Clowns have it tough these days. 

In the last 60 years clowns have undergone a fundamental cultural shift: From goofy, sometimes troublesome characters, to portraits of pure evil. What's behind this relatively new but deeply felt fear of clowns? These days, many people cannot hear the word 'clown' invoked without a shudder, or a knee-jerk response of "Clowns freak me out." 

The roots of this go back to two of the earliest modern clowns. Joseph Grimaldi in London and Jean-Gaspard Deburau in France. The pair were contemporaries in the early 1800s and invented much of what we think of as clowning today. Both were also troubled men.

Grimaldi's father died when he was nine and his brother left shortly thereafter, leaving the young Grimaldi in charge of earning the household wage. Perhaps as a result of these early life traumas, Grimaldi was a depressive and an alcoholic. The intense physical comedian had a favorite pun on his name, and often declared, "I'm GRIM-ALL-DAY so you can laugh all night." Grimaldi's first wife and child died in childbirth and though Grimaldi remarried, and had another son, he too died young, succumbing to alcoholism at the age of 30. 

While Grimaldi's life was tragic, Jean-Gaspard Deburau may actually have been an evil clown of sorts. As France's most famous clown, his real life self was sometimes confused with his clown creation. Once, when taunted by a child in the street as if he were the clown, Deburau clubbed the child with his cane, killing him. 

So the makings of the killer clown may have been there all along. But clowns were supposed to be troubled men. Wild, manic, drunks. It wasn't until the clown image was cleaned up and the underlying sadness and tragedy of clowns was swept under the rug in 1950s America, with Bozo and Ronald McDonald, that the truly evil face of clowning could really emerge. Real life killer clown "John Wayne Gacy" used his Pogo the Clown image as both a cover and lure for the 33 victims he killed. When caught, Gacy told detectives, "You know... clowns can get away with murder."

This would mark a turning point from which clowns have never recovered. It is shame. Despite the horror and fear of Gacy, the vast majority of clowns are good people and wonderful performers hoping to bring some genuine joy into the world. 

There is, however, a silver lining to this newfound fear of clowns. While the world seems to have lost the character of the troubled and humorous clown, we have gained a new archetype of classic monster. Up there with the zombie, vampire, and Frankenstein's monster, the killer clown has been added to the pantheon. It seems he is there to stay.

Watch the video above for the story of a remote motel with an all-encompassing clown theme.

Planets converge for a party in the sky. (Photo: ESO/Y. Beletsky/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

There’s a celestial conjunction this weekend—did you get the invite? 

It’s pretty exclusive; not even all the planets are invited. Starting today, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars are converging, which means that all three are within only five degrees of one another—their closest gathering until 2021. This means that if you go outside and stretch an arm towards the sky, your fist can cover the entire trio.

Venus is brightest, then Jupiter, then Mars, and they’ll remain in this close celestial threesome until Halloween. Mercury and Neptune are even trying to get in on the party. 

Five of the seven other planets will be visible from earth until Halloween, and three will be within a few degrees of one another. (Photo: WP/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

If you look carefully, just before sun-up, you should be able to spot Mercury peeking in on the trio's lower left, and a distant Neptune to the right of the moon. They're both visible through binoculars, though it's best to have a telescope. Even Saturn might stop by in the early evening, before fading out of view. The best photo-op will come on Sunday morning, when Venus and Jupiter will appear separated by a mere one degree. 

This planet party is due to the planets’ positions in relation to one another. The distances between earth and its seven planets is always changing. For example, when Venus is on the same side of the sun as earth, they’re only 26 million miles apart at the closest point. However, when they’re on opposite sides, Venus can be up to 160 million miles away.

A snapshot of Halley's Comet and the resulting meteor shower in 1986. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

Some bits of comet are crashing the party, too. From late Tuesday through Thursday morning, 10 to 20 shooting stars will pass through the sky each hour. This is part of an Orionid sprinkle (not quite a shower), which is a result of debris from Halley’s Comet. The sprinkle’s peak will be in the early hours of October 22. 

If you want more details on the gathering, check out this guide to the five visible planets.

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.

Margaret, Kate and Leah Fox. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

It was nearing midnight in late March 1848 when two young girls, Katie and Maggie Fox, cried out to their parents from their shared Hydesville, New York bedroom. Mysterious rappings noises were reverberating through the room and keeping the girls awake. The Fox family searched the house by candlelight, but found no source for the noise. The next night, the rappings commenced again. And the night after that–and every night for the next two weeks. The rappings happened for several hours each night, and it left the Fox family frightened, confused and tired.

On March 31st, the girls were sent to bed early, in an attempt to make up for their lost rest. Almost immediately, the rappings began again. This time, Katie responded to the noises by producing her own claps. The rappings, amazingly, responded in kind. Maggie joined in, asking whatever was making the noises to “do this just as I do." She clapped four times and the knocking happened four times. For several hours, the two girls continued to interact with the source of the sounds. Through this call and response questioning, the girls concluded that this was an “invisible intelligence,” a spirit of a murdered tin peddler named Charles B. Rosna whose remains were still buried underneath the house. When their mother Margaret tried to speak to the spirit, the rappings stopped. Apparently, the spirit would only communicate with Katie and Maggie.

The next night, Margaret invited the neighbors over to watch her  daughters communicate with this spirit. The neighbors, at first skeptical, asked a series of increasingly intimate questions about themselves to the supposed ghost. With the help of Katie and Maggie, the spirit answered every question (through “yes or no” rappings) correctly, sometimes embarrassingly so. The guests were shocked, awed, and scared, but some needed further proof. Several volunteers grabbed shovels and dug into the cellar of the Fox house, looking for the body of “Charles Rosna.” Rising water stopped them from digging further, but the inability to uncover proof did not deter the believers. They were convinced that there was a spirit in their small town, and that the teenage Fox sisters were capable of talking with the dead.

An illustration from the 1897 book Hours with the Ghosts, or, Nineteenth Century Witchcraft: Illustrated Investigations into the Phenomena of Spiritualism and Theosophy, showing scientists investigating the claims of a spirit medium. (Image: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

For much of the mid-19th century, the Fox Sisters were rock stars–traveling around the world to communicate with those beyond the veil. By the 1880s, there were over eight million believers in the Fox Sisters’ ability to talk with the departed. Katie and Maggie's gifts were so highly regarded that they inspired a religious phenomenon, which would become known as spiritualism. Over the years, spiritualism would inspire Arthur Conan Doyle, give hope to President Lincoln's widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, and anger the great magician Harry Houdini, who was convinced the entire thing was a hoax.

Knowing their gifts would not be properly recognized in the small town of Hydesville, Margaret sent her two daughters to live with their elder sister, Leah, in Rochester, New York. At the time, the city was a hotbed for political activism, religious freedom, and industrial innovation. There were wealthy people in Rochester that Leah was sure would pay for her sisters’ unique abilities. Leah managed the act, setting up the sisters’ séances in Rochester and inviting prominent citizens like Isaac and Amy Post; she also filled in for Maggie and Katie when one of them couldn't perform. On November 14th, 1849, the Fox Sisters (in this case, Maggie and Leah) hosted their first big public séance in Rochester’s famed Corinthian Hall. Ads were taken out in local papers and word of the event spread it across the city. Hundreds of people showed up, some to be amazed and others simply to mock. By the end, no one was mocking, at least according to the Rochester Daily Democrat, which wrote, “that those who were present… could not but admit the evidence of their séances that THE GHOST was there.”

Maggie, Katie, and Leah became international celebrities. Luminaries of the day, like Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison, came out to witness their performances. The Fox Sisters traveled the world, from London to New York City, giving many a chance to witness them straddle the line between the living world and afterlife.

Mrs. Fish and the Misses Fox: the original mediums of the mysterious noises at Rochester Western, N.Y. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Often, people who approached the sisters for their expertise were grief-stricken and vulnerable, having just lost a loved one. For example, Mary Todd Lincoln, still reeling from the loss of not only her husband, but her son as well, attended a Fox Sister séances. Heart-broken people were willing to pay nearly any sum of money to be able to talk to their family member just one more time. Leah, who managed nearly all of the Fox Sisters' finances, was more than happy to take it.

As Maggie and Katie grew older, they began to resent their elder sister more and more. Several times they wanted to quit the medium business, only to have Leah tell them it was impossible. Despite money pouring in, it always seemed as if Maggie and Katie had little of it. When Maggie fell deeply in love with and secretly–though, it seems, not legally–married explorer Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, she initially did not tell Leah about it. Soon enough, Leah found out and berated both Maggie and her beloved. But Maggie and Kane remained in love until he died suddenly in Havana, Cuba in 1857. Maggie fell into a deep depression and began to drink. By October 21st, 1888, Maggie may have felt she had nothing to lose.

