North Korea (photograph by Darmon Richter)

North Korea might not be everybody's first choice of holiday destination. In fact, many remain oblivious to the fact tourism to North Korea is even a thing. In fairness, it’s easy to see how anyone who follows the news might find a leisurely holiday in the DPRK (or “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”) to be irreconcilable with everything they think they know about the place: a totalitarian nightmare of gulags and thought police, poverty and oppression.

This article is to examine the nature of tourism in North Korea, and to speculate just how much any of us can ever truly know about this secretive “Hermit Kingdom.”

The Quest for Authenticity

The search for authentic insight into other cultures has become a cliché; it is the Holy Grail of the backpacker, the travel blogger’s muse, the driving force behind many an off-the-beaten-path adventure. This trope of travelers searching for an unspoiled slice of foreign heaven formed the premise of Alex Garland’s 1996 novel The Beach. The blockbuster film which followed generated enough traffic to virtually destroy the chances of stumbling across such paradise in Thailand. The remote Thai island known as Koh Phi Phi, where Garland set his story, is now a chaos of hotels, bars, souvenir shops, and strip clubs. This beach paradise has been fully commercialized.

Statues of the nation's leaders on Mansu Hill, Pyongyang (photograph by Darmon Richter)

A man waits for a bus on a street in Pyongyang (photograph by Darmon Richter)

So what about North Korea? As far as original travel goes, it doesn’t get much more off-the-grid than the DPRK — a country that we Westerners know so very little about and where email, phones, and messaging are as good as forbidden. The conservative nature of tourism to North Korea however, makes the prospect of authentic interaction all the more elusive.

Getting into North Korea is easy. Most passports — US included — require only the approval of a basic tourist visa, a process which generally takes less than a month. Discovering authentic culture however, embracing the real North Korea, may prove somewhat more difficult.

The Illusion of Pyongyang

The truth is, the North Korean government doesn’t want you to see their reality. Western tourists are allotted trained guides, whose job it is to show you all the sights approved by the nation’s leadership. In fairness, it’s as thorough and culture-packed a tour as you’re ever likely to experience, a whistle-stop ride around the DPRK’s landmarks and museums, monuments, palaces, memorials, and mausoleums. They’ll treat you to fine examples of traditional Korean cuisine, while every site you visit will (sometimes literally) roll out the red carpet for your approach. You’ll get to skip the queue at Mangyongdae Funfair. Children will sing and dance for your entertainment. 

Kim Il-sung Square, Pyongyang (photograph by Darmon Richter)

A young girl performs for tourists at a school in Rason (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Most visitors opt for a tour of Pyongyang, the nation's capital, and it is here amidst the homes and schools of the North Korean elite that one gains the most skewed illusion of life in the country. Reason being, Pyongyang is actually quite a lovely city. Your tour guides are trained to talk their way around questions of poverty and starvation, while the vast majority of beggars know better than to show their face before a group of foreigners. Tour coaches even seem to stick to select, approved roads as they travel through the city, sometimes leading visitors in bizarrely complex routes around the capital, in what one can only assume is an effort to minimize contact with the less-affluent districts of Pyongyang.

Pyongyang then, is hardly the “real” North Korea, but there are times when the veil shifts just enough to allow a glimpse beneath.

On my first trip to the DPRK, we visited the “Grand People's Study House” — Pyongyang’s pagoda-style university building, equipped with an impressive array of computer terminals and a library stocked with government-approved publications. (There’s plenty of Jane Austen, but not much from the last 50 years of Western literature.) On the way out, passing a statue of Eternal President Kim Il-sung seated in a marble-lined foyer, the lights suddenly went out. There were shouts, hisses in the dark, and then the power flicked back on. I was left with the distinct impression that such luxuries as electricity were reserved for those occasions when there was someone to impress.

The Grand People's Study House, Pyongyang (photograph by Darmon Richter)

A statue of Kim Il-sung in the foyer of the Study House (photograph by Darmon Richter)

One of the many classrooms inside the Grand People's Study House (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Outside, we passed an ornate fountain, and our guide told us that we’d missed the display by a matter of hours. But the water feature was inactive, the pool it stood in empty and choked with dry dust. 

Alternative Travel in North Korea

This illusion of prosperity is more difficult to maintain as soon as one ventures outside of Pyongyang. Other tourist attractions in North Korea include the ancient Korean capital of Kaesong in the south, and the infamous tour of the DMZ (“Demilitarized Zone”): the heavily-secured border that divides the Korean peninsula some 180km south of Pyongyang. Visiting these sites necessitates a certain degree of travel, and it is here that the illusion begins to shatter.

Tour guides typically issue blanket rules of “no photography on the bus” as you speed along straight, empty roads, between fields where laborers herd goats or harvest crops with their bare hands. Much like neighboring China, North Korea features an abundance of bicycles; unlike China there are very few cars to be seen, even when traveling main highways that run the full length of the country.

The main street in the southern city of Kaesong (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Bicycles and political posters in Kaesong (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Within minutes on the bus, the guide has been ignored. Cameras come out, and up and down the length of the vehicle tourists are snapping illicit photos out the window. Some get caught and receive a stern — yet always incredibly polite — telling off. Most, however, get away with it. 

Even here though, in the rural provinces, there are times when it feels an effort is made to maintain some form of illusion. I visited a waterfall one time near Kaesong, where our group ran into a horde of uniformed school children on a day trip. Nearby, several families sang karaoke and danced beside a barbecue in the woods. It was an idyllic scene, until I remembered that it was the school holidays. The families were still there when we left. As we boarded our coach, the only other transportation in sight was another bus featuring government-issue number plates. It was hard not to conclude that we had been surrounded by actors all afternoon.

Separating Truth From Fiction

It’s impossible to hide a country, to make an entire people disappear. There are stories that the North Korean government fills its fields with smiling workers, a nation-wide deception for the benefit of visitors. The truth though, is that observant tourists will always see between the gaps. You’re hardly going to witness one of the political executions that many defectors insist are presented as public events, but try as your guides might to restrict your interaction to trained tourism agents and upmarket city districts, you will see poverty.

A poorer suburb of Rason, a city in the northeast of the DPRK (photograph by Darmon Richter)

A rural scene from just outside Rason (photograph by Darmon Richter)

I even saw a beggar once on a visit to Rason, a city in the northeast of the country. There were pickpockets, too, children who tugged at our jackets as they brushed by in a crowded market. Such experiences are rare for tourists, and all but completely controlled in the capital.

Perhaps the strangest part of it all is that these imperfections North Korea tries to hide are universal flaws. Hunger, crime, poverty, violence, are all intrinsic to virtually every city on the face of the earth. The desperation of the North Korean regime to pretend such things don’t affect them would seem to be politically inspired; perhaps they consider these faults representative of more than just a race, a nation, but deeper still, a critique of their social ideology. To acknowledge such problems, to allow others to acknowledge them, would be to undermine the intelligence and foresight of the DPRK’s founder, President Kim Il-sung, by whose political philosophy of “Juche Thought” the nation is still governed.

Politics aside, North Korea is a very real place. It is largely unexplored by outsiders, untouched by commercialization, and in some ways, in certain places, this mountainous landscape with its forests and beaches does present a kind of unspoiled paradise. But for the time being at least, the only way visitors are likely to witness this North Korea is through glass.

Locals pay respect to Kim Il-sung at a monument in Pyongyang (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Two women deep in conversation in a Rason suburb (photograph by Darmon Richter)

A work party await their transport back to the city (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Pedestrians stop to watch a political broadcast in a park in Rason (photograph by Darmon Richter)

In modern economies, we use an agreed-upon medium of exchange, or currency, to trade with merchants, corporations, and our neighbors. Throughout history, this has most often been domestic animals, agricultural staples like rice and barley, salt, beads, cowry shells, precious metal, and government-backed legal tender. These are things that can be led or carried by the owner. However, what if your currency is an enormous limestone disc that can be over three meters in diameter and weigh four metric tons? What if it is a shovel blade that one can put the handle back in and use in the field? Some agreed-upon currencies used throughout history, and even in the modern day, we would consider impractical.

Yap stone in Micronesia (photograph by tata_aka_T/Flickr)

On the Micronesian island of Yap stand the Rai stones. Limestone is a very rare mineral in this area of the Pacific. The stone was quarried mainly from the island of Palau, with Guam supplying some for a time as well. Originally fashioned into the shape of fish, and later as circular discs, these stones are still used today, though mainly for social transactions like marriage by the Yapese. Instead of carrying these behemoths across the island, giving the stone can be as simple as saying it belongs to a new owner, and the “bank statement” would be the oral history of the stone’s possessors. Not all Rai stones are colossal, and vary in value by their history, as well as size. Even a stone that sank into the ocean is still considered owned, because it is agreed upon that the stone is still there, and it has a history.

In ancient Greece, rods of various metals were used as currency before coins. These are the oboloi (singular obolos, or obol in English) — rods of iron, copper, or silver about a meter in length. In Athens, six oboloi equaled one drachma, meaning “handful.” The word passed into usage as the name of Greece’s currency until the euro was adopted. Even after the introduction of coins, Plutarch wrote that Sparta kept using oboloi to discourage the pursuit of wealth over deeds in battle. One obolos could buy a ritual cup with wine.

A drachma of oboloi (via Odysses/Wikimedia)

In Zhou Dynasty China, there are two examples of tools being used as currency. Spades and weeding tools with the handle taken off were used in northeast China. This is known as spade money. When first used, the spade kept the hole so the handle could be reattached. In time, the money of the area and era kept the spade shape, but shrank to a more manageable size. In some areas, various stories took hold about how knives became traded, and then for 400 years, knife money became the currency. These knives weren’t edged, but they did have the same shape and dimensions as common knives of the time.

Spade money with hole for the handle (photograph by Davidhartill/Wikimedia)

Knife money from the Capital Museum, Beijing (photograph by Yanan Peng/Wikimedia)

Impractical currencies aren’t just limited to isolated and ancient societies. Throughout modern history, instances of hyperinflation, where the rate of inflation skyrockets due to factors such as war or political instability, make currencies worth less and less in a short length of time. To compensate, the government prints out large quantities of ever higher denominations of bills. In Weimar Germany in 1923, the price of a loaf of bread went from 1.5 million Marks in September to 200 billion Marks in November. Citizens had to shop with wheelbarrows full of rapidly depreciating Marks, or all that currency would be next to worthless in the next few days.

In Hungary after World War II, all Hungarian pengő in circulation amounted to 1/1000 of a US dollar, with an inflation rate of 41.9 quadrillion percent in 1946.  In Zimbabwe at the height of its recent hyperinflationary period, images were shown in the news of people carrying stacks of multi-billion and multi-trillion dollar bills wrapped with rubber bands. After the government had printed 100-trillion dollar bills in 2009, the Zimbabwe dollar was abolished. The ludicrously high denomination bills from this period are still inexpensive collectors’ items, with the 100-trillion dollar bill costing about 30 US dollars today.

Stacks of hyperinflationary Weimar Germany Marks (via German Federal Archives)

With the holiday shopping season soon to be upon us, consider how easy it is to not have to take the cashier to your Rai stone, pay with agricultural supplies or long metal spits, or take a wheelbarrow full of bills and count out a figure in the quintillions. Your wallet, and back muscles, will thank you.

