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Why Do People Paint Skeletons on Live Horses?

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Understanding how the bodies of horses work—muscles, bones, and all—is a key part of any true equestrian’s training. And while many study diagrams, dissections, and preserved parts, some trainers swear by painting their anatomy lessons on living horses, which not only provides a terrific look at how a horse’s insides work, but also creates a pretty spooky bit of decoration.

With each joint and muscle a potential problem spot in a horse’s body, being able to visualize how its inner workings are actually functioning can be an important tool in understanding an animal, as well as providing it the proper care. “The majority of people have no idea of where the bones are within the horse,” says Dr. Christin Finn of Kingston, Washington’s Equisport Medicine.

Finn has been using painted animals as training tools for a number years, even practicing the technique on dogs. “When they are interacting, or riding a horse, they’re having an impact on that structure without having an understanding of where those parts are, let alone how they work.” A number of trainers and vets use painted horses as training tools, providing demonstrations, classes, and seminars with their painted beasts.

In a 2012 article on CNN about painting horses, the U.K. equine massage therapist Gillian Higgins, who runs a business, Horses Inside Out, strictly devoted to painting horses, describes the benefits of painted horse training, saying, “if you see a horse moving and jumping around with a skeleton painted on the side, it really brings it to life.” In her career painting horses, she has illustrated just about every part of the equine interior, from the skeleton to the digestive system to the reproductive system. She noted that many people who have attended her seminars described the experience as putting together puzzle pieces.

How do the horses feel about being painted? The paint itself poses no danger to the animals, and is typically hypoallergenic. But Finn notes that the act of applying paint with brushes can be so relaxing for a horse that it can make the painting process more difficult. Describing one horse she painted, Finn says, "That stroking with the brush caused deep relaxation with the animal, and their neck actually relaxed, and the space between the vertebrae increased."

The process is now so widespread that even Queen Elizabeth, a noted equestrian who has reportedly made over $8 million on her own race horses, recently got to meet a training horse that Horses Inside Out had painted a skeleton onto. Her response? “Good gracious.”

Of course to the uninitiated observer, painted anatomy horses look like they are dressed up for Halloween. However in reality they aren’t trying to be spooky, just scary educational.


How an Indigenous Clan Honored Its History on Alaska Day 2017

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On October 18, 2017, the Kiks.ádi clan of the Tlingit tribe in Sitka, Alaska, had a decision to make: whether to show up for the 150th anniversary of Alaska's transfer to the United States.

“I can see why those who received this vast land would want to celebrate it,” Dionne Brady-Howard, a member of the Kiks.ádi clan and a Tlingit leader, told local press in a ceremony on October 15. “But for us, it marks the loss and selling of our land.”

More than 10,000 years ago, the Tlingit tribe settled on this island, a land mass nearly the size of Delaware, veined with salmon rivers and snow-capped ridges. On a hill at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, the Kiks.ádi clan built four houses. They called the hill Noow Tlein, the “big fort.”

In 1804, a Russian army razed Noow Tlein and built a fort that became the epicenter of its Alaskan fur-trading empire. On October 18, 1867, Russia transferred Alaska to the United States at Noow Tlein, which Americans renamed Castle Hill. The price for Alaska, stretching across tribal settlements from the Bering Sea to the Arctic and down to Sitka, was $7.2 million, or roughly two cents per acre.

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From all accounts, the ceremony 150 years ago was awkward. None of the soldiers could wrest the Russian flag from the pole. It eventually escaped and billowed into the soldier’s bayonets. The Russian Princess Maksoutoff wept. Soldiers hurriedly hoisted the American flag and said a few words. No Tlingit representatives were invited to the ceremony, but they paddled to the base of Noow Tlein for a view.

“I heard stories from elders that we were in canoes at the bottom, watching the Russian and American flags go up and down, wondering what was going on,” Louise Brady, Dionne’s mother says.

Now, every year on Alaska Day, October 18, Alaskans in Russian bonnets, hoop skirts, and 19th-century military garb re-enact the transfer ceremony on Noow Tlein. In a town where a quarter of the population is Alaska Native, Brady says no one from the local Tlingit tribe had ever been officially invited to the ceremony until this year.

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Elaine Strelow, who has volunteered on the Alaska Day Festival committee since 1966, says that beyond organizing participants of the reenactment, the committee rarely offers specific invitations.

“We announce it’s going to happen and everyone is welcome,” she says, noting that October 18 is a celebration more of Sitka than of the transfer. "It’s a recognition of the significance of this place—not just the ceremony but the centuries before that. It’s a time to celebrate who we are here: a diverse bunch of people of various cultures.”

But “celebrating diversity” is open to interpretation.

In 2016, one Tlingit woman showed up in traditional regalia, a full-length felt button robe, decorated with her clan emblem on the back. People might have ignored her, had it not been for a cardboard sign she brought thanking her ancestors in Tlingit and English: “Gunalchéesh Sheet’ka Kwaan for your care of Tlingit Aani for time immemorial.”

Another ceremony organizer asked her to leave.

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This year the Bradys, prominent members of the Kiks.ádi clan, got a few invites from ceremony participants to attend the events on top of the hill, in what some townspeople saw as an effort to include Tlingit perspective, albeit 150 years late.

But the clan felt uncertain. On the morning of October 18, members were still debating whether to attend the ceremony, or to hold a separate one.

“It was a nice invitation,” Louise Brady said. “But if we go are we being complicit? Are we saying that we're now okay with the transfer?”

Some of the clan wanted to show up on their own terms, wearing black armbands and singing mourning songs. Others worried that such an approach would be considered too radical. Protests in the lower 48 over symbols of white supremacy may have bolstered similar conversations on the Final Frontier, but the accompanying violence has also had a chilling effect.

“It is a really delicate situation, especially given the current climate of racism in this country,” Brady says. “I mean in my mind, I’m going, ‘Is it going to be safe?’”

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Brady isn’t sure what convinced the clan to go. But at around 1:30 p.m., members drove to the base of the hill, brought out their elaborately painted hand drums, and pulled on ceremonial button robes.

“The robes represent our ancestors,” Brady says. “Women fought right alongside the men in the 1804 battle. And so our grandmothers and our great-great-great grandmothers were invited to come and join us. That’s the at.óowu—sacred object—and that’s the robes, a representation of who were we are, throughout the generations, including the children yet to come.”

A group of about 60 supporters joined Tlingit leaders at the ceremony. Some held signs with the same phrase that appeared on the cardboard sign in 2016.

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As the Russian flag inched down the pole in the re-enactment ceremony at the hill’s summit, singers launched into a Tlingit mourning song below.

Some of the re-enactors above faltered for a moment and peered down to find the source of the dirge, but the ceremony continued.

The American flag went up, and soldiers started firing westward towards the Pacific.

Brady said the gunfire shook her to the core.

“All of a sudden we hear the guns and the cannons going off and it was like, so this is what our ancestors must have felt like.”

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Members of the tribe said these songs were the first time that Tlingit voices were heard on October 18, in the original transfer or celebrations since.

“It’s as though they are saying in this song to the Noow Tlein: we are still here,” Gerry Hope, a Tlingit leader from another clan, said in the silence after the music ended. “We are still here. We are still here. We are still here.”

Strelow, the Alaska Day organizer, said the clan was entitled to its own concurrent ceremony. “I recognize there are people who have other feelings that I have not heard as fully as I could have.”

When I asked her if the transfer ceremony would ever officially incorporate Tlingit leaders, she said probably, one day. But it would be an incremental step to shift a process that began with the razing of Noow Tlein more than 200 years ago.

Louise Brady says the Kiks.ádi ceremonies at the base of Noow Tlein marked a shift that "felt incredibly healing." When I asked her what she hoped for next, she laughed and closed her eyes for a few seconds: “It’d be nice to have the clan houses up there again.”

The Charm of New York's First Newspaper for Single People

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The year was 1975, and a 31-year-old Marilyn J. Appleberg had been headhunted from a job in publishing to become the editor of a publication that would soon be known as Singles News. It was her first day, and she wore suede pants and a ribbed turtleneck. She walked in and was introduced to the owners of the small press that put out the paper, all men. One of them walked up to her, she recalls, put out his hand, and said, “Per-‘suede’ me.” Now nearly 74 and still quite glamorous, Appleberg says, “I was extremely … curvaceous, so there were assumptions made. And then I turned out to be a romantic.”

For the next three years, Appleberg edited the paper alone, under the intentionally gender-ambiguous moniker “MJ Appleberg.” Her résumé from the period, kept in a locker in the East Village co-op she has lived in since 1969, describes her as “responsible for editorial concept of pioneer monthly Singles News, geared to the interests of unmarried New Yorkers.” Appleberg found contributors, wrote much of the content herself, supervised the graphic design, oversaw sales, distribution, typesetting, photo sources, printers, and more. Thinking back on it today, she laughs, “I wonder how much they were paying me for that.” All this she did alone in an office building on 3rd Avenue and East 55th Street. The masthead on old copies lists just a P.O. Box, “in case someone wanted to sue.”

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In the first half of the 20th century, you might marry your childhood sweetheart, the child of your father’s business partner, or a nice boy or girl you met at church or synagogue. Now, more than a fifth of couples meets online. In the meantime, after the pill “liberated” women in 1960, dating had evolved. By the 1970s, couples were meeting at singles bars or discos—or by putting personal ads in physical, printed papers. (That spirit of optimism and belief in serendipity similarly suffuses online dating. At least at first.)

But before Singles News launched in New York, the options for romantic personal ads in the city were limited, Appleberg says. “The VillageVoice had kind of a kinky and or bohemian feeling, the New York Review of Books was more intellectual, bookish, so I think there was this idea, that we would be somewhere in between.” One German-Israeli-American “executive” in his early 50s sought a woman who was “lively, buxom, flexible, non-intellectual.” That was their target audience.

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Singles News was the first, and largest, “singles newspaper” in the city, and promised “real ads... real people... real responses...” from “100's of eligible singles.” A fresh romantic life could be yours for just 75 cents a copy. Across the country, comparable publications sprung up like mushrooms, eager to capitalize on a wave of singles and divorcees looking for love in a time of increased sexual openness. One such of these copycats on the West Coast, the Singles News Register, was the subject of a 1977 psychology journal article, “Courtship American Style: Newspaper Ads,” which attempted a deep dive on what it called “a fascinating new development in the field of courtship and marriage.” Coastal differences and similar names aside, the two papers were remarkably alike, and provide a revealing window into heterosexual dating at the time.