That night, in front of thousands at the New York Academy of Music, a tired, deeply depressed, and possibly drunk Maggie Fox walked to the middle of the stage. With her sister Katie in the audience for support, she revealed to a shocked crowd that the Fox Sisters were a hoax. She explained, both onstage and in a signed confession that appeared in the New York World, that the deception started when they were young girls. The “rappings” at their home in Hydesville were nothing more than falling fruit. “At night when we went to bed, we used to tie an apple on a string and move the string up and down, causing the apple to bump on the floor, or we would drop the apple on the floor, making a strange noise every time it would rebound,” Maggie explained. In order to keep up the trick, the girls learned how to produce a resounding popping or knocking sound by cracking their toes, knuckles, and joints. A consummate performer, Maggie removed her shoe and sock right there on stage for a demonstration, and made her toes emit several loud “raps.” She also explained other ways the sisters fooled people–like having a knocking table specially designed, and learning to write on a slate using only their feet. As the New York Herald described the scene that night in the Academy: “One moment it was ludicrous, the next it was weird.”

The 1887 painting "Hypnotic Séance" by Richard Bergh. (Image: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Newspapers across the country called this the “death blow for spiritualism,” since the very person who helped turn it into a worldwide phenomenon had reveled herself to be a fraud. In fact, spiritualism would continue—there was actually a revival after World War I—but the Fox Sisters were done as mediums. Believers blamed Maggie’s alcoholism, or even claimed that bad spirits had possessed her to denounce her abilities. Eventually, Maggie agreed; a year later, she recanted her admission of deception, saying:“At the time I was in great need of money and persons…took advantage of the situation. The excitement, too, upset my mental equilibrium. When I made those dreadful statements, I was not responsible for my words.”

All three Fox Sisters faded into obscurity and died penniless, beginning with Leah in 1890. In July 1892, Katie died from end-stage alcoholism. Less than a year later, Maggie also died from complications related to alcoholism.

But there's a strange coda to this tale of a childhood prank turned international sensation. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote that, in 1904, schoolchildren snuck into the old Fox house, which was known locally as the “Spook House.” There, they found parts of a skeleton sliding out of a crumbling wall, which a local doctor would later assess was approximately fifty years old—just about when Maggie and Katie's “Charles B. Rosna” should have died. Later accounts say that along with the skeleton, they found a peddler's tin box.

Could the Fox Sisters talk to the dead after all? Or were the bones themselves just another hoax? Without the help of a real medium, we may never know for sure. 

A smaller specimen of Armillaria pokes its caps aboveground. (Photo: Dan Molter/Mushroom Observer CC BY-SA 3.0)

In the late 1980s, a couple of biologists working near a logging site in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula noticed that something was eating the trees. Not the chainsaws, either—something deeper and quieter. For acres, stumps of logged oak trees were dissolved into pulp, and hardly did a new seedling break ground before something strangled it by the roots and began to slowly digest it.

Though they quickly identified the culprit, a fungus called Armillaria bulbosa, attempts at further study led to a much crazier discovery—it wasn’t a bunch of smaller fungi chomping up the forest, but one enormous one. Though the fungus occasionally appeared aboveground, in the form of distinct clumps of mushrooms, the scientists found that most of its bulk was comprised of a billions-strong net of genetically identical tendrils entwined in the earth. “We went out and we sampled,” recalls Myron Smith, “and the first year we covered a large area but we didn’t get to the end of the individual. So the next year we did it again, and we still didn’t get to the end of the individual.”

It seemed to be the largest underground organism on Earth, if not the biggest organism entirely. 

Until, of course, it wasn't.

The rhizomorphs that make up much of a fungus's mass. (Photo: Lairich Rig/Geograph CC BY-SA 2.0)

By the third year, 1992, they still hadn’t exhausted it. But at this point they’d covered “a pretty big area”—about 37 acres—so they decided to publish their findings in Nature. After a few pages about how to differentiate a bunch of closely related fungi from one giant one, genetically speaking, they pointed out that thanks to their 100-ton discovery, “members of the fungal kingdom should now be recognized as among the oldest and largest organisms on earth,” a distinction that had previously belonged to blue whales, redwoods, and other things for which, as Smith puts it, “you can point to it and say ‘look, that shape over there is a moose.’”

The response was immediate. The New York Times gave it the front page. Stephen Jay Gould used it to wax poetic about different concepts of individuality, and a misguided CNN tried to film the underground mass from the air. Nearby Crystal Falls began throwing an annual Humungus Fungus Fest, even as mycologists worldwide went out hunting, quickly finding an even bigger Armillaria in Washington and, eventually, the current record-holder, in Malheur National Forest, Oregon.

A small slice of Pando looks over Utah. (Photo: J Zapell/USDA Public Domain)

Elsewhere in the country, Michael Grant was skeptical. “I thought to myself, ‘Can’t we have a more aesthetically pleasing ‘largest’ organism?’” he wrote in an email. He had one in mind already, namely, an aspen distributed over about 106 acres of Fishlake National Forest, in Utah.

Like the fungus, this aspen looks from aboveground like a stand of distinct trees, but is really all one enormous clone. A botanist named Burton Barnes uncovered its secret in 1976, when he noticed that leaves from many separate and far-apart aspen trees were indistinguishable, like identical quaking fingerprints.

Grant and a few colleagues put their heads together over Barnes’s paper and did some quick figuring. Then they wrote to Nature, too, purporting that this aspen clone clocked in at “60 times larger than the mass of the Armillaria.” About a year later, in Discover magazine, Grant introduced the world to the tree’s nickname—Pando, Latin for “I spread”—and to its various charms, as though the campaign for the title depended not on the organisms' respective sizes, but on their personalities.

A bit of Pando from below. (Photo: Scott Catron/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

It does, to a degree. The answer to the question "what is the biggest organism?" rests on your definition of both "organism" and "biggest." In Smith's mind, he pulled off a coup by convincing the world to invest a giant fungus with individuality at all; Grant's nudge, though it challenged Smith's specifics, solidified his overall concept. As far as numbers go, it depends on your criteria—for area, the fungus wins; for mass, it's probably Pando. 

For personality, it's probably Pando again. In terms of sheer aesthetic pleasure, thousands of graceful trees shading from green to yellow in unison beats out a creeping underground fungus. Its mode of growth is also somewhat more appealing. While Armillaria spreads from food source to food source, identifying, surrounding, and devouring its woody prey, Pando’s literally grows by healing—an asexual growth response means it reacts to any damage by putting up a brand new shoot, a plant version of getting back in the saddle.

The last big point in the tree's favor might double as its undoing: Pando is an underdog. While the latest humongous fungus, in Oregon, already lives in a protected area, various encroachments on Pando's territory mean it’s in danger of dying out, says Paul Rogers, director of the Western Aspen Alliance at Utah State University. Experts theorize that Pando “was good at growing fast, and maybe not so great at defending itself,” Rogers says, and as Pando ages, the second part of this trade-off is coming back to haunt it. Though it hasn’t lost any ground, its individual stems are aging and dying; meanwhile, any new growth is quickly eaten by Utah’s booming herds of elk and deer. The result is the kind of population imbalance that frightens any community: “there’s no babies, there’s no teenagers, there’s no middle-aged stems, there’s not even any young senior citizens,” says Rogers. “They’re almost all the same age and they’re dying quickly. It’s a very unsustainable formula.”

An area of Pando that is noticeably losing density. (Photo: Paul C. Rogers/Western Aspen Alliance, Utah State University)

Meanwhile, Armillaria’s formula—grab food, eat food, stay underground—is extremely sustainable. The current most humongous fungus lives in a protected area, and development, though hypothetically devastating, isn’t likely. As such, mycologists can plan studies around its longevity, hoping to use it to learn about long-distance cellular signaling, genetic stability, and “how some organisms can escape the effects of aging,” Smith says.

This particular fungus’s bigness doesn’t interest Smith as much as the fact that, because it’s the biggest, it provides a baseline for such studies.

Scientifically speaking, Rogers doesn’t really care whether Pando is the biggest, either. He readily admits that, depending on how you look at it, the fungus might deserve the championship ring. He just loves aspen, and he sees Pando’s title as a way to help its smaller brethren. “There are other spinoff issues that are important to me,” he says. “Aspen in this country is an enabler of biodiversity. It’s a conserver of water, and water is the #1 issue in the West.” Pando generates media interest, lent its name to an ecological movement, and is even on a postage stamp. If this fame translates to more knowledge, more awareness, or more research funding, Rogers says, “that’s great for me.”

Grant, though frustrated that these efforts haven’t yet led to any sort of official protection, is also reluctant to complain too much. “I think it has stimulated some interest in things botanical,” he writes, “and subsequent work has significantly advanced our understanding and appreciation for the complexity of Pando.” After all, Pando may not be the oldest or the biggest, but, Grant points out, “he is pretty famous.”