Hey, buddy, can you spare a few trillion? (photograph by the author) 

WHOI Diving Safety Officer Edward O'Brien "spacewalks" in Exosuit, suspended from the Hellenic Navy vessel THETIS during the 2014 Return to Antikythera project. (photograph by Brett Seymour, courtesy Return to Antikythera 2014)

In 1900 some sponge divers off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera stumbled upon what would turn out to be the richest and largest ancient shipwreck ever discovered. Over the next two years a great number of ancient artifacts were recovered from the site — coins, bronze and metal statues, glasswork, and a very corroded bronze device called the Antikythera mechanism, used to calculate astronomical positions, that is considered the world's oldest analog computer.

The Antikythera mechanism (photograph by Marsyas/Wikimedia)

Then a few divers died, and the shipwreck, which is 55 meters deep and covers 300 meters of the seafloor, was deemed too dangerous for continued exploration. Decades later, in 1976, Jacques Cousteau brought a team back down, and over 27 days they were able to recover hundreds more ancient objects. No one else has investigated the wreck since — until now. 

Last month a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution headed back under, equipped with a one-of-a-kind diving system called the Exosuit. The suit is made of aluminum alloy and weighs 530 pounds — but more importantly, it allows divers to stay underwater for up to 50 hours, is safe at depths of 1,000 feet, and does not require decompression on the way back up. (Here's Atlas Obscura's previous coverage of the Exosuit.)

A prototype of the Exosuit (courtesy Nuytco Research, Ltd)

The dive has been a great success so far. The team created a 3D map of the wreck site to determine where to find more buried treasures, and they have already located parts of the ship, pieces of furniture, and a spear so big it is assumed to have been part of a massive statue. The size of the ships components recovered also indicate that it was far larger than previously believed — one of the researchers has called it "the Titanic of the ancient world." One theory is that the vessel's cache of luxurious goods made up the dowry of a soon-to-be married woman aboard the ship.

Greek technical diver Alexandros Sotiriou discovers an intact "lagynos" ceramic table jug and a bronze rigging ring on the Antikythera Shipwreck. (photograph by Brett Seymour, courtesy Return to Antikythera 2014)

Statue recovered in 1901, now on display in the Athens National Museum (photograph by Dimitris Agelakis/Flickr)

National Park Neusiedler See-Seewinkel in Austria, part of the European Green Belt (photograph by Leander Khil/Wikimedia)

Europe’s landscapes have been intensely impacted by human beings for thousands of years. Deforestation in Crete was rampant by the late Bronze Age; 200 years of hydraulic gold-mining by the Romans sculpted the famed Las Médulas badlands of Spain. Despite this legacy — or perhaps because of the perspective it gives Europeans on the place of humanity in ecological systems — the continent today lays claim to some of the most visionary conservation efforts going on anywhere.

Among the most ambitious is an international attempt to transform a gloomy frontier into an epic refuge for wild things and wild processes. What was once called the Iron Curtain has been reborn as the European Green Belt, a protected natural corridor of unprecedented scale and remarkable heritage.

The Iron Curtain materialized at the close of World War II, and served as the fortified, sometimes bloody seam between Soviet-affiliated territory and Western Europe through the Cold War’s long reign. As political reforms and popular uprisings dismantled the Curtain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, conservationists took note of how remarkably wild much of the narrow strip was that it had constituted. Here were mature forests, stretches of free-flowing river, and naturally functioning wetlands; here were populations of plants and animals rare or extirpated from other parts of Europe. The tense no-man’s-land character of the Iron Curtain, where human access was severely limited, had created a refuge for wilderness and wildlife from Finland to Bulgaria.

But even as Europe celebrated the fall of the Iron Curtain, environmentalists worried that development and resource-extraction would swiftly erase the former divide’s comparatively pristine state. Protecting the corridor would mean balancing the economic and cultural livelihoods of local populations, conducting thorough ecological inventories, and implementing international cooperation between numerous interest groups.

The European Green Belt (image by Smaack/Wikimedia)

Formalized in the early 2000s by the conservation group Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) and the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), the concept of the European Green Belt spread impressively along the old Iron Curtain course. The European Green Belt Initiative has now been laboring to establish and link protected zones across some 7,768 miles between the Barents Sea’s Arctic coast to the balmier shores of the Black Sea for better than a decade. It threads an astonishing 24 countries and 40 national parks within a vast spectrum of native biomes, from the Fennoscandian taiga to the beech woods and high-country meadows of the Jablanica-Shebenik Mountains in the Balkans.

Podyjí National Park in the Czech Republic (photograph by Joadl/Wikimedia)

The Corridor Concept

The corridor is a fundamental theme of contemporary landscape ecology and conservation biology. A thoroughfare of habitat facilitating the passage of organisms between core territories or resources, it can be conceived of at any number of scales. The skein of thickets marking a creek’s passage through farmland is a local corridor for the fox. Broaden the scope, and you find efforts to define and protect corridors that bridge ecoregions and international boundaries. Beyond accommodating the movement of individual creatures, they also keep sub-populations of a given species healthy by encouraging genetic interchange, and, in the face of biosphere-level upheavals such as global climate change, offer migratory routes for both plants and animals retreating or expanding to occupy new habitat.

The European Green Belt is one of several schemes worldwide striving to safeguard large-scale ecological corridors, including the Yellowstone-to-Yukon Conservation Initiative in the North American Rockies, and the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor in Mexico and Central America. It also represents a foundational component of the Pan-European Ecological Network, a blueprint established by the Council of Europe to preserve representative tracts of the continent’s major ecosystems in the face of mushrooming habitat fragmentation.

What sets the Green Belt apart is the degree to which it represents a twining of human history and conservation. Its evolution from a rigidly enforced barrier against cultural interchange to a cooperative international project promoting biodiversity is poignant. The corridor also showcases a fascinating imprint of geopolitical boundaries upon the natural face of the landscape. For people, the Iron Curtain meant barbed wire, checkpoints, and armed guards; for the landscape, it meant ribbons of unbroken forest, wildflower glades, lumbering bears, and moonlit swarms of moths.

Construction of the Berlin Wall, a prominent stretch of the Iron Curtain ("Berlin Wall 1961-11-20" by National Archives, licensed under public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Treasures of the Green Belt

From mountaintop balds to marshy lakeshores, ecosystems in the Iron Curtain were spared many of the environmental degradations that had heavily fragmented ecological landscapes elsewhere. Pesticide- and herbicide-free meadows bristled with a rich roster of grasses, forbs, and invertebrates. Deep timber allowed wilderness-loving beasts the space and seclusion to survive.

That status as a longtime inadvertent refuge as well as its vast geographic spread mean the European Green Belt plays home to a striking diversity of life. The biological spectrum sweeps from endemic plants such as the Wismar cinquefoil and river mussels thriving in unpolluted waterways to what conservationists term “charismatic megafauna,” flashy and dramatic animals such as the common cranes staging for migration on Germany’s Baltic coast or the European wolves and wolverines stalking Fennoscandia’s boreal forest. The reintroduction of the Eurasian lynx into Germany’s Harz Mountains, a low but rugged range fronting the North European Plain along the Iron Curtain trace, was a standout success story in the early years of the corridor effort.

Eurasian lynx were reintroduced into high-quality habitat in Germany's Harz Mountains in an early European Green Belt project (photograph by David Castor/Wikimedia)

Pristine habitat is one of the Green Belt’s great ecological virtues. Protected here aren’t just organisms, but natural processes, which can be as threatened as animals or plants by human activity. Take the Drava River, for example, along the Croatia-Hungary border, part of a drainage so biologically diverse it’s sometimes called the “Amazon of Europe.” Left alone in the Iron Curtain, the unshackled river followed its age-old practices of meandering and seasonally overspilling. Cutbanks on its outer curves provide nesting sites for sand martins. Large snags in the Drava’s old-growth floodplain timber support the aeries of imperiled white-tailed eagles.

Some creatures appear to hold the imperviousness of the Iron Curtain in their collective memory. Researchers have discovered that red deer on either side of the Germany-Czech Republic line don’t cross it: Apparently the herds are still faithfully abiding by home ranges established in the context of that enduring obstruction, though now nothing physical bars them from mingling with their foreign neighbors.

A white-tailed eagle, one of the apex predators calling the European Green Belt home (photograph by volganet.ru/Wikimedia)

The Iron Curtain Trail

People, of course, are also part of the ecological framework preserved in the old domain of the Iron Curtain. The European Green Belt Initiative envisions the conservation corridor as “an ecological network connecting high-value natural and cultural landscapes, whilst respecting the economic, social, and cultural needs of local communities.” Along with the integration of small-scale sustainable agriculture, resource gathering, and hunting with ecosystem preservation, there’s a strong movement to make outdoor recreation part of the Green Belt’s mission.

A long-distance cycling and hiking path, the Iron Curtain Trail, is being established along the route. It offers an opportunity not only to observe firsthand these remarkable vestiges of wild Europe, but also to commune with history. Recreationists along the trail make a pilgrimage of sorts: a pilgrimage to honor those affected by the ideological schisms of the past — and to pay respect to the geographies we help set in motion and the fundamental ecological interconnectedness that makes such world-shaping possible.

An abandoned DDR watch tower in Germany (photograph by Niteshift/Wikimedia)

An overgrown border patrol path from the DDR (photograph by Global Fish/Wikimedia)

Emblem from Daniel Cramer's 1624 "Emblemata Sacra" (all images via Internet Archive Book Images)

An eagle sprouts from a heart and soars above severed hands and feet stamped with stigmata; a hand reaches out from the clouds to stab a heart through with a hammer. The strange and surreal scenes are part of an incredible series of woodcuts in a 17th-century manual of the soul.

Emblemata Sacra (1624) by Daniel Cramer is just one of many emblem books published between the 16th and 18th centuries. At a time when literacy was still low, they mixed detailed religious symbolism with recognizable objects from the everyday to offer a visual component for the textual stories. Cramer, a Lutheran theologian from Germany, was especially drawn to the heart. Moving away from the Catholic Church with its belief in an actual transformation of the host into the body of Christ during communion, this heart was more a symbol. As Emily Jo Sargent wrote in an essay for The Heart (2007, Yale University Press), "During the seventeenth century, books of 'Emblems' were published, which featured this symbol over and over again in a series of situations intended as a guide to the various duties and sufferings of the good Christian heart."

You can think of them as a sort of morbid precursor to the hearts of Valentines and emoticons that we know today. The brutal journey of the heart, representing the trials of individuals in seeking salvation, have the organ sailing rough seas, riding with wings on the back of snail, and sprouting flowers and wheat. Not all of it is immediately understandable now, but the arcane visuals were meant for deep contemplation on perseverance, faith, and how to live in line with religion. Cramer's book was so popular it had numerous editions in German, French, Latin, and Italian. It even got into the visual architecture of the protestant churches, and you can still find these emblems with heart motifs on everything from pews to pulpits in the Protestant churches in Northern Europe.

The entire publication is viewable online at the Internet Archive (part of the greater Emblem Collection of the University of Illinois), and more of the Cramer emblems are at the Internet Archive Book Images on Flickr Commons. Below are some highlights, and perhaps ideas for the tattoos you never knew you needed. 

