Lonesome George at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC (all photographs by Michelle Enemark) 

With a neck that stretches for days, the taxidermy of the late, last Pinta Island giant tortoise Lonesome George went on display Friday at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. Standing proud in his own gallery encircled with windows, the symbol of lost biodiversity is on view through January.

Atlas Obscura paid Lonesome George a visit this past Sunday, joining the small throng of a crowd with their cameras angled over the weathered skin and saddle-backed shell of what was arguably the world's most famous tortoise. Lonesome George — named as such for being the last known member of his subspecies of Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii, as well as totally uninterested in mating with female tortoises — passed away on June 24, 2012, at an age estimated over a hundred years old, in the Tortoise Breeding and Rearing Center. He'd lived at the Galápagos Islands center since he was discovered in 1971, which was after scientists had believed the Pinta Island giant tortoise extinct. 

Now, although his loss was mourned as yet another tragedy in human-spurred extinction, it's hoped by preserving him in taxidermy he can be a continued icon of conservation awareness. It's believed there were between 14 and 15 giant tortoise subspecies on the Galápagos prior to human arrival. With the destruction of available flora by feeding pigs and goats introduced by voyagers, not to mention the travelers themselves taking the hardy tortoises along for their own food source on the ships, their populations were wrecked. 

In January, Lonesome George will journey in death to Ecuador, rather than to the originally planned Galápagos, as we reported last year. It's incredibly unusual to know the exact individual who marks the end of an animal, which makes the taxidermy of Lonesome George all the more precious. Like the taxidermy and skeleton remains of extinct animals preserved at the Paris Grande Galerie d'Évolution, he's now in an afterlife almost on the level of a relic. Eleanor Sterling of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the AMNH explains in a video embedded below: 

The last known individual of an entire species is gone because of human activity, and so we think that understanding the plight of the giant tortoises and understanding what happened to the Pinta giant tortoises, and then thinking about how that translates into what we do to take care of the other remaining giant tortoises in the Galápagos and endangered species everywhere, is a really important message for us, and one that I think the individual called Lonesome George can really bring to the public.

Lonesome George is on view at the American Museum of Natural History in New York through January 4. 

J. W. Ocker, the author of Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe, out now from Countryman Press, discovered a surprising array of sites and artifacts connected to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in his year-long trek to visit all things Poe in the many places the poet lived.

Illustration by Édouard Manet for a French translation by Stéphane Mallarmé of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" (1875) (via Library of Congress)

You know the image. A lone man sits in his chamber one midnight dreary pondering over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, when his reverie is interrupted by a grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore that perches on a pallid bust of Pallas just above his chamber door.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” was published in January 1845 in New York’s Evening Mirror. This was less than four years before Poe died, and 15 years since he last published a full volume of poetry. Its 18 stanzas represent the peak of his fame in life. It probably still does, but that’s two very different peaks, like Bunker Hill and Olympus Mons different.

Today, “The Raven” is as relevant, well-known, and popular as, well, whatever the kids are listening to and watching these days. Sorry. I’m old. Artists and storytellers, even the National Football League, have tried to wrestle the image of the raven away from Poe’s death grip, but all have failed to even rustle a single ebon feather. Perhaps the strangest thing about this poem that started in one man’s imagination and expanded into the collective cultural consciousness is how many physical artifacts related to it have survived.

For my new book, Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe, I spent more than a year visiting memorials, mementos, monuments, and more dedicated or connected to Edgar Allan Poe in the places he lived and visited. That meant traveling from Massachusetts all the way down to an island in South Carolina, as well as across the Atlantic, seeing amazing Poe sites and artifacts and meeting the people responsible for maintaining his physical legacy. By far, some of my most favorite sites were directly related to “The Raven,” most in surprising ways. 

Once Upon a Midnight Dreary

W. 84th Street in Manhattan (all photographs by the author unless noted)

It seems like a normal Upper West Side Manhattan street. People cram the concrete, cars cram the asphalt, the kind of thick bustle of humanity you either love or hate. Until you look up and see the shiny green sign that says "Edgar Allan Poe St." It’s a short stretch of West 84th Street, from West End Avenue to Broadway, a mere block, but the sign doesn’t honor Poe randomly. It hints at something significant related to Poe in the area. You have to lower your gaze to discover what that is.

Two different plaques, one on the side of The Alameda building at 255 West 84th Street, and one at Eagle Court Apartments at 215 West 84th Street, attest that somewhere thereabouts stood the farmhouse where Poe penned “The Raven.” The former plaque was placed in 1922 by the Shakespeare Society, the latter by a local landmark society in 1986.

Looking around the urban chaos, it’s hard to imagine the isolated farmhouse perched on its rocky crag, much less the dark man inside making a list of English words that rhyme with “nevermore.” But nearby, there’s something that can help spur the imagination.

Each Separate Dying Ember Wrought Its Ghost Upon the Floor

Butler Library at Columbia University

Columbia University is a mile and a half north of Edgar Allan Poe Street. There, in the rare books department of Butler Library, a building that has Poe’s name carved on its façade along with many other founding literary fathers, is an amazing artifact.

Located in a short, thin, white hallway across from a series of glass-walled offices is a black fireplace mantel. It would have been easy to walk right past it had I not been directed to it, and even easier to miss the tiny brass plaque affixed to it, with its brazen statement, “EDGAR A. POE wrote THE RAVEN before this mantel.”

The farmhouse where Poe wrote “The Raven” was torn town in 1888, four decades after his death and long enough after for his fame to spread. A fan named William Hempstreet pulled the mantel from oblivion, and 20 years later donated it to Columbia University.

Two chairs sit in front of it, and of course, I sat in one to read the copy of “The Raven” that I had brought, savoring particularly the line “Each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor,” as it may well have been the fire within that very mantel that inspired it.

From My Books Surcease of Sorrow

The Free Library of Philadelphia

In Philadelphia, there are two main places you can go to search out Poe in general. The first is his home, a National Historic Site, which has no real relation to “The Raven,” although in its basement is a plaque declaring that the poem was written there. The idea is actually semi-defensible, but generally not held. It’s left over from the previous owner — wealthy grocery story scion Richard Gimbel — who was a little too zealous in his love of marketing Poe. To really see something related to the poem, you must head to the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Central Library, where Gimbel’s full collection of Poeana resides. And, really, you must.

"The Raven" in Poe's writing

There, in the rare books department on the third floor, accessible by advance request, is the only extant, full copy of “The Raven” in Poe’s own handwriting. It covers two sheets front and back, and was written at the request of a fan who lived in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.

But as amazing as that manuscript is, the Free Library tops itself when it comes to “The Raven.”

Stately Raven of the Saintly Days of Yore

On display in a glass case just down the hall from where I got to hold “The Raven” manuscript in my hands is a taxidermied raven. Its story is going to be a hard one to stuff in a nutshell.

Grip the Raven (via Atlas Obscura)

In short and inadequately, that piece of bird-wrapped sawdust is Grip the Raven, a pet of Charles Dickens that he used, along with another of his pet ravens, as the model for the talking raven in his book Barnaby Rudge. Poe reviewed that book for one of the magazines that he worked for, noting the use of the bird in particular and expressing the wish that its utterances had been used more prophetically. A few years later, “The Raven” was published, with its “Prophet!...thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!”

Basically, that dead bird flesh under glass was muse to two of the greatest writers in the language. I can barely believe it exists, much less that it’s publically accessible. A highlight of my entire Poe trek, no doubt.

On This Home by Horror Haunted

People loved “The Raven” enough that Poe was often asked to read it in front of lecture audiences and at social gatherings. The last time he did so was in the city where he grew up — Richmond, Virginia — in a farmhouse called Talavera. It was the home of a friend of Poe’s sister Rosalie, who lived most of her life in Richmond. Poe was enjoying a triumphant return to that city, famous at last for his work and all the shadows that marred his youth there long dispelled. Two weeks after his reading, Poe died under mysterious circumstances in Baltimore while en route to Philadelphia.

The yellow house still stands, although it was moved from its previous location to what is now 2315 W. Grace Street in a charming Richmond neighborhood. The privately-owned house bears no sign that attests to the fact that it’s one of the few places Poe can be tracked in the last weeks of his fever called living.

Be That Word Our Sign of Parting

We’ve all heard the lines of “The Raven” so many times that they can blast right past us like those rock songs from the 1960s and 70s that got played too many times on FM radio over the years. To see the sites connected to the poem anchors the words and imagery, slows them down to the meticulous scratching of a real pen against real paper, adds a new angle for us to approach it to help us continue to appreciate this poem. After all, it’s not going anywhere.

And that Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting.

 J.W. Ocker is the author of The New England Grimpendium and The New York Grimpendium, both personal travelogues of deathly sites in those regions. He also runs the website OTIS (www.OddThingsIveSeen.com), where he chronicles his visits to oddities of culture, history, art, and nature across the country and world. Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe is available now. 

Mists of Mùli (all photographs by the author)

In the Faroe Islands, automatic transmission vehicles are hard to come by. And I soon found that my quick practice run around the block in a borrowed pick-up truck only moments before I left for the airport in Boston hadn't prepared me for a multi-island odyssey along wildly curved one-lane roads and through aging mountain tunnels.

After stalling the car in the unlit, single-track tunnel between Árnafjørður and Hvannasund (and being unable to restart it as a set of headlights barreled toward me), I wound my way along a wrinkled gravel road gouged from the side of a mountain to its terminus, the now-abandoned village of Mùli at the tip of the northern island of Borðoy.

