The attack with the infernal machine illustrated by P. C. Geissler (1835) (via Bibliothèque nationale de France)

The French Revolution wasn't the end of kings in France. In 1830, the July Monarchy controlled by the wealthy elite took power, and King Louis-Philippe ruled. There were seven assassination attempts on this new king, but none so fantastic as Giuseppe Mario Fieschi's "infernal machine."

Fieschi, a Corsican with a prison record for fraud, was joined by co-conspirators Theodore Pepin and Pierre Morey, who encouraged the building of his diabolical device. Rather than fire just one shot at the king, or even three if the trio joined together, Fieschi constructed a mutant weapon with 25 barrels that could shoot at once, all pointing in different directions. The machine of wood and iron was finally set up on the third story of 50 Boulevard du Temple in Paris, and on July 28, 1835 put to its macabre test.

The infernal machine on display at the French National Archives (photograph by the author)

Unfortunately, while gifted with super villain ideas for munitions, Fieschi was also foiled by the complexity of his plan. As the king road by with the royal family in a procession, the infernal machine did let out a hideous volley. Unfortunately among the 42 injured was Fieschi himself, who had part of his face ripped off by a defective barrel. Outside the street, as one report put it, was suddenly "strewn with dead and dying men and horses." 18 were killed, but not one of them was a member of the royal family, the king just barely grazed in the unaimed chaos. Smoke wafting from the third floor window immediately revealed the wounded Fieschi's hideout and he was quickly arrested. 

Rather than let his wounds fester, he was treated with the top physician care available for a dramatic trial, a spectacle that the Corsican readily adopted. According to Jill Harsin's Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830-1848, at the trial he "clearly embraced his celebrity status, assumed that the slightest details about himself would interest the court, and entered into numerous narcissistic rambles about his thoughts, emotions, and habits."

No good for Fieschi, who would ultimately be sentenced to death by guillotine, his perfectly healed head lopped off on February 19, 1836, alongside Pepin and Morey. But even immediately after the brutal massacre of the procession, the infernal machine was causing a sensation. A biography on Fieschi describing its gory details was released the same year as the attack, and in London a replica went on display that August alongside a Fieschi mannequin. A newspaper report described his unflattering faux double as "very ill-looking ; his immense forehead, overhanging brow, deep-sunken eyes, and high cheek-bones, make more repulsive the animal character of his features." Even his severed head would get the full oil painting portrait treatment: 

The infernal machine is now on display at the National Archives in Paris, with a replica kept on view at the Paris Police Museum. Outside 50 Boulevard du Temple, a historic marker recalls the events of July 28, 1835. While unsuccessful as an implement of assassination (the 1848 Revolution would finally bring France into its Second Republic), the infernal machine remains one of the most spectacular and fiendish failures. 

The infernal machine at the National Archives (photograph by the author)

A replica of the infernal machine at the Paris Police Museum (photograph by the author)

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

Have you ever been in a building that doesn't have a thirteenth floor? Even in modern skyscrapers in the United States, some superstitions like this have persisted in the construction. In China, since the number four sounds almost like the word for death, many buildings will similarly lack this level.

All over the world, different cultures have their own ways of adapting architecture to beliefs in demons, specters, and ghosts. Here are six places guided by spirits. 

TIAN HOU GONG
Quanzhou, China

A decorative spirit wall blocks ghosts from entering the temple grounds (photograph by Vmenkov/Wikimedia)

Dedicated to the Tian Hou ("Heavenly Empress"), also known as Mazu the Sea Goddess, many sailors and fishermen have worshipped at this Chinese temple over the years for prosperity and safety in their perilous occupations. Giant statutes of turtles decorate the temple grounds, but a notable architectural element is the spirit screen (影壁) placed squarely in front of the main entrance gate.

Known also as a spirit wall, this is positioned in order to deter malevolent ghosts from entering the temple. Spirit walls used to be a privilege reserved for palaces and the mansions of nobility, so usage was not widespread in architecture until much later.

ERAWAN SHRINE
Bangkok, Thailand

Erawan Shrine (photograph by author)

Surrounded by luxury hotels in the heart of bustling Bangkok, the Erawan Shrine is a popular place to meet up. Tourists and locals alike gather to admire the garlands of flowers and to pray. The construction of this famous shrine in the 1950s was actually meant to appease the land spirits possibly offended by the building of the nearby Erawan Hotel.

The spirits were believed to be responsible for delaying the hotel's construction by injuring the laborers and causing the loss of a shipment of Italian marble intended for the building. To add to the cacophony of angry ghosts swarming around the Ratchaprasong intersection, the government had historically executed criminals in the same place.

A Hindu shrine was seen as a solution, and the hotel plans were modified to accommodate a statue of Than Tao Mahaprom. As a god with four faces, his visages radiate kindness, mercy, impartiality, and sympathy. No further mishaps delayed the construction of the hotel after his installment.

Than Tao Mahaprom and his offerings (photograph by author)

WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE
San Jose, California

Winchester Mystery House (photograph by Roxanna Salceda/Wikipedia) 

Known as the "Gun that Won the West," the Winchester rifle was the most popular weapon among American settlers pushing into Indian lands in the last quarter of the 19th century. After the inventor of the rifle died in 1880, ownership of the company passed to his son, who died the next year. William's wife Sarah inherited the massive wealth, granting her a daily income of about $30,000 in today's money. With the double deaths in her family, Sarah believed the fortune to be cursed, and she sought the guidance of a medium. She was told to continuously build a mansion in California or ghosts would continue to haunt her and her family.

In 1884, Sarah bought an unfinished farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley. Construction began and never stopped for 38 years. Carpenters worked day and night, and with no architect to plan the building, the rooms grew into an organic architectural form. Doors and stairs went to nowhere, windows overlooked other rooms, and stairs were mismatched with the floors they ascended to. On September 5, 1922, Sarah died and work on the house finally stopped. 

The Winchester Mystery House today has survived two massive earthquakes with its 160 rooms, 40 bedrooms, and two ballrooms. Within the vast chambers of the house, there are 10,000 panes of glass, 19 chimneys, and it all sprawls across 162 acres.

HIJI CASTLE
Hiji, Japan

Hiji Castle (photograph by Mukai/Wikimedia)

Construction of Hiji Castle (日出城) started in 1601 overlooking Japan's Beppu Bay. Traditional Japanese beliefs would say that ghosts all come into buildings from the northeast corner, which is referred to as the kimon (鬼門), or demon gate.

As you might guess, the demon gate is a bad place to put a door or window (or plumbing), and this has been true across much of Japan's architecture. In Hiji Castle though, the architects went one step further and built a guard tower there to watch for evil spirits. The tower itself even has the northeast corner cut off for extra protection. 

GEORGE STICKNEY HOUSE
Bull Valley, Illinois

George Stickney House (photograph by Ronincmc/Wikimedia)

The Stickneys were a curious couple who decided to build their home in 1836 in Bull Valley, Illinois. Safe from nosy neighbors in the sparsely populated area, the Stickneys were free to practice their fervent belief in spiritualism. The couple thought the spirit world could speak to and through them, and their house was designed to allow these otherworldly visitors to move freely. Every corner was rounded, and none of the architecture met at a sharp angle, since abrupt corners were thought to hinder ghostly movement. 