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Opening day ceremony for the first subway line at City Hall, October 27, 1904. (Photo: Courtesy of the New York Transit Museum)

When New York City Mayor Robert Anderson Van Wyck lifted the first shovel of dirt from the ground outside City Hall on March 24, 1900, the city celebrated the beginning of its first subway tunnel. It was heralded as “one of the most important events in the history of the city,” according to a story that appeared in the New York Times the next day, which described the crowd as immense, unruly, and “eager for souvenirs.”

But the thousands of onlookers who gathered in excitement hadn’t seen the start of the subway’s construction at all. What they saw was a symbolic photo op.

The system’s groundbreaking actually happened two days later and over a mile away on Bleecker Street, when chief engineer William Barclay Parsons drove a pickaxe into the ground. 

The image of a single engineer wielding a piece of technology no more sophisticated than a hammer isn’t what most people have in mind when they think of modern infrastructure projects. But it may be the fastest technology available to New Yorkers, even now—especially now, as the Second Avenue subway, a project that began planning in the 1910s, has been under construction since 2007, is not yet open. By contrast, workers laid over 9 miles of track across Manhattan in only four years after initial groundbreaking. “The fact that we still don’t have a subway under Second Avenue is kind of amazing,” says Polly Desjarlais, a senior educator at the New York Transit Museum.

So if we could build a new subway line in four years back in the early 1900s, why is the Second Avenue line taking so long? Why are we still using so much infrastructure that's more than 100 years old? What has changed in the last hundred or so years for the subway?

Groundbreaking at Bleecker and Green Streets, March 1900. (Photo: Courtesy of the New York Transit Museum)

Labor conditions, for one. For better and for worse, it was easier to launch a major construction project before there were labor and safety regulations in place. While newer tunnels may not seem dramatically different from their predecessors, the built environment and social conditions that make them possible have dramatically shifted.

Much of the city’s first subway line was built using a method called “cut and cover,” for instance, which essentially involved digging giant trenches through existing streets, laying tracks and covering them back up. “They were digging the hole basically from the ground,” says Elyse Newman, the transit museum’s education manager. “All traffic on Broadway had to stop at certain times over the course of this construction, which is crazy because it was really disruptive to the city.”

Cut and cover hasn’t been abandoned—it was used for part of the new Fulton Center—but “you could never, ever do anything like this now” on the same scale, says Desjarlais. In the early years of construction, engineers simply didn’t have to relocate huge numbers of people or dig deep, expensive tunnels into the earth if they wanted to build a subway. Instead, planners could just put a giant hole in the street. “They didn’t have to deal with property rights,” Desjarlais adds. “You have 9 million people that you have to get around today.”

The City Hall station of the IRT Lexington Avenue Line opened on October 27, 1904. (Photo: Public Domain/Library of Congress)

Also crucial to the original tunnel’s speedy construction was the sheer number of workers deployed and the conditions they were expected to endure. Somewhere between 7,700 and 12,000 people were involved in building the first line, according to Desjarlais, and most of the workers wielding pickaxes were only bringing home around $1.50 per day.

“You have these guys down there who are literally banging at the rock with shovels,” says Newman. And it’s not like there were generous benefits or protections. “I think they were just working insanely. There were many fewer regulations in terms of public safety [and] public health.”

Workers completed tunneling for the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway in 2011. (Photo: MTA/flickr)

But even though there aren’t massive numbers of workers streaming into modern subway construction with pickaxes, haven’t technological advances made the whole process more efficient and cost-effective, thereby making additions to the subway even easier? It’s a question Desjarlaissays she gets all the time. The answer is that 115 years of advancement doesn't necessarily balance out the ways in which the city’s infrastructure is more complicated to disrupt than it was in 1900, or the political challenges in securing long-term funding.

Elm (Lafayette) Street and Bleecker Street, NY, April 1, 1901. (Photo: Courtesy of the New York Transit Museum)

And while projects like the Second Avenue subway are being built partly by enormous boring machines that would have been unfathomable a century ago, the original tunnel on Bleecker street may never look like an artifact. The trains are still running in tunnels that are fundamentally the same, powered by the same third-rail electrification scheme that was in place when the subway opened. Even the original stations were peppered with ads.

“The bones of the system are exactly the same,” says Newman. “The engineering and the concept was so successful that here we are and it works relatively—relatively well.”

Still, that’s probably not much consolation to anyone who has ever been jammed into into the city’s overcrowded east side subways. But to those complaints, the original engineer Parsons might have said: it’s never too late to grab a pickaxe.

An artist's image of the star's meal (Image: Mark A. Garlick/Nature)

One day, the Sun will become a white dwarf star. All its mass will collapse into an area about the size of Earth, but so much more dense that the force of its gravity will pull in anything that gets near it.

That's what astronomers think, at least, and recently, they got a glimpse of our planet's fate. The Kepler Space Telescope caught an image of a white dwarf pulling in and shredding pieces of destroyed planets. A group of scientists, writing in Nature, described the phenomenon, evidence that this will be how Earth finally ends, as well.

The star that the astronomers observed is WD1145+017, and it's 570 light-years away. Before now, the evidence that scientists had of white dwarves' destructive power was the signature of heavy elements on the stars' surfaces. Those don't normally appear on the surface of stars, and their presence indicated that rocky bodies brought them there. 

But this is the first time that scientists observed the process in action. They saw one or more "disintegrating planetesimals" passing around the star ever 4.5 to 4.9 hours, they report. The passing objects looked like "a small object with a cometary tail of dusty effluent material." In other words, parts of a broken up planet were spiraling towards the dying star, leaving a trail of dust behind them. 

Bonus finds: New species of giant Galapagos tortoise, old species of turtle with a weird snout, particles doing crazy quantum things, a Viking sword

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. 

The offending error. (Photo: Bonhams)

If you're extremely wealthy and extremely corrupt, get your credit cards ready—because next month, for one day only, you'll have a chance to buy a Bible that tells you to go ahead and sin. 

There are only about 10 remaining copies of the Wicked Bible, also known as the Sinners' Bible or Adulterous Bible. Printed in 1631, this edition became famous because of an embarrassing error. (Or an encouraging error, depending on your moral code.) Instead of the commandment reading "Thou shalt not commit adultery," this one says "Thou shalt."

Originally, printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas ran off about 1,000 of these bad boys, and apparently nobody noticed for a year. Eventually Barker and Lucas were fined £300 for their carelessness (a much bigger sum in the 1700s, more like $65,000 today), and their printers' licenses were revoked. (This would have been especially harsh if, as some believe, the error was actually an act of sabotage by rival printer Bonham Norton.) Barker especially seems to have been unmoored by the incident; he was in and out of prison for the next ten years, and died there in 1645.

A printer's workshop in 1643, about a decade after the Wicked Bible was printed. (Photo: Public domain/WikiCommons)

Most of the print run was destroyed, but a few copies sneaked past the censors. There's one at the New York Public Library, but the public rarely gets to see it, and one at the Dunham Bible Museum in Houston. A copy is listed at Bible dealer Greatsite.com for $99,500, but it doesn't appear among their Bibles available to purchase. And on November 11, there will be one up for sale at London auction house Bonhams, with an asking price of £10,000 to £15,000 (around $15,000 to $23,000).

So, sinners of the world, get ready to spend your nest egg on a book that says you can do whatever you want with thy neighbor's wife – but make sure it's your nest egg. Even the Wicked Bible doesn't say "thou shalt steal."

Title page of the Wicked Bible. (Photo: Public domain/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.

Looking north toward the Marin Headlands through a small portal. (All photos by Sierra Hartman)

Two hundred feet down the cliff from Deadman’s Point lies an exposed coal vein that, according to the coal miner who discovered it, contains enough fuel to change the face of San Francisco. "I am of the opinion," the man told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1891, "that it marks the opening of a vein of coal that will develop fully as good as any that can be found on the Pacific slope."

Found by a lifelong coal miner named Charles Jackson more than 120 years ago, the announcement rocked the young city and sparked a frenzy of development in a remote corner of Land’s End, a popular tourist attraction on the San Francisco Bay. Strangely, little documentation exists about this spectacular find; San Francisco historian John Martini helped us track down a meager three newspaper notices from the time.

Tourists rarely attempt to enter this space, though, and most locals don’t know that it exists. Aside from a few nimble raccoons, it’s likely that no one has seen the inside of this tunnel in more than 40 years, let alone photographed it.

The eastern terminus is nearly sealed from 124 years of mudslides pouring over the tunnel.

Adolph Sutro owned the land where the coal was discovered and, after finding the quality to be higher than anything else on the West Coast, started development of a prospecting tunnel within days of Jackson’s discovery. Meanwhile, Jackson followed the vein north, clear through Marin County, finding deposits of coal the entire way, 30 feet underground. Every indication pointed to a bonanza of high quality coal just on the outskirts of the already booming Gold Rush city. 

