Darul Aman Palace, Afghanistan (via Wikimedia)

Golden beds, crocodile ponds, guests drowning in rose petals, rooms full of treasure: the homes of absolute rulers have always been marked by stratospheric excess. From the city-sized palaces of the Egyptian pharaohs to the swimming pools of Gaddafi, the world has looked on in fascinated wonder for thousands of years.

But even in this company, some palaces stand out. They have no claim on the reality around them. Their very presence signals the depth of their owners' delusions. From Nero's Golden House — a building which threatened to eat an entire city — to Saddam Hussein's Victory Over America Palace, the homes of history's true megalomaniacs tell a story of impossible power and of impossible hubris. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair..."

Here are their ruins:

NERO'S GOLDEN HOUSE
Rome

Piranesi's impression of the ruins of Nero's Golden House (via Wikimedia)

The Great Fire of Rome, in 64 AD, left much of the city in ruins. The Emperor Nero, it is said, watched his city burn, and sang to himself of the destruction of Troy. As the smoke cleared, he saw an opportunity. On the Palatine Hill, where the homes of Rome's elite used to stand, Nero built himself a gigantic palace — the Domus Aurea, or Golden House.

Nero's extravagance was already legendary. "He presented Menecrates the lyre-player and Spiculus the gladiator with mansions and property worthy of those who had celebrated triumphs," wrote Suetonius. "Nero never wore the same clothes twice. He placed bets of four thousand gold pieces a point on the winning dice when he played. He fished with a golden net strung with purple and scarlet cord. And he rarely travelled, they say, with less than a thousand carriages." But the Golden House was to surpass everything which had come before.

Portrait head of a young Nero (via Wikimedia/Carole Raddato)

From Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars: 

"The entrance hall was large enough to contain a huge, hundred-foot high, statue of the Emperor, and covered so much ground the triple colonnade was marked by milestones. There was an enormous lake, too, like a small sea, surrounded by buildings representing cities, also landscaped gardens, with ploughed fields, vineyards, woods, and pastures, stocked with wild and domestic creatures.

Inside there was gold everywhere, with gems and mother-of-pearl. There were dining rooms whose ceilings were of fretted ivory, with rotating panels that could rain down flowers, and concealed sprinklers to shower the guests with perfume. The main banqueting hall was circular with a revolving dome, rotating day and night to mirror the heavens. And there were baths with sea water and sulphur water on tap.

When the palace, decorated in this lavish style, was complete, Nero dedicated the building, condescending to say by way of approval that he was at last beginning to live like a human being." 

The ruins of Nero's Golden House (via Wikimedia/Carl Hudson)

The Golden House was shunned and despised by Nero's successors — and was swiftly buried beneath later construction. That, paradoxically, was instrumental in its preservation. It lay undiscovered until one day, in the 15th century, a young man fell through a crack in the hillside — and found himself in the echoing chambers of Nero's abandoned palace. Soon, the greatest artists of the Renaissance - Michaelangelo and Raphael — were lowering themselves down carefully into the ruins of the Golden House, creeping through its halls and chambers, and memorizing every detail of its intricate frescoes.

Once discovered, the Golden House could not stay pristine for long. Damp and rot attacked the delicate paintings. Visitors scratched their names on the walls — Casanova next to the Marquis de Sade. Rains led to the collapse of ceilings and vaults. Once-bright frescoes faded to muddy outlines. The Golden House is currently sealed to all but a few archaeologists — with many of its fantastical secrets still to be discovered.

MALKATA PALACE
Egypt

Malkata Palace from the air (via Wikimedia/Markh)

Amenhotep III, Amenhotep the Magnificent, ruled over Egypt for almost 40 years, from c.1386 BCE to 1349 BCE. Never before had Egypt seen such wealth, such power, or such ostentation. He ruled as pharaoh, as god-king, from the palace of Malkata.

In all that remains to us of ancient Egypt, the homes of the dead — and the homes of the gods — have fared far better than the homes of the living. The palace of Malkata — now in ruins — is one of the few places capable of hinting at the splendour of the pharaohs' lives. Just what kind of house would a living god build for himself? Malkata can show us.

Mummified head of Amenhotep III (via Wikimedia/G. Elliot Smith)

 Courtyards, audience-chambers, harems, and a gigantic ceremonial lake can be traced at the site of Malkata, today. The walls were covered with bright, delicate paintings — some still faintly visible — of animals, flowers, and the reed-beds along the Nile. It was a home on the scale of a city — a city built around one man. Today, the ruins of Malkata stretch across the desert, close to Thebes, still marking the course of Amenhotep's 3,000-year-old power.

SANS-SOUCI
Haiti

Sans-Souci, Haiti (via Wikimedia/Rémi Kaupp)

Henri, by the Grace of God and the Constitutional Law of the State, King of Haiti, Sovereign of Tortuga, Gonave and other adjacent Islands, Destroyer of Tyranny, Regenerator and Benefactor of the Haitian Nation, Creator of her Moral, Political and Martial Institutions, First Crowned Monarch of the New World, was born Henri Christophe, a slave, in 1767. The struggle for independence in Haiti brought him, in 1811, to his country's throne.

A king needed a palace — and the hills of Milot, Haiti, Henri Christophe set about building himself one. That is to say, he forced his people to do so. Having successfully evicted Haiti's former colonial rulers, Henri Christophe promptly reintroduced forced labor for the entire adult population. The Palace of Sans-Souci was built swiftly and ruthlessly.

Entrance to the Sans-Souci Palace, Haiti (via Wikimedia/Rémi Kaupp)

"The Versailles of the Caribbean" astonished visitors from all over the world. There were Neronian feasts and dances, elaborate gardens, artificial springs, and unapologetic splendor. For his people, looking on from outside the gates, it seemed like a different world. Henri's dreams of founding a dynasty were to be short-lived. He shot himself in October 1820, amidst a rising tide of public anger. His son survived just 10 days on the throne.

Milot, site of the Sans-Souci Palace (via Wikimedia)

KHAN'S PALACE
Uzbekistan

Khan's Palace (via Wikimedia)

Henri Chistophe's palace was a monument to his own power. The palace of Khudoyar Khan, last ruler of Kokand Khanate, was a monument to his powerlessness. By the time it was completed in 1871, Kokand had become a vassal state of Russia — and the Khan's power was almost at an end. With no nation left to govern, the Khan retreated behind the walls of his palace, turning it into a crazy, magnificent monument to his own vanishing authority.

Khan's Palace (via Wikimedia)

A hundred and nineteen rooms open up across seven courtyards, and the palace itself covers four acres. Compared to Nero's Golden House — let alone the scale of Malkata — this is nothing. But in the intricacy of its decoration, and the skills of its craftsmen, the Khan's palace was almost unmatched. 16,000 workmen constructed it — once again, compelled by forced labor.

In 1876, Tsar Alexander II of Russia announced that he would "yield to the wishes of the Kokandi people to become Russian subjects." Kokand Khanate ceased to exist, becoming part of Russian Turkestan. The Khan — having had but a few years to enjoy his new palace — was forced to flee, escaping over the mountains to Afghanistan with his family, and his wealth. His palace was promptly taken over by the new Russian government.

DARUL AMAN
Afghanistan

Darul Aman (via Wikimedia/Carl Montgomery)

Darul Aman, "the dwelling-place of peace," sits in ruins outside Kabul, Afghanistan. Amanullah Khan, ruler of Afghanistan between 1919 and 1929, ordered its construction. He intended the palace to be the centerpiece of his new capital city — a gleaming, European-style settlement, rising up from the plains.

Amanullah Khan was no Neronian despot — indeed, many see him as a progressive and reforming monarch. He enshrined equal rights for men and women in Afghan law, and confronted religious conservatism. Yet like many of the rulers whose palaces appear here, he was so certain of his own rightness that he was neglected to pay attention to the world around him. His plans had no roots in the reality of Afghan society — in the beliefs and the ambitions of his people. Afghanistan, as many have discovered since, cannot be transformed overnight, by sheer force of will.

American soldiers looking from Darul Aman towards Kabul (via Wikimedia/pitcdbf)

 Needless to say, the dreamed-of new city was never built - and the palace never came into its own. The conservative rulers who deposed Amanullah Khan scorned his plans, and his reforms. Darul Aman was left to rot. Set on fire in the 1970s, shelled by mujahideen in the 1990s, and targeted by the Taliban in 2012, it has suffered greatly.

Still standing today, Darul Aman is a crumbling ruin. A plan to restore it has so far come to nothing, but its walls contain the last century of Afghan history: the grandeur of its ambitions, the depth of its bloodshed and violence — a monument to Quixotic hope.

Inside Darul Aman, 2010 (via Wikimedia/Magnustraveller)

VICTORY OVER AMERICA PALACE
Baghdad

Mural of Saddam Hussein at the Victory Over America Palace (via Wikimedia/Robertjalberts)

Hubris and self-delusion on an epic scale, made manifest in reinforced concrete, the Victory Over America Palace squats by an artificial lake next to Baghdad Airport. Saddam Hussein began it to commemorate his very dubious "victory" over the United States in the 1991 Gulf War. (A Victory over Iran Palace, similarly dilapidated, sits nearby.)

The palace was never completed; construction was held back by economic sanctions. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the palace complex was taken over by the US Marines. As with all of Saddam's former palaces, the Victory Over America Palace became something of a tourist spot for the military. The photo opportunities, after all, were irresistible.

The Victory Over America Palace (via Flickr/Redcritter86)

Today, the complex has been handed back to the Iraqi Government, and the Victory Over America Palace still stands — what there is of it, in any case. It is likely to remain forever incomplete — a lasting monument to a triumph which never was, and the depth of a dictator's delusions.

For more on thwarted megalomaniac dreams, check out the Atlas Obscura Essential Guide to Epic Failure >

Just two days after the world’s largest goth festival had extinguished the candles for another year and the dark masses had left Leipzig, construction workers around the East German city’s main station unearthed a WWII bomb. My train was delayed as hundreds of people were evacuated so that the 160lb US explosive could be detonated. It was a reminder that Leipzig has experienced its fair share of darkness over the past century, and continued to do so for decades after the war, until 1989 when non-violent protests began locally and grew into a revolution that played a key role in the destruction of the Berlin Wall.

With more than 20,000 brooding revelers descending on the idyllic city of Leipzig for the Wave-Gotik-Treffen in June this year, an exhibition at the Stasi ‘Runde Ecke’ Memorial Museum revealed the secret history of the ministry’s persecution and surveillance of goths, punks, and any subculture that had a whiff of The Cure about them.

Die Gedenkstätte Museum in der Runde Ecke, the former offices of the Stasi in Leipzig

Awaiting the tour guide on the round street corner that gives the museum its name, the variously Doc Martened, mohawked, and leather-corseted members of our party must have looked like we had been rounded up for interrogation. I almost believed it myself, seeing that the museum sprung from the former building of the Stasi district headquarters. Leipzig is the only place in Germany where the original SSS offices have been preserved as a public memorial, down to the peeling linoleum, barred windows, security cameras and, the staff claim, "the typical GDR smell" lingering in the musty hallways.

We crept past a row of stern-looking filing cabinets as our guide presented us with internal reports from the 1980s on how the secret police documented counterculture factions, interviewed underage goths to ask them to spy on their friends, and prevented some from attending university. (There were staged readings from these files throughout the festival.) The SSS took cloak-and-dagger espionage to the next level — just not the kind of cloaks and daggers goths like.

Photo by Ulrike Horak

The "Schwarze Szene" (black scene) popped up relatively late in Leipzig around 1986 (with a whopping 85 goths known to the authorities by March 1989), whereas punks already had an established presence. The SSS, which took particular interest in investigating "unsozialistisches Aussehen" (anti- or un-socialist traits) lumped them in with the files on "Negativ und Dekadent" groups, profiled in a handy illustrated chart helping officers and informants recognize Gruftis or Gotiks, Heavy metals or "heavys," Skinheads, Punks, New Romantics, Teds (rockabilly teddy boys), and Poppers. A confusing flow-chart was created to clarify the relationship between these and their various subgroups and assess the threat they posed — Anarchie-punk and Nazi-punk, Psycho-billy, Satanisten, and the classic Hooligan among them. I don’t speak German. “What’s a Schmuddel-punk?” I wondered, “And is it anything to do with strudel?”

Gruftis were thought to exhibit the following characteristics: being 15-20 years old (“I’m leaving!” grumbled a middle-aged Mancunian goth within our group), Satan worshippers, fans of the band The Cure, disinterested in politics and society, or grave desecrators. And, most prominently: an "extrem pessimistische Einstellung" (extremely pessimistic attitude).

'Personifizierung' of a Grufti

I don’t know about that last one. (Grave desecration, on the other hand…) In many of the group photos the Stasi managed to get hold of — with each individual’s eyes eerily blackened out by the censors — everyone seems pretty comfortable hanging out with their friends, most sporting something that resembles a half-smile. And looking around the tour group and at other Wave-Gotik-Treffen visitors exploring the museum, they all seemed pretty cheery; sufficiently interested in society and politics to learn about how the Stasi trespassed on their peers.