Looking Down the Fjord from Mùli To Hvannasund

Author's accommodations in Mùli

As I stepped out of the car I was instantly enveloped by a crushing silence — a vacuum of human sound that swallowed even the miniature noise of gravel under my shoes as I walked over to the house that I'd rented from a woman living in the capital. Out the kitchen window, across the fjord, the towering pyramid of rock, Malinsfjall, cast deep shadows across this isolated microcosm. In a golden un-night, I heard the roar of quiet just beyond the waves that crashed against the cliffs below the deserted hamlet.

Malinsfjall

Mùli is (was) one of the most remote settlements in this already remote cluster of 18 islands in the North Atlantic. A kind of secondary isolation — a place removed from a place removed. At a tiny grocery store somewhere along the way, I asked for directions to this place, and it took no fewer than five people to figure out where I was headed, and when they finally realized where I was going, five faces looked back with a mixture of wonder and dread. None of them knew how to get there.

People lived in Mùli until the mid-1990s, but now only a shepherd regularly makes his way down the warbled road to check on the sheep that still graze among the precious slivers of flat land on the mountainsides. And me, an anthropologist in search of the cultural meaning of isolation. I think I'm close.

Sheep barn in Mùli

Mùli

Old staircase to the abandoned wharf

The village was the last to be connected to the country's power grid in the late 1970s, and road access didn't reach Mùli until 1989. Before the road, residents relied on intermittent boat (and later, helicopter) service, and had to haul goods up a steep, twisted stairway from the tiny landing. To attend church services, a boat would bring them across the fjord to the larger village of Viðareiði on the neighboring island of Viðoy. I tried to imagine what it would be like living at the end of an island in this far-flung archipelago at any time other than that exact moment. This place is a trace of a time when survival was more hard-won, a palimpsest of everyday ways of life that have passed away. I can read the struggle in the landscape made out of thin bands of inhabitation that encircle these mountain islands in the middle of nowhere. It's beautiful and terrible.

When I occupied the little black house in Mùli, in that tiny slice of a summer, the sun only pretended to set, dipping behind the mountains, only to resurface a couple of hours later, illuminating the bulletproof quiet of this place. I spent my days writing at the kitchen table, sneaking furtive glances at Malinsfjall as the clouds drew strange patterns on its eerie geology. I became obsessed with my heartbeat. It seemed to get louder each day, reminding me of my detachment from the rest of the human world. I was the only living thing in this ghost town at the edge of the world.

Outbuilding in Mùli

Remains of a building in Mùli

Turf roof in Mùli

Periodically, some wayward tourists would find their way to my adopted hometown, and in that moment, I became a ghost in the ghost town: the movement of curtains behind dusty windows, the distant sound of music in between gusts of wind, the figure moving silently in a half-lit kitchen.

Every couple of days, I'd brave the darkened tunnels and make the trip to Klaksvik, the "second city" of the Faroe Islands, to stock up on supplies and check my email. Each time I made the journey, I felt like I was entering an odd little dreamworld, a place of people, as if I wasn't one of them anymore.

In a way, I'd become more remote as result of my place. I'd become a crooked, unhinged shadow, removed from people and their sounds. It is a strange thing to purposefully inhabit an abandoned place. It's a kind of archeology of the present, like I hadn't given the place time to decompose, to accumulate layers of hidden meaning. It's as though I wanted to see the world of the last person to live there through their eyes. And in that magically bizarre moment of being there, I caught a few glimpses into the everyday afterlives of Mùli.

Malinsfjall from the road to Mùli

Road to Mùli

Visible storage at the Luce Foundation Center for American Art (photograph by Cliff/Flickr)

In the world’s largest museums, only a small fraction of their collections are ever placed on display. This makes the storage capacity and conditions of museums incredibly important.

Jennifer Jones, chair and curator within the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, wrote a few years ago about the difficulties museums face when considering storage and how it should work. As time elapses, museum staff must contend with an increase in collections, as well as technologies and filing systems that go out of date.

While museums are chiefly concerned with the health and condition of their collections, they are also keenly aware of the need to compete with outside influences to keep patrons heading in through their doors. Whether it is other museum options in major metropolitan areas, the need to attract brand new visitors, or tech projects like Google Art, museums find themselves constantly on the lookout for new acquisitions, exhibit redesigns, and inventive ways to attract visitors.

These conditions have helped produced the ever-popular trend of "visible storage," a new way museums across the world are preserving their collections in beautiful, yet safe, environments that offer museum-goers a window into the daily operations behind-the-scenes, all the while maintaining tight conservation control over storage systems and collections.

One of these institutions is the Brooklyn Museum, where Luce Center for American Art visible storage enables visitors to view approximately 2,000 items from the museum’s storage facility. This 5,000 square-foot space enables visitors to view a rotating collection of storage items that would normally be packed away in the dark. At any one time, 600 paintings from the museum’s holdings are rotated in and out on rolling racks situated behind glass walls, with numerous other artifacts positions in cases around the gallery.

Kevin Stayton, chief curator at the Brooklyn Museum, explained: “Since the installation was introduced in 2004, [visitation] numbers are up and have consistently risen.” According to Stayton, visitors have described visible storage as providing a “treasure box feeling,” enabling them to find hidden objects and make connections with surrounding displays without much guidance. But the Brooklyn Museum is just one of a growing number of museums around the world that are developing beautiful, visually-stimulating visible storage facilities, allowing museum goers to see more than ever before.

Below is a photo collection of just a few of the world’s most beautiful visual museum storage spaces:

Luce Foundation Center for American Art
Washington, DC 

photograph by Cliff/Flickr

photograph by Cliff/Flickr

photograph by Cliff/Flickr

photograph by Cliff/Flickr

photograph by Cliff/Flickr

Victoria & Albert Museum
London, England

photograph by Philafrenzy/Wikimedia

photograph by Andreas Praefcke/Wikimedia

photograph by UK_FGR/Wikimedia

photograph by Sarah Stierch

Museum Aan de Stroom
Antwerp, Belgium

photograph by Filip Dujardin, courtesy MAS

photograph by Filip Dujardin, courtesy MAS

photograph by Filip Dujardin, courtesy MAS

Larco Museum
Lima, Peru

photograph by Lyndsay Ruell/Wikimedia

photograph by Marcelo Druck/Flickr

photograph by Robert Nunn/Flickr

photograph by Raban Haaijk/Flickr

Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn, New York

photograph courtesy of Brooklyn Museum

photograph courtesy of Brooklyn Museum

photograph courtesy of Brooklyn Museum

The Warehouse, National Railway Museum  
York, England

photograph by Ben Salter/Wikimedia

photograph by David Jones/Flickr

photograph by Ben Salter/Wikimedia

Rietberg Museum
Zurich, Switzerland

photograph by Martin Sauter/Wikimedia

photograph by Andreas Praefcke/Wikimedia

photograph by Andreas Praefcke/Wikimedia

Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum
Birmingham, Alabama

photograph by Roger Smith/Flickr

photograph by Roger Smith/Flickr

Discover more of the world's most amazing museums and collections on Atlas Obscura >

Doel, Belgium (all photographs by Chris Staring/Skaremedia)

Despite the fact that Doel has existed for more than 700 years, this small village will soon be erased in order to make way for the constantly expanding Antwerp port.

Doel, Belgium, sits about a 20 minute drive to the northwest of downtown Antwerp on the edge of the port inlet. Since the 1970s, Doel has been scheduled for demolition multiple times, but the residents managed to delay the inevitable through repeated protests. After almost 30 years of delays, however, the government finally scheduled Doel for complete demolition, and in the late 1990s the residents slowly started trickling out of Doel, leaving their houses empty, and ripe for street artists to use as their canvas.

Some demolition work appears to have already begun

When visiting Doel, it really feels like you have entered a post-apocalyptic world with its empty streets, overgrown vegetation, and abandoned houses, all in the shadow of a nearby power plant.

The gates to the village Lock, with the power plant looming in the background

A lot of the artwork scattered around Doel depicts the nearby cooling towers from the nuclear power plant

Vegetation has begun to reclaim the town

There are still a handful of residents who call Doel home, and continue to fight for its survival, and encourage artists to come and decorate the abandoned houses with colorful murals. Some of the remaining eccentric citizens also contribute by erecting sculptures, folk art, gardens, and “Save Doel” banners and signs, as well as informational posters throughout the village.

A colorful birdhouse/folk art sculpture, presumably erected by one of the few remaining residents

The main reason I came to Doel was to hunt out murals painted by one of my favourite street artists from Antwerp who goes by the name “Roa.” Most of the artwork and murals painted around the town seem to be abstract, yet some artists have used use the unique canvas to their advantage, and some of the artworks are purposefully targeting certain subjects and messages.  Roa paints only large black and white animals, sometimes dead or decaying, and they have a unique sketchy look unlike any other street artist I have come across so far.

One of the many Roa murals that can be found in Doel

Another Roa mural on the side of an empty house

An Iconic Mural by Antwerp street artist Roa

During my visit, I explored all of the streets, photographed the most interesting spots, and, although forbidden, I also entered a few of the buildings in the search of Roa's murals.

One of the abandoned houses which is easily accessible

The flooded basement inside the house pictured above

The vandalized lounge room inside the house

It is forbidden to enter the houses due to safety reasons, such as this stairwell which is missing its railing

Pretty much everything in Doel has now closed. The only three places I found which seemed to still be operating were a big church, a small windmill/café to the side of the village, and a small bar/restaurant in the center of town which caters mainly to the few residents who still call Doel home, and the visitors who cycle here from Antwerp during the summer. Everything else in the town has closed down.

The windmill café which still seems to be open for business.

These gas pumps may have been out of order for some time now

A large factory sits abandoned

A few spray cans inside the factory

Abstract artwork on an abandoned building

A face painted onto the façade of an abandoned house

Some street art has more meaning behind it. This one makes a statement about nearby Antwerp, its large Jewish population, and role as the biggest trader of diamonds in the world.

