When birds fall out of the sky, people think the worst—apocalypse, environmental catastrophe, mass bird protest. Sometimes, though, the birds are just drunk.
That's what happened yesterday in Austria, where a whole flock of starlings guzzled down fermented berries and then decided to mess with some drivers. Soon, they were divebombing the A2 motorway, crashing into cars and trucks and causing miles-long traffic jams, The Local reports.
This happens to birds surprisingly often, especially in the fall, as freezing and thawing cycles turn berry juice into alcohol. "Most birds likely just get a bit tipsy," Meghan Larivee, a scientist with Canada's Environment Yukon, told National Geographic in 2014 after an incident with some hammered waxwings. "However, every now and then, some birds just overdo it."
In those cases, she says, "They cannot coordinate their flight movements properly or at all." But they probably think they're doing awesome.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Three camoufleurs in the Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps make one woman disappear into the forest floor. (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-1)
Imagine taking a quiet stroll through the expansive wilderness of Van Cortlandt Park in Bronx, New York. You’re surrounded by a forest of oak trees, stony ridges, and a tranquil lake—completely isolated and alone in nature. But in 1918, visitors to the 1,146-acre park were unaware that they were in the company of a group of women hiding among the rocks, trees, and grass.
“Weird shapes, the color of the rocks and earth, moved here and there, and from the tops of trees came loud halloos and catcalls from other shapeless objects,” journalist Elene Foster wrote in the April 28, 1918 issue of the New York Tribune. “I stumbled over a hump of grass, which squealed when I stepped on it, and rose before me."
These hooded women were frequent park visitors. (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-19)
The women disguised in special (and fairly creepy) dried grass or "rock suits" were student military camouflage artists, or camoufleurs, of the Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps, a forgotten division of the National League for Women’s Service.
Female artists across the United States joined the ranks of this highly specialized military group in New York to help with the war effort during World War I. They used their creativity and crafting skills to develop designs and patterns that mimicked the landscape to provide soldiers with added protection.
Parks were used as laboratories to test different camouflage suits, and city streets doubled as studios for them to paint dazzling, distracting designs on battleships.
Women's Reserve Camouflage Corps sketch the landscape as a basis for their camouflage work at Van Cortlandt Park. (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-23)
The photos uncovered by the National Archives and Records Administration reveal how the women hunched behind tree trunks or huddled against boulders, suddenly disappearing from view.
“The photos are really some of the most unusual I’ve come across during my time here,” says Richard Green, an archivist who’s worked at the National Archives for five years.
He found the 42 peculiar photos of the women in Van Cortlandt Park while working on the archive’s World War I film and photo digitization project. “There would be a picture of the girl and she would just fall down and disappear.”
Now you see her. (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-21)
Now you don't. (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-29)
While the photos appear somewhat comical today, they tell of the historical significance of these female camoufleurs, Green says.
Women played a crucial role during the war effort, working in factories, hospitals, machine gun battalions, and many other military organizations. At the same time, camouflage became an increasingly important military tactic during World War I.
French painter and military telephonist Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola is said to be the first to suggest painting artillery earth-toned colors to conceal soldiers from the enemy. In November 1914, the French established a camouflage service and began developing different techniques, and recruiting artists, sculptors, architects, mold-makers, and cartoonists for the group.
It quickly evolved from decoys and dummies to a sophisticated art form of elaborately disguised rooftops and painted battleships.
Women's Reserve Camouflage Corps study camouflage at Van Cortland Part, New York. (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-21)
As men had to leave camouflage units to fight at the front, the work was left to women. Following in the footsteps of England and France, the United States began training a group of 40 female artists on April 1, 1918 in New York, forming the first class of the Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps.
The first group came from different parts of New York state and from Philadelphia, almost all of them working artists. To become part of the exclusive military unit, women had to have some training in painting, sculpture, photography, or wood carving, and be in perfect physical condition. All the women in the camouflage corps took the regular army physical examination. While there was no age limit, most women were in their early 30s, the oldest member of the first class being 45. After paying a $43 fee ($25 for the uniform, $18 for tuition), the women were ready to learn the art and science of camouflage.
“Camouflage is the sort of work which has a strong appeal to the woman with imagination who at the same time is clever at doing things with her hands,” wrote Foster.
A camoufleur stands alone on the top of rocks. (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-39)
The entire top floor of 257 Madison Avenue served as the main headquarters. Lieutenant H. Ledyard Towle of the 71st Infantry, who directed the division, conducted the same training he gave to the men of the New York Camouflage Corps. In order to create the best protection for soldiers, Towle firmly believed that the women should be taught the ins-and-outs of modern warfare, including army formations and maneuvers.
The intensive three-month course consisted of three indoor lectures and two open “field days” per week, where the women would survey the environment and test their designs. The successful camouflage techniques would be sent to the U.S. military.
Climbing up trees and holding fake branches. (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-30)
Camoufleurs would don “rock suits” which could keep the wearer safe from detection at a distance of 10 feet, Green wrote in a blog post about the photos. “Observation suits” were colored so the person could blend into the sky, snow, or ice.
Park police were aware that the Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps were experimenting in Van Cortlandt Park, but some admitted that they often couldn’t spot them. A policeman informed Foster that he knew they were among the rocks, “but ye can’t see thim till they move.”
A Living Rock. (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-13)
They also had to learned how to disguise rail lines, depots, aircraft hangars, supply bases, and trenches. A British zoologist noticed that gray ships were easily spotted, and suggested painting abstract, multicolored patterns to confuse the enemy. So the group mastered a unique form of camouflage for battleships called “dazzle camouflage.”
The United States Navy started using dazzle camouflage in March 1918, painting 1,250 ships with odd patterns. Out of the 96 ships sunk by German U-boats after March 1918, only 18 of them were camouflaged, Green wrote.
Women apply dazzle camouflage to a ship in Union Square, New York City. (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-9)
A dazzled battleship in the middle of Union Square. (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-8)
All 42 photos of the Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps are still in the process of being added to the National Archive catalog, but Green says that they will be made available for everyone’s enjoyment soon. While the women may have spent quite a bit of their time hiding in the forest cloaked in hooded suits, they wanted their work to be taken seriously.
“Please don’t go away with the idea that all we do is make costumes and dress up in them,” the camoufleur dressed as a patch of grass told Foster. “We are going to do every sort of camouflage work that they will allow us to do, from painting a battleship to making a fake tree.”
Try to see if you can find the Women's Reserve Camouflage Corps artists in these photos:
Blending seamlessly with the boulders. (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-22)
Can you find the camoufleur? (Photo: NARA/165-WW-599G-18)
By the 19th century, church graveyards had a worse reputation than you might expect. In addition to their general doom and gloom, they were rife with body snatching, gambling, and prostitution. Add to that the fact that they were literally overflowing, sending decaying matter into water supplies and causing deadly epidemics, and you've got a real problem on your hands.
At the same time, social attitudes towards death were shifting. While before, the church graveyard was meant to be a memento mori—a reminder that you, too, would meet your maker someday and so you'd better shape up—in the Victorian era when men, women, children, and the elderly were dying at an unprecedented rate, people didn't want to be reminded of death and damnation when they buried their dead. They wanted to mourn in peace.
The architect Sir Islington Wren had introduced the idea of a garden-like cemetery on the edge of town as early as 1711, but it wasn't until the 19th century that rural cemeteries caught on. When they did though, everything about death changed.
With names like "Green-Wood" and "Forest Lawn," graveyards came off as places of natural respite, not of decay and foreboding. Grassy lawns, flowering trees, and reflective ponds made them as much a place of repose for the living as for the dead. The skulls and crossbones of 16th century grave markers were replaced by more artistic, interpretive symbols like lambs, lilies, and open books. And unlike the restrictive religious burying grounds, in these new rural cemeteries of the 19th century, municipally operated and religiously unaffiliated, anyone was welcome to be interred.
The living flocked to rural cemeteries in droves. In some places these were among the first parks open to the public, and when they opened Victorians would take day outings to the new cemeteries. Celebrity corpses were a draw, but so were those who became famous in death—tragic young women who threw themselves into rivers and pioneering balloonists who fell from the sky. Memorials, too, gave sculptors and artists a place to showcase their work, some of which became famous in its own right.
Death was never more present than in the Victorian era. But rather than pretend it wasn't there, people living in the 19th century got cozy with their final fate in bucolic grounds where the notion of beauty in death was celebrated.
It all started in Paris, a city known for its overflowing catacombs, which was more in need of an expansive burial ground than most. Père Lachaise was established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804 in response to the squalid church graveyards, and set aside specifically for the purpose of being an organized and beautiful burying ground owned by the city, the first of its kind. The cemetery really gained repute when Molière's remains were reinterred there. Since then, its dramatic grounds have become known as the final resting place for many tragic misfits: Oscar Wilde is buried there, as are Jim Morrison and Edith Piaf. The classically French monuments, which shrug austerity for romantic, dramatic sculptures, brought tourists along with mourners right from the start.
Highgate was not the first of these to open, but it is the crown jewel. The densely overgrown greenery shrouds the crumbling granite headstones, and the literal "high gates" surrounding the grounds cut off the world outside, making Highgate feel like a secret garden for the dead, equal parts fairytale and horror story. It's been the set for many movies, plenty of them vampiric, but many visitors still come to the dilapidated cemetery simply to pay their respects to the dead—in particular, the famous ones like Karl Marx.