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 >

Luis Ricardo Falero, "The Witches' Sabbath" (1880), oil on canvas (via Wikimedia)
Witches were almost always portrayed naked until the 1900s. 

In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a pipe of oyntment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin. 
— 1324 investigation of suspected witch Lady Alice Kyteler.

Silhouetted against the moon, pointy hat pushed back by the wind, the witch on her magic broomstick is an iconic image, ubiquitous during the Halloween season. While the image can be found pasted in elementary schools throughout America, the story of why witches look they way they do, and why they fly on broomsticks, is a racier, lesser known tale. What follows is mildly NSFW. 

For a long time the common  answer to the question of why witches flew on broomsticks was relatively straightforward if a bit broad. The broom was a symbol of female domesticity, yet the broom was also phallic, so riding on one was a symbol of female sexuality, thus femininity and domesticity gone wild. Scary for any patriarch! It wasn't just women, however. The first known reference to witches flying on broomsticks was confessed by a suspected male witch, Guillaume Edelin of Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris, while he was being tortured in 1453. 

There was also once a common pagan fertility ritual where poles, pitchforks, and brooms (basically, phallic objects in general) were piloted through the fields with people jumping as high as they could to entice the crops to grow to that height. (A tradition related to the jumping of the broom wedding traditions.) Reginald Scot's book, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, published in 1584, described these festivals as such:

At these magical assemblies, the witches never failed to dance; and in their dance they sing these words, 'Har, har, divell divell, dance here dance here, plaie here plaie here, Sabbath, Sabbath.' And whiles they sing and dance, ever one hath a broom in her hand, and holdeth it up aloft.

Combine pagans, brooms, phallic fertility symbols, and jumping into the air, and you have all the ingredients you need for the myth of the flying witch. But there is another possibility, a more literal and much saucier origin story of the witches riding their broomsticks. 

Francisco Goya, "Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)" (1821-1823), oil on canvas
(via Wikimedia)

Besides riding on broomsticks, the second most iconic image of a witch is of old hags brewing up a witches brew, the old "double, double toil and trouble" of Shakespeare's Macbeth, written in the early 1600s. But just what were these witches actually brewing up? Well, around the same time as the first reports of witches flying broomsticks is the mention of "flying ointments." 

The use of hallucinogenic plants for shamanic purposes goes back to prehistory. In medieval Europe there were a number of hallucinogenic plants in fairly easy supply. First among these was the rye mold containing ergot fungi. With effects on humans similar to LSD, ergot was a powerful hallucinogen. Among other readily accessible hallucinogenic plants were henbane, deadly nightshade, mandrake, and, according to Johann Weyer in his 1563 Praestigiis Daemonum, these were all principal ingredients in any witch's "flying ointment."

 Hans Baldung Grien or Grün, "Witches' Sabbath" (1510), woodcut (via Wikimedia)

However there is a problem with drinking such a potent witches brew, chief among them that it can make the drinker quite sick, and could even be deadly. But among the other ways to ingest a hallucinogenic drug besides swallowing it is through the mucous membranes, such as under the armpits, through the anus, or for women, through the mucous membranes of their vaginas. And how might such a ointment be best applied to those delicate mucous membranes? From the 15th century records of Jordanes de Bergamo: 

But the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.

An early 1600s illustration of a French witch preparing to fly, ointment in hand, from the Museum of Witchcraft in Bayonne, France.

Even more telling is a quote from a 1324 investigation of suspected witch Alice Kyteler:

In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a pipe of oyntment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin.

In 1477, Antoine Rose, known as the Witch of Savoy, confessed, again under torture, that "the Devil, whose name was Robinet, was a dark man who spoke in a hoarse voice. Kissing Robinet's foot in homage, she renounced God and the Christian faith. He put his mark on her, on the little finger of her left hand, and gave her a stick, 18 inches long, and a pot of ointment. She used to smear the ointment on the stick, put it between her legs and say 'Go, in the name of the Devil, go!'"

Albert Joseph Pénot, "Départ pour le Sabbat" (1910) (via Wikimedia)

Once this had been done, the effects of the "flying ointment" would begin to take effect. Brewed up from such things as deadly nightshade, wolfsbane, henbane, and hemlock, often in a base of animal fat, the ingredients would have been potent indeed. And the effect of this brew, this tropane alkaloid (due to the nightshade and henbane) hallucinogen? As relayed in a 1966 description by Gustav Schenk: 

Each part of my body seemed to be going off on its own, and I was seized with the fear that I was falling apart. At the same time I experienced an intoxicating sensation of flying. […] I soared where my hallucinations — the clouds, the lowering sky, herds of beasts, falling leaves […] billowing streamers of steam and rivers of molten metal — were swirling along.

Luis Ricardo Falero, "Witches Going to Their Sabbath (or The Departure of the Witches)" (1878), oil on canvas (via Wikimedia)

And why the fixation on the broomstick and not another object? Wouldn't a broomstick be a bit… unwieldy? One such explanation is that the herbs used in such a preparation would have been kept in small broom-like bundles know as whisks, which may have been boiled whole in oil, both releasing the active ingredients from the whisk and thus soaking the handle with the concoction. The use of this whisk, stick, or broom coated in the oil would have done the trick quite nicely, along with some added personal benefits.

From the viewpoint of our modern times, such drug use and self pleasure are not such shocking acts, but are in fact liberating, but at the time a woman choosing to do what she wished with her own body or mind was so unthinkable as to be synonymous with the devil himself. Many women were tortured and killed because they dared to explore such personal liberties.

Let us be glad those times are (mostly) past us. In the words of Scottish "witch" Antoine Rose', who is believed to not have been killed but disappeared after her trial, jump on your broomstick and "Go, in the name of the Devil, go!"

Hans Baldung Grien's 16th century drawing of Witches mid "flight."

Albrecht Dürer, "The Four Witches" (1497), engraving (via Wikimedia) 

Francisco Goya, "Witches Flight" (1797-1798) (via Wikimedia)

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF WITCHES:

THE MUSEUM OF WITCHCRAFT, Boscastle, England

THE MUSEUM OF ICELANDIC SORCERY & WITCHCRAFT, Hólmavík, Iceland

YORK WITCH GRAVE, York, Maine

THE WITCH HOUSE OF SALEM, Salem, Massachusetts

This article originally appeared as part of Atlas Obscura's 31 Days of Halloween in 2013. 

Photo taken from a roll of film found at the camp of the Dyatlov Pass incident (via Wikimedia)

In January of 1959, 23-year-old Igor Dyatlov led a group of eight young Soviet hikers, comprising seven men and two women and mostly university students, into the Ural Mountains, attempting to reach Mt. Ortorten from the small settlement of Vizhai. It took more than three months to locate all nine of their bodies.

They were found about six miles away from their destination, in a forest almost a mile away from their campsite, without their skis, shoes, or coats in approximately -30 degrees Fahrenheit weather. Two of them had fractured skulls, two more had major chest fractures, and one hiker was missing her tongue. Soviet investigators listed the cause of death as “a compelling natural force,” and abruptly closed the case not even a month later.

Skiers setting up camp at about 5. p.m. on Feb. 2, 1959. Photo taken from a roll of film found at the camp of the Dyatlov Pass incident (via Wikimedia)

Here’s what we know about the incident. Six of the skiers died of hypothermia and three died of injuries. They died separately — two of them were found under a cedar tree near the remains of a fire, while three others were found in intervals of hundreds of feet from the tree, and four more were in a ravine another 250 feet away. The two under the tree had burned hands. The four in the ravine weren’t found until May 4, three months after the incident. The dead seemed to have donated some of their clothing items to the living; Ludmila Dubinina’s foot was wrapped in a piece of Yuri Krivonischenko’s pants, while Semyon Zolotaryov was found wearing Dubinina’s hat and coat, and some garments had cuts in them, as though they were forcibly removed. Consistently, there were eight or nine sets of footprints in the snow, accounting only for the skiers and not suggesting another party’s involvement (on foot, at least). There was no sign of struggle or of any other human or animal approaching the campsite. There was a snowstorm the night of February 2, which is when it was determined, via their diaries, that they died.

A view of the tent as the rescuers found it on Feb. 26, 1959 (via Wikimedia) 

Their campsite was made on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl (Dead Mountain), at about 3,600 feet. All the travelers — eight of them in their early/mid-20s with Zolotaryov in his late 30s — were experienced mountaineers, having skied across frozen lakes and totally uninhabited areas to get there. Despite nasty weather and slower progress than they'd planned, their last diary entries reflected high spirits. Charmingly, in a very typical Soviet way of bonding, they even produced a little newspaper about the trip, which they titled The Evening Ortoten and which bore the headline: From now on, we know that the snowmen exist. It goes on to say, “They can be met in the Northern Urals, next to Otorten mountain." (They were, it's thought, probably jokingly referring to themselves.)

After the first five bodies were found, a legal inquest began, eventually determining that the cause of death was hypothermia. The deaths seemed kind of straightforward at first. Sure, these dead were in various stages of undress, including one in his underwear, but this was explained away as “paradoxical undressing,” which happens in about 25 percent of hypothermia victims, as the hypothalamus malfunctions and body temperature seems to rise when it’s really dropping. But then it got super weird.

Mysterious 33rd photo from Yuri Krivonischenko's film (via Wikimedia)

The skiers’ badly damaged tent, it was determined, had been cut open from the inside, and all of their stuff was still in it. Why were they dead of exposure if they’d had access to their winter gear BEFORE going out into the freezing winds? To all appearances, they appeared to have left the tent out of their own volition and in a hurry. Bizarrely, Zolotaryov fled the camp with his camera but not his gear. As well, Rustem Slobodin — who, along with Dyatlov and Zina Kolmogorova, seemed to have died in a pose indicating he was trying to return to the tent — had a small crack in his skull, but it was ruled that the elements were what killed him, not the fracture. No external wounds were discovered.

Things got really shaken up when the four bodies in the ravine were found and examined; both Dubinina and Zolotarev had fractured ribs, while Nicolai Thibeaux-Brignolles had a major skull fracture. One of the investigators compared the force required to injure a human so severely to that of a car crash. The injuries were absolutely not caused by force exerted by another human being. Once again, no soft tissue damage was observed, as though the skiers’ bodies were crushed by pressure. When Dubinina was found to be missing her tongue, the theory of another party’s possible involvement must have arisen again — Who would do this? Why? Or did another skier from the group cut it out? And where did it go?  — but there were absolutely no indications of other people having been nearby, apart from the other travelers in Dyatlov’s group, not even the native Mansi people sometimes known to inhabit the area. And, perhaps most baffling of all, some of the skiers’ clothing was found to contain significant levels of radiation.

Monument to the dead skiers (photograph by Dmitriy Nikishin)

Due to “an absence of a guilty party,” the inquest was closed in May of 1959, only a few short weeks after the last four bodies were discovered, and the files were archived and classified. When they finally became accessible in the 1990s, post-Soviet era, parts of them were missing.