The Stickney House takes up two floors, with living spaces on the first floor and a massive ballroom on the second. This grand room was the setting for decadent séances for the couple and their friends to commune with the dead. Among the many denizens of the spirit world who supposedly spoke to the Stickneys were their own dead children. Sylvia had ten children in her lifetime, and only three survived to adulthood. George Stickney himself passed into the legend of the house, allegedly found dead in a corner of the home that was accidentally built at a forbidden 90 degrees.

Although used today as the Bull Valley government and police center, the Stickney House is still believed by some to host spiritual visitors, sometimes reported by police officers themselves.

OLD ROUND CHURCH
Richmond, Vermont

Old Round Church (photograph by Butson/Atlas Obscura)

Although not a true circle, the 16-sided polygon (hexadecagon, for you geometry nerds) Old Round Church was constructed in 1812 to serve as the town hall and a shared house of worship. Five squabbling Protestant factions called Richmond home at the time, and the church was officially created to bring together the Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Universalists.

The legends are more fun though, and it is said that the architect William Rhodes put together the multifaceted design around a central belfry in order to leave no corners for Satan to hide. Another story argues that 17 carpenters were involved in the project, one building the belfry and the others each taking ownership of a wall. Less imaginative people would point out that William Rhodes' hometown had a similar church that he probably copied for the Old Round Church.

All photos by Matthew Maye & Lynn Freehill-Maye unless noted

There are few places on earth where can you consume a flying creature of the night. An Indian Ocean island chain is among them.

You might be wheeling around the Seychelles, admiring island birds and flowers, when the scene turns darker. Your guide points out a bat trap in the sky. Fishing wire dangles from a palm tree, hooks at the bottom. The Seychellois have been catching and cooking fruit bat since the days of slavery, he explains.

And then he delivers you to Marie Antoinette's, the oldest restaurant on Mahé island, and vanishes. You are left on your own to choose: Do you want to sample curried bat meat cut from tiny wings?

My husband and I faced this decision on our first-anniversary trip to the Seychelles. We had expected glamour on these tropical islands 1,000 miles off the coast of Madagascar. After all, this was where Prince William and his wife Kate had honeymooned; George and Amal Clooney would be next. But with bat, we had found the islands’ creepier edge. Fruit bats swooped over Mahé not just at night, but even at high noon.

Like snails in France, we discovered, bat in the Seychelles is a delicacy. Slaves used to hit the animals they call "flying foxes" with stones or clubs, local historian Tony Mathiot told me later. According to Mathiot’s research, the Seychellois palate really developed a taste for bat flesh in the 1940s. In those years, many locals bought hunting rifles to expressly to shoot the flying mammals.

Seychelles Fruit Bat on La Digue Island (photograph by Marion Schneider & Christoph Aistleitner/Wikimedia)

Fruit bats flying in the Seychelles (photograph by Gerwin Sturm/Flickr)

All 100 or so of the country's rifles were collected after a coup d'etat in 1977. Without guns, the bat population really took flight. These days, nets and hooks allow now-plentiful fruit bat to be caught, skinned, and curried. The bat trap that our guide, Alrick Agricole, pointed to was an example. Each is carefully placed next to ripening mango or breadfruit so the bats get caught going for the nectar.

Curried bat is appreciated as a "delectable" dish in the Seychelles, Mathiot told me — but some locals and tourists refuse it. "Those who revolt at the thought of eating bat say it's because when the little creature has been skinned, its small body resembles that of a human being — which is true," he says.

Back at Marie Antoinette's, my usually adventurous-foodie husband was squeamish about ordering the fruit bat. I insisted this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. When the bat arrived oozing brown curry sauce, though, even I was daunted by its tininess. We struggled to knife meat off the wings bent across our plates. After sawing at it, we were rewarded with what tasted like bits of extra-tough duck.

There are other reasons to avoid the meat. Fruit bat, the largest bat species, is also eaten in places like West Africa, Papau New Guinea, and Gaum. But health officials warn against eating them, saying they can carry disease.

When he reappeared, Agricole laughed to see us holding utensils. "You must gnaw them like chicken wings!" he said. "Lots of tiny bones."

For 50 years, starting in 1949, a man visited Edgar Allan Poe's grave every year on his birthday and raised a toast to the poet. Leaving behind roses and Cognac, the mysterious figure became known as the Poe Toaster. The identity of the Poe Toaster has never been revealed and the visits ceased in 2009. 

In honor of Edgar Allan Poe's 205th birthday, and in memory of the now-vanished Poe Toaster, Atlas Obscura wanted to offer our very own literary and literal toast to Poe. This one's for you Edgar. 

See all of our Poe places and articles in our Edgar Allan Poe category and special thanks to Burnt Impressions for their help.

Text and photographs by Michael Bukowski & Jeanne D'Angelo

If you wander the streets of Lucerne, you'll doubtlessly cross the Spreuer Bridge at some point. It's probably one of Switzerland's most notable series of Totentanz (Dance of Death) paintings with 45 of the original 67 panels still intact. However, 20 kilometers outside the city, in the quiet suburb of Wolhusen, one of the most unique Dance Of Death paintings is housed in an unassuming mortuary chapel. What makes it so special is that there are actual human skulls set into the plaster of the large mural that circles around the ceiling.

Details about the Wolhusen Totentanz are hard to come by in English. From what we can gather, it was constructed in 1657 or 1661 by the Wendelin Brotherhood and painted by an unknown artist. After it was completed, it seems to have been forgotten for a century or two until Professor Dr. Rudolf Rahn was credited with "bringing it to the public's awareness" in 1875. It was then restored three times; 1901, 1958, and lastly in 2006.

When you first approach the chapel, it looks small and quaint. Your first clue that it is something unique are the human skulls embedded in the frame of the entrance. One on each side about head height, and one at the top of the arch, loom over you like watchmen, with Swiss coins placed carefully in the empty eye sockets.

Inside, the mural is comprised of a series of figures in the classic Dance of Death motif, showing people from all walks of life (kings, bishops, musicians, and peasants) being led away by dancing skeletal figures, each of which has a real human skull set in the plaster where its head should be. The skulls are even situated to match the angle of the skeletons' poses, with one set in the plaster face first to show the skeleton with its back turned to the viewer.

Wolhusen itself looks like a typical Swiss town, with centuries old cottages nestled next to modern storefronts and all surrounded by hills. Like most churches in Switzerland, the chapel is left unlocked and unattended. Which means, not only will you probably have the quiet chapel completely to yourself, but you may even need to turn the lights on!

To get there, take the S6 Train from Lucerne to Langenthal (approx. 20 min.) and get off at Wolhusen, the 5th stop. From the train station head east on Bahnhofstrasse until you get to the traffic circle and make a slight right onto Menznauerstrasse. Then make a left onto Kirchegasse. This will lead to you to the cemetery adjacent to St. Andreas Church, the mortuary chapel is on the hill in the back.