I also noticed that a good portion of festival-goers shuffling about as fast as their creepers or vinyl platforms can carry them were in their forties — the right age to have been part of the original generation of persecuted teenagers. WGT is not just a youth-oriented event as one might expect: one purple-haired Dutch couple from the Stasi Museum tour told me they have been coming to the festival for twenty years (it’s just wound up the 23rd edition), and some have started to bring their children.

At the Wage-Gotik-Treffen Festival in Markt, Leipzig

Wave-Gotik-Treffen, too, was initially a victim of the GDR witch-hunt. The first Treffen, or gathering, was staged in Postdam in 1988, but was deemed illegal and only a few hundred visitors risked attending. It wasn’t until after reunification that the festival was launched in Leipzig.

It has since expanded and diversified to include so many subgroups that the Stasi would never have been able to keep track. Wandering through the camping grounds, the vast Südfriedhof (South Cemetery), or the Brühl boulevard in the main city center, I saw that steampunk seemed to be the order of the day, but pagans and vikings were out in full force, perhaps partly thanks to Game of Thrones. The Clara-Zetkin-Park’s Victorian picnic is in actual practice a relaxed mixer: among the unwieldy bustles and yards of black lace I spied fairies, punks, rivetheads (that last one I had to look up), and a proliferation of kilts.

Just being a goth or similar is a lot of work in the searing sun, with this year’s festivities falling on one of the hottest Whitsun weekends on record. I discovered the best trick is to take refuge under the cool marble of the St Nicholas Church. Surely no one who arrives at a dark music and arts festival with a carefully maintained vampiric complexion expects to leave with a golden tan, but those black parasols are no match for sunny Leipzig.

Kids in awe at the WGT Victorian Picnic

Which begs the question: why Leipzig? The city is known as the German "Musikstadt" where Bach composed his greatest masterpieces, and as the birthplace of Richard Wagner, one of classical music’s great titans and, inconveniently, one of the 19th century’s most infamous anti-Semites. It might seem just a tad incongruous to glance at the WGT line-up and try to choose between the bands Christian Death, Kiss the Anus of a Black Cat, and The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. Mind you, the annual Bach Festival runs a battle of the bands called Bachspiele, won in 2012 by local sadcore group Molllust, who played WGT this year. Their "opera metal" take on Bach’s aria Blute nur, du liebes Herz features angsty lyrics from the Matthew Passion that could have been penned by Evanescence: “Bleed on, dear heart/Ah, a child…threatens to murder its guardian/For it has become a serpent.”

Leipzig’s long and distinguished history is an integral part of what makes WGT so special. The pride of the city is its 800-year-old gothic church, the Thomaskirche. If you really are into Satan worship, as Stasi officials suspected, the Auerbachs Keller is just a few minutes’ skulk away. The 15th-century tavern is still cashing in on Goethe’s enthusiastic patronage during his studies in Leipzig between 1765 and 1768 — it was to become Mephistopheles’s den of choice in Faust. You can see the thriving contrast between Leipzig’s classical and punk scenes literally on every street corner, the elegant Wilhelminian buildings covered with graffiti and hand-drawn posters for noise rock gigs in Connewitz.

And still, it’s a tranquil town. Even when it’s taken over by a crowd of 20,000 souls in strange black regalia, the locals are welcoming, enjoying the spectacle as they go about their business. I asked repeat visitors from all over the world why they keep coming back, and the answer most gave me was that it’s “peaceful,” “everyone respects one another,” and “there’s no violence.” This is absolutely the way things should be in Leipzig, seat of the Friedliche Revolution (Peaceful Revolution).

For three nights during WGT, I was hosted by a classical musician based in the suburb of Plagwitz, and slept literally in the shadow of the harpsichord in his living room. (Do I get goth points for that?) According to my harpsichordist friend, if Leipzig were a person, it would be a rebellious teenager with conservative parents, just at the point of deciding what to do with his life. Perhaps the goths will give him a nudge in the right direction.

All photographs by the author unless indicated. 

Pop-up library by Matali Crasset in Istres, France (photograph by Philippe Piron, via Designboom)

Books and the beach go together like sun and sand, and around the world libraries have been set up right by the shore. From Spain to Tel Aviv, pop-up mobile carts and elaborately designed structures are offering books to beachgoers to read for free. 

The above colorful canopy was designed by Matali Crasset and installed in Istres, France, last year. The Bibliothèque de Plage offered shade along with shelves of books in a fold-out design of steel and tarpaulins. While Crasset's is more elaborate than most beach libraries, many of them are like this — able to set up quickly right on the sands. There's also a mobile version in Holland, and another inaugurated last July in Tel Aviv on the Metzitzim Beach, offering books in five languages and Wifi for tablets to check out electronic reading material. In 2010, IKEA set up 30 shelves on Sydney's Bondi Beach for the surfers and sunbathers

Biblioplatja in Vinaròs, Spain (photograph by Daniel Gil)

The Albena, Bulgaria, beach Library (via Albena Resort) 

Some of the beach libraries are more permanent. In May in Abu Dhabi, a public library opened in a beautiful glass architecture on Corniche Beach. Starting in 2006, the Department of Seine-Maritime in France has installed 12 small libraries on its northern beaches (you can find a whole map of them online). Perhaps the most well-known is the extensive beach library at Albena, a restort on Bulgaria's Black Sea. Designed by German architect Herman Kompernas, it's built to withstand the sun, water, and wind, and equipped with a vinyl cover to protect the books in rain. It reopened this May with more than 6,000 volumes in 15 languages, all totally free to take — and visitors are encouraged to leave their own tomes for others. 

At Atlas Obscura, we've written about libraries in cemeteries, on the backs of burros, in Masonic lodges, and other unexpected places around the world. Yet with summer in season and the train to the Rockaways inviting us away from the office here in NYC, there idea of finding a good read on the beach is irresistible. 

Library on the beach in Étretat, France (via Mosman Library)

View of the library on the beach in Étretat, France (via Mosman Library)

Discover more beautiful and unusual libraries on the Atlas Obscura >

photograph from esosedi.ru, via rt.com

What is this curious concoction of towering tubes? Seemingly abandoned in a forest near Moscow, the electrical installation has been turning up on the internet for a while now, and resurfaced this week on RT.com with a more detailed backstory on the futuristic machine. 

While it may look like a sci-fi dystopia set piece, its real use is much more interesting. The towering Marx generator, sometimes erroneously mistaken for a Tesla coil, was constructed by the Russian Electrical Engineering Institute in the 1970s in the town of Istra to test lightning insulation. As RT.com reports:

The facility is absolutely unique; nothing like it exists anywhere in the world, primarily because of its outstanding charge capacity. At its peak operating capacity the giant Marx generator, when lightning is discharged onto an isolated platform, has power equal to all power generation facilities in Russia — including thermoelectric, hydroelectric, nuclear, solar, and wind power stations combined. But only for about 100 microseconds, Rossiya-1 TV reported.

You can check out the dormant "lightning machine" in the aggressively dance-soundtracked drone video below. According to reports, the machine is still periodically brought back into use, so a caution to would-be explorers: if you see your hair standing on end, the air is bristling with a manmade storm. 

Find more electrical oddities on the Atlas Obscura >

A weaver in Ollantaytambo, Peru (all photographs by James Emmerman)

In the Andes of Peru, tucked between Cusco and Machu Picchu, lies the Sacred Valley of the Incas. A stretch of virtually untouched villages and ancient ruins ranging across broad fields and mountain slopes, it drips with Andean history, culture, and beauty.

Originally formed by the Urubamba River (the region is also known as the Urubamba Valley), the valley was once the fertile and spiritual base of the Incan Empire. Corn, coca, potatoes, and more grew in fields and along terraced mountain slopes, while the Incan astrological beliefs reflected the river’s relentless flow.

Today, the mountain air is crisp and thin. Massive sky tumbles into tremendous landscapes. Quechua-speaking farmers work the fields with methods unchanged since the ancient Incan era. But while the Sacred Valley is deeply routed in its history, contemporary influences are now intertwined with tradition. The only thing more striking than the landscape is the cohesive, living blend of the ancient and the modern.

The region continues to produce crops for Cusco including grains, peaches, and avocados, and while the ages-old farming methods and market days attract tourism, they also remain important cultural practices.

Farmers in the Sacred Valley region

Farmers in the Sacred Valley region

A farmer in the Sacred Valley region

A farmer drinking from a mug in the Sacred Valley Region

In Maras, approximately 40 kilometers north of Cusco, salt has been harvested through up-slope evaporation ponds since pre-Incan times. Heavily salinized spring water flows into an intricate system of tiny channels, constructed so it runs down to several hundred ancient terraced ponds. An informal cooperative system between farmers established during the time of the Inca, if not before, keeps the system running.

Salt ponds in Maras, Peru

Stream at the salt ponds in Maras, Peru

The Sacred Valley boasts some of the finest Incan ruins in all of the Americas, peppering the landscape like grounded ships. The town of Ollantaytambo is set on a plateau with surrounding mountains, each covered in terrace-style ruins, originally for farming on the unstable terrain.

Smoke from a nearby wildfire in Ollantaytambo, Peru

Today the space is used for public enjoyment, such as the summer Ollantay Raymi festival dedicated to the Incan sun god. An elaborate performance of the 18th century Ollantay Drama is performed on the ancient terraces, which tells the story of general Ollantay and his forbidden love of a princess. 

Ollantay Raymi performers in Ollantaytambo, Peru

Ollantay Raymi performer standing on the terraced ruins in Ollantaytambo, Peru

Ollantay Raymi performers standing on the terraced ruins in Ollantaytambo, Peru

Ollantay Raymi performers in Ollantaytambo, Peru

A hug at the Ollantay Raymi festival in Ollantaytambo, Peru

With so much tourism flooding in and out of Machu Picchu and Cusco, it’s easy to miss the teeming beauty of this region. From its natural vibrance to rich history, the Sacred Valley is a truly unique hidden wonder.

A weaver in Ollantaytambo, Peru

 A weaver at The Textile Centre in Chinchero, Peru

Farmer walking with donkeys in Chinchero, Peru

A shaman in Ollantaytambo, Peru

Ollantaytambo, Peru

A house in Chinchero, Peru

A shop in Ollantaytambo, Peru

Thread at the The Textile Centre in Chinchero, Peru

Men sitting against a church in the Sacred Valley region

Two weavers at the The Textile Centre in Chinchero, Peru

A weaver's hands at the The Textile Centre in Chinchero, Peru

Clouds over ruins in the Sacred Valley region

View more of James Emmerman's photography on his website. You can also follow him on Flickr and Twitter. 

Entering Riesending: from this point it is 600 feet straight down (photo by Markus Leitner/Bavarian Red Cross, via Wikimedia)

This unassuming hole in the ground is the only known access point to Germany’s deepest cave — the Riesending-Schachthöhle. It recently made headlines around the world when a man named Johann Westhauser was seriously injured in a rockslide 3,200 feet underground. It took 12 days to bring him back to the surface, in a rescue operation that grew to include over 700 people.

Stretcher & a section of rigging used to pull Westhauser through the Riesending (photo by Markus Leitner/Bavarian Red Cross, via Wikimedia)

 Westhauser was no amateur who got in over his head. He’s an experienced caver, and probably knows the Riesending as well as anyone else on Earth. He was a member of the team that first began exploring and mapping the system in 1995. But the Riesending is not an ordinary cave. Its name translates to “massive thing,” a fitting descriptor for this gigantic underground realm. There are almost 12 miles of passages, sheer vertical shafts hundreds of meters high, and an underground lake lying between the surface and the cave’s deepest point over 3,700 feet below.

Profile of the Riesending Cave; scale in meters. Westhauser was injured between bivouacs 5 and 6. (map by Maxxl²/ARGE Bad Canstatt, via Wikimedia)

The Riesending was formed by acid-charged rain and groundwater seeping through openings in the limestone near the peak of the Untersberg massif — a 6,400-foot table-top mountain that towers over the landscape between Germany and Austria. Over time, the porous limestone dissolved away, leaving behind caverns and shafts in much the same way that a river carves a canyon. Because it begins on the top of such a large mountain, the water that formed Riesending had a long way to travel before coming to rest at the water table — making it much deeper than other, similar cave systems. 

The Untersberg Massif, viewed from Germany (photo by Malouette/Flickr user)

Legend holds that 12th century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I is asleep deep inside Untersberg mountain, poised to wake and restore Germany to its ancient greatness as soon as his beard grows around the table three times and/or “the ravens cease flying.” So everyone has to be extra quiet inside.  

Frederick I dispatches a boy from his lair to see if the ravens are still flying (via Wikimedia Commons)

The Riesending is called a "pit cave" because of its vertical orientation; this is what makes it so technically challenging to traverse. Because the access shaft and much of the interior structure run straight up and down, cavers must descend and ascend on ropes for large parts of the cave’s length. 