Without any real, public answers to any of these freaky questions, all manner of insane theory flourished around the incident over the ensuing 50 years, but the Soviet government’s very sudden closing of the case seems to have made it the most popular culprit in the minds of the theorists. Orange spheres were sighted in the sky on the night the Dyatlov group died by campers about 50 miles away from the scene; some explained these away as R-7 intercontinental missile launches, seeing as the last campsite was located on the pathway from Balikonur Cosmodrone to Chyornaya Guba, a Soviet nuclear testing ground. Per the radiation found in the skiers' clothing, some speculated that they drank melted contaminated snow. A 12-year-old eyewitness who attended five of the skiers' funerals claimed that the bodies had a “deep brown tan.” And you can’t talk conspiracies (and radiation) without mentioning aliens and UFOs, of course. Some folks even blamed the "snowmen" referenced in the students' newspaper.

Detail of the monument with photographs of the skiers (photograph by Dmitriy Nikishin)

To this day, a scientific explanation for the deaths of these nine people has yet to be nailed down. Manifold publications were inspired by the incident, some investigative journalism and some entirely fiction. The mountain pass where the skiers set up their last campsite was named for Dyatlov, and the Dyatlov Foundation, established by Yuri Kuntsevitch — none other than the child eyewitness at the skiers’ funerals in 1959 — still works to persuade the Russian government to reopen the investigation. The foundation operates the Dyatlov Museum in Ekaterinaburg as well, to commemorate the dead travelers and tell the story of their strange ends.

This article originally appeared as part of Atlas Obscura's 31 Days of Halloween in 2013. 

Location of the 131 cities in the study's dataset and geographical repartition of the different groups (via Royal Society Publishing) 

Marc Barthelemy and Rémi Louf, researchers at L'Institut de Physique Théorique outside of Paris, are seeking quantitative approaches to understanding cities. They use philosophy and physics to determine things like the ways traffic burdens cause cities to fragment, or whether large or small cities are smoggier. In their latest paper, "A typology of street patterns," published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, they argue that cities can be classified by the size and layout of their blocks, concluding that there are only four different types of cities in the world. 

"You can think of this classification being for cities what Zoology is for animals or Botany for plants: a way to sort some objects according to their similarity," Barthelemy said in an email. Categorizing a city based on its blocks uses both topology and geometry, and yields a given city's "fingerprint" or street pattern. As explained by The Week, the cities representing each of the four fingerprints are New Orleans (large blocks in a variety of shapes), Athens (smaller blocks in a variety of shapes), Buenos Aires (medium-size blocks that are mainly square and rectangular) and Mogadishu (almost exclusively small square blocks). 

The four groups of cities with typical street patterns for each group (via Royal Society Publishing)

The researchers also analyzed the five boroughs of New York City and came to some surprising conclusions. Staten Island and the Bronx have similar fingerprints, but the other boroughs have more in common with other cities. Brooklyn and Queens, both of which have regular block patterns, fall into the group represented by Buenos Aires, whereas Manhattan, which is mostly made up of elongated rectangles and squares, has the most in common with New Orleans. “Manhattan is very distinct from all the other boroughs,” Barthelemy explained on Motherboard. "These other boroughs are very similar to each other — and similar to Detroit — but with different feels or touches: Brussels for Brooklyn, Miami for Queens, Porto for the Bronx, and As-Suwayda for Staten Island.”

NYC and its different boroughs' fingerprints (via Royal Society Publishing)

Of course, as they acknowledge, "Cities are complex objects, and it is unlikely that a representation as simple as the fingerprint can capture all their intricacies." But this research can help us understand the many differing factors in the ways cities grow — in response to geography vs. planned patterns, for example — and whether these methods can be improved. "Despite the simplifications that our method entails, we believe that the classification we propose is an encouraging step towards a quantitative and systematic comparison of the street patterns of different cities. This, together with the specific knowledge of architects, urbanists, etc. should lead to a better understanding of the shape of our cities."

Mating female and male Microbrachius, by Brian Choo, Finders University

Scientists have long believed that prehistoric fish all mated externally by releasing eggs and sperm into the water. But a new discovery — "one of the biggest in the evolutionary history of sexual reproduction" — has led an Australian professor to conclude that Microbrachius dicki, prehistoric armored fish, actually had genitals, and were using them to copulate internally 385 million years ago.

Paleontologist and Flinders University Professor John Long made the discovery accidentally, while going through old boxes of fossils at the University of Technology in Tallinn, Estonia. He found that the M. dicki is the first species in which the male and female developed physical differences. Males had "genital limbs" called claspers on either side of their bodies that were used to transfer sperm into females, and females had "genital plates," which are rough like cheese graters, to dock the male organs in place. Those claspers are now believed to be the oldest sexual organs, which, over hundreds of millions of years, would evolve into the penis.

By Brian Choo, Finders University

The M. dicki also have limblike protrusions on their upper bodies — hence their name Microbrachius, which means "little arms" — and scientists never understood what they were for. Now it's clear that the M. dicki use them to hold on to one another during copulation. The findings, which were first published in the science journal Nature, also indicate the position in which the fish had sex: side by side, as if they were square-dancing.

Here's a video of the fun: 

Ebola facility in Sierra Leone, August 2, 2014 (©EC/ECHO/Cyprien Fabre)

Death, disease, and fear ravage much the world right now, as thousands die of Ebola in West Africa, and hundreds of thousands across the globe read about it. In such a climate, it only makes sense to quarantine the affected areas to stop the swell of infection, or does it?

Sitting at home, our idea of a quarantine probably brings to mind one of two images. The first is a humane and sanitary containment system, where victims are tended to by healthcare workers versed in precautionary measures to prevent spread, and perhaps a second containment system for those who may have been in contact with the disease, so that those who are not infected remain so, and those who are can be swiftly moved to the correct facility. The other image is that of the dystopian novels, where thousands of people — sick and well — are left to fend for themselves in abandoned stadiums or hospitals, as the rest of the word metaphorically throws red tape around the area and walks away.

Sadly, the reality of quarantine is closer to the second image than the first, and it may even be more dire than that.

In August this year, military forces surprised citizens in a neighborhood of Monrovia, Liberia, with a "cordon sanitaire." Makeshift roadblocks of old scrap wood were forcibly placed around the area of West Point, a densely populated slum where education is minimal and health care is virtually nonexistent. The residents of the neighborhood were not informed of this blockade, were not made aware of its purpose or the reasoning behind it. They were expected to comply with brute force, as the government there scrambled, feeling they had no time for communication.

In these conditions, can we really blame victims of the disease and their possibly infected loved ones for breaking out of (or into) the neighborhood?

As much common sense as it may make to first-world countries trying to stop a deadly disease, quarantines have always walked the thin line between healthcare and human rights violations. It has been well-documented that the difference between these two outcomes is efficient and strong communication. Something we have not achieved in West Africa.

Cordon sanitaire is a specific type of quarantine that uses physical barriers to mark an area of disease or military aggression. Its first known use as a phrase stems from France in 1821, when the French government sent 30,000 troops to the Pyrenees to stop a deadly fever from traveling from Spain into their country. Quarantines of this nature have been in use since the 1500s, often used in medieval times to thwart the bubonic plague. 2014 is the first year one has been government sanctioned since 1918, when the border between Russia and Poland was closed to prevent spread of typhus.

In almost all cases of use, cordon sanitaire is a last resort, implemented when the cause and spread of a disease is unknown. As some residents of parts of West Africa are condemned to a dystopian reality, it is worth looking at the history of quarantines, and the diseases they were meant to prevent.

Bubonic Plague: 1665

Scenes of the Great Plague of London in 1665 (via Wellcome Images)

In 1665, England experienced its last epidemic of the deadly bubonic plague that had been prevalent since the 1400s. Top estimates say it killed 100,000 of London’s 460,000 citizens. While we now know the plague is spread by fleas from rats, in those days little was known about the origin of the disease. As is common, the infection stemmed from a destitute area.

In the small town of St. Giles, west of London, rats carrying the disease made their way through alleyways strewn with garbage into Whitechapel, then London itself. Quarantines were immediately set in place, the houses of the infected locked, and churches prohibited from keeping bodies on their property. Those who died of the bubonic plague were carried away at night and thrown into plague burial pits. By September of 1665, however, quarantine measures were abandoned. Those who could afford it fled the country, leaving the impoverished and already-sickened to their own devices. Parliament ceased activity. What actually stopped the disease in 1666 was not quarantine measures (as they were carried out haphazardly and not adhered to properly), but a great fire that burned nearly all of the city, taking the plague with it. The city rebuilt itself with wider streets and implemented stricter sanitation codes to prevent another epidemic from taking place.

Cholera: 1830 - 1920

Quarantined children of cholera victim (early 20th century) (via Library of Congress)

The 19th century could virtually be defined by the various outbreaks of cholera all over the world, as transportation improved and cross-country travel became possible. With origins in India, cholera is most known for its outbreaks in London and New York in the early 1830s. Again, the disease hit hardest in the poorest neighborhoods, where health standards and sanitation were not enforced. A highly respected civic leader at the time, John Pintard, wrote that “the epidemic is almost exclusively confined to the lower classes of intemperate dissolute & filthy people huddled together like swine in their polluted habitations.” He went on to encourage allowing the sick to die off, calling them the scum of the earth. When quarantines are not equipped with communication and easily available aid and food, this is essentially what happens anyway.

We now know that cholera is spread via food and water that has come in contact with fecal matter, but in the 1830s the idea was that people were spreading it to each other. When it arrived in England in 1831, the Privy Council put all ships arriving from Russia under quarantine. In New York in the summer of 1832, the opposite occurred. There are reports that 100,000 people out of a population of 250,000 fled the city. Another 3,515 perished.

During the subsequent American fears of an outbreak in the early 1890s, the media were hard at work quelling hysteria, stating that controlling the disease was simply a matter of sanitation and disinfection. Even still, all ships coming into New York’s harbor were quarantined for a time, as that same media maintained that adequate sanitation and disinfection could not take place on a boat.

AIDS: 1985-1986

Act Up!, AIDS activism art on the Berlin Wall (photograph by Queerbubbles/Wikimedia)

While a large-scale quarantine was never approved for AIDS victims and those with HIV, several polls and legislation were crafted around the issue when the United States struggled to contain yet another disease without knowing how it spread. Only this one had a bad guy. Gay people. In one case, police in Atlanta apprehended a man who ended up having a bloody nose in the back of the squad car. The car itself was placed under quarantine for 21 days, and would have been there indefinitely if the state’s assistant epidemiologist hadn’t gone to the pound lot, and washed the car out with disinfectant. The police claimed they simply didn’t know what to do with it.

While many thought an AIDS quarantine was a good idea, 51 percent of Americans polled at the time favored programs to protect homosexuals from being discriminated against in the workplace, but 55 percent said they would take their child out of school if one of the other children was known to have HIV or AIDS. Meanwhile, 51 percent favored a full-on quarantine for AIDS victims, going so far as to suggest visible tattoos to differentiate them from the general population.

SARS: 2003

photograph by Teresa Folaron/Flickr

During the SARS epidemic from March to July of 2003, 30,000 residents in Beijing were quarantined. The virus took 778 lives, and more than 8,000 people contracted the disease. Spread by coughing and sneezing, this quarantine made sense as the severe acute respiratory syndrome spread to cities in the United States, Europe, and Canada; however the quarantine measures taken in Canada were labeled ineffective and inefficient.

