Last week, nearly two dozen potential buyers showed up for a remote open house in Sugar Grove Station, West Virginia. Unlike typical open house-goers, though, they weren’t planning to buy a home. They wanted the whole town.
From the road, Sugar Grove Station looks like many of the other small towns that break up the forests in this part of West Virginia. There’s a bowling alley, a car wash, and a hotel. The town has the ability to generate its own electricity and pump its own water.
But Sugar Grove Station isn’t like the other towns. There’s a fence around the entire 123-acre town, and guard booths at the entrance. That’s because Sugar Grove Station was a base run by the Navy and the National Security Agency to monitor communications sent to the East Coast.
Operations around Sugar Grove have also been tied to the NSA’s controversial ECHELON surveillance program, according to National Security Archive researchers. The top-secret program was created during the Cold War to monitor Soviet and Eastern Bloc communications, but later evolved into a global interception and data harvesting system.
After being shut down last year, the spy town can now be yours—for a couple of million dollars.
Once home to some 400 government employees and their families, Sugar Grove Station’s only residents a year after it was decommissioned appear to be spiders and a particularly brazen groundhog. The spying activities have moved on, some of them to a related nearby base that’s still operational.
That leaves a whole lot of empty buildings, and not just ones related to the base’s NSA operations. The challenge of keeping hundreds of employees busy in the middle of West Virginia’s forests means that these days, Sugar Grove Station looks like a particularly desolate summer camp. The town has a swimming pool, tennis courts, a playground—even a Frisbee golf course.
Other parts of the base still show evidence of when the town was still operational. Navy plaques hang on the walls, while the base’s indoor basketball court has a mascot—a ram holding an anchor—and a chart with the names of the town’s forgotten basketball stars. One building has a wave pool, although heads up to potential buyers: it probably leaks.
The government shut down Sugar Grove Station in Sept. 2015. The NSA’s reasoning was characteristically cryptic, saying publicly only that they no longer needed the site. After an initial sale by the General Services Administration in July ended with a $11.2 million winning bid, but failed to find a buyer who could complete the sale, the whole town—valued at around $16 million in local tax assessments—is back on the auction block.
Anyone who buys Sugar Grove Station will have to deal with a big problem: cell phone service. It’s situated in the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile mile area surrounding the Green Bank Telescope where electronic transmissions are strictly regulated.
That electronic quiet made it easier for the base’s occupants to spy on transmissions headed to the East Coast, and it makes the area a haven for so-called “electrosensitives” who claim they’re made ill by cell phone or Wi-Fi transmissions. (Researchers who study the condition are more skeptical).
At Sugar Grove Station, meanwhile, the Quiet Zone means that cell service is all but nonexistent. While the town exists outside of the 10-mile area around the telescope, any attempt to set up a cell tower would require input from the Green Bank observatory to make sure its transmissions wouldn’t interfere with the telescope. Sometimes, according to a Green Bank spokesman, that can be as simple as changing the design on an antenna.
With its 80 townhouses and multitude of other buildings, Sugar Grove Station could definitely be...something. West Virginia politicians worked to find some use for the site that would bring jobs after the area after other military agencies opted against taking it over. Various government agencies have considered it for everything from a women’s prison to a temporary site for unaccompanied immigrant children.
The problem is that Sugar Grove Station—about an hour’s drive from Harrisonburg, Va. and two hours from West Virginia’s capital—isn’t really close to anything.
What do you with an empty small town in the middle of nowhere? Apparently, think of more unorthodox options. Potential buyers have considered the site for corporate retreats, or transitional housing for veterans. No matter what ends up there, it can be well-protected from a fire—Sugar Grove Station has a very new fire station with space for as many as six fire engines.
The town has even been considered as a potential movie set, says a spokesman for the General Services Administration, which is handling the sale.
Walking through Sugar Grove Station’s empty neighborhood, it’s certainly easy to see it in a horror movie. An overgrown playground straight out of Are You Afraid of the Dark is surrounded by rows and rows of empty, identical houses. One house still had an abandoned lawnmower; another, a children’s chalk drawing still on a brick wall.
While Sugar Grove Station has only been closed for a year, potential buyers got a surprise in the town’s 45,000-square-foot hotel-style dorm. As they stepped into an elevator, caretaker Junior Smith warned them that the elevator hadn’t been maintenanced in years.
Most of the time, wild grizzlies are independent creatures. New moms and cubs excepted, they tend to hunt alone, hibernate alone, and wander the forests solo.
But a week ago, a grizzly management specialist named Mike Madel was out bear-tracking in Montana when he found not two, not three, but thirteen grizzlies, all hanging out. "I don't know if anyone has really observed that many bears together before," Madel told the Great Falls Tribune.
The bears, mostly mothers and young cubs, seemed healthy and relaxed, bedding down in the snow in the foothills of a local ranch. Biologists across the state tried to figure out why they were so close together despite a lack of obvious draws, like a large quantity of food. One, Wayne Kasworm, speculated that it may have been a family reunion. "That's at least one of the theories out there, [that] these bears have some relationship with one another in terms of [being] mother-daughter and possibly even grandmother," he said.
But bears are mysterious creatures, and it's tough to deduce their motives. Were they celebrating a bear holiday? Attending a conference? Grouping up to early vote? "Quite frankly," Kasworm says, "we don't know for sure."
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.
We’ve all heard this phrase before: man cave. Whether it’s in a hardware store commercial, a chagrined sigh from mom, or as a sitcom punch line, the man cave is, without a doubt, a part of our current homeowner vernacular. But what defines this space, and how did it get here? Of course, the history of the masculine-feminine dichotomy in interiors and architecture is a well-exhausted field, but few have covered the fact that the 30+ year increase in home size has created opportunities for new gendered spaces, and that these spaces are more than mere frivolity: they are an interesting piece of a changing social landscape.
So what are man caves?
A man cave usually develops in spare rooms, such as bedrooms, offices, finished basements, or recreation rooms. The garage, another traditionally masculine space, is more often a workshop or place to make repairs. Its connotation with work (often frustrating and unsavory as any viewer of Home Improvement can attest) as well as its thermal issues (it’s rarely cooled or heated like the rest of the house) demarcate it from the man cave, an interior space.
Most man caves are devoted to a man’s hobby, such as sports, music, or video games. In fact, the “theming” of a man cave is often what sets it apart from a mere recreation room or den. Theming in man caves is often a visual demarcation—it says this is my space and this is what I do in it. While the rest of the house often follows the interior design dogma of the woman, the mancave is the domain of the man, and is his space of self-expression. And it’s a pretty new thing.
While men have always had their sacred spaces in the home such as the garage or study, the domesticity of the 19th and early 20th century overall implied that the home was, of course, the woman’s place. In the previous centuries, men sought refuge outside the home in establishments such as gentlemen's clubs (think more country club than strip club), and male-only social clubs and establishments such as the Freemasons.
While a few of these establishments remain today (mostly in cities or as historical places such as the Yale Gentlemen’s Club) they are few and far between in this egalitarian age. In the case of the Freemasons and other fraternal service groups, memberships are dwindling at an alarming rate, primarily because their core membership consists of elderly and retired persons, making these clubs stodgy or otherwise unappealing to young people.
In addition to the dwindling number of male-only public spaces, two other male-dominated spaces, the workplace and the university—have become more and more gender-balanced over the last 50 years. The participation of women in the labor force increased 53 percent in the years between 1963 and 2012, and the percentage of working mothers increased 30 percent. During the same period, the number of women to complete four or more years of college increased by almost 25 percent. The combined effects of the disappearing male-only clubs and the integration of women in academia and the workplace left men fewer and fewer places to be alone and to be, well, men.
The mancave is no doubt in part a response to these social changes, and this is reflected in the etymology of the word itself. The term “man cave” only entered the public lexicon in the last decade of the 20th century. It’s first recorded use was in the 1992 book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, by John Gray, who writes:
“[A man] becomes very quiet and goes to his private cave to think about his problem, mulling it over to find a solution. When he has found a solution, he feels much better… If he can’t find a solution then he does something to forget his problems, like reading the news or playing a game…”
The home, the former domain of the woman while the man worked, became increasingly gender-neutral. The task of parenting, once relegated to the woman and/or servants, has also seen these changes as more and more women seek long-term careers. In the last decade, the number of stay-at-home dads has doubled.
According to Paula Aymer, a professor of Sociology at Tufts University, in this new landscape where childcare becomes more equally divided between mom and dad, now “...both partners occasionally feel the need to retreat… [and] there's value for a man wanting to declare his space as private, while the woman's space is open to others in the family."
In an increasingly egalitarian world, will the man cave see a similar fate to its predecessors? While women-only spaces in the house are on the rise, with labels such as the “she shed” or “woman cave,” the concept hasn’t taken off in the same respect as the man cave, for the reason that much of the home is still demarcated as a feminine space in the popular eye. The woman’s need to escape the world of men is a relatively new phenomenon, after all. The man cave came first because men were losing their hold of the world, and sought to retreat to a place in the home where they could still possess feelings of power.
Perhaps man caves can be seen as a physical manifestation of changing social rules, with the rise (again) of feminism and gay rights. After all, the digital world is filled with man caves: think of all the sites devoted to the Men’s Rights Movement.
How long will this phenomenon last? As new generations of men become more adjusted to changing social norms, their need to assert aggressively masculine space will cede to their need to establish their own private rooms. The man caves of the future will be less assertively gendered, and their rhetoric will be less filled with terms like “asserting your dominance.” The need to escape the hassles of parenting, work, and yes, one’s spouse sometimes, will always be present. Marking one’s territory? Hopefully not.
In 1960, the Cold War was going strong and the enemies of the United States were both manifold and secret. The threat of global destruction loomed large just beyond the horizon. There was a feeling that death could come in nearly any form, which was reinforced by the U.S. government in the form of films from the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization.
The government felt the need to prepare for any kind of attack. This included a theoretical bioweapon, which might take the form of an airborne pathogen that would spread quickly and cause unimaginable chaos.
The U.S. Army Chemical Corps set about making protective masks that would suit every civilian man, woman, and child. These required models and tests, and, as this 1960 video pulled from the National Archives shows, who better to test on than actual children?