At the time of writing the few remaining residents of Doel are rallying to have the demolition of their village delayed until 2020, and inviting artists to come and contribute to the huge urban art gallery to raise awareness. Only time will tell how much longer they are able to delay the inevitable expansion of the Antwerp port, which will eventually leave Doel no more than a distant memory.

All photographs by Chris Staring/Skaremedia.

Sunken lane in Normandy, France (photograph by Jean-François Gornet/Flickr)

Appearing like trenches dragged into the earth, sunken lanes, also called hollow-ways or holloways, are centuries-old thoroughfares worn down by the traffic of time. They're one of the few examples of human-made infrastructure still serving its original purpose, although many who walk through holloways don't realize they're retracing ancient steps.

The name "holloway" is derived from "hola weg," meaning sunken road in Old English. You're most likely to discover a holloway where the ground and the stone below are soft, such as places rich in sandstone or chalk. No one ever engineered a holloway — erosion by human feet, and horses or cattle driven alongside, combined with water then flowing through the embankments like a gully, molded the land into a tunneled road. It's hard to date them, but most are thought to go back to Roman times and the Iron Age, although in the Middle East some are believed to stretch back to Mesopotamia. They even have their own ecology, such as the spreading bellflowers that enjoy the disturbed earth. 

Last year Robert Macfarlane published a book called Holloway that mused on the landforms alongside gorgeous woodcuts by Stanley Donwood. Macfarlane described the sunken lanes as "rifts within which time might exist as pure surface, prone to recapitulation and rhyme, weird morphologies, uncanny doublings." Back in 2008, he described the geology of the holloways in an Orion magazine article:

The oldest holloways date back to the early Iron Age. None is younger than three hundred years old. Over the course of centuries, the passage of cart wheels, hooves, and feet wore away at the floor of these roads, grooving ruts into the exposed stone.

Some holloways have garnered modern infamy due to their use as shelters in war, such as one in La Meauffe, Normandy, that earned the nickname "Death Valley Road" in a clash between American and German soldiers, or another now called "Bloody Lane" after the hundreds who died there in Maryland's Battle of Antietam in the American Civil War. However, most are quietly still offering passage through forests and the overgrowth, just as they have for centuries. 

Erbrée, Brittany, France (photograph by Olybrius/Wikimedia)

Sunken lane in La Meauffe, France, site of a 1944 World War II battle (photograph by Romain Bréget/Wikimedia)

Brittany, France (photograph by Jean-François Gornet/Flickr)

Stourton, England (photograph by David Coombes/Flickr)

Little Covert, Bradford Abbas, England, where a holloway was worn in the soft rock over centuries (photograph by Nigel Mykura/geograph.org.uk)

Parc des Oblates, Nantes, France (photograph by Jibi44/Wikimedia)

Dark Lane, Southowram, England (photograph by Tim Green/Flickr)

Dark Lane, Southowram, England (photograph by Tim Green/Flickr)

Wrinkleberry Lane, North Devon, England (photograph by Andrew/Flickr)

From August to September, Eames Demetrios, Geographer-at-Large for Kcymaerxthaere, is serving as the Geographer-in-Residence at Atlas Obscura. Read his previous posts & discover places in a world parallel to our own here.

It is dawn in west Michigan and tomorrow, at 8:30 AM (getting coffee at 8), some intrepid folks will begin their journey of story from Michigan to Indiana, and thence to the 9th Annual All-Kymaericas Kcymaerxthaere Spelling Bee in Paris, Illinois.

Never been to a parallel universe spelling bee before? Here is what one looks like. DON'T miss it.

ArtPrize in Grand Rapids has been going on for four or five years now, and is the largest crowd-sourced arts festival anywhere in the world. Even as I prepare for the caravan, I've been lucky enough to take a look around at a couple of things.

One of the most striking so far? Anila Quayyum Agha at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. It is just one of 1,500 works spread around the city for three weeks, creating a real celebration of public space.

I have a soft spot for ArtPrize — it was where I installed the five markers we'll be touring here, one of the densest concentrations of Kcy sites anywhere in the world. And because of ArtPrize, we were able to install right by the river, so important to the story — and so very close.

Tomorrow morning, we'll start on the tour at 8:30, but with an added bonus that we will expand to sites all over the world. As another interactive feature of the residency, we have created simple pdfs of Kcymaerxthaere Tourist Cards for field agents and others to put in brochure racks in their community to promote their local Kcymaerxthaere sites.

The files will start going online next week, but members of the Altas Obscura team will be modeling good behavior on this caravan. More details on the caravan are here. 

This is a shorter than usual post, because we have to get ready — including organizing our surprise gifts.

Until then, greetings from Grand Rapids — and follow us at @kcym and @atlasobscura on Twitter, plus Instagram and all weekend. 

Shøaf!!! And see you on the road.

 Join the Kcymaerxthaere from September 27 to 28 with Atlas Obscura >

Anita in the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (photograph by beccapie/Flickr)

Alongside the huge airplanes and spacecrafts in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is a small spider who went to space, the name "Anita" stuck onto her preserving jar. Anita and her companion spider Arabella were part of an experiment to see if spiders would weave their webs once propelled out of the Earth's atmosphere.

Spiders are known to use the weight of their bodies to coordinate their web weaving, so a change in gravity was something scientists were interested in testing, especially as studying the nervous system of spiders could have an impact on essential drugs for humans. As NASA explains on their site:

The experiment was designed to measure motor response, an indication of the functioning of the central nervous system. Drugs such as stimulants and sedatives affect the nervous system by causing degradation of certain motor responses. In an effort to study the effects of drugs, researchers have often utilized spiders as test subjects. The geometrical structure of the web of an orb-weaving spider provides a good measure of the condition of its central nervous system.

High school student Judith Miles presenting her proposal for a Skylab experiment with spiders in 1972 (via NASA)

Last week the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum shared Anita and one of the spider cages also on display on their Twitter. The idea to send spiders to space actually came from a 17-year-old  Lexington, Massachusetts, high school student named Judith Miles. She proposed the "Web Formation in Zero Gravity" test as part of an initiative to bring 25 student experiments aboard the Skylab 3 mission. Two common Cross spiders were selected, given a housefly meal before launch, and from July 28 to September 25, 1973, they were sent to spin where no webs had been spun before. 

After being coaxed into the cages designed specifically for the experiment, neither spider started web building immediately in the microgravity, reportedly demonstrating "erratic swimming motions" upon entering. A camera was trained on their movement, and despite the totally unfamiliar dislocation from the planet, in two days Arabella built a web, and later Anita would spin one of her own. They were finer webs than those they made on Earth, but otherwise not completely dissimilar. 

Neither spider made it back to earth, both dying likely due to dehydration, surviving the harrowing journey, but not the limitations on their care. Yet the experiment was revealing about the adaptation of motor response in space, building webs despite a major stimulus — their body's weight — being disrupted. While Anita is on display in the Smithsonian annex at Washington Dulles International Airport, Arabella is on loan at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. There are several of these involuntary animal participants in space exploration preserved in space museums, from dogs Belka and Strelka in Moscow to Miss Able the monkey, also in the Smithsonian. Yet it's easy to overlook these arachnids who so incredibly constructed their delicate webs out soaring with the stars.

Flight Director Neil B. Hutchinson & astronaut Bruce McCandless II with a glass enclose for the spider Arachne (via NASA)

 
Dr. Ray Gause of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center feeding a housefly to Arabella by placing it in her web (via NASA)

Arabella on her web (via NASA)

Objects of Intrigue is a feature highlighting extraordinary objects from the world's great museums, private collections, historic libraries, and overlooked archives. See more incredible objects here >

A well & water bogie spirit (illustration from "Books and Bookmen," 1899, via Internet Archive Book Images)

The Japanese are renowned for the supernatural — the yokāi (roughly "monsters"), and yūrei ("ghosts"). The ghosts and monsters of Japanese tradition still infiltrate and live in the Japanese conciousness, with school children telling stories about yokāi first mentioned a thousand years ago, alongside some that were only invented during the 20th century. Remakes of Japanese films such as The Ring and The Grudge have also helped to introduce these stories to larger audiences around the world.

Rumors of haunted temples, office buildings, and homes are widespread around Japan. Imagine a Google Maps page where the archipelago that makes up Japan is obscured by red pins of hauntings, from Okinawa to Hokkaido. Yokai, like the Nopperabō (the "man with no face") and the Kuchisake Onna ("slit-mouthed woman") are still seen on city streets, and terrified bystanders have been known to report their presence to the police. Places like the Aokigahara Suicide Forest and Sunshine 60, a mixed-use skyscraper in Ikebukero, Tokyo, are well-known as haunted sites in Japan, and each summer Obake Yashiki ("haunted houses"), such as Tokyo's the Cursed Tooth, pop up to give people a chill in the hot weather.

A Storm-Fiend (illustration from "Books and Bookmen," 1899, via Internet Archive Book Images)

The props and scares of the Obake Yashiki industry might be worth a scream and a moment of terror with your friends, but traditional Japanese ghosts are not to be laughed at, as a spirit will only return to spook the living if it died due to serious betrayal or other powerful, unresolved emotions. So-called kodokushi, or "lonely deaths," are also implicated, as are suicides and murders, and to live in a house where such a death has occurred is to tempt fate. 

A "lonely death" is one where the body is not found for a long period after death, and the stains left behind on the floor are, in the Japanese mind, the path for the ghosts to re-enter the world. Although the traditional Japanese view of family is one of three generations living together, this life is far removed from the modern reality. In 2008, Tokyo saw more than 2,200 people over the age of 65 die a lonely death.