Shortly before the release of the first issue, Appleberg placed two “dummy ads” in the Village Voice to get a sense of who her customers were likely to be. The text of each was similar, though one claimed to be from a woman in her 20s, the other in her 40s. “There were about 25 or 30 responses to the 40s ad,” she says, “but there were over 200 to the 20s one, including doctors, lawyers, and several from prison.” In her paper, men’s ads skewed a little older, women’s slightly younger. Many of the seekers were divorced, and looking for an alternative to the carousel of what the authors of “Courtship American Style” call “the tedious and meaningless … round of bars and singles’ clubs.” One ad says the writer is looking for “a little fun and excitement and a lot of deep down feeling but not wedding bliss (I’ve gone that route).”

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“The ads in this paper read a little like the ask-bid columns of the New York Stock Exchange,” wrote those authors, Catherine Cameron, Stuart Oskamp, and William Sparks. “Potential partners seek to strike bargains which maximize their rewards in the exchange of assets.” Positive descriptors about appearance abound. Men are good-looking, handsome, and sophisticated. Women are attractive, very attractive, or extremely attractive. Women stress those physical attributes, while men speak of status, occupation, or financial security. Cameron, Oskamp, and Sparks remark, drily, “The overwhelmingly positive content of the ads is especially clear if one considers the likely nature of information which was not presented.”

Well, hope springs eternal. One man searched for a “mature Twiggy-type woman who is also unpretentious,” while another wanted an “Angie Dickinson type.” Women were usually less specific: someone “warm, self-confident, with it,” though taller men were preferred. (Correspondingly, the men seem to have fudged a little—many listed their height as at least one inch above the average.).

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The paper, Appleberg says, was fashioned after an English singles magazine. Her bosses “didn’t care anything about editorial content, it was all about the ads and the money they were going to make from them.” Indeed, if they’d been able to run the paper without any articles at all, she’s certain they would have. Instead, the paper offered dating advice that is a relic of a time before the internet, when people were advised, to maximize the potential for romance on a Staten Island ferry ride, to “Check a daily paper to find out what time the sun will set on the day you want to go—that’s the most exquisite time for boating with a date.” Another article proposes “[getting] yourself a small fondue set, if you don’t already have one,” leaning heavily into the spirit of the decade.

Throughout those years, and for most of her life, Appleberg has been a prolific dater. Though she is agnostic about how she found those dates, she never placed an ad in the paper. “It seems like the dark ages compared to how people meet now,” she says. “Everyone was liberated, but not quite like now. The pill really changed things.”

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At every party, she says, at least one joint was floating around. “You never knew where the drug came from, whose lips were on that before you, you never even thought about that stuff. In a strange way, it was a very innocent decade of time,” she says. “Once you were on birth control, you thought there was nothing to worry about. People having unprotected sex, things that I did when I was in Europe … ”

Her dating life from that period found its way into the paper. A bad boyfriend, who gave her a Dandie Dinmont terrier as a Christmas present, is immortalized in print. “If your lover wants to buy you a pet, opt for a bathrobe instead—it will hardly become a bone of contention if and when your relationship winds down and out.” The man didn’t stick, but the dog, Elizabeth, did. She’s now on Nick, her fourth companion of the breed, who caterwauls with joy as he hears her climbing the stairs. Her enduring love of vintage clothing—a 1950s navy-and-red checked coat, for example—appears in the paper, as well, when she recommends second-hand clothing stores as a dating idea. In each biweekly paper, Appleberg wrote a column called "When was the last time," which asked readers to think back to when they last picked apples, or didn’t wear a watch, or visited a lighthouse.

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The paper never made quite enough money, despite Appleberg’s best efforts. “I was a looker in those days, and sometimes I intentionally used it with newsstand operators,” she says, “to get them to put the paper forward.” In 1977, it folded, and she went to work for Moviegoer, an early movie listings paper owned by the same company.

Appleberg went on to write a series of travel books. Despite proposals from nine separate men, she says, she never married or had children, and has no regrets about a life spent traveling, collecting vintage clothing, and dabbling in real estate. (Though she does regret passing on an additional apartment in her building when it was listed at $125,000—it’s now worth $940,000.) One of her books, Romantic New York, built on her experience at the paper—and in life.

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Although she says she hasn’t had a date in a while, many of her recent beaux have been much younger. "I'm too old for the old guys," she says. She has no intention of slowing down, but she finds the idea of online dating “terrifying” and unromantic. She bemoans that beautiful women now might go unnoticed on the streets of New York, as everyone is nose-deep in an electronic world (though many women in the city probably disagree). So, today, when people ask her whether she would like to meet someone, she knows what she wants. It happened to her in Paris, Venice, and “everywhere I ever went.”

“I want someone to fall in love with me as I’m crossing the street. I’ll do the rest. I’m willing to do all the rest.”

Italian Truffle Prices Mushroom After a Parched October

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Last year, two pounds of Italian white truffles might set you back a little under $3,000. This year, after the driest October in 60 years, the same quantity of the rare, coveted mushroom costs well over $5,000, reports The Telegraph, sending chefs into a panic and leaving Italy's agricultural organizations praying for rain.

The two most superior kind of truffles are the black ones from France, and these white ones, native to the Italian region of Piedmont but eaten with gusto around the world. Their short season runs from just September to December. "The white ones are only available a couple of months of the year," according to food writer Josh Ozersky, "and there are fewer of them, and of lesser quality, every year." Different weather conditions affect this; a dry summer followed by a wet fall seems to be ideal for growing conditions. While things didn't look so bleak in early October, but earlier this week restaurateur Alberto Bellini told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, "Only a miracle can improve things."

As recently as 100 years ago, no one was sure exactly what truffles were—and certainly not how they grew. Ancient scientists theorized that they were a type of root, perhaps cousins to radishes and carrots, or even the product of autumn lightning storms. In truth, their growth does look a little like magic, with a web of near-invisible filaments interlinking with particular tree roots to produce these fungal fruiting bodies, which spring up seemingly from nowhere.

It's consequently near-impossible to farm them, with 200,000 registered hunters and their dogs instead sniffing them out as they grow in the wild. Likely locations, and the truffling rights, are guarded jealously, particularly when prices get so stratospheric. A good truffle dog can cost well over $5,000—comparable to the current price-per-kilo—but this year truffle hunters might have to make do with the companionship they offer.

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The Forgotten Italian Tradition of Building Monumental Food Palaces

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In 1768, Austrian princess Maria Carolina married Ferdinand IV, the king of Naples. To celebrate, they had a magnificent, fake fortress built in front of the Neapolitan royal palace and decorated with delicious food. At a signal from the king, a mob of Neapolitan commoners waded through a moat stocked with live fish, slipped through the mud, and grabbed all the food, to the delight of the noble spectators.

The event was a tradition of Naples and other Italian cities, because nothing caps off a royal wedding or holiday like watching hungry people fight for food. Temporary temples, pyramids, and castles were plastered in roasts, bread, and cheese, which the poor risked their lives to gather.

These Cuccagna festivals represented an earthy paradise where no one went hungry. For centuries, European poets and artists described the magical land of Cockaigne, or Cuccagna, where the lazy were king and food fell from the sky. One 14th-century poem described rivers of milk and honey. Unpleasant reminders of daily life, such as bad weather or fleas, didn’t exist.

Cuccagna festivals brought the dreamworld of Cockaigne to life. But instead of paradise, they were demonstrations of wealth and power that often descended into brutality.

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Creating a real-life Cockaigne meant displaying massive quantities of fruit, cheese, meat, and bread in beautiful configurations, Marcia Reed, the chief curator at the Getty Research Institute, explains. But not all the bounty was dead. Reed, who also curated the GRI’s The Edible Monument: The Art of Food For Festivals exhibition, notes that Cuccagna also featured hunts of live pigs, bulls, and birds.

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In 1716, Bologna had a Cuccagna-inspired Feast of the Roasted Pig. Men with spears pursued loose bulls, while commoners climbed “Cuccagna trees” in the gardens. The trunks were covered in grease, so only the most nimble could pluck the whole, live birds tied or nailed to the branches.

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The most elaborate Cuccagna festivals were always in Naples. The first Cuccagna displays were more like parade floats. But by the 18th century, they were stationary. For the name day of Holy Roman Empress Elizabeth Christina, a massive, stage-like Cuccagna was built in 1722. Statues of gods and angels adorned each plinth, but a closer look reveals an unusual embellishment. Studding every wall and column, as Reed describes in Edible Monuments, were “breads, pastries, swags of fruit and vegetables, livestock and fowl.”

Cuccagnas were so popular that they were used to celebrate everything from saint’s days to royal birthdays. Nobility usually sponsored the monuments, and local craftsmen and farmers set up the edible embellishments. Occasionally, fireworks accentuated the beautiful scenes.

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In 1747, a Cuccagna for the birth of Prince Philip, son of Charles VII, king of Naples, featured a fabulous building on a hill in front of the royal palace. The building's balustrades and the paths up the hill were made of cheese, cows and goats roamed about, and fountains burbled with wine. Two greased Cuccagna trees, which look more like poles, have suits of fine clothing attached to the top. Surrounding the vision of perfection, “the poor wretches of the Neapolitan streets,” as Reed describes them in Edible Monuments, sprint towards the vision of food and plenty.

"I think one of the sad elements [of Cuccagna] is that the people running and getting the food were very poor and very hungry," says Reed. The city elite watched from their balconies, but the Cuccagna was meant as entertainment for the whole city. Reed emphasizes one positive aspect: Many hungry people got their hands on food.

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In 1764, a famine in Naples contributed to the demise of Cuccagna festivals. That year, hungry Neapolitans sacked the Cuccagna before the king’s signal. Disgruntled authorities decided the events weren’t worth the trouble, and over the next few decades, they disappeared.

It may have been for the best, as the Cuccagna often turned bloody. Stampeding citizens crushed each other and fought over food. One Neapolitan king, Charles III, set up a fund for widows of Cuccagna casualties. Even the infamous Marquis de Sade was horrified by the Neapolitan Cuccagna he witnessed in 1776, calling it a display of barbarity and chaos. The princess Maria Carolina reportedly expressed horror when she saw live animals being torn apart at her wedding Cuccagna.

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The philosophy of the Cuccagna was always excess. "Too much was never a concept they absorbed,” Reed says of Neapolitans, whose idea of a good time was "More fireworks, more food, more fountains." While there aren’t many similar events these days, Reed notes that food is still a central theme at festivals. She points to the Macy’s Day Parade: It’s all about a giant turkey float, even if no one tries to rip it to shreds every year.

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Found: A Planet Where It Snows Sunscreen's Active Ingredient

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For many people in the world, titanium dioxide is just another chemical compound, but those of us with distressingly pale, burns-after-10-minutes-in-the-sun skin know it as the active compound in sunscreen. (The good type! The type less likely to give you some other form of cancer.)

Because the universe is weird and wild, it turns out there is an exoplanet far out in space where titanium dioxide naturally occurs as snow.