Luckily, there was never any need to use these masks. But if there had been, they probably would have worked. Now, in our post-Cold War world, the images of American schoolchildren in identical gas masks make for quite the jarring visual.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
In December 2005, the FBI opened a file on the religious extremist group the “Church of the Hammer.”
Named after the infamous treaty on witchcraft and allegedly founded by a protégée of Westboro Baptists’ Fred Phelps, the group called for violent retribution on those in defiance of God’s will.
Particularly practitioners of the goth subculture, but they weren’t by any means picky.
The Bureau’s main source on the case was a goth who had engaged with members of the Church via their Yahoo Group “GodHatesGoths,” trying to dispel their misconceptions about the relationship between the subculture and Satanism.
The unnamed goth was apparently unsuccessful.
Eventually, the FBI deemed the Church enough of a threat to move beyond mere fact-finding into full-on investigation - agents feared that if they didn’t act soon, they might have another Waco on their hands.
However, pretty early on the Bureau ran into a snag: none of the people asked about the many incidents the Church was supposedly involved in had any clue what agents were talking about.
And then in March of 2006, the FBI did something it hadn’t done before - it actually visited GodHatesGoths.com. And what did they find?
A disclaimer - in small print, mind - that the site and and the Church were satire.
And so, in July of 2007, over two years after the FBI opened their investigation into the Church of the Hammer, the Bureau closed it, on grounds that it didn’t exist.
Once you’re in a panic, there are so many things to panic about! But it’s also possible to stay cool—to follow the immortal advice of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: DON’T PANIC.
With that in mind, below is a list of 32 real-life phenomena that could be panic-inducing, but chances are you are not panicking about them currently.
Feel free to substitute any of these concerns for a real panic-inducing anxiety. Why worry about an election you can’t control when you can freak out about the lights on the 2017 Jeep Wrangler or the giant underwater city found off the coast of Mexico? (Was it built by aliens? Could it have been built by aliens?)
Either way, just remember: deep breaths always help. Ready? Here we go. These are 32 things that we are totally not panicking about!
At the very end of the Malay peninsula sits the city state of Singapore, which was once plagued with retracting penises. In 1967, in one of the best-documented epidemics of koro, (or genital retraction syndrome) ever, hundreds of people rushed to hospitals, deathly afraid that if they loosened their grip they would die.
Today Singapore is one of the wealthiest and most successful countries on earth, and much of its old character seems to have been washed away by a tide of modernization. An international crossroads for hundreds of years, the city is now clean and safe and has everything most countries aspire to. You can walk along the street and be sure none of your body parts will disappear. But this wasn’t always the case.
The mass genital shrinking epidemic began in October of 1967. In one case, a 16-year-old male rushed into the General Hospital’s outdoor clinic with his parents close behind. “The boy looked frightened and pale,” as one report described it, “and he was pulling hard on his penis to prevent the organ from disappearing into his abdomen.”
The boy’s parents shouted for the doctors to help because the boy had suo yang (the Chinese word for koro, which we consider a culturally-related "genital retraction syndrome") and if the retraction didn't stop, he would die. The doctors reassured the family and gave the boy ten milligrams of chlordiazepoxide, after which he improved.
The boy’s problem had started at school, where he’d heard rumors that tainted pork—inoculated against swine fever—could cause koro. Earlier that morning, he’d eaten a steamed bun with pork in it. When he went to urinate, he looked down and felt his penis start to shrink. “Frightened, he quickly grasped the organ and rushed to his parents shouting for help.”
More people followed. Before long the hospitals were flooded with patients. Pork sales plummeted. The Ministry of Primary Production announced that both swine fever and the vaccine were harmless to humans, but the epidemic seemed to accelerate. For seven days it continued, until finally the Singapore Medical Association and the Ministry of Health started appearing on television and radio to announce that suo yang was a purely psychological condition, and that no one had died from it. There was an immediate drop in the number of cases. By November, there were no reports at all.
In the end, a total of 469 cases were recorded, though the real number was certainly higher, since the survey only included Western hospitals and did not account for traditional Chinese doctors. All patients who were interviewed by doctors had heard stories about koro before they experienced it. After the epidemic, the Chinese Physician Association concluded that “the epidemic of Shook Yang was due to fear, rumor mongering, climatic conditions, and imbalance between heart and kidneys….” Meanwhile, a Western-oriented “Koro Study Team,” concluded that koro was “a panic syndrome linked with cultural indoctrination.”
How much had changed since 1967? Had the remains of the city’s old culture been washed away in the tide of modernization? Were the old ways of thinking—of believing—gone? Or was it more complicated?
Singapore’s Chinatown is peppered with stores that sell traditional Chinese medicine. Not long after I arrived in the city, I went there to ask around about suo yang and strolled among the open bins of flattened squid, dried sea cucumbers, mushrooms, oysters, and tree bark. People streamed in constantly, bringing their health complaints, for which the shopkeepers could prescribe a mix of herbs and other ingredients—either fresh or prepackaged. The stores did a brisk business.
In one shop in a dingy open-air mall packed with travel agencies, photocopy shops, noodle stands, and tea stores, I approached the counter. A portly man behind it ambled over. For some reason, I had my hand on stomach. He pointed to it.
“You have problem with bathroom?”
His English was choppy, but he made a downward sweep with his hand that indicated the flushing of the bowels.
“Yes,” I said. This was sort of true.
“You go every day?”
“Yes.”
“Too many per day?”
I just kept saying yes. It seemed easier than launching into my genital inquiry. He brought over a small box.
“You take this every day.”
“Is this for yin or yang?”
“Oh you know yin and yang!”
“A little.”
“This for too much yin.”
“Do you have anyone with suo yang?”
He stared blankly.
“Suo yang?” I said again. “When the man’s penis is being sucked into his body?”
“No, never.”
“Were you here in 1967?”
“In 1967, I study.”
I bought the stomach medicine, then walked around till I came to another shop. I asked the man working if he knew suo yang. “You know, when your penis is disappearing into your body.” I tried to make the motions, but it was a strange public game of charades. He pointed to his crotch. “You mean for this problem?”
“Yes.”
“For men?”
“Yes.”
He handed me a box of small pills. “This very good,” he said. He turned away from the female clerks, lowered his elbow to his crotch and raised his forearm like a giant erection. “Makes you very strong.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I took the box from him an examined the label. This was not working. Language was a problem.
I put the medicine back, then went and called a friend who lived in the city, and who spoke and wrote Mandarin. He e-mailed me the Chinese characters for suo yang along with an explanation. I printed these out, then went back to Chinatown and stopped into the first shop I came to. I showed the woman at the country the paper.
“Do you know this?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “One of the ingredients is suo yang. It’s especially for men.
“No,” I said, “it’s not an ingredient. It’s a condition. There was an epidemic and people thought they were going to die.”
She looked at the paper. “To die? For this problem, maybe you should see the doctor.”
“The traditional doctor?”
“Yes, he will be back in half an hour.”
“But I don’t need the medicine for myself.”
“Here’s some medicine. This will help you.” She handed me a small box.
“How much is this?”
“Twenty dollars.”
Back on the streets, I walked past the Chinatown museum, past the crowd of tourists looking at drink menus. Despite appearances, and despite my communication troubles, it was clear that people had not stopped believing in the world as it was stitched together in old Chinese medical texts. Perhaps the difference was simply that now there was another world, the Western one, layered on top in a kind of palimpsest. How did they fit together? Was the older one weaker than before?
Before I left, I stopped in one last shop. The man working there wasn’t particularly old but he spoke good English, so I asked him directly: “Do you ever have people ask about suo yang? When the penis is disappearing into the body?”
He knew exactly what I meant.
“For that,” he said, “you need tiger penis. But it’s very hard to get in Singapore. Maybe you go to Thailand.”
“But do you get many people asking about it?”
“Not now. In the olden days, yes. But now, no.”
“What would you do for them?”
“For that,” he said, “you need to see your physician."
After a long day at work, there’s nothing better than sitting down at a bar and enjoying a nice, foamy bottle of yellow liquid previously stored in a human body.
Did the thought make you panic? If so, you might understand how lovers of Corona beer felt in 1987.
Though the brand had only arrived to the United States in 1979, its rise to the top was almost immediate. Its allure as the “California surfer/life by the beach” beer of choice, made it a national favorite. Less than ten years after its arrival, it was second only to Heineken for imported beer popularity.
It seemed like nothing could stop Corona Extra, a product of the Mexican beer company, Grupo Modelo. But then, unexpectedly, stores begun to refuse to sell it, sales plummeted, and the entire country turned against it. The reason? A rumor that urine was one of its components.
Beer distributors whispered that Mexican workers used beer containers destined to be exported to the U.S. as urinals. Supposedly, this was the way the irate workers took vengeance on their northern neighbors and fiercest rivals. Or something to that effect.
Sadly, this obvious lie was believed by many beer drinkers. In some towns, sales went down by almost 80 percent, and stores all over the country returned shipments. Though not everyone believed the ridiculous rumor, enough people panicked and spoke out against the company for there to be irreversible consequences on sales and brand name.
Panicking, Michael J. Mazzoni of Barton Beers, the company that distributed Corona, decided to investigate into the matter to see in what way the company’s reputation could be salvaged. He somehow managed to trace the rumor back to one of Heineken’s retailers, Luce and Son, Inc., who were eager to chip away at Corona's growing market share.
Corona's parent company sued for $3 million in damages. A settlement was reached, and, Luce and Son, along with representatives of other beer companies who had been happy to repeat the rumor, agreed to issue public statements denying the veracity of the allegations.
The damage to Corona's reputation had been sustained, though and not just to the beer: the rumor fed upon and amplified racist stereotypes against Hispanic culture. It took the company years to recover, and it has taken them even longer to dispel the falsehood that, perhaps, prevented their becoming the most popular imported beer in the U.S.. Articles dedicated to dispelling myths about beer continue to struggle to debunk the rumor.