A Japanese ghost (illustration from "Books and Bookmen," 1899, via Internet Archive Book Images)

In Japan, the memories of yokai and yurei impact peoples' daily lives, as jizo (stone statues that placate the dead) are decorated with red scarves and are left offerings of mochi (cakes made of bean-curd) and tanuki statues stand outside bars and restaurants to trick the prankster yokai into thinking they've already feasted here (and paid with leaves, no doubt). Even in the West, you would have seen statues of neko-chan waving their paws, or golden toads with a coin in their mouths at almost any Asian fast foodery, to bring in money. Reports of "ghost lights" illuminating the seas off Fukushima in the wake of the twin natural and manmade disaster were made, and indeed were reported in the same area after a tsunami in the 1770s. Reports of these "ghost lights" out at sea span the length of Japanese history, almost always following in the wake of tsunami and earthquakes. The official explanation is that "ghost lights" are the result of escaping gas, but Japanese traditions seem to indicate otherwise.

Japan's estimated population at the time of their last census was 127 million, and people have been living on this small collection of islands since the Jomon period (~12,000 BCE.) In an increasingly crowded country with a strong traditional belief in ghosts and hauntings, the question of avoiding a marauding ghost becomes impossible to solve, without outside help. The wake-ari bukken, or "stigmatized properties," have not only spawned a collection of websites to either help you avoid or assist you in renting a place that may be "psychologically harmful," but also have been written into Japanese law, a law which refers to a list of seven different criteria, which are:

• A location near a known criminal organization;
• A location built by, or on ground once owned by, a cult;
• A location built on top of a well, whether filled in or still open (wells feature heavily in Japanese folklore);
• A location near a waste or sewerage treatment facility, or a crematorium;
• A location with a history of fires or flooding that caused death or injury;
• A location where a suicide, murder or “lonely death” have occurred.

Spirit on the ceiling (illustration from "Books and Bookmen," 1899, via Internet Archive Book Images)

Houses, hotel rooms, and entire buildings can be afflicted — and several services exist to help concerned Japanese either avoid these haunted houses, or to find cheaper rental properties, up to 20% cheaper. They can also be used by the more macabre-minded to find allegedly haunted hotel rooms. Websites such as SUUMO are honest about any problems that may have existed. They even take it further than that with a cutesy jingle: “It's a stigmatized property, which means a low initial cost! You'll be living by yourself, but it won't feel like it! It's perfect for lonely singles!”, and they have a cute picture of a ghost in the images as a mascot, a mascot designed by the creators of the popular Japanese character, Doraemon. OutletFudousan only deals with stigmatized properties, and even offers a free exorcism with any rental. CAVEAT EMPTOR is another site that deals just with "real-estate listings with problems," although they're expanding their database to cities outside of Japan itself, and now show similar listings for the US and Canada via their Android app.

Would you live in an allegedly haunted house?

I know I would — especially with the rental prices in Tokyo. 

The Simulcram Vulgare (illustration from "Books and Bookmen," 1899, via Internet Archive Book Images)

Main Support Frame of Engine Unit, March 20, 1902. (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

The steam-powered trains that first provided New York City with mass transit quickly became a sooty mess, rumbling over the elevated tracks above the streets and leaving dark clouds in their cacophonous wake. So in 1900 construction began on a massive new facility that would use alternating current (AC) electricity to propel the transit lines of the Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth avenues in Manhattan.

An exhibition at the New York Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn called Anatomy of a Powerhouse: Electrifying the El, brings together 31 photographs of the building of the 74th Street Powerhouse. The images are all from an archive of 1,200 photographs donated by the MTA New York City Transit, Department of Subways, Division of Electrical Power Operations. They show the colossal engineering of 6,000 tons of metal — both steel and iron — that went into the machinery. Generators, transformers, steam pipes, and coal conveyors all fit together into what was the world's largest AC power station. Designed by George H. Pegram, the building radically influenced the future of New York City mass transit when the elevated lines in Manhattan were all electrified by June 25, 1903, even if the fanfare was minimal. Yet the subways are cleaner, safer, and more efficient today thanks to this incredible engineering project. 

Such an achievement deserves celebration, and now over a century later Atlas Obscura is partnering with the New York Transit Museum this Thursday, October 2, on an evening called Power Play. Situated alongside Anatomy of a Powerhouse, as well as its companion exhibition ElectriCity: Powering New York's Rails, the after-hours event will feature music from gypsy punks Amour Obscur, artifacts from the Museum of Interesting Things, and other retrotech-themed marvels to honor this powerful transit history. We hope you'll join us! Below are some images from Anatomy of a Powerhouse that show the turn-of-the-century grandeur of the 74th Street Powerhouse.

Manhattan Railway Company 74th Street Powerhouse, ca. 1902. (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

Workmen Assembling Generator, May 15, 1902. (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

Transformers and Rotary Converter, March 6, 1902. (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

Steam Pipe and Piston Engine in the Engine Room, December 28, 1902. (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

Engine Room, November 18, 1902. (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

Construction of Coal and Ash Tower, May 29, 1902. (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

Coal Conveyor Belt, May 22, 1902. (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

Coal Conveyor Belt Mechanical Gears, April 10, 1902. (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

Assembly of Engine Generator Unit, May 29, 1902. (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

74th Street Powerhouse, Pressure Gauges & Steam Pressure Wheel for Rotary Generators, February 20, 1902. (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

Power Play, an evening event in collaboration with Atlas Obscura at the New York Transit Museum, is this Thursday, October 2 >

Gate of Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia (all photographs by the author)

Philadelphia's Mount Moriah Cemetery has been officially closed and abandoned since 2011, its 380 acres now overgrown, the over 85,000 graves consumed by an encroaching forest. Incorporated in 1855, it was once among the most elite of the Victorian cemeteries. Now you're lucky if you can find a family member's grave without rubbing against poison ivy. 

How such a significant place fell into such ruin is complicated, and years after its last burial it's still effectively without an owner. A nonprofit volunteer-spurred group called Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery regularly cuts a path in the bramble so there is at least some navigation through the grounds. But as the cemetery is divided between Philadelphia and Delaware counties, each with its own potential managing corporation, as of this month Mount Moriah's future is undecided by the two sides.

Mausoleum crumbling in the flora

Vines climbing up a statue

This past weekend Atlas Obscura visited the cemetery, drawn to the place by the recent entry posted to our site by Luke Spencer, whose photographs showed monuments swallowed by vegetation with a Victorian decay found more in Europe with places like Highgate Cemetery in London. There were vines winding up obelisks and pillars topped with statues of mourning women who seemed soon to be pulled down into the dense verdure. Graffiti on bricked-up mausoleums was buffed over in white. No one else was in the cemetery, and coming around one of the blind bends of high foliage we were startled to see a group of at least four deer bound away from us into the green labyrinth. While there were definitely some unnerving areas, such as a place where it seemed people had been coming at night to party, it overall was just incredibly sad. Here is a place meant as memorial, as a place of peace for the dead, and they've been left to obscurity and neglect. There is a definite beauty to nature overtaking the old marble and granite monuments, but this is not the burial choice that these people made. The sole exceptions are the mowed Civil War plots which are still cared for by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Mount Moriah was once as prestigious a rural cemetery as its city sibling Laurel Hill, which still enjoys a preserved status as a historic space. Even Betsy Ross was once interred in Mount Moriah, until she was dug up and reburied in 1976 at the Betsy Ross House. What brought Mount Moriah down was not just a fall from fashion for the old grandiose monuments and Victorian-style death rituals, but a gradual deterioration of administration, until the last member of its cemetery association passed away in 2004. Now its most visible face is the old Romanesque entrance that is a fragmented vision of what it once was — a fractured, crumbling portal into a cemetery only peaking through the overgrowth. 

The ruins of the gate

An Egyptian-style mausoleum with its door bricked up & graffiti covered with white paint

Vines on an obelisk & statue of Hope

Two bricked-up mausoleums

A shrouded urn covered with vines & honeysuckle

A 1930s tombstone among the plants

The bushes & grass grow to the middle of this tall monument

This statue of Time was once on the entrance gate before being purchased by this lot holder

The Civil War plots are the only ones regularly maintained

A group of mausoleums & obelisks are abandoned on a hill

Another view of the hill with the mausoleums & obelisks

A view over one of the more maintained areas of the cemetery

MOUNT MORIAH CEMETERY, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

One of the most important things to us here at the Atlas is to always keep traveling and discovering. Notes from the Field are first person reports from the most inspiring trips taken by the Atlas Obscura Team. Read more Notes From the Field Here>

All photographs by Rachel Friedman

Istanbul is a city with zero public funding for the arts, so private money has swooped in to fill the gap by supporting a wide range of spaces and projects. Among them is Borusan Contemporary, an office-museum concept (the first in the world, they claim), opened in 2011.

At the end of every week, employees of Borusan Holdings, a conglomerate active in the steel, auto, and telecommunications industries, tidy their desks and leave behind an active contemporary art museum. It’s open to the public all weekend for viewing mesmerizing multi-platform, site-specific installations. When I was there, a selection of work from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was on display. Massive images of the Golden Gate Bridge were projected onto a long wall on one floor; on another, long stacks of television screens illuminated the room with eerie blue light.

A few employees were still finishing up their work as I wandered the nine floors, popping into various nooks to find where artwork was interspersed with office space. Specific areas of each floor form mini-galleries, but there are is also a permanent collection of sculptures and paintings you must hunt a bit for. A light-installation piece flashed through in the hallways as I made my way up the stairs, past the outdoor café, and out onto the roof deck. I peaked into the little gazebo where the company’s employees have their rooftop meetings looking out onto the city’s hillside homes, the sleek cappuccino machine now unplugged for the weekend.