Pit cavers get down these deep shafts the same way climbers descend cliffs; they anchor ropes and rappel down to the bottom. The hard part is getting back up. Using traditional rock climbing techniques is often infeasible or just impossible in a deep pit cave like the Riestenberg. Instead, cavers use a special piece of equipment called an ascender to inch back up the same rope they used to rappel down — a technique sometimes called “jumaring” or “jugging.”

Caver rappelling into a 96-foot pit cave in West Virginia, about 1/6 the depth of the Riesending's entrance shaft (photo by Dave Riggs/Flickr user)

Dr. George Veni directs the National Cave and Karst Research Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although he hasn’t been into the Riesending, he's been exploring and studying caves like it for over 20 years. Navigating through such an environment, he says, is a physical, technical, and even mental challenge: “Cavers who explore caves like Riesending usually spend weeks getting into shape in order to maximize what they’ll be able to do, with the greatest safety and ease." 

Reaching the bottom of a cave that deep, he explains, is never accomplished “on a single trip by a single team. Many hundreds of pounds of rope and associated hardware, not counting personal food, water, lights, batteries, first aid kit, etc., are needed so these caves are explored and rigged in stages over several trips.” The team that set the world record for depth in Krubera Cave in 2012 followed in the footsteps of many previous expeditions, but were still underground for 27 days in total.  

If you’re headed to the bottom of the Riesending, you'll need to bring a boat as well. About 930 meters below the entrance point, there is a vivid blue lake that must be crossed by raft in order to proceed deeper into the cave. With temperatures constantly hovering just above freezing, and humidity near 100%, swimming is not an option. 

In addition to the physical demands and technical skill required to navigate these environments, Dr. Veni says there is a strong psychological component to exploring exceptionally deep caves: “Far more than with distances in horizontal caves, deep caves produce a more profound feeling of remoteness. Sometimes very fit people, but not very experienced with caves, do not go as deep as they physically could because of the psychological discomfort with their distance from the surface. As a take-off on diver terminology, we call this discomfort 'The Rapture of the Deep'.”

There must have been something alluring about this feeling of remoteness for Johann Westhauser, but his near fatal accident is a reminder of how dangerous such an alien environment can be. 

Descend into more of the world's strange and beautiful underground realms on the Atlas Obscura >

Image of the French Revolution from "Histoire religieuse, monarchique, militaire et littéraire de la Révolution Française, et de l'Empire, depuis la première assemblée des Notables en 1787, jusqu'au 20 Avril, 1814, etc" (1840) (via British Library)

The motto liberté, égalité, fraternité is all over Paris, from the walls of the Panthéon to the Hôtel de Ville. Yet that famous phrase of "liberty, equality, fraternity" omits a few words that were often included during the French Revolution: “ou la morte” — "or death."

Put that way, it might remind you of the Reign of Terror that swept through the ideals of the Revolution. But without it, the city’s violent history hides in plain sight. Despite reminders of the Revolution nearly everywhere you look, from mass graves from the guillotine at the Cimetière de Picpus to the stones of the Bastille reconstructed as the Pont de la Concorde, the one thing that can be hard to fathom in modern-day Paris, is the sheer terror of The Terror.

Marie Antoinette's recreated cell at the Conciergerie (photograph by André Lage Freitas/Wikimedia)

It’s perhaps most noticeably absent in Marie Antoinette’s cell at the Conciergerie. To Americans like me, the name alone suggests the Four Seasons instead of death row. In her cell, a mannequin serves as a stand-in for the queen, but she’s frozen in time, sitting in front of a tiny altar with her head eternally attached to her neck. It’s difficult to imagine the panic and dread she must of felt beneath her dignified façade on the way to the scaffold, but then again, being sympathetic and well-understood was never Marie Antoinette’s strong suit. Even the original site of the guillotine that decapitated her doesn’t inspire much fear today, transformed into the Place de la Concorde with its enchanting, illuminated obelisk.

But there’s at least one place where the violence of the French Revolution is still palpable. Every Saturday at 3 pm, you can take a guided tour of the crypt beneath St. Joseph des Carmes. There you can see the battered remains and bloodstains of some lesser-known victims of The Terror — a group collectively known as the martyrs of September.

Joseph des Carmes (photograph by Frédérique Panassac)

The remains of the Martyrs of September (photograph © Marie-Christine Pénin/tombes-sepultures.com)

The martyrs were a group of priests, seminarians, bishops, and, most famously, the Archbishop of Arles. They were rounded up by a mob of sans-culottes and imprisoned in the convent near St. Joseph's after refusing to take an oath that undermined papal authority. The mob’s punishment for this transgression was quick and especially brutal. They began killing their prisoners on September 2, 1792, when they bashed in the Archbishop’s head, stabbed him, and trampled the body.

The following day the mob set up a kangaroo court to try the remaining prisoners. Martyrologist John Foxe described them as soaked in blood up to the elbows with executioners and judges freely subbing in for one another without bothering to wipe the gore off their hands.

"The Massacre Of The Priests In September 1792" by Hippolyte de la Charlerie

Unsurprisingly, nearly all the clergy members were found guilty. But instead of condemning them from the bench, the judges simply told them they were free to leave. Each defendant left down the same stairway and at the bottom there were plenty of people waiting to hack their bodies apart. British ambassador, Earl Gower, described the wake the mob left behind:

“After [the killings] their dead bodies were dragged by the arms or legs to the Abbaye… here they were laid up in heaps till carts could carry them away. The kennel was swimming with blood, and a bloody track was traced from the prison to the Abbaye door where they had dragged these unfortunate people.”

When it was over, 190 people were killed at the convent in just two days. Their bodies were thrown in a pit and covered in quicklime.

The paving stones stained with the blood of the martyrs (photograph © Marie-Christine Pénin/www.tombes-sepultures.com)

Today, some of the recovered bones of the martyrs are on display in the church crypt. Many still have the obvious marks of swords and pikes. Some skulls sit in niches, while others are stacked in a cabinet above the epitaph, "Having preferred death to violating the holy law of God, they were massacred." In a separate room, bloodstained paving stones are displayed. The spilled blood, coupled with the list of names of the martyrs and the portraits of the executed bishops, allows us an unusually visceral, yet empathetic look at these casualties of the Terror. 

The monument to the Martyrs of September at St. Sulpice (photograph by Allison Meier/Atlas Obscura)

Of course there are other, less shocking monuments to the Martyrs of September. Every day at nearby Saint-Sulpice, visitors pass a memorial featuring two black angels without knowing the story behind it. There, The Terror continues to hide in plain sight. 

Read more about the strange lives and afterlives of the saints at Elizabeth Harper's All the Saints You Should Know.

The derelict amphitheater of Mount Buzludzha as it appears today (photograph by Darmon Richter)

The Bulgarian Communist Party, who ruled this Eastern European nation from 1946 until the fall of communism in 1989, was not without its critics — and a large proportion of those numbered amongst the party’s own subjects. Today, most Bulgarians are keen to forget their nation’s communist years, and move on into the 21st century. But as they do, the monoliths of that former regime still cast down long shadows from Bulgaria’s mountains and hilltops.

The Bulgarian Communist Party oversaw the construction of more than 150 large stone, steel, and concrete monuments, spreading the full length and breadth of the country; from Vidin in the west, to Varna in the east. The majority of these adhered to the same cubist style that underlined Stalin’s own architectural initiatives in the Soviet Union — the socialist-realist style, as it would be later dubbed.

In subject matter, however, the sculptures varied greatly.

A good number of Bulgaria’s communist monuments were built to celebrate connections with Moscow, either the role that Russia’s army played in delivering Bulgaria from Ottoman rule during the Russo-Turkish Wars of the 19th century, or in the 20th century, when Stalin again offered Bulgaria the hand of friendship in the form of Soviet affiliation.

Statue of Russian Admiral F. F. Ushakov at Cape Kaliakra (photograph by Darmon Richter)

 
A graffitied communist monument in Shumen (photograph by Darmon Richter)

It’s interesting (and perhaps unsurprising) to observe now, how Bulgaria’s pro-Soviet monuments have been allowed to fall into the worst states of repair — neglected, defiled, graffitied. Meanwhile, monuments built in the same years, by the same hands, in the same style, and yet dedicated to Bulgaria’s own history, are cherished to this day.

The statue of the revered 19th century Bulgarian philosopher-poet Hristo Botev, for example, stands clean and well-maintained as the revolutionary gazes thoughtfully across the town of Kalofer in the south. In Shumen, the “Monument to 1,300 Years of Bulgaria” has been beautifully preserved, featuring a ticket office, guided tours, and even serving as a popular venue for weddings.

Bulgaria’s “communist monuments” then, have only their origins in common. While all of them were built under a communist regime using the materials and styles made popular at that time, it seems that many are no longer deemed communist in nature or ideology. The Bulgarians, wisely, are picking the best relics of a (largely) bad time and re-appropriating them, recasting these impressive sculptures into the long, complex and — at times — tragic narrative of their collective past.

To list all of Bulgaria’s surviving communist-era monuments here would be near-impossible. Instead, consider this a tasting session. Here are six of the country’s most impressive communist ghosts, some beloved, some despised, and relics all of an age that many would rather forget.

Monument to 1,300 Years of Bulgaria, Shumen

Towering over the city of Shumen in the east of Bulgaria, the memorial complex of the Monument to 1,300 Years of Bulgaria — alternately known as the “Founders of the Bulgarian State Monument” — rises out of a mountain plateau at a height of 450 meters above sea level.

Bulgaria's founding fathers (photograph by Darmon Richter)

The structure is formed from a series of interlacing scenes and statues, encased within a cage of vast concrete pillars — pillars that close to form an awning high above a central marble-tiled courtyard. Designed by the local sculptors Krum Damyanov and Ivan Slavov, the monument was opened by the communist government in 1981 to celebrate the anniversary of the foundation of the First Bulgarian Empire in 681 AD; and, no doubt, to closer associate their own regime with that beloved golden age of Bulgarian history.

Bulgaria’s founding fathers appear to emerge from the very bricks themselves, and the imposing monument can be seen from as far as 20 miles away.

The grand staircase approaching the memorial at Shumen (photograph by Darmon Richter)

An ancient Bulgarian ruler with warhorse (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Another figure emerges from the stone (photograph by Darmon Richter)

The Shumen memorial complex is larger than it looks... (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Park-Monument of the Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship, Varna

Based on a design first conceived in 1958, the “Park-Monument of the Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship” didn’t rear its seven concrete heads until 1974 — when 27,000 volunteer laborers were recruited into what would become a four-year construction project in the port city of Varna.

The Park-Monument of the Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship pictured in the 1970s

A communist rally outside the Varna monument

Locally-based sculptors Evgeni Barǎmov and Alyosha Kafedzhiyski worked with leading state architect Kamen Goranov to create a unique monument celebrating Bulgaria’s love for Moscow, for Russia, and for the Soviet Union. Perched on an artificial hill at the edge of the city, the monument points across the Black Sea towards Russia and measures 48 meters across, 23 meters high. During those years, the city of Varna itself was briefly renamed “Stalin.”

The “Park-Monument of the Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship” was built on the site where the Russian army made their camp as they fought to liberate Bulgaria from Ottoman rule during the First Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829). The 11-meter tall figures positioned along the “wings” of the structure depict Russian soldiers coming to the rescue of Bulgaria’s women, who offer in return gifts of bread, salt, and flowers.

Before the collapse of Bulgarian communism, the monument was lit each night with 180 floodlights positioned in the surrounding park. Each of the park's 20,000 trees represented a fallen Russian soldier, while a series of loudspeakers would play the “Leningradsky” movement from Shostakovich’s seventh symphony.

An inscription on the front of the monument, now all but faded from both sight and memory, read: “Friendship for centuries throughout centuries.”

Approach to the monument (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Detail of Russian soldiers (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Bulgarian women bearing gifts of gratitude (photograph by Darmon Richter)

A Soviet-esque star inside the hollow monument (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Another chamber inside the Varna monument (photograph by Darmon Richter)

View from the top observation deck (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Looking out across the city of Varna (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Detail of Russian faces cast in concrete (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Monument to the Soviet Army, Sofia

In Bulgaria’s capital of Sofia, a 1954 monument dedicated to the Red Army of the Soviet Union has become, in more recent years, a veritable forum for counter-cultural political expression.

Placed atop a high pedestal, a Soviet soldier stands between a Bulgarian man and woman; around the pillar, other military compositions look out across one of the city’s main parks. It’s a popular spot with the youth culture of Sofia, and so perhaps it’s no surprise this Soviet memorial has become a punch-bag for young Bulgarians who feel less than empathic towards their nation’s former overlords.