Winding paths in Cambridge's Mount Auburn Cemetery. (Photo: Daderot/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Although the relatively new cities of the United States were not as crowded with dead as those in Europe, American burial grounds nevertheless trended towards the rural cemetery as well. Following the French and English examples, the first American garden cemetery opened in Cambridge in 1831. Winding paths looped around sunny hillsides, with peaceful gravestones under shady trees.
As if the draw of literary figures like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wasn't enough, Mount Auburn is also protected by the National Park Service and functions as an arboretum and a wildlife refuge. This distinctly park-like atmosphere set the tone for practically all rural cemeteries to come. With the success of Mount Auburn, idyllic green cemeteries that offered respite to city-dwellers as well as the dead and buried began to crop up all over the U.S.
Philadelphia merchant William Warner's monument features a female figure lifting the lid off a coffin so Warner's soul may escape to heaven. (Photo: dbking/CC BY 2.0)
Not to be bested by Boston, equally historic Philadelphia opened its own rural cemetery a mere four years later. If Mount Auburn was the resting place for American literary figures, Laurel Hill was the garden cemetery for America's war heroes. Its headstones, much like those in Père Lachaise, tended toward the sculptural and often depicted the veterans and statesmen buried beneath them.
Shortly after came Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, which was quickly folded into New York City lore. It was instantly a coveted place to spend the afterlife. Hundreds of New York's famous and infamous are buried at Green-Wood. Just a few of the most notable interred include William and Henry Steinway, F. A. O. Schwarz, Samuel Morse, Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed, and Louis Comfort Tiffany. People flocked here to see the graves of these famous people (this was often closer than they could have ever gotten when they were alive), but also to see the resting places of those who became famous in death. These included those who died in the tragic Brooklyn Theatre fire and a young debutante killed in a carriage crash.
The grounds also boast some impressive monuments, including pyramids, mausoleums, and an intricately carved Gothic entranceway that apparently houses a flock of escaped parakeets. The cemetery conducts an extensive series of events (many with Atlas Obscura!), and makes its resources available to the public, including the undertakers' ledgers.
Bucolic Mount Hope Cemetery is home to some of upstate New York's most famous, many of whom were political pioneers. Susan B. Anthony is buried here, as is Frederick Douglass. Taking full advantage of its park-like atmosphere, the greenery in Mount Hope is as impressive as are its residents. Its towering trees dwarf even the highest obelisks, and the fall foliage is a breathtaking sight. It followed the example set by Mount Auburn, Laurel Hill, and Green-Wood, solidifying park cemeteries as a distinctly American phenomenon.
Sunlight streams through trees and monuments at Spring Grove. (Photo: David Ohmer/CC BY 2.0)
Soon states outside the Northeast caught wind of the trend and the movement spread. It wasn't just a nicer way to bury the dead, it was a representation of European civilization, and as such any cities that considered themselves metropolises ceased the use of musty church graveyards and opted for new, lush, green garden cemeteries instead.
It wasn't only trend-following that prompted Cincinnati to open Spring Grove Cemetery though. In the early 1840s a massive cholera epidemic swept the city. As churches grew unable to handle the daily influx of corpses, the city stepped in and opened Spring Grove Cemetery. At first it was just your average burial ground, but in 1855 Cincinnati hired renowned landscaper Adolph Strauch. He dug ponds and lakes with their own islands, planted small forests, and designed a Gothic chapels and mausoleums where there had been practically nothing before. Like those that came before it, Spring Grove instantly became a desirable place to be buried, a lovely place to take an afternoon walk, and one of Cincinnati's crowning gems.
If the names of these cemeteries are beginning to read as somewhat generic, it's because they often didn't mean anything. Elmwood Cemetery's name was chosen from a hat.
Like Spring Grove, Elmwood's population was largely "born" out of a yellow fever epidemic. It took the lives of roughly 5,000 Memphians, about half of which are buried in Elmwood. Because the death toll was so high, many of the dead didn't have anyone left behind to bury them, and so are interred in a mass grave labeled "No Man's Land." Elmwood is the only rural cemetery that has made a regular practice of memorializing the unknowns. Following in the example of the yellow fever grave, there is also a headstone dedicated to fallen Civil War soldiers (both Union and Confederate), enslaved Africans, and people who donated their bodies to science.
While most rural cemeteries were the result of neat city planning, others grew by accident. In the case of Cave Hill Cemetery, it was first farmland purchased by the city to be quarried, but became the site of a "pesthouse" for diseased persons in the first half of the 19th century. Following all the death that came out of that place, the land was dedicated by a Reverend Edward Porter Humphrey. Continuing the thematic trend of the rural cemetery movement, he stated that, "...reason and taste suggest that [this cemetery] should be decorated appropriately by the beautiful productions of our great Creator...."
Unlike most of these cemeteries, Cave Hill continues to inter bodies today. As such, its grounds are a hodgepodge of somber gravestones like the ones seen above, effusive Victorian monuments, and modern interpretations of the sentimental tombs of yesteryear. These include a life-size sculptures of a couple bearing swords, Jesus holding a swing for a little girl, and an eagle and a hawk fighting to the death.
Like Cave Hill, Hollywood Cemetery was built around an older cemetery, and so it contains elements of pre-Victorian graveyards as well as the flowery effects of a typical garden cemetery. It formally opened during the wave of rural cemeteries in the 1840s, but received most of its burials during the Civil War. It has all the trappings of its companions (rapturous monuments, shady oaks, winding paths), with one colorful addition: a vampire.
Legend has it that following a mysterious railroad tunnel collapse in 1929, a human-like creature covered in blood with jagged teeth and flesh falling off its body was seen creeping into a mausoleum. Ever since, the cemetery has been a popular place for teenagers to sneak into late at night in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the Richmond Vampire. It just goes to show that despite all efforts to strip the dark and depraved from a cemetery's reputation, some spookiness avails.
The rural cemetery eventually became the de facto model for burial grounds, but it's easy to forget it wasn't always this way. As interest in the morbid grows more acceptable and even encouraged, people go to cemeteries not just to mourn or gawk, but to look into the past.
People will always die, and we will always have to do something with their remains. However, cemeteries themselves are becoming a less efficient option of funerary treatment. Burial is space-consuming and embalming is bad for the environment. It's becoming less and less common to be buried at all, and new cemeteries are almost never opened. As such it's fascinating to walk through these sumptuous parks that were once the height of innovation and style in funereal treatment. Bring a blanket and make like a Victorian to your nearest rural cemetery to spend some time with the dead.
“My leg was so badly broken, they thought I might lose it.”
So begins this visually hypnotizing short documentary by British director Ian Derry. Surrounded by monochromatic arctic landscapes, we follow Finnish diver Johanna Nordblad through snow-covered pine forests to the middle of a frozen lake. As she slowly cuts a triangle in the ice, she tells us in a calm voice the story of how she got there.
After a terrible cycling accident, she almost lost her leg to necrosis, but the ice saved her. At first a truly agonizing experience, she came to discover the peace that lay beyond the pain.
She sits on the edge of the triangle, getting ready to plunge in. When she disappears beneath the surface you can almost feel the sharp shock of the icy water.
“There is no place for fear, no place for panicking, no place for mistakes,” she says. When she comes out for air, she seems as if she was born to do this. It is not difficult to imagine her diving 50 meters under the frozen surface—wearing only a swimsuit and a mask—to break the women’s world record for freediving under ice.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
The interactive map above tracks over 100 clown sightings and threats across America, beginning in early August. This map will be updated as more clown activity happens.
The first American "creepy clown" sighting, by most accounts, ended up being for a movie. Gags, the Green Bay clown, was seen wandering around Wisconsin in early August, carrying a host of black balloons. People were a bit freaked out until a local man said that he was using Gags for a short film he was working on.
The intent, in other words, was benign.
But then, on August 20, an anonymous caller in Greenville, South Carolina, said that they'd seen clowns in the woods, and the next day someone else said they'd seen clowns in the woods flashing green lasers. Just as everything started to calm down, on August 29, it happened again: two children reported seeing clowns in Greenville.
And with that, clown hysteria began. Next came clown sightings in nearby North Carolina. And, then, sightings—and, increasingly, social media threats—up and down the Eastern Seaboard. By mid-September, the sightings and threats had moved west, to Middle America. And by late September and early October, they'd reached the West Coast.
Few of the threats have amounted to much more than a scare, and even fewer have produced actual clowns. But in at least a handful of cases, living, breathing clowns have turned up.
Take a case in Middlesboro, Kentucky, on September 23, when a 20-year-old man in a clown outfit and mask was arrested after he was spotted crouched in a wooded area by an apartment complex. Or, a week earlier, a 25-year-old in a Walmart parking lot who was arrested after numerous people called police to complain about him.
That clown told police it was merely just for fun, with Halloween coming up and all.
"It's not illegal to scare people," the man, dressed in face paint and a checkered suit, told a cop in a patrol car.
But those guys are the exception, not the rule. If you think you've seen a clown, maybe stop for a second before calling police, and think about whether you're actually looking at a clown. If you verify that what you're seeing is a clown, then it might be a good idea to call 911.