Panteón Real de El Escorial (photograph by Bocachete/Wikimedia)

Every royal family has its ostentatious burial chamber, from Basilique Saint-Denis in France to the Hapsburg Imperial Crypt in Austria. In Spain, 26 gold and marble tombs are installed in San Lorenzo del Escorial, containing every monarch since the 16th century's Charles V. However, before these regal remains are allowed to enter their gilded sepulchers, they must first be reduced to bones in the "Rotting Room."

Rotting Room is the unglamorous translation of "El Pudridero." When Felipe II designed the gargantuan El Escorial royal complex in the 16th century northwest of Madrid, he practically made it a shrine of death. Containing a Hall of Battles full of detailed war murals, a sort of wedding cake-shaped tomb encasing royal babies, and even arranged with its granite architecture like the gridiron on which San Lorenzo was roasted alive, the palace is one big memento mori. Felipe II also designed it as his own tomb.

Diagram of the Royal Pantheon (by SalomonSegundo/Wikimedia)

The Royal Pantheon (Panteón Real de El Escorial) is all ornate marble with its stacks of identical tombs and their gleaming nameplates. But their cohesive design also means it's a one-size-fits-all situation, so before this beautiful grave, each monarch must take a trip to the Rotting Room. Located behind the Pantheon walls, accessible only to monks at the Escorial monastery, this is a secretive room accessed by a private passage (here's the only known photo inside). It's here where for at least 20 years mortal kings — and queens who birthed kings — decompose beneath lime until they are completely bone.

Centuries later, the Rotting Room is still in use. The parents of King Juan Carlos I, who just abdicated his throne to his son Felipe VI last year, are reportedly still inside the rotting room, awaiting their transfer. However, after them the Pantheon will be full, so whether Juan Carlos will be eternally among the glimmering gold tombs of the past Spanish monarchs remains a question. 

Tombs of Carlos and Felipe in the Pantheon (photograph by Gabriel Rodríguez/Flickr)

The Royal Pantheon (photograph by Alberto/Flickr)

photograph by Bocachete/Wikimedia

photograph by Rogelio/Flickr

Stairs down to the Pantheon (photograph by losmininos/Flickr)

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

Cherry the dog (photograph by the author)

They say every dog shall have its day, and that's certainly the case for a Pekingese named Cherry, immortalized in the Sydney Justice and Police Museum's permanent collection for providing key evidence in Australia’s first major child-kidnapping and murder case. 

It was the crime that shocked the nation. On July 7, 1960, at 8:30 am, eight-year-old Graeme Thorne was abducted on his way to school. A £25,000 ransom was demanded by telephone; the kidnapper targeted the boy because his father, Basil Thorne, had just won the Opera House Lottery.

Graeme's body was later found on a vacant lot in Seaforth, wrapped in a traveling rug; his hands and feet were bound with string and cause of death was determined to be a blow to the head and/or asphyxiation.

Forensic evidence led police to the house of Stephen Bradley, a Hungarian immigrant. Hairs from a Pekingese found on the rug wrapped around the child's body matched tufts found in Bradley’s vacuum cleaner bag and were traced to his dog, Cherry. This moulting mutt proved the lynchpin of the case, providing sufficient evidence to charge Bradley, who had fled for England and abandoned his pet in a vet's kennel at Rushcutters Bay. The animal was discovered there by police.

During the ensuing trial, Cherry was hit by a car — an accidental death by all accounts — and the canine corpse was sent to a taxidermist before being introduced as evidence. Bradley was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, dying in Goulburn Gaol in 1968.

Cherry isn’t the only taxidermied dog now on display at the Sydney Justice and Police Museum. Find out more on the Atlas Obscura page for the site, which includes information on Tess the Alsatian, the first canine to perform official duties as part of the Sydney Police Dog Unit formed in 1932.

Cherry discovered by police (courtesy Sydney Justice and Police Museum archive)

Cherry the dog (photograph by Stilgherrian/Flickr)

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

As buildings inspired by a belief in a higher power, churches often have soaring ceilings, detailed stonework, and other architectural flairs that make them simply amazing structures in their own right. When these churches are no longer used as places of worship, new innovative uses of the space can preserve that sense of awe, reimagining the gorgeous interiors for a new purpose. Here are eight incredible rebirths of former churches.

SKATERHAM
Surrey, England

A skater on one of Skaterham's ramps (photograph by Austin Fraser-Jones/Flickr)

In the former Guard's Chapel of the Caterham Barracks Trust in Surrey, England, an indoor skate park known as Skaterham now houses endless ramps, quarterpipes, and jump boxes. 

The brainchild of a youth conference held in 1999, Skaterham grew from an attempt to find out what the young people in the local area needed, and wanted. The kids themselves were consulted on every aspect of the design, and now over 26,000 people count themselves as Skaterham members. In addition to the skating facilities, there is a restaurant and a skate shop, all run by young volunteers.

Skaterham (photograph by OLi PHiPPS/Flickr)

SELEXYZ DOMINICANEN
Maastricht, Netherlands

Bookstore patrons inside the Selexyz Dominicanen (photograph by Bert Kaufmann/Flickr)

A gothic church consecrated in 1294 by the St. Dominic's Order of Predicators is now a sleek bookstore in the heart of Maastricht, Netherlands.

No religious functions have been held here since 1794, which is when the church was first repurposed by Napoleon's army for military purposes. Since then, it's been a town archive, warehouse, and even briefly a space for bike storage. In 2005, the town decided to convert it into the Selexyz Dominicanen bookstore that contains 1,200 square meters of literary retail space.

Stairs lead visitors up to imposing black steel bookcases, which also lend an up-close look at the vaults of the nave and the detailed frescoes. Upwards of 700,000 people stream through this old church every year to peruse the over 25,000 books.

Selexyz Dominicanen (photograph by Minke Wagenaar/Flickr)

ENTREPRENÖRSKYRKAN
Stockholm, Sweden

Aerial view of the Entreprenörskyrkan (photograph by Fredrik Wass/Flickr)

Known as the Entreprenörskyrkan, the "Entrepreneurs Church" in Stockholm is a co-working space housed in a former Greek Orthodox Church.

Small business start-ups now populate the main hall, filling the open-office space with spunky, techie energy. On any given day, there are hackathons, video game nights, start-up socials, and other tech events.

Entreprenörskyrkan (photograph by Erik Starck/Flickr)

MONIQUE-CORRIVEAU LIBRARY
Quebec, Canada

Exterior of the Monique-Corriveau Library (photograph by Esteban Ravanal/dsgnr.cl)

Canadian architect Jean-Marie Roy designed the dramatic profile of Quebec's St. Denys-du-Plateau Church in 1964, which in winter appears to float just above the ground.

Later deconsecrated and renamed as the Monique-Corriveau Library after a local author, the ex-church is now a public library and local community center. Visitors enter the building through a glass atrium in the church's former nave, and can enjoy the library's offerings amidst bold reflective colors that enhance the white brilliance of the original church. 

Rêver ("to dream") in the Bibliothèque Monique-Corriveau (photograph by Jeangagnon/Wikimedia)

BARCELONA SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER
Barcelona, Spain

MareNostrum's glass box (courtesy of Barcelona Supercomputing Center)

Inside the stone halls of the 19th-century Chapel Torre Girona, a supercomputer named MareNostrum beeps away in a massive glass box that displays its electronic innards along the length of the old church's main hall.