The slogan beneath the figures translates as "Up to Date" (via Creative Commons)

In June of 2011, one of the memorial scenes was painted over by unknown artists, to recast the Red Army soldiers as comic book characters — Wolverine, Superman, Captain America and the Joker amongst them. Since then the trend flourished, with the Soviet figures decorated in colored balaclavas mimicking those worn by the controversial Russian protest group Pussy Riot; and later, in the Guy Fawkes masks favored by hacker organization Anonymous. In 2013, the monument was painted pink to commemorate the anniversary of the “Prague Spring.”

Most recently, in February 2014, an anonymous artist once again transformed the Soviet soldiers — this time painting the central figure in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, to show support for the revolution in Kiev. 

Sofia's "Monument to the Soviet Army" (via Creative Commons)

The monument in 2014, sporting the Ukrainian colors (via Creative Commons)

Memorial to the Defenders of Stara Zagora, Stara Zagora

In 1977, a 50-meter monument was unveiled in the southern city of Stara Zagora to commemorate the 100th anniversary of a fierce battle for independence.

Officially titled the “Samara Banner Memorial to the Defenders of Stara Zagora in 1877,” this particular memorial complex honors the Bulgarian volunteers who fought against the Ottoman forces here, alongside troops from the Russian city of Samara.

The iron-inlayed courtyard beneath the monument (photograph by Darmon Richter)

After six hours of conflict, the battle was lost — the Bulgarian and Russian fighters were forced into a surrender, powerless to prevent the massacre that would follow. Over the course of the next three days the city was burnt to the ground. By the end of the battle, the death toll in Stara Zagora and its neighboring villages numbered 14,500.

The monument, designed to resemble the Samara banner blowing in the wind, stands now on the site of the former Russian command post. The figures of a Russian officer along with six Bulgarian volunteers — one for each of the units who joined the Russian forces — stand solemn watch over the city below.

A Russian officer emerges from a concrete block (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Detail of Bulgarian volunteer fighters (photograph by Darmon Richter)

The soldiers look out over Stara Zagora (photograph by Darmon Richter)

The banner of Samara blowing in the wind (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Hillock of Fraternity, Plovdiv

The south of Bulgaria was once ruled by the ancient Thracian kings, and there remain a number of royal burial mounds spread far and wide across these grassy plains. In the city of Plovdiv, a 1974 monument set out to recreate the grandeur of those ancient burial grounds in the form of the “Hillock of Fraternity.”

Looking across the memorial courtyard (photograph by Nate Roberts, via Yomadic)

Unveiled on the 30th anniversary of Bulgaria’s Socialist Revolution, the memorial complex at Plovdiv is shaped like a vast, concrete wreath. Inside, it contains the interred remains of partisan fighters from the Plovdiv region.

The Hillock of Fraternity has sadly fallen into disrepair in recent years. An eternal flame that once burnt inside this 90-meter installation has long since been allowed to die, and nowadays the outside of the monument bears the scars of graffiti and neglect. 

View inside the Hillock of Fraternity (photograph by Nate Roberts, via Yomadic)

The tomb of the fallen partisans (photograph by Nate Roberts, via Yomadic)

House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Mount Buzludzha

High up on the windswept peak of Mount Buzludzha — a location which, at 1,440 meters above sea level, marks the near-perfect geographic center of the country — stands the largest and most imposing of Bulgaria’s communist ghosts.

The “House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party” was opened in 1981, a colossal concrete saucer accompanied by a tower which rises to a height of 107 meters (351 feet). The project was dedicated to Bulgaria’s 1878 liberation from Turkish rule, and in particular to the bloody battle that raged in nearby Shipka Pass, where a 30,000-strong Ottoman horde was defeated by a small garrison of Russian soldiers and Bulgarian volunteers. 

The House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party in the early 1980s

The central amphitheater of the Buzludzha monument

The observation deck inside the outer rim of the saucer

Detail of a mural depicting the Red Army marching into battle

The design of the building was created by Georgi Stoilov, while more than 60 Bulgarian artisans were recruited to work on the painstakingly detailed murals inside. The project cost more than 16 million Bulgarian Levs (about $11 million), much of which the Bulgarian Communist Party managed to source from its own citizens in the form of “suggested donations.”

In its heyday, the Buzludzha Monument was like nothing else on this planet. Even now, it commands breathtaking views across the Balkan Mountains, the outer rim fitted with a circular observation deck that once featured thick glass windows. The building also benefitted from a comprehensive heating and air conditioning system, powered from a boiler room in one of the basement levels.

The central amphitheater, a space used for important meetings and political rallies, featured tiered marble seating and a circular ceiling lined in beaten copper. Murals on the walls depicted Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Bulgaria’s own communist leaders, in between illustrated scenes of battle, industry and harvest.

Today, the harsh climate of the Balkans has left the monument in poor shape. The Cyrillic characters across the front of the building, that once spelt the words of the socialist hymn “The Internationale,” are falling away to leave blank, grey concrete; the emblematic hammer and sickle set into the ceiling of the auditorium now gazes down forlorn upon a scene of ruin and decay.

The road to Buzludzha (photograph by Darmon Richter)

View across the memorial plaza (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Detail of Cyrillic lettering on the building's exterior (photograph by Darmon Richter)

The breathtaking view from Mount Buzludzha (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Inside the red star at the top of the Buzludzha tower (photograph by Darmon Richter)

View from the top of the tower (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Looking down onto the saucer (photograph by Darmon Richter)

The House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Darmon Richter is a freelance writer, photographer, and urban explorer. You can follow his adventures at The Bohemian Blog, or for regular updates, follow The Bohemian Blog on Facebook.

It's deep into summer now in New York City, and here at Atlas Obscura we have a whole wunderkammer of wondrous events planned to make the most of the sunny season. We also have some recommendations of hidden spaces in all five boroughs, with what we are sure as some unfamiliar locales for even the most extensive of city explorers. 

ATLAS OBSCURA HOSTS A STRANGE SUMMER:

	ROAD TRIP TO NEW HAVEN July 19 Leave New York behind and hit the road with Atlas Obscura for a full day exploration of New Haven, Connecticut, including the Cushing Brain Collection and an underground cemetery.
	MANHATTAN'S GILDED AGE RUINS July 20 Discover what remains of the Gilded Age in Manhattan in a walking tour of history hidden in plain sight.
	LOVECRAFT IN BROOKLYN July 21 H. P. Lovecraft concluded his unsettling "The Horror in Red Hook" in Brooklyn's historic Green-Wood Cemetery, and in tribute we are staging a complete atmospheric reading of the tale among the tombs.
	THE RACE UNDERGROUND July 23 Author of The Race Underground Doug Most joins us at the New York Transit Museum for a story of rivalries, corruption, and incredible invention — the battle between NYC and Boston to build America's first subway. For a preview, check our our Q&A with Most.
	THE INSALUBRIOUS VALLEY July 26 Prepare for rough terrain and wear sturdy shoes for this adventure into the industrial and colonial-era secrets of the Newtown Creek. For even lifelong New Yorkers, it's an area that remains a void in the public eye.

OFF THE BEATEN PATH IN THE FIVE BOROUGHS:

	FORT TILDEN Queens Hit the beach alongside military ruins at Fort Tilden, once a part of the Atlantic sea wall defense system. Walk through sand-filled frames of houses, explore bunkers, and check out MoMA PS1's installations in the abandoned structures as part of their Rockaway! summer exhibition.
	DEAD HORSE BAY Brooklyn Prefer your beaches covered in 19th century glass and other bits of curious trash? Then step off the Q35 bus just before crossing the bridge to Fort Tilden for Dead Horse Bay. Don't worry, the name is just a leftover from its proximity to where were once horse-rendering plant, although watch your step for horseshoe crabs and other unfortunate sea creatures.
	TUGBOAT GRAVEYARD Staten Island We can't resist one more recommendation for strangeness on the NYC shores: the Tugboat Graveyard on Staten Island. Around two dozen harbor ships rest here rotting in the shallow water.
	HIGHEST POINT ON MANHATTAN Manhattan While Manhattan has soared far beyond the island's highest natural point with its skyscrapers, we still recommend a stroll out to Bennett Park in Washington Heights to find the boulder embedded with its now-humble title. The parks in the summer can be brimming with the crowds, but you are likely to have this obscure locale to yourself.
	LITTLE RED LIGHTHOUSE Manhattan Perfect for a summer picnic is the Little Red Lighthouse beneath the looming George Washington Bridge. Then stroll down the Hudson River as far as your legs will take you.
	MMUESEUMM Manhattan Sure, the Met, MoMA, New Museum, AMNH, and all those behemoth museums have the high-powered AC, but summer is for exploring new places, and we recommend seeking out the curiosity-packed Mmuseumm lodged in an elevator shaft. Check their site for open hours.
	WOODLAWN CEMETERY The Bronx With 400 acres accessible at the end of the 4 line, strolling the shady space of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx is a beautiful escape. Even better, join their August 10 full moon tour to experience the burial ground after dark.

Thomas Brothers Map Co. map of East LA (1966), one of the many companies to include trap streets (via david/Flickr user)

With all the time and energy cartographers spend preparing maps, it makes sense that they would want to protect their investment. One of the ways they do so — although they don’t always admit it — is by including “trap streets,” deliberate mistakes added to maps to catch unsuspecting copyright violators. These may include fake streets, as the name suggests, but the term is also applied to other  erroneous cartographic data included to embarrass those who might steal it. Usually, these “mistakes” are minor: tiny (and entirely false) bends in rivers and roads, or slightly altered mountain elevations. 

The TeleAtlas Directory, the basis for Google Maps, is said to have included several trap streets. According to a 2012 article in Cabinet, Moat Lane once curved its way through North London, at least in the regular view of on Google Maps, although the satellite layer revealed that the place where the lane was supposed to exist was a disparate collection of trees and houses — there was no lane there at all. 

Other TeleAtlas/Google Maps trap streets have included Oxygen Street, which supposedly ran between two houses in Edinburgh (it didn’t), Adolph-Menzel-Ring and Otto-Dix-Ring, both attached to Wiesenstrasse in Zeuthen, Germany (they weren’t), and Kerbela Street, which purportedly ran through the Shropshire Learners & Driving Instructor Training Center in Shrewsbury, England (it never existed). 

Perhaps the strangest trap street is the phantom town of Argleton, England, which appeared on Google Maps as recently as 2009. Online listings showed the town as having jobs, real estate, weather forecasts, and even a single scene. But no one had ever set foot there, because it doesn’t exist. Google has since removed the town from their listings, and though many speculate that it was a town-wide version of a trap street, the company wouldn’t reveal if its inclusion was a deliberate attempt to catch thieves.

The empty field where Argleton was charted to be (via small-town hero/Wikimedia)

Most map-makers deny including trap streets, and there are plenty of other ways that errors find their way into maps. (These include “paper streets,” planned by developers and included on blueprints, but never actually built.) However, in the 1980s, the vice president of Thomas Brothers maps revealed that the company sprinkled fictitious streets around their Los Angeles guides. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the vice president said that San Bernadino and Riverside counties has the strongest concentration of fake streets, between 100 and 200 of them.

In America, trap streets themselves are not copyrightable, ever since Alexandria Drafting Co. v. Amsterdam ruled in 1997 that "the existence, or non-existence, of a road is a non-copyrightable fact." In the United Kingdom, however, things are different. In 2001, the UK’s Automobile Association agreed to pay agreed to pay £20,000,000 after it was caught copying Ordnance Survey maps. The theft was revealed thanks to tiny design fingerprints in the Ordnance Survey maps, like the width of roads, rather than entirely fake streets.

Map-makers are far from the only ones to use copyright traps. Dictionaries are frequent culprits: recent editions of the New Oxford American Dictionary included the word “esquivalience” (defined as “the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities”), which was later shown to be entirely made up, just to catch would-be plagiarists. Such lexicographical traps are sometimes called Mountweazels, after the entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia. Mountweazel  was apparently a fountain designer-turned-photographer celebrated for her photographs of rural American mailboxes; alas, she never lived. Richard Steins, one of the volume’s editors, told The New Yorker: “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”

Bess Lovejoy is a writer, researcher, and editor based in Brooklyn. Her book Rest in Pieces was published last year by Simon & Schuster. 

 
Saturn shot through the 60-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory. (photo by Steve Grant)

 In 1903, astrophysicist George Ellery Hale went hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains. Resting at the summit of Mount Wilson, he gazed at his surroundings and realized he had found the perfect place to build an observatory. Five years later, at the very same spot, he revealed the world’s largest telescope, a 60-inch reflector that attracted preeminent scientists such as Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble. In fact, it was with this telescope that Harlow Shapley discovered that the sun’s position was not the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

An attendee climbs the ladder to view through the 60-inch telescope. (photo by Steve Grant)

As modern astronomy moves into the invisible spectrum, the optical instruments of the early 20th century have become available for public outreach and education. Lucky for us, this is also the fate of Mount Wilson’s 60-inch. On June 29, the LA Obscura Society caravanned up the mountain to gaze at planets, galaxies, and globular clusters.