Ironically, this “sunscreen” snow only forms on the planet’s dark side.

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Kepler-13Ab, one of the 2,337 confirmed exoplanets discovered using the Kepler space observatory, is in a solar system 1,730 light years from us. It is a large, gaseous planet, about six times the mass of Jupiter, but it’s a type of planet called a “hot Jupiter.” In fact, Kepler-13Ab, where temperatures reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, is one of the hottest exoplanets yet discovered.

Part of the reason the planet is so hot is that it’s incredibly close to its star—so close that it doesn’t rotate like the Earth does. Instead, one side is always facing the sun, and the other side always facing away from the sun.

Astronomers at Penn State were intrigued by a surprising feature of the planet. On other hot Jupiters that astronomers have observed, the atmosphere is warmed at higher altitudes. On Kepler-13Ab, the opposite was true—the atmosphere was cooler at higher altitudes. What was happening?

Usually, hot Jupiters have titanium dioxide gas in their atmospheres, which absorbs energy and heats up the upper atmosphere. On Kepler-13Ab, the astronomers think that the planet’s strong winds blow all that gas over to the dark side of the planet, where it condenses into clouds of sunscreen snow.

Calling this “sunscreen snow” is, of course, mostly clever packaging: Rubbing pure titanium dioxide snow onto your face probably would do something weird and gross to your skin. But it’s fun to imagine a future where it’s somehow energy efficient to be harvesting pure titanium dioxide from this strange planet quadrillions of miles away from us.

Philadelphia's Reading Viaduct Underwent a Major Transformation on Friday the 13th

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The Philadelphia & Reading Railroad was once the iron backbone of the United States. Carrying millions of pounds of coal and cargo each year, by the 1870s, The Reading Company was considered to be the largest and wealthiest conglomerate in the world.

Of course, the world has changed distinctly since the company's heyday, from transportation technology to fuel consumption patterns to the very structure of civic life. Today, the abandoned elevated rail tracks that cut through Philadelphia's Center City neighborhood are a stark, rusted reminder of those changes.

Fourteen years ago, a campaign began to reverse the decline of the crumbling viaduct and transform it into a reimagined piece of infrastructure that could serve the evolving needs of its surrounding community. The result of that effort, the Rail Park project, was born through the combined efforts of the Center City District Foundation, the Friends of the Rail Park, local government, and most importantly, the people of Philadelphia.

On October 13, the retail company Timberland pitched in as well. As part of its "urban greening initiative," which aims to help create green spaces that "match or exceed the combined retail footprint of [their] local stores in that city," Timberland organized 100 volunteers -- including folks from Journeys, KicksUSA, Urban Outfitters and their Philadelphia store -- to clean up over 25,000 square feet of neglected tracks. They planted trees, carried pavers, and moved barrel after barrel of topsoil.

As a way of saying thank you to volunteers for all of their hard work, Atlas Obscura and Timberland partnered to throw an afterparty for the laborers. The West Philadelphia Orchestra, a local brass band, met volunteers at the entrance to the park site and led them second line-style through the streets of Center City to the nearby Roy-Pitz Barrel House. People clamored out of their houses and businesses to get a look at the raucous parade of work-booted marchers and be-suited musicians. Even after a long day's work, volunteers found the energy to dance in the street as the band performed outside the venue.

Atlas Obscura also invited fans from its local Philadelphia Atlas Obscura Society to join the festivities, with all proceeds from the doors being donated back to the Center City District Foundation. Guests were treated to tarot card readings, sideshow acts, fire eating, acrobatics and more. Volunteers who needed a little time to recuperate could retreat to the theater space to munch on popcorn, watch silent films, and listen to lectures on the haunted history of Philadelphia.

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A huge thanks once again to our friends at the Center City District Foundation, Timberland, and all the incredible guests and volunteers who contributed to the revitalization of the Rail Park.

Stumbling on Skeletons in Old Odd Fellows Lodges

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In August of 2011, 16-year-old Jenny Minten was cleaning out a cabinet in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge in Scio, Oregon, when she came across something unexpected: a child-sized coffin, caked with mud. When she pried it open, the surprises continued. Inside were a number of moldy, decidedly adult human bones: femurs, teeth, a mandible. Jenny called over her mother, Lindy, who in turn called 9-1-1. "I have a skeleton in the closet," Lindy said, when someone picked up. ("We all do," the dispatcher reportedly replied.)

A detective came by and picked up the coffin and its inhabitant. After an investigation by the sheriff's department, which found no foul play involved, the remains were donated to the Oregon State University Osteology Laboratory, where Dawn Marie Alapisco, then an undergraduate student, began piecing them together.

The skeleton "pretty much just fell in my lap," says Alapisco, now the university's NAGPRA coordinator and a human osteologist. This tends to happen with skeletons and Odd Fellows lodges. Throughout the past few decades and across the country, people using, exploring, and renovating these buildings have opened a drawer or pulled up some false floorboards and been faced with a set of human bones.

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The Independent Order of Odd Fellows, or IOOF, is a fraternal organization. It's focused, in its own words, on "mutual aid and conviviality… [and] social and practical support." Although it gets lumped in with so-called "secret societies," current members balk at that designation. "Maybe we used to have secrets," says Nancy Chew, the longtime office manager for the Odd Fellows lodge in Corsicana, Texas. "But these days we definitely do not."

What they do have is the sort of general muddying that comes with long histories. For instance, people disagree about exactly how the IOOF got its name: the group's official website says that in 17th-century England, when its parent organization was founded, "it was odd to find people organized for the purpose of giving aid to those in need."

Others, including former group historian Charles H. Brooks, hold that it had more to do with the Fellows' diverse membership, which—unlike the more status-conscious Freemasons—consisted of "men of every rank and station in life." Either way, the group was popular: at its peak in the early 20th century, there were 3.4 million Odd Fellows in the United States, each committed to the Order's main principles of "Friendship, Love and Truth."

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Like other fraternal organizations, the Odd Fellows use certain rites, rituals, and codes, passed down through the years and meant to facilitate the group's shared values. One of these is a new member ceremony that includes, at some point, an encounter with a skeleton. "There's really nothing too creepy about it," explains Chew. "The lodge members are acting out a drama... [and] the skeleton merely represents the mortality of mankind."

Other members have said that the ritual is meant to instill a visceral awareness of one's own mortality. By literally looking death in the face, one is encouraged to live a virtuous life. (An anonymous account of one such ceremony—which made quite a splash when it was published in 1846, and may or may not be legitimate—describes how an initiate must confront a skeleton "kept rattling by means of wires," while current members tell him "What thou art he was. What he is thou wilt surely be.")

For this reason, Odd Fellows lodges generally keep a skeleton or two on hand. These days, they're props, made of plaster or papier-mâché. In the past, though, it wasn't difficult—or particularly unusual—to get ahold of a real specimen. (The one Alapisco studied likely came from De Moulin Bros & Co., an Illinois company that once offered an extensive selection of fraternal hazing standbys: robes and ribbons, trick chairs and fake goats, and "genuine, deodorized" skeletons, priced between $110 and $200.)

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Said skeletons then linger in IOOF lodges, sometimes for decades, before surprising a new generation of Odd Fellows. Lindy Minten belonged to an associated organization, the Rebekahs, when she found the skeleton in Oregon. Other members have sold or given away old prop coffins without realizing—or at least without mentioning—that there were actual bones inside.

As membership dwindles, and the group's buildings and belongings are repurposed for other community activities, non-members end up coming across the skeletons, too. In 2000, a theatrical collector in Missouri salvaged coffins from a disbanding Odd Fellows lodge, and discovered a skeleton in each: one fake, and one decidedly real.

The next year, an electrician fixing up a former lodge in Warrenton, Virginia, found one hidden in a recess in between two walls. "You could see the rib cage and the sinew," he told the Washington Post at the time. "It was like a Dracula movie." In 2004, a group of girls in Houston, Texas, stumbled on a casket full of bones during cheerleading practice. There have been similar finds all across the country: in a basement in New Jersey; a crawlspace in Pennsylvania; a cobwebbed wardrobe in Washington State.

Once it is found, an Odd Fellows skeleton might come to any number of fates. One, called "George"—once an Odd Fellow himself, who donated his own remains—is currently on display at a former Odd Fellows complex in Liberty, Missouri. Some are auctioned off for charity, donated to medical schools, or sold online.

Others are given proper funerals by community members. "Jane Doe," found in Pittsburgh, had a particularly eventful afterlife: after her tenure as an Odd Fellows skeleton, she was sold to a prop dealer, cameoed in Dawn of the Dead, and then ended up in a window display at a costume shop. She was finally buried in a local cemetery in 1983, after a policeman noticed that she looked a little too realistic.

If they're kept hidden, though, their prospects are generally bleak. The skeleton Alapisco studied had stayed in his child-sized coffin for about a century and a half. In 1962, when his lodge was destroyed by a flood, the coffin was removed, stored elsewhere for a while, and then put back in the replacement lodge, all without being cleaned. By the time he arrived at the university, he was completely covered in mud and mold. "He was so dirty," says Alapisco, that when she and other students were cleaning him, "we had to wear masks, gloves, and ER-style robes."

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No one likes to find dirty skeletons in their closets. The Odd Fellows—who, according to their website, maintain a presence in every U.S. state except Alaska, as well as nine European countries and seven Canadian provinces—would rather the focus stayed on their charitable work, says Alapisco: "They don't like it when there's a big public thing [about the skeletons]." One member told me that certain chapters have begun using urns for the initiations instead, and others have made a point of getting out ahead of the problem, auctioning skeletons and other props before or soon after a defunct lodge changes hands.

The Scio skeleton has found a new home at Oregon State. Although Alapisco usually doesn't name specimens—doing so is too close to "stripping the identity of who they were," she says—she spent so much time with this one, she couldn't resist, and she calls him Amadeus. After three lifespans spent in a pile in a box, he now often travels with Alapisco to talks, where she tells people about him—what she learned about his life, and all that happened after. "It's all part of the story," she says.


How 16th-Century European Mapmakers Described the World’s Oceans

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According to medieval mapmakers, the world was made up of three continents ringed by narrow bodies of water. When the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Ferdinand Magellan uncovered continents previously unknown to Europeans, this posed a major problem for those cartographers. But these explorers did not just stumble upon uncharted land—they also became aware of expansive stretches of ocean around the world.

For the first time, Europeans were confronted with the realization that they lived on a blue planet, with 71 percent of the Earth’s surface covered by water. The narrow strips of blue on medieval mappae mundi—also known as T-O maps, which showed the earth as a T centered on Jerusalem—were suddenly dwarfed by unimaginably vast oceans. Stories about the European discovery of the New World are ubiquitous, but stories about the discovery of so much new water are much more rare.