The church itself was rebuilt after the Spanish Civil War, and is located on the campus of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Used as a Catholic church until 1960, the space was deconsecrated and transformed into an events space before the Barcelona Supercomputing Center moved in.

MareNostrum has been operating since 2005, working its way towards groundbreaking discoveries in genetics, weather forecasting, and astrophysics at a rate of 63.8 trillion operations per second. In 2012, researchers at the Center reported breakthroughs in antigen therapy by using MareNostrum to simulate the structure of triple helix DNA within a vacuum.

MareNostrum beeping away (courtesy of Barcelona Supercomputing Center)

CHURCH BREW WORKS
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

The Church Brew Works, Pittsburgh (photograph by ctj71081/Flickr) 

Inside what used to be St. John the Baptist Church in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh, the Church Brew Works has been malting and fermenting away since 1996, just three years after the original church closed its doors. 

In its flagship beers, the brewers make nods to the building's prior use, naming them Celestial Gold, Pipe Organ Pale Ale, and Pious Monk Dunkel. In 2012, the Church Brew Works won the Great American Beer Festival's Large Brewpub Brewer of the Year Award.

Church Brew Works (photograph by Bill Rand/Flickr)

MR. SMALL'S FUNHOUSE
Millvale, Pennsylvania, United States

Sleigh Bells performing at Mr. Small's Funhouse (photograph by RJ Schmidt/Flickr)

From the altar of what was an 18th-century Catholic church, also in the Pittsburgh area, performers now get different types of congregations jumping and dancing.

Nationally-known groups and indie rock types alike have come through Mr. Small's Funhouse. The building also now houses a maze of outdoor terraces and DJ club rooms. Across the street, Mr. Small's owners have bought a second abandoned church, and will be transforming it into a recording studio, café, and store for musical instruments.

Exterior of Mr. Small's Funhouse (photograph by Joseph/Flickr)

SOUTH RIVER VINEYARD
Shalersville, Ohio, United States

South River Vineyard at sunset (photograph by Mark K./Flickr)

Originally built in 1892 as a Methodist chapel 50 miles from its current location in Shalersville, Ohio, the South River Vineyard's building was moved in 2000 by the winery owner, Gene Sigel.

Gene had spotted the church while waiting for a street light to change and he was so intrigued by the structure that he asked a neighbor for permission to photograph it. The woman responded that he could do more than that since the building was for sale for just the cost of dismantling it. A week later, Gene was already in the process of shifting it to its current location, where it's now part of a charming vineyard.

South River Vineyard (photograph by Everett/Flickr)

The old walls of Pentridge Prison, Melbourne (photograph by Darmon Richter)

The history of Australia is closely interwoven with its role as a British Empire prison colony, and in many ways this ostensibly grim narrative could be said to have helped define the culture and developing personality of the nation over time: the sense of camaraderie and “mateship," the celebration of anti-establishment underdog heroes, even the bawdy language of Australian humor are able to find their correlates within the culture and mentality of a prison population.

Now 240 years after the first convict ships arrived, Australia has exploded into one of the key players on the world stage — with a robust GDP and a wealth of cultural exports. But if the mentality of a former prison colony has been assimilated over the years into a contemporary Australian culture, what of the physical scars left by that penal past?

In this article, we’ll be taking a look at seven former prison sites spread across Australia and Tasmania, some of them abandoned, some long since disappeared, but others earning a roaring trade as museums and sites of "dark tourism."

A collection of death masks at Old Melbourne Gaol (photograph by Darmon Richter)

The Prison Colony

During the late 18th and 19th centuries, Australia saw a radical population shift in the form of Western colonization. But it wasn’t just explorers, opportunists, and those in search of a fresh start who made their way to the Australasian continent; in the space of 80 years, the British government would send more than 165,000 convicts to Australia by sea, to be confined in any of a series of growing penal colonies on the island.

The Industrial Revolution in Britain resulted in a huge displacement of the population, and a loss of many jobs. As a result, the work houses were full, petty crime was at an all-time high, and the nation's gaols were overcrowded to the point of crisis. The people were hungry, and eight out of ten prisoners were in on theft charges. Up until 1776, somewhere in the region of 60,000 prisoners were deported to America, but after the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States another solution had to be found to the growing incarceration rate.

Transportation was deemed more savory than execution, and so when James Cook claimed the Australian east coast in the name of King George, a decision was made to start shipping the excess prison population away to this distant colony.

The first convict ships arrived in Botany Bay, the soon-to-be site of Sydney, in 1788. By 1824, penal colonies were established to the north in present-day Queensland, including a settlement at Moreton Bay that would in time grow to become Brisbane. The Brisbane penal colony was closed in 1839, from which point people would begin to colonize the area freely.

Fremantle Prison Inmates, 1971 (photograph by Iwelam/Wikimedia)

Western Australia

In the west of Australia, transportation of convicts was at its peak between 1850 and 1868, during which time almost 10,000 detainees would be incarcerated in purpose-built prisons. The most famous of these facilities was Fremantle Prison, a 15-acre site constructed using convict labor between 1851 and 1859.

Fremantle Prison remained in operation for almost 140 years, but it never truly recovered from a violent riot in 1988 in which guards were taken hostage and fires caused approximately $1.8 million in damages.

Today Fremantle Prison is the only World Heritage Listed Building anywhere in Western Australia. Since being memorialized in the form of a museum it has received more than three million visitors, offering tours of both the prison itself as well as the extensive labyrinth of tunnels located beneath.

Fremantle Prison Main Cellblock (photograph by Ghostieguide/Wikimedia)

Fremantle Prison Three-Division (photograph by Ghostieguide/Wikimedia)

The Fremantle scaffold, last used in 1964 (photograph by Chris Quinn/Wikimedia)

Fremantle Prison Tunnels (photograph by Ghostieguide/Wikimedia)

Victoria

In the state of Victoria, then still part of New South Wales, the first convict ships arrived in 1803. After several tentative attempts at establishing a penal settlement, the Port Philip District was sanctioned in 1837. Over the next 12 years, approximately 1,750 convicts were shipped directly from England.

The Old Melbourne Gaol, one of Australia’s most notorious penitentiaries, was opened in 1842. It served as the city's main prison until 1929, during which time a total of 133 inmates were hanged on-site. The prison boasted a number of "celebrity" inmates, including the outlaw bushranger and national underdog hero Ned Kelly, as well as the serial killer Frederick Bailey Deeming. Deeming, recently arrived from England, was theorized by some newspapers to be the true perpetrator of the Ripper murders in London. Both men met their end at the Melbourne scaffold.

Today dark tourism to Old Melbourne Gaol is a thriving industry, with the site receiving an estimated 140,000 visitors each year. The main cellblock has been turned into a museum, each individual cell adorned with personal effects of its former occupants, newspaper clippings, and rows of death masks in glass cabinets.

The main cell block at Old Melbourne Gaol (photograph by Darmon Richter) 

Old Melbourne Gaol exterior (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Cells in the Old City Watch House, Melbourne (photograph by Darmon Richter)

A holding pen in the City Watch  House (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Convict paraphernelia at Old Melbourne Gaol (photograph by Darmon Richter)

The corpses of prisoners executed at Old Melbourne Gaol were largely buried onsite in mass graves, and these would later be disturbed by construction work in 1929. When the graves were unearthed, there was a frantic rush of looters looking for a grisly souvenir, and before the police were able to take charge of the situation many of the bones had been removed.