Viewing through the 22 ton telescope. (photo by Erin Johnson)

Our evening began with the planet Mars, home of the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers. Our session director Shelley Bonus described its appearance as a “bruised apricot.” As we approached the telescope, she advised to have patience while viewing, and between the shimmering of the air currents, we might catch a crystal clear glimpse. As the last rays of light faded, our eyes adjusted to the night. In the low, red light we became a collection of shadows murmuring and wandering about. 

 
LA Obscura Society mingles in the red glow. (photo by Erin Johnson)

Next stop, Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System! Squeaking and moaning, the old wooden dome spun above us, while the buzzing motor rotated the telescope until both were in alignment. With one foot on the ladder and one foot braced against the telescope, attendees leaned forward to witness this twinkling potato-shaped rock.

The telescope control station (photo by Kristen Marcum)

My favorite object of the evening was Messier 92, a globular cluster located nearly 27,000 light years away from Earth. This complex concentration of stars appeared as a faint blue spiderweb covered in tiny drops of dew.

The Milky Way (photo by Kristen Marcum)

Living in the photographic age of the Hubble telescope, I was surprised by the subtle and powerful beauty of firsthand observation. Watching objects in their celestial environment revealed shifting colors and dancing air currents. Was the Cat’s Eye Nebula blue or purple? Was the color actually changing, or were my senses playing tricks on me? The light became a living entity that forever changed my perception of the sky.

Thank you, Shelley and Michael for sharing your historic telescope and the beauty of the universe. Afterimages of spiral galaxies, dying stars, and globular clusters will likely continue to haunt all who attended. More photographs from Atlas Obscura's visit are below, and to learn more about the Mount Wilson Observatory, click here.

Passing by Radio Ridge antenna farm on the way to the Observatory. (photo by Steve Grant)

The dome of the 60-inch telescope (photo by Sandi Hemmerlein)

LA Obscura Society attendees eagerly waiting to enter the dome. (photo by Erin Johnson)

Our incredible Session Director, Shelley Bonus. (photo by Steve Grant)

The Obscura Society is the real-world exploration arm of Atlas Obscura We seek out secret histories, unusual access, and opportunities for our community to explore strange and overlooked places hidden all around us. Join us on our next adventure, and keep up with LA Obscura Society events on our mailing list.

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Graceland Cemetery, Chicago (photograph by Allison Meier/Atlas Obscura)

The art of dying in the United States is in a league of its own in terms of options, and cost. While green burial sites sprawled through forests, and even underwater reefs where ashes have been transformed into future homes for fish, are growing in popularity, there are still the exorbitantly expensive coffins buried in carefully manicured cemeteries, the embalming, the obituaries. American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning by Kate Sweeney, published this March by the University of Georgia Press, goes on-the-ground in examining what the history of death is in the United States, and how it's rapidly changing. We asked Sweeney, an Atlanta-based author and award-winning radio story producer with NPR affiliate WABE, about her walk through the shadow of death. 

You did a lot of legwork in the book, wandering through Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, visiting roadside memorials, exploring green burial forests, riding the boat with families out to a memorial reef. Why do you think a sense of place is so essential to death in America?

We’re experiencing a period of change in this country, in which people are increasingly opting for cremation and scattering rather than traditional burial at cemeteries. We are a transient people, and that’s a big reason the family burial plot is dying off. (Cremation is also a lot cheaper, and another part of this may have to do with an increased squeamishness about dead bodies, but I digress.)

Still, people choose to scatter at the places their dead loved, or places of majestic beauty, and to we who survive, those places — the Grand Canyon, the Gulf of Mexico — become imbued with the spirits of the dead. And that’s kind of the ultimate testament.

A lot of people are scattering in more than one place, and maybe that’s a major statement about who we are as Americans. In life, we live out our American destinies manifest, traveling to where our careers and passions take us. Then in death, where our ashes are scattered reflects that: Here I am, in the Smoky Mountains, under my favorite tree in the backyard, scattered off of Maui, and hanging in a chain ‘round my daughter’s neck.

Much of American Afterlife uses the (now closed) Museum of Funeral Customs as a point of reflection on death in the United States. What drew you to center the narrative on the museum?

Other than the fact that the place was amazing?

Okay, so really: It’s always helpful for a writer to have strong scene with which to illustrate a point. As I wrote these stories of all these people making memorial choices today, I naturally ended up looking at how we got here as a nation. That involved reading and note-taking a great deal, going to research libraries, etc.

And that research was fascinating: learning, for instance, about our Victorian forebears, the folks who lived in the 1800s and influenced a great deal of what we think of when it comes to death and memorialization. These are the people who invented the deathbed scene, the cemetery as we know it, and even the conception of heaven that still holds sway in the popular imagination.

But when you’re telling tales of memorialization in America, there’s no substitute for actual scene, right? (People only want to read so much “I was sitting in the library, looked up from the microfiche and declared, ‘My god, that’s wild!’”)

The Museum of Funeral Customs was perfect. Want some Victorian jewelry made from human hair? Here are several cases! How about a collection of hearses? Cooling boards? A model of a home funeral from the 1920s? The place granted some great concrete jumping-off points for illustrating our nation’s fascinating past and present when it comes to death.

A viewing display at the Museum of Funeral Customs (photograph by Robert Lawton)

Funeral carriage at the Museum of Funeral Customs (photograph by Robert Lawton)

Do you think there will ever be an afterlife without cemeteries, or do people need the dead around?

A lot of historic cemetery people I talk with worry about this. Sure, we may have digitized records now, that genealogical researchers can use when looking up family histories even without cemeteries, but that’s no substitute for traveling to the place and touching the gravestone. I kind of have to concede the point. After all, I was just talking about what a pilgrimage for me it was to visit this museum in Springfield to see all that stuff I’d been reading about, right?

There is something to the artifact, to the original object — especially when combined with the physical place it came from. And again, that may be one reason scattering ashes is so popular. When Americans lack a single home-place, they might opt for association in death with the multiple places that moved them in life.

In what way have the deceased and mourning shaped our current cities and landscapes?

What a fascinating question. Here’s one example: As I mentioned above, our Victorian ancestors basically invented the cemetery. Prior to about the turn of the 19th century, there were no cemeteries in the United States, only graveyards. Graveyards were places you buried your dead, but they were not designed to be pleasant places, and the living did not spend much time there. Many were built in city centers, but European cities in the late 1700s developed this little problem: graveyards there were getting overcrowded. There were cave-ins and all sorts of nasty, smelly incidents, including this disgusting one in Paris I talk about in the book [the collapse of the Cemetery of the Innocents that threw over 2,000 corpses into neighboring basements, leading to the creation of the Catacombs].

Oddly enough, this was part of what led to the great cemetery movement, and the advent of the rural-style cemetery, a trend which came into our continent in the early 1800s, with the establishment of cemeteries like Mount Auburn in Massachusetts and Oakland Cemetery in Georgia.

These cemeteries were designed to be gardens for the dead and places of respite and reflection for the living. They were intentionally placed on the outskirts of city-centers, on these great, sprawling grounds, where families and courting couples visited and held picnics and planted gardens on their family plots. If you look at their design, you’ll see that they’re quite reminiscent of the nation’s first great parks, which were being established around the same time. (Although, to our Victorian forebears, the great cemeteries were far more romantic and contemplative than mere parks, having, as they did, that added thrilling element of death to dwell on. The Victorians were big on that.)

With their winding walkways, cul-de-sacs, and landscaping, early cemeteries are also reminiscent of another later development: the suburb. I’ll leave that one with you to ponder. 

What do you imagine an American cemetery will look like in a hundred years?

I try to leave most prognosticating to actual experts, as I’m just a writer who got obsessed with this stuff and let it take over her life for several years. Here’s what we do know: the cremation rate is rising. It has topped 40 percent, and the Cremation Association of North America estimates it will outpace traditional burial by 2016 or so.

Of course, people still bury ashes in cemeteries. Another trend is the green burial cemetery, which buries people in an ecologically friendly manner: no embalming, no vaults. According to the Green Burial Council, there are now 40 green burial cemeteries in the United States; that’s up from four in 2007, when I began following that phenomenon. So in a hundred years, who knows? It would be fun to quip that maybe all cemeteries will be historic cemeteries, but in truth, I wouldn’t bet on it. 

A roadside memorial in California (photograph by Donald Lee Pardue)

American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning by Kate Sweeney is available from University of Georgia Press. 

Much of the Atlas Obscura is created by intrepid users around the world, out exploring the places no one else is noticing, or jumping into historical research that's been all but forgotten. In appreciation, we are highlighting five of our favorite recent additions to the Atlas. Have a place we've missed? Create an account and become a part of our community. 

KIPTOPEKE'S CONCRETE FLEET
Cape Charles, Virginia

Bow of the SS Slater (photograph by Matt Flowers)

Decaying in Virginia is the Concrete Fleet, a weathered group of nine of the 24 concrete boats that the U.S. Maritime Commission contracted during World War II. Since 1948 they've been left to guard the Kiptopeke Beach, now worn through with holes. Atlas Obscura user Matt Flowers also added these gorgeous photographs of the rare retro-tech in all its decrepit glory.

VISCARDIGASSE
Munich, Germany

Viscardigasse alley (photograph by David Holt)

We love reminders that even the most unassuming of places has a secret history if you know where to look.  Added by Atlas Obscura user jhavenhill, bronzed bricks curving through Viscardigasse alley subtly remember when the small thoroughfare was used to avoid giving the Nazi salute at a monument to Hitler in Munich.

BLUESPRING CAVERNS
Bedford, Indiana

Navigating the underground river at Bluespring Caverns (photograph by lahvak/Flickr user)

Discovering Bluespring Caverns in Indiana, added by Altas Obscura user baikinange, was a fascinating reminder that some of the world's greatest wonders are beneath our feet. With 21 miles of caves, the longest underground river in the United States flows through this subterranean realm. But you won't be along as you navigate it, for a whole thriving host of ghostly-hued. aquatic creatures live along its banks and in its waters. 

HUNDERTWASSER TOILETS
Kawakawa, New Zealand

Hundertwasser Toilets (photograph by Eli Duke)

Austrian architect and artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser was renowned in his lifetime for his vibrant colors and organic forms, but we had no idea his last project was so humble. Added by Atlas Obscura user oliverkellow, these elaborate mosaic public toilets in the small town of Kawakawa in New Zealand opened in 1999, the same year Hundertwasser passed away.

PAINT MINES INTERPRETIVE PARK
Calhan, Colorado

Paint Mines at night (photograph by Dave Soldano)

While humans have constructed many wonders, in many ways we still can't compete with the beauty of nature. From Atlas Obscura user larkspurtile we explored the Paint Mines Interpretive Park in Colorado, where the layers of pigment in the sand and clay have been used for 9,000 years by people to transfer some of the otherworldly color to pottery, art, and war paint. 

Thanks to our intrepid users for uncovering these wondrous places, and we look forward to more! Help us show that the world is still a place of mystery by adding your own discoveries. 

Once the domain of only the most determined of oddballs, micronations are a more common phenomenon since the advent of the internet. These days, you don't even need a physical territory to declare yourself a head of state — you only need a website — and even if you do have a property to claim, a populace of fellow oddballs to be your country's citizens is a lot easier to come by when you have access to the whole world's supply.

The difference between a nation and a micronation is a small but important one: A micronation is one that's not officially recognized by world governments. Also, a mcironation is usually, but not strictly, a secession from an established nation. Beyond that, there are two general conventions that define the conditions of statehood: The Montevideo Convention requires a) a territory, b) a permanent population, c) a government, and d) the facility to enter into discussions with other states, while the constitutive theory of statehood adds a fifth criterion: the recognition of the rest of the world as a separate state, which disqualifies the vast majority of micronations.

Either way, if we're counting virtual space, i.e., on the internet, all of this is a lot easier to attain and document online than it used to be. But back in the day, it took some hardcore chutzpah, creativity, and organizational skills to pull this feat off — emphasis on the creativity. It's no surprise, then, that so many of the first micronations were established by artists. Here are a few of the most original ones we've come across.

THE REPUBLIC OF ROSE ISLAND

In 1967, Giorgio Rosa, an Italian artist and architect, funded and spearheaded the construction of a 4,300-square-foot sea platform in the Adriatic Sea between Cesenatico and Rimini. Originally, he did this under the premise of it being a tourist destination, and it was replete with a night club and a gift shop. 

But on May 24, 1968, immediately upon completion of construction, Rosa declared sovereignty from Italy, dubbing the platform "Insulo de la Rozoj" ("The Republic of Rose Island" in the universal language of Esperanto, which Rosa declared his new nation's national language, the only place to ever do so).

After hiring employees to help run the new nation, Rosa then named himself the President, instated a crest, and issued a number of stamps depicting the republic's approximate location, 6.8 miles off the coast of northern Italy. The Italian government didn't do much until Rosa announced several days later that he would be printing up his own currency, which gave them cause to think he would use it as a platform to avoid paying taxes on his tourist trap.