Looking west toward the cave.

Looking east from the eastern terminus.

Until that point, coal of this quality had to be shipped from as far away as Vancouver, British Columbia. Looking at the land now though, it’s clear that the vein was never fully exploited. The reason remains a mystery.

As the land around the tunnel eroded, it became more and more difficult to access until only the most adventurous neighborhood kids would venture into it. The story of the tunnel’s origins faded too. The only fragments of evidence that remain include a handful of newspaper articles from March and April of 1891, worn brick and iron infrastructure, and a 250-foot tunnel bored through solid rock, a portion of which cuts through a thick column of jet black bituminous coal. 

Recent raccoon footprints are evidence of the tunnel’s only regular visitors.

A wooden plank is buried under sand, deposited over decades of high tides washing into the cave.

Looking north from the top of the cave.

Cave-ins have nearly sealed the western end of the tunnel.

The tunnel was dug parallel to the coastline and was, at one point, accessible on either end by a footpath. Landslides have since taken out the path and portions of the tunnel, leaving it in three broken sections. One of these sections is bisected by a sea cave. This provides the only reasonable access to the tunnel but still involves technical climbing and careful planning. When it was first dug out of the cliff face, the tunnel was about seven feet high and at least four feet wide. A century of earthquakes and stormy weather have taken their toll though. There is clear evidence of cave-ins and some points have been reduced to crawl spaces.

The only access point is a sea cave with remnants of brick and iron infrastructure.

The tunnel’s clear sections were at tall enough to walk through.

Nearly half of the tunnel has been washed away, leaving a long gap between sections.

Coal veins are clearly visible.

After more than a century of sand and high tides, it’s hard to say what the original structure was used for.

The tunnel and its openings are only visible from the beach below and the beach is only accessible at exceptionally low tides. Depending on the season, the level of sand can also vary dramatically, meaning the difference between walking on dry sand and wading through chest deep tide pools. Even under ideal conditions, it’s extremely important to pay attention to the tides. It’s easy to lose track of time and wind up swimming out instead. If you do decide to explore this piece of San Francisco history, understand that the name Deadman’s Point didn’t just come out of nowhere.

 Gnomes... always peering at us from below. (Photo: Humusak/pixabay)

Humans have long been fascinated with the underground. It's a dark, uncharted place where we've allowed our minds to roam free, imagining all manner of creatures, from children's book heroes to horror film beasties. Here are a few of the classics.

Nomes (or Gnomes)

Gnomes are likely the cutest, cuddliest underground creatures. They’re often small and roly poly and generally have big noses–although the Nomes who live under the earth’s surface in L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz are mean-tempered half-human, half-rock people who die when exposed to the insides of chicken eggs. The idea of a gnome was apparently introduced in the 16th century, its etymology linked to the Greek term for “earth-dweller.” Some gnomes are known to move through solid earth as we humans pass through above-ground air. Famous gnomes include the “Earthmen” living in Narnia’s Underland, the mischievous garden gnomes of Harry Potter, and the Travelocity gnome. 

Tell your great-great-great-great-great grandchildren to watch out for Morlocks! (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

Morlocks  

Morlocks are the creation of writer H.G. Wells, who first introduced them in his 1895 novel The Time Machine. They’re classic creatures of the underground, with the greyish skin, grey-red eyes, flaxen hair, and weak constitution associated with thousands of generations without sunlight. They live beneath the English countryside and can only access the surface through a series of structures resembling wells. In Wells' novel, it's AD 802,701 and the Morlocks and Eloi are the two existing post-human races. Morlocks are the underground working class doing all the drudge work, while the Eloi are the above-ground upper class living lives of ease–though at night, Morlocks catch Eloi and eat them. Morlocks have popped up in other works of fiction and film, and in different iterations, Morlocks can take on some alternate characteristics: in a 1960 film adaptation they’re blue, and in a 2002 version, they’re strong and ape-like.

C.H.U.D.

C.H.U.D. is an acronym for "Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller,” as well as the name of the 1984 film (followed by C.H.U.D. II and Bud the C.H.U.D.) in which they appear. If you’re unfamiliar with the film, then here’s the basics: a C.H.U.D. is a human-turned-monster mutated by radioactive, toxic waste who is always hungry and emerges from the sewers only to seize human meat. C.H.U.D. live underground and their existence is connected to the Nuclear Regulator Commission! To the NRC, C.H.U.D. simply represents waste by-product (“Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal”). But to citizens of New York, C.H.U.D. are beasts with glowing eyes and dagger-like teeth out to get them.

Mole may live underground, but the dark can still be scary! (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

Mole

It’s hard not to love the darling anthropomorphized Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s classic, The Wind in the Willows (1908). He's accompanied by Rat, Badger, and Mr. Toad, but Mole is the star of the show: a mild-mannered homebody who decides to explore the outside, upstairs world. He puts down his brooms and dusters one day in a huff and scrambles out of the seclusion of his cellarage. Seeing a river for the first time, Mole learns to swim and to row, and exposed above ground, he discovers the feel of the wind in the willows. Mole reminds us not to take sunlight and soft breezes for granted.

Moloids

Moloids—also known as Mole People or Subterraneans—are creatures of the kingdom of Subterranea, brought to us by Marvel. They are weak, hairless, and sallow-skinned, finding strength in numbers. Subterranea seems to have limited dating options, which meant that Moloids became seriously inbred. This intense inbreeding caused great damage to their intelligence and independent thinking; after enough inbreeding, Moloids started to simply follow whoever seemed to be in charge. At one point they worshipped Mole Man, which is why they became known as Mole People, or Mole Men. 

The Sewer Alligator

Someone’s always talking about the alligator in their sewer. Stories of such gators date back to the 1920s (back when alligators did in fact live in the sewers), but thanks to the 1980 film Alligator, we know exactly how they got there–it happens when people flush their baby alligators down the toilet! This definitely happened at least a few times, since shops (in Florida) used to sell baby gators as novelty souvenirs, and of course some New York tourists tried making them into pets. When things started getting out of hand, down the toilet they’d go. Sewer workers have reported gator sightings, but none were ever confirmed. Hmm…

Graboids

Graboids, also known as Dirt Dragons or Tu-Long, were brought into this world by the 1990 movie Tremors (followed by Tremors 2, 3, 4, and 5—which came out this month!) They are basically huge subterranean leathery larvae, growing to lengths of up to 30 feet and weighing in at up to 20 tons. They also have three 10-foot serpentine tongue-tentacles, each of which has its own set of jaws and teeth. They’re always hungry and will eat whatever they come across–sheep, donkeys, humans, even other Graboids. They have no eyes or nose, so they locate prey by following vibrations and tremors, ambushing their targets, and regurgitating anything inedible. Graboids have now been around for 25 years, surviving multiple cinematic regurgitations.

"Z" from Antz: above ground and human sized! (Photo: Jim Larrison/flickr)

Antz

Cast your mind back to 1998, when DreamWorks Animation gave us “the world from a whole new perspective.” Antz was the company's first animated film, and gives us the story of an underground totalitarian ant society in New York’s Central Park where everything is very militaristic, including the dancing. It’s also very dark and earthy, since these antz don’t see the light of day. The plot twist comes when the underdog protagonist and his ant princess crush get thrown into the above-ground world. Then there’s an ant revolution and worker ants eagerly claw their way to the surface. 

The Centipede, the Glowworm, the Earthworm, et al.

Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach is one of very few children’s novels to render fruit-infesting bugs adorable. Seven-year-old James Henry Trotter is given a bag of magic "green things," but he accidentally spills them into the dirt—at which point a nearby tree starts growing a single humongous peach. Inside the peach, James discovers a new gang of best friends: the Centipede, the Earthworm, the Glowworm, the Silkworm, the Ladybug, the Old Green Grasshopper, and Miss Spider, who have all become human-sized after finding magic green objects in the dirt in which they lived. After a madcap adventure by sea and by seagull, the peach is impaled upon the tip of the Empire State Building, and New Yorkers mistake the harmless bugs for monsters or extraterrestrials. But James, of course, shows us that creepy underground creatures can instead become fond friends, and each of the crew finds a job in the city’s human society.

Drow

Drow (or dark elves) are evil creatures from Dungeons & Dragons, and unlike many creatures from sunless places, their skin is dark, not sallow. Drow have light, well-coiffed hair and often have bright red eyes. Their name, “drow,” comes from the Scots word for “troll,” and they appeared in the game’s 1977 1st Edition, where they were listed as “The Black Elves.” They are known as weak with their fists, but strong with their magic. The drow live with other shadowy creatures in the Underdark, a network of underground caves, and can live as long as 1,000 years.

The tunnel (Photo: Policia Federal)

Among all the illegal tunnels in the world, the one found this week by U.S. and Mexican law enforcement agents is a doozy. It's 2,600 feet long, about three feet wide, and equipped with a rail system to move large quantities of drugs.