The bodies left were reburied at Pentridge Prison.

Pentridge Prison opened in 1851, just north of Melbourne at Coburg. It operated through 1997, although in that time only 11 executions were carried out at the site. From 1980 onwards, Pentridge housed the infamous "Jika Jika" unit, and was home to some of Australia's most dangerous contemporary criminals: Mark "Chopper" Read and the Russell Street bombers included.

When the prison closed in 1997, the corpses beneath were once again exhumed, this time undergoing DNA testing in hopes of reuniting them with their descendants. Although many former convicts were identified, it transpired that Ned Kelly's skull had been stolen away, and possible leads on its whereabouts still make news headlines today.

Today, there isn’t much left of Pentridge Prison. The southern part of the site has since been developed into the gentrified "Pentridge Village" residential area, while the last of the gaol's bluestone towers now rise out of parks and parking lots. Only the D Division of the former Pentridge Prison still stands in its original form, with a number of ghost walks offered by the local group Lantern Tours.

The gates of Pentridge Prison, Coburg (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Security walls around the Pentridge site (photograph by Darmon Richter)

D Division is the last remaining prison block at Coburg (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Security gates at D Division, Coburg (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Another atmospheric Victoria site is the former Aradale Mental Hospital in the rural town of Ararat. The hospital was originally known as the Ararat Lunatic Asylum, and it was opened in 1865 to care for a growing number of metal patients diagnosed within the Victoria penal colony.

The asylum closed in 1998, and in 2001 a wine college was built on one portion of the site. The remaining buildings have been preserved as a museum, including the much-storied "J Ward" which today entertains a regular stream of visitors on ghost tours.

Ararat Lunatic Asylum, c.1880 (photograph by Victoria State Library/Wikimedia)

The J Ward building at Ararat (photograph by Rulesfan/Wikimedia)

There is another abandoned asylum in Victoria State, and one that has become a popular draw for tourists of an entirely different variety. Larundel Mental Asylum was built on the outskirts of Melbourne in 1938, and today this abandoned facility is a well-trafficked site amongst local street artists, photographers, urban explorers, and the usual stream of paranormal investigators.

The Larundel site at Bundoora was able to accommodate 750 secure patients in its heyday. It didn’t go straight into operation, but from the outbreak of WWII it served as a military hospital for five years and offered training grounds for WAAF operations. Even after that, the asylum buildings were used for a period as temporary post-war housing.

It was 15 years after construction that Larundel Asylum finally received psychiatric patients. The staff on site were equipped to deal with a range of conditions, specializing in acute psychotic and schizophrenic cases. In time, however, pharmaceutical treatments would start to replace the need for traditional institutional care, and Larundel finally closed its doors for good in the late 1990s.

Today this abandoned mental asylum stands in ruin. Parts of the site have been redeveloped, with 550 new homes appearing on the former grounds, but still the last few buildings remain. Largely derelict, these have become a popular destination amongst daredevil kids, as well as those practicing their photography or graffiti techniques. There are tales of hauntings, too — loud crashes, crying sounds coming through the walls, and most famously, the mysterious music box that can supposedly be heard playing in the asylum at midnight. According to the story, it belonged to a young girl who died at Larundel, and there are even videos on Youtube of visitors who claim to have documented the eerie phenomenon. 

The abandoned wards of Larundel Asylum (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Exploring the asylum (photograph by Darmon Richter)

Larundel's last wards are facing demolition plans (photograph by Darmon Richter)

The "haunted" ward on the third floor of the asylum (photograph by Darmon Richter) 

Tasmania

The island of Tasmania is worthy of mention, having accommodated more than its fair share of the growing convict population of Australia. The first colony was established at Hobart in 1804, in what was then known as "Van Diemen’s Land."

That first gaol isn't there any more, but in 1821 it was replaced with the new Campbell Street Gaol. This maximum security prison was built using convict labour, designed in the Georgian Renaissance style. Following some later extensions, by its peak it was able to hold more than 1,200 inmates. Between 1857 and 1946, this Tasmanian facility saw a total of 32 executions.

As the population continued to grow, the site was replaced by the new Risdon Prison; by the early 1960s the prison's full population had been relocated away from Campbell Street. Most of the buildings were then destroyed. Today just a few of the old prison wards remain, managed for tourism by the National Trust. 

In the 1980s the hanging scaffold was reconstructed for the benefit of visitors. Of particular note, though, is the Penitentiary Chapel Historic Site. This place of worship was built between 1831 and 1833, situated directly above a block of subterranean isolation cells. Some of Tasmania’s most notorious criminals were kept here at one point or another, including the English convict Mark Jeffery who was previously as a gravedigger on the Isle of the Dead at Port Arthur. 

Old Hobart Gaol on Campbell Street (photograph by Michael Thomsen/Wikimedia)

The chapel at Campbell Street Gaol (photograph by Michael Thomsen/Wikimedia)

Over on the west coast of Tasmania, the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station was established in 1820. It was situated on the remote Sarah Island and notoriously difficult to escape. In their desperation, convicts were reported to have drowned, starved, and in two documented cases, turned to cannibalism.

The Macquarie Harbour facility was replaced in 1830 by the colony at Port Arthur, and the buildings on Sarah Island were left to ruin. There’s little to see there today, other than a few collapsed stone walls and the outline of the former solitary cells. 

Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbor (photograph by M. Murphy/Wikimedia)

The remains of solitary cells on Sarah Island (photograph by Scott Davis/Wikimedia)

The newer Port Arthur prison was located on the Tasman Peninsula, some 35 miles southeast of the state capital at Hobart. This experimental "model prison" preferred solitary confinement over other forms of punishment, and in time earned a reputation as a particularly harsh and inhospitable destination for confinement.

Port Arthur was abandoned as a prison in 1877, and tourism followed fast. The location of the facility on the picturesque Tasman Peninsula certainly helped, and the newly built town of Carnarvon welcomed visitors who came for the local shooting, hunting, fishing and, of course, to marvel at the decaying ruins of the former prison colony.

By the 1970s, a great deal of work was put into preserving the site's striking sandstone architecture, the model prison, the chapel and guard tower in particular. In recent years even the Isle of the Dead — the site of the mass graves of executed prisoners — has been attracting a healthy stream of visitors, and Port Arthur survives today as Tasmania’s most popular tourist attraction.

Port Arthur Penitentiary (photograph by Martybugs/Wikimedia)

Inside the prison block at Port Arthur (photograph by Jörn Brauns/Wikimedia)

A convict-built church at Port Arthur (photograph by D. Gordon E. Robertson/Wikimedia)

The rarely-seen Cook fabric book (all photographs by the author unless indicated)

Located deep in the collections of a Canadian museum is a tiny book. Its corners are frayed, its spine cracked, its cover is worn. As the Royal BC Museum librarian carefully unties the rope around the custom-fitted box and lets the sides fall away, opening the cover and turning the tea-colored pages with her white nitrate gloves, it's revealed that this slim volume contains swatches of cloth. This book, which is only allowed to be handled a few times a year and is never on display for the general public because of its delicate condition, is one of the few remaining copies of Captain Cook’s catalogue of tapa cloth samples from his third and final voyage throughout the South Pacific. 