They responded by sending the military police to evict Rosa and his employees. Then, on June 29, the Italian Navy showed up with explosives and blew the entire structure up, just 55 days after sovereignty had been declared. As a sassy riposte, Rosa printed up another batch of postage stamps, bearing an image of the platform being dismantled, and issued from Rosa's self-declared government in exile. Since the island was destroyed, however, Rosa stopped exercising his rights as a citizen, although the legend of Rose Island lives on in the form of a 2008 play, a 2009 documentary, and a semi-abandoned Facebook group.

THE KINGDOM OF ELLEORE

Located not far from Copenhagen in the Danish Roskilde fjord, the tiny, kind of crescent-shaped island of Elleore was purchased in 1944 by a group of school teachers who purported to use it as a summer camp. 

Instead, they established a tongue-in-cheek independent kingdom as a sarcastic gesture to the Danish government — as well as to Nazi Germany, which had been occupying Denmark since 1940. Erik I, Elleore's first king, was crowned a year later, followed by a new king (and, once, a queen) every decade or two. Seventy years later, with its original population no longer in the picture, the island, also named Elleore, sees its citizens only one week per year, during an annual holiday wherein the dozens of nationals claim to be returning home after a 51-week vacation. Elleore has no permanent structures; its citizens camp in tents during their stays. Legally, it's still a part of Denmark

Although it was started as a flip-off toward Denmark's royal and governmental traditions, Elleore is run as kind of a Monty Pythonian joke these days; its place names are satirical versions of Danish ones, and it observes Elleore Standard Time, which is 12 minutes ahead of Central European Time. Elleore does issue stamps and coins, though, sort of straddling the border between complete joke and actual micronation. It probably can afford to be more of a joke now that Denmark isn't occupied by the Nazis and things are little more chill. 

NEUE SLOWENISCHE KUNST

Its name translating to "New Slovenian Art" in German, this collective of Yugoslav political artists announced itself as a separate state in 1984, back when Slovenia was still a part of Yugoslavia. The avant-industrial band Laibach originated from the group, taking the German name of the Slovenian capital city, Ljubljana, where the collective was founded.

Its territory is not physical but "confers the status of a state not to territory but to mind, whose borders are in a state of flux, in accordance with the movements and changes of its symbolic and physical collective body." So a floating castle sort of idea (but not a cyber-castle, as NSK wasn't founded online).

NSK's art style is an ironic jab at totalitarian and nationalist movements, especially Nazism, appropriating symbols and juxtaposing them with opposite concepts. It also frequently reappropriates political kitsch and borrows from Dadaism. 

In 1992, just a year after Slovene independence was established, NSK began organizing embassies and consulates in cities around the world, so far in Moscow, Ghent, Berlin, and Sarajevo, which host various events for its citizens. NSK also started issuing passports around this time, although they're considered to be works of art and not actually valid for travel.

These passports and embassies are what NSK claims sets them apart as a micronation rather than an art collective. Some refugees have been scammed over the years, purchasing NSK passports from Nigerian and Egyptian sellers, ostensibly for more than the €24.00 they're currently selling for on passport.nsk.si. Even though it didn't begin on the internet, NSK is mostly based there today, and its thousands of citizens reside around the world, on six continents, helping to further the nation's principles of anti-totalitarianism and transnationality.

Wheatpaste of NSK's art, often posted in public spaces (photograph by Vuk Cosic)

THE REPUBLIC OF KUGELMUGEL

It seemed like a good idea at the time, when artist Edwin Lipburger decided one day in 1984 to build a 25-foot ball-shaped house in the Lower Austrian countryside. This worked out fine for a while, until a dispute arose between Lipburger and the Austrian government over building permits, giving Lipburger the choice of having it destroyed or moving it to community property. The authorities relocated the whole house to an amusement park in Vienna. Lipburger responded by declaring his house, named Kugelmugel (kugel, "sphere," and mugel, an Austrian-German expression for a small hill) to be an independent republic, and himself its head of state.

Not long after his arrival in the park, Lipburger began printing his own stamps and announced that he would not be paying taxes, as all micronational leaders must, whereupon the Austrian government took him to court and he received a 10-week prison sentence for his trouble. A last-minute pardon from President Rudolf Kirchschläger kept him from actually going to prison.

Surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, Kugelmugel still stands in the amusement park, Vienna Prater — at 2, Antifaschismusplatz 1 (2nd district, Anti-Fascism Square, No. 1), sharing the street with a little café. Although the republic itself is no longer operated by Lipburger, his ghost nation is (only outwardly) accessible to curious tourists during park hours.

photograph by Peter Gugerell

LADONIA

Dr. Lars Vilks began building a series of sculptures out of 75 tons of driftwood on the shores of Sweden's Kullaberg nature reserve in 1980. This was followed by construction on a stone sculpture nearby in the same year. The structures were named Nimis (Latin, "too much") and Arx (Latin, "fortress"), respectively. Then nothing happened, because the pieces, although very large, were in difficult-to-reach areas of shoreline, accessible only by boat or a strenuous 45-minute hike, and nobody knew about them.

Two years later, the local council discovered the sculptures, which they deemed to be buildings and which were forbidden to be constructed on the reserve, and they were ordered destroyed. 

Vilks didn't take them down, though. After many appeals, all of which he lost, the case went to the Swedish government, whereupon it was finally settled in the council's favor. While all of this was going down, Vilks sold the driftwood pair of structures to monumental artist-couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1984 and he therefore refused to take them down on the grounds that they no longer belonged to him.

In 1996, with Vilks and the Swedish government still immersed in a court battle, Vilks declared Ladonia, the land the sculptures were built on, to be a separate state. The flag, a green field with a faint white outline of the Scandinavian cross, is alleged to depict what the Swedish flag would look like if boiled. All of Ladonia's citizens live abroad and they number over 15,000; citizenship is available online for free, with titles of nobility costing $30. Taxes are payable only in creative labor, the interpretation of which is left up to the applicant.

The nation is ruled in tandem by a queen-for-life, Carolyn I, and a president and vice president, who are elected tri-annually. Vilks himself serves as the state secretary and manages passport applications as well as the Ladonian newsletter. The country has not one but two national anthems: One is a tone poem on the development of freedom in Ladonia, and the other is performed by throwing a rock into the water. 

A new stone-and-concrete sculpture, Omphalos, appeared in Ladonia in 1999, at over five feet tall and weighing a metric ton. After some rigamarole involving complaints being filed to police by a Swedish arts foundation, artist Ernst Bilgren purchased the piece just before it was ordered demolished by the district court, which sent a bill to Vilks for 92,500 Swedish krona as a dismantling fee. Afterward, Vilks applied to the council for permission to erect a monument for Omphalos, which was granted, as long as the memorial built was no more than eight centimeters high. Vilks complied, and the memorial was inaugurated in 2002. 

Nimis (photograph by Sebastian Vidovic)

Arx (photograph by Hakan Dahlstrom)

LIZBEKISTAN

Speaking of creative micronations, we will conclude by giving a shout-out to (seemingly) the original online territory. 

As part of a larger project on citizenship, Australian artist Liz Stirling invented a virtual, internet-based micronation in 1996, back when it was a hot new idea, declaring herself "Princess, Absolute Monarch, and Virgo," at lizbekistan.com. As the nation was not founded on any physical territory, it was considered more of a concept than an actual micronation, but it was popularly "inhabited," with several thousand citizens, called Lizbeks. 

According to its site, the virtual nation was planned over regular real-life cocktail hours, and eligibility was open to anyone, provided he or she was willing to contribute content, tech help, logistical aid, cash, or some other kind of assistance to the project. Lizbekistan had a currency, called the "nipple,"and produced passports, stamps, and several online newspapers, including but not limited to the state-run State Newsletter, The Lizbek Sentinel, and Galasnost, all written and published by sundry Lizbeks.

Despite being lovingly produced and well-maintained, Lizbekistan was doomed from the start. Stirling established it with an expiration date of 9-9-1999, which is when Stirling "blew it up," leaving her homeless Lizbeks with the (now also defunct) lizbekdiaspora.com and, Stirling's most recent project, lizvegas.com. 

Discover more micronations on the Atlas Obscura >

photograph by Darmon Richter

This underground realm in London is rarely accessible, but Sunday, July 20, it's opening to the public. No, it's not some sort of secret druid lair; it's a marvel of 19th century ingenuity.

The Ice Wells at King's Cross Station were constructed in 1847 by Italian-Swiss immigrant Carlo Gatti to hold ice imported from Norway. Impressive in size, they stretched 42 feet deep and 30 feet in diameter. At the time, ice was an incredible luxury, and Gatti quickly became rich, dying a millionaire in 1878. The wells continued to be used until 1904, but new technology for artificial ice production then made them obsolete.

Over the 20th century they were built over and forgotten. Now, however, the London Canal Museum has them illuminated and viewable from an observation platform. Once a year they're opened to visitors. So stop by this Sunday for the annual event, as these are the only ice wells of their kind still in existence. 

photograph by Darmon Richter

photograph by Darmon Richter

photograph by Darmon Richter

photograph by Darmon Richter

photograph by Darmon Richter

The King's Cross Ice Wells will be open this Sunday, July 20, at the London Canal Museum. 

Aerial view of Mecca in 2010, showing new construction alongside the Kaaba (photograph by Fadi El Benni, via Al Jazeera English) Mecca is one of the "unruly places" featured in a new book by Alastair Bonnett. 

With Google patrolling the streets and even far flung locales like Mount Everest, and the proliferation of geotagged documentation of the planet on social media, it can feel like every corner has been catalogued and confirmed. Yet it was only two years ago that Sandy Island, illustrated on maps for over a century, was proved fictional, and even some of the world's most iconic locales like Mecca are in a rapid state of flux with new construction paving over the old. In Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett, published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, these "feral" destinations are explored.

Bonnett is a professor of social geography at Newcastle University in England, and also was the editor of Transgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration, a psychogeography magazine. Throughout Unruly Places, whether it's the town of Baarle chopped through with Dutch and Flemish enclaves, the Manila cemetery that has turned into a community, or Gordon Matta-Clark'sFake Estates that claimed the gutter spaces of New York City, Bonnett emphasizes a sense of discovery in geography, even if it's experiencing the world of the traffic median in your own town. This is a concept Atlas Obscura wholeheartedly embraces — that the world is much stranger, and unknowable, than you think. We asked Bonnett a few questions about Unruly Places and the myth of a fully-documented world. 

We at Atlas Obscura love places that don't fit neatly into geography. But sometimes it feels as if these crooked sites are all being straightened out, and the world made less interesting. How can people fight the good fight of keeping a sense of place?

No one should pretend this is easy: the forces flattening out the world, and making everywhere seem similar, are colossal. But equally powerful are our need for and love of place; it’s an important part of what makes us feel human. I think that most people understand this, that’s why so many of us invest so much of our time and energy fixing up and making special our own, private, places — our homes, cabins, even our vehicles.

The challenge is to expand that sense of care. Every time we go on vacation, or go traveling, and search out unique and authentic places, we are part of a quiet resistance movement. Another form of resistance is seen when we protest about the way our town is sliding into the mire of non-place banality. In my adopted home city of Newcastle, in the far north of England, I’m just one of thousands who’ve tried, many times, to stop an endless succession of "executive housing" schemes being built on the margins of town, drawing out in the innards of the city. It’s perverse: finding anyone who actively wants this kind of development is almost impossible, yet they nearly always get built.

Maybe we need a pro-place protest movement, a bit like the "occupy movement" (which was, in its own odd way, a place making movement), but one that makes the pro-place case and shouts out that, when it comes to place, the concerns of the great majority, the 99%, just aren’t being heard.  Because place is fundamental to our freedom and well-being. Indeed, I have come to think that living in a "real place" should be thought of as a human right. It is that important and should be in UN declarations of rights and in national constitutions.  

In a world of floating islands and ever shifting borders how do you define “place”? What then makes it "unruly"?

It’s a question that a lot of people are wondering about. For me, a place is somewhere distinct and somewhere that has its own story: the richer and deeper that sense of distinction, and those stories are the more likely it is to feel like a "real place."

An "unruly place" is somewhere that disrupts the usual and conventional stories we tell about place.

But I don’t just use the term "unruly places" to talk about quirky or quaint places. Many of the places in my book are very dark, and a look at the map of Syria or Iraq today shows shifting multitudes of unruly places that are anything but cute. The destitute enclaves and tribal pockets that now scatter those countries are both fascinating and appalling: they remind us that our relationship to place is a very fierce thing and how quickly and easily ordinary-looking and "boring" places can mutate into places with strange and disturbing stories to tell. 

Ordos, China's biggest ghost city (photograph by Uday Phalgun)

The new city of Kilamba in Luanda Province (photograph by Santa Martha)

There is something very eerie about the pristine yet empty cites Ordos and Kilamba. Why do you think this is the era of empty cities, as you said in the book?

