too often spelled disaster. Since their earliest encounters with Europeans, more than a hundred years ago, the Waura have survived epidemics of measles and flus, been shot at by poachers, lost land and cultural heritage, and faced increasing pressure from soy farms, powerful soy lobbies, hydroelectric projects, and their own government. Despite these mounting pressures, the Waura have held onto their traditions, and kept many of them alive. Fish from the Batavia river is still their primary food source. Ceramics and wrestling matches continue to be central cultural practices.

And yet the Waura want the world wide web. They were, in fact, the ones who sought it out in the first place, approaching a conservation group to help them install and pay for it. Even though they know the web may bring unwanted visitors, less control over cultural property, or knowledge they find distasteful, they also know it comes with opportunity.  

In a moment when Brazil’s soy lobbies are stronger than ever, and the Belo Monte dam, a major hydroelectric project, may soon threaten the river that feeds them, the villagers are hopeful that tools like Facebook and GPS technology may help them protect their land, and raise awareness about poaching and threats to their cultural heritage. They’re hopeful that this time around, contact may be a good thing.

Empowering indigenous villages through the internet has been part of official Brazilian policy since 2007, when the government announced a plan to provide free internet to native Indian tribes, by bringing satellite access to 150 isolated regions. "It's a way to open communications between indigenous communities, former slave villages, coconut crackers, river fishermen and the rest of society," former environmental minister Marina Silva said at the time, after signing the agreement.

Map of the Amazon Basin with the Xingu River highlighted. (Photo: Kmusser/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

For conservation groups, it’s also been a way to put the environmental management of the country in the hands of the people who know its forests and rivers best. Amazon Conservation Team, the non-profit organization that helped wire Ulupuene, has been training interested tribes how to use GPS technology, camera traps and ground information collection techniques for more than a decade. With the tools and skills to map their land and share their ancestral forest management practices, the hope is that tribes will be able to monitor trees on the ground and respond to illegal activities with greater force and precision.

So far ACT’s approach, which is animated by the idea that if forests die, local culture does too, has seen success. During their flagship project in Suriname, where a casino-style gold rush had devastating environmental impacts, they partnered with the Trio tribe to help them map their territories and track illegal mining. In one notable instance, the tribe was able to use GPS to identify where miners were illegally cutting portages through the forest, and stashing their canoes behind waterfalls to cover their tracks.

“By tromping through the forest with the GPS in hand, they’ve been able to track, and in some cases, stop, illegal mining activity,” says Mark Plotkin, founder of ACT, renowned ethnobotanist, and author of the best-selling book, Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice.“It’s an example of how good, old-fashioned elbow grease, and on-the-ground truthing with GPS technology, helped them figure out where the bad guys were getting in and put a stop to it.” Since then, ACT has worked with 30 other tribes in South America.

Deforestation in the Mato Grosso state of Brazil, where the Zingu National Park is located. (Photo: Pedro Biondi/ABr/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0 BR)

And yet, Plotkin says, you can’t just drop an iPhone from a plane and expect it to make a difference. Government efforts to wire these villages has been criticized for poor implementation, lack of training, and conflicting interests (the governor of Mato Grosso, the state where Xingu is located, is also one of the largest soy farmers in Brazil). The same is true for nonprofits and volunteers, many of whom come, build a solar project, or set up a router, and leave.

Without long term management, solar panels fall and scatter in the mud. Without training, a viable signal, or a desire to have them at all, brand new computers don’t get turned on.

It’s something that Plotkin and his wife, Liliana Madrigal, who oversaw the project in Ulupuene, have seen again and again. Not having a long-term, on-the-ground strategy is like doing “conservation from the air.” They say it can end up reinforcing a vicious narrative: that the natives don’t get it, or care.

“I go back to when Columbus first landed in the Bahamas, and took out his sword in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella,” Plotkin says. “The local chief, having never seen steel, reached up and grabbed the blade. And he bled. What I draw from this is that sometimes technology is good, sometimes technology is bad, and sometimes it's both.”

For the Waura, getting internet has been the culmination of a years-long process that began in 2011, when their chief approached the Amazon Conservation Team and asked them to help rebuild their ancestral village on a southwestern portion of Xingu that they consider their spiritual home. Abandoned long ago, the original village was gone, and much of the surrounding land has been taken over by soy farms and ranchers, including a series of caves that the tribe considers sacred.