It’s not easy being green, or orange for that matter. According to New Scientist, explorers in Gabon’s Abanda cave system have discovered subterranean crocs with vibrant orange skin (no relation to Mario Batali's footwear). And it’s because of bat poop.
Researchers first headed into the African cave network, known as “The Crocodile Cave” to study the strange cave-dwelling animals. These unique crocodiles live underground for most of their lives feeding on the copious population of bats and crickets that live inside the caves. Scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how they survive down there since, while food is plentiful, the cave ecosystem does not provide a good place for the animals to lay their eggs and reproduce. The crocodiles likely leave their underground shelter in order to lay their eggs and then return with their children for the easy feasting.
As the researchers got deeper into the caves, they began to discover that the older crocs became paler, and that some of them had even turned a shade of orange. These orange crocodiles are the result of a lifetime of swimming in the waters of the cave. The cave’s large bat population also produces a large amount of guano that falls into the cave waters where the crocs swim. One researcher described the waters as little more than “an alkaline slurry formed from bat droppings.” The chemicals in the bat poop eventually erode the crocodile skin, and turn it orange.
Because the crocs don’t live exclusively in the cave, they are not likely to start adapting like other cave-dwelling animals, going blind, having naturally pale skin. But even half a life in those caves leaves its mark.
On July 7, the Dallas Police engaged Micah Xavier Johnson in a 45-minute gun battle before ultimately sending in a bomb-defusing robot laden with explosives to kill him.
Later that week on CNN, Dallas Police Chief David Brown answered exactly the question everyone had been asking: How did the police department know to put a pound of C4 onto a bomb-defusing robot and use it as an execution drone? “They improvised this whole idea in about 15, 20 minutes - extraordinary.”
Documents acquired from the Dallas Police Department through the Texas Freedom of Information Act confirm exactly what Chief Brown said in July: there is absolutely nothing in the DPD’s robot training materials to suggest that officers and manufacturers had considered using the robots for this purpose.
Among the twelve pages of documents released in response to a request for all training materials about the bomb defusing robot are at least two pages ofTwitter and Facebook screenshots which indicate that this particular robot was acquired by the DPD on May 2, 2016, only months before the shootout.
The released training materials, however, consist solely of a 7-slide PowerPoint presentation from April 2003. Looking beyond the ongoing concerns raised in other MuckRock investigations as to whether military equipment always comes with military training this PowerPoint also raises the question of whether or not the protocols of the Explosive Ordnance Unit changed with the implementation of updated technology.
The improvised nature of the July 7 bombing raises more questions than this PowerPoint can even begin to answer about the efficacy and safety of how the robot was used, unless of course the “Hazardous Device School” and “International Bomb Technician Seminar” were more about making bombs than defusing them.
But, with Reuters counting the number of bomb-defusing robots distributed to local police departments through the 1033 program at a whopping 451, the public’s knowledge of the capabilities and training behind the robots are more important than ever. Our understanding of robots that could be deployed to extrajudicially kill will never get any better, however, if police departments continue to respond to FOIA requests with screen shots of tweets and PowerPoint presentations.
Does Candle Cove sound familiar? That old children's show with the sinister talking boat, and the skeleton, The Skin-Taker? It aired on the local channel in Ironton, a small town in Ohio, back in the '70s, and had that creepy calliope music playing over every episode. There were those rumors, too, that when kids said they were watching it, all the parents could see was static.
Well, it never existed—until now. This month, the Syfy network will be launching a show called Channel Zero, based on one of the internet's most persistent and terrifying bits of lore, part of the scary story phenomenon known as creepypasta.
The story, "Candle Cove," was first released in 2009 on author and illustrator Kris Straub’s horror fiction site, Ichor Falls, which collected a number of creepy stories he had written revolving around the titular fictional town.
The story plays out between exchanges from members of the “NetNostalgia Forum,” who are trying to remember a strange children’s show from their youth, Candle Cove. As they bat their memories back and forth, the commenters recall marionette characters like Pirate Percy, a cowardly buccaneer who captained the Laughingstock, a living pirate ship with a wide mouth across its bow. They were joined on their adventures by a young girl named Janice, who was the protagonist of the show.
While they continue to remember the details of the program, they begin to recall some more sinister figures like the one-eyed Horace Horrible, whose handlebar mustache sat over a set of too-tall teeth, and most unsettling, a skeleton in a tattered cape and top hat, calling himself The Skin-Taker. Other details pop-up such as the Laughingstock’s repeated command to the scared Percy saying, “YOU HAVE… TO GO… INSIDE,” and memories of an episode where everyone is just screaming the whole time.
Without spoiling the ending of the short tale, which you can read in full here, the commenters begin to realize that Candle Cove was much more than just a normal kid’s show.
In a 2011 interview on Kindertrauma, Straub said that he wrote the story just to get the idea out of his head, having flashed on the idea of a horrifying, half-remembered kids show after reading a 2000 article on The Onion titled, “Area 36-Year-Old Still Has Occasional Lidsville Nightmare.” Straub said that while it was funny, the basic concept was frighteningly true.
“So many things that scare us as kids start from this innocuous desire to entertain children," he said, "but it’s produced carelessly, or some special effect comes out way more ponderous or ugly than the creators intended, and it lingers as we, as children, try to make it fit with our limited understanding of the world.”
Without Straub’s approval, fans began sharing "Candle Cove" on larger horror fiction sites, and forum sites like 4chan and Reddit. As the popularity of the story grew, it truly morphed from a scary story into an internet-friendly creepypasta when fans began going on actual message boards and posting the stories exchanges as though they were an active conversation that was taking place. (A creepypasta is a scary story that has been cut and pasted around the internet to the point that it takes on a mythic life of its own, and "Candle Cove" became one of the most iconic.) In the process, the story became somewhat detached from Straub, but was often shared as some kind of urban legend.
Candle Cove quickly picked up a creepypasta fandom rivaled only by the Slenderman him(it)self. Line Henriksen, a doctoral candidate at Sweden’s Linköping University focusing on, among other things, hauntology, monster theory, feminist theory, and creepypasta, attributes the rabid popularity both to the story’s verisimilitude, and for its open-endedness. “In this sense, 'Candle Cove' forms part of the current Lovecraft renaissance, where existential anxiety in the (absent) face of a boundless and indifferent universe is what causes horror,” she says. “This type of horror is fairly common when it comes to creepypasta, which often claims to be presenting you with a glimpse of a terrible truth that cannot be unseen and that may infect, contaminate and haunt you forever.”
Henriksen also notes that the story is also appealing in that it revolves around a barely explained television show, which has allowed fans to create their own visions of the horrifying program, and their own answers to its mysteries. And in the years since its release, fans of "Candle Cove" have not disappointed.
Today there is a whole Wiki devoted to its characters and mythology that has been fleshed out and expanded solely by the fans. You can find detailed episode descriptions for the two seasons of the show (a fan invention), an in-depth exploration of the 1767 book The Nickerbocker's Tale, which supposedly inspired the made-up show (another fan invention), and much more. There are countless pieces of fan art on places like DeviantArt, and there is even porn of it. The "Candle Cove" rabbit hole is deep.
Fans have also produced tons of videos and music either about the show, or claiming to be footage of the fictional show itself (start your headphone volume on low, the screams can be pretty piercing). There are videos of people reading original creepypasta about their experiences seeing fake show-within-the-story Candle Cove as children, and even one peak-internet video that mashes up Candle Cove with the popular Fine Brothers series, Kids React:
According to his interview with Kindertrauma, Straub saw the story’s growth into a fan-powered urban legend as a flattering evolution of his short story, realizing that the natural behavior of such a story is to be appropriated by shadowy corners of the internet. “I know that serves the mythos way more than me being a litigious dick about it,” he said. Although he also acknowledges his ownership of the copyright, and doesn’t like the idea of people making money off his work without authorization.
It seems as though Straub is receiving his due credit for inspiring Channel Zero, and the show looks to be upholding the creepy spirit of his story and the legends it has inspired (as well as including a kid made of teeth). For Henriksen’s part, she is optimistic about the show. “It’ll be interesting to see what Syfy does with 'Candle Cove'," she says, "Personally, I’m hoping Channel Zero will offer its viewers glimpses of a disturbing, contaminating truth that cannot be unseen. As any decent creepypasta would.”
America’s sinister clown trend has spread to Australia. According to the Telegraph, sightings of creepy clowns are on the rise around the country, and more are promising to rear their colorful heads.
Much ink has been spilled over the rise in clown sightings across America recently, as pranksters and creeps have taken to dressing as clowns, as if it’s their duty to promote the upcoming remake of Stephen King’s It. Now the trend is appearing in parts of Australia.
A number of “clown groups” have begun to appear across Australian social media, promising that the number of clown sightings in the country would soon increase. The group, Clown Nation Perth posted a message on their Facebook page saying, “You will start seeing clown sightings soon. We have been preparing for a while now.” What is being prepared is unclear, but probably clown stuff.
Police in places like Victoria, are responding in kind, issuing statements to reiterate that anti-social and alarming behavior will not be tolerated. Some have simply asked that people stop “clowning around.”
The trend is mostly harmless, save for some unsubstantiated threats from some American creepy clowns, but people seem hell bent on being afraid of the trend, and clowns, nonetheless.