For explorers, these oceans were dangerous obstacles. Attempting to traverse them could quickly turn deadly, as the sailors on Magellan’s expedition learned when only one of their five ships—and 18 of the original 280 crewmen—returned to Spain in 1522. Antonio Pigafetta, one of Magellan’s surviving men, described this first Pacific Ocean crossing, which took three months and 20 days, in a report. He wrote, “We only ate old biscuit reduced to powder, and full of grubs, and stinking from the dirt which the rats had made on it when eating the good biscuit, and we drank water that was yellow and stinking.”

The oceans also posed a problem for mapmakers. Reports from explorers deviated wildly from pre-Columbian perceptions of the world’s water, as evidenced in mappae mundi. The 1475 world map in Lucas Brandis’s Rudimentum novitiorum captures this older outlook on the world. Asia, at the top of the map, represents one hemisphere, while wedges depicting Europe and Africa sit in the bottom half of the world. The map was not intended to be representative; instead it focused on a Christian ordering of space with Jerusalem at the world’s center. The world’s territories appear as hills, and in Europe, rulers sit atop them, with the pope in Rome shown holding a gold cross. Asia and Africa, less well known to 15th-century Europeans, have more fanciful illustrations, including a pair of dragons, a burning phoenix, and a man-eating demon chasing his victim while clutching his severed arm. On the map, the Mediterranean separates Europe from Africa and the rivers Don and Nile mark the divide between Asia and its neighbors. Yet on this particular map, these bodies of water are marked by thin black lines and nothing more. The only water seems to flow from the four great rivers at the top of the map, which represents the Garden of Eden’s Earthly Paradise.

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The discovery of massive bodies of water forced mapmakers to devise creative solutions. One of the earliest strategies was to shrink the oceans. Here, mapmakers borrowed from Columbus himself, who minimized his trans-Atlantic voyage by claiming that the crossing took only 33 days. However, Columbus only counted from the Canary Islands to the Indies, omitting the 37 days spent traveling from Spain to the Canaries, which included repairs on two of his three ships.

One of the earliest maps to show the New World, the 1502 Cantino planisphere, shrunk the Atlantic by showing Flores Island, the westernmost of the Azores, just slightly west of the jutting coast of Brazil, when in fact it is several degrees of longitude east of the Brazilian coast. Battista Agnese, a Genoese mapmaker who produced at least 100 hand-drawn atlases for wealthy patrons, also narrowed the Atlantic in his 1544 world map. Agnese drew only 10 degrees of longitude between Brazil’s furthest east point and Africa’s furthest west, nearly halving the actual distance of over 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles). These cartographic manipulations consistently under-measured the Atlantic, minimizing the distance between the Old World and the New.

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Sixteenth-century mapmakers also invented massive “undiscovered” continents to fill the oceans. Two of the most famous maps from the 16th century, Abraham Ortelius’s 1570 world map in his atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, and Gerhard Mercator’s 1569 world map, (which introduced the Mercator projection) rely on this approach. Produced less than a hundred years after the Rudimentum novitiorum, Ortelius’s map shows a completely transformed globe. The shapes of the world’s continents, recognizable to our contemporary eyes and now divided by the grid of latitude and longitude, are arranged with north at the top, a convention that only emerged in the 16th century. The least familiar part of the globe is its southern stretches, which Ortelius labels “Terra Australis Nondum Cognita,” or southern land not yet known.

Both the Ortelius and Mercator map admitted that the world’s oceans were vastly larger than those shown on any pre-Columbian map, but both also hypothesized a massive southern continent to “balance” the landmasses north of the equator. Mercator made this explicit in 1595, when he wrote, “it was necessary for such a continent to exist below to Antarctic Pole, which . . . would balance the other lands.” Europeans were so certain that this continent existed that Australia, first spotted by Europeans in 1606, took its name from the Latin term for Terra Australis. These imagined continents did not just multiply the Earth’s land—they also limited the disturbing vastness of the world’s oceans.

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Other cartographers embraced the ocean’s blank canvas in a different way: by emphasizing just how empty it was. In addition to minimizing the size of the Atlantic in his beautifully-colored maps, Agnese painted the land a rich green, depicting the mountains, rivers, and lakes that dotted the territory. On the land, water is drawn in brilliant blue, and the Red Sea and the Gulf of California are colored red, a convention borrowed from mappae mundi. The ocean, by contrast, was largely blank, the untreated vellum standing in for water. Agnese did scatter a few islands throughout and used the blank space to highlight Ferdinand Magellan’s route as he circumnavigated the globe. But his map implies that Magellan did not discover anything notable in the ocean; rather, the ocean was an emptiness between “real” places, defined by the absence of land rather than containing anything worth recording. Agnese’s unknown land, or terra incognita, which also faded into blank vellum, was visually identical to the explored oceans, perhaps hinting that the ocean was ultimately unknowable.

But the seeming blank space of the ocean signified more than peril and emptiness—it also posed an opportunity for enterprising mapmakers. Blank spaces on the map could be filled with promotions for the map’s creator or his hometown. The French royal cosmographer and mapmaker André Thévet manufactured not one but two fictional Thevet Islands in the Atlantic in the 1580s. Similarly, in a 1558 book with an accompanying map, Nicolò Zeno, a Venetian nobleman from a flagging family, alleged that his familial predecessors, Nicolò (his namesake) and Antonio Zeno, had landed on the invented island of Frisland and led voyages in the North Atlantic that discovered the New World in 1380, over a century before Columbus’s Genoa or Vespucci’s Florence could claim the glory. And on his 1560 world map, Paolo Forlani, one of Venice’s most active mapmakers, used the wide oceans to promote Venice by sprinkling the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans with Venetian galleys, clearly not designed for transoceanic voyages. The ships not only filled the water, but they also proclaimed Venetian dominance in an era when Venice had already lost the race to colonize distant territories.

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Mapmakers also explored a range of design techniques to fill the oceans. Giovanni Lorenzo D’Anania’s 1582 map of the North Atlantic not only populated the waters with imaginary islands, but also filled the sea with dark dots and large labels for the land, minimizing the impression of blankness. In his 1566 map of North America, Forlani similarly peppered the Atlantic with islands both real and invented, expanded the size of North America, and dotted the waters on his engraving to avoid the impression that the oceans were simply blank. He also made the Pacific much smaller than the Atlantic, placing the island of Japan halfway between North America and Asia.

These mapmakers and the explorers who crossed the newly found oceans saw the water both as an obstacle, separating Europeans from their destination and posing countless dangers, and as an opportunity. A blank space on a map let a mapmaker reinvent himself, much like pirates who roamed the seas, by manufacturing islands or adding flourishes to promote his city. And when mapmakers signed their works, they almost always did so in the ocean.

The Myth of a Medical Explanation for Vampirism

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The vampire myth has been around, in one form or another, for millennia. Tales of the undead with a penchant for sucking life from living were even told in ancient Egypt, long before Vlad III or Bram Stoker. The specifics of the legend vary in different parts of the world, but the core tale, involving blood-drinking revenants, comes up again and again. Modern scholars have looked to medical literature for an explanation of the universality of the myth, and in some cases suggested that what we know as vampirism is, in fact, based on the symptoms of known diseases. But connecting a feared mythical creature to a real human disease—and the real people who suffer from it—has consequences.

The most widely known vampire mythology today draws on Slavic folklore and stories from the 18th century. The stories tend to involve a recently deceased family member who, upon exhumation, didn't seem to have decomposed at all, and instead appeared to be full of fresh blood. This was still the thinking in early-19th-century New England. Novels such as Carmilla (1871) and Dracula (1897) featured vampires that were mobile, rather underground undead. Eventually, light sensitivity and an aversion to garlic were added to the classic vampire folklore.

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Connecting the many variations of the vampire myth to diseases that we now understand is a tall order, but people have tried. A 1998 article in the journal Neurology posits that rabies's characteristic hallucinations and agitation are one source of the myth. Pellagra, a deficiency of niacin and tryptophan that causes sun-sensitive skin, a red tongue, and erratic behavior, has also been fingered as a culprit. Tuberculosis and schizophrenia, too.

In a talk at a conference in 1985, Canadian biochemist David H. Dolphin proposed that vampire and werewolf myths derived from a disease known as porphyria, the New York Timesreported. The symptoms of congenital erythropoietic porphyria, in particular, were cited: light-sensitive skin, a lack of heme (a molecule in hemoglobin) that could have driven sufferers to bite others and drink blood, and sensitivity to garlic. It was not the first time Dolphin had suggested the link. He mentioned it in a 1982 speech to the Royal Society and again during a 1984 appearance on NBC.

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No one apparently questioned the hypothesis at the conference, but it has since become the subject of plenty of contrary opinions. A 1995 article in Postgraduate Medical Journal, for example, questioned the evidence Dolphin presented, and noted that light sensitivity is a relatively modern addition to vampire lore, that people with the disease don't crave blood, and that the disease is extremely rare. Perhaps the strongest condemnation of Dolphin's idea was a 1990 article in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. The authors, Mary G. Winkler and Karl E. Anderson, called Dolphin's hypothesis a "medicalization of a myth."

"There is a necessity for scientists and the media to set aside cynical assumptions about their audiences and consider first and foremost their responsibilities to the communities of patients who are affected by diseases and by stories about their diseases," they wrote. They stated that despite critical comments from other doctors and scientists, Dolphin and the media continued to distort the public's perception of rare diseases. That has translated to real effects on patients. One doctor, they wrote, "described a porphyria patient who was depressed and otherwise adversely affected by reports in the press linking porphyria and vampirism and required reassurance that he was not descended from vampires and would not turn into one." Winkler and Anderson also cite the murder of a man in Virginia who claimed to have porphyria and thought he was a vampire.

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Winkler and Anderson pointed out a critical flaw in the porphyria explanation. "Dolphin's hypothesis assumes that vampires were real enough to require a medical explanation." A medical explanation probably isn't necessary at all—the myths could easily come from a misunderstanding of decomposition, or be the product of a generations-long game of “telephone” coupled with active imaginations.

"There will be a continuing need for the medical community to dispel this and other ill-founded notions that may link legends and myths to specific diseases," they wrote. They advised doctors and scientists to avoid "interpreting mythology" as a topic for actual medical study or "allowing ancient, dark fears to dim scientific understanding."

But their article certainly wasn't the stake in the heart of the vampire-porphyria myth. Scholarly articles in well-known journals and press releases continue to link the genetic disease and the immortal mythical affliction, often around this time of year. Some have taken the message to heart, though. A 2016 article in JAMA Dermatology noted that, “Life with porphyria is difficult enough without everyone thinking you are Dracula.”