Some of the best views in Istanbul are to be had at contemporary art galleries and museums — the sculpture garden at Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul Modern’s terrace restaurant, not to mention art hotel Marti’s top floor sweep of Taksim Square — but nothing tops Borusan’s panorama view of the Bosphorous Bridge, which reaches out from the hills to span the luminescent water. A bronze and gold sculpture by Andrew Rogers called “Unfurling” is on permanent display, seemingly impervious to the heat and cold of the seasons. I sat down on a long white bench to wait for the sun to set. The noise of chaotic Istanbul was blissfully muted; only the occasional renegade horn punctuated the silence.

Construction of the castle-like red brick building began in 1910, but was halted during World War I. The second and third stories remained unfinished for decades, and whistling winds coursing through led to locals nicknaming the building “Haunted Mansion.” Another legend tells of a girl as beautiful as a fairy passing away in the space, leading to its second nickname: “the kiosk with the fairies.” Both nicknames have stuck to this day.

This November, three major art events collide in Istanbul: the 9th Contemporary Istanbul, 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial, and the very first Art Istanbul Week. The contemporary art scene here is not much older than a decade, with new galleries, museums, and unique art spaces like Borusan sprouting up every few months in diverse neighborhoods across the city.

Borusan Contemporary is located at Baltalimanı Hisar Street, Perili Köşk No:5, 34470, Rumelihisarı, Sariyer, Istanbul, Turkey.

People who live in glass houses often just had a lot of bottles around, and in a sort of DIY-Philip Johnson style, constructed a transparent, fragile fortress. From an embalming fluid bottle house in Canada to a beer bottle temple in Thailand, here are six of the world's strangest bottle buildings. Just don't maliciously throw any heavy stones while you're around.

BOSWELL EMBALMING BOTTLE HOUSE
Boswell, Canada 

photograph by TilJ/Wikimedia

With around 500,000 used embalming fluid bottles, David H. Brown turned his retirement from the funeral business into an incredible iridescent building project. The Embalming Bottle House in Boswell, Canada, is a small, cheery cottage started in 1952 that used the old death preservative containers from Brown's business like bricks, including a little gazebo even overlooking the neighboring lake. 

photograph by TilJ/Wikimedia

WAT PA MAHA CHEDI KAEW
Si Kaeo, Thailand

photograph by Mark Fischer/Flickr

Seeing beer bottles strewn around the area and in an effort to encourage recycling, the monks of Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew started to build. Beginning in 1984, they accumulated the Heineken green and Chang brown beer bottles and embedded around 1.5 million of them into a Temple of a Million Bottles. From there, they kept constructing, taking in all that people would bring them, and now they boast glass and beer bottle cap mosaic-covered water towers, housing, and even a crematorium. 

photograph by Mark Fischer/Flickr

photograph by Mark Fischer/Flickr

BOTTLE HOUSE OF GANJA
Ganja, Azerbaijan

photograph by gragimli/Flickr

You might not notice anything immediately strange about the Bottle House in Ganja, Azerbaijan, while strolling by, but look a bit closer and it's revealed the patterns on the exterior walls are all made from bottles. In fact, they're claimed as the main building material, and meticulously arranged into portraits and elaborate designs. It is a private home, however, so it's hard to tell just how far the bottle work goes.

photograph by Самый древний/Wikimedia

photograph by Самый древний/Wikimedia

GRANDMA PRISBREY'S BOTTLE VILLAGE
Simi Valley, California

photograph by Los Angeles/Wikimedia

Starting in 1956 and continuing for 25 years, Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey built sculptures and structures from bottles and other salvaged landfill junk on her 1/3 acre lot in Simi Valley, California. The busy Prisbrey passed away in 1988, leaving 13 buildings and numerous curious sculptures, such as one composed mainly of doll heads. Now Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village is celebrated as an incredible example of vernacular architecture with its listing on the National Register of Historic Places. 

photograph by Brenna/Flickr

photograph by Los Angeles/Wikimedia

photograph by Stephen Schafer/Historic American Buildings Survey

THE BOTTLE HOUSE
Kaleva, Michigan

photograph by Doug Coldwell/Wikimedia

Soda is a major part of the industry history in the small town of Kaleva, Michigan, and one of the homes in the community of just over 500 inhabitants is appropriately built with more than 60,000 glass bottles. The Bottle House was once the home of John J. Makinen, Sr. who owned the local Northwestern Bottling Works. Completed in 1941, the words "Happy Home" are spelled out in glass on the front and other geometric motifs pattern the side walls. Sadly, Makinen died suddenly in 1942 before he really had a chance to appreciate the shimmering home. 

The Bottle House in the 1940s (via Up North Memories/Flickr)

EDOUARD ARSENAULT BOTTLE HOUSES
Wellington, Canada 

photograph by Douglas Sprott/Flickr

While not as elaborate as some of the bottle buildings on this list, the Edouard Arsenault Bottle Houses are among the most picturesque. Built with more than 25,000 bottles in every available color, the three buildings shine in a garden of lush greenery in Wellington, Canada. Arsenault, their builder, was inspired in 1979 at the age of 66 by a postcard he'd received of a Vancouver castle, and thought he'd like one of his own, eventually expanding to a tavern and chapel. Like all of the constructions on this list, it's a captivating example of using the resources you have to build the delicate palace of your dreams.

photograph by Douglas Sprott/Flickr

photograph by Douglas Sprott/Flickr

Explore more eccentric homes on Atlas Obscura >

Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, design by Michelle Enemark.

Among the millions of pieces of anonymous taxidermy throughout the world, some are special. Some have names. Some are heroes.

Be they pigeon, horse, or hippo, these animals performed acts of bravery, inspiration, and sacrifice during their often short lives. (At least through the lens of human morality — it's hard to say what a hippo thinks of as brave.) Too beloved to be let go, too honorable to be forgotten, these animals were instead memorialized. Skinned and stuffed, they have been turned into preserved monuments to themselves, icons of their heroic deeds. In doing so they have become not just another museum piece, but something greater. They have turned into Heroes of Taxidermy. 

We have previously catalogued these Heroes in Taxidermy, and amassed many more such examples since. However, we felt there was yet a further way to honor these beasts of bravery. With this Sunday's Atlas Obscura event dedicated to "Taxidermy Gone Wrong," we decided tp honor some "taxidermy gone right" in the form of a collectable Heroes in Taxidermy postcard series. We have started with five postcards.

All dogs go to heaven, but some show up with more medals. To these Heroes in Taxidermy, we salute you. 

P.S. If you mail us an awesome postcard of your curious travels to Atlas Obscura, 61 Greenpoint Ave #302, Brooklyn, NY 11222, we will send you back one of these very special limited-edition heroes of taxidermy postcard for free. (Be sure to include a return address!) 

Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, design by Michelle Enemark.

Stubby, the bravest dog of World War I, started his military career as a stray who wandered onto Yale Field, and became the mascot of the 102 Infantry 26th Yankee Division. Yet unlike most mascots, Stubby, a pit bull mix named for his short tail, actually went to war and experienced 17 major battles on the Western Front. More on Stubby here. 

Image Public Domain, design by Michelle Enemark.

No one knows why Huberta started walking south in 1928. Some believed that she was looking for a lost mate, others that she was fleeing the killing of a parent, while still others thought she was making a pilgrimage to the places of her ancestors, where hippos had ceased to tread. No matter the reason, she kept walking until 1931, gathering more and more international attention and local love for the roaming hippo. More on Huberta here.

Image courtesy of the KU Natural History Museum, Lawrence, Kansas. Design by Michelle Enemark.  

On June 25, 1876, the five companies of the US 7th Cavalry under the command of Gen. George Armstrong Custer were annihilated by a force of Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The following day, troops from the remaining companies of the 7th Cavalry discovered the carnage — 210 men lay dead, including their commander, along with dozens of horses. While no US Army soldier survived the engagement, one horse was found alive on the battlefield. More on Comanche here.

  Images courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, design by Michelle Enemark.

Major Charles Whittlesey's battalion had charged through enemy lines in 1918, only to be surrounded by Germans and then battered by artillery from fellow Americans who didn't know that they were there. They'd sent out two pigeons with desperate messages to stop the friendly fire, but both had been shot down. Only one pigeon was left: Cher Ami. More on Cher Ami here.

Images Creative Commons. Design by Michelle Enemark. 

Before Yuri Gagarin became the first human in outer space, numerous animals gave their lives for science in the often cruel and stressful tests of space flight. The first creatures to survive a 24-hour ordeal orbiting earth in a space craft were two spirited dogs named Belka and Strelka. More on Belka and Strelka here.

We pay our respects, and honor these heroic animals. Keep your eyes peeled for Heroes of Taxidermy: Collectable Postcards Edition Two.

Taxidermy on the move in the Bouten Workshop in Venlo, Netherlands (all photographs by Robert Marbury)

In a digital world where technology can archive and reproduce almost anything, taxidermy holds a very peculiar status. Walter Benjamin, the early 20th-century social critic, proposed that in an age of reproduction, the aura of “oneness” lends importance to an object. In contrast to the flattening effect of digital technologies, taxidermy preserves nature in its varied singularity and serves as a perpetually decaying document, which reminds the viewer of his or her own impermanence. Although the internet has been a boon for sharing art and information about rare taxidermy collections, it is no substitute for this physical “oneness” that I relish when seeking out specimens in person.

During the first half of 2013, I traveled almost 70,000 miles to make studio visits with artists and do research for my book, Taxidermy Art (Artisan Books, 2014). Before every trip, I dug through articles and websites to find strange collections and objects to visit in each location. The internet has spread the knowledge of these unique collections more widely, but the artworks still face continued threat of extinction in the physical world, due to the financial or personal limitations of their caretakers. The loss of collections like that of Sam Sanfillippo, which was housed in a Wisconsin funeral parlor basement until his death, should serve as a reminder to us to visit these specimens while they still exist. These places that I visited while writing my book certainly merit discovery before time changes their incredible oneness, or they cease to exist all together.