A smaller, modern version of the same sort of oven. (Photo: timquijano/CC BY 2.0)
Sometime around 400 A.D., in a place now called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, someone started making a meal. They dug a pit and lined it with rocks and willow branches. They nestled meat inside, then created an oven by closing the hole and building a fire on top. It would have looked something like this.
Whoever made that meal never ate it; the oven sat untouched for hundreds of years until Bob Dawe, an archeologist in southern Alberta, rediscovered it, about 25 years ago.
Since then, he’s been waiting to excavate the old earth oven, without messing with what’s inside.
Now, with the help of experts, a local elder (the oven was found in Blackfoot First Nation territory), and a crane, the oven is being taken to the Royal Alberta Museum. Lifted from the earth, this set-up is huge. The CBC says it’s size of a kitchen table and had to be lifted from the earth with a crane.
Dawe still doesn’t know what exactly is inside, but based on bones found at the site bison calf or a "wolflike animal" are possibilities. Once the oven is in a local museum, he will be able to analyze its contents to find out what meal was left behind—for what, no one knows.
"It may have been a prairie fire or perhaps a blizzard, or maybe some other party of people interceded,” Dawe told the CBC. “We're not really sure. We'll never know."
In a densely populated city of over seven million people, it can be hard to gain a sense of space and calm. Not so for Hong Kong photographer Kyle Yu, whose architectural images on Instagram provide an unusually tranquil take on this dynamic city.
Yu seeks out clean shapes and symmetry in his compositions, and unexpected angles. He shoots up towards residential towers, and down over street scenes, like a calm lens above the busy city.
“Hong Kong is quite lacking in space,” he says. “I guess I’m trying to represent that in my photos and at the same time create some space through my photos.”
Yu has some particularly intriguing photographs of Hong Kong’s crosswalks. He says he’s “kind of obsessed with zebra crossings simply because of the lines.” For him, moving elements like people and vehicles “add an extra layer of meaning.”
“The contrast of light also interests me,” he says. Atlas Obscura has a selection of Yu’s striking architectural images from his Instagram account, which you can check out here.
Chickens have done many bad things. For example, they yell every morning at sunrise. There is no need for this anymore at all, and yet they continue to do it. In addition, one was arrested in Dundee, Scotland earlier today after trying to cross the road.
Before I tell you more about this particular case, I must point out that, chicken crimes notwithstanding, humans are much worse. For example, in March of 1847, someone writing for a monthly magazine called the Knickerbocker came up with this "joke:"
There are ‘quips and quillets’ which seem actual conundrums, but yet are none. Of such is this: ‘Why does a chicken cross the street?[’] Are you ‘out of town?’ Do you ‘give it up?’ Well, then: ‘Because it wants to get on the other side!’
But I digress. In a Facebook post, Tayside Police explained that they found the chicken around 8:30 a.m. in East Marketgait, "trying to cross the road and giving passing motorists cause for concern." So they chased her down and called the SSPCA, who are caring for her until she can be returned home.
"Police are appealing for any information as to why the chicken was crossing the road," Tayside Police asked at the end of their post. Are you "out of town?" Do you "give it up?" She was trying to get away from us.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Memorial to Luis Andres Colmenares Escobar, the victim of the Colombia's most famous murder mystery. (Photo: Pedro Felipe (Own work) CC BY-SA 4.0)
It reads like the perfect Agatha Christie novel. A presumed suicide turns out to be a murder. All the clues are elusive, all the witnesses suspect, all the theories imperfect. Oh, and it happened on Halloween.
Such is the Colmenares case, the most famous murder mystery to shake up Colombia in the past decade. However scandalous the details, there are two things that make it unfit for Christie’s collection: the case has not yet been solved, and the circumstances are too bizarre and fantastic to be in a work of fiction.
This is a case where the dreams of the victim's mother have become part of the public record.
The crime happened on October 31, 2010, in the aftermath of a Halloween party in Bogota’s hottest party district, the Zona T. Luis Andres Colmenares, a student at the prestigious University of los Andes, and Laura Moreno, a classmate whom he was romantically pursuing, were leaving the gathering. Both came from powerful and affluent families.
Colmenares and Moreno, along with a large group of friends, came out of a dance club at around 3:00 am. Drunk and tired, Colmenares got a late night hot dog. Moreno and his good friend, Jenny Quintero, went with him. After this, nothing is certain.
According to Moreno and Quintero, for some reason, Colmenares threw the hot dog on the ground and began running. Surprised and concerned, Moreno ignored the difficulty that her heels presented and ran after him into the darkness of nearby El Virrey Park. She caught up to him twice, but both times, she failed to calm him down, even after passionate pleas and embraces. The second time, he pushed her away and ran in an unstoppable frenzy. “The last memory I have of him” she claims in an interview“is seeing his silhouette in the air.” Whether on purpose or by accident, Colmenares fell into one of the canals that run through the park.
It took two hours for the authorities to be notified, and 12 hours to find the body. As to why it was found meters away from where he supposedly fell, and in a place that had been previously searched in the morning, there are only guesses.
The official autopsy declared that Colmenares had suffered a blow on the head and died from asphyxiation. The case was ruled as a suicide, the body buried, and everyone involved tried their best to move on.
That is, everyone except Oneida Escobar, the victim's mother, whom he did not entirely leave behind. Or so she says. Months after the funeral, she had a dream. In it, Luis Andres told her to stop looking, that the truth lay in his body.
As a Wayúu woman, Oneida held a strong belief, central to this indigenous culture, that dreams are the way the dead communicate with the living. She was convinced that her son was trying to show her the way to the truth. So she had the body exhumed and a second autopsy performed. The conclusion? Colmenares had not committed suicide. He had been murdered.
According to the results (some of which have subsequently been questioned by other experts), instead of one blow, as the original autopsy stated, he had received seven individual blows to the skull. There were pre and post-mortem wounds, and marks on his back and on his knees that contradicted the position he had been found in.
Mystified by the account of a mother’s dream and the evidence of a vicious crime, the entire country went into an uproar. Laura Moreno and Jenny Quintero were arrested. Every news outlet in the country covered the case in minute detail; it went to the Supreme Court of Justice.
The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court of Justice, located inside the Palace of Justice, pictured above. (Photo: Baiji - Own work, CC BY-SA 3)
Oneida’s dream was taken as a serious indication of the truth, not in court, of course, but in the eyes of the country. Several news sources reported on the dream, not questioning her motivation for exhuming the body. But Colombia hardly has a monopoly on unofficially using supernatural evidence to “solve” crimes. Even in nations with Western ideology, like the U.S. and the UK, there are cases of police forces recruiting clairvoyants and mediums to find bodies. In 1999, CBS reported that 35 percent of urban police departments have used psychics "at one time or another” (the report does not go into the efficacy of that help).
This case, though, has become a cause célèbre in Colombia the way few individual crimes ever become. Facebook groups dedicated to the case sprung up after the dream revelation. Most continue to be active, five years after the crime. In them, a few people defend the suspects, but most retort to violent language and call to higher powers to bring justice: “Liars but you cannot hide your secret from God,” claims one angry commenter in Spanish. His sentiments are echoed throughout the page.
More than just the strangeness of evidence seemingly being revealed in unconscious visions, this case spotlights problems of the judicial process itself. In the course of five years, there have been three district attorneys assigned to the case. Evidence has been mysteriously misplaced, witnesses have claimed to being threatened or bought by Colmenares' father, and “experts” continue to contradict each other on the type of injuries left on the body, and the number of blows received. Key witnesses are now incarcerated for false testimony, and a recording of a phone conversation shows Moreno’s father discussing the possibility of buying off the district attorney. At this pace, the case might need more revelatory dreams to be resolved.
Imagine, for a moment, that you and your friend have been given a seemingly straightforward task: to measure the coastline of Puget Sound, in Washington State. Resources are tight, so you've got a yardstick, while your friend has a foot-long ruler. You each walk along, laying your measuring stick along the edge of the water, following the the ins and outs of the shore as best you can. When you're finished, you compare notes—and you're shocked. While you ended up with a respectable 3,000 miles,your friend and his foot-long got a way higher number, somewhere around 4,500 miles.
You guys aren't crazy. You're victims of the coastline paradox, a tricky mathematical principle that messes with cartographers, stymies government bureaus, and makes it impossible to know exactly how big our world truly is.
The coastline paradox, in one handy gif. (Image: Branden Rishel)
People have been confused by coastlines since at least the fifth century B.C., when Athenian sailors were reportedly tasked with measuring the coast of Sardinia and came back baffled. But the paradox first rigorously revealed itself in 1951, during a study of armed conflict. Lewis Fry Richardson, a pacifist and mathematician, was trying to figure out whether the length of the border shared by two given countries had any bearing on whether or not they would go to war.
He saw disagreement even in the data-gathering phase—while seeking the length of the Spain-Portugal border, he found that Spain had it plotted as 987 km, while Portugal said 1214 km. Fascinated by this discovery, he looked into it further, and worked out that not only are the lengths of coastlines and certain borders extremely variable—if you get a small enough measuring stick, each is effectively infinitely long.
This line of thinking was soon picked up by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, in a 1967 paper called "How long is the coast of Britain?" “Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible,” he later told the New York Times. In order to tackle it—and to measure other similarly wonky shapes, like clouds, snowflakes and mountains—Mandelbrot invented the concept of the fractal, a curve that gets more complex the more closely you look at it.