Mostly, it’s down to the way money works today. It’s very mobile and has developed a masochistic attraction to property. So we get capital flooding into all sorts of building schemes, bigging them up and making them seem like the best game in town. And this can happen without anyone really being interested in who might live or work in these places, or what will happen when the market has one of its sporadic bouts of self-harm and/or sanity.

I could have filled the book with newly built ghost towns. Some of the most striking ones in Europe are in Ireland, where the property market took off a few years ago and created swathes of new suburbs, often in odd and remote locations. And they now stand empty, the overgrown lawns cropped by semi-feral ponies.

You seem to share the belief that easily overlooked places within your own neighborhood can be equally as strange and fascinating as distant places. What are ways people can re-engage with their familiar surroundings to see them in a new light?

Most of us follow very strict spatial routines. Take me for example. For years I walked or drove to work or downtown along the same route: it was mechanical and unvaried. That’s why, even though I’ve lived in the same city for 20 years, it was only in the last few that I’ve realized that I didn’t actually know the city at all. Breaking my old habits has been a revelation.

I remember one of the key moments very well. I was out in the car with my two kids and we were all bored, travelling to the usual garden center or whatever. Anyway it was shut and I began to drift: came off at a new exit and drove along a new route, past this graveyard of double-decker buses, piled high, some almost toppling, then we stopped off at a flooded quarry. Then (because we were getting a taste for this drift by this time), an old farm, then an deserted agricultural college, where we wandered round inside the warm glass-houses, each full of sick looking cactuses. I guess these destinations sound very ordinary, but that was a few years ago and we still talk about it. It’s a good memory and still makes me smile. I find it odd to think that that kind of pleasure, that kind of personal adventure, is so close, so easy, yet so distant.

Other folk have more concerted techniques. I myself used to undertake quite a bit of "urban exploration." We’d follow transects, straight lines that we’d draw on the map and try and follow on the ground, or use maps of a different city to get ourselves round. It was disorientating; and that usually helps when you want to see the city with fresh eyes. But I’ve come to believe that the trangressive or counter-cultural shtick can sometimes get in the way. A bit of humility can take you just as far.

Yesterday I wandered round a nature reserve that lies well inside the city, a small swath of ponds and reeds surrounded by housing and the airport. I’m not any kind of bird expert but there in the dark bird-hide were these gruff birders, taciturn but welcoming. They’d been there all day — it seemed like they didn’t want to ever go home. Corny as it sounds, they loved that place and their enthusiasm was compelling. I guess what I’m saying that it isn’t just what you and I do, but also who we care to listen to, or give the time of day to, that can open up the possibilities of place.

A border cutting through a house in Baarle, partly in the Netherlands and partly in Belgium (photograph by Carsten aus Bonn)

You write of a complex relationship with borders, seeing them as both good and bad depending on the circumstances. Do you believe there could ever be a borderless world?  

I’ve changed my mind on borders. For many years, I was an anarchist and borders were the ultimate symbol of everything that was wrong with the nation-state. As I drifted out of anarchism in the early 1990s, quite a few anarcho-lite ideas started to percolate into the general culture, notably the idea that it would be "nice" to live in a world without borders. And a borderless world is not an impossibility. The European Union is the best developed example of the mass removal of obvious borders. You can travel from the Netherlands all the way to Italy with no border controls and no need to change your money. That’s what you notice as a traveller, but if you live inside those countries their borders are very real: your taxes, your politics, almost everything, are bound by them. And elsewhere new borders are springing up. Look at the fragments left by the USSR, or the tensions and conflicts that threaten Africa and the Middle East and are likely to produce more and more borders over the coming years.  

Borders can sometimes be terrible things but I’ve come to appreciate that in order to achieve any kind of self-control, or basic sovereignty, a community of people need them. That community might be a nation or, indeed, it might be an anarchist commune, but, either way, borders are vital to sustaining a sense of jurisdiction and control. As long as people want those things they will keep drawing borders. We also keep drawing them because not many of us want to live in a world where escape to somewhere else, somewhere beyond the border, is impossible. 

So, a world without borders is not an impossible goal but I don’t think it’s a desirable goal. It’s a fantasy shared by multinational capital and, of course, by my old anarchist comrades, but not, anymore, by me.  

Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

We aspire to climb to the summit of Mount Rainier in Washington, as well as Charles Mound, at the top of a family’s driveway in northwest Illinois. We wish to ascend to the highest peak in the Rocky Mountains — Colorado’s Mount Elbert — as well as Panorama Point, a low rise on a bison ranch in Nebraska. We want to climb the very pinnacle of the continent — Denali in Alaska at over 20,000 feet above sea level — as well as Britton Hill, at 345 feet above sea level in a park in the Florida Panhandle. We are highpointers.

 Highpointer convention on Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, in 2006 (all photographs by the author)

As a kid, I would read my father's Rand McNally Road Atlas. Mountaintops were designated by a hollow triangle with the name and elevation. One mountaintop, however, was filled in and had some extra text to it, saying it was the highest point in the state.

Some time later, I needed to hit the road, and bought a road atlas. Looking for a destination, I found Pennsylvania's highest point, Mount Davis, and then found directions. It was an easy drive up, with a tall observation tower, a surrounding forest, and unique geology. Then, I was hooked. I discovered there were guidebooks for the highest points of the 50 American states, and a club for those interested in this quest.

The Highpointers Club

In October 1986, climber Jakk Longacre wrote to Outside magazine to see if anyone else was as interested in climbing the state highpoints as he was, after seeing familiar names in summit registers. Thirty climbers wrote back, and the Highpointers Club was born. The club now has grown to over 2,000 members, holds a yearly convention in a city near a selected state highpoint, and sponsors a foundation to make improvements to highpoints. 

View from Mount Mansfield, highest point in Vermont

Mount Sunflower, the highest point in Kansas

The Journey Through, and Up, the United States

With most highpoints away from well-known tourist destinations, the journey brings travelers to parts of the country few tend to visit. Not many people I know would put southwest North Dakota or the Oklahoma Panhandle on their itineraries. Through going to the highpoints, one sees the whole variety of landscapes the country offers: the desert and salt flats of west Texas; forests and hilltops in the South and East; the suburbia of Wilmington, Delaware; Midwestern prairie and badlands; and remote mountains of New England and the West.

To take part in the journey, one does not have to be an expert mountain climber or outdoorsman. Of the 50 state highpoints, 30 are simple drive-ups and/or require a hike of less than two miles. However, since most of the points are “off the beaten path,” a guidebook or article and a good sense of direction are necessary.

Reaching the loftier and more remote highpoints, though, requires longer hikes. However, most of them can be done in one day by someone in good shape. For people getting fit, these hikes make great goals to measure one’s progress. While climbing Mount Marcy in New York’s Adirondacks, I nearly gave up at mile 6 of the 7.2 mile hike, but I saw the summit just one mile away and 500 feet up. I did say to myself, “You should have eaten more vegetables.” Now 30 pounds lighter from that day, I wish to conquer even more challenging peaks.

The hikes clamber through badlands, wilderness, and alpine terrain, allowing for great photography of pristine landscapes and maybe even wildlife. Moss-covered trees surround the summit of Mount Rogers, Virginia. A tree grows on a rock on the Van Hoevenberg Trail up Mount Marcy, New York. Lucky hikers might see mountain goats on Mount Elbert, Colorado. Incredible sunsets are de rigueur on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Views from the top over the surrounding land give a personal sense to how vast the country really is.

Here are some of the intriguing and beautiful highpoints of the United States, and you can find even more on the map below:

MOUNT MARCY
5,343 feet above sea level; Keene Valley, New York
Climbed by then-Vice President Theodore Roosevelt just before he found out President McKinley wasn't likely to survive his assassination attempt

HARNEY PEAK
7,242 feet above sea level; Black Hills National Forest, South Dakota
The ashes of the "Holy White Man" are interred here, the first white man to climb the summit

MOUNT DAVIS
3,213 feet above sea level; Allegheny Mountains, Pennsylvania
The boulders at this highpoint traveled to the surface due to nothing but cold

HIGH POINT MONUMENT
1,803 feet above sea level; Sussex, New Jersey
New Jersey's highpoint is stretched 220 feet taller by an obelisk, which you can enter for sweeping vistas

HOOSIER HILL 
1,257 feet above sea level; Lynn, Indiana
This highpoint is in danger of losing its title to a garbage heap

CLINGMANS DOME
6,643 feet above sea level; Bryson City, North Carolina
A concrete tower is surrounded by ghost trees devastated by invasive insects

MOUNT GREYLOCK 
3,491 feet above sea level; Adams, Massachusetts
The 93-foot-tall war memorial at the top offers views to five surrounding states

MOUNT WASHINGTON
6,288 feet above sea level; Jackson, New Hampshire
Claimed by some to also be home to the "worst weather in the world"

MAUNA KEA 
13,803 feet above sea level; Hawaii
If you measured from its base on the Pacific Ocean floor, this volcano be the highest mountain in the world

All photographs by the author.

When it first opened its doors last year, this crowd-funded Paris café – based on a Japanese concept Frenchified in the heart of the trendy Marais — was rumored to have a four-week waiting list for Saturday brunch. But that had nothing to do with the food, or the coffee. Ailurophiles and Francophiles can get a double shot of sheer pleasure at the Café des Chats, where the twelve adorable live-in cats are the star attraction.

Inside the Paris cat cafe (all photographs by the author)

Carefully chosen from shelters for their sociable personalities among both humans and other cats, the feline residents spend their days in the lap of luxury — or indeed in the lap of anyone they choose — imparting ronronthérapie ("purr therapy," that’s the scientific term) and relaxed vibes while you sip your café crème.

There are strict rules in place to maintain all-round hygiene and the well-being of the animals, but they basically roam free over two levels, curling up atop the piano or in plush leather seats and comfy corners of this charming rock-den; the Aristocats could have done worse.

I used reverse psychology and a dangling toy to distract the inquisitive black-and-white Orea from my tuna tarte — feeding is forbidden — while the regal Khalessi lolled like a Manet nude on a nearby canapé as an artist sketched her from life. (The names are helpfully etched on the tables and listed on a photo chart so you can try to summon your favorite.)

I'm not sure the ronronthérapie really worked wonders on me this visit. A little cat-challenged, perhaps? Rather than swooning in a state of warm, fluffy bliss, I was a little perturbed by the fact that none of my advances were met with outright enthusiasm; that the cats seemed to prefer the company and caresses of my date, and that he, at that moment, preferred theirs. I eventually sank into a velvet armchair and looked on as a group of elegantly dressed elderly American ladies and two French bearded hipsters suddenly found themselves on the same social plane, speaking the same language: cutesy-wootsey.

I would suggest booking a table downstairs, not too late in the evening when our furry friends are all either dozing (strictly do-not-disturb) or fantasizing about their 10pm feeding.

For the craziest Parisian cat-lovers there’s a carte de fidélité (loyalty card). After all, repeat ronronthérapie sessions are cheaper than a shrink.

Le Café des Chats is at 16 rue Michel Le Comte, Paris. Métro: Rambuteau

With more than 1,500km (932 miles) of underground tunnels hidden beneath its streets, it’s no wonder Melbourne has grown into something of a mecca for urban explorers. Its complex network of storm water drains is often cited as one of the most elaborate in the world, and the labyrinth has drawn its own string of admirers.

In 1986, three teenagers from Melbourne banded together to form the Cave Clan, a clandestine group dedicated to recreational trespassing in the city’s hidden underworld. Today, the Cave Clan is still going strong, and larger than ever with local chapters in each of Australia’s main cities. 

Drain explorers beneath Melbourne (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

A subterranean waterfall in the Melbourne storm drain network (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

Naturally, exploring urban storm drains comes with some obvious risks attached: flash floods, bad air, steep shafts and reservoirs, and of course, the hefty fines that you’ll be served should the authorities catch you in the act. And don’t forget, this is Australia, which means these tunnels often serve as prime nesting or hibernation spots for some of the world’s most deadly creepy-crawlies.

Danger aside, the complex systems of tunnels, waterfalls, gates, ladders, and reservoirs beneath Melbourne combine to create a fascinating — albeit challenging — urban assault course, which draws in visitors from all around the world.

Here’s a quick introduction to five of the Cave Clan’s favorite hang-outs in the Melbourne drain network:

ANZAC Drain

Entrance to the ANZAC Drain (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

The ANZAC Drain was first charted by the Cave Clan on April 25, 1987, or as it’s known here, ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) Day. Since then this relief drain has served as a kind of local headquarters for the Clan, and it’s one of the easiest drains in the city to access.

Entering from the river outflow, a wide, red brick passage curves gently into the dark recesses — an arched tunnel which rumbles and rings with the sound of traffic passing overhead. The aliases of Cave Clan members appear on the walls like sentries, painted high in block white capitals.

At low tide, this is one of the least challenging drains in Melbourne (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

One of the drain's perennial residents (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

Ten minutes into the warren, you’ll find “The Chamber.”