Scholars were also shocked at the first quarantine measures being used there in well over a century. They maintain that Toronto quarantined 25 times more people than necessary to prevent the spread of the disease. Only 57 percent of those "forced" into quarantine were compliant, and apparently with good reason. Toronto health officials quarantined 100 people for every SARS case, whereas China quarantined only 12 for every case.

H5N1 (Bird Flu): 2005

Poster in Vietnam warning against H5N1 (photograph by Joe Gatling/Flickr)

On July 18, 2005, Dr. Henry Niman wrote of the forced quarantine measures taken in China to prevent the spread of a deadly flu strain, H5N1. By the time the government responded to the province impacted, several people were afflicted with intense pneumonia. The quarantine was not well explained, and forcing people to cordon themselves off from their lives caused them to “lose control of themselves and revolt against the authorities,” resulting in many extra casualties. The people were told nothing. Many farmers thought it was “nothing, just a fight over a bunch of birds.”

***

A compulsory mask for a post-WWI flu epidemic in Australia (via State Library of New South Wales)

Of course, quarantine is used on an individual basis quite often, mostly for diseases like tuberculosis which spread easily through the air. The key, though, is that these are isolated, individual cases where a patient gives consent to give up certain rights while harboring the disease for the sake of public safety. There have been documented cases of forced isolation for tuberculosis patients, and these bring up ethical dilemmas that the world has yet to face. Thankfully, the instances are few and far between. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the ethical implications of quarantine. We need to look at public safety, at human rights, at education, sanitation, aid, food and treatment options, and write down a policy that is comprehensive so that the next time a disease breaks out worldwide, our leaders have a plan to follow.

For your Friday-afternoon pleasure, a new regular feature: Roundup Obscura, one photo and five links to fascinations around the world and the web. 

Photo of the week: "Cata Sopros," an interactive sound installation by Elas Duas at the Museu de Alberto Sampaio in Guimarães, Portugal. This "collective musical instrument" is made from paper windmills and transform users’ breath into haunting and melodic sounds. The title is a a play on the Portuguese word for windmills — cata ventos means wind catchers, so cata sopros means breath catchers. See a video of the installation in action here

Spelunking on One Wheel
Tom Lupton and Stephan Thomas, two friends from Cardiff, may have come up with the world's newest extreme sport: cave unicycling. Videographers Michael and Kate Garret recorded the duo hopping over boulders, fording underground streams, and squeezing through subterranean passages — all from atop their unicycles. "The added level of risk makes everything you do that much more special, that much more monumental when you achieve it," says Tom. [via Atlantic]

What Makes a Building Sacred?
The concept of "sacredness" is not intrinsic to objects or building materials — something only becomes sacred by decision, custom, or consensus. Yet sacred buildings certainly exist; whether due to the presence of divinity, the suggestion of the forbidden beyond, or a consummate aesthetic appeal, being in the presence of that which we consider sacred can even act upon our physiology. How do we make these assignments, and what happens when a sacred building is destroyed? [via Aeon Magazine]

"Knut Ekwall Fisherman and The Siren" by Knut Ekvall (via Wikimedia)

The Sordid and Sexy History of the Mermaid
Mermaids have captivated popular imagination forever, but where did it all begin? In his latest "Fantastically Wrong" column, Matt Simon delves into the mythic, folkloric, and literary history of the mermaid. It's a great primer on the difference between nereids, sirens, and dugongs, as well as the ancient techniques old sailors used to avoid them all. [via Wired] 

The Muxes of Juchitán de Zaragoza
In this indigenous Oaxacan town, muxes, who are born presenting as males but live as women, have been revered since precolonial times for bringing luck to their families. Each November, muxes are celebrated at the Vela de las Auténticas Intrépidas Buscadoras del Peligro, or Vigil of the Authentic Intrepid Searchers of Danger. The four-day festival includes one mass, several days of partying, dancing, and feasting, plus a parade, a pageant, and the coronation of a muxe queen. [via Nowhere Magazine]

"Trepanation - feldbuch-der wundartzney" by Hans von Gersdorff (via Wikimedia)

Surprising Evidence About Antiquated Medical Practices
Lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and leeches — thank goodness those barbaric practices have all been abandoned. Except... maybe they haven't? Here's a (somewhat disturbing) roundup of five old-timey medical treatments that actually seem to work. [via Popular Science]

The foundation of Atlas Obscura is contributed by intrepid users around the world, out exploring the places no one else is noticing, or delving into history that's been all but forgotten. Here we are highlighting five of our favorite recent additions to the Atlas. Have a place we've missed? Create an account and become a part of our community.

TRUNYAN
Bali, Indonesia

Trunyan Cemetery (photograph by Yusuf IJsseldijk/Wikimedia)

For centuries in a Bali village, the dead of the Bali Aga people have been placed out in the open beneath a giant banyan tree. The Trunyan cemetery added to Atlas Obscura by cum2tekuiti is actually a practical solution to death's unpleasant decomposition. The smell from the tree reportedly masks the scent of decay. 

MICROPIA
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Some of the bacteria residents at Micropia (via micropia.nl)

Opened in 2014, Micropia in Amsterdam is the world's first microbe zoo. Added by labatteg to Atlas Obscura, this incredible space focuses on the bacteria that live on and around us, with exhibitions of petri dishes with cultures. A microbiology lab on site tends to and grows new specimens. 

RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL'S SECRET APARTMENT
New York, New York

Radio City's secret apartment (photograph by Luke J. Spencer)

Even a heavily-trafficked destination like New York's Radio City Music Hall has its secrets. High above the stage is a hidden apartment. Added by Luke J. Spencer, who also contributed photographs, the apartment is almost perfectly preserved from when it was built in the 1930s, with 20-foot ceilings adorned in gold leaf and plush furnishings. 

COLONIA FARA
Genoa, Italy

Colonia Fara (photograph by progettochiavari/Flickr)

Mussolini himself attended the dedication of Colonia Fara, a seaside resort built by Italy's National Fascist Party in the 1930s. Contributed to Atlas Obscura by ThomLaB, the complex still stands, although in a state of massive deterioration. The curved tower is covered with graffiti, its windows broken, as it looms as a reminder of the country's past. 

GRAVE OF JOSEPH PALMER
Leominster, Massachusetts

Grave of Joseph Palmer (photograph by Ken Sears)

"Persecuted for Wearing the Beard" reads the epitaph on the grave of Joseph Palmer in Leominster, Massachusetts. Added by Ken Sears along with photographs, the tombstone shows Palmer proudly wearing a great, bushy beard. When he chose this facial hair in the 1820s, he was actually a century out of style, and not only that, physically attacked once by a small mob with razors as it was seen as offensive to good taste. He once famously retorted to a preacher who accused him of being devilish: "If I remember correctly, Jesus wore a beard not unlike mine."

Thanks to our intrepid users for uncovering these wondrous places, and we look forward to more! Help us show how incredible and curious the world is by adding your own discoveries. 

For your Monday-afternoon pleasure, a new regular feature: Roundup Obscura, one photo and five links to fascinations around the world and the web. 

Photo of the week: "Cata Sopros," an interactive sound installation by Elas Duas at the Museu de Alberto Sampaio in Guimarães, Portugal. This "collective musical instrument" is made from paper windmills and transform users’ breath into haunting and melodic sounds. The title is a a play on the Portuguese word for windmills — cata ventos means wind catchers, so cata sopros means breath catchers. See a video of the installation in action here

Spelunking on One Wheel
Tom Lupton and Stephan Thomas, two friends from Cardiff, may have come up with the world's newest extreme sport: cave unicycling. Videographers Michael and Kate Garret recorded the duo hopping over boulders, fording underground streams, and squeezing through subterranean passages — all from atop their unicycles. "The added level of risk makes everything you do that much more special, that much more monumental when you achieve it," says Tom. [via Atlantic]

What Makes a Building Sacred?
The concept of "sacredness" is not intrinsic to objects or building materials — something only becomes sacred by decision, custom, or consensus. Yet sacred buildings certainly exist; whether due to the presence of divinity, the suggestion of the forbidden beyond, or a consummate aesthetic appeal, being in the presence of that which we consider sacred can even act upon our physiology. How do we make these assignments, and what happens when a sacred building is destroyed? [via Aeon Magazine]"Knut Ekwall Fisherman and The Siren" by Knut Ekvall (via Wikimedia)

The Sordid and Sexy History of the Mermaid
Mermaids have captivated popular imagination forever, but where did it all begin? In his latest "Fantastically Wrong" column, Matt Simon delves into the mythic, folkloric, and literary history of the mermaid. It's a great primer on the difference between nereids, sirens, and dugongs, as well as the ancient techniques old sailors used to avoid them all. [via Wired] 

The Muxes of Juchitán de Zaragoza
In this indigenous Oaxacan town, muxes, who are born presenting as males but live as women, have been revered since precolonial times for bringing luck to their families. Each November, muxes are celebrated at the Vela de las Auténticas Intrépidas Buscadoras del Peligro, or Vigil of the Authentic Intrepid Searchers of Danger. The four-day festival includes one mass, several days of partying, dancing, and feasting, plus a parade, a pageant, and the coronation of a muxe queen. [via Nowhere Magazine]"Trepanation - feldbuch-der wundartzney" by Hans von Gersdorff (via Wikimedia)

Surprising Evidence About Antiquated Medical Practices
Lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and leeches — thank goodness those barbaric practices have all been abandoned. Except... maybe they haven't? Here's a (somewhat disturbing) roundup of five old-timey medical treatments that actually seem to work. [via Popular Science]

Carl Tanzler, aka Count Carl von Cosel, was a man of many talents. The German-born radiologist (who was most definitely not a count) claimed to have nine university degrees, be a former submarine captain, and an accomplished inventor. In reality, he was an eccentric and lonely man who had abandoned his wife and children to work in the United States Marine Hospital in Key West, Florida.

Carl Tanzler (via Florida Keys Public Library); & Carl's Dream Woman (via Florida Keys Public Library)

After taking the job at the hospital in 1927, Carl maintained a relatively low profile and mostly kept to himself. That is, until he met Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos. When the 21-year-old Cuban beauty came in for an examination, Carl knew immediately that Hoyos was the woman of his dreams — literally. For years, Carl had been plagued by visions of a beautiful dark-haired woman who was destined to be the love of his life. Unfortunately for Elena, Carl assumed she was this apparition in human form.

Carl’s examination yielded a grim prognosis, and Hoyos was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a highly fatal disease at the time. However, now that Carl had found his soulmate, he was determined to save her life. Sparing zero expense and displaying a total irreverence for hospital authority, Carl set out to find a miracle cure for his Elena. He administered homemade specialty tonics and medicines, illegally brought x-ray and electrical equipment to the Hoyos’ house for home treatments, all while showering Elena with copious gifts and professing his love.

However, despite Tanzler’s best efforts, she died of complications from her disease on October 25, 1931. Tanzler insisted on paying out of pocket for Elena to be buried in an expensive stone mausoleum, and with the approval of her family he hired a mortician to clean and fix up her body before placing it in the tomb. One fact her family remained ignorant of was that Tanzler was the only person with a key to the mausoleum.