The Mandelbrot Set, a fractal likely familiar to you from the front of a math textbook. (Photo: Wolfgang Beyer/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Considered abstractly, the coastline paradox is an awe-inspiring thing, proof of the impossibility of pinning everything down, and of the essential irreducibility of our world. On a practical level, though, it's a huge pain, says Branden Rishel, a cartographer who works on shoreline restoration in Puget Sound. Like much of Washington State, Puget Sound is full of fjords, endless nooks and crannies carved into the land by glaciers 15,000 years ago. Fjords add a lot of crazy to a coastline—the endlessly crinkly Norway, for example, has about 18,000 miles of coastline with fjords, and a mere 1573 miles if you leave the fjords out.
On top of the pure mathematical strangeness, coasts are constantly changing, says Rishel. Bluffs erode, sea levels rise, land masses slowly rebound from where the glaciers pushed them. Every day, the tides go in, shifting the waterline ten feet, and then back out again. "Beaches change shape with every wave," Rishel says. "How can you pin that down?"
You can't—even when you really want to. In 2006, the Congressional Research Service published a memo called "U.S. International Borders: Brief Facts," meant to ensure everyone was on the same page about exactly how much border we need to think about securing. One again, there wasn't even a same page to be on. "The 'general coastline' data in this report are based on large scale nautical charts, resulting in a coastline measure for the 50 states totaling 12,383 miles," the report reads. "Another measure using smaller scale nautical charts more than doubles this measurement to 29,093 miles... while the figures used by the NOAA in administering the Coastal Zone Management program come to 88,612 miles (not including the Great Lakes)."
Sometimes, though, people have to find a way to agree. In Washington State, experts like Rishel use what's called the "ShoreZone Shoreline," which was drawn by the Washington Department of Natural Resources in the late 1990s, based on photos and videos taken from low-flying helicopters. The ShoreZone version of the Puget Sound coastline is about 2,500 miles long, Rishel says—a manageable number, or at least better than "infinity." By agreeing on this approximation, people who work to restore beaches, track where fish spawn, or build waterfront homes can make sure they're speaking the same geographical language.
But attempted standardization has its own flaws. The ShoreZone shoreline treats some manmade structures, like certain jetties, as though they're part of the coastline, and leaves others out. "Sometimes the ShoreZone shoreline is dozens of feet from where any respectable shoreline should be," Rishel says. "In one place it's 800 feet off and there's an airstrip in what should be water." It even managed to miss an entire island.
Rishel expects ShoreZone to be updated soon with LiDAR data, which replaces cameras and human eyes with more precise laser measurements, taken from planes. Still, it's not going to be perfect. "Over the month or two it took to fly, even the best LiDAR would capture a blurred snapshot of the Sound," he says. "Winter beach profiles are drastically different from summer ones. Bluffs keep eroding. Landslides happen."
That's what happens when we try to work with something that's literally infinite—we just have to do the best we can.
Across the United States during autumn, there are fields that turn into a war zone of pumpkin pulp. The orange mulch is the mark of pumpkin chucking (also called punkin chunkin for rhyming reasons). For the annual fall tradition and competition, groups build and wheel out massive machines that hurl pumpkins up into the air. Some can even fling pumpkins thousands of feet away.
In the video above, pumpkin chuckers test and prepare a large wooden slingshot and trebuchet. These machines are impressive. At the 13-second mark, four men have to work together to pull the heavy counter weight of the trebuchet into place.
Both of the launchers send the pumpkins far across the grassy field—smashing them into bits. If you ever wondered what it's like to be catapulted from a trebuchet or shot from a slingshot, the pumpkin chuckers also strap a GoPro camera to the orange objects to give viewers a dizzying ride.
Punkin chunkin competitions, both formal and for fun, are held throughout the fall. All kinds of mechanical launchers are present at these events from the Middle Ages trebuchet and catapults to menacing pneumatic canons that use pressurized air to shoot the little pumpkins across fields. The farthest a pumpkin has ever been chucked was by a pneumatic canon named "Big 10 Inch," reaching over 5,500 feet.
People have even lit the flying pumpkins on fire:
Teams have been shooting pumpkins at the World Championship Punkin Chunkin in November intermittently since 1986. The 2016 championship will begin on November 4.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
There used to be parties in the apartments on the top floors of New York City's branch libraries. On other nights, when the libraries were closed, the kids who lived there might sit reading alone among the books or roll around on the wooden library carts—if they weren't dusting the shelves or shoveling coal. Their hopscotch courts were on the roof. A cat might sneak down the stairs to investigate the library patrons.
When these libraries were built, about a century ago, they needed people to take care of them. Andrew Carnegie had given New York $5.2 million, worth well over $100 million today, to create a city-wide system of library branches, and these buildings, the Carnegie libraries, were heated by coal. Each had a custodian, who was tasked with keeping those fires burning and who lived in the library, often with his family. "The family mantra was: Don’t let that furnace go out," one woman who grew up in a library told the New York Times.
But since the '70s and '80s, when the coal furnaces started being upgraded and library custodians began retiring, those apartments have been emptying out, and the idyll of living in a library has disappeared. Many of the apartments have vanished, too, absorbed, through renovations for more modern uses, back into the buildings. Today there are just 13 library apartments left in the New York Public Library system.
Some have spent decades empty and neglected. "The managers would sort of meekly say to me—do you want to see the apartment?" says Iris Weinshall, the library's chief operating officer, who at the beginning of her tenure toured all the system's branches. The first time it happened, she had the same reaction any library lover would: There’s an apartment here? Maybe I could live in the apartment.
"They would say, look, just be careful when you go up there," she says. "It was wild. You could have this gorgeous Carnegie…"
"And then… surprise!" says Risa Honig, the library's head of capital planning.
"You go to the third floor…"
"And it's a haunted house."
The exterior of the Fort Washington library the year it opened, 1914. The top floor windows are for the apartment. (Photo: New York Public Library/Public Domain)
The downstairs of the Fort Washington branch of the library feels big and bright. The Carnegie libraries have tall ceilings and sweeping windows meant to keep the buildings light and cool; each of the bottom two floors is an open, book-lined space, and on the second level, several giant, colorful lampshades float over the children's section.
A low wooden gate stretches across the base of the wide stairway that leads to the next floor. Walking up that last flight feels like fading into a different building. A water stain darkens the wall, and the etched steps are dusted with the chips of peeled paint fallen like dandruff from above.
At the top, the stairway opens into a large, shabby room with high ceilings. To enter, you pass through a well-crafted wooden frame of what was once a wall; now there is empty space where the door and windows were. The front room is brown and full of the textures of abandonment—the walls and ceiling look like they're sloughing off dead skin. Once, the library hosted performances in this space, and dances, but now the prettily molded ceiling is covered partway with rectangular metal chutes.
Fort Washington, the front room.
Fort Washington, the ceiling.
The apartment is reached through a smaller door by the staircase. Inside it, there's a long, dark hallway stretching down the length of the building. The room to the right once had generous windows, two, on the far wall. They looked onto the library roof. Now, in their places, there are walls of concrete bricks that block out the light but also unwanted visitors.
Even without lights to turn on, it's clear that the last family that lived here, probably a quarter-century ago, tried to make the apartment bright. The walls are painted in vibrant blue and yellow hues; the flooring in one room, now half torn away, is diamond-patterned with green and pink. No surface that could be decorated is left plain.
Inside the apartment, looking past the living room and kitchen doors.
Paint peeling.
The back bedroom.
The apartment doesn't feel haunted, exactly, but lonely and left behind. There is, however, a mysterious black door, with three sections, and a row of bells alongside it. No one knows where it leads, and it's jammed shut. It's the sort of door someone opens at the beginning of a horror movie that releases a demon or hungry creature.
Wrenched open, the middle section reveals a wall, brown and textured like washed-up seaweed. It's the back of a shaft. Look up, and there's a plate of glass keeping the rain out. Look down, and the hole plummets to the basement.
Death shaft, looking up.
Death shaft, looking down.
Death chute aside, this would have been one of the nicer library apartments to live in. Often the flourishes that made the Carnegie libraries special—the large windows and decorative moulding—were left out of the custodial apartments, but this one has some nice details.
The apartment is larger than the others, too. Take a right at the kitchen, and there are two more bedrooms; go past it and there's another room in the back. Here's what the plan looks like:
Fort Washington plan. (Image: New York Public Library)
In that back bedroom, a small, dirty mirror is still hanging on the wall, at eye level. If it were my room, this where I might stand to apply mascara. Two dusty decals are still stuck to the door: one for the Muppet Movie, one that warns others to "Knock Before Entering."
In the kitchen, where the walls are covered with a stone-mimicking wallpaper, there are other remnants of previous lives—a Polaroid of a Christmas tree and a pirate-themed card, addressed to David J from William J, that reads: “You're a real treasure to me.”
Fort Washington kitchen.
Fort Washington.
Another bedroom, used for storage.
In today's New York real estate market, this apartment is not unappealing. Yes, it would need cleaning and modernizing before anyone moved in. The one toilet in the apartment is facing into a corner. But the rooms are large enough, the kitchen could fit multiple people, and it's in a library. Finding this much empty space anywhere in Manhattan is a rarity; walking upstairs in a well-used building and finding an empty floor feels like being in on a great secret.