The James Ford Bell Museum
Minneapolis, Minnesota

Wolf diorama at the James Ford Bell Museum

I first visited the small art deco building of the James Ford Bell Museum when Sarina Brewer, Scott Bibus, and I began the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists. This intimate collection is a keystone in the world of habitat dioramas because it contains the largest collection of environmental paintings by Frances Lee Jaques. The eponymous founder started the collection in 1872 in order to preserve the natural history unique to Minnesota, but dioramas didn’t become a focus of the museum until he became devoted to representing wolves as social hunters rather than as vermin.

Bell lured Jaques away from the American Museum of Natural History, where he had been involved in the layout and design of the mammal hall and the Whitney Bird Hall. Today, the Bell Museum hosts amazing programming, including sleepovers, sketch nights, and the discontinued flashlight tag (which unfortunately resulted in a kid’s running through the glass panel and into the Sand Hill Crane diorama). The museum is in the process of moving, which comes with its own challenges, because Jaques’s spectacular backdrops were painted directly onto the cyclorama walls. All effort is being made to preserve these dioramas in the move, and no doubt the new Bell Museum will be amazing. But if you want a first-hand experience of 1940s-style naturalism, you must visit the Bell Museum before it relocates.

Sandhill Crane diorama at the James Ford Bell Museum

Fox cub diorama at the James Ford Bell Museum

Jar of Moles
Grant Museum University College of London, England

Jar of Moles at the Grant Museum

You may be wandering the halls of University College of London looking for the famous auto-icon of Jeremy Bentham, but do not miss visiting the Grant Museum while you’re there. Just inside the door is the ultimate oracle for the modern age: a glass jar full of moles. Wet collections of multiple animals are not uncommon due to limited space and the time required to preserve animal remains; however, there is something about the "Jar of Moles" that draws visitors like few other specimens.

Perhaps it is because the jar has its own Twitter feed, which of late has taken on a political tone, or because we see those packed moles reflecting our own subway crush of modern life. Either way, it is worth a trip to stand in front of the Jar of Moles and quietly ask the kind of questions that not even Google can help you with.

Auto-icon of Jeremy Bentham

Le Comptoir Général
Paris, France

Le Comptoir Général in Paris

Down an alley off of the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris’s 10th Arrondissement is a humble corner-store sign that simply reads “Le Comptoir Général” (aka, the Ghetto Museum). From the outside appearance, it would be hard to guess what this hideaway contains. Le Comptoir Général is, in fact, a mixed-use space that offers food, drinks, shopping, events, installations, and wonder.

Devoted to the preservation of the marginal, the entire place is an elaborately decorated installation. There is a Ballroom, an Abandoned Hall, a Classroom, a Rampant Garden, and a library located in the mezzanine. When I visited, there was even a taxidermy-filled installation by Maïssa Toulet. Le Cabinet de Sorcellerie (“the witchcraft cabinet”) promised me, “the chill won’t leave your blood for hours.” The schedule of le Comptoir is erratic, but the space is always worth a visit.

Curios installed in le Comptoir Général

Convict Colonial & Robot Exhibition
Conning, Tasmania

Copping Colonial & Convict Exhibition

On the single highway that leads to Port Arthur, the famous prison colony in southeast Tasmania, just before you get to the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park, you will see a sign on the left hand side of the road that reads: “Convict Robot Exhibition.”

Properly called the “Copping Colonial & Convict Exhibition,” the attraction is in reality a shed filled with so much stuff that you may get overwhelmed by the abundance. And did I mention Convict Robots?! These automatons are powered to do simple motions wearing masks and signs that identify their convict status. Sitting in the midst of this cacophony is a disintegrating Tasmanian devil mount, a reminder of the impermanence of nature in the midst of what was once the technology of the future. The decay and rust are authentically exciting.

Tasmanian Devil taxidermy in the Copping Colonial & Convict Exhibition

Copping Colonial & Convict Exhibition

Bouten Workshop
Venlo, Netherlands

Bouten Workshop in Venlo, Netherlands

Founded in 1918, the fourth-generation Bouten taxidermy studio is a real treasure. The taxidermists associated with the studio are known for their incredible restorations in museums throughout Europe, but their willingness to work with contemporary artists has kept them very busy. And their building is a museum in its own right, filled with taxidermy supplies and mounts for rent. The importance of this studio cannot be overstated as there would not be a tradition of taxidermy in the Netherlands had it not been for founder Jac Bouten.

After World War II, Jac helped create the Nederlandse Vereniging van Preparateurs (Dutch Union of Taxidermists), which lobbied the government for the right to practice taxidermy. The Workshop has store hours and studio visits by appointment. It is impossible to visit the studio and to speak with third- and fourth-generation owners Leon and Maurice Bouten without sensing how tradition and artistic intent can be handed down through the generations.

Bouten Workshop in Venlo, Netherlands

This Sunday, October 5, to celebrate the launch of Robert Marbury's Taxidermy Art book, Atlas Obscura is collaborating with Morbid Anatomy on a rogue taxidermy fair at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Click here for more details & tickets >

Robert Marbury is a multidisciplinary artist and a cofounder of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists. In addition to creating his own art, he launched the taxidermy biennial at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, and co-hosts and judges the annual Carnivorous Nights Taxidermy Contest in Brooklyn. Marbury lives in Baltimore, Maryland. His first book is Taxidermy Art (Artisan Books, 2014).

Detail of the new Edgar Allan Poe statue being unveiled in Boston this weekend (courtesy Edgar Allan Poe Foundation of Boston)

One of the greatest literary rivalries in history is revived this weekend in Cambridge and Boston, some 165 years later: Statues of both Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe are being honored on Saturday and Sunday. The question is: which will draw the larger crowd?

Think of it is as the Fireside Poet versus the Raven. The “Goody Two-Shoes” versus the “Tomahawk Man.” The Parlor Poet versus the Master of the Macabre. Longfellow, who lived most of his life in Cambridge, was honored with a monument in that town’s “Longfellow Park” in 1914. The monument — made by no less an artist than Daniel Chester French — turns 100 years old in October, and the city and others are marking the occasion.

Memorial by Daniel Chester French in Longfellow Park, Cambridge (via National Park Service)

Poe, on the other hand, was born in Boston — and once said he was heartily ashamed of it. Generally unsuccessful for most of his life, he made a career of creating critical enemies, particularly Boston writers whom he summarily dismissed. Poe’s birthplace is no longer standing, and it took 165 years after his death for Bostonians to forgive his slights. This Sunday, a dynamic statue of Poe by Stefanie Rocknak will be unveiled in the city of his birth at the corner of Boylston and Charles Street South.

Boston Poe statue by Stefanie Rocknak in progress (courtesy Edgar Allan Poe Foundation of Boston)

In fact, Poe’s statue will be placed in such a way that he is turning his back to the Beacon Street home where Longfellow was married in 1843, perpetually giving his fellow poet the cold shoulder — a conscious decision by the artist.

Poe and Longfellow had their first run-in (in print) in 1839, shortly after Longfellow published his first book of poems, Voices of the Night. Poe, who was then more recognized as a critic, reviewed the book and flatly accused Longfellow of plagiarism. He called it a “most barbarous class of literary robbery; that class in which, while the words of the wronged author are avoided, his most intangible, and therefore least defensible and least reclaimable property is purloined.”

In other words: Longfellow did not steal word for word, just the ideas and forms from other poets, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Still, Poe was not entirely against Longfellow; not long after, he determined he was “unquestionably the best poet in America” and invited him to contribute to a journal he was editing. Longfellow responded kindly and acknowledged Poe’s talent by predicting “you are destined to stand among the first romance writers of the country, if such be your aim.”

But Poe continued his assaults on Longfellow, calling him a “bold” plagiarist, as well as “a determined imitator and a dexterous adapter of the ideas of other people.” Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman summed up the interchange as “the longest, strangest, and most-publicized personal war in American literary history.”

The accusations were so strong, a period of this real-life drama was nicknamed the “Little Longfellow War” (by Poe himself) in a series of articles in a New York newspaper for which Poe served as editor. The articles garnered responses, apparently, from a supporter of Longfellow writing under the name Outis (who some have suggested was actually Poe himself, perpetrating another of his literary hoaxes for a publicity boost). His former business partner admitted to James Russell Lowell, a friend and neighbor of Longfellow’s, that Poe was “a monomaniac on the subject of plagiarism,” and the best thing to do was to wait out his current obsession. Lowell privately believed that Poe was “wholly lacking” in character.

1876 portrait of Henry W. Longfellow (via British Library)

1901 portrait of Edgar Allan Poe (via Internet Archive Book Images)

Longfellow never responded publicly to his vitriolic accuser, once noting that life was “too precious to be wasted in street brawls.” Privately, however, he noted in his journal in 1845 that he “damns censorious Poe.” When Poe died four years later, Longfellow recorded his “high appreciation” of his fiction and poetry, and excuses his harsh criticisms as nothing more than the result of “irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong.” He even purchased copies of Poe’s collected works and provided financial support to Poe’s impoverished aunt Maria Clemm.

In this literary rivalry, Longfellow comes across as the level-headed one who stayed out of the controversy. Poe appears to be, and has often been presented, as being irrational and inspired more by jealousy than anything else. But what explains Poe’s angry rhetoric against Longfellow? Had he gone off the deep end, as some of his detractors (then and now) have suggested?