And even people who are sound enough to realize the rumor is a blatant lie, often have a hard time dispelling the unpalatable image of urine as they see the yellow, foamy beer. So much so, that Urban Dictionary lists “Mexican piss water” as a derogatory name for Corona. Old rumors die hard.
There’s an area in the Chihuahuan desert in northern Mexico where radio signals don’t work, and compasses spin out of control when placed near stones on the ground. It’s called the Zone of Silence. It measures only 50 kilometers across, and it is located in the Mapimí Biosphere Reserve, a huge, mostly uninhabited expanse of almost 400,000 hectares, where the flat and desolate terrain is interspersed with lonely mountain outcrops.
“The Zone is my passion,” Benjamin Palacios says as we bounce through the area in his 4-wheel drive Suburban, surrounded by mesquite, cactus, and guamis—brilliant yellow flowers resembling buttercups. Palacios, 61, grew up in the village of Escalón, Chihuahua, on the edge of the Zone, and now has his own UFO-themed ranch on the area’s periphery.
As we head into the heart of the Zone, Palacios, a charismatic man with a deep tan and a full beard, veers his truck onto a desert track. Back on the main road, only a few miles away, the radio came in loud and clear. Now, he hits ‘search’ and it endlessly scans. No signal.
The disruption is believed to be caused by subterranean deposits of magnetite, as well as debris from meteorites. The Zone’s overall effects (and even its location) are disputed, but there’s no doubt that the area, which sits on the borders of the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Durango, and Coahuila, has an abundance of celestial activity—including, some say, visits from UFOs and extraterrestrials.
Throughout the 20th century large meteorites landed in southern Chihuahua near the Zone, with two even falling on the same ranch—one in 1938, and another in 1954. A third fell in 1969 in the Allende Valley, just to the west. “It woke me, and I saw the firmament alight,” Palacios says of that meteorite. “People for miles saw the light and heard the tremendous noise, which broke windows. It attracted the attention of scientists from around the world.”
The name Zone of Silence was not given until 1966 when Pemex, the national oil company, sent an expedition to explore the area. The leader, Augusto Harry de la Peña, was frustrated by the problems he was having with his radio. He christened it the Zone of Silence.
This turned the area into something of a curiosity. However, on July, 11, 1970, the Zone made headlines. That was when an Athena rocket was launched from a U.S. air force base in Green River, Utah, as part of a scientific mission to study the upper atmosphere. The rocket was supposed to come down near White Sands, New Mexico. Instead, it went wildly astray and, at two in the morning, crashed in the heart of the Zone of Silence.
The Zone was now—if only briefly—in the international spotlight, and some locals saw a tourism opportunity. Wernher Von Braun, the famous Nazi rocket scientist who helped the Americans build their space program, came to investigate on behalf of the U.S. He was greeted at the train station by Palacios’ father, who was then the mayor of Escalón. Von Braun took reconnaissance flights in a Cessna to confirm the crash site. With the aid of 300 Mexican workers, a 16 kilometer rail spur was built across the desert to the impact crater. A team of Americans then came and excavated.
“Von Braun was here for 28 days after the crash,” says Palacios during our extended tour of the area. “The Americans brought temporary dormitories, labs, kitchens, medical facilities, and set them up right here in the desert. They even built a runway to transport cargo directly to Houston. By rail, they hauled away tons of debris.”
It’s all gone now. There is no evidence of the five-story, seven-ton rocket, of the impact crater, of the rail spur, or of any of the structures. However, the rocket crash sparked interest in the area, and a few years later the Mexican government created the Mapimí Biosphere Reserve. The reserve has a research station, and hosts scientists from around the world, many of whom are biologists attracted to the unusual flora and fauna–including North America’s largest land reptile, the threatened Gopherus tortoise.
A larger area extending to the northeast is part of a bolsón, a depression in the desert which, due to the thickness of the soil, retains moisture. At one time, millions of years ago, the Zone was under the Sea of Thetys, the remnants of which can be seen in fossilized sea shells and vast salt deposits. Today, the salt is mined by laborers with shovels and wheelbarrows. It is difficult terrain, and not an area where outsiders should venture alone.
“We can’t go in that direction,” says Palacios, pointing to Tetas de Juana, twin peaks that shoot directly from the desert floor—and behind which the two large Chupadero meteorites fell. “It is riddled with old mine shafts, and there has been some moisture, which can make for hard driving.”
For generations, stories have abounded from in and around the Zone of encounters with strange beings, unusual lights in the sky, and an over-abundance of meteor showers. These usually come from people living on remote ranches, or outsiders who have gotten lost in the desert. People have seen fireballs in the sky and, at times, flames rolling down the sides of mountains like massive, ignited tumbleweeds.
“There are lots of stories of aliens and unidentified flying objects in the Zone,” says Geraldo Rivera, a bespectacled state bureaucrat who is also Chihuahua’s most devoted UFO investigator. “People often get lost in the Zone. When this happens, sometimes tall blond beings appear out of nowhere.”
Those who claim to have encountered the tall, fair haired aliens, say that the individuals speak perfect Spanish, ask only for water, and disappear without so much as a footprint. When asked where they come from, the beings—known as Nordics—say only, “Above”.
Even Benjamin Palacios has a story. “I was 12 years old when a light appeared from above, and completely encircled us,” he says. “I was traveling with my brother in the Zone. We didn’t know what was happening. When we got to back to the ranch, we realized we had lost two hours.”
Palacios’ dream is to capitalize on the supernatural intrigues and turn the Zone of Silence into a “tourist Mecca, with people staying at my ranch, and taking guided tours.” At one time, the area attracted hordes of curious “zoneros” seeking aliens and paranormal experiences, but few tourists come to this part of Mexico now, largely due to the deteriorating security situation. If they ever come back, “I want to build eight small cabanas, each named after a planet in the solar system,” he says.
It might happen. The area has under-explored delights, such as a hacienda abandoned over a century ago, during the tumult of the Mexican revolution, and thermal springs tucked into a cave. This is a starkly beautiful and compelling part of the world, but it is remote: Escalón has under 1,000 inhabitants, and Ceballos has just over 3,000. Their populations diminished as passenger rail service was abandoned and young people moved to the city or the U.S. Other than a few ranches, the desert itself is essentially empty.
Nonetheless, boosters like Palacios carry on, eager to recount stories of the Zone’s unusual properties. These include abnormally large flora and fauna and, according to Palacios, salutary properties—he tells me that he has never been sick, and this, he believes, is because of the Zone.
“The Zone has been good to our family,” says his wife, Cha Cha Palacios, as we move through the waning light. “Our daughter Alejandra and her husband could not have children. They tried everything, went to all the doctors. Then they came to the Zone, and conceived. Two years later, they returned, and conceived again.”
Is it true? It hardly seems to matter as we trundle across the flat terrain, the sun setting to the west and the moon, directly opposite, rising over a distant mountain range. Out here in the desert the world feels different. It is as if we are on a fulcrum, the earth tilting, with an orange fireball raising a metallic saucer in a quiet, celestial see-saw.
The nature of dreams is that their origins are, mostly, mysterious. Where do they come from? They start from reality, of course, but the true beginnings are rarely clear.
This year it's a little bit different, though, mostly thanks to Donald J. Trump, who has a not-implausible shot at being the next leader of the free world. This idea has caused some alarm and panic, specifically, sometimes, in dreams.
So yesterday, we asked you for true tales of your panic dreams. Dozens of you came through, with everything from the disturbing to the downright absurd. One person said they “woke up screaming,” while another refused to describe the dream, only saying they saw both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Some of the dreams were centered around the color orange. “Donald Trump walked down a short staircase and into my room," one respondent said. "He was so evil inside that he turned the air and light orange."
Another said, "Men on motorcycles were dragging people behind them if they posted negative things about Donald Trump. They were called 'The Oranges.'"
Others were weirdly optimistic:
I dreamt that I was trying to go vote on election day but I couldn't get out of work. Panicking about not getting to vote in time. Woke up feeling relief that even if I wasn't able to vote, the election was over. I considered turning on the TV to see if they had called our state or the electoral college. As logic returned to me, I realized that we still had more than a week to go. Sinking feeling returned to my stomach. Though, lesson learned, you can be sure I'll be out the for bright and early to my polling place before work! Dems and diehards vote early in the day, and I happen to be both.
Others had panic dreams that got pretty dark, especially about sexual assault.
“I dreamed that Donald Trump was pinning me down on my bed, sneering at me and not letting me up no matter how much I struggled," one person wrote.
Another said: “Being chased by a mob of people trying to take my uterus out. Politicians and scary white men trying to run [sic] my body.”
A third:
Yes, I was riding on a train when Trump sat down next to me and proceeded to chat me up. Gen wouldn't shut up or leave me alone, he just kept shoving identical business card after identical business card into my uninterested hands. I probably had it because of all the women that are opening up about assault by him.
And a fourth:
I was having Donald Trump over to my apartment for dinner. At first, I was taken aback that he seemed nicer and distinctly more down to earth than he appears in the news. However, he kept getting progressively more annoying as the night went on. He followed me into the bathroom, kept blaring one of those cheesy New Years Eve blow-out noisemakers directly in my ear, and then, finally, right before I woke up, he stuck both of his hands into my pockets.
And a fifth:
I woke up shouting: "I WILL REPORT YOU." Scared my husband half to death. I was mad as hell and ready to get some justice … The next morning I was still angry as hell, full of righteous rage. Remembered and cursed the men who've harassed me in real life. To hell with them! Makes me mad again to think of it.
Not all of the dreams were so dark, though. Some were about animals.
When I get stressed, I have a reoccurring dream that I was supposed to feed a friend's pet while they are gone and I have forgotten for days. The last one, I sat bolt upright in bed and thought "I forgot to feed the cat!" Got out of bed and stumbled toward the door "And the goats!" in the doorway "And the flamingos! Waaaaaait...who do I know who has flamingos?!". And then I went back to bed.
And the stress of animal rescue:
I kept finding hurt animals I had to take care of, but my house wasn't big enough and I didn't have enough time and they also started eating each other. I tried to keep them all in my basement because I didn't want them to hurt my cat and 2 dogs, and I kept forgetting to feed them, and it was pretty stressful. Guessing it relates to my generalized anxiety and trying to juggle obligations.