Which the agents also found: 10 tons of marijuana, in 873 packages.

The tunnel, which crosses the border in Otay Mesa, a San Diego neighborhood just across the border from Tijuana, was controlled by El Chapo, the famous Mexican cartel boss. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, agents discovered it in a sting operation. On the U.S. side, agents found a small opening that dropped 32 feet down, and their Mexican counterparts found a similar entrance on the other side.

The only real way to locate tunnels like these is through law enforcement action: tunnel detection technology is neither accurate or flexible enough for tunnel hunters to rely on. Which is one reason why drug cartels keep building them: they're really, really hard to find.

Bonus finds: Half-male, half-female butterfly; coffin of a dog

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. 

The annotated map! (Photo: Blackwell's Rare Books) 

In the 1960s, the British illustrator Pauline Baynes was working on a color map of Middle-earth, the land of wizards, elves and, of course, hobbits. While she was drafting the map, she worked closely with J.R.R. Tolkien, who sent her a copy of a map from a previous edition of Lord of the Rings, covered in notes revealing details of Middle-earth. 

Baynes tucked that map into her copy of Tolkien’s trilogy, where it stayed for decades, until, just recently, it was found at Blackwell’s Rare Books, reports the Guardian.

Tolkien’s notes, in green ink, reveal some of the real-world inspirations for Middle-earth. 

“Hobbiton is on the same latitude as Oxford,” the Guardian reports. “The Italian city of Ravenna could be the inspiration behind the fictional city of Minas Tirith.” Tolkein noted place names not on the old map and had thoughts about exactly what trees should appear where, the Guardian says.

At the moment, the map is on display in Oxford. But it’s also for sale, at a bargain price of 60,000 pounds. Who wants to go in on it?

Bonus find: A baby giant squid, the first ever to be found by humans

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 Death Star-eye view of the home in question. (All photos: Courtesy Unique Estates)

A strangely-shaped dwelling in the wilds of Queensland, Australia is capturing the imaginations of aspiring home buyers across the galaxy, since it kind of looks like the Millennium Falcon.

The home's resemblance to the spaceship is evidence either that Han Solo and friends crash-landed in the bush sometime after the Second Galactic Civil War, or that a Star Wars fever has overtaken everyone. The seller, a retired postage stamp dealer named Rod Perry, says he thought his home was just a cool mansion until he saw aerial photos, at which point he understood why everyone was calling it things like "starship galactica." 

Fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy!

It was designed by Charles Wright in 2006 and built in 2009, and later received a 2014 Queensland Architecture Award for successfully integrating "an otherworldly presence" with "the world's oldest and most pristine landscape." The open-air floor plan solves the humidity problems that plague residents of Australian rainforests. 

"Inside" the open-air living space.

There are some important differences between the home and the ship—for example, the home is stationary and lacks sensor jammers and blasters. It does, however, include a pool, four bedrooms, and a private beach.

The house is listed at $15 million, and Unique Estates is offering viewings to "genuinely interested purveyors." May the Force be with you, genuinely interested purveyors.

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.

It's autumn at Atlas Obscura headquarters in New York City, and we're lucky enough to be enjoying crisp weather, peak foliage and bars that serve warm drinks. But when we look down at the ground, we worry.

What's going on in there? If movies are any guide, quite a lot. There are worms of a variety of sizes and temperaments just below the surface, waiting for their chance to see the light of day. To help readers sort the cute subterranean beasts (think Labyrinth) from the truly deadly varieties (think all five Tremors) , we have ranked them by size in the video below. Enjoy! 

Robert the Doll, in close up. (Photo: Cayobo/flickr)

Here is something that most people would agree is true about Robert the Doll: He’s terrifying.

Ostensibly a little boy in a sailor suit, his careworn face is only vaguely human. His nub of a nose looks like a pair of pinholes. He is covered in brown nicks, like scars. His eyes are beady and black. He wears a malevolent smirk. Clasped in his lap he’s holding his own toy, a dog with garish, popping eyes and a too-big tongue lolling crazily out of its mouth.

Here are some other things that people also agree is true about Robert: That he’s haunted and that he has caused car accidents, broken bones, job loss, divorce and a cornucopia of other misfortunes. 

Robert is 111-years-old and lives at the Fort East Martello Museum in Key West, Florida. Before that he was the property of Robert Eugene Otto, an eccentric artist and member of a prominent Key West family. (Yes, the doll and the owner had the same name, but the boy answered to “Gene”.) Robert was a childhood birthday gift from Otto’s grandfather, who bought the doll during a trip to Germany. Otto’s relationship with the doll continued into adulthood. 

Haunted, right? (Photo: Courtesy Key West Art & Historical Society)

“What people really remember is what they would probably term as an unhealthy relationship with the doll,” says Cori Convertito, curator of the museum and Robert’s caretaker. “He brought it everywhere, he talked about it in the first person as if he weren’t a doll, he was Robert. As in he is a live entity.” 

After some digging, the museum traced Robert’s origins to the Steiff Company, the same toy maker that first manufactured a Teddy bear in honor of Theodore Roosevelt. Robert was most likely never intended to be sold as a toy—a Steiff historian told the museum that Robert was probably part of a set fabricated for a window display of clowns or jesters. 

“Which is kind of adorable,” says Convertito, “Especially with his impish behavior it kind of suits his personality really well.”

Robert’s little sailor suit was not supplied by the company; it was probably an outfit that Otto himself wore as a child.

More Robert. (Photo: Courtesy Key West Art & Historical Society)

According to legend, young Otto began to blame mishaps on the doll. While this could have been laughed off as childish storytelling, adults also started noticing odd occurrences, especially as Otto and Robert grew older. As an adult, Otto lived in a stately home he called “The Artist House”, where Robert could be seen positioned at the upstairs window. Schoolchildren swore that he would appear and reappear, and they avoided the house. Myrtle Reuter purchased the Artist House after Otto’s death in 1974, and also became Robert’s new caretaker. Visitors swore they heard footsteps in the attic and giggling. Some claimed Robert’s expression changed when anyone badmouthed Otto in his presence. Rueter said Robert would move around the house on his own, and after twenty years of antics, she donated him to the museum in 1994.

But far from banishing Robert to obscurity, his arrival at the museum marked a turning point for the doll.

Since Robert arrived, visitors have flocked to the museum to get a look at the mischievous toy. He has appeared on TV shows, he has had his aura photographed, he is a stop on a ghost tour, and he’s inspired a horror movie. He has a Wikipedia entry and social mediaaccounts. Fans can buy Robert replicas, books, coasters and t-shirts. And they can—and do—write to him.

“He gets probably one to three letters every day,” says Convertito. But they aren’t typical fan letters; they’re often apologies. Many visitors attribute post-visit misfortunes to failing to respect Robert (or even openly disrespecting him) and they write begging forgiveness. Others ask him for advice, or to hex those who have wronged them. Convertito says they have received around one thousand letters, which they keep and catalog.

Where Robert lives. (Photo: Courtesy Key West Art & Historical Society)

Robert also receives emails and homages. At some point, it became known that Robert had a sweet tooth so people leave and send him candy. Just recently he received a box containing eight bags of peppermints, a card, and no return address. (Exercising caution, the museum staff does not consume treats sent to Robert.) Guests leave him sweets, money and, occasionally, joints.

“It’s completely inappropriate,” says Convertito. “We are still a museum.”

Convertito is Robert’s caretaker—once a year she administers a check-up, taking him out of the case and weighing him to assess whether the humid Florida weather has adversely affected his straw-filled body. She is also his proxy, receiving and reading all his emails and letters and running his social media feeds. 

In August she photoshopped Robert’s knobby face onto the now-famous picture of Kim Kardashian popping a bottle of champagne into a glass balanced on her behind. It was in order to attract attention to a campaign that would score the museum a grant if they garnered enough votes. Through the combined forces of Kardashian’s and Robert’s celebrity and the doll’s social media reach—he has almost 9,000 Facebook likes—the museum won by a “landslide”.

The 2015 movie based on Robert the Doll. (Photo: Courtesy of bttm.co.uk)

Occasionally, Convertito corresponds on Robert’s behalf. She tries to send something to every child who writes him (“Gene always had that childlike temperament around him and we feel like Robert would want to be kind to children.”) and she has also responded to more poignant ones, such as an email from a girl who was being bullied at school.

So, does Convertito think Robert is haunted?

“I don’t know. I really don’t,” she says. “I’ve never had a bad experience with him. I’ve never felt uncomfortable. It’s always been a very basic relationship and I have a job to do and I go and do it. And whether there’s something to it or not, he just allows me to get on with my job.” 