Published in London by object collector Alexander Shaw in 1787, this catalogue of tapa cloth (also known as Polynesian bark cloth) is a palpable reminder of the complex relationship Cook had to the islands he so rigorously explored, and a prototype for the interior decorator’s swatchbook. It is a book that documents, shows, and tells the stories of 38 different pieces of tapa cloth, all handmade from breadfruit trees, ficus, lace bark, and mulberry by women from Tonga to Figi to Tahiti.

One of the more pristine copies of the book was bought at auction in 1913 and brought to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia, where it’s been cared for ever since. As Claire Gilbert, expert librarian at the BC Museum, told me the morning of my visit, the title is quite a mouthful for a small book containing only 38 tiny specimens: A catalogue of the different specimens of cloth collected in the three voyages of Captain Cook to the southern hemisphere; with a particular account of the manner of the manufacturing the same in the various islands of the South Seas … and the verbal account of some of the most knowing of the navigators; with some anecdotes that happened to them among the natives.

The text, a wonderful mingling of technical cataloguing with first-person narrative accounts, is as fascinating as the samples themselves, revealing the history of a man who, obsessed and in love with the people of the South Pacific, took it upon himself to bring home a bit of fabric from every community he visited. Cook came from a long line of people obsessed with the life-cycles of exotic objects. Though obsessions with cataloguing, categorizing, and collecting go back thousands of years (anyone read Aristotle's History of Animals?), the rise of mass travel, global exploration, and cabinets of curiosity in Europe in the 18th century led to some, shall we say, interesting interpretations on the theme of collecting objects.

Naturalists ventured out to collect and catalogue thousands of plants, animals, and insects to help them understand the natural world; artists took to the sea to find new ways of dyeing tapestries, painting canvases, and tattooing bodies; explorers paid by royalty went to seek land and bring back samples of any and everything they found. In a very real sense, many of these collected objects and experiences — which were often told in the pages of newspapers, bound up in books, or sold to aristocratic curiosity cabinet exhibits — began to form the public experience of foreign places.

As a technical document (like many of the catalogues written by European explorers at this time), each snippet of tapa cloth in the Cook book is accompanied by a number and a brief description that tells where the object was from and for what — and how — it was used by the local communities and peoples. Though the book itself is small, some samples are large, taking up the whole page and allowing readers to see more of the pattern. Others are small and arranged three to a page, showing fragments of composition, color, line, contour, and design.

One of the more famous specimens, #34, a vibrantly-colored cloth dyed in geometric triangles, relates the touching story of a Tahitian woman who, aboard the HMS Resolution, nearly lost her young son in a trade between her community's chief and a British lieutenant. As Cook writes, before the trade could occur, the woman unbound the cloth she wore around her body, gave it to the shipmates, took the hand of her young son, and jumped overboard with him so they could escape the trade. Other specimens, such as #2, with the notation "From Otaheite. This is used to spread below the chiefs while at dinner under the trees," and #28, "Used as a sash, and under garments for the dancers at Otaheite," reveal simpler, everyday matters of life. Some cloths were used as bedding, some as undergarments, some as fine outerwear, and some as tablecloths. There is no apparent hierarchy to Cook's list: from the headdresses of kings to the underwear of peasants, there is a place for everything.

According to the Indiana University Art Museum, the fact that Cook felt the insatiable need to document both the extraordinary and the mundane is not surprising, given that the importance of barkcloth in Polynesian society cannot be overstated. Traditionally, the cycle of use for barkcloth is likened to the life cycle of a human being: it is first lovingly given life by the women's hands and then, after it is decorated and integrated into the community, it is given to ceremonial or ritual events, where it does its job for as many years as the fibers hold together. Then, it is eventually split into smaller pieces and made into clothing; later, blankets; and later still, as patches to stitch onto newer tapas, where the life cycle begins all over again.

No matter Cook’s purpose or the manner in which he acquired all of these cloths, the very act of it suggests an undeniable passion for, and unshakable interest in, gathering and sharing a small glimpse into the lives of people whose experiences were radically different from his own. There are plenty of preserved documents out there that reveal to us the European fascination with documenting in the 18th century. So why, hundreds of years later, is a book of fabric swatches still fascinating?

Joseph Gerena, a Manhattan art dealer, believes the answer is easy. In an article for the New York Times about the rise in tribal art interest, he wrote: "The attraction is primordial….[t]apa is very tactile….it lets us see the imaginations of peoples." What makes collecting something more than activity for its own sake is the way these objects indicate the immense capacity of human creativity, even as we do something as ordinary as clothe our bodies.

John Cleveley the Younger, Captain Cook's voyage in Tahiti (1787-88) (via Wikimedia)

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

The Museum of Everyday Life (all photographs by the author)

On entering the Museum of Everyday Life, you are immediately struck by two things. First, there is the sign telling you to turn the lights on when you arrive, and off when you leave: the museum is self-service. Second, the entryway displays the "New England Barns Found Objects Collection," which consists of discarded horseshoes, farm tools, glasses, and other objects found in the dirt around the building, or in neighboring barns. Both signal that this museum will be unlike any other you’ve experienced before. And that is its intention.

As its name suggests, the Museum of Everyday Life is dedicated to exploring and enshrining the role that ordinary, mundane objects play in our daily lives. Situated in a barn in Vermont's rural Northeast Kingdom with no street address, the museum can be discovered through word of mouth, by a chance visit to its website, or, more commonly (and delightfully), by stumbling upon the structure on a drive to other attractions in this bucolic part of the state.

Founder and "Chief Operating Philosopher" Clare Dolan, whose greatest invention may be her own job title, was faced with a set of concerns when she contemplated starting the museum. "I was wanting to poke fun at the museum as establishment, and to mock the high seriousness and expense of these institutions," she said. She began by writing a manifesto about what a museum should be. Among them:

• Down with sanctification of the "original"!
• Down with all things valuable and antique!
• Up with a new kind of museum, living and breathing and as common as dirt!

This spirit is enshrined in the museum's exhibits, which are equal parts whimsical and sincere reflections on the subjects. For the exhibit on matches, an array of matchboxes from around the world (including a saucy "x-rated" series which is behind a curtain in a tiny vestibule, and a violin made entirely from matches) pays homage to the homely tool whose power is inherent in the chemical reaction that lies in waiting.

A violin made of matches

Another exhibit, on toothbrushes, strips away their ordinariness through an exploration of their origins (the Chinese were using toothbrushes in the ninth century), aesthetics (from the racist "Darkie" toothbrushes to a doll/toothbrush hybrid with bristles at the end of a shapely high heeled leg), and uses. As Dolan notes, toothbrushes are intimate daily tools we put inside our mouths to groom a part of our skeletons, and this makes them both banal and exceptional.

The Museum of Everyday Life has the feel of a large-scale curiosity cabinet, albeit with ordinary objects. And therein lies its fascination. The project has become increasingly about exploring the transformational potential of homemade museums, where the exhibits are the "collections" we surround ourselves with everyday.