The Club Dedicated to Eating Unconventional Aquatic Creatures

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From 1880 to 1887, members of an unusual New York club met once a year for elaborate banquets of unusual water-dwelling creatures. “Ichthyophagous” means fish-eating, but the Ichthyophagous Club devoured all things aquatic, including dolphin, starfish, and manatee.

The club’s stated goal was to expand culinary horizons. Led by the editor-in-chief of the New York Times, its members hoped their example would prove that “there are quite good fish left uneaten.” Which aquatic creatures—considered ugly or inedible by Americans—could be redeemed, especially if cooked in a fine French style?

The membership included fishing experts, food industry executives, journalists, and writers. They considered their efforts philanthropic, but they certainly weren’t martyring themselves. Each event was a rowdy party.

The media followed the annual dinners attentively. The first dinner, which The New York Times called“unique, startling, [and] wonderful,” included novelties like platter-sized moonfish cooked Spanish-style and bottom-feeding sea robin fish with lettuce salad. The Times writer also observed that few members could pronounce the club’s name.

In its third and fourth years, the club’s menu was especially quirky: fresh-caught dolphin steaks, many-toothed lamprey eels fried in crumbs, and dogfish shark croquettes. All of the club’s menus featured typical banquet food—like beef tenderloin and lobster salad—alongside the oddities. But club members were most interested in the eccentric options, even if they failed to impress. The dolphin and alligator garfish were particularly unpleasant. The next year, members loved the manatee filets and alligator steak.

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The New York Public Library’s copy of the menu from the sixth dinner shows a feast of long-legged sea spider crab, periwinkle sea snails, and starfish bisque. The periwinkles were met with disgust, but the starfish bisque was considered quite tasty. In another claim towards the public good, one of the club's chefs, Thomas J. Murray, suggested that eating starfish would prevent them from preying on the once-bountiful oysters of the Long Island Sound, leaving more for their human predators.

While the Ichthyophagous Club never popularized starfish soup, it did influence American cooking. Delmonico’s head chef Alessandro Filippini credited it with popularizing both skate and squid, which Americans rarely ate before the Ichthyophagous Club.

While the Ichthyophagous Club successfully introduced new dishes, the seas and rivers of today look very different. In the 1880s, the sea still seemed plentiful enough that advocating for new seafoods could appear philanthropic. Now, whenever a tasty fish is embraced, it's fished nearly to extinction, making the dream of endless watery bounty more distant than ever.

We’re launching a food section! Gastro Obscura will cover the world’s most wondrous food and drink. Sign up for our weekly email to get an early look.

An Artificial Intelligence Bot Writes Stories of the Macabre

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Machines are taking over jobs, taking over lives, and just plain taking over. This common fear is an inspiration for a new AI bot created by the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), nicknamed "Shelley." But, rather than being part of that particular horror story, "she" is writing her own scary stories. Named for the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who penned Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, Shelley is an AI system that feeds on the horrors of other writers. "Nowadays, nothing seems to frighten humanity more than runaway intelligent machines," MIT research scientist Manuel Cebrian writes in an email, citing concerns from mass unemployment all the way through to the annihilation of the human race. "We wanted to playfully commemorate humanity's fear of AI."

Shelley has been trained on more than 140,000 horror stories posted on Reddit's r/nosleep subreddit (thread titles include "I think someone I'm Catfishing is a Serial killer"). She "exists" on Twitter, where, every hour, she starts a new story, to which readers are encouraged to contribute. By drawing on the stories of others, she is able to conjure stereotypically terrifying images—claws brushing against one's ankles, a creepy doll, a mysterious figure in a black trench coat. But, says Pinar Yanardag, a postdoctoral researcher at the Media Lab, she is unfettered by what is possible, or even imaginable. She has generated stories about disembodied mouths and, on the flip-side, a smiling "thing" with no eyes, no nose—and no mouth. "We expect Shelley to inspire people to write the weirdest and scariest horror stories ever put together."

Human authors have nothing to fear at the moment, says associate professor Iyad Rahwan. "Algorithms are still not very good at generating complex narrative." While human creativity appears to be infinite, machines are limited by what we can teach them, at least for now. "If we can build machines that understand the very essence of human experience, we would have bigger problems than simply losing jobs in creative writing," he adds. Shelley's stories are led by the cues fed to her, and now there are tales about zombies, vampires, and aliens in the pipeline. But so far, Shelley's been curiously silent on one increasingly common horror trope, one that she might have an unusual take on: the singularity.

Revisit the Enchantment of 'Into the Veil'

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In the late October gloom, 600,000 graves sat dark and quiet, but around them the reading of sonnets, a dulcimer, and the slow drip of candle wax brought the night to life. It was Atlas Obscura's Into the Veil 2017, two nights of mystery and magic in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery.

S U R V I V E (Stranger Things), Laraaji, Lucien Shapiro, Rob Roth, The Burns Archive, Ashley Rose Couture, The Apprehension Engine, and others put on a show for the ages. If you weren't one of the 3,500 attendees, or if you want to relive it, check out the video above, shot by Addison Post and P. Nick Curran of Loroto Productions, LLC.

Into the Veil 2017 was a night off the beaten path and deep into the transcendent.

Welcome to Your Worst Nightmares

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Last week, we asked you to tell us about your nightmares. Sometimes, when people talk about their dreams, it can be hard to understand the weird worlds and emotions their subconscious minds serve up. But your nightmares are clear and vivid, and chilled us to the bone.

You told us of tornadoes, disembodied hands, moms in peril, nuclear war, flaming eyes, hollow eyes, flaming hollow eyes, creepy old houses, falling elevators, giant spiders, giant tortoises, and giant jellyfish. In your nightmares, you are running away from rubber wolves, from Slenderman, from vampires, from a Chrissy doll. And sometimes you don't get away.

As we read through these dreams, some of them were so creepy that they generated audible groans ... and the occasional chuckle. Even dreams that are disturbing during sleep can be kind of funny in the daylight. Many of the bad dreams we heard about were from childhood, memories that have lingered for years. Some of your nightmares, you told us, weren’t obviously scary but overwhelmed you with feelings of dread and terror. Some of them could be clearly traced to experiences in your life, but as one dreamer put it, “It all made sense, but it didn't make it any less horrifying.”

We received hundreds of nightmares, and we read every one. Here is a small sampling of what haunts you.


I had a nightmare that William Shatner was stabbing me with a fire poker. We were in a big fancy home in a study type room with expensive furniture and I'm being stabbed to death by a fire poker while Shatner is laughing and smiling maniacally. I'm still terrified of the man.
Caitlin S.

I dreamt that I cut my own eyelids off with a pair of very blunt nail scissors.
RPC

Someone wheeled a metal gurney onto a stone bridge in a park. My body had been barbecued, and it was laid out on its back on the gurney. My skin was crispy and covered with BBQ sauce. I was told to carve up my body as the main course for a catered picnic in the park. I hesitated for a minute, and someone whispered over my shoulder, "It's much easier after you remove the hands and head." So I cut off my own hands and my own head. The advice was right. It was much easier to carve up the rest of my body after that. I served up the slices to the people at the picnic but I didn't eat any of it.
Guy Bocchino

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Walked into my house and about half a dozen hairy black spiders the size of dishwashers were arguing (in English) over the remote control. TV was on in the dark room casting blue light over everything. It also wasn't anything like my actual house. They chased me out and just as one was about to catch me I woke up.... I think that means I died. —Rosie Bright

Fist-sized houseleeks (also called sempervivum) are growing out of my armpits. If I pull on them or trying to tear them off, they bleed heavily.
Srta. Perez

I was driving down a specific street in my home town. Ahead of me I saw a pedestrian crossing the street. As I approached, she turned ... and it was also me. I drove over myself.
Jocelyn Martin

Walking in a forest glowing with lanterns. However, when passing a lantern, I realized it's made out of human skins pulled taut over a wire frame, crudely stitched together. I can see the shocked and pained faces on certain parts of the lanterns. The forest was eerily calm.
Shu

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As an adult, I have a recurring nightmare about being surrounded by large aquariums that are overgrown with algae and contain fish that have been forgotten but that have somehow survived on their own. Usually, the fish are huge, or have lost their color, or have mutated in some way. During the course of the dream, the fish begin to swim out of the tanks and into the air around me. It is a terrifying nightmare, and I have been having it for about 15 years.
Susan Gualtier

Having to climb a five-storey, very narrow, rickety fire escape outside of a brick building ... fleeing from a serial murderer psychopath that had left dismembered body parts under my bed.
Jeanne

Scariest dream I ever had happened in my 40s. I walked into a grocery store, bought some stupid thing (not important), and went to the cashier to pay for it. They looked at me and said they needed exact change. I smiled, said, "No problem," and pulled a shotgun out from under my long coat and pulled the trigger. When it went off I woke up in a pool of sweat. I could still feel the recoil of the shotgun in my shoulder and hands.
David Davis

That I could jump, and each jump would take me higher, but quickly there was one jump that was too high and as I came down I knew it was going to kill me, painfully.
Dana F.

When I was 12 my mother had a particularly underpowered car that took ages to reach up to speed. One night I dreamed we were driving along a long straight local road we called "no man's land" and the car was being chased by an enormous gray rubber wolf. The car was failing to gain speed but the rubber wolf was, he wobbled but still managed to catch us up and as he reached us I woke up. I swear I could see him standing in the corner of my bedroom breathing heavily. I'm 46 now and still think of it.
Zoe Mason

When I was six or seven, I had a recurring nightmare of a hideous, wrinkled hand, sticking out of my bedroom wall. The ancient hand and forearm were covered with blotchy gray skin, and the nails were yellowed, pointed, and cracked. The hand beat on the floor, accompanied by a thudding drumbeat, commanding my attention, drawing me to it. I couldn't sleep for days, weeks, for fear of this horrible hand reaching out for me. Finally, I grabbed it, and it pulled me through the wall and into a cage hanging in a cavern. Below me, a witch was stirring a cauldron full of bubbling goop, and I was the next ingredient. After being pulled through the wall, I never had the dream again.
David F.

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The corpse of "Ethel Mertz" (from the I Love Lucy show) rose from her grave and came after me. Scary and funny!
Kimberley Faria

I wake up in the back room of my parent's lake cottage in rural Pennsylvania. It's the dead of night, in winter, and I immediately know that there is no other person within miles. The only light is a very faint blue glow coming through a crack in the door. I'm already terrified, yet I can't stop myself from going toward the source of the glow. As I move through the door and down the back hallway I'm not walking—I'm bounding in slow motion, as if I'm on the Moon. My breathing is very loud in my ears, the sharp sound of a respirator kicking on and off with each breath. As I near the end of the hallway the glow continues to get brighter, and I want desperately to not see what's around the corner, but I keep slowly bounding forward. A high-pitched whine has been growing as I begin to turn the corner, and the entire front room is lit up by the blue glow. The whine rises into an ear-splitting shriek of sound as I turn my head to see the source of the glow—and I wake up.
Bobby R.