A fake skeleton, cozy in a bed decorated with an (allegedly) real skull. (Photo: Anna Fox/Flickr)

For theme park buffs, Disneyland's "Pirates of the Caribbean" is considered to be the gold standard of amusement rides. Its plot—a peaceful bayou boat ride rip-roaringly interrupted by a pack of pirates—has lent inspiration to pretty much every experience-based theme park ride since, from Universal Studio's "Jurassic Park" to the various Six Flags superhero roller coasters. And the impressive special effects, once way ahead of their time when it was built in the mid-'60s, are now standard practice for blockbuster attractions. From the moment the first animated skull and crossbones yells "Avast there!" ride-goers know they're in for a classic adventure. 

But there's one major (and majorly spooky) difference between "Pirates of the Caribbean" and its many descendants: the skeletal pirates strewn about the attraction were once made of real human remains. And some people, including former Disney employees, insist that a few of them still are.

Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean, built in 1967, was the last ride whose creation Walt Disney himself supervised. Before the passenger boats were completed, the Imagineers pushed him through on a dolly and solicited his feedback. (Imagineers are Disney's term for park creative employees, a portmanteau of "imagine" and "engineer.") He loved it, and was especially happy that "each time guests go through, they'll hear something new and different." It was hard-won praise. Building the ride involved close collaboration between the machine shop, the animatronics team, and the sculpting and wardrobe departments, and the whole thing cost $15 million, about $106 million in today's currency and as much as the rest of the park combined.

After creating such realistic mayhem, the design team was disappointed by "the faux skeletons of the period," which they found "just too unconvincing," reports former Disney producer Jason Surrell in his book Pirates of the Caribbean: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies. So they hit up their friends at UCLA Medical Center and got some grisly props from the anatomy department. Eventually, as fake skeleton technology improved, "a new generation of Imagineers" replaced the real ones, which "were later returned to their countries of origin and given a proper burial," assures Surrell.

Some fake skeletons enjoying a fake drink in a fake bar. (Photo: faerie-angel/DeviantArt CC BY-SA 3.0)

Some fans, though, are not convinced about this last part. Rumors that several of the real skeletons were never replaced have been swirling in the Disney community for a while, and have become a popular topic of discussion on fan blogs in the past couple of years. In a ride most famous for its convincing illusions—besides all the animatronics, there's a "burning town" so realistic the Anaheim fire chief almost shut it down—these small pieces of (alleged) reality have drawn a lot of attention. 

People disagree on exactly which remains remain. After an investigation, Jason Petros of the EarzUp Podcast concluded that there are exactly three denizens of Pirate Town that were previously living—two skulls on a small island right after the second waterfall, and a whole torso trapped under a beam in a burning jailhouse. They cite "extra details on the inside of the skull around the nose" and "small holes and such" as evidence. Josh of Disneyland Report points to a skull and crossbones decorating the headboard of an ornate bed, itself home to a skeletal pirate captain with a sleeping cap ("If you look closely, you'll notice they're darker and more aged than the rest of the skeletons on the ride," he writes). David Erickson of Fresh Baked Disney has heard that this particular skull was "donated" by an Imagineer. The blog DisneyDose even got a cast member to confirm this theory—"I've heard there are two more," she said, "but I haven't found them yet."  

A controversial part of the ride that remains unchanged. (Photo: Anna Fox/Flickr)

As a very old ride that has gone through a number of renovations, Pirates of the Caribbean is a popular target for fan speculation and conspiracy theorizing. Those in charge have drawn online fire for making the attraction more "politically correct"—changing dialogue and props so that the pirates, for example, are chasing food instead of women. One of the original writers, Francis Xavier "X" Atencio, has referred to these changes as "Boy Scouts of the Caribbean." If the real live skulls could talk, maybe they could help the ride regain a little cred. 

"The Garden of Earthly Delights", by Hieronyous Bosch. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Even in Disney World, an impenetrable fortress of G-rated delights, sex is happening.

Hop on a complimentary shuttle bus from the Magic Kingdom to the edge of Fort Wilderness Beach, take a right, and walk along the nature trail until you come upon a copse of trees. There, in the shadow of Cinderella's Castle, is an entirely different kind of wonderland. If that doesn't suit you, there are other options; the sauna of the Walt Disney Swan Resort on a Sunday afternoon, the men's bathroom in the basement of Disney’s Great Hall, the “totally private” fourth floor handicapped toilet near the monorail to Epcot. In every setting, there’s a sacred concealed world—a hidden network of men meeting other men for sex, masked in the mundane.

When I first discovered Cruisingforsex.com, I was stranded in rural Pennsylvania to attend the wedding of my best friend’s third cousin. Armed with nothing more than a wifi connection and a complimentary buffet, the only sane thing for my friend James and I to do was chug white wine and browse Tinder. As we speculated about a 19-year-old farmer with a rat-tail, James made a suggestion: Let's go on Cruisingforsex.  

After a few minutes of fumbling with my phone, I managed to enter my search query: Hershey, Pennsylvania. And there it was. A toilet in Hershey Park's outlet mall was only two miles away, a parking lot by James' high school was a quick 15-minute drive, and just down the road was a hotel with a back room. Just like that, this landscape—engulfed in neon, eerily suburban—was transformed before me into a series of negotiations, authored by gay men who usurped public space in whatever way they could.

In the age of Tinder and Grindr, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that I could conjure up this world in moments. But Cruisingforsex.com isn’t just any website—it marked a turning point in the history of the internet, and in the history of gay life in the United States. This intersection was only possible thanks to the vision of a man whose life contained multitudes of contradictions—almost as many as the sexual mores of the community that he sought to empower.

For the uninitiated, cruising is the modern term for the practice of casual and anonymous public sex. Enshrined in Rome’s hedonistic baths, the ancient art of cruising went down in Athenian cemeteries, seedy 17th century theaters, and the ornate, public gardens of Victorian Paris. More recently, cruising spots include deserted parks, truck stops, gloryholes, bathhouses, and, of course, the dirty theater. Here, the most banal of gestures—the tap of a foot or the flash of a handkerchief—become a loaded sexual advance.

The website disclaimer. (Photo: Courtesy of the Wayback Machine.)

Until the advent of the internet, cruisers relied on sheer luck and local gossip to navigate a world that was punctuated by police raids. But word of mouth has given way to web-based message boards and forums, and, beginning in 1995, cruising entered the digital age. By all accounts, it was a good year to be single on the internet. America Online reigned supreme, personal ads wouldn’t grace Craigslist for another year, and chat rooms were the bread and butter of gay hook-ups. It was then that two websites, seemingly diametrically opposed, were founded—one was the ultra-conservative Match.com, the other was the consciously hedonistic Cruisingforsex.com.

By 1997, Match.com was everywhere. It bombarded basic cable with commercials, boasted a formidable 200,000 registrants, and was universally hailed as an instant marriage generator and the future of computer courtship. If Match was a corporate Goliath, then it seemed as though Cruisingforsex was a waifish David. Cruisingforsex.com was a bare bones operation, with nary a full-time staffer or office. Yet, in its way, it was just as big. Cruisingforsex was clocking over 130,000 hits per day, amassing over six million visitors per month, while boasting a spot in the top two percent of viewed websites at the time.

The website was founded “on a lark” by Keith Griffith, an enigmatic Southern gentleman with a soft spot for Blanton’s single barrel liquor. Griffith was born into a strict, Southern Baptist family in 1959 but his upbringing didn’t quite stick (an oft-quoted mantra was that his religion as an adult came from getting on his knees for a different sort of prayer.) As a young man, Griffith married his high school sweetheart in a quiet church ceremony, but divorced her in a dingy courtroom in Alberta, Georgia a year later. It was then that Griffith decamped to California, where he enrolled in San Francisco State University and met his true love: cruising.

It was 1978 and ostensibly, the city was a legalized orgy. Three years later, the AIDS crisis hit.

A table of contents page from a 1993 issue of Steam magazine. (Photo: History of Gay and Lesbian Life, Milwaukee, Wisconsin)

The disease descended swiftly on the city. By 1985, the first year that President Reagan publicly mentioned the disease, the global death toll stood at 12,529. It was in the those “darkest, desperate days” that Griffith met Scott O’Hara, a trust fund kid turned porn star who became Griffith’s all-in-one confidante, employer, and sometime lover. Together, Griffith and O’Hara founded Steam magazine in 1993, a print quarterly billing itself as a celebration of “all kinds of sex, but especially public, publicly-disapproved, exciting sex.” Like many early internet projects, Cruisingforsex can trace its lineage directly back to the printed page.

At a moment when the “gay plague” had subsumed the lives of thousands of gay men and women around the world, O’Hara and Griffith fought for a slice of sexual freedom. This ran counter to the prevailing medical advice, but Griffith would defend his stance on public sex by invoking the words of O’Hara, who once told him, “If you want safety, don't have sex because sex is risky.” Safety was not the point; fully living was the point. O’Hara believed that life, gay life, should be more than mere biological survival.