Dolan explained: "I now am becoming more sincerely interested the idea of the homemade museum as a real and actual potential kind of tool that can possibly transform our relationship to our lives — help us to be both more self-reflective and present in our day-to-day moments, and also maybe to actually transform the way we think about being 'ordinary' people and the mundane parts of being human."

It's a nice counterpoint, not only to the extensively mediated and exclusive world of most museums, but also to the current zeitgeist in which we are all supposed to strive to be exceptional innovators, endlessly escaping from the quotidian into the customized fantasy-scapes of our screens. The Museum of Everyday Life takes us back to a world of objects that exist not to proclaim our own shifting identities, but to unite us in our common humanity, the needs of our bodies, and the overlooked tools that perform important jobs for us every single day.

Body snatching carved on a 19th-century tombstone (photograph by Stephencdickson/Wikimedia)

Many people know about the resurrection men in the UK who robbed graves to sell corpses to medical schools, but few are aware that American medical schools also paid body snatchers to supply cadavers for their anatomy laboratories from the 18th to the 20th centuries. The skeletons in the closets of these respected institutions were sometimes hidden for decades until unsuspecting construction workers stumbled across bones in old wells or behind walls.

For much of the 19th century dissection was illegal in many parts of the United States, making it very difficult for medical students to learn human anatomy. So colleges had to rely on the discrete services of body snatchers who were sometimes slaves or employees of the schools. Grave robbing was even practiced by medical students and members of shadowy student organizations.

Medical College of Georgia

In the summer of 1989, a construction crew working in the basement of a building at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta stumbled across thousands of human bones. Known as the Old Medical College Building, it was used as a lecture hall and laboratory space from 1835 until 1913.

Since dissection of human cadavers was illegal in Georgia until 1887, acquisition and disposal of a corpse had to be done in secret. So the school purchased bodies from freelance body snatchers and kept one full-time in their department.

Grandison Harris started at the Medical College of Georgia in 1852 as slave, but retired as an employee in 1908. Harris was purchased in 1852 in Charleston, South Carolina, and was owned by the entire faculty of the medical school, where he acted as a porter, janitor, teaching assistant, and resurrection man. After the Civil War, Harris became a full-time employee. Throughout his tenure, Harris stealthily robbed graves, purchased bodies of the poor and unclaimed for dissection, and quietly disposed of the remains in the basement.

When Georgia passed a law that made dissection legal in the state in 1887, it also provided a means by which medical colleges could get cadavers. But this legislation didn’t provide enough corpses for the school's dissection tables, so Harris' services were still needed.

Harris preferred to harvest corpses from the Cedar Grove Cemetery because this where Augusta's poor and black populations buried their dead. This meant there was little security and the dead were interred in flimsy coffins.

Cedar Grove Cemetery in Augusta (photograph by Sir Mildred Pierce/Flickr)

Old Medical College Building in 2012 (photograph by Chip Bragg/Wikimedia)

An estimated 10,000 bones were recovered from the basement of the Old Medical College Building during excavations in 1989. These disarticulated bones were dispersed among old medical tools and trash from the lab. Archaeologists also found an old wooden vat, where lecturers stored bodies in whiskey, that still contained bones. Some of the remains showed evidence of dissection and had labels marking them as specimens.

Because many bones were cut up and scattered across the basement, it was extremely difficult for archaeologists and forensic anthropologists to determine ancestry, sex, or age of each individual. Analysis of the remains showed that 77% of the bones were male, and most of the remains belonged to African Americans. The excavation revealed that Harris likely threw the bones on the dirt floor and covered them with a layer of soil, then added quicklime to the surface to stifle the stench.

Medical College of Virginia

In 1994, a crew discovered an old well containing human remains and old medical trash while constructing a new medical sciences building on the campus of the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The precursor to MCV was known as Hampden-Sydney College, opened in 1838. But it wasn't until 1884 that the Virginia General Assembly passed the state's first anatomy law, which also created the Virginia Anatomical Board. The board distributed to Virginia's three medical colleges corpses belonging to criminals, the poor, and bodies that were not claimed. Like Georgia's anatomy law, similar legislation in Virginia didn't provide enough bodies for the lab tables, so resurrection men were still a necessary evil until the 20th century.

Historical records indicate that MCV had a janitor on staff named Chris Baker, who was the school resurrection man from the 1860s until his death in 1919. Baker stole cadavers from African American cemeteries and purchased them from Richmond's poorhouses. When the students were finished with their cadavers, Baker threw what was left in an old well below East Marshall Street that became known as the "limb pit."

1896 newspaper illustration of Chris Baker with a funeral director in the Medical College of Virginia anatomical theater (via Library of Virginia)

Baker was not as lucky as Harris because he was arrested or caught by police several times, and these encounters were reported by the local newspapers. Known as the "Ghoul of Richmond" he was something to be feared by the African American community and fuel for urban legends. African American children told stories that warned against going near the medical school at night because they might be taken by the Richmond ghoul or boogeyman. But Baker was also respected by Richmond's medical community because he had a reputation as a loyal employee of the college and a self-taught anatomist. He died at his home on campus on June 8, 1919.

According to analysis conducted by forensic anthropologists from the Smithsonian, in the well there were at least 44 adults and nine children, and the remains belonged predominately to people of African American descent who were at least 35 years or older. Many of the bones showed evidence of surgical training and dissection, and some demonstrated perimortem trauma and disease. When archaeologists reached the bottom of the well, they found a second well that was capped and not excavated.

Harvard Medical School

During renovations at Harvard's Holden Chapel in 1999, a worker operating a mini bulldozer stumbled across human remains when his machine broke through a wall into an old well. Holden Chapel, built between 1742 and 1744, became home to Harvard Medical School in 1801 and was used for anatomy lectures until 1850.

Holden Chapel in 2007 (photograph by GFDL/Wikimedia)

While Massachusetts had more liberal laws than other states when it came to dissection, it still did not provide enough learning material for medical students. As early as 1647, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony allowed for the dissection of cadavers every four years, which is not enough for a medical school that regularly teaches anatomy courses. Massachusetts also permitted the bodies of executed criminals to be used for dissection, but anatomy classrooms were lucky if one body a year could be obtained from the gallows.

Since demand exceeded supply, students at Harvard Medical School needed the services of resurrection men to supply their labs. Sometimes these were employees of the school, and sometimes these were morbidly curious students.

Harvard University was home to the Spunker Club, also known as the Anatomical Club. Its members included anatomists and future doctors, but the club was not officially recognized by the university. Members of this clandestine organization robbed graves to get corpses for study, often in competition with other classmates. A few of the most well known Spunkers included Dr. John Warren, future professor of anatomy and surgery at Harvard; Samuel Adams Jr., son of the Founding Father; and William Eustis, a statesman and future governor of Massachusetts.

Spunkers understood that grave robbing was an art form that had to be perfected to avoid detection. John Warren, in a letter written in 1775, brags about the skill of his fellow Spunkers when a resurrection man left a grave open.

It was done with so little decency and caution ... It need scarcely be said that it could not have been the work of any of our friends of the Sp–––r [Spunker] Club ... where the necessities of society are in conflict with the law, and with public opinion, the crime consists ... not in the deed, but in permitting its discovery. [As cited in Hodge (2012) p. 17)].