For the library, though, these apartments are a waste, almost an embarrassment. They were built to serve a particular function, when libraries could survive on just lending out books. Now, when many libraries are reinventing themselves, their physical spaces must transform, too.
"We have so many demands on our space, besides just the books, that it’s almost criminal not to turn these apartments into program space," says Weinshall.
Fort Washington, in the kitchen.
Fort Washington.
Even the flagship 42nd Street building once had an apartment in it, occupied by a superintendent who had been a bootblack, bartender, Harvard man, boxing instructor, and a designer for Thomas Edison. The family moved out in 1941, because the library needed the space for a mimeograph room, telephone switchboard, and smoking rooms.
At Fort Washington, now, the library's programming room is a dark and narrow space on the second floor. After school, when the kids and teenagers arrive, the bottom two floors fill up fast. The teens have to stay on the first floor, with the adults; after-school tutors clash with parents over the proper noise level. There's no elevator here, either, so when parents bring their kids for story time, the entryway is crowded with a phalanx of strollers.
That's why the library is renovating the apartments, one by one. Not far from Fort Washington, at the Washington Heights branch, the third floor is almost ready to re-open. The glass elevator opens on a newly painted hallway, a bright blue not so different from the color in the dark apartment. In the ceiling, the white circles of new fixtures create pools of light. The front room has the same expansive quality as Fort Washington's, but this one is newly white.
A mock-up of the Washington Heights renovation. (Image: New York Public Library)
The apartment here was vacated more recently; there are still people on staff who remember Mr. Adams, the last custodian, and even after he left, employees would come up here to use the bathroom and even the claw-footed tub. Now, though, the space is divided into smaller, anonymous rooms; the kitchen has a brand-new fridge.
The renovation here is not quite finished, but the rooms look nice. Practical. The floor feels like any new space in 2016. It would be hard to tell anyone had ever lived here, or that this century-old library ever had an apartment in it at all, unless you already knew.
The so-called "Nag's Head Portrait", possibly of Theodosia Burr Alston. (Photo: Public Domain)
In 1869, a vacationing doctor named William Gaskins Pool was called to help an ill old woman named Polly Mann, who lived in a shack near Nags Head, Carolina. When he and his daughter, Anna, gingerly entered the dark, cobweb-covered home, they were drawn to a picture on the wall, Anna remembered, “of a beautiful young woman about twenty-five years of age.” After extensively questioning Polly about the painting, Dr. Pool believed his initial hunch was correct. He was staring at a portrait of the long vanished Theodosia Burr Alston, a portrait which may hold the key to her long-debated fate at sea.
Today, if people know anything about Theodosia, it is because of the lovely lullaby “Dear Theodosia,” sung by the character of Aaron Burr in the sensational musical Hamilton. But the real-life Theodosia grew from a beloved child into a highly intelligent, complex adult, whose fascinating story is largely unknown and worthy of its very own Broadway smash.
Theodosia Bartow Burr was born in Albany, New York, on June 21, 1783. Her mother, also called Theodosia, was a brilliant, cultured woman. She had scandalized New England society, when as a married mother of five, she fell in love with an equally brilliant and much younger blue-blooded lawyer and Revolutionary War—Aaron Burr. After her first husband’s death, the two were married, and little Theodosia, the couple’s only child to survive, became the center of her parents’—particularly her father’s—world.
“Your dear little Theodosia cannot hear you spoken of without an apparent melancholy,” the elder Theodosia wrote to a traveling Aaron in 1785, “insomuch that her nurse is obliged to exert her invention to divert her, and myself avoid to mention you in her presence. She was one whole day indifferent to everything but your name. Her attachment is not of a common nature.”
Aaron reciprocated these feelings. His plans for his lovely, dark-haired “Little Miss Priss,” who was already displaying an extraordinary intellect and sharp wit, were incredibly ambitious, and for the times, highly progressive. “I hope yet by her [Theodosia] to convince the world what neither sex seems to believe,” he wrote, “that women have soul!”
In 1800, Theodosia became deeply enamored with Joseph Alston, a wealthy planter from South Carolina. “My father laughs at my impatience to hear from you,” Theodosia wrote teasingly to Joseph during a separation.
The couple were married on February 2, 1801, in Albany. Little more than a month afterwards, she and her new husband watched as her father was sworn in as Vice-President of the United States, under President Thomas Jefferson. They were further blessed nine months later when their son Aaron Burr Alston, nicknamed “Gampy” by his doting grandfather, was born.
However, the birth of her only child took a heavy toll on Theodosia. She was severely injured during the traumatic birth, and the prolapsed uterus she suffered left her in immense pain, and made intercourse impossible. Although she adored her husband and his family, she had a hard time adjusting to the isolated life of a plantation mistress at The Oaks, the family estate on the Waccamaw River in South Carolina, and was soon spending half the year in New York with her father.
On July 10, 1804, Aaron sat down at his desk and wrote his Theodosia a letter of goodbye. “I am indebted to you, my dearest Theodosia, for a very great portion of the happiness which I have enjoyed in this life. You have completely satisfied all that my heart and affections had hoped for or even wished.” The next day, Aaron—still the Vice President of the United States—would kill Alexander Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey.
Rumors swirled as to the cause of the duel. Aaron had been incensed by a comment Hamilton had made about “still more despicable” acts. Some thought Hamilton may have been referring to Aaron and Theodosia’s “morbid affection” for each other, which had led to whispers of incest.
Whatever the case, Aaron was soon on the run, although he was never tried for the murder. After serving out his term of Vice President, Aaron headed west to establish a new country comprised of western North American territory and Mexico. He planned to become emperor of said country, with Theodosia succeeding him as empress. He had the full support of his daughter and son-in-law, who supplied much needed funds. The Alstons even headed west to help Aaron in his quest. Theodosia wrote to her half-brother excitedly about “the new settlement which I am about to establish.”
But the Burr dynasty was not to be. The plot was found out, and Burr was taken into custody. In 1807, he was tried for treason in Richmond, the ever loyal Theodosia at his side. Amazingly, Aaron was acquitted, and with the help of Theodosia he soon smuggled himself out of the country and headed for Europe.
Her father now gone, Theodosia’s health—she was probably in the final stages of uterine cancer— deteriorated further. “The most violent affections have tormented her during the whole of the last 18 months,” she wrote in third-person to a doctor in 1808. “Hysteric fits, various colors and flashes of light before her yes, figures passing around her bed, strange noises, low spirits and worse.” She missed her father intensely. “What indeed,” she wrote him, “would I not risk once more to see him, to hang upon him, to place my child upon his knee, and again spend my days in the happy occupation of endeavoring to anticipate his wishes.”
In 1812, Theodosia’s beloved “Gampy” died of malaria in South Carolina. With the loss of her only child, Theodosia’s world grew darker. “There is no more joy for me,” she wrote. “The world is blank. I have lost my boy.”
On December 10, 1812, Joseph Alston was elected governor of South Carolina. His new position made it impossible for him to accompany Theodosia to New York, and with the War of 1812 raging in the Atlantic, he was worried about his frail wife making the treacherous trip to New York. To ensure his daughter’s safety, Aaron sent down his friend Dr. Timothy Green to secure a boat and make sure that Theodosia made it home to him.
Theodosia, along with Dr. Green, a French maid and skeleton crew, boarded a small schooner called the Patriot at the port of Georgetown on December 31. One week passed, then two, then three—with no word from the Patriot, its small crew or passengers. “In three weeks I have not yet had one line from her,” Joseph wrote Aaron. “My mind is tortured—after 30 days—my wife is either captured or lost!” By February 24th, he had given up all hope. “My boy and-my wife- gone both! This, then is the end of all the hopes we had formed,” he wrote to his father-in-law. “You may well observe that you feel severed from the human race. She was the last thing that bound us to the species.”
Within weeks of the Patriot’s disappearance, rumors about Theodosia’s fate began to spread in the North and the South. Joseph died in 1816, a shell of the man he once was. Burr lived another 23 years, long enough to witness the cottage-industry of conspiracy theories about his daughter’s disappearance come to life. He refused to believe she was still alive, stating firmly: “She is dead. She perished in the miserable little pilot boat in which she left. Were she alive, all the prisons in the world could not keep her from her father.”
Many believed the Patriot had been captured by one of the pirate ships known to troll the Outer Banks. Over the years, numerous “death-bed confessions” from various aged or imprisoned pirates were reported in papers all over the country. The first to gain traction was the case of Jean DeFarges and Robert Johnson, who were executed in 1819 for other crimes. An 1820 article in the New York Advertiser claimed that the two had confessed to having been crew on the Patriot. They claimed to have led a mutiny, and scuttled the ship, killing all on board.
In 1833, The Mobile Commercial Register reported that another man had confessed to raiding the Patriot with other pirates, who had reluctantly forced Theodosia to walk the plank. Other stories claimed that she had become the wife of an American Indian in Texas, been taken as a pirate’s mistress to Bermuda, or that she had killed herself after resisting the advances of the pirate Octave Chauvet. Yet another fanciful story had her writing farewell letters to her father and husband, and stuffing them and her wedding ring into a champagne bottle and throwing it into the Carolina sea before being executed.