Elena's Tomb (via Florida Keys Public Library)

After two years of visiting Elena’s mausoleum nightly and generally creeping everyone out with his dead patient obsession, Tanzler was fired from his job and ceased going to the Elena’s final resting place, which Hoyos’ family found rather odd, considering his behavior.

Little did they know, Tanzler was far from satisfied with his nightly visits. He needed more quality time with his decaying dream girl, so he put Elena’s rapidly decomposing carcass in a toy wagon and transported it to a makeshift lab he had fashioned inside of an old airplane. Using plaster of Paris, wires, mortician’s wax, and glass eyes, Tanzler brought Elena “back to life,” and proceeded to take her to his home where the pair shared a marital bed.

Elena's Airship (via Florida Keys Public Libraries)

Carl's home and laboratory(via Florida Keys Public Library)

Over the years, Tanzler kept Elena “alive” using wire hangers to preserve her frame, stuffing her abdominal cavity with rags, routinely reapplying wax to her face, replacing her decaying scalp with real hair, and constantly dousing her in disinfectants and oils to mask the rotting smell of her body. While attending to the physical demands of his moldering bride, Carl attended to her material needs as well, purchasing her clothing and perfume, and even installing a curtained cloth veil for privacy on the bed they shared (apparently feminine modesty was a prerogative for a man who routinely saw Elena’s innards). This domestic Ed Gein’s style bliss went on for seven years.

Everything was going great, until people inevitably started asking questions. The combination of Carl’s habit of routinely buying women’s clothing, his absence from the mausoleum, and a local boy’s sighting of him through a window dancing with what appeared to be a giant doll, aroused some serious suspicion. The rumors began to swirl that Tanzler was keeping Elena in his house.

In October of 1940, Elena’s sister confronted Tanzler at his home. He allowed her inside where, to her horror, she was met with what appeared to be a wax dummy of her sister (if only). Elena’s sister alerted the authorities, which seized the “doll,” only to discover it was actually Elena’s rotted corpse. Not only that, but while performing an autopsy on Elena’s remains, coroners discovered that among the multiple body parts Tanzler had reconstructed, he had inserted a paper tube inside her to serve as a makeshift vagina. Whether or not Tanzler fully consummated with his real life corpse bride is a subject of public debate, however, it’s pretty clear Elena wouldn’t have been into any of this regardless.

Carl's "Doll" (via Wikimedia)

Tanzler was arrested and stood trial for "wantonly and maliciously destroying a grave and removing a body without authorization." The trial became a media sensation, and surprisingly the majority of the public, especially women, supported Tanzler, finding him to be an eccentric romantic.

While on the stand, Carl claimed he planned to use an airship to take Hoyos, “high into the stratosphere, so that radiation from outer space could penetrate Elena’s tissues and restore life to her somnolent form,” which made about as much sense as anything else during the hearing. Tanzler was eventually cleared since the statute of limitations on his crimes had expired.

Tanzler during his trial (via Florida Keys Public Library)

However, since the trial had garnered so much media attention, and because this took place in Florida, Elena’s body was put on public display at a local funeral home where thousands of people got to view her disturbing form. After the gawking was over, Elena was finally reburied in an unmarked grave so that she could rest in peace without any further romantic shenanigans.

As for Carl Tanzler, after asking for Elena’s body back (a ballsy request that was obviously denied), he lived the rest of his days out without further incident, although with a life-size effigy made from Elena’s death mask as a companion,. Cleary, Nicholas Sparks has nothing on the undying romance of Carl Tanzler.

 
Elena's body on display (via Florida Public Library)

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.

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>

From the 19th to mid-20th century, huge asylums were constructed around the United States that acted as their own closed communities, and often included separate cemeteries. Forgotten in life, the patients sent to these mental institutions often were outcast in death. The unclaimed bodies of the deceased were buried beneath grave markers that rarely were graced with a name, usually just a number if anything at all. When this style of asylum started to close in the later part of the century and many were abandoned, the cemeteries were likewise left to decay, a final stroke of obscurity for the forgotten. 

AUSTIN STATE SCHOOL FARM COLONY
Austin, Texas

Cemetery at Austin State School Farm Colony (photograph by Andy Mistler)

Opened in 1933, Austin State School Farm Colony in Texas was constructed as a 436-acre facility for mentally disabled boys. It started under the name "State Colony for the Feeble-Minded" and gradually expanded to a massive complex of 1,800 residents. This area included a cemetery on its southside, and despite the colony's closure the graves of an estimated 3,000 people remain in the rough ground. Each was unclaimed by family or friends, lowered into the earth in a simple pine box beneath simple markers. 

Shrine on the way to the cemetery (photograph by Andreanna Moya/Flickr)

Austin State School Farm Colony (photograph by Andy Mistler)

DANVERS HOSPITAL FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE
Danvers, Massachusetts

Danvers State Hospital Cemetery (photograph by Rana Xavier/Flickr)

While the Danvers Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts that inspired both the Arkham Asylum of Batman and horror of H.P. Lovecraft with its gothic spires has been mostly demolished and converted to condos, its cemetery still lurks in the surrounding forest. Opened in 1878 as a forward-thinking institution for treating mental health, by the 1930s lobotomies and shock therapy were not uncommon. It was closed in 1992, and while its cemetery was then left to the overgrowth, the Danvers State Memorial Committee now works to keep it preserved. Hexagon-shaped concrete markers stamped with just a number remain a reminder of the place's former identity.  

Danvers State Hospital Cemetery (photograph by Zach/Flickr)

Danvers State Hospital reborn as condos (photograph by John Phelan/Wikimedia)

ATHENS LUNATIC ASYLUM
Athens, Ohio

Athens Lunatic Asylum cemetery (photograph by Justin Masterson/Flickr)

Much of Athens Lunatic Asylum has been absorbed into Ohio University, but traces of the abandoned mental institution linger, including its cemetery. Established on 141 acres and opened in 1874, the asylum, also known as "the Ridges," stretched over 1,000 acres by the 1950s, and at one point employed the most people in the entire state. Patients worked the grounds in the early years as therapy, while in the later years psychotropic drugs, lobotomies, and shock therapy slowed the labor down. The institution closed in 1993, and its cemetery fell into decay with the rest of the asylum, subject to vandalism and weathering. However, in recent years the cemetery with its more than 1,900 interments has seen dawning attention, with maintenance from the National Alliance on Mental Illness and even a Ridges Cemeteries Nature Walk past the low, numbered tombs. 

Epitaph on a patient tombstone (photograph by Justin Masterson/Flickr)

Part of the Athens Lunatic Asylum turned into the Kennedy Art Museum at Ohio University (photograph by Angela/Flickr)

MARLBORO PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
Marlboro Township, New Jersey

Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital's cemetery (photograph by Jackie/Flickr)

The Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey started demolition last year, but out on a gravel road nearby are the leaning graves of its former patients. The institution opened in 1931 on 468 acres, and shuttered in 1998 after controversies over patient treatment which included some fatal food poisoning in the 1970s. In the cemetery, the patients are buried sequentially, with the oldest markers in stone, and the last in metal that is now rusting. 

Inside Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital before its demolition (photograph by kathryn/Flickr)

LETCHWORTH VILLAGE
Rockland County, New York

Letchworth Village Cemetery (photograph by George F/Flickr)

A memorial at the cemetery of the abandoned Letchworth Village in Rockland County, New York, reads: "Those Who Shall Not Be Forgotten." T-shaped markers made of now-rusting metal are each embossed with a number, which according to Abandoned NYC, wasn't just an act of simplicity or bureaucracy, but a way of hiding names due to family shame. Letchworth Village opened in 1911 as a residential facility for the disabled, both mentally and physically, but closed in 1996 after years of reported abuse and a lack of funding. 

Letchworth Village Cemetery (photograph by TheTurducken/Flickr)

Letchworth Village in 2011 (photograph by Doug Kerr/Flickr)

Letchworth Village Cemetery grave marker (photograph by TheTurducken/Flickr)

FOREST HAVEN
Laurel, Maryland

Forest Haven cemetery memorial (photograph by Jack Says Relax/Flickr)

Before it shut down in 1991, the serenely-named Forest Haven had become synonymous with patient mistreatment and overcrowding. The Maryland institution opened in 1925 idealistically enough, adopting the work and community ethos of many of these asylums, but over the years never embraced new approaches to mental health treatment. Now abandoned, its 200 acre site includes the remains of a cemetery with an unclear number of dead, the graves of which have reportedly been repeatedly exposed due to erosion. One large granite marker dedicated by the families, friends, and staff of Forest Haven includes the names of as many who are known at rest beneath the shallow ground.

Abandoned Forest Haven (photograph by Forsaken Fotos/Flickr)

Abandoned Forest Haven (photograph by Forsaken Fotos/Flickr)

Greek Fire in action; its secret is now lost (via Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid)

There’s long been a fascination with secret knowledge, passed down in the shadows of the world. Tales of hidden societies, obscure movements, and cabals behind closed doors have grown taller and taller in the telling. The past has often been conscripted wholesale by the conspiracy theorists — until even poor Pythagoras has been held up by some as "the first Grand Master of the Illuminati." Most "secret knowledge" is, of course, drivel. But some isn’t.

Contemporary society assumes most knowledge is open, almost nothing is more than an internet search away (stories of nuclear blueprints and state secrets circulating for all to see hardly dampens that idea). But, throughout history, openness has very much been the exception rather than the rule. The secret of "Greek fire" was kept for centuries by the Byzantine Empire. This fearsome concoction burned without stop — even when atop water. It swept with devastating effect through the Arab fleets which threatened Constantinople. Its formula has been lost — and is still the subject of speculation.

Some secrets have been kept more closely still. And sometimes, the keeper of these secrets took that knowledge to the grave. But first — as anyone who has read H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allen Poe, or a Gothic novel of any description could tell you — when you go searching for hidden knowledge, be careful what you seek to recover. 

But some hoards still resist discovery — and they are the ones which teeter between fact and fiction. In 1820, fabulous treasures were being gathered at the docks in Lima, Peru: hundreds of solid gold statues and candlesticks, a thousand diamonds, two hundred chests brimming with jewels — the fruits of centuries of Spanish colonialism. Lima was no longer secure, and Captain William Thompson was entrusted by the Spanish Viceroy with bringing the treasure away to safety in Mexico.

Once out of sight of land, Thompson killed the Viceroy’s men, and took the treasure for himself.

The Cocos Islands, possibly the site of pirate treasure (photograph by Shannon Rankin, NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service, Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC))

It’s said that Thompson buried the treasure in the Cocos Islands. He and his crew were captured, and all but Thompson and his first mate were hanged for piracy. He promised to lead the Spanish back to their treasure, but having brought them to the Cocos Islands, he slipped away and disappeared. Nothing was heard of him, or the treasure, again. It has been sought ever since — by everyone from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Errol Flynn — with no success.

Few stories about treasure can, of course, can be trusted. Certainly, in South Africa, should someone sidle up to you, and promise to tell you how to find the lost treasure of the Boers, you are without doubt being conned. Some enterprising grifters have, in recent years, made a fortune from greedy tourists, hot for the lost gold of Boer president Paul Kruger who died in 1904. Ingots of gold and silver, and coins by the thousand, lie buried somewhere in the Transvaal, but the spot itself was known only to Kruger and a few associates; no map has ever marked the spot.