More likely, Poe did believe his assessments of Longfellow were accurate. Plagiarism, as Poe used the term, did not refer to verbatim copying as we think of it; it was a general term for the opposite of originality (one of the strongest yet most nebulous of buzz words in American literary criticism in that period). Poe believed Longfellow based entire poems on other poets, be it in their themes or rhyme schemes.

Worse, for Poe, was that Longfellow was doing everything that a good writer should not do, but succeeding immensely as a poet. His rising popularity made him an easy target — and it did not help that he was living a comfortable life just outside of Boston, a literary city which Poe both despised and sought affirmation from.

Poe was entirely correct about his rival. Longfellow, one of the most learned scholars of European culture, was a borrower of European styles, themes, and structures. Even he admitted as much: his two-line journal reference to the Poe controversy in which he “damns censorious Poe” included a notation that it was an imitation of an epigram by German poet Friedrich Schiller. Longfellow scholar Christoph Irmscher says the notation was tongue-in-cheek, his attempt at both confirming and mocking his accuser. Either way, later works were equally inspired by other works: Song of Hiawatha (1855) took its model from a Finnish epic called the Kalevala, for example.

Even so, Longfellow was merely continuing a tradition of poetic tribute common among most writers of the day — including Poe himself, whose “The Raven” (1845) was modeled after “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” by English poet Elizabeth Barrett.

Hypocrisy notwithstanding, it is likely Poe was using Longfellow as a representative target to promote his own critical theories on literature, most carefully expounded in essays like “The Poetic Principle” and “The Philosophy of Composition.” Poe had little patience for dogmatic poems — those with a “moral taint” that taught lessons — a type of didactic poetry which Longfellow wrote almost exclusively. Poe further was frustrated at long poems, and would have scoffed at epic-length poems like Longfellow’s Evangeline (1847). Longfellow’s rapid rise earned him admirers around the country, who spouted unqualified praise. And Poe, who earned a reputation as a tomahawk-wielding poet who used prussic acid instead of ink, would not stand for such effusive praise for any writer who did not deserve it.

Illustration from "The life of Edgar Allan Poe" (1880) (via Internet Archive Book Images)

The disagreement between the two schools of poetry was enough that, in 1903, one writer asked, “What critic could warmly admire Longfellow and not feel somewhat bitter toward Poe?” The Cambridge poet was eventually revered as the most popular poet of the century — and hugely successful financially, an achievement Poe could never reach. But Longfellow’s popularity came crashing down in the 20th century in the aftershock of modernism. Poe, on the other hand, finally earned a place in the literary canon, and remains admired both by scholars and general readers who are intrigued by his literature and melancholy life.

The respective statues in the spotlight this weekend are perfect examples of the two men. Longfellow, who is getting a rededication, stands regally in a quiet public park in Cambridge. With the exception of a few dog walkers (and Longfellow loved dogs), it is a low traffic area, appropriate for a man who lived a relatively quiet life. Plans for its erection began not long after his death, representing an immediate recognition of Longfellow as a poet to be remembered. It stands just across the street from his former home (now a museum), not far from Harvard, where for several years he taught the children of upper crust families. Wanderers through Harvard Square can see the home of Dexter Pratt, the man who inspired his poem “The Village Blacksmith,” as well as his final resting place in bucolic Mount Auburn Cemetery.

2011 rendering of the Poe statue in Boston (courtesy Edgar Allan Poe Foundation of Boston)

Poe, on the other hand, will be unveiled in an urban center, surrounded by heavy foot traffic and the constant roar of engines at the congruence of two busy roads. Poe used his writing career to show the dangers of an urbanizing world — places brimming with crime and untrustworthy strangers. And his recognition in bronze form comes significantly late, mirroring the length of time it took for Poe to achieve his place in literary history.

Boston finally joins the ranks of other Poe-affiliated cities that honor the writer — including his adopted Richmond (where he spent much of his young life), Philadelphia (where he spent his most prolific years), the Bronx (where he spent his final period), and Baltimore (where he died under mysterious circumstances). And whether Poe liked it or not, his connection with Boston is undeniable. Born not far from Boston Common, his maternal family immigrated to that city from England. Here, he published his first book of poems in 1827, credited only “By a Bostonian.” Later, he published “The Tell-Tale Heart” in Boston, as well as most of his final works when other publishers spurned him. 

And, as Boston College professor Paul Lewis has argued, he spent his career trying to be as unlike the Boston writers’ coterie that had usurped literary America’s attention, while still hoping to earn their adulation. Lewis has been leading the charge in honoring Poe as head of the Poe Foundation of Boston.

With the Poe-Longfellow War so far behind us, perhaps this rivalry is water under the (Longfellow) bridge. Or perhaps we still have to ask the same questions from that period: For whom do we write poetry: critics and scholars, or general readers? What purpose does literature serve: entertainment or education?

As one poet’s monument is rededicated and another writer’s statue is unveiled, each of those in attendance might just have those same questions in their mind.

Detail of the new Poe statue (courtesy Edgar Allan Poe Foundation of Boston)

The Longfellow Memorial in Cambridge will be rededicated on Saturday, October 4, beginning at 3 p.m., in a program overseen by Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site. The Poe statue will be unveiled in Boston on Sunday, October 5, with a series of programs and events beginning at 12:30 p.m. The creation of the statue was spearheaded by the Edgar Allan Poe Foundation.

Rob Velella is a literary historian specializing in 19th-century American writing who has written extensively on Poe, Longfellow, and their contemporaries. Through tours, talks, dramatic readings, and performances, he hopes to bring writers of the past back to readers of today. His loyalties are somewhat torn as he will be presenting at both statue ceremonies this weekend.

Fresco of St. Paul's shipwreck in St. Callistus from "The Open Court" (1887) (via Internet Archive Book Images)

A long time ago, a man named Paul was on his way to Rome to be tried as a political rebel when the ship carrying him — and 274 other passengers — was swept up in a terrible storm and crashed onto a sandy beach somewhere in the Mediterranean. By some kind of miracle, all 274 passengers survived, and Paul stumbled onto the bay, forever changing the lives of everyone on the tiny island that was, at the time, called Melita, the land of honey.

The island, as we know it now, is Malta, a little island 16 miles long and nine miles wide, midway between Sicily and Tunisia. This moment, which according to the Bible occurred in 60 AD, was later commemorated as St. Paul’s Shipwreck — the unexpected moment that brought Christianity to the island and turned Malta into one of the first Roman colonies to completely convert to Catholicism.

As St. Luke describes Paul’s first night in Acts 28: 1-11: “….the barbarous people showed us no little kindness; for they kindled a fire, and received us every one, because of the present rain, and because of the cold” (from the King James). As the fire was being lit, Paul was bit by a poisonous snake, but survived. Because this was his second miraculous act of survival in one day, the islanders decided he possessed special powers, so they brought him to Publius, the Maltese Roman chief, whose father was gravely ill. With one flourish of the hands, Paul cured the man of his fever, and in a flurry of graciousness, Publius converted the island to Christianity and became the nation’s first bishop.

Paul didn’t stay long. According to sources, he left for Alexandria after three months and never returned to the limestone rocks of the Maltese islands. Except for two thousand years later, when his right wrist bone did.

St. Paul's wrist bone (photograph by Daniel Cilia)

Today, it is on display, encased in a decorated muscular bronze forearm inside a marble urn in the Church of St. Paul’s Shipwreck (Parroċċa San Pawl Nawfragu in Maltese), a small church built in the 1570s on the exact site where it is rumored that a fire was once lit to warm a shipwreck’s survivors over 20 centuries ago.

Oddly, the journey of Paul’s wrist back to Malta is perhaps even more intriguing than his first trip to the island, because no sources have been able to confirm where it spent its first 1,700 years after his beheading, or how it came into possession of the Catholic Church. Maltese historian Michael Galea writes that the first mention of its authenticity came on September 26, 1771, when Archbishop Mons. Fra Giovanni Pellerano examined the relic, declared its authenticity, placed the object in a silver shrine, and gave it to his friend Gio Battista Tonna to display in any church or oratory he deemed worthy. However, Tonna’s heirs couldn’t agree what to do with it, so it was eventually removed from the silver shrine and given to Archbishop Labini. Upon receiving it, he, too, declared it authentic and sent it back to Tonna’s family, who then gave it to their mutual friend Vincenzo Aloisio Bonavia. From there, Bonavia took it to Rome in 1822 and asked the Pope’s assistant to put in his two cents. He also declared its authenticity and placed a seal directly onto the bone itself. A year later, Bonavia donated it to the Church by public deed and the Pope sent Paul’s bone back to Malta on December 8, 1854, where it would find a home in the church made hundreds of years ago, just for him.

Church of St. Paul’s Shipwreck (photograph by Daniel Cilia)

Column relic on which St. Paul was said to be beheaded in the church (photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia)

Detail of a side entrance to St. Paul's Shipwreck Church (photograph by Frank Vincentz/Wikimedia)

The church, which is in the middle of downtown Valletta — Malta’s illustrious Renaissance-style capital city — can be difficult to find, but during open hours, there is a three-foot wooden sign propped up on the white-washed cobblestone streets outside that reads “St. Paul’s Shipwreck Welcome” in big bulky letters. Above the towering oak doors, a welcoming statue of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin outstretches her arms to visitors.

The Church itself is modest in size and eclectic; entering it feels a bit like diving into a musty collection in the attic, or sifting through dusty antiques at a street bazaar, or marveling at an art collection in a warehouse waiting to be put on exhibition. There are elderly couples sitting silently in pews, their heads bowed; families solemnly lighting candles in prayer; a few tourists milling around whispering to each other above their guidebooks.