Perhaps the most oft-repeated “confession” was that of Benjamin F. Burdick, a “hard, rough old salt” of a sailor. On his death bed at a poor-house in Michigan, he is said to have confessed to a minister’s wife that he had been on the pirate ship that overtook the Patriot. According to an 1878 edition of the New York Times:
He said there was one lady on board who was beautiful appearing, intelligent and cultivated, who gave her name as Mrs. Theodosia Alston. When her turn came to walk the fatal plank she asked for a few moments time, which was gruffly granted her. She then retired to her berth and changed her apparel, appearing on deck in a few moments clad in pure white garments. And with a bible in her hand, she announced that she was ready. She appeared as calm and composed as if she were at home, and not a tremor crept over her frame, or a pallor overspread her features, as she walked toward her fate. As she was taking the fatal steps, she folded her hand over her bosom and raised her eyes to heaven. She fell and sank without a murmur or a sigh.
Then there is the curious case of “the female stranger,” who is buried in the St. Paul’s Episcopal Graveyard in Alexandria, Virginia. It is said this “veiled lady” appeared in the city in 1816, with a man claiming to be her husband. She died a short time later. Legend has it that this was Theodosia and Dr. Green, recently returned from captivity in the islands.
Perhaps the only clue we have as to what really happened to Theodosia is the Nags Head portrait, discovered by Dr. Pool in 1869. According to his daughter, Polly Mann told her and her father that her deceased husband, Joseph Tillett, was a “wrecker” who scavenged the ships that washed up on the shores of the Outer Banks. She claimed that decades before, he and his friends had come upon a scuttled, empty schooner near Kitty Hawk. In one cabin they found many fine items, including the portrait and dresses, which were now in Polly’s possession. “Also exposed to our view—a vase of wax flowers under a glass globe,” Anna remembered, “and a shell beautifully carved in the shape of a nautilus.”
A drawing of Burr Alston from 1900, based on a 1811 miniature. (Photo: Public Domain)
Polly gave the portrait to Dr. Pool in lieu of payment. He took it back home to Elizabeth City. Over the years, he and his cohorts would attempt to get authentication of the portrait from the Burr and Alston families, whose opinions as to whether the likeness was Theodosia varied greatly. “I do remember her beautiful eyes,” Joseph Alston’s youngest sister wrote, “and the eyes in the picture are really beautiful.”
Those who believe in the painting’s authenticity think it proves that Theodosia died off the coast of the North Carolina shore, one way or another. There were fierce storms on the Outer Banks January 2nd and 3rd in 1812, which caused damage to ships nearby the Patriot’s planned route. It is most likely that the small ship was simply over-powered by the storm, but who knows? Perhaps pirates, rouge wreckers, the British, or something else caused the boat’s destruction. Or perhaps Theodosia was spirited away to some exotic land, and lived a long life—though in her precarious health that seems very unlikely.
Today the legend of Theodosia lives on. The Nags Head Portrait now hangs in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale. Her ghost is said to haunt her plantation The Oaks, the Outer Banks, Richmond Hill and Bald Head Island, where it is said her spirit is chased by three headless pirates. In the late 19th and early 20th century the mystery was spun into several novels and countless magazine articles. Many little girls were named after her—including Theodosia Burr Goodman, who would become famous as the silent screen vamp Theda Bara. Her story was a favorite of poets, including Robert Frost, whose poem Kitty Hawk includes the line:
Did I recollect how the wreckers wrecked Theodosia Burr off this very shore? T’was to punish her, but her father more.
As viewers nervously tuned into the first presidential debate in September, the first question might well have been about the venue itself. Why are we watching these candidates at Hofstra University? At this point, the school's most salient feature might be hosting presidential debates, having been the only venue to have hosted debates in three consecutive election years.
But if Hofstra University seemed a bit random, the second debate's venue might have been even more esoteric: tiny Longwood University, in Virginia.
In recent years, there have been a spate of strange academic settings. Washington University, in St. Louis, has been a popular choice, along with a series of seemingly haphazard hosts, including St. Anselm College, in Goffstown, New Hampshire; Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky; Lynn University, in Boca Raton, Florida; and Belmont University, in Nashville.
It wasn't always this way. Probably the most famous presidential debate of all time, the 1960 clash between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy that might've decided the election, was held in a Washington, D.C. television studio. And almost all of the debates up until 1988 were held in a variety of convention centers, auditoriums, and theaters.
So what changed? The short answer is money.
The Kennedy-Nixon debate, the first between major party nominees, was sponsored by television networks, and the debates in 1976, 1980, and 1984 (there were no debates in 1964, 1968, or 1972) were each sponsored by the League of Women Voters. But beginning in 1988 a new entity took over: the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), a nonprofit formed then by Republicans and Democrats in part to help ensure that debates would keep happening.
But as the debates became more formalized, they also became more expensive, in part to support the CPD and its staff. Venues like theaters make money by staging a show and charging admission, but presidential debates cost $4 million or more to produce. And very few pay to get in.
All of which makes little sense for a private venue, but a lot of sense for colleges, who both have the money to spend and aren't out to make money themselves, only garner publicity. The commission, in turn, gets a venue with a neutral sheen, in addition to one that gestures at harmless intellectual pugilism. What is college for? Mindless debate, mostly.
The CPD doesn't have any shortage of options, or colleges willing to pay up. Hofstra spent around $5 million this year to host the debate, or about the same amount they spent in 2012. Longwood University, in Farmville, Virginia, which hosted the vice presidential debate, paid $5.5 million for the privilege, a number equal to about 10 percent of the university's entire endowment. Washington University, which hosts the second presidential debate, and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, which hosts the final debate on October 19, will pay similar numbers.
Where does all that money go? Around $2 million for each debate goes back to the commission, in the form of a host fee, which the commission uses to fund its staff.
The rest is spent on production costs, which aren't small. This is because the CPD requires a lot for the debates, which include thousands of spectators, in addition to hundreds of journalists and political operatives, as well as countless television crews.
Have a look at the CPD's requirements for debate hosts, which they update each election cycle:
A debate hall of at least 17,000 square feet that is air conditioned.
A large parking area close to the debate hall for 40 television remote trucks, trailers and/or satellite trucks up to 53 feet in length.
A media filing center, located either in the same facility as the debate hall or extremely close to the debate hall that is a minimum of 20,000 square feet (may be a tent). This space must be air conditioned.
A media parking lot, located approximately one-quarter to one mile away from the media filing center, that can accommodate approximately 500 passenger vehicles.
An accreditation center of at least 3,000 square feet, located one-half to one mile away from the debate hall, with parking for 75 vehicles.
Nearby hotels that can provide 3,000 rooms for the event.
Good air and ground transportation networks.
The host's guarantee of complete city services, including public safety personnel.
Which is how you end up at Longwood and not Harvard, which doesn't need the publicity nor any potential headaches. But for Longwood—a public institution of around 5,000 students whose most famous alumni might be the former NBA player Jerome Kersey—it can be well worth it.
Taylor Reveley, Longwood's president, likened it to buying a television ad during the Super Bowl.
"Hosting one of these crucial debates is a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Reveley told PBS.
Some of the people Longwood might be trying to get their name out to are the candidates themselves. On Tuesday, when Mike Pence, the Republican vice presidential nominee sought to thank the university, he didn't quite get it right.
"Thank you," Pence said, "to Norwood University for their wonderful hospitality."
Mummification is, obviously, most closely linked with ancient Egypt, but it is a varied and culturally broad burial trend. Here are some examples of its more modern manifestations—from self-mummification, a brutal practice that only came to light in Japan in the 1960s, to more traditional embalming.
Fair warning: The images below might be disturbing to some readers. We are, after all, talking about preserving human bodies.
Feeling his death approaching, Buddhist monk Luang Pho Dang instructed his followers that should his body decay, he wished to be cremated. Otherwise, he wished to remain on display in hopes of inspiring others to follow the Buddhist way of life. Luckily for us, the latter proved to be his destiny. Like other noteworthy modern mummies, Luang Pho Dang died mid-meditation. Since that time his body has been displayed in a glass viewing platform within the Kunaram Temple. The monk remains seated in the lotus position, and his bodily tissue shows a remarkable lack of decay for the amount of time that has elapsed since his death.
The sunglasses, though, are a more recent development.
In the mid-19th century, an ingenious doctor by the name of Gottfried Knoche emigrated from Germany to Venezuela, taking with him a passion for accurately preserving the dead.
Fueled by a nearly unlimited supply of unclaimed bodies from his adopted nation's civil war, Knoche developed a unique embalming fluid that would stave off the seemingly inexorable forces of death. This "mummification serum" prevented the decomposition of flesh without necessitating the removal of the specimen's internal organs, a groundbreaking discovery for the era.
Knoche apparently had a knack for predicting death as well as staving off the effects of those already afflicted. When he felt the tingle that his own life was drawing to a close, he instructed Amelie, his ever-faithful nurse, to inject his (still living) body with his homemade embalming serum. Immediately thereafter it is said that he locked himself in his family's crypt, never to be seen again.
Whatever secret acts transpired on his family's land thereafter followed Amelie to her grave in 1926. Though scientists, morbidists, and bounty hunters alike have pillaged his homestead ever since, few vestiges of Doctor Knoche's macabre experiments have seen the light of day. A photograph is rumored to exist in which the bodies of his mummies, including a few prominent government officials and academics of the time, are scattered about his lawn, though precise evidence remains hard to come by. In fact, despite modern experts' best attempts, the best approximation to Knoche's original "mummification serum" remains an imprecise concoction based on aluminum chloride.