More elusive still than lost treasure is lost knowledge. For several hundred years, from around 1200 BC, the art of writing was lost in ancient Greece. When it returned to the Greek world, it would be in an entirely different script — and the old Linear B script would remain unknown and undeciphered until the end of the 19th century. Understanding is far more fragile than it might seem; it can be lost more easily than it can be gained. Waves of destruction swept across the ancient world time and again, taking much of its knowledge with them. Artifacts which survived, when discovered, can seem bizarrely anachronistic — centuries ahead of their time. Most famous is the so-called Antikythera Mechanism: dating from the second century BC, it has been seen as the world’s first computer. Its intricate dials, cogs, and gears could predict the positions of the stars and the sun, often with startling accuracy.

Antikythera Mechanism at the National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Greece (photograph by Tilemahos Efthimiadis/Flickr)

Reconstruction of the front of the Antikythera Mechanism (photograph by Giovanni Dall'Orto/Wikimedia)

Perhaps the most famous piece of lost knowledge, however, dates from much later: Fermat’s Last Theorem. The French mathematician Pierre de Fermat annotated his copy of the ancient Greek Arithmetica with a simple, cryptic statement: he had a proof for one certain theorem, which was "too large to fit in the margin." Exactly what his proof was, he never said. But ever since his death, scholars have attempted to reconstruct it. Twice in the 19th century, the French Academy of Sciences offered a substantial prize to anyone able to prove the theorem. A German tycoon offered an even larger prize in the early 20th century (he received thousands of "proofs," not one of which was correct). More recently, scholars began to think that Fermat must have been mistaken: he thought he had a proof, but in fact he didn’t.

In 1996, however, after a decade of work, the British mathematician Andrew Wiles published what has been recognized as, at last, a definitive proof. Fermat’s own reasoning may have been lost, but his theorem stands.

Mathematicians pursuing Fermat had, at least, the luxury of choosing their route: multiple lines of attack, and methods for attempting to prove his theorem, existed. But some secrets are more challenging. Lost machines, lost structures, and lost materials often have only one correct blueprint, one way to crack the code. When, for instance, a previously unknown researcher showcased his seemingly-indestructible "Starlite" material in 1990, scientists were first skeptical, then intrigued, but never managed to persuade him to part with his secret. Attempts to reconstruct "Starlite" have failed.

Houdini's scrapbook (via Boston Public Library)

Some of the most famous lost devices belong to history's most elusive figures. Ever since he astonished the world, Harry Houdini’s tricks and contraptions have been the subject of speculation. Houdini was, in fact, known for revealing the tricks of magic, but only those tricks which his rivals relied on, or had stolen from him. His own greatest tricks, he kept close. How did he escape from locked safes and bolted prison cells? How did he survive under water for impossibly long periods of time? As the New York Times put it:

In his special field of entertainment he stood alone. With a few minor exceptions, he invented all his tricks and illusions, and in certain instances only his four intimate helpers knew the solution. In one or two very important cases Houdini, himself, alone knew the whole secret.

Rumours circulated that he was literally buried with his greatest secrets, following his death on Halloween, leading to ghoulish fascination (and one attempted grave-robbery) around his final resting-place.

Lost knowledge can be a spur to investigation, rather than a hindrance; a cause of hope and excitement, rather than despair. The past rarely comes back to us intact. But whether it is the blueprints of Houdni or the poetry of Sappho, the stories we cannot complete are often the ones we most want to tell — and to make our own.

Houdini's grave in Queens, New York (photograph by Allison Meier/Atlas Obscura)

In 2011, when Google Earth hit the scene, armchair explorers began discovering all kinds of strange stuff scattered across the globe. Seen from space the planet could be very weird indeed. One category that has launched a thousand conspiracy theories are the enormous patterns, pictures, and measuring tools carved or painted directly onto the landscape. Many of these are enclosed within military compounds or are far out in inhospitable terrain, lending them an even greater air of mystery. 

A few years ago Gizmodo ran a slightly feverish roundup of user-submitted photos of large patterns and structures in Chinese deserts: an 18-mile-long grid, a bright blue decoy airport, a 1:20 scale model of border terrain, a massive series of squiggles that had a clearly discernible pattern. 

Satellite calibration targets in the Gobi Desert (Google Maps image via the Blaze)

Many guesses were presented as to what these were for — including that they were a QR code to be read by aliens — but according to a researcher at the Mars Space Flight Facility (which operates space cameras for NASA), this one, at least, is merely a satellite calibration target. These were created to give aircraft-mounted cameras something on which to focus their lenses, allowing them to test their resolution and ability to take clear pictures at high speeds. The resulting properly calibrated satellites could then go on to do the work for which they were meant: spying. 

Not that China was alone in that pursuit. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States' Corona Satellite System included 144 satellites, many of which were used to track weapons development and nuclear threats from other countries, primarily China and Russia. Due to the technology of the time, these satellites required a system of fixed points to focus their lenses on, so a series of huge concrete targets were poured throughout the Arizona desert by the US Army Map Service, which leased the land ostensibly for office space. 

Corona Satellite Calibration Targets, Casa Grande, Arizona (image via Google Maps)

There are many other kinds of calibration targets,  some acting like a giant eye chart for airplanes and other spacecraft. This type has tri-bar markings in decreasing sizes; the smallest one that the satellite can focus on indicates the greatest distance it can go and still take discernible pictures. These too are scattered throughout the United States, with the highest concentration at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California, and many more on airport runways and in deserts from Florida to Arizona. 

Tri-bar satellite calibration targets in Fort Huachuca, Arizona (image via ilikethisart.net)

Of course, satellites by now have plenty of uses other than covert operations. Environmental scientists rely on them for many things, such as measuring the changing level of the ice shelf in polar regions. In order to be able to determine the change, satellite-based altimeters need a stable reference point that hasn't risen or fallen since the last time the satellite looked at it. Such as, for example, the Salar de Uyuni.

Salar de Uyuni (image via Alfredobi / Wikimedia)

Once part of a giant prehistoric lake, the massive salt field — nearly 4,000 square miles, about the size of New Jersey — is the one of the world's flattest places. In 2002 the entire expanse was mapped with both fixed and kinematic GPS, yielding a topographical precision accurate to 2.2 centimeters which is a perfect reference point for satellite calibration. 

Similar to the Bolivian salar, the Railroad Valley in Nevada is "flat, bright, spatially uniform, and spectrally stable over time," and it has also proven to be an excellent reference calibration site for satellites and other "large footprint sensors." It was used to calibrate ground temperature measurements in 2000, to measure solar radiation in 2004, and to measure Japan's greenhouse gas emissions in 2009.

Railroad Valley, Nevada (image via J Brew / Flickr)

The majority of the decades-old calibration targets are now technologically obsolete, and many have been destroyed. Those that remain have become relics and curiosities, conspiracy-theory fodder and the stuff of legends. Some do receive the respect they deserve, though; one of the oldest, which was built in the 1930s for use by airplane pilots long before satellites existed, is the compass rose painted onto the enormous Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base in California. 

World's Largest Compass Rose (image via NASA / Wikimedia)

It's the largest compass rose in the world, boasting a diameter of more than 4,000 feet, and is accurately inclined toward magnetic north. To honor the fact that when it was made, it was at the very cutting edge of aerospace and aviation technology, the rose was designated a National Historical Landmark in 1985. 

Bones in preparation (courtesy Skulls Unlimited)

Have you seen the ghost of Tom?
Long white bones with the skin all gone.
Po-oo-or Old Tom!
Wouldn't it be chilly with no skin on?

This well-known childhood rhyme proposes a pretty thoughtful question that has to be answered with an affirmative: Yeah, it would be pretty chilly with your bony skeleton all exposed and no skin on. 

At the Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma City, bones, skeletons, and skulls are the main attraction. Complete skeletons of every variety, from deer to dog, hawk to human, are on display. In fact, it's known as “America’s only skeleton museum.” In of itself, this collection is surely unique. But that isn’t their only claim to fame, or even the most impressive attribute of the museum or the retail portion of the facility, which is called Skulls Unlimited, the “world’s leading supplier of osteological specimens."

The reason I entered their rather non-descript building was to discover how they created a skeleton, or more accurately, the tedious, smelly, and strangely hypnotic process of stripping the skin away (and muscles, tendons, fat, and anything else that can be considered flesh) in order to get their “long white bones.”

courtesy Skulls Unlimited

Jay Villermarette began collecting skulls at the age of seven. The cranial portions of cats, dogs, cows, and deer were the first to join his collection. The skulls didn’t necessarily represent anything particularly morbid to Jay, but rather it gave him a chance to learn about the differences and similarities of all types of animals, including humans.

Many of the bone samples he collected from his backyard and beyond still had scraps of flesh clinging to it. He tried burning, boiling, and even using lye to get rid of the meat, with no method working particularly well. Then, Jay realized nature had it right all along. When animals die in the wild, the decomposition process includes insects enjoying a delicious meal. The hungriest, most effective, and efficient of these insects is the dermestid beetle, or as it is more commonly known, the skin beetle.

Dermestid beetles in action (courtesy Skulls Unlimited)

The dermestid beetle is indigenous to North America and commonly found under a rotting corpse, snacking away. Now, Jay had discovered not only the most efficient way of cleaning his skulls, but the most cost-effective.

Cleanings bones with beetles (photograph by Matt Blitz)

In 1986, in his early twenties and during a time of unemployment, Jay decided to turn his passion into a business — Skulls Unlimited International Inc. He collected, prepared, and cleaned skeletons not only for his own research purposes, but for institutions, museums, and fellow collectors around the world. 

Twenty-eight years later, Jay’s company is unlike any other, using hungry beetles to process samples. Skulls Unlimited now employes 23 fellow skeleton enthusiasts, along with Jay’s wife (who is the co-owner) and his four children, three sons and one daughter. Their clients include leading schools of osteology, independent researchers, and the Smithsonian. They have prepared and processed skeletons from practically every animal on Earth (yes, including humans), save for a panda, due to the restriction that when a panda dies, it must immediately get sent back to China.

courtesy Skulls Unlimited

I had the honor of a special “behind-the-scenes” tour of Skulls Unlimited by Josh Villemarette to see the stripping away of skin from full-fleshed animal to skeleton. It begins with some basic slicing and dicing, the technicians cutting the chunks of flesh off so the beetles can eat quicker.

Then, the bones go into the beetle tank. For, say, a dog skull, it can take less than 24 hours for the beetles to do their job. Sometimes, it can take longer. As Jay said to me as I was exploring, “If you had steak everyday, there would be some days where you were tired of steak. The beetles sometimes need to take a break.”

Bones & beetles (photograph by Matt Blitz)

I was allowed to enter the beetle room with one warning from Josh, “It will smell in there. Since it is a Monday, it won’t be as bad as other days, but it will smell. In fact, be prepared, your clothes will smell the rest of the day as well.” He was right. It smelled. With thousands of bugs chomping at decomposing flesh, I guess it is only fair to have a rather poignant stench. As for my clothes, they did reek the rest of the day like, well, death. That night, I threw my second favorite pair of jeans out.