I dreamed this approximately 40 years ago. I was told (or just "knew") that I would be murdered by a man named John Cavenaugh.
Anonymous

I was walking through the expansive backyard of an old abandoned house. It looked like autumn—all of the trees were dead and black, and the sky had this orange tint to it. I came across a small basin (ankle high) with cobwebs, dead leaves, and some small drops of a tar-like substance inside. Standing in the center was a metal framework that roughly looked like the outline of a human body, but off. It reminded me of a medieval torture device. I heard a voice behind me say the following: "They say a woman used to live in this house. She was deformed and looked like a seal. She used this framework to press her back into shape." Woke up sweating and panting.
Brian O'Connell

Everything is white. I hear the faint sound of a slow heartbeat. The beating starts to get louder. Louder. Faster. In the distance something is moving toward me, spinning. Louder. Faster. The objects are getting closer moving in a spiral motion. LOUDER. FASTER. The objects become clearer, I realize they are individual human organs. The heartbeat is racing, the organs cloud my vision as the sound of a scream envelopes me. I wake up.
Sam

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There was a full moon shining down on my bed. Suddenly there was a woman standing beside the crib. She was haggard and had black holes where her eyes should have been. She reached her long sinewy arms with long white fingers ending in long nails and she pushed the covers up under my chin. I had pushed them down to my feet. I could cry, or move. She pressed the covers hard on my chest. She stood there for some time. I finally shut my eyes and when I opened them, she was gone.
Diane Hagan

I had this dream as a child of about four or five years old: I'm riding bikes with neighborhood friends. One boy stops so we all stop around him. He pulls out a tube of what looks like toothpaste, takes the cap off, spreads some on his wrist, and then pops his hand off at the wrist, leaving a ball and socket hand and wrist. No blood, just a perfect, doll like arm. He then wants to put the goop on our necks to pop our heads off, and we all take off on our bikes in fear and he's chasing us. I make it to my house, dump my bike and run inside and hide behind a couch, heart pounding. I woke myself up in such fear of that kid and his magic solution that I'm calling out for my dad and mom. My dad came in to check on me, but I thought the kid had gotten to my dad already and that my dad's going to pop HIS head off to show me it was fine, it doesn’t hurt. Took a while for me to shake that dream state off.
Susie Rose Major

Being chased by sentient tornadoes. They always know where I'm hiding.
Allison

The Secret History of Paris's Catacomb Mushrooms

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From the Louvre museum to the sculpted façade of Notre Dame to the quintessential six-story apartment buildings with their grey-beige blush, Paris is built of local limestone, extracted from quarries that thread beneath the capital like the holes of a Swiss cheese. But these tunnels have a culinary legacy, too. Within these catacombs, in dark, cavernous chambers, farmers once cultivated a button mushroom variety that bears the name of the French capital: the Paris mushroom.

The stone upon (and from) which Paris is built is known as Lutetian limestone, after the Roman name for Paris: Lutetia. While locals have used these natural resources since Gallo-Roman times, it wasn't until the massive medieval churches (such as Notre Dame) were built that Parisians quarried underground—a tradition that continued for centuries as they expanded and beautified the city. Over time, they created another, cavernous city below the streets.

Parisians found uses for the quarries long after miners winched the last block of stone up through the deep wells. In the late 1700s, after several cave-ins at the Holy Innocents Cemetery, city officials disinterred what was left of the remains and transferred the bones to these underground tunnels. This set the stage for the ossuaries of the Catacombs of Paris, which now hold the remains of more than six million people, including prominent French revolutionaries. Two centuries later, the French Resistance used the abandoned quarries to organize the Liberation of Paris far from Nazi eyes. One lesser known use? The cultivation of a unique species of mushroom.

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Since the 17th century, gardeners grew what would become known as Paris mushrooms in the gardens at Versailles. King Louis XIV is said to have been a particular fan of what was then known as the “rosé des près” or “pink of the fields.” The name came from the mushroom’s color, which is oddly similar to that of Lutetian limestone. But in the 19th century, this culture moved underground.

Some accounts, such as that of Jean-Louis Carpentier of the Association du Champignon de Couche, attribute this move to Napoleonic soldiers. According to his story, Paris mushrooms were first grown underground near the site of the Eiffel Tower, when deserters of Napoleon’s army hid inside the galleries below Chaillot hill. The men found that their horses’ manure—combined with the caverns’ microclimate—spawned a veritable forest of mushrooms, providing them sustenance.

In his Traité de la culture des champignons (1847), however, Victor Paquet attributes the discovery to a Parisian farmer, Chambry. In 1811, he writes, after tossing the fruits of a disappointing harvest into an abandoned quarry, Chambry realized that Paris mushrooms, unlike most mushroom species, which thrive in forests, grow better underground. Cultivating them in dark limestone quarries also turned them into a year-round crop.

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However this discovery was made, it caught on. Mushrooms had retained their royal reputation from Louis’ day, and demand was high. By 1880, more than 300 mushroom farmers worked in Parisian quarries to produce 1,000 tons of Paris mushrooms each year. Most of the quarries were not accessible by foot, so farmers used wooden ladders or pulley systems to lower themselves down in baskets. Once underground, they used hand-held lanterns to plant and gather mushrooms.

The mushrooms, farmers found, were picky about temperature and humidity. While the quarries tended to remain at approximately 12 degrees Celsius all year, farmers developed systems to control humidity and air circulation. In dry rooms, they channelled water that seeped in from faults or cracks and distributed it with watering cans. In damp rooms, farmers created ventilation by making holes in dividing walls and building furnaces at the base of wells leading to the surface. This created air suction, and they built unique chimneys above these mine wells, described at the time as a "truncated pyramids," to cover the entrances.

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In 1896, a plan was established for Paris’s underground métro system—a development that historians link to the Paris mushroom’s demise. Although the métro tunnels were to be built above the catacombs, the quarries in which the farmers worked had fallen into disrepair.

"The mushroom farmers rented underground plots from private owners—often former quarrymen," explains Florence Cavaillé of the Inspection Générale des Carrières in Paris. "They had no obligation with regards to the upkeep of the quarries. They stopped renting and left when the quarry became dangerous or too degraded."

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that mushroom farmers abandoned the capital's tunnels in response to this massive building project. They moved from the rapidly growing city to its outskirts, sometimes relocating as far as the Loire Valley quarries. Today, only five or so mushroom farmers remain in the region, and none work underneath Paris.

Bruno Zamblera is a fourth-generation mushroom farmer in Méry-sur-Oise, 15 miles from the capital. While his father abandoned the trade, Zamblera has returned, albeit to produce smaller quantities of Paris mushrooms for local food co-ops and CSAs.

“It’s our cultural heritage,” he says. “For some people, it’s a sign of quality.”

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Today, 70 percent of the Paris mushrooms sold in France hail from China. (Outside France, Paris mushrooms are known by other names, such as button mushrooms.) Less than half a percent of the supply is French, and most of this supply is produced in industrial hangars.

This marks a turn for the catacomb mushrooms of Paris. While farmers once flocked to Paris’s underground caverns to expand mushroom cultivation, those who remain in quarries seek superior flavor rather than superior yields.

Yannick Alléno, chef of the 3-Michelin-starred Pavillon Ledoyen, makes a point of seeking them out. “I always choose true Paris mushrooms,” he says. “There’s no comparison with industrial.” Not only, he says, are industrial mushrooms too similar to one another, as though they were factory made, but the flavor of a true Paris mushroom is unparalleled.

“The real Paris mushroom is really concentrated in sublime flavors,” he says. “The other has no flavor, except that of water.”

Ledoyen attributes this to the elusive French idea of terroir. No translation accurately explains this concept, shorthand for the conviction that the nature of a food is innately linked to the region that produces it. It’s the concept that spawned the Designation of Protected Origin label, a legal certification that makes it impossible to sell sparkling wine made outside the Champagne region as Champagne and forces American brie makers to market their cheeses as “Brie-style.” Alléno calls himself a “fervent” defender of Parisian terroir; he even launched two “Terroir parisien” restaurants in 2012.

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Angel Moïoli, a third-generation mushroom farmer, agrees with Ledoyen. Industrial mushroom farms are heated to force the mushrooms to grow rapidly and uniformly. But “in underground quarries," he says, "we do things the old-fashioned way.”

“We use manure and compost, and the earth is limestone, and that lends flavor to the mushrooms.”

Unlike Grenoble walnuts or Puy lentils, however, the official status of Paris mushrooms as a terroir product was never established. What was once a key element of Parisian terroir has become a mere variety, like a Fuji apple or a Hokkaido squash.

“It was never protected,” says Zamblera. “It’s just a commonplace product, now … and it’s too late to change that.”

But Moïoli hopes that even if it’s no longer possible to legally protect the Paris mushroom’s name, the savoir faire that goes into a true Paris mushroom can be protected.

“I’m a defender of the Paris mushroom from the Paris region,” he says. “There’s a traditional way to do it. It’s the way it’s always been done.”

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Found: A Rare Bodysnatching Fungus

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The Earthy Powdercap Mushroom was minding its own business, living out a perfectly good mushroom life in Clumber Park, a pleasant, woodsy spot in Nottinghamshire, England. But it was in danger. A rare fungus was taking over—until, like a sci-fi alien erupting from a human chest, the bodysnatching fungus burst from the mushroom’s head.

These perfectly nice Powdercap mushrooms became victims of Squamanita paradoxa, the Powdercap Strangler, the Nottingham Post reports.

The Powdercap Strangler is a shadowy character. First discovered in 1948, in Oregon’s Mount Hood National Forest, the Strangler is rarely seen. It rears its actually pretty ugly head in parts of the U.S., Canada, and Europe, but everywhere it’s found, it’s an unusual sight. In the U.K., it’s only been found 23 times.

These particular Stranglers were found during a foraging expedition in the park, and identified by the British Mycological Association. The species was also seen in the U.K. in 2011.

The Powdercap is an orange mushroom, and even after the Strangler takes over, it retains an orange stem, to hold up its own grey head. As one mycologist puts it, the Strangler’s “mushroom erupts in place of the host’s mushroom.”

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The Strangler is picky about its victims, though; it has “extreme host specificity,” according to a 2010 study on this parasitic relationship. It’s rare for fungi to be parasites, and the BBC reports that only 30 mushrooms in Europe exhibit this type of behavior. The Strangler and the Powdercap are actually closely related species, so it’s possible that, despite what it looks like, this is a symbiotic relationship.