And then there were those that were downright dystopian or disturbing. Here's a selection:
I dreamed that I was working for a large...corporation? government agency? Not sure. One day they offered me an opportunity: I could press a button, and it would launch a missile from a drone being flown by somebody else. The missile would take out their target, a single person. This was a person they assured me was deserving. I would be paid $500,000 to push this button, and there would be no record of my involvement.
I was actually trying to go to bed early and I was really relaxed but then my mind just started whirring and pretty soon I was falling into sleep but all of the things that I hadn't written down or hadn't accomplished during the day just surged into chaos! Then Donald Trump was there just yelling and looking disgusting. He was in my face and sweating all over and stomping and I just woke up with the sensation that I was falling. I just snapped awake with force. I had the full on heavy chest, hard breathing, and like a headache coming on.
My wife passed out at the wheel of the car, I was in the passenger's seat trying to figure out how to simultaneously steer and get her foot off the gas pedal, but her leg was rigid and the pedal was on the floorboard. We were approaching 120 mph.
Others, like most dreams, were in the realm of the nonsensical.
I was sick about 3 weeks ago, and my fever dreams were completely inundated with Donald Trump and Mike Pence. They weren't doing anything in particular; they were just always there. It was agonizing, because I knew every time I managed to get back to sleep they'd be there waiting. … They stopped when I started to recover from my illness. I probably dreamt exclusively about Trump and Pence for three days straight.
Dreamt I was sent to apocalyptic magdalene laundry.
I was hiking the Appalachian Trail when a large tree with the face of Donald Trump chased me off a cliff.
There were zombies.
It was like Jurassic Park, dinosaurs were trying to find my friends and I in a theater to kill us.
Maybe, in another week, we'll forget all this ever happened.
There's still time if you want to add your panic dream to the list:
If you’re at all interested in the history of cinema, you’ve probably heard some version of the story about the train film that sent an audience running. According to the tale, as the silent black-and-white image of a moving locomotive filled a movie screen in Paris, the people in the cinema thought it was going to drive right into them. They panicked, and bolted for the back of the theater.
While this story is often taken as fact, it turns out that this theatrical panic is likely no more than a sturdy urban legend—and probably already was even when the film was still in the theater.
The myth of the runaway movie train surrounds a short 1896 film called L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, or Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. The 50-second-long silent film was created by Auguste and Louis Lumière, a pioneering set of brothers who were among the very first people to create moving pictures.
Many of the brothers' early works were barely classifiable as movies even at the time, mostly being short snippets of a scene. “This film is memorable among all the other 1,400 one-minute films (they were called ‘views’ at that time, like ‘living’ picture post cards—single-shot films without any editing), which are listed in the Lumière film catalogue,” says Martin Loiperdinger, a film scholar at the University of Trier, Germany. Loiperdinger is the author of maybe the preeminent piece of writing regarding the myth of La Ciotat, calling the film and its attendant popularity, “Cinema’s Founding Myth.” In the piece he points out that there is no hard evidence that the famed audience stampede ever occurred.
The film itself is a scene on a train platform. Riders mill about the station, while a black steam train pulls in toward the camera, which has been set up close to the edge of the tracks. But even as it was presented as just snapshot of natural action at a train station, the scene was staged by the Lumière Brothers, with the extras being told not to look at the camera.
The movie is often credited as the first documentary film, but this is also untrue. “This film clearly shows a perfect mies-en-scène of a train entering the station, from the perspective of somebody waiting on the platform, standing close to the tracks—thus the locomotive enters the frame from right rear and runs to the left bottom corner of the frame and leaves the frame while the trains stops: a perfect diagonal composition,” says Loiperdinger. The film was beautiful in its simplicity and ability to bring viewers right up and into the action on-screen, even if the scene was a portrait of daily tedium.
It’s almost hard to imagine a black-and-white short creating much of a splash, but it seems like it was a hit. According to Loiperdinger there are no accounts of how the audience reacted at the time, but journalists who wrote about their experiences at the showings of the Cinématographe Lumière, the program of short films in which La Ciotat first began appearing in 1896, seemed reasonably amazed. Even without color or sound, the film’s clear portrayal of three-dimensional movement was a sensation.
Since there are no surviving contemporary accounts of the audience reaction to those 1896 showings, there is no concrete proof that audiences ever went scurrying for the back of theater as the train pulled in on screen, and Loiperdinger thinks that such a reaction is unlikely.
“There is no evidence at all about any crowd panic in Paris or elsewhere during screenings of L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat– neither police reports nor newspaper reporting,” he says. The screen the film was shown on was small (around seven feet wide), and the picture quality was not only lacking color, but it was full of grain. The image flickered noticeably, and of course, there was no sound. In other words, there was no way anyone was confusing the film for reality.
So if it never happened, where did the story of the panicked audience come from?
“The anecdote of train films and panicking audiences was already in the air before 1900,” says Loiperdinger. According to Loiperdinger, tales of panicked audiences began to surface mainly as a way for people to try to describe the emotional power inherent in the then-new medium of film. Writers reporting on Cinématographe Lumière would talk about the train nearly crashing into the audience, but just as a rhetorical method of invoking the convincing 3D effect of the moving picture.
There was also a component of class commentary in the story that spoke to film’s power and effect on the unwashed masses. The erudite, newspaper-reading, educated elites of the day took solace in the idea of rubes getting spooked by a moving image that they would never let affect them in such a way. This can be seen clearly in the 1901 silent film, The Countryman and the Cinematograph, which shows a bumpkin reacting outrageously to a series of short films. There is even a bit where he runs from the image of an oncoming train.
For the same reasons the urban legend of the train and the audience panic first arose around the release of L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, it continues to survive today. The story still makes for a great shorthand for the power of film, and the elitists still like to giggle at the effect popcorn movies have on the masses. “The anecdote about naïve early film audiences who confuse moving pictures with reality means balm for the souls of self-conscious media consumers in later decades up to today,” says Loiperdinger.
The story of the audience panic and the train film might be bogus, but with advances in 3D making movies come alive like never before, maybe it won’t be long before people finally bring this myth to life.
The specimen above is a voting machine—but not just any voting machine. This voting machine was used in Florida, in the 2000 election. More specifically, it comes from Palm Beach County, where Democrats tried to challenge votes cast for Pat Buchanan by arguing that the design of the infamous butterfly ballot confused voters who intended to vote for Al Gore.
This, in other words, is a piece of history. And if you’re willing to spend $2,400 on eBay in the next two days, it could be yours.
It only took a few years for pieces of the 2000 election to go to market. In 2005, as the Associated Press reported years back, Jim Dobyns, a political consultant, bought 1,200 Palm Beach County voting machines and, after renting a few to HBO for Recount, started selling them off. The price for a punch card machine back then was $75, although it later went up to $99, then $250 as the supply ran out, Dobyns told NPR in 2011.
Now, they’re rare enough that this eBay seller thinks this one might be worth much more. The package also includes a signed photograph of the canvassing board who counted the chads, a photo of George W. Bush, a bumper sticker signed by Jeb Bush, and Palm Beach Post papers from the time.
If that’s not convincing but the idea of owning a piece of the 2000 election is enticing, there are cheaper options. One eBay seller was offering a Votomatic used in Marion County, Fla., during the election for $1,400; the seller bought it at auction three years ago and was told this was one of two considered for permanent preservation in the George W. Bush Library. There's another Palm Beach County machine available for $400. For budget election ephemera, there’s also Votomatic used in Florida’s 2000 election (county not specified) on sale for just $79.99.
To dance with Eleanor Powell—the Golden Era of Hollywood star considered to be among the best tap dancers in the world—was a privilege afforded to few. None of her partners, however, were as decidedly talented and swoon-worthy as Buttons, the pup.
This charming dog had the honor of participating in one of the most original tap routines of all time, in this scene from the 1941 movie Lady Be Good. Described by the Pittsburgh Press as “better than Fred Astaire, nimbler than George Murphy, and can look more woebegone than Buddy Ebsen,” he clearly won over the hearts of the viewers.
Once the runt of the mill, the star was discovered by a prop boy named Jackie Ackerman, who trained him. The routine, full of jumps, flips, and taps, was learned over the course of six weeks, and gave the dog a chance to show his incredible potential and ability to pick things up quickly.
It is said that Ackerman, Powell, and Button's 14-year-old owner constantly competed for his love and attention. After watching the last part of the scene, where Buttons jumps from a sofa to a table and straight into Powell’s arms and they both tumble down in perfect harmony, one is inclined to think his preference was given to his dancing partner.
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.
During the Second World War the only way civilians could stay safe from bombs dropped during air raids was by going underground. When bomb technology ramped up with the introduction of nuclear weaponry, bunkers and shelters responded in kind. The thought was that in the event of nuclear detonation, people could retreat underground to wait out the danger indefinitely. The American government urged its citizens to build their own bomb shelters, and many of them did.
For the most part, the bunkers and fallout shelters were never used. They were made to withstand the most violently destructive climates imaginable though, so of course they're still around. Many have been preserved and transformed into museums where visitors can see what it was like to be underground in Churchill's War Rooms or Stalin's personal bunker. Others have been left abandoned, like the ruins at Duncan's Cove or those in Vieques.
However, some 20th century bunkers have found a second life as art spaces, homes, and commercial spaces, all within the bomb-resistant concrete walls of a subterranean cavern. These used to be places to hide. Now, they've been transformed into expressions of creativity, the antithesis of Cold War ideology.
When Nazi forces took control of the historic French Fort des Dunes they installed a series of imposing seaside bunkers as part of their larger "Atlantic Wall," but today their concrete fortifications have fallen into ruin and are being used as the canvas for ambitious street art. These include graffiti projects as well as installations, like this disco-ball inspired bunker.
Built at the behest of Yugoslav revolutionary and "benevolent dictator," Josip Tito, the nuclear bunker officially known as ARK (Atomska Ratna Komanda, or "Atomic War Command") D-0 was a well kept secret for decades. The construction started in March of 1953, all hidden behind what seems to be an ordinary house, and stretching 663 feet into the mountain with over 919 feet of rock on top of it, at the thickest point. The whole complex is built in a horseshoe shape, resembling a maze with offices, conference rooms, dorms and of course, Tito's private rooms. It was all supported by two kitchens and a supply of oil, food. and water that could sustain the bunker for up to six months. In the event of a nuclear strike, the bunker could accommodate Tito and 350 of the most important political and military persons in the country.