Ever the utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham had set forth a plan for every atom of his deceased body, and his faithful friends and colleagues at the University College London saw to it that his will was followed to a "T". After dying on June 6, 1832, Bentham's body was first dissected as part of a public anatomy lecture. Then, his skeleton and head were preserved in a wooden container until the time in which his bones could be reassembled, padded with hay, and "lad in one of the suits of black occasionally worn by me."
He decided that his place in all eternity should be none other than sitting upright in a chair positioned in the main lobby of his beloved University's South Cloisters. Here he sits 99.8 percent of the time. Of course, even the deceased occasionally require a promenade; at the institution's 100th and 150th anniversaries, Bentham attends the meeting of the Council College where records hilariously list him as "present but not voting."
Only one element of his plan went awry: originally Bentham had requested that his head be embalmed and his glasses embedded in his face in order that he might most resemble his living self. Unfortunately a terrible accident in the preservation of his head grossly disfigured his face. No matter! A wax replica was formed and placed atop his neck, and the rather perverse original placed between his feet.
As many a child will tell you, those fun houses dragged around the country by carnies are terrifying. Speak to adults of a certain age, and they’ll not only agree but also provide ammunition for exactly why this is the case. The only exhibit needed in such an argument is Elmer McCurdy, an urban legend come true.
Shot dead on the Kansas-Oklahoma border by sheriffs in a scuffle after robbing train passengers of $46 and two jugs of whiskey, McCurdy’s body was embalmed while waiting to be collected by a family member. As it turns out, McCurdy had been enough of a scumbag that no one wanted him, even in death.
At first, his body was propped-up in the corner of the coroner’s office where curious onlookers could see the mummy for themselves. Eventually a pair of enterprising carnies posed as distant McCurdy relatives and hauled him off to parts unknown... until he surfaced in a Long Beach, California fun house in 1977 where he’d been used as a prop for who knows how long. His discovery was made by an unfortunate crew member for the television series The Six Million Dollar Man who was moving the “prop” out of a shot when the mummy’s arm broke, revealing a real human bone underneath.
Two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo is the most tragic of the modern mummies featured here. Cut down by pneumonia at the age of two in 1920, Rosalia’s father sought a locally renowned embalmer to preserve her body for the ages. Alfredo Salafia’s special mummification serum—formalin, alcohol, glycerin, salicylic acid, and zinc salts—had remained a mystery until very recently, though its effectiveness was never in doubt.
As one of the last bodies ever admitted to the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Italy, Rosalia has been on display in a glass casket for nigh-onto one hundred years at this point. Her curls, eyelashes, and unparalleled appearance have earned her the name “Sleeping Beauty.”
X-rays have shown that her internal organs remain remarkably intact, and only in the past few years has her body begun to show signs of decomposition. In response, those responsible for maintaining the Capuchin Catacombs deemed it necessary to place Rosalia’s original coffin into a hermetically sealed glass container and relocated it to a drier part of the structure.
The titular head of the Buddhist faith in Russia knew his time was coming. Befitting a man of such piousness and wishing to share one last meditation with his fellow "lamas," Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov, the twelfth Pandito Khambo Lama, left this world mid-chant. His followers placed him in a wood coffin exactly as he left this world: seated in the lotus position, bedecked in his saffron robe.
This was in 1927. Shortly thereafter, Buddhism went the way of all religions in newly communist Russia and Itigilov was left in eternal peace... or so government officials were led to believe. Exhumed twice in the course of 50 years, the astonishingly pristine state of the monk was kept under the radar until societal conditions were more favorable. No less than 75 years after his death, Itigilov's body was reintroduced to the public.
Despite a complete lack of tissue paper wraps or formaldehyde, only the holy man's eyes and nose are worse for the wear, having slightly retreated into his sinuses. But looks aren't everything, right? Professor Viktor Zvyagin, an expert from the Federal Center of Forensic Medicine, took it upon himself to study samples of "The Most Precious Body" in 2004 and concluded that his tissue deterioration equaled that of someone who had died a mere 36 hours prior. Devotees interpret his incredible condition as evidence that he had attained the supreme state of emptiness espoused by Buddhism, while pilgrims seek his visage in hopes that it will heal their deepest ailments.
When it comes to religions, one of the freshest faces on the block is that of Summum, a gnostic, Christianity-based faith founded in 1975 by Corky "Ra" né Nowell. Resting somewhere between science fiction and new-age mysticism, Summum preaches the value of mummifying the dead in order that a) the soul transcends more smoothly from this life to the next, and b) is primed for cloning when science catches up with their beliefs.
At the time of his death in 2008, Nowell became the first human to undergo the nearly 1,000 hours of labor required to fully achieve modern mummy status. In preparation, Nowell had written a “spiritual will” that would be recited throughout the 77 days his body would be immersed in Summum’s special brand of mystery mummification fluid. To this day, his golden casket remains on display to visitors in Summum’s joint pyramid-winery headquarters.
Financially speaking, the church has decided that the best way to make ends meet in these tough economic times is by offering their specific brand of mummification to open-minded nonbelievers. Consequently, pet lovers (like you, dear reader!) can now have their companions prepared to meet them at the doorstep of the afterlife.
As the 1972 presidential campaign wore on, George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for president, began hearing troubling rumors about his chosen running mate, Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton. According to the rumors, Eagleton had been hospitalized for depression and given electroshock treatments, treatments that up until then had been kept secret from the public.
By late July, it was becoming clear: McGovern had to do something to quash the rumors. And so, on August 1, 1972, McGovern did, asking Eagleton to step down as the nominee three months before the election.
A presidential or vice-presidential candidate had never quit a race in modern history before the Eagleton affair, but this year might offer an even grander political spectacle, thanks to Donald Trump. Ever since a damning recording surfaced of Trump talking about kissing and groping women against their will, Republicans have been expressing increasing nervousness about his candidacy, with many urging him to quit.
Would Trump actually quit on his own volition, having done the math and decided that bowing out now is better than losing by a landslide in November? Who knows! But we've never seen a candidate like him, and for someone who seemingly entered the race on a whim it wouldn't be outrageous to see him exit in a similar fashion. On Saturday, Trump denied this possibility, telling the Wall Street Journal, that there was ”zero chance I'll quit.”
The media and establishment want me out of the race so badly - I WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF THE RACE, WILL NEVER LET MY SUPPORTERS DOWN! #MAGA
From the standpoint of Republican Party rules, Trump quitting, while unprecedented, would be relatively easier than forcing him off the ticket. That's mostly because the party's rules pretty clearly lay out what would happen next.
"The Republican National Committee is hereby authorized and empowered to fill any and all vacancies which may occur by reason of death, declination, or otherwise of the Republican candidate for President of the United States," according to the GOP's own Rules of the Party.
The rules go on to define a simple process of replacement: another vote by members of the RNC that could happen at a second national convention or if necessary, remotely. Whichever candidate gets a majority of the votes, wins the nomination. When similar talk of removing Trump surfaced in August, during his war of words with the parents of a fallen veteran, House Speaker Paul Ryan came up as the likeliest replacement. Now the debate centers around his running mate, vice presidential candidate Mike Pence.
A far trickier problem, however, are the actual ballots. And it's that process, separate from the nominating process, where time is running out. In the U.S., each individual state controls the election process, from making and printing ballots, to counting votes on Election Day, to certifying election results.
Election law in the U.S. is a 50-state patchwork. From voting machines to filing deadlines, each state has different rules. And it's the printed ballots—and even early voting that has already begun—that concern party officials should Trump quit. The closer it gets to the November election, the more state ballots will have Trump's name on them, as state deadlines for certifying nominees' names have come and gone.
It's already impossible, in fact, to keep Trump off all 50. Most state deadlines to certify names for the ballot passed in September or early October, meaning that even if Trump quits today you'll still be able to vote for him in many states.
The Electoral College provides additional sources of potential mayhem. Electors in most states are party officials, loyalists who have pledged to vote for their party's nominee should they win a majority of that state's votes. But should state party officials rebel, the national party would have little recourse to stop it. State parties could, in theory, nominate a different candidate for president, or make their electors unpledged, meaning that they are obligated to vote for no one.
George Wallace, left, attempting to block the integration of the University of Alabama in 1963. (Photo: Public domain)
This has happened only a handful of times in modern political history, most recently in 1964, when George Wallace, a Democrat from Alabama, ran against the incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson. That year, Democratic party officials in Alabama opted to make their electors unpledged, and Johnson's name simply didn't appear on ballots across the state. Instead, voters chose between Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, and the unpledged electors, in effect handing the state to Goldwater, though Johnson won the election handily.
The system is designed to handle sudden jolts, in other words, even if the jolt is often a sign of a broader dysfunction within the country or a particular campaign. The results rarely turn out well.
When Eagleton stepped down in 1972 he was replaced by Sargent Shriver, an in-law of the Kennedys and the father of Maria Shriver. McGovern and Shriver went on to lose in November to the incumbent President Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, in what was then the biggest landslide in modern political history.
Update, 10/8: This story has been revised to reflect new developments.
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