Hara died in 1998; Griffith died in 2012. Both men approached sex as if it were their last meal.

In December 6th of 1995—just as Griffith’s site was exploding across the still-young internet—the FDA approved the drug Invirase, the first protease inhibitor. Protease inhibitors diminish viral loads in order to stunt HIV before it transforms into AIDS. Protease inhibitors ushered in a new, unfamiliar era of safety. For the very first time a positive test result wasn’t a death sentence.

Acts that seemed unthinkable at the height of the AIDS epidemic—color-coded handkerchiefs, condomless bacchanalias—began to return as talismans of the pre-plague era. Cruising was one of them. “There was a sense that [gay men] were mining a long-buried, pre-AIDS memory,” says Michael Scarce, author and former columnist for Cruisingforsex.

The Castro district in San Francisco, one of first gay neighborhoods in the U.S. (Photo: Jennifer Woodard Maderazo/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

But cruising is a risky activity, beyond sexual health concerns: It’s a crime in many areas. When Scare took a brief trip to Columbus, Ohio, he remembers the police “hiding in foxholes, staking us out with night vision goggles. They had helicopters.” In Fort Lauderdale, the mayor attempted to spend $250,000 on self-cleaning robotic bathrooms. In Palm Beach, a massive five-year undercover operation commenced in 2012 with upwards of 600 arrests. In 1997, one cruiser from New York wrote: “I'm hearing from a friend of mine about the wrath of the Giuliani administration. He went there one night, was chased out by cops on horses. The police were scaring the boys away by shooting rubber bullets. No riot. No crime.”

Cruisingforsex’s Confession Board is riddled with such horror stories. There’s the road tripper who quit his job rather than wait to be fired during the next company-wide criminal check, the student who was giving oral sex to his boyfriend in the back of his Buick before he was unceremoniously strip searched by the police, and the cruiser who returned to the scene of the crime to plaster the park with posters that read “Voyeuristic Gay Cops Meet Here Nightly—Bring your own knee pads and night vision goggles.” 

Those who got caught cruising could expect a public airing of their activities. It wasn’t uncommon for police to schedule raids around TV "sweeps" rating periods. Griffith warned, “Sex, especially gay sex, is always one of the topics of choice during May sweeps. My advice to you is to be extra vigilant.” In 1998, over 20 news programs deployed a fleet of undercover cameras to stake out local dens of inequity. Their reports all began with a nearly identical incantation: “Do you know what's going on in the very parks your kids could be playing in?"

Once a hush-hush fortress, everything changed when law enforcement caught on to Griffith’s digital encyclopedia. In 2000, Griffith began to seriously consider shuttering the website. An article from the Wired archives describes how one police officer logged into the website to dispute the complaint of a cruiser over a trespassing charge. Griffith admitted, "Those who doubted this site could be useful to our enemies were very naive." In 1997, Cruisingforsex published 146 entrapment alerts. By 2005, that number had swelled to 1,210. It was no longer a place to find locations for sex, but a place to find out where not to hook up. One cruiser informed, “I have a buddy that is a deputy sheriff that has told me to stay away from certain locations posted on CFS. He says that the ‘department’ monitors this site.”

"In the Roman Baths", by Russian painter Fyodor Bronnikov. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiArt)

The site’s next redesign, then, wasn’t a matter of aesthetic improvements. Enlisting the help of a Boston law firm, Donahue & Grolman, Cruisingforsex's redesign included a makeover of the homepage, the debut of a legal column, and robust entrapment alerts.

Emerging mobile technology turned out to be a bigger threat to the practice, though, than law enforcement. Even in his lifetime, Griffith mourned the decline of traditional cruising, while deriding apps such as Grindr as a passing “trend.” The cyclical ebb and flow of queer spaces is largely invisible, yet it’s inevitable. As we mourn the loss of once-vibrant gay bars and bookstores, it’s all too easy to chalk their disappearance up to assimilationist hoo-hah of queer culture. And yes, that’s one answer. The other is that queer landscapes have always been cunning spaces, impossible to control or maintain, and somewhat appropriately, they have transcended the brick and mortar world completely, instead favoring a digital one.

Cruisingforsex is not a website with an optimistic future today. The days when it attracted millions of monthly visitors have long since passed, and with the exception of a few diehard truckers and online curmudgeons, its message boards lie dormant.

Yet, Cruisingforsex stands as an artifact of a bold queer contingent, one that blithely ignored what their local LGBTQ community center thought of them. Griffith, who often censored political conversations in the message boards, created a post-AIDS utopic space where gay men no longer had to be “good.” Cruising has always had a secret history—brothels where men anonymously partook in illicit sexual acts once stood on the site that would become Buckingham Palace, for instance. Just steps from the Louvre, the Jardin des Tuileries has been an active cruising site for over 275 years, but it’s unlikely that you’ll find a commemorative plaque. The cyclical ebb and flow of these queer spaces is largely invisible. Instead, they become a repository of collective memory with an expiration date. Therein lies the beauty of Cruisingforsex: At long last, cruising became part of the permanent record.

It may not have been Griffith’s goal, but his website stands as a powerful document, the intersection of an emerging internet and a gay community regrouping after crisis. Crass, dirty, in questionable taste and legality, Cruisingforsex.com is also unquestionably liberating. 

A map of southern Italy, decorated with tarantulas, from Giorgio Baglivi's Opera omnia medico-practica et anatomica, 1723. (Photo: Angelica Calabrese) 

On a hot day in the summer of 1728, Anna Palazzo was working in the vineyards surrounding her hometown of Campi Salentina when a tarantula bit her on the elbow. The young woman collapsed, and the farmers working beside her rushed to her side as the situation deteriorated: her face and stomach swelled, her breathing became ragged and deep. Worried that she was on the verge of death, her husband and the other farmers hurried to bring the poor girl into town, “slung over the back of a donkey and tied up as if she were a cadaver,” according to local physician Nicola Caputo. She was nearly unconscious when they dropped her into her bed and called the only people who could still save her: the musicians. 

Anna wasn’t suffering from the average spider bite: she had been bitten by the tarantola, a creature of local myth and legend. She had become a tarantata. 

Soon, the tambourines, mandolins, guitars, and harmonicas crowded into her small room in the center of town and began to play. They played one melody, and then another. But the woman barely stirred. “At the third melody, or maybe the fourth, the young woman in my presence awoke and began to dance with so much force and fury that one might have called her crazy,” writes Caputo, in his 18th century study of the infamous tarantula and its victims. “After two days of dance, she was free and healed.” 

Salento is a region of Italy in the southernmost part of the Apulian peninsula, the “heel of the boot.” The region has long been associated with magic, music, and dance: from the Middle Ages until just a few decades ago, physicians, travelers, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists documented the regional phenomenon of tarantismo, or “tarantism.” Young women, and occasionally men, bitten by tarantulas or other venomous insects like scorpions, would be stricken by an apathetic unresponsiveness, from which they could recover only through hours, and often days, of lively dance. 

“As she dances, she becomes the spider that bit her,” describes mid-20^th century Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino in The Land of Remorse, one of the most extensive studies of the phenomenon. Scientifically speaking, this spider could be one of two species: the lycosa tarantula, or wolf spider, a large and frightening spider with a painful but innocuous bite, or the latrodectus tredecimguttatus, or European black widow, a smaller spider with a dangerous but rarely fatal bite associated with muscle spasms and vomiting.

But the scientific names and classifications of these spiders were of no interest to the women suffering from tarantism–and many believe that spider venom had little to do with what the women endured. Rather, it was a kind of possession: when she heard melodies of the musicians, the tarantata dragged herself across the floor, crawled on her hands and knees, climbed up the walls, jumped and pounded her feet on the ground, as if she had become a spider. 

A 1749 study of the tarantula's anatomy to try and understand tarantism, from De tarantulae anatome et morsu. (Photo: Angelica Calabrese) 

The musicians’ had to intuit the melody that might make a sufferer dance. With their tambourines and violins, they played lively folk music called the pizzica-pizzica, in reference to the “pizzico,” or bite, of the tarantula. After her frenetic dance, the tarantata would eventually collapse, freed from possession by the tarantula and healed. But for many, this freedom was only temporary.

“My dear, the tarantulas are haunting me,” wrote Anna, an older woman who had suffered a tarantula bite in her youth, in a letter sent in the early 1960s to Annabella Rossi, a friend and young researcher. “I can’t eat because my plate is full of fat scorpions, I can’t drink because my glass is full of tarantulas too, and last night my bed was packed with the creatures.” It was late June, the peak of the agricultural year, and Anna had fallen victim to the tarantula again, as happened to many tarantatas. Every year, on June 29^th, the Feast of St. Paul, the tarantatas would congregate in Galatina, a city in the south of the Salento, to ask St. Paul for mercy from the terrible tarantula.  