Once a place where their ancestors painted, and held piercing ceremonies for boys, the caves are now on a private soy farm, while portions of the once lush Xingu basin have denuded into dust bowls. The Waura hope that by reclaiming this land, they can help protect it, even rejuvenate it, while reviving their cultural traditions and establishing a stronger presence in the area.

 Installing the satellite. (Photo: © 2015 Amazon Conservation Team)

With help from the indigenous association of Ulupuene and the local non-profit SynBio, ACT provided tarps, transportation, food, and whatever else the villagers needed—other than the manpower and raw materials; the Waura supplied those themselves— to rebuild their traditional ocas. But on the first go-round, they built the new village too close to the river and one night it flooded, inundating the huts with water, snakes, and frogs. So the villagers took down the ocas, moved them away from the river, and rebuilt them all over again.  

The gardens came next. To supplement their diet of cassava and fish, and give their village some shade, they planted coconut trees, bushy pineapple plants, and rows of squash and watermelons. The children love it, as do the tapirs, an endangered pig-like mammal, who come mostly for the pineapples.

The push to wire the growing village—now home to 75 adults and at least a hundred children—began with a basic necessity: better contact with their indigenous coordinator, who lives in Brasilia—a 25 hour journey that involves a truck, a canoe, and a plane.

The initial idea was to build a radio tower, some 60 meters high, but that was eventually scrapped in favor of installing a more powerful satellite. In a series of actions that illustrate just how slow development can be, the dish had to be deconstructed by hand in the town of Canarana, where it was loaded onto the back of a pick-up, hauled 18 hours overland to the banks of the Batavia, where it was loaded into a canoe, and paddled an hour and a half down river to Ulupuene.

The router in situ inside a thatched oca. (Photo: © 2015 Amazon Conservation Team)

Now that the web has arrived, reception is spotty and costs are far from free. The signal works only three hours a day, usually at night, and the fees amount to nearly $300 a month, a bill that ACT pays. The computers are a major source of excitement–“it’s like candy for them,” Madrigal says, “like anyone else, they’re so excited to connect and share and post pictures of themselves”–but to make the most of it, the village has laid down guidelines: the internet is only to be used for emergencies, educational purposes, and initial wildlife monitoring.

Using Facebook, the tribe wants to post updates on poachers, share photos of their ceremonies, raise awareness about the power of the soy lobbies in their region, and combat the notion that indigenous land is idle, and therefore ripe for development. The tribe also plans on using camera traps to monitor local monkeys, which they eat during rituals. A couple of villagers have already created profiles, and are anxious to begin a cultural map–a project that would record their ancestral forest management practices, and store them in the cloud for future generations.

Madrigal is also hopeful that the web can help the Waura empower themselves against future threats as well, namely, the Belo Monte hydroelectric project, which is currently under construction, and has been widely criticized as a white elephant that won’t produce the energy that politicians and energy interests are promising.

For now, the satellite and computers are safely housed in Ulupuene’s ocas, away from any trees that could potentially fall in a storm. The children have been warned away from playing around the router. Even though the elders don’t use the internet much, they know its signal is precious. 

A later steamer from the same line (Image: Currier & Ives/Library of Congress)

For more than 150 years, the Bay State has been at the bottom of Lake Ontario. One November day, in 1862, the propeller-driven steamship left from Oswego, N.Y., en route to Cleveland. It was packed with merchandise and carrying 16 to 18 people.

Almost immediately, it was hit with dangerously strong winds, Reuters reports, and tried to turn around. But the storm sunk the boat, and it settled 350 feet down, on the floor of the lake—until it was found this year.

Three men, Roland Stevens, Jim Kennard and Roger Pawlowski, found the shipwreck using a sonar scan. They're pros at this: the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle calls Kennard and Pawlowski "without question the most accomplished shipwreck sleuths in western New York" and Reuters notes that Kennard has found more than 200 shipwrecks. They were scanning the lake from their own boat when they passed over this one.

The sunken ship was 137 feet long, and, by law, belongs to the state. According to the Democrat and Chronicle, there are no plans to pull it up to the surface: it'll stay right where it's been for the past century and a half.

Bonus finds: Medusa's head, sculpted; an unexpected asteroid

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.