St. Paul is everywhere, too: from the magnificent frescoes painted by famous Maltese architect Bartolomeo Garagona depicting his journey to Malta, to the silver-embossed altars depicting the famous shipwreck scene, to the intricate marble tombstones covering the floor. Paul’s Church unmistakably, undeniably, belongs to him. There is even an impressive life-size wooden carving of him, carved in the mid-1600s by Melchiorre Cafá, that features a barefoot and heavily bearded Paul donning a gilded golden robe, holding an open Bible in his left hand and preaching passionately with his right hand. He is carefully removed from its glass case every February, carried at shoulder-height, and paraded down the streets of Valletta for St. Paul’s Shipwreck day, a day that, purportedly always thoughtfully ends in rain.

Carrying the statue of St. Paul in 2014 (photograph by Daniel Cilia)

And then, of course, there’s the muscular bronze arm holding the most precious relic in all of Malta, the same right wrist bone belonging to the hands that cured the sick and that preached the word of God so convincingly that, even today, the Maltese remain one of the most religious, committed Catholic nations in the world. The bone, wrapped up in rose petals and encased inside the reliquary, sits unassuming in a large marble urn, tucked away in a very modest church on a cobblestone alley, for all its faithful pilgrims to see.

The skeptic in me wonders: Could this really be Paul’s skeletal remains? How was it preserved for so many centuries? How did anyone actually authenticate it? And why wasn’t it with the rest of his remains, which were recently discovered in a Roman catacomb in 2009?

But then the traveler in me wonders if it really matters.

On an island where Neolithic temple builders once reigned, where the Great Siege took place, where WWII fighters dropped bombs, where finding ancient bones and skeletons are as commonplace an archaeological find as a piece of pottery, it’s befitting that a part of Paul, who spent three short months on a tiny Mediterranean land, should remain here, too.

Inside the Church of St. Paul’s Shipwreck (photograph by Daniel Cilia)

Sources:

Michael Galea’s The Church of the Shipwreck of St. Paul, Valletta

http://www.visitmalta.com/en/st-paul-in-malta

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2010/february/searching-for-pauls-shipwreck-on-malta/

http://www.rtijourneys.com/destinations/malta/

http://www.sanpawlvalletta.com/Souvenirs/hidden%20gem.pdf (there are some excellent images in here of the many paintings and depictions of Paul inside the Church)

Back in 1919, a Baptist reverend named Clarence Larkin published an unusual book breaking down each verse of the Book of Revelation into charts. The Book of Revelation; a study of the last prophetic book of Holy Scripture was one of several religious publications at the time to use maps and charts to explain the often confusing ramble of the Bible. The end of the world, a definite confusion of unsettling imagery that has all the chaotic horror of a bad acid trip from the Sun-Clothed Woman to a seven-headed dragon throwing stars with its tail, was carefully charted by Larkin with drawings to unravel the last days for believers.

Larkin stated that he spent 25 years studying the Book of Revelation from a "Futurist Standpoint" to "show that the Book of Revelation is to be taken literally." The Pennsylvania-born Larkin was influential on Dispensationalism that emphasized this futurist view in Protestantism, publishing all sorts of charts in a collection of books in the 1910s and 20s. You can flip through the whole Armageddon book at the Internet Archive.

Below we've examined some of the details of these apocalyptic designs, such as the progression of the dreaded horsemen, the sounding of the seven trumpets, the opening of the bottomless pit, the resurrections, the hideous creatures rendered on the planet, and the other portents of judgement day. You can view more images from Larkin's book at Flickr Commons.

All images via Internet Archive Book Images on Flickr Commons. 

Morbid Mondays highlight macabre stories from around the world and through time, indulging in our morbid curiosity for stories from history's darkest corners. Read more Morbid Mondays>

Diagram of a Raven's skull, from "The myology of the raven (Corvus corax sinuatus.) A guide to the study of the muscular system in birds" (1890) (via Internet Archive Book Images)

Today in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died after being discovered in a dire state a few days prior in the Baltimore streets. It's still not clear what killed him, with everything from alcohol, to murder, to even rabies under speculation in the over a century since. It's the kind of macabre mystery that seems almost too fitting for an author who arguably penned one of the first detective fictions — "Murders in the Rue Morgue" — and who continues to cast a brooding shadow over contemporary life and literature (see the new statue of Poe flanked by a soaring raven unveiled over the weekend in Boston). 

It also seems like a good day to start our annual series of Halloween-themed content. As in 2011 and 2013 when we brought to you a whole October of strange and startling history for the spooky month, this year we're focusing again on the world's darkest corners, shining a light for you Atlas Obscura readers on true stories of horror.

"Evermore" at the Grolier Club (all photographs by Allison Meier/Atlas Obscura)

Right now in New York City, one of our favorite haunts, the Grolier Club, is hosting an exhibition called Evermore: The Persistence of Poe on Poe-related artifacts from the collection of Susan Jaffe Tane. Among the manuscripts and contemporary comics inspired by his work, you'll see fragments from Poe's coffin harvested when he was relocated to his current burial spot in Baltimore, as well as a lock of his hair clipped at his funeral by his cousin Elizabeth Herring, one of the few who turned up to mourn the writer. But walk directly to the large glass case at the back of the library space and you'll see an even more intricate hair memento, where Poe's dark strands are mixed with those of his lost love Virginia. 

Jewelry from the hair of Virginia & Edgar Allan Poe

Virginia was Poe's first love, as they met when she was 7 and he was 13. After marrying in September of 1835, she got ill with consumption in 1842, staying miserably invalid until her death on January 30, 1847. Not surprisingly, the loss of beloveds would fix in the work of Poe, as if Virginia was a phantom he could not shake. Some believe she is the "lost Lenore" of "the Raven." However, "the Raven" was published in 1845, before Virginia was gone. Yet to have your young wife whither into illness before your eyes must have felt like a loss long before the actual death, although we will never know for sure if the agonizing despair of the "the rare and radiant maiden" was anything but a symbolic evocation of the doom of death that hangs like a specter over all of us. 

Also in the Grolier Club exhibition is a manuscript of Poe's "The Spirits of the Dead." As we launch another year of Halloween-related content, we'll end here with some of Poe's shadowy words:

Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness—for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee—and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still. [...]

Evermore: The Persistence of Poe is at the Grolier Club in New York City through November 22. 

All this month we're celebrating 31 Days of Halloween with real tales of the macabre and strange. For even more, check out our spooky stories from 2011 and 2013.

Samutprakarn Crocodile Farm and Zoo (photograph by the author)

On the afternoon of September 12, a 65-year-old woman from a rural suburb of Bangkok traveled an hour to the Samutprakarn Crocodile Farm and Zoo. She paid the $9 admission and headed for a pond holding thousands of crocodiles. There, she slipped off her shoes, climbed over a barrier and jumped in.

The police said Wanpen Inyai, identified later by the ID card in her pocket, committed suicide. Compounding the tragedy, she wasn’t the first. Since 1992, at least four people have taken their lives there.

Sometimes it’s difficult to write about suicide because of the great risk of inspiring copycats. But the track record at Samutprakarn is already disturbing. How could this happen? And is the park doing anything to reduce its danger to vulnerable people? When I arrived on a sunny morning about a week after her death, the farm was back to normal. Which is to say, it was back to being extremely bizarre. I had come to see the crocodiles — the park advertises more than 100,000 of them (though I have doubts about that figure).

But the first thing I saw was a man in a cage. Splayed beside him on the concrete slab was a dormant tiger. For a fee, anybody could step inside and have a picture with the beast, a fairly common gimmick across Thailand. Last year, a 19-year-old tourist was mauled in another part of the country. Farther into the park, I started to hear a strange popping sound. I followed it up some stairs. A crowd of Asian tourists had gathered on a catwalk above a pond, cheering at each pop, pop. 

A crocodile at the park (photograph by the author)

This, I soon learned, is the understated sound a crocodile makes when its jaws slam together with the crushing force of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The tourists were taunting some 15 gape-mouthed crocs with fish heads on strings. They laughed when the crocodile missed its meal, and groaned when it didn’t. There was nothing there to stop a person from hopping into the pond. (I should mention at this point that I tried to speak with a manager or the owner about safety, half expecting to find Alejandro Jodorowsky was behind all this. Although there were two luxury cars parked outside the administrative office, a secretary said no one was there. I left a note asking someone to call or write, but no one ever did.)

Suddenly, bad Thai music from tired speakers lured us thither. Up more stairs, we found ourselves in an 800-seat arena. In the center there was a murky pool of more than a dozen six- or seven-foot crocodiles around a concrete island. Two performers, clad like snake charmers, waded into the water and began teasing the animals about the face with batons.

The ease with which they could elicit a jaw pop put me on edge — because I knew what was next.

After some ritualistic soothing and a respectful bow, a man inserted his arm into the mouth. He pulled it out. He put it in again. And again. The third time, the mouth went pop, but not before the hand was out, and the crowd was applauding and showering paper money into the stinky pool.
Then the other performer jammed his head in there, a stunt that, at least once, has not been successful. A croc grabbed a trainer’s face there last year and then, inexplicably, let him go. To my relief, no one was harmed, but — these being unpredictable, powerful animals — I still don’t know how or why.

A 2010 crocodile show at the park (photograph by Will Will/Flickr)

A 2008 crocodile performance at the park (photograph by Cameloctober/Wikimedia)

To exit, I walked past broken (or unplugged?) arcade games from some historical decade and then down a long pathway lined with concrete cells. On the park map, this area is labeled as, “Handicapped Crocodile.” Signs above the tanks indicate the “disability”: “albino,” “dark and tailless,” “hook-tailed.”

Just before the gate, a woman in an apron scolded a small trousered chimp chained at the waist to a table. Beside them, a man combed the arm hair of another. Stepping back into the sun, I left all that behind and fled back to Bangkok, the city of vice.

Woman in the park with a chained monkey (photograph by the author)