But that seems doubtful. Most living things, no matter what their persuasion, do not thrive by having their heads shoved off and another grown in its place.

Meet a Scottish 'Witch' Who Died 300 Years Ago

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The face of a woman believed to be a witch 300 years ago has been revealed by a forensic artist, working alongside a BBC historical television program.

Lilias Adie was summoned before a court in 1704, in the Scottish village of Torryburn, Fife, where she lived. She had been accused of witchcraft and, likely following a torturous interrogation, told the court how the devil had come to her before sunset, on a sultry July evening three years earlier. He took her behind a pile of wheat sheaves, put one hand on the crown of her head, and the other on the soles of her feet, and asked her to renounce her baptism. They had sex. His embraces, she told the court, were cold and unsatisfactory. "His skin was cold, and his color black and pale, he had a hat on his head, and his feet was cloven like the feet of a stirk [young cow or bull]." They met again by moonlight, and again, and again.

Adie died in prison before she could be tried (and likely burned). Her body was buried in the sticky mire of the mudflats around the village, with a large stone placed on top. This, the villagers believed, would keep her in her grave and stop the devil from possessing her remains. (Satan was said to animate such "walking corpses," sometimes in order to have sex with witches.) Around a century later, her skull was dug up by some enterprising locals and sold to the University of St. Andrews, where it was photographed—and then promptly disappeared. The images eventually wound up in the hands of forensic artist Christopher Rynn, of the University of Dundee.

Rynn created a detailed facial reconstruction based on the skull photo, and it may be the only existing likeness of a Scottish "witch." Most were burned, their skulls reduced to ash. "[Subjects] begin to remind you of people you know, as you're tweaking the facial expression and adding photographic textures," Rynn said, in a statement. "There was nothing in Lilias' story that suggested to me that nowadays she would be considered as anything other than a victim of horrible circumstances, so I saw no reason to pull the face into an unpleasant or mean expression and she ended up having quite a kind face, quite naturally."

That kindness, historian Louise Yeoman said in a statement, was likely accompanied by cleverness, ingenuity, and toughness. "The point of the interrogation and its cruelties was to get names," Yeoman said. Adie said that the other women at the witches' gatherings were masked and unidentifiable. She only offered up the names of people who has already been exposed—"despite the fact it would probably mean there was no let-up for her. It's sad to think her neighbours expected some terrifying monster when she was actually an innocent person who'd suffered terribly. The only thing that's monstrous here is the miscarriage of justice."

European 'Corpse Medicine' Promised Better Health Through Cannibalism

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In 17th-century England, at the age of 23, Richard Baxter, writer of Protestant Christian works, was generally having a bad time. Every day he coughed, sometimes spitting blood. He had pains in his stomach, suffered from daily flatulence and joint pains, had bouts of scurvy, and to top it off, often had an achy tooth. He suffered from constant headaches, and much of the medicine of his day had no idea what to do with him. So he did what anyone else would in his time, under the circumstances: he tried some more potent cures, made of human corpses.

Baxter’s ailments plagued him in the middle of an increase in medical cures in Europe, made from human body parts and blood from corpses as ingredients, now called corpse medicine. The use of dead bodies in medicine had been simmering in the medical community since around the year 25 in parts of the ancient Roman empire, with more organized and widespread use in Europe since the 1200s, lasting in dwindling practice into the 1890s. Over the centuries, physicians experimented with their corpse-related remedies; human remains became a cure for anything from gout to deep wounds.

Richard Sugg writes of all this medical macabrely in his book Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires. Some recipes for corpse medicine cures have survived over a very long time. Human body parts have been used in medicine around the world at various points in history, but Europe’s corpse medicine heritage seems to have largely stemmed from ancient Rome. Sugg writes that in ancient Rome, the equivalent of medical professionals at the time advised drinking blood straight from a freshly perished gladiator, and similar practices continued through the middle ages. When Baxter suffered “a fit of bleeding,” he was cured by applying moss that had been grown on a human skull. To promote hair growth for anyone with a receding hairline, “liquor of hair” would help hair grow, while powdered hair taken orally was thought to help cure jaundice. For anyone developing cataracts in old age, human excrement could be ground into a powder, writes Sugg, after which you would “blow it into the eye.”

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When people ate ground-up body parts and bodily fluids, they believed that they were using powerful bodily forces to cure another body system issue. Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss physician and “father of toxicology” believed that to cure an ailment you needed to treat it with something similar, and many of the corpse medicine-using doctors followed this lead. To prevent tooth decay, someone could wear a tooth taken from a corpse and wear it around his or her neck, or touch the corpse tooth to one’s own. Sometimes, according to Sugg, the belief that “like cures like” was in effect, but at other times, the cure seems to have little to do with which body part it came from and everything to do with the mystical nature of dead bodies.

Kings and commoners alike were interested in this whole mysterious corpse medicine business, and King Charles II of England was apparently very fond of using human skull in a concoction known as “King’s Drops.” The recipe was simple: take a human skull and powder it into a fine dust. Add alcohol to form an extract, and drink it down. On his deathbed, Sugg writes, Charles II’s doctors frantically used these drops along with a barrage of herbal enemas and treatments to no avail. The drops lived on, though, and were sold in shops in London through the 1700s for what 18th-century physicians called “nervous complaints” and dysentery. In some cases, physicians added exotic chocolate or other herbs to the mix, but the skull was key to curing epilepsy, various bouts of bleeding, and it was believed that it could, at the last moment of one’s life, prevent death.

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If you’re reading this in gross fascination, you might be asking—where did they get the bodies? According to Sugg, all over the gruesome place. Mummies were sometimes looted and shipped from Egypt, but since those were in short supply, a locally made mummified body would do the trick. Often, the specific social role of a person in life dictated whether their body was used, usually an executed criminal or one of the poor. In the U.K., the Irish, who were maligned and colonized by England, were a possible common source; Sugg writes that a 17th-century physician named John Pomet of England noted that a specific moss found on skulls imported to England and Germany was from Ireland. These skulls, which were crushed into a fine powder, were used in wounds to stop bleeding and as a salve, though Sugg points out that any starch or powder would generally stop bleeding.

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Corpses were also taken from wars, and criminal executions—violent deaths were seen to give the body particular medicinal power. Dissection and corpse medicine became somewhat socially intertwined, with bodies dug straight from the ground. While some doctors may have drawn the line at preying on actual marked graves dug by families of the deceased rather than those of unclaimed bodies, ”bones and skulls were clearly in considerable demand around this time, and not everyone had the luck to live so close to an anonymous burial mound," writes Sugg.

If the mummy supply from abroad was lacking, it was an easy fix to prepare one from scratch. One recipe promoted by German physician Johann Schroeder in his 17th-century medical tome Pharmacopoeia Medico-Chymica is blatant about the uses of certain bodies over others in mummy-making:

“Take the fresh, unspotted cadaver of a redheaded man (because in them the blood is thinner and the flesh hence more excellent) aged about twenty-four, who has been executed and died a violent death. Let the corpse lie one day and night in the sun and moon—but the weather must be good. Cut the flesh in pieces and sprinkle it with myrrh and just a little aloe. Then soak it in spirits of wine for several days, hang it up for 6 or 10 hours, soak it again in spirits of wine, then let the pieces dry in dry air in a shady spot. Thus they will be similar to smoked meat, and will not stink.”

Whether doctors had a bonafide Egyptian mummy or a locally sourced version on hand, they made use of every piece for their practice. Some corpse medicine treatments seemed to have nothing to do with the ailment; fingernails, skull, mistletoe, and peony root were believed to help cure epilepsy, though you could also try dried human heart. Or, Sugg writes, if you wanted to get fancier with your cures, you could infuse water with “lily, lavender, malmsey, and three pounds of human brain.” The whole corpse could be dried and sold as one piece, which Schroeder recommended to other doctors, lest they be cheated with subpar materials.

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Even the less preservable parts of the body were used; an ointment of human fat and cinnabar was said to cure patients of various ailments including hydrophobia, now commonly known as rabies. To prepare human fat for use, 18th-century French pharmacist Comte Antoine-François de Fourcroy called for cutting the fat into pieces with “membranes and vessels separated” in his book Elements of Chemistry and Natural History, in which he cites physicians using human fat in cures around Europe. After the fat was washed in water and allowed to melt, it was “poured into a glazed earthen vessel” to solidify; Fourcroy adds helpfully that “twenty eight ounces of human fat” lends about 20 ounces of oil.

Medical beliefs surrounding corpse medicine were sometimes, to put it mildly, at odds with other cultural or religious beliefs during corpse medicine’s popularity. Sugg points out that 17th-century Europeans decried cannibalism, and used accusations of cannibalism against colonized people as a justification for violence.

“Humans are able, and in fact do all the time, carry these contradictory ideas,” explains Zoe Crossland, Archaeologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Even protestant Christians who decried the cannibalism implied by the Catholic eucharist, which was a huge debate in the 1600s, could easily separate their religious beliefs from their desires for the best cures around. Edward Taylor, a Puritan physician who practiced corpse medicine in New England for over 40 years, was one of many religious physicians who promoted the use of dead bodies as cures. Crossland notes that while many relationships between religion and medicine may have existed in Taylor’s time, medical cannibalism and its relationship to his religion might not have been clear, especially if the medicine didn't come directly from his Christian community's dogma. “He may not even have articulated or seen this as contradictory as we do now,” she says.

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In Europe, the autopsy was growing in popularity as a way to learn about the body, but medical dissection was often seen as a punishment to the dead, and reserved for those considered undesirable in society. Some of the hype around corpse medicine grew from a mix of folk beliefs and medical practices; blood was believed to be such a powerful substance that it was collected at the gallows straight from the recently executed.

The practice of corpse medicine waned over time, but it lasted in small bursts for centuries after its heyday. Sometimes any substance that touched or came from a dead body was seen as potentially healing, even into the 19th century in the U.K.; an 1893 collection of folk cures explains that “Coffin water is considered good for warts, and the water with which a corpse has been washed has been recently given to a man in Glasgow as a remedy for fits.”

Richard Baxter relied on the most current medical knowledge of his day to alleviate his pains, but so do we. While we might cringe at these corpse medicine cures, medical practices in the U.S. and U.K. still involve human body parts, including organ donation, engineering fat cells for medicine, corpse-donated dental grafts and human blood.

“We don’t necessarily take it orally … but we use blood in all sorts of ways,” with inoculations and blood transfusions among them, Crossland says, pointing out some similarities to how people thought of those cures of old. “We get it from the living, not from the dead—but we don’t view that as cannibalistic. We see it as part of the medical world.”