ARK D-0 exists today only because of one Bosnian military guard, who refused to carry out an order from Serbian high command to blow up the bunker up in 1992. It now exists as a time capsule, much the same condition as it was during the Yugoslav era with all of its furniture and equipment intact. The bunker is also home of a contemporary art biennial called D-0 ARK Underground, where artists from across the Balkans contribute their work. Some works have been left behind at the bunker, making it a work of art in itself.
Between 1969 and 1988, the United States Federal Reserve stored billions of shrink-wrapped dollars in an underground facility lined with 12-inch thick concrete walls reinforced by steel. The stash was preserved as a precautionary measure, to rehabilitate the dollar supply east of the Mississippi River in the event that the East Coast was demolished by a nuclear bomb. Later, it was used as a "continuity of government" shelter, designed to house and feed 540 people for 30 days in case of a catastrophe. As it turned out, an industrial-grade bunker was also the perfect place to keep rare and valuable audiovisual recordings, which necessitate climate-controlled temperature storage, so the National Audio and Visual Conservation Center moved into this former disaster relief bunker.
This Berlin military bunker built in 1943 never saw much action as World War II ended shortly after, but the building remained standing. Today, it is one-third history museum and two-thirds haunted house. The first floor of the complex houses the bunker museum. This display features clippings, photos, and other ephemera from World War II era, and the many of the spare furnishings also remain giving visitors a sense of what bunker life would have been like. The second floor begins to get more gruesome with a multi-room exhibition on medicine and torture throughout the ages including displays regarding amputation, cannibalism, and animal-to-human blood transfusions. The third floor gives up any educational pretense and simply contains a year-round haunted house with black light rooms and jump scares.
Though technically not a bunker, this fortress in the middle of the Bay of Biscay is certainly impenetrable. Napoleon had it built in 1801, though by the time it was finished weapon technology had improved to the point that an ocean fort no longer made sense. Without any purpose for the massive fort, it quickly fell into disrepair, only being used infrequently over the next 130 years.
In 1988 though, Fort Boyard was restored to be the set for an adventurous, physical challenge game show of the same name. The show is still running today, and is the only way to get a look at Fort Boyard. You must be a contestant on the show to visit the island fortress, as it is not legally open to the public.
Built in the late 1950s this city in the limestone caves under Corsham was designed to house up to 4,000 Central Government personnel in the event of a nuclear strike. It features six miles of roads and could sustain its occupants for at least three months in complete isolation from the outside world. The Burlington nuclear bunker contained among other facilities: offices, laundries, storerooms of supplies, a hospital, cafeterias, kitchens, a television studio where the remaining government could make public addresses, and its own pneumatic tube system for speedily relaying messages throughout the complex. It even includes a pub called the Rose and Crown.
Kept absolutely top secret until it was decommissioned in 2004, the facility was never used, and boxes of government-issue glass ashtrays, lavatory brushes and civil service tea sets remain unopened and unused. When the underground city was put up for sale a number of unusual possible buyers came in including a massive data storage site, the biggest wine cellar in Europe, a nightclub for rave parties, and appropriately, a 1950s theme park. What it will be repurposed for remains to be seen.
The bunkers atop the hill of Turó de la Rovira were situated so that they could survey the entirety of the city. As such, although they're crumbling, the bunkers are now one of the most popular places to photograph Barcelona.
In the 2000s, as the popularity of the site grew, the bunkers received a renovation as officials wanted to make it more appealing to tourists as well as celebrate the ancient Iberian settlement that is also nearby. The bunkers themselves haven't been repurposed, but their builders can't have imagined the number of Instagrams that would take place there, let alone what Instagram is.
Slime molds may be more intelligent than you think. At least that’s what scientists are discovering in labs at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. These single-celled, yellow blobs seen above don’t have brains or neural networks, yet they creepily crawl over decaying vegetation in search for food.
“This thing is literally jelly making smart decisions,” New Jersey Institute of Technology researcher Simon Garnier says in the video filmed and produced by bioGraphic.
Slime molds are known for their sluggish, congealing movement patterns. Just to observe a few centimeters of movement, the scientists have to record the slime molds for up to two days. If you place the organism in a nutrient-deprived environment, you’ll find that it grows little fingers that find food in a seemingly intentional manner. Experiments have shown slime molds navigating through mazes to reach a bounty of food, each of the extensions communicating with the rest of the organism.
Garnier and his research colleague Greg Weber want to find out how this simple organism is able to make complex decisions. Using time-lapse footage, they were able to see that the slime molds membrane inflates and deflates, oscillating about once per minute. At the 2:00-mark you can see the yellow membranous network wiggle and pulse. The group then uses a machine to poke the slime mold membrane and see if they can manipulate its direction.
These clever slime molds really make you wonder “what we mean by intelligence,” Garnier says.
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.
“All the world that is still free marvels at the composure and fortitude with which the citizens of London are facing and surmounting the great ordeal to which they are subjected, the end of which or the severity of which cannot yet be foreseen.”
Winston Churchill broadcast these words from a secret underground command center in central London on September 11, 1940, just after Garmany began bombing the city. Now known as Churchill’s War Rooms, the complex was situated beneath Whitehall and, for the next five years, would serve as the center of wartime operations.
The site contained numerous important functions including the Map Room, for charting the course of the war, a broadcasting room and, most crucially, the Cabinet Room. With tables laid out in a horseshoe configuration, this is where the heads of Army, Navy and Air Force would meet with Churchill. It was, in Churchill’s words, “the room from which I’ll direct the war.”
These inner workings are the subject of a new book by Jonathan Asbury, Secrets of Churchill’s War Rooms. The book provides fascinating details of life in this top-secret, subterranean space, such as the portable sun lamp used by staff who spent long hours underground; the specially designed gas masks that would allow switchboard operators to continue working even in the event of an attack; and the top-secret Transatlantic Telephone Room, which was given a toilet-stall style lock so staff presumed it was just Churchill’s own private lavatory.
After the war, the Churchill War Rooms were left abandoned until 1984, when they were re-opened to the public by the Imperial War Museum. Secrets of Churchill’s War Rooms draws from personal accounts of staff, archival photographs and images of the restored rooms to provide a behind the scenes look at this once-secret space. AO has a selection of images.
Ever since the release of the 2002 movie Panic Room, in which Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart play a mother and daughter taking refuge in their home's specially designed safe room during a burglary, the idea of a secret, impenetrable home bunker has quietly seeped into the popular consciousness. But what exactly is a panic room, and where are they being installed?
In recent years, stories about the domestic safe rooms of the rich and paranoid have been popping up all over. From the New York Times to the New York Postto the Daily Mail, the story is the same: real panic rooms have become a necessary amenity for high-end homes, but for the most part, they are no longer the secret closet most people have in mind.
“The hidden room, the ‘Jodie Foster Panic Room,’ that’s a thing of the past,” says Tom Gaffney, CEO of Gaffco Ballistics, a company specializing in creating high-end safe rooms. Gaffney, who is frequently quoted about the state of the panic room, has been creating safe spaces for decades, starting in the 1980s. He began by designing secure check-cashing stores in New York's South Bronx, before moving on to banks and corporate spaces. Gaffney now works mainly in ultra-high-end residential spaces, which he, for one, didn’t see coming. “Ninety percent of our work is high-end residential, 10 percent is corporate," he says. "Our residential work tends to be the true one percent of society. Very high net worth individuals. ... If you told me what I’d be doing 20 years ago, I’d say you’re mad."
Gaffney sees the decline of the secret safe room stemming from two main factors. For one, with real estate at a premium in most spaces, and especially in New York City, where the majority of his business comes from, no one has the square-footage to hide an extra room. On top of that, there is a practical element. If you have a little safe room hidden away that you never use, you don’t really know how to use it in the case of an actual attack. Now, the trend in residential safe rooms is to turn a regular use space in the home, often the bedroom, into a possible fortress.
All of the panic rooms Gaffco builds are outfitted with a satellite phone so that they can never lose communication with the outside. Increasingly, they integrate the robust interconnectivity of standard smart homes so that all the rooms outside the reinforced one can be monitored. The levels of protection vary somewhat, however.
The main concern in creating panic rooms can vary from region to region, depending on the likely threat. “People in Palm Beach don’t have as much concern over a dirty bomb as people in New York City would,” says Gaffney. “People in San Francisco wouldn’t have the same concern as people in Los Angeles.”
Most safe spaces Gaffco builds focus first on preventing damage from ballistic attacks like guns or even rockets, and making forced entry impossible. They do this by building defenses right into the building itself. Walls can be reinforced with steel barriers and seemingly standard wooden doors can conceal a layer of military-grade polymer. If there are windows, those too will be made of bullet-resistant glass. And it’s all seamlessly integrated into the normal architecture.
“We’ve got glass that looks like normal glass, it doesn’t have a green tint to it, so you can’t even tell it’s bullet resistant," says Gaffney. "Doors are high-end wood doors that look exactly the same as the doors in the rest of the residence. All of the security hardware concealed so you don’t even know it’s there."
A step up from ballistic protection are the safe rooms that provide their own air filtration systems to help protect people from chemical, nuclear, and other airborne threats. Surprisingly, Gaffney says that the home movie theaters of the very wealthy, which are often located underground, make the perfect spot for such safe rooms.
“The idea of the movie theater is that in the case of a dirty bomb attack, you’re underground to begin with,” he says. “It’s a fallout bunker because it’s underground, but as it’s a movie theater, that’s usually equipped with food and water anyway. It has communication, it has air filtration, it has the air conditioning unit. It’s usually soundproofed, too.”
In addition to the ever-expanding residential market, Gaffney says that it is becoming increasingly standard for corporate spaces to have a safe room built into their offices. Usually this will be the board room, but it can also be places like a bathroom—anywhere employees can hide and wait for the authorities, in the case of an attack. This is in response to an increase in what Gaffney describes as “active shooter policies,” put in place to direct an employee’s response to an attack by a gunman.