Some scholars argue that the roots of tarantism can be traced to back to ancient Greece, when groups of men and women worshipped Dionysus in ecstatic, trance-like dances, but there are few–if any–documents that attest to such origins. Officially, tarantism first appears in a 14^th century text by a physician from Padova describing how to treat bites or stings from venomous animals and insects. 

Later doctors, like Ferdinand Epifanio in the 17^th century, and Nicola Caputo in the 18th, studied the phenomenon, documenting cases and effective treatments. Epifanio offers a recipe for a homemade brandy that could be used to treat tarantismo; it included not only “tender oak leaves,” “blessed thistle,” and “dried red roses,” but also sage, marjoram, lavender, wormwood, rosemary, bay leaves, juniper, cinnamon, and other local spices. Another notable recipe suggests that the venomous tarantulas themselves be ground into a powder and mixed into a hearty glass of wine. However, Dr. Epifanio concluded that “in Apulia, there is no remedy more effective and immediate than music.”

These early descriptions of the venomous bite and the associated music and dance make no reference to Christianity. But in the late 17^th century, as the Church sought more uniform control of its subjects, tarantism became one of the many traditions co-opted by Catholicism. St. Paul, patron saint of the city of Galatina and of those bitten by venomous animals, emerged as the protector and savior of the tarantata. 

In the late 1700s, a chapel dedicated to St. Paul was built in Galatina, next to a well whose water, as the legend goes, had been blessed by St. Paul during his travels across the Mediterranean. If local musicians were unsuccessful in curing a tarantata in her home, she would be brought to St. Paul’s chapel in Galatina, where she would plead with the saint for mercy from the spider’s venom and often drink the blessed well water. In addition to the suite of musicians, the family would also bring monetary offerings for the saint and the church. For many tarantatas, this trip to Galatina became a yearly pilgrimage: in June of each year, her symptoms would return, and she and her family would work to collect the money to fund the trip and the pay the musicians that would accompany her.

In the 17th and 18^th centuries, both men and women, rich and poor, fell victim to tarantism. However by 1959, when Ernesto de Martino and his team traveled to Salento to document the “relics” of tarantism, they found that the phenomenon largely affected women–women who had been abused, who had been forced to marry men they didn’t love, who had lost their husbands, or who found themselves at the margins of society in other ways. 

De Martino, and later researchers like Luigi Chiriatti, argued that tarantism was an expression of this marginality: a way for these women to manifest their social suffering, have that suffering recognized, and relocate themselves within a community, rather than outside of it. When a woman, young or old, was struck with tarantism, it was an opportunity for the community to come together.

Inside St. Paul's Chapel in Galatina, tarantataswould beg St. Paul, protector of those bitten by venomous animals, for mercy. (Photo: Angelica Calabrese) 

In the stricken women’s home, often just a single room, the family would lay a white sheet on the floor, and as the musicians would play, the tarantata would begin her dance: arching, running, climbing, crawling, barking, resting, and doing it all over again to the melodies played by the tambourines and violins. Community members would gather in the room, bringing food or a few coins for the family, observing in curiosity and wonder, but also in solidarity. When the woman collapsed, four hours or four days later, exhausted from her dance and freed from the tarantula, she found herself surrounded by family, friends, and community members expressing their support and enthusiasm. 

One morning, in the early 1990s, a family brought their elderly grandmother into a mental health clinic in Poggiardo, a small town in southern Salento. The family presented her to the psychiatrist in the clinic, asking him to treat her for psychotic episode. But the psychiatrist, who had studied traditional medicine and healing in addition to his formal medical education, knew that drugs would not help the old lady. 

“‘That little grandma was a tarantata,’ he told me,” recounts Giacomo Toriano, a sociologist and musician who worked in the clinic at that time. “The family didn’t understand what was happening. They didn’t know that she needed music.” In that moment, Toriano understood that tarantism was dead. “The cultural context in which the phenomenon had existed for centuries had disappeared.”

In the years after de Martino and Chiriatti studied tarantism, modernization, industrialization, and emigration led to an abrupt abandonment of the fields stretching across Salento. Entire systems of knowledge and ways of life–including those that had led to the abuse and mistreatment of women–were abandoned in turn.

Early in the morning on June 29th, the Feast of St. Paul, crowds would gather to watch the tarantatas as they frenetically danced and howled for St. Paul's mercy. (Photo: Angelica Calabrese) 

The tarantatas slowly disappeared: the musicians stopped being called to homes across Salento, and on the mornings of June 29^th, the street in front of St. Paul’s chapel in Galatina was empty. Though a folk revival has rescued the melodies of the pizzica-pizzica and local dance companies have created dances inspired by those of the tarantatas, there are few people left who might recognize a true tarantata’s suffering and treat it appropriately: with a community-wide event filled with music and dance. 

Luigi “Gigi” Stifani, one of the most famous musicians of the tarantatas, once claimed that the chemicals and pesticides used since the industrialization of the early 1950s led to the demise of the tarantatas:  “With all those herbicides, pesticides, and anti-parasites that they are dumping in the fields, there aren’t any more tarantulas.” 

But it wasn’t just the tarantulas that had caused tarantism. The entire culture that had conjured, as well as cured, the tarantate was gone. 

An occurrence map for the American Pipit. (Image: eBird.org)

Want to be mesmerized by an expanding orange glow while being reminded of how little and flightless you are? Then eBird.org's bird occurrence maps, which track the movement of 57 different bird species across the US using lava lamp-esque visuals, are perfect for you.

The maps, produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology with support from the Leon Levy foundation and National Science Foundation, are predictions for how likely you are to find any given bird on a one kilometer walk at 7 a.m. in the morning. They are built from a massive collection of data–280 million observations from around the world submitted by thousands of birdwatchers–and use a method known as the Spatio-Temporal Exploratory Model (STEM).  

Migration map in motion for the Swainson's Hawk. (Image: ebird.org)

"By taking all those observations and correcting for distance, duration, and time of day, and then tying those in with habitat variables from satellite coverage—then we can tie birds to the habitats on the ground," explains Marshall Iliff, the project leader. All of this data, with averages across multiples years, combines to create a nuanced look at bird distribution for each day of the year.

Iliff says these occurrence maps are "hands down the most exciting thing that has come out of the whole eBird project." 

Seasonal patterns of the Hermit Warbler. (Image: eBird.org) 

Since eBird started in 2002, bird enthusiasts have been using the site to record individual sightings and track general patterns of bird movement. The database has been expanding exponentially ever since, and is now a data lover’s paradise. 

Each map comes with an explanation of a species’ appearance and habitats, migration habits and trends. The maps show year-round migration patterns for the Lower 48 states, and eBird is already researching an expansion to Canada, Central America, and South America that will incorporate satellite-sensed data.

The Species Maps let you see where certain bird species globally reside. This map is for the Osprey. (Image: eBird.org)

Start delving into the worlds of the lazuli bunting, dickcissel and white-eyed vireo, and you may have trouble pulling yourself away. In addition to the captivating occurrence maps, the site also features the Species Map, an interactive world map that lets you type in a bird species (say, American flamingo or Vogelkop Bowerbird) and see where on Earth it resides.

Their Line Graphs let you figure out what types of birds to expect in certain locations throughout the year. There’s even a Submission Map where you can watch people across the globe log their sightings in real time, which is unexpectedly thrilling. 

This line map shows the range of migratory strategies for five different species. (Image: eBird.org)

Probably the most exciting thing about the occurrence maps, says Iliff, is that they’ve been used in tangible conservation efforts. For example, the maps have contributed to the U.S. government's State of the Birds report, which studies bird protection and conservation. It's a positive, self-propelling cycle: birdwatchers submit data; data contributes to conservation efforts; and conservation efforts enable more birdwatching.

By the time you finish ogling these maps and exploring the many other data-driven goodies on offer, you will know significantly more about the birds of America. You'll likely want to find some bufflehead, greater scaup, and sooty shearwaters in the wild yourself. Time to go grab those binoculars and get birding. 

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.

A giant spider (Photo: John/Flickr)

Piotr Naskrecki, an entomologist at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, was in the rainforest in Guyana, surveying the animals and plants to be found there, when he came across a creature that would make many of us freak out. It was a giant, giant arachnid—one that belongs to the largest spider species in the world. 

The South American Goliath Birdeater, Theraphosa blondi, can grow so big that its legs span nearly a foot in width. It can also "weigh about as much as a young puppy," Naskrecki wrote on his blog. It is not deadly to humans, but it does have giant fangs. And it's so big that the tips and claws on the end of its feet make a sound when it walks. 

The Goliath Birdeater is actually a very common species and is sometimes kept as a pet. The spiders don't survive on birds (earthworms make up more of its diet), but it is capable of killing small creatures. Just watch—if you're not too squeamish:

Bonus finds: 10,000 guns, an incredible, treasure-filled grave of a Greek warrior who died 3,500 years ago

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.