A Look Back at America's Psychedelic Countercultural Witch Music

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In the middle of the 20th century, pretty much anything went, in hip American circles, when it came to unlocking the doors of perception. A generation bent on questioning the social and moral status quo of the establishment was on an earnest quest for happiness, fulfillment and mind expansion. On this quest, a wide variety of tools and technologies were fair game for exploration—from alternative family and living structures (such as communal living or open marriage) to nonwestern belief systems and spiritual traditions, like the Zen Buddhism so beloved by the Beat poets. Searchers dabbled in psychedelics, astrology, yoga, Satanism, eccentric variations on Judeo-Christian faith, and psychology-driven groups, cults, and practices like EST and Scientology.

There was also magic. The surface aesthetics of witchcraft—long and flowing hair, beards and fabric, plus arcane symbols—dovetailed nicely with hippie fashion, and women-centered practice and a sense of connectedness to the earth and moon fit in well with new waves of female liberation and environmental consciousness.

The ‘60s counterculture wasn’t the first flowering of interest in magical practice or free love or Eastern spirituality in industrialized Western society. Waves had come and gone, most recently at the turn of the 20th century and in the 1920s creating recent lineages and legacies for the beatnik and hippie-era seekers to connect to. But one thing that was new, or new enough, was the utter explosion of the recorded-music industry and its overt alliance to the counterculture, and that is what we have to thank for a fascinating mini-trend of trippy recordings meant to open up the listener’s connection to the eternal power of the stars and her own innate magical ability to shape her destiny—and also sound very neat at cocktail parties.

Mainstream rock and rollers like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, of course, had dabbled in occult imagery and themes. Other recording artists had more direct connections to the dark arts: Graham Bond, a sax player and organist who played with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce before the other two musicians would go on to join Eric Clapton and become Cream, was to all accounts a practicing occultist in the Aleister Crowley mode, using a well-known quote (“Love is the Law”) from Crowley’s Book of the Law as an album title and recording under the name Holy Magick. Wilburn Burchette, who released seven albums in the ‘70s, regarded his psychedelia-meets-New Age guitar compositions as tools for mystical practice.

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Vincent Price’s 1969 double album Witchcraft & Magic: Adventures in Demonology falls somewhere in between entertainment and instruction; bubbling cauldrons, whistling winds and other familiar chilling-and-thrilling sound effects underscore actresses quoting lines from Macbeth and his own signature over-the-top macabre theatricality. But he’s also quite deadpan in giving instructions for spellwork over creepy synth, and his tales of witchcraft in history, on tracks with titles like “Hitler and Witchcraft” and “Witch Tortures” if lurid, seem well-researched and accurate.

Louise Huebner, who released her Seduction Through Witchcraft album on the Warner Brothers label the same year, on the other hand, was definitely no actor. A psychic, palm reader and astrologer since childhood, Huebner had written several books on the occult and had a regular public presence in Los Angeles media, appearing frequently on radio and TV in her capacity as a practitioner of the esoteric arts. In her thirties when she recorded the album, she cut a rather elegant figure, with lush brunette waves and dramatically arched eyebrows adding to her glamorous, sexy hippie-witch look. When she received the formal designation of “Official Witch of Los Angeles County” at the Hollywood Bowl in 1968—a position that hadn’t been filled before, and hasn’t since—she cast a spell to increase the sexual vitality of her magical constituents. The spoken-word album, though it includes witch history and other general rituals described over electronic exotica, is, as the title implies, a sensual listen, with Huebner purring her way through the spells.

Seduction Through Witchcraft was reissued on vinyl in 2009. For Halloween 2017, a similar album (The Hour of the Witch) of recited spells from a Detroit-based witch named Gundella the Green Witch, originally released in 1971, got a similar treatment. It’s a beautifully done package, pressed on bright, antifreeze-green vinyl, and it includes a delightful booklet compiling examples from a column Gundella wrote—titled “Witch Watch”—for a regional newspaper chain in the ‘70s, in which, like an spookier, more prescriptive Dear Abby, she advised her readers on spells to assist in their particular predicaments.

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The Hour of the Witch comprises several tracks of spell instruction (the “Spell to Make a Man Love You – Flower Bulb” is a notably little less than half as long as the “Spell to Make a Woman Love You – Wax Doll”) backed by subtle, mood-setting synthesizer music composed and performed by Gundella’s son. And that—very charmingly —is where its similarity to Seduction through Witchcraft, Adventures in Demonology or The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds ends.

On tape, the accomplished sorceress Gundella, whose legal name was Marion Kuclo, sounds every inch the sensible Midwestern schoolteacher that she, having spent more than 20 years working in the Michigan public school system, was. The Hour of the Witch isn’t sexy, or dramatic, or space-age hip: it’s simply a no-nonsense guide to spellcasting, dictated in the sort of brisk, patient, authoritative voice one might also trust for advice on how to plant tulips, or breed spaniels. Giving directions on how to strain a potion, she suggests using cheesecloth, or “perhaps one of those new disposable coffee filters.” It’s easy to imagine her—maybe wearing the flowered muumuu she sports on the album cover—in front of the camera for the Food Network or a more eldritch version thereof, pleasantly shepherding novice magicians through a recipe. (“If you don’t have fresh eye of newt,” she might have said, “canned or frozen is fine.”)

Gundella’s daughter, Madilynne Mulleague, wrote liner notes to The Hour of the Witch, portraying her mother as the good-natured, friendly Michigan matriarch who comes across on the recording. She was a natural teacher, with boundless creativity and enthusiasm that benefited her grade-school students as well as her grown-up friends and acquaintances: she delighted in throwing theme parties, for which she would make piñatas, write original plays, and once, for a luau, built a six-foot-tall volcano—but she drew the line, Madilynne wrote, at serving alcohol. In 1992, the year before Gundella died from cancer, she published a book on Michigan-area hauntings, although she had long since given over her newspaper column from spellcraft to recipes and culinary advice.

It’s spookily ironic, then, that for all of her down-to-earth, demystified, cookbook-witch lifestyle, Gundella’s story is the one with the real-life horror for its coda. The famous witch had a second daughter, Veronica, who inherited her interest in magic and had opened a shop, Gundella’s Witchcraft and Wares, four years after her mother’s death, telling fortunes and selling tarot cards, spellbooks, and other occult items. Veronica was married to a man named Peter Raub, with whom she had four children. On Halloween morning 1999, the morning after the couple had hosted a Halloween party, Veronica Kuclo-Raub was found stabbed to death in the couple’s bed. “Man arrested in death of his witch wife,” read the Detroit News headline.

Mr. Raub, who had been charged with spousal abuse three years prior to the murder, was arrested in Los Angeles after a week-long manhunt. The children, three daughters and a son, went to stay with Ms. Mulleague, according to a mid-November report from the Detroit News—which also, in a surprisingly sensitive move for the time, ran a short piece examining its use of language in the coverage of Kuclo-Raub’s murder.

“In hindsight, we shouldn't have said the slain woman was a witch in the headline,” wrote the News’ public editor. “Her religion was a critical part of her life, but not pertinent as it relates to the tragedy.”

Certainly, that’s the kind of sensible, thoughtful behavior that Gundella—the mom, the teacher, the advice columnist, the Green Witch—would have wanted to see.

The Effort to Bring Sail Freight Back to New York’s Hudson River

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At any given moment, more than 20 million shipping containers full of raw materials and finished products and everything in between are crisscrossing the ocean, neatly stacked on ships. Other goods travel by rail or plane. Even the hyperlocal produce at your nearest farmers’ market was packed into a truck and driven there. The shipping industry makes our modern global economy tick. But before engines powered trains and trucks and ships, moving goods any considerable distance relied on wind and water. A new project on New York's Hudson River is looking to bring that spirit back—with carbon-neutral local sail freight.

The Hudson River starts up in New York's Adirondack Mountains, runs through Albany, down between Manhattan and New Jersey, and ends at New York Harbor. South of Troy, it's considered a tidal estuary, with brackish water rising and falling by as much as six feet every day. The waterway has always been an important route for moving people and things, first by canoe, and then later by sloop. Sloops, single-mast sailboats, were a common Dutch style that first plied the river in the 17th century. A trip from New York City to Albany by sloop took roughly a week, depending on winds and tides, and could only be made in warmer months when the waterway wasn't iced over. It was all much too slow for moving perishable goods.

Things sped up a bit in 1807, when the first steamer ship made the trip, in about a day. Fruit, milk, and impatient passengers could be moved upriver with relative speed. Later steamers were faster, and dedicated passenger steamers added comfort to the trip, a popular leisure option through the 1920s. The construction of a railroad line in the middle of the 19th century, however, changed the local shipping industry. Perishable goods were sent by rail, while heavier bulk goods, such as construction materials, coal, large blocks of ice, and grain, were still loaded onto steamers.

By the mid-20th century, industrial river traffic consisted mostly of barges, and communities turned away from the water. Hudson, for example, "was built as a city that was interacting with the river, but then there certainly was a period of time when that was forgotten," says Sam Merrett. Merrett is captain of the schooner Apollonia, the new sail freight project. "There used to be a bay south of town where all the big sailboats would dock, and that bay literally got cut off when they put in the train track. It's now completely sedimented and silted in. You wouldn't even recognize it as part of the river, it just looks like a kind of wetland-y marsh zone."

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Many Hudson River towns still have some waterfront infrastructure, historically used for loading and unloading cargo, but dockage is now a major challenge for a ship like Apollonia. Jason Marlow, a sailor on the schooner, points to towns such as Cold Springs and Peekskill as places where residents are enthusiastic about developing riverfront access. Towns on the western side of the river, such as Athens, New York, are also ideal, as they don't have a railroad blocking their river access.

The boat that Merrett and his crew have enlisted is a 64-foot-long, 15-foot-wide, steel-hulled schooner that was built in Baltimore in 1946. In addition to sails, the ship has a diesel engine—readied to run on used vegetable oil—to help it maneuver 20,000 pounds of cargo. The crew is partnering with local businesses along the river to offer an alternative to moving products by truck. The Apollonia is almost ready to carry freight on the Hudson next spring. The team is working on funding their final step—a mast and rigging for the ship's salvaged-material sails.

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Just like sail freight in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Apollonia won't be speedy enough for perishable goods. But the steel schooner is perfect for carrying heavy, shelf-stable products—think beer, wine, or cider. And the route should run both ways. A sea salt producer in Germantown, New York, needs saltwater to freeze and evaporate, so Apollonia will have a bladder, "like a Camelbak," says Merrett. "If we're ever down in New York [City] and don't have a load to bring back up, we can just go off shore a little bit, pump some clean salt water in, and that can be our load coming north."

"A regional, local focus is an important thing, including how we get things to and from a place," says Marlow. "You can get anything from anywhere, [so] why would you want it from here? Because it's special, this is where we live."

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