No matter the venue, in designing their panic rooms, Gaffney says they follow the general example set up by U.S. embassies, which is to create layers of safety, with the safe room at the core. “The embassies are designed so that every area you fall back to, the security gets stronger,” he says. “The marines move backwards to the ambassador’s office which is a pure safe space within itself. We build to their specifications.” Most embassies, like many of Gaffco’s current safe rooms, also hide their defenses just under the surface of the building’s facade, when they are built up to the correct standard.
Panic rooms as we tend to think of them may no longer be around, but demand for them seems to be as great as ever. Gaffney told us that his company’s revenue doubled over the last year, working mainly on the homes of the very rich. And he for one, doesn’t see their increased interest in high-level safety precautions as panicky. “I really don’t think they’re paranoid, I don’t think they’re expecting the worst,” he says. “I think they’ve got a higher sense of the lack of security in the world today, based on events that are happening every day of the week.” Whether or not that’s true, his clientele definitely have a safe space to ponder it.
On March 12th, 1950, a 23-year-old Air Force Lieutenant named William M. Guinther found himself in a tricky situation. He had just flown out of Otis Air Force Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and his engine started sputtering. After a few minutes, it died completely.
Luckily, the young pilot thought fast. "Guinther pushed the 'panic button,' was ejected, cockpit and all, from the plane, and 'chuted down onto a cranberry bog," the Pottstown Mercury reported the next day. "The plane crashed into the sea."
These days, when someone mashes the panic button, they're usually acting metaphorically—overreacting, letting emotion trump logic, and generally freaking out. But for a little while, Air Force pilots like Guinther were equipped with actual panic buttons, a last-ditch option during dangerous flights. It's thanks to their sense of humor that this useful phrase is in the modern lexicon today.
According to a 1956 oral history compiled by Lieutenant James L. Jackson, the first planes equipped with so-called "panic buttons" were B-17s and B-24s used during the Second World War. Under regular conditions, bomber pilots would communicate with their crews via an intercom. But if a plane sustained enough damage to break the intercom, they had a backup system—a set of bells which, sounded in a particular way, meant "prepare to abandon" and then "jump."
This was the original "panic button," and it was generally rung instead of pushed.
By the time the U.S. entered the Korean War, in 1950, new planes were in play, equipped with brand new panic possibilities. F-84 Thunderjets had a button that jettisoned the "tip tanks"—extra fuel tanks held on the ends of the wings—in case the plane had trouble flying or taking off. Some models had controls that would shoot extinguishing fluid into a flaming engine, or that would deploy ejector seats like Guinther's. And almost all planes had "feathering buttons," which reconfigured the propellers into a more aerodynamic shape in case of engine failure. According to Jackson, all of these were referred to as "panic buttons."
Sticking a bunch of young men together in a stressful situation is great for slang, and at some point during the war, pilots repurposed the panic button as an opportunity to make fun of their agitated comrades, and then of most wartime situations. "[It is] a joking expression used to cover almost everything," wrote correspondent H.D. Quigg in 1951. "When an outfit moves, wags will remark, 'Somebody hit the panic button.' Some guys in the rear areas even have a well-labeled panic button on the wall by their desks."
Quigg and other reporters latched onto the free and easy use of this joke as a sign that the fighters were in good spirits. As enemy forces marched towards American camps in the capital, "signs reading 'panic button' were shortly found on light switches throughout Seoul," reported another 1951 article.
"It's always uttered as broad humor," Quigg wrote in a different dispatch that same year, adding that its new status as a joke boded well for the troops' position: "The days of panic are gone," he wrote. "Experience and confidence have taken over."
The phrase also began appearing in Air Force slang guides—a popular genre in the 1950s, as people at home became increasingly curious about what, exactly, the soldiers in this relatively new wing of the military were getting up to. In August of 1950, it showed up in The Pegasus, a magazine for aspiring pilots, explained as a "state of emergency when the pilot mentally pushes buttons and switches in all directions."
Quigg included its jokier definition in his own 1951 lexicon, along with a few other new coinages, including "hassel" [sic] and "no sweat." The New York Times, behind as usual, stuck it in a 1954 sidebar, called "Jet-Stream of Talk," right between "hangar rats" and "hawk it." They defined it as "get excited." Such a clearly relevant saying quickly made the jump to civilian usage. A New York Times archive search reveals that over the course of the next decade, the metaphorical panic button was either pushed or considered by the television industry, the New York Yankees, and a teen displeased by an unwanted kiss from a sailor.
These days, as the general rate of panic seems to climb higher and higher, real panic buttons still exist—usually as a way to quickly contact police or security companies. But the phrase, with its cooling-down influence, has stuck around as well, working itself into stock tips, sports analysis, and (of course) political discourse. So next time you find your finger inches away from your own personal panic button, thank those feisty Korean War soldiers, who taught us to save the ejecto-seats for when we really need them.
In 1977, Tish and Snooky Bellomo opened a store at 33 St. Marks Place, in New York's East Village. It was called Manic Panic, and as far as anyone knows, it was the first punk store in America. The Bellomo sisters were singers themselves, but they'd always had enviable style, too. At their tiny store, they sold stilettos, sunglasses, gloves with a bit of glam to them, the vintage clothes that they loved—or tore up until they did, and the product they'd become famous for, hair dye.
Almost 40 years later, to visit Tish and Snooky, you have to head to Long Island City, in Queens, where Manic Panic has been headquartered since 1999, in a warehouse-like building sitting along Newtown Creek. "We've always been underground," says Snooky—a sort of "secret society."
The headquarters still has that vibe: inside the 14,000 square foot space where boxes upon boxes of extra bright and bold hair dye are stacked, there's a tiny, hidden boutique, about the same size as the original store, full of hair dyes, rainbow-colored hair extensions and eyelashes, lipstick in pink, orange, purple, blue, and green, and the rest of their iconic line.
Manic Panic is going through a bit of renaissance right now, as pop stars from Rihanna to Katy Perry decide to dye their hair bright blues, red, pinks, greens, and more. Tish and Snooky talked to Atlas Obscura about the place where the company got its start—the store on St. Marks Place.
How did you first even get into music and decide you want to be singers?
Tish: That was easy. We just decided it, and we were.
Snooky: Yeah, we were sisters, we would always sing and dance and put on little shows for our mother, make her watch our shows.
Tish: And for the neighbors and stuff.
Snooky: Oh, yeah, we put on puppet shows.
Tish: We did puppet shows, and then during intermission, we would sell Kool-Aid.
Snooky: We made all the money on the concession stand.
Tish: Yeah, the show was free. But the concession was separate. We’d make Kool-Aid, and we’d sell it. We’d make it in all different colors, very similar to Manic Panic colors.
Snooky: And Tish would make the snacks which was...was it rice?
Tish: I would take rice, and it was all in the presentation. All it was, was white rice. I was five or six, so for some reason, my mother would allow me to cook rice. And then I learned this little trick. You could take a glass—I would take a shot glass—and butter it, put the rice in, and dump it upside-down, so you’d have this perfect little shape, this little pyramid-type shape. It would be garnished with jujubes, these multi-colored little candies. So, it would be rice with jujubes. It was all like Manic Panic colors. The Kool-Aid, the jujubes.
Snooky: So we were always singing and dancing…
Tish: And playing with glitter…
Snooky: Putting on shows, playing with glitter, and selling stuff. We’re still doing that.
How did you get into more punk music?
Snooky: We were on the scene…
Tish: First hanging out at Max’s..
Snooky: Yeah, going to Max’s Kansas City [a punk and glam-rock club in New York]...and it was at the tail end of the glitter-glam era. We were just out and about all the time. So we knew all the bands, we’d go to all the shows. Then we got into a show. We heard a friend of ours...a guy who became a friend of ours, this guy Gorilla Rose, we were in the room—I’ll never forget, it was the dressing room of Town Hall…
Tish: I thought it was the stairway.
Snooky: I thought it was the dressing room, because the Miami…
Tish: It was their dressing room, but I thought it was outside the dressing room door, a little bit, and we were sitting on the stairs, because we were all smoking.
Snooky: Well, I wasn’t. He was talking about this show he was going to be in, the Palm Casino Review, and he was going to play a talking portrait on the wall. He said, I’m going to do this act called Gorilla Rose and the Gutter Rats, and I need two backup singers to be my gutter rats. And Tish tugged on the tails of his clear plastic tuxedo, and said...we’re backup singers.
Tish: We’re your gutter rats.
Snooky: So then we were in the show.
Tish: That was ‘73?...’74? We became involved in this huge production, the Palm Casino Review, with all these drag queens, who taught us so much about make-up. And all these fabulous people, who basically just wanted to be on stage. A lot of them were very talented; a lot of them were not.
Snooky: Everybody loved putting on a show...
Tish: Everybody had great style.
Snooky: ...being divas.
Did you live down in the East Village?
Snooky: No, we lived in the Bronx. We would take the train from the last stop in the Bronx, all the way downtown, putting on our make-up the whole way, and by the time we got downtown, which was over an hour ride…
Tish: And it was usually around midnight. We would go out pretty late, come back when it was getting light.
Snooky: But we were obsessed with the downtown scene. We just thought it was so exciting and glamorous, and it was. You’d see David Bowie out at Max’s...you know, Lou Reed and all these people…
Tish: Oh, you know, I think one of the things, even before we started hanging out heavily at Max’s, didn’t we go to England first?
Snooky: I know when we came back from England, we really started going to Max’s. Yeah, because we had gone to England, where we went to these fabulous clubs, one of which was Speakeasy, where we saw, all these glam rock icons, just hanging out, all in one night.
Tish: Led Zeppelin…
Snooky: Jethro Tull…
Tish: Yeah...it was amazing.
Snooky: One-stop shopping.
So you were singing mostly, and then you got the idea to start the store.
Tish: We were in the Palm Casino Review, and the guys from Blondie, Debbie and Chris, were friends with Tomato and Gorilla and all our friends in the Palm Casino Review, so they decided we could try out to be back-ups in the Blondie band.