In this dank subterranean cavern, thin daylight filters down from a grate positioned at the far end, to illuminate walls daubed in panel after panel of painted art. It’s a gallery of sorts, a secret museum of street art where the cockroaches thrive, and the sound of dripping water echoes wet and hollow against concrete walls and old, rusted metal.

Cave Clan welcome sign on approach to The Chamber (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

The Chamber in ANZAC Drain (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

More than just a canvas though, the Chamber serves as the venue for an annual event held to mark the close of Melbourne’s draining season: The Clannies.

At the end of each summer, the Cave Clan’s Melbourne Chapter gathers here to celebrate the very best — and the worst — of the year’s explorations. Staggered shelves on either side of the main space offer a kind of tiered seating, while the Chamber is transformed with sound systems, video projectors, fairy lights, and fireworks.

The Clannies Award Ceremony in The Chamber (photograph by PTC via deviantART) 

Maze Drain

The upstream reaches of the Maze Drain (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

One of the more complex of Melbourne’s storm water systems, Maze Drain does exactly what its name suggests. The network has numerous entrances, scattered in a wide spread across the city’s suburbs. There are dry and dusty culverts upstream, where the original stream trickles gently through the basin of long disused drains. Elsewhere, manhole covers open into streets, courtyards, and playing fields. The Maze Drain can be accessed from several open-air stretches midway along its course, or alternatively, by wading in through its semi-submerged outflow onto the River Yarra.

The drain measures roughly 5km (3 miles) from one end to the other — though taking into account the many junctions and side tunnels, alternate routes and overflows, that figure could be multiplied several times over.

Looking over the waterfall (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

Amongst its more notable landmarks, an upper stretch of the Maze features a slippery waterfall nicknamed the “Pit of Death.” Another chamber is known as the “Tram Room,” and then there’s the “Triple Split,” the “Slide,” the “Skull Chamber,” and so on.

One of the more popular entrances to the Maze Drain lies beneath a city park, where a wide and roomy passage leads straight into a convenient meeting place. Here the graffiti is at its richest, and, as is the Cave Clan tradition, one wall has been given over to form a giant guestbook where visitors are invited to sign their names. 

Completionists will no doubt want to see the outflow, too. The Maze Drain culminates in a pair of massive steel pipes, where twin streams converge into an underground inlet of the river. Wade on into the waist-deep waters of the Yarra, and follow the corrugated tunnel as it snakes away towards the light. Towards its eventual mouth, from where the drain explorer can watch cars and pedestrians pass by on the opposite back, you can stand on the threshold of a secret world, peering out from the shadows towards an unsuspecting city above. 

The Maze Drain's first waterfall (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

Piles of dry leaves are a popular hiding place for snakes (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

"Godzilla Point," one of the Maze's many landmarks (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

The reasons behind the drain's title slowly become more apparent (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

One of the many types of tunnels making up the large & varied Maze (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

The Cave Clan guestbook in the Maze Drain (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

God Drain

The ominous entrance to the G.O.D. Drain (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

This third entry on our list is quite the opposite of the last. Whereas Maze Drain commences with a nondescript culvert which descends into an increasingly taxing labyrinth, G.O.D. Drain starts with a bang before tailing out into a slow and painful sigh.

Entering through a gaping metal mouth beneath the freeway, the visitor first climbs a watery stair; a series of slick stone steps washed by a murky stream. There’s a pool at the top, an overflow into which a waterfall crashes noisily down from a height of perhaps 25 feet. To get to the next section you’re going to need to climb.

The watery steps marking the first section of G.O.D. Drain (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

It's a long drop, but the ladder is more secure than it looks (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

From the bottom, the warped metal ladder propped against one side of the waterfall looks anything but secure. Its rungs are twisted, its limbs buckled, while the top end is held in place by an old chain attached to the tunnel wall.

The chain hangs slack, so as you take your first step up the ladder you find it slipping, leaning suddenly back out above you as if it were about to fall. Then the chain snaps taught, and you’re climbing upwards at an ever-so-slightly unnatural angle.

After its grand entry, G.O.D. Drain soon runs out of tricks. There are a couple of larger chambers early on, space enough for explorers to gather, to drink beer, and to sign their names on a wall. The place is littered with the physical evidence of all three activities.

The inevitable Cave Clan guestbook (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

From there on though, this one’s what they call a "shrinker." You keep walking, and in time the wide tunnel narrows into a square passage. It’ll get smaller still, until you’re walking with a hunch. Keep it up, and you’ll be down here for hours — while the graffiti on the tunnel walls echoes your own doubts.

“The end is not nigh,” reads one pessimistic tag.

“Time to head back!” says another.

Worse still, it feels like you’re running out of air. That’s the claustrophobia kicking in. Luckily, there are a few moments of reprieve — occasional tributaries empty into the main channel of G.O.D. Drain, narrow pipes that jut out of the wall like the roots of trees. Once in a while you’ll pass one and feel a cold breeze on the back of your hand, and just like that you’ll find yourself on your hands and knees, sucking up the fresh air like an addict getting a fix.

If you decide to turn back at this point — to take the long and stooping walk back in the direction of inevitable freedom, rather than pushing on into the ever shrinking unknown — nobody is going to think any the less of you.

One of the larger sections of G.O.D. Drain, near the entrance (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

These tunnels get smaller and smaller, the deeper you go (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

Not everyone makes it to the end of G.O.D. Drain... (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog) 

Tenth Drain

One entrance to the massive Tenth Drain (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

Of all Melbourne’s subterranean waterways, the system known as the “Tenth Drain” is by far the largest in volume.

In the early days of the Cave Clan, when Melbourne’s underworld remained uncharted by the emerging new generation of urban explorers, this particular storm drain represented the fledgling team’s tenth major discovery, hence the name.

Whatever storm the drain’s architects had planned, it must have been near-biblical in size. The colossal Tenth Drain largely follows the path of a freeway, a second thoroughfare hidden beneath the first and through whose vast arches it is possible for two vehicles to drive abreast.

It’s not just the size of its main channel that makes the Tenth Drain worth a look though, but a supporting cast of side drains and tributaries that turn a quick walk-through into a full-day trip.

Wading into the darkness (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog) 

One of the many tributaries leading into Tenth Drain (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog) 

Some parts of the network are a bit of a squeeze, such as the tight, cobwebbed passages that lead off to landmarks like “Cactus Island.” Other sections can be walked with ease, and provide a welcome distraction to the cathedral proportions of the central tunnel.

There’s a room where shop window dummies have been mounted beneath an inflow channel, the water splashing and glistening on their dismembered torsos to momentarily conjure the illusion of something wholly unpleasant. Another small chamber houses miniaturized battlefield tableaux, with plastic soldiers, palm trees, oil barrels, and helicopters glued to the walls, to the ceiling, as they act out scenes of warfare.

The wide-open spaces of the Tenth Drain also provide the perfect canvas for graffiti artists, and so it is in this tunnel that you’ll find some of Melbourne’s finest underground (in the most literal sense) exhibitions of art.

Well, that clears that one up (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog) 

Academic graffiti at its best – the chemical formula for methamphetamine (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

Sticker in a side chamber of the Tenth Drain (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog) 

This probably falls under the wider definition of "art" (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

More Tenth Drain graffiti (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog) 

Mummy Drain

Mummy Drain starts off with a cylindrical tunnel (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

The last drain on this list, Mummy Drain takes its name from the peculiar hexagonal cross-section of its long and winding passages — cutting through the earth like the outline of a coffin. The current here is slower than in other drains, so that the stream stagnates in the darkness to leave a curd of orange filth along the waterline.

The grime, the rich, rusty colors, and the sarcophagus illusion combine to gives the impression of a catacomb, or some other macabre grotto. 

This drain can be entered from a discreet riverside outflow after which it cuts sharply inland, veering deep beneath the city. It’s another long drain — the mummy passages seem to stretch on forever, the shape and color changing only by increments over time. The novelty will almost wear off, as you trudge on through the slippery drain, head ducked to avoid webs and the tiny brown stalactites formed from who-knows-what.

Looking up an ornate brickwork shaft in the drain (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

But the real joy of Mummy Drain is yet to come. Eventually passing through the final section of claustrophobic, funerary tunneling, the ardent explorer is treated at last to a taste of Old Victoria. The passage opens up into a space of beautiful red brick, and here the tunnel begins to split off into new and interesting directions. These low-ceilinged chambers — particularly compared to the last length of concrete tunnel — are a beautiful example of Victorian architecture, complete with decorative details that adorn cornerstones and flues.

It’s remarkable to think how much effort went into the design of this hidden space, into the artful architecture that no eyes were meant to see. But then, perhaps that sums up the whole appeal of exploring drains: the skillful engineering, the long hours of labor, the thoughtful design, all these elements that come together to create a whole subterranean city. A brickwork warren. An uncharted labyrinth where the rules of the world above no longer apply.

It's hard to imagine a more effective way to escape from the mundane reality of day-to-day life, other than by taking a peek inside the hidden — and often, forbidden — structures that lie beneath our city streets.  

Melbourne's River Yarra, into which many of its drains flow (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

The sarcophagus shape that gives Mummy Drain its name (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

A water feature halfway through the drain (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

A female huntsman spider guarding her egg sac (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

Suddenly concrete is replaced by Victorian red bricks (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

One of the spacious intersections that appear later in Mummy Drain (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

Fresh air and sunlight, at last... (photograph by Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

Darmon Richter is a freelance writer, photographer, and urban explorer. You can follow his adventures at The Bohemian Blog, or for regular updates, follow The Bohemian Blog on Facebook.

Clay McLeod Chapman reading at the Pierrepont monument in Green-Wood Cemetery (photograph by Mitch Waxman)

Robert Suydam sleeps beside his bride in Greenwood Cemetery. No funeral was held over the strangely released bones, and relatives are grateful for the swift oblivion which overtook the case as a whole. The scholar’s connexion with the Red Hook horrors, indeed, was never emblazoned by legal proof; since his death forestalled the inquiry he would otherwise have faced.
— H. P. Lovecraft, The Horror at Red Hook

It was with those strange words in mind from the the late H. P. Lovecraft's lexicon of unfathomable horror that Atlas Obscura staged a candlelit reading in Brooklyn's historic Green-Wood Cemetery. Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn Heights near Red Hook at 169 Clinton Street from 1925 to 1926, rather unhappily, and is said to have roamed the lush grounds of Green-Wood. It's during this time that he wrote "The Horror at Red Hook," which, while heavy on his outright xenophobia, tapped into an unsettling urban anxiety. 

This Monday we invited an intimate group of Atlas Obscura followers to Green-Wood Cemetery to hear the story read in its entirety, responding to the real presence of the Suydam family interred in the 19th century burial space. Respecting the grounds as a place of memorial, we visited the Whitney mausoleum, paused beneath a weeping beech tree, stopped amongst relocated 18th century tombs, and ended at the Pierrepont memorial, a monument to one of the prominent Brooklynites who helped establish the cemetery in 1838. Readers Clay McLeod Chapman, Bess Lovejoy, and Mitch Waxman each gave the stages of the sinister narrative of occult mysteries a distinct and resonant horror. 

Our final destination was the Suydam mausoleum (usually closed to the public), where the eerie notes of the Saw Lady, aka Natalia Paruz, accompanied the serving of drinks along the cemetery road from the Lovecraft Bar (opening next week in the East Village). 

Below are some photographs from the evening by Kathryn Yu and Mitch Waxman. Many thanks to all who joined us for the adventure, to readers Clay McLeod Chapman, Bess Lovejoy, and Mitch Waxman, as well as the Saw Lady and Lovecraft Bar for making it a success. And of course, thanks to the Green-Wood Historic Fund for collaborating with us on an event that was able to showcase the beauty of the cemetery and link in this literary history. To join us on our next event, sign up for the NYC Obscura Society mailing list. 

Clay McLeod Chapman reading in the Whitney Mausoleum (photograph by Kathryn Yu)

Departing the candlelit Whitney Mausoleum (photograph by Kathryn Yu)

Bess Lovejoy reading beneath the weeping beech (photograph by Mitch Waxman)

Traveling through the cemetery by lanternlight (photograph by Kathryn Yu)

Listing to Mitch Waxman read near 18th century tombs (photograph by Kathryn Yu)

Clay McLeod Chapman reading at the Pierrepoint monument (photograph by Mitch Waxman)

The Saw Lady performing at the Suydam mausoleum (photograph by Mitch Waxman)

Inside the Suydam mausoleum (photograph by Kathryn Yu)

Inside the Suydam mausoleum (photograph by Kathryn Yu)

View to the Suydam mausoleum (photograph by Kathryn Yu)

The gate of Green-Wood Cemetery illuminated in the night (photograph by Kathryn Yu)

Craving more Lovecraft? Check out our Essential Guide to Living Lovecraft.

The Obscura Society is the real-world exploration arm of Atlas Obscura We seek out secret histories, unusual access, and opportunities for our community to explore strange and overlooked places hidden all around us. Join us on our next adventure, and keep up with NYC Obscura Society events on our mailing list.

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