After their time with the beetles, the bones are dipped in a vat of liquid — the ingredients being a “trade secret.” Then, with a tad bit of scrubbing, the skulls are ready to go — either shipped out across the world or sold in their museum retail shop.

Bird skeletons (photograph by Matt Blitz)

Before I left, I made sure to purchase a muskrat skull for my friend and fellow Obscura Society field agent Erin Johnson (she’s really into bones and all things taxidermy). As for my souvenir, I did not throw out the purple polo shirt I wore that day. It still smells like the rotting flesh peeled off from those long, white bones. 

Articulating a skeleton (courtesy Skulls Unlimited)

Snake skeleton (courtesy Skulls Unlimited)

Behind-the-scenes at Skulls Unlimited (photograph by Matt Blitz)

Killer Whale in the Museum of Osteology (courtesy Skulls Unlimited)

courtesy Skulls Unlimited

Museum of Osteology & Skulls Unlimited (photograph by Matt Blitz)

In terms of abandonment, ghost towns get all the love — there are a spooky 160 of them on Atlas Obscura as of this writing. These gaping remains of human activity departed are both unnerving and often beautiful, but what about ghost islands? Around the world whole island communities have been evacuated and deserted, leaving the landmasses to nature and the atrophy of time. Here are eight of these ominous places on the water, and the details on why people left, and if you can visit the isolated ruins. 

HASHIMA ISLAND
Japan

Hashima Island (photograph by kntrty/Wikimedia)

Abandoned: 1974

Eerie Elements: Derelict, fortress-like compounds on Hashima Island once housed workers for a coal mining facility. The island was nicknamed "battleship" ("gunkanjima") for its typhoon-resilient architecture that's now crumbling like a dystopic wasteland. 

Can You Go? Yes, tours have been operating since 2009. You can also explore it digitally through the ominous Hashima Island: A Forgotten World interactive project.

Exploring Hashima Island in 2012 (photograph by Jordy Meow/Wikimedia)

Hashima Island in 2010 (photograph by Jordy Meow/Wikimedia)

Hashima Island in 2014 (photograph by Jordy Meow/Wikimedia)

Hashima Island in 2010 (photograph by Jordy Meow/Wikimedia)

POVEGLIA PLAGUE ISLAND
Italy

Poveglia Island (photograph by Angelo Meneghini/panoramio.com)

Abandoned: 1968

Eerie Elements: Poveglia served as a plague quarantine station for Venice from 1793 to 1814, and some rumors state that 50% of the soil is composed of the remains of the dead. A mental hospital was later opened, and remains in ruins in the overgrowth of ivy. It's also not the only ghost island in the Venice area, which is spotted with these abandoned relics of eras gone by. 

Can You Go? While technically off-limits, boats do offer visits circling the island, and hire the right one and maybe you can step on the unsettling shores. 

Poveglia Island in 2010 (photograph by ntenny/Flickr)

Poveglia Island in 2010 (photograph by ntenny/Flickr)

HOLLAND ISLAND
Chesapeake Bay, Maryland

Holland Island in 2010 (photograph by baldeaglebluff/Flickr)

Abandoned: 1918

Eerie Elements: People lived on Holland Island from the 17th century until the 20th, but the land just keeps eroding and at high tide the island is barely visible. One creaking house from the 19th century long remained, swarmed with pelicans, but it collapsed into the water and was burned in 2010. 

Can You Go? Watch your tide tables closely, but try soon before the island disappears. 

Collapse of the house in 2010 (photograph by baldeaglebluff/Flickr)

HERSCHEL ISLAND
Yukon Territory, Canada

Herschel Island (photograph by Maedward/Wikimedia)

Abandoned: 1960s

Eerie Elements: Herschel Island served for decades as a 19th-century whaling station after being spotted and named by the ill-fated John Franklin in 1826. The haven for ships trapped in the ice is now totally abandoned, including its four graveyards.

Can You Go? Sure, get a sturdy kayak, and watch for ghost harpoons. 

Herschel Island in 2010 (photograph by Ansgar Walk/Wikimedia)

Herschel Island in 2010 (photograph by Ansgar Walk/Wikimedia)

ROSS ISLAND
South Andaman, India

Ross Island (photograph by Biswarup Ganguly/Wikimedia)

Abandoned: 1940s (mostly)

Eerie Elements: While there is some settlement now and a museum, most of the structures of Ross Island, once a British administrative center for the Indian Penal Settlement, are abandoned and covered with wild Ficus. A high mortality rate encouraged one of its first abandonments, before use in Word War II. 

Can You Go? Yes, its creepy ruins burdened with branches are a tourist destination. 

Ross Island in 2009 (photograph by Biswarup Ganguly/Wikimedia)

Ross Island in 2000 (photograph by IomaDI/Flickr)

HIRTA
Scotland

Hirta Island (photograph by Otter/Wikimedia)

Abandoned: 1930

Eerie Elements: Despite humans living on Hirta Island in the St. Kilda archipelago of Scotland since prehistoric times, every human was evacuated in the 1930s due to the threat of starvation and ongoing harsh weather. Now the lines of stone structures have been left to crumble. 

Can You Go? Yes, but watch out for the feral Soay sheep, an ancient, agile breed that calls the island home. 

Sheep at Hirta (photograph by Irenicrhonda/Flickr)

A Soay lamb on Hirta (via PLoS Biology)

Hirta Island in 2010 (photograph by Irenicrhonda/Flickr)

SPINALONGA
Gulf of Elounda, Crete

Spinalonga (photograph by Ggia/Wikimedia)

Abandoned: Mid-20th Century

Eerie Elements: After being carved off Crete to be a fortress, Spinalonga — sometimes called the Island of Tears — last served as a leper colony in the 20th century. 

Can You Go? While once lepers shuddered to enter the island's isolation through "Dante's Gate," now tourists are welcomed for visits with open arms, as long as they leave before the day is out. 

Spinalonga in 2011 (photograph by Deror_avi/Wikimedia)

Spinalonga in 2009 (photograph by Guérin Nicolas/Wikimedia)

NORTH BROTHER ISLAND
New York, New York

North Brother Island (photograph by reivax/Wikimedia)

Abandoned: 1960s

Eerie Elements: Mostly forgotten out in the East River in close proximity to the Bronx, North Brother Island served most infamously as a quarantine hospital, whose patients included the notorious Typhoid Mary. And what is more unnerving than hospital ruins on an island directly visible from one of the most populous cities in the world?

Can You Go? Despite some parks committee chair ideas of making North Brother Island public, it's now a bird sanctuary, although some explorers still slip into the abandoned home of the avians by boat. 

North Brother Island in 2013 (photograph by Jonathan Haeber/Flickr)

North Brother Island in 2014 (photograph by Jessica Sheridan)

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.

Gargoyle under Budapest (via Labirintus)

Carrying only a gas lamp, at the heart of the Buda Castle Labyrinth there is nothing except for slimy damp walls, darkness, and things that go bump in the night. After 6 pm it’s lights out in Labirintus, and each group gets a single lantern to navigate around the network of natural tunnels found in the underbelly of Budapest's Castle Hill.

I hear a sequence of squishes as my feet leave an impression in the muddy path, and I can smell smoke. I’m a good few metres underground, there shouldn’t be any smoke here, except for the flame leaping up inside the metal canister hanging off my wrist, but the smell is different. I can hear an echo of voices behind bounding off the stone walls carrying up from different tunnels.

I hold the lamp up, the warm red flame licks the walls and I hear an uncomfortable hum in the background. Some sinister music plays quietly, but becomes louder with each step. The air feels heavier, and there is a haze of smoke lingering. I hear screams in the distance, either from others in the tunnel or as part of the eerie soundtrack being pumped in. The light illuminates fragments, bits of rubble with an Ottoman slant to them, a stone turban perhaps from a disembodied statue, and a placard on the wall with a picture of the infamous Vlad Dracul.

Above the portrait, words inscribed in gothic script say “Dracula’s Chamber” in both Hungarian and English. I know nothing is going to jump out at me, but I still hesitate to venture further into the dark, smoke clad chambers alone, and decide to wait for a few Australian tourists I left behind a few rooms back.

Inside the labyrinth (photograph by Jerzy Kociatkiewicz/Flickr)

The labyrinthine network of tunnels under Buda Castle arose from the hot thermal waters coursing through the subterranean underbelly of today’s Budapest. Archaeological evidence points to inhabitants living down the caves from pre-history right up to the Middle Ages, but apart from offering shelter, these caves hold a darker history in the years that followed.

A Turkish Harem once existed near the entrance to the labyrinth, and several female skeletons were found in the caves dating back to the era of the Ottoman occupation. Some believe that the women were thrown into wells when the Turks were forced out of the castle, but there is a more sinister legend behind the bones. One gruesome version of the tale is that the Pasha of Buda bricked up these women from his harem once he got bored of them.

The labyrinth also functioned as both a prison and as a torture chamber. In the 15th century, its darkest, dankest chambers held its most infamous resident — Vlad Tepes, better known to you and me as “Dracula.”

Dracula gargoyle in the labyrinth (photograph by Thomas Timlen/Flickr)

Vlad Tepes’s role as the Voivod of Havasalföld was to protect Christian Europe from the Ottoman invasion. However, conspiring to make deals with the Turks, the Hungarian King Matthias, his former ally, abducted and imprisoned Dracula in the bowels of the Castle Hill. The duration of Dracula’s stay in the subterranean chamber is uncertain. Some believe he was there over 10 years, others say it was for a shorter time, and whether or not he was tortured is a secret kept within the walls. However, after Dracula’s release, he became infamous for his impaling and torturous acts, clearly impacted by his time in prison.

On a placard down in the Labyrinth, one legend has it that Dracula died here and his body was buried in the Buda Labyrinth, his head elsewhere. It’s very likely just a spooky tale put in place to give tourists goosebumps. There are five legends about Vlad the Impaler’s death, and the exact date has never been pinpointed. One story says he was killed when he had sex with a Turk amidst the bodies of his loyal bodyguards. The true location of his burial is also a grey area, since the site said to be his resting place at Snagov, an island monastery just outside Bucharest with an “unmarked tombstone” attributed to Vlad Tepes, houses no human body — only bones and jaws belonging to horses.

However, in the 19th century, a ghost known as the “Black Count” terrorized the labyrinth, so could there be a connection? Or was he simply a man in a black cape having illicit liaisons down in the tunnels?

The figure of the Black Count has a root in history though, since there was once an impoverished count in the 1800s who allied himself with bandits, allowing them to hide out in the labyrinth in exchange for spoils. The story behind his life and death is unclear, but the stories of the mysterious black figure haunting the labyrinth still linger. 

Illumination in the labyrinth (via Labirintus)

Finally mustering the courage to plough further into the labyrinth, the music deafened me, shaking the walls around the tunnel. The smoke cleared slightly as the shadow of a cross lingered under my lamp and I could make out a grave made out of plaster; behind a set of bars in the corner I caught sight of another chamber housing a coffin. I almost expected a bat to fly out and hit my head, but the spooky music just began again on a loop.

Even though the bowels of Buda Labyrinth has been turned into a hammy tourist attraction, these slimy, cold walls have certainly seen some horrors in their time. If ghosts existed they most certainly would roam down here.

via Labirintus

via Labirintus

via Labirintus

photograph by the author

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.