Everybody loved the way we dressed, so after we were out of the band, we decided to open a store with our friend Gina, because rents were so cheap.
How did you dress? What did people like?
Snooky: It was like a...mixture
Tish: It was glammy, punky...glam-punk...I guess.
Snooky: We’d go thrift shopping with Debbie Harry [the lead singer of Blondie], and find stuff from the ‘50s and ‘60s, just anything we felt was cool. If it wasn’t, we’d trash it up to make it cool.
Tish: I guess it was “glunk,” glam into punk.
When did you first realize that you were someone that other people looked at and thought, I like what they’re doing, I’m going to copy them—that you had your own style?
Tish: Just throughout life.
Snooky: In high school, we started wearing stars in our hair, and then other people started wearing stars in their hair. We got so mad.
Tish: We’d get so annoyed that people were copying us.
Snooky: People were always asking us where we got our outfits.
Tish: And I went to fashion design school for a short period of time, but it interfered with my nightlife too much, so I gave it up. But I had the desire to design, and I was making stuff for people here and there. I did some work for Dr. John, like rhinestoning and glammy stuff like that.
Snooky: Then we opened the first punk store in America. It was just what we loved. We always sold what we loved, and always did what we loved. So we got so much attention because we were the first punk store in America, we realized we were onto something. It was a good thing.
How did you find the first storefront?
Tish: I think someone told us about it.
Snooky: St. Marks wasn’t cool then. It was a wasteland. It was like this battle zone, there were all these empty store fronts. No one was shopping there.
Right, because it was before the ‘80s art scene in the East Village.
Together: It was ‘77.
So, post-Beatnik, pre-’80s art scene.
Tish: Yeah, we used to call St. Marks a dead hippie block.
Snooky: It was lots of junkies…
Tish: Homeless people…
Snooky: It was not a pleasant place to be, but it was cheap. It was $250 rent, and between me and Tish and our ex-partner, Gina, we’d come up with the rent.
We made stuff and brought stuff down from our rooms in the Bronx...and we’d go shopping with Debbie Harry at this basement on Reade St. that had all these unused leftover vintage stiletto-heeled shoes from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Cleared them out. And we’d find leftover lots of sharkskin suits, and just whatever we found, and we’d invest any money we made back in the business. Little by little, we built it.
If I had come during the first couple of years, how would the store have been? How had it changed five or seven years in?
Tish: In the very beginning, we hardly had anything to sell.
Snooky: Hardly anyone came in.
Tish: We were just living on this press we kept getting because we were the first punk boutique in America, and people would call us and ask us to mail them things. One of the most impressive products we had was our hair color, which we were bringing in from England. And you know, we’d have vintage sunglasses, and gloves, and all sorts of unused vintage.
We had a cat that used to swat at people.
Snooky: Cranky cat.
Tish: She was a polydactyl, so she had lots of extra toes in the front and the back. And sometimes she’d be sleeping on the boxes behind the clothes racks, and she’d just start batting at people...it would scare people.
Snooky: It was kind of a dump, because it was a couple steps down from street level, and the dirt would always come in. It was really hard to keep clean. In the beginning, it would just be Tish or me or Gina in the store…
Tish: Or Howie Pyro.
Snooky: Our first employee, he was, what, 14 or 15?
Tish: He needed extra credit for school.
Snooky: All we could pay him was $5 a day, but it was more than any of us made. Sometimes not one person would come in all day. Sometimes we’d make 50 cents, but luckily we were living at home with our very patient, understanding mother.
Did you imagine it would grow into a business?
Tish: I think we hoped it would, but we never had any kind of business training, and everything we had to do on such a shoestring budget. We couldn’t afford—we had really crappy looking floors, so we just painted it black. I think we did the same thing with the ceiling because it was so ugly. We drilled holes in the wall…
Snooky: We couldn’t afford a shoe rack.
Tish: We just drilled holes in the wall. Actually, Snooky’s boyfriend drilled holes in the wall. We put the heels in the holes.
When did it first feel like it was starting to work?
Snooky: It wasn’t that long... I think it was Christmas or Halloween. We were just amazed. We had gotten so much publicity. I remember Gina saying...we’re sitting on a gold mine here.
Tish: That was...we opened somewhere around April, but our official opening was in July. So if it was around Christmas, we were already doing well. Or mostly.
Snooky: We realized then it was a business that we had, that no one else had. Since we were the first. We were the only ones selling that style in all of America. And so we had the jump on everyone. Then all these other “punk stores” started popping up on St. Marks. Stores that had been vintage turned punk, but...we were the only punk “owned and operated” store.
Tish: We were the only ones who were entertainers as well. So we knew everything about makeup. We had a full line of not only extreme make-up but theatrical make-up, so people would come from all over to buy our cosmetics.
Snooky: And Halloween, there would be like, a line out the door. We had to let people in in little bits, because otherwise we would get ripped off. We were known for being the best store to rip off because we were just two women…
Tish: It was terrible layout, too. The door was at that end, and it was long and narrow. It was a little bit wider than this. But it was just really hard to control. Even though we had 5 or 6 people working different stations, you just couldn’t help everybody. So we had to have a doorman, and let people in like that, and we had to have them checking all the bags. It was really, you know...
Total crazy.
Snooky: It was. But we just figured everything out as we went along. We started out with one little candy box as our cash register, a Louis Sherry vintage candy box. And we knew we really made it big when we had to get a second candy box for our register in the back. And then Tish found a giant one.
Tish: So then we had three.
Snooky: Then we finally got a real cash register but it didn’t really work. It was just this big piece of metal that didn’t do anything but basically what the candy box did, just have the money in it. It didn’t add or subtract, or give you a receipt, but it looked like a cash register, so we were thrilled.
Tish: Yeah, and you could lock it.
Was it the sort of thing where you always had to be there?
Tish: Most of the time, unless we were out foraging for more stuff.
Snooky: We were almost always there. And we’re almost always here.
Sometimes we would sleep there. When the blackout happened in ‘77, we had to sleep there, to make sure we didn’t get ransacked.
Tish: People were looting, so we just slept over, like we were going to do something, other than get murdered.
Snooky: When we were closing the store, we were sleeping there. Because the apartment above us, where Tish had been living was empty, and we’d hear people…
Tish: Squatters.
Snooky: ...living there, and I think we heard through the grapevine that they were planning on breaking in.
Tish: And there was a big hole in the floor, too, wasn’t there?
Snooky: Oh god, what a nightmare.
Tish: So we’d sleep there, guarding.
Snooky: And it was so cold on the floor, and we had these giant cardboard, packing boxes, I guess they were, and we’d sleep inside of them, like homeless people. And thought, homeless people have the right idea, the cardboard is really warm. But it was scary.
I remember the cat knocking something over, and we were sure the burglars were coming in, and we were like, trying to get out of our boxes.
You had that great sign—where did it come from?
Snooky: Oh, Tish made it.
Tish: The original sign...there was a lightbox, and it had a broken piece of plastic in it. We measured it; Gina and I went down to Canal Street, got a new piece of plastic, I remember coming back with it on the train, and us laughing because we were like, in rush hour, with this thing on the 6 train, and it was huge. It was 6 or 7 feet wide. We got a can of red paint, and I just sat there on the sidewalk, painting our sign.
We had figured we wanted to call the store Manic Panic, our mother had thought of the name, and I just thought, ok, Manic Panic, this is what it looks like to me. I just did the shatter-y logo, that didn’t exist back then. Then it became a font. I just did it by hand. It was a little sloppy, but...it was alright. So, that was our sign.
I don’t know what ever happened that. It went into storage and then it disappeared.
Snooky: We’ll probably have to find on eBay, and we’ll have to pay to get it back.
People now often talk about the ‘80s as one of the St. Marks heydays. Did it feel like something special was happening at the time?
Snooky: It did.
Tish: That whole area was like, the place to be. When people came from other areas, they’d be really nervous, like, a friend of ours said, “Oh, I was so scared when I walked in your store, and you were there and you were Blondie’s back up singers, and you were in the Sic F*cks, and you did this and that, and God, I was so scared, but you were so nice to us.”
They were really surprised, because you went into the other stores, with no one who had anything to do with the scene, except maybe hanging out, and they would give everybody attitude, and be bitchy to everyone and make them feel uncomfortable and unfabulous. We were the store that wasn’t like that.
It never has been our way of doing business—we’ve always felt like especially the people who were a little...not so fabulous, they should feel fabulous, if they want to.
Snooky: It’s just the way our mother brought us up was, to be nice to people, and not be mean.
Tish: We can’t be mean to anyone. Unless, you know, they do us wrong.
Snooky: Then forget it.
Tish: Forget it. Hell hath no fury like a Bellomo scorned.
Snooky: But we did know, from early on, at the dawn of punk, we knew it was such a special thing, and such a special scene to be a part of. And it was like, a turning point in the history of music. We felt it and we knew it, and it was just so much fun to be there at the beginning of it. There’s never been anything like it, and there never will.
That’s about having taste, too—recognizing when something special is happening.
Tish: It attracted a group of people that I think felt just different from everybody else. It was sort of like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where all the different people from all over the world are, like, playing with mashed potatoes and they end up at the giant mountain. It was sort of like that. Everybody who kind of felt like a misfit or like they didn’t belong anywhere, they would feel at home at CBGB at night and Manic Panic during the day.
Snooky: Because everyone was a misfit. Everybody in a punk band was a misfit. We all banded together, and the rest of the world wanted to be misfits with us.
Tish: A lot of them were the same people who laughed at us, all of a sudden wanted to be part.
Snooky: We were tortured for the way we looked.
Tish: It’s the same thing with our hair color. When we first started doing beauty shows, people would laugh at us, and now we’ve got a hundred competitors, and they’re acting like it’s something new or they discovered it, or something. They’re the same people who laughed at us.
What kind of hair shows?
Snooky: We would go all over the world, to like trade shows, and conventions. These companies exhibits show their wears. The head honchos at the biggest convention, CosmoProf wanted to ban us because they said our booth looked like a bordello, you know we made the show look trashy, or something. Then the next year, everyone’s stand looked like a bordello.
How did you end up leaving the original store?
Snooky: Our landlord bought the building and didn’t renew our lease. So we were month by month.
Tish: This was his introduction. He walked in, he was like the third landlord. No one would ever tell us they were selling the building, even though we kept asking, because we wanted to try to buy it. He walked in, and said, I’m your new landlord, and I suppose you’re going to guess that I’m not going to renew your lease. That was his introduction. We had maybe a year left, or less.
Snooky: We just like didn’t know what to do or where to go. I guess we were in denial, that we would ever have to leave St. Marks. When it finally happened we were kind of caught off guard, and we just put everything in storage. At that time, we had started doing wholesale, for hair color. We continued doing the wholesale out of my then-boyfriend, now-husband’s studio apartment. It was a walk-up apartment in the West Village.
So, tiny, probably.
Snooky: It was a studio, one room, with hair dye up to the ceiling.
Tish: I don’t think it was any bigger than this room. It was a different shape but..
Snooky: It might have been smaller…but you know, we’d get these hair dye deliveries.
Tish: Oh, the UPS guy hated us.
Snooky: Oh, he did. We were just doing it ourselves. Answering the phone, taking the orders, packing the orders, rolling the boxes down the stairs, and putting them into my car, driving up to UPS, sometimes trying to find boxes to pack the stuff in on the way, and Tish would be in the backseat, packing the orders, while I’d be driving like a madwoman so we could get to UPS before they closed.
Tish: And they were usually pretty accurate. I didn’t screw up the orders.
Snooky: Yeah, we didn’t get many complaints! So then, after a year of that, we happened to be talking to someone we knew who had a chain of exercise studios—Crunch! I saw him at a party, and we knew him. And I said, we have all this stuff in storage from our old store, we’re doing wholesale out of my boyfriend’s studio apartment. He said, oh, well, I’m moving onto St. Marks Place, and opening a Crunch, and there’s this little office space that I’m not using, and you could have your store there and sell off your stuff and do your wholesaling over there. And so we moved in there.
Tish: And it wasn’t much bigger than this…the same size as this.
Snooky: Yeah! It was. It was a little basement. We were literally underground.
Tish: But at least we were still on St. Marks Place, and we were still down the block from our old space. But the guy upstairs, from Kim’s Video, kept throwing our sign away.
Snooky: He hated that our sign was hand-painted. And he’d instruct his employees to take it down the street and put it in the garbage. And we’d have to take it out of the garbage every day. Then he’d take it upstairs, and they’d have to have it behind their counter, and they’d say, oh, yeah, here it is and give it back to us. Finally, he burned it or something because we never saw it again. He tortured us, he absolutely tortured us, because he hated how DIY we were.
When the Crunch moved, we had to move again, over to 9th Street, to this little basement, which had a good vibe, it was Jimi Hendrix’s old crash pad and the original La Mama theater started in that basement. We were there for three years, maybe?
Tish: That landlord was nice.
Snooky: Then we moved to Tribeca, to a big loft space…
Tish: Because it wasn’t big enough for us, that little basement.
Snooky: Yeah, we were doing lots of wholesale by then. It was a scary basement, another underground place, with these rickety metal steps that people were afraid to go down. You know, you couldn’t even see what you were going down into. It was this little dungeon.
So, our wholesale was getting bigger and bigger. We outgrew that space and moved to this big—seemingly, at the time—loft space in Tribeca, and we were there for five years, and when that lease was up, the landlord wanted to quadruple the rent, so we moved out here, in ‘99.
By this time, you were doing a lot of wholesale, mostly with the hair dye...When did it become clear that the hair dye would be the product that would come to define the company?
Tish: I think it was back in the ‘70s. When we first started wholesaling, we thought, this was it. People were coming in from all around the world.
Snooky: We were the only ones who had it.
We’d go over to England with suitcases full of stuff they couldn’t get over there, like vintage sunglasses, and whatever we found.
Tish: Biker rings.
Snooky: We’d sell all that, and with the money, we’d buy all the things they had there that we didn’t have here. One of the things was hair dye. I think we just went to beauty supplies or something, and got it.
Tish: We just started bringing it in. We were like international smugglers. We were bringing it in for our store, and people started asking us to wholesale it. We contacted the manufacturer, and we were getting it from them, wholesale and selling it here. Then we just kept getting bigger and bigger.
They weren’t supplying us properly. We had a gentleman’s agreement with them that we were an exclusive, then we would find boxes that were marked for our competitors and our customers. It got really, you know, they weren’t really nice people.
Snooky: Oh, they were horrible. It was one of the worst times of our lives.
Tish: Our mother was dying, they weren’t supplying us, they were selling to our customers and competitors.
Snooky: We were in this tiny little basement.
Tish: We thought everything was over, and we had just enough strength to go find somebody to make the dye for us. It turned out that was the guy who originally invented it, and that the guys we were buying it from had stolen the formula. They were working for the inventor at one point, and they had taken the formula and run with it. So we found the original inventor, and he was manufacturing it for us.
Snooky: He said to us, oh, I wondered when you’d be calling me. So it all worked out. Always does.
Is Long Island City a good place for you?
Snooky: It’s great.
Tish: We love it. But we know we’re out of here, too, in a few years. We’re traveling salesman. We still do our dog and pony act. We’re coming out with a professional line, and expanding our product line, and looking into licensing our name for products. So it’s just expansion.
What are the things that make you guy panic?
Snooky: Someone in the Middle East who pretended to want to carry our line and distribute our line is now using half of our name, Panic, for a line of alternative hair colors. That has put me in such a panic, and I’m just so mad.
Tish: He took one of our competitor’s packaging, the exact same packaging, but put our name on it. So it’s really like, you know, it’s so blatant.
The other things that panics us is people not getting stuff done that they’re supposed to get done. Little things like that you can’t control.
Snooky: The thought of moving puts me in a panic, because every time we’ve had to move, we’ve had a bigger and bigger space, so now we have 14,000 square feet of stuff we’ve collected over almost 40 years. So the thought of moving almost traumatizes me. It puts me in such a state of panic. I would just love to never have to worry about moving ever again, and never be in that panic mode. It disrupts your whole life, your whole business, it’s horrible. The last time we moved it was horrible. That was 17 years ago, and it was not as much stuff as we have now.
New England, winter 1923. A little girl sits alone in her room, staring through the window at the woods behind her house. She daydreams as most children do, but then she goes to her typewriter and she writes. By age 12, Barbara Newhall Follett has published her first novel—The House Without Windows—based upon the wonders of those woods. She is called a child prodigy, a literary luminary, a spirit of nature. So why have so few people heard of her or read her work?
For one, Barbara Newhall Follett disappeared without a trace when she was 25 years old.
After The House Without Windows was published to such acclaim, the young author was in hot demand for reviews and additional books. Of course, not all the critics adored her. A few were downright dismayed that she had been published and had a taste of literary success at such a young age: “What price will Barbara have to pay for her ‘big days’ at the typewriter?” wondered Anne Carroll Moore of the New York Herald Tribune. But Barbara wasn’t particularly concerned with having a “normal” childhood. Like many children who display intellectual giftedness or precocity, she didn’t seem that interested in children her own age. When one of her playmates criticized what Barbara considered fun (her writing), she wrote them a letter explaining, “You don’t understand why I have my work to do—because, at this particular time, you have none at all.”
Throughout her teens Barbara continued to write, but she also turned her focus to what she considered the most prudent adventure of her life: to be a crewman on a ship sailing out to the Atlantic. At 14, her second book was published, The Voyage of the Norman D. During this time her father, Wilson, left Barbara’s mother for a younger woman. Barbara and her mother coped with the loss by sailing around the world, writing about their expeditions. They left Barbara’s younger sister, Sabra, behind. Don’t feel too sorry for Sabra Follett, though: she was also brilliant and went on to become the first woman admitted to Princeton’s graduate school in 1961.
Barbara and her mother eventually came back to New York with no money, and Barbara took a job as a secretary, which made her miserable. “My dreams are going through their death flurries,” she wrote to a friend. Without her father, who had been her encourager since she was small, the work began to dwindle. She found new inspiration in a young man she’d met named Nickerson Rogers. They traveled extensively—along the Appalachian Trail and in Europe—before marrying in 1934 and settling in Brookline, Massachusetts. For the first few years of the marriage she was happy, but somewhere around 1939, the marriage began to suffer.
“On the surface things are terribly, terribly calm, and wrong,” she wrote to a friend rather ominously, .”I still think there is a chance that the outcome will be a happy one, but I would have to think that anyway, in order to live; so you can draw any conclusions you like from that!”
What happened next was, whether she intended it to be or not, the conclusion: On December 7, 1939, after she and Nick had a fight, Barbara left their apartment on foot with just $30 and a notebook. She was never seen or heard from again. Nick didn’t report her missing for two weeks, and when she was listed as missing it was under her married name, Barbara Rogers — so the press didn’t pick up on the child prodigy turned gone girl. In fact, it wasn’t until her mother published a book in 1966 that the press got wind that the former child prodigy had disappeared. She’d been gone without a trace for over 25 years and no one knew.
Except, of course, her family. Over the years no sign of Barbara ever turned up, but her father, with whom she had never reconciled, wrote a letter imploring her to come home that was published in The Atlantic.
Today, Barbara’s half-nephew, Stefan Cooke, is the keeper of her mysteries. He’s published a book of her letters, runs farksolia.org which is dedicated to her work, and has tried to keep the spirit of Barbara Newhall Follett alive. Despite his extensive research, Stefan admits he can’t say with any certainty what happened to Barbara, though he thinks she very well could have started over again somewhere else, under a new identity. Though even that possibility, which would be true to Barbara’s dramatic and fascinating life, doesn’t sit entirely right with him:
“Whether she could have been so cruel as to not let her mother and sister and friends know whether she was living or dead is a good question,” he told me in an email, concluding “Maybe we'll never know what happened to her. Thankfully she left behind her treasure chest of letters, short stories, poems, Farksoo (her invented language), and her superb lost novel, Lost Island—and her voice rings loud and clear throughout.