When Harvard Medical School opened its doors in 1782, Dr. John Warren was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Surgery. He insisted that the school provide a medical library, a dissection theater, and required students to demonstrate a thorough knowledge of human anatomy through cadavers.

Harvard Medical School in the 19th century (via Journal of American History)

To reduce the need for grave robbing, Massachusetts passed the Anatomy Act in 1831 that allowed the state's medical schools to get bodies that belonged to the poor, insane, and those who died in prison. This law lessened the need for illicit bodies, but it didn't eliminate it.

In 1842, Harvard Medical School employed a janitor named Ephraim Littlefield who supplemented his income by supplying students with cadavers, but it's unclear if he was a resurrection man or just a middleman. He played a pivotal role in the infamous Parkman-Webster murder case. Littlefield's eye-witness testimony led to the conviction of Dr. John Webster in the murder of Dr. George Parkman. He and his wife lived in the basement of the medical school, where he also disposed of the dissection waste in an old dry well, where it was were forgotten until 1999.

According to an osteological examination of the bones, the remains in the well belong to least 11 people, mostly adults. Archaeologists found bones from men and women, but most of the remains were so cut up that it was difficult to determine sex or ancestry.

Conclusion

In 1998 the bones from the Medical College of Georgia were reinterred in a mass grave at the Cedar Grove Cemetery with a plaque that says, "Known but to God." Harris was also buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery in 1911, but the location of his grave was lost when the Savannah River flooded in 1929. Chris Baker was buried in an unmarked grave in Richmond's Evergreen Cemetery after his death in 1919. The VCU community created the East Marshall Street Well Project to ensure that the remains are properly studied and memorialized. As for the Holden Chapel bones, it's not clear if they have been reinterred, or if they have become part of a skeletal collection stored at Harvard.

University of Pennsylvania Medical School students with a cadaver (1890) (via University of Pennsylvania Libraries)

For more fascinating stories of forensic anthropology visit Dolly Stolze's Strange Remains.

References:

Grauer, A. (1995). Bodies of Evidence: Reconstructing History through Skeletal Analysis. New York, NY: Wiley-Liss.

Hodge, CJ. (2012). Non-bodies of knowledge: Anatomized remains from the Holden Chapel collection. Journal of Social Archaeology. Retrieved from: http://www.academia.edu/2517397/Non-bodies_of_knowledge_Anatomized_remains_from_the_Holden_Chapel_collection_Harvard_University

Holmberg, M. (2010 November 17). Meet Chris Baker – Richmond’s grave robber. CBS6. Retrieved from: http://wtvr.com/2010/11/17/mark-holmberg-meet-chris-baker-richmonds-grave-robber/

Kapsidelis, K. (2011 November 11). Confronting the story of bones discarded in an old MCV well. Richmond Times-Dispatch. Retrieved from: http://www.richmond.com/news/article_4a784033-ca30-5a30-be4d-80c7fd9a3783.html

Lonergan, JM. (1999 July 9). Human Bones Found During Holden Chapel Renovations. The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved from: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1999/7/9/human-bones-found-during-holden-chapel/

Lovejoy, B. (2014 May 6). Meet Grandison Harris, the Grave Robber Enslaved (and then Employed) By the Georgia Medical College. Smithsonian. Retrieved from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/meet-grandison-harris-grave-robber-enslaved-and-then-employed-georgia-college-medicine-180951344/

Owsley, D. and Bruwelheide, K. (2012 June 18). Artifacts and Comingled Skeletal Remains from a Well on the Medical College of Virginia Campus: Introduction. VCU Scholars Compass. Retrieved from: http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=arch001

Flak Bait sits piece-by-piece in the gigantic Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar in Chantilly, Virginia (all photographs by the author)

It is generally agreed upon that air and space meet at approximately 62 miles above sea level. This is where a barrier exists, the Karman Line, that when passed, the atmosphere thins out and outer space begins. Here on Earth, that divide is celebrated at the corner of Independence Avenue and 6th Street Northwest in downtown Washington, DC, and off Sully Road in Chantilly, Virginia. 

These two complexes of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum are two of the most visited museums in the world, where visitors of all ages can ogle the breath-taking machines, instruments, and tools that have taken us all the way to the moon and back. But beyond the curated displays, there is work going on to allow these pieces of history to survive for generations to come. The Smithsonian Institution is not just a place to store history, but to bring back history.  

This Saturday, January 24, at the Uday-Hazy Center, the public will be allowed behind-the-scenes access to view these artifacts and talk to the conservationists who are working on them. 

This week at a press preview, the Udvar-Hazy Center presented a public look on the behind-the-scenes work that goes into restoring, conserving, and reviving America's aeronautical and space exploration past. The historians, scientists, archivists, and conservationists have to deal with all sorts of issues, from fading paint to rotting organic material to mice who made their home in a B-26 Marauder's rudder. As Malcolm Collum, Air and Space's chief conservationist, puts it: "As conservationists, we take the hippocratic oath like doctors. Anything that is brought to us, no matter the historical or cultural value, we try to save, restore, and conserve."

The items we got to see up close include several of the country's most prized aerospace icons.  

Flak Bait close-up

Flak Bait survived more operational missions than any other American aircraft during World War II, completing 207 over Europe. While the forward fuselage was on view in the museum on the Mall since 1976,  the new project is to restore and display the entire aircraft. One of the more unique aspects of this is figuring out a way to save the old fabric of the aircraft by possibly adhering it to new, sturdier fabric — a method conservationists at Air & Space have never tried before on an aircraft. 

The Apollo Telescope Mount that was supposed to fly on Skylab, America's first space station.

Before the International Space Station, there was Skylab — NASA's first space station, launched in 1973. With the first Skylab's complications, among them regulating heat, the second Skylab never got off the ground. Attached was intended to be the Apollo Telescope Mount, a solar observatory and the first space-born telescope that would look at the sun across the electro-magnetic spectrum. Today, conservators are preparing this unique artifact to be shown to the public.

A late 19th century print depicting an odd fish-like aircraft. 

Among of the oldest artifacts in the Air and Space collection, and recently obtained, are prints, mother-of-a-pearl fans, and a band box that date back to between the 18th century and 19th century that depict various magical and fantastical flying machines, including one that a curator called "the flying fish." Depicting three people sitting backwards (and possibly rowing?) on an airborne fish, the print is vibrant, whimsical, and rather bizarre.  

The USS Enterprise

One of the most recognizable and beloved spacecraft of all time never went to space. Spending most its life on a Hollywood sound stage, the Starship Enterprise was hanging in the Air and Space gift shop for nearly 40 years, until it was brought down for restoration. What researchers discovered was that the Enterprise was falling apart, for it was a Hollywood prop and never meant to survive beyond the several years the show needed it for shooting in the 1960s. 

In order to figure out what needed repair inside the model, conservators brought in an X-ray machine normally reserved for the furry residents of the National Zoo. They discovered cracks, screws, and even a light inside the model that will need attention.  

X-ray from the National Zoo

Work on all of these items is extremely detail orientated with long project times (in the case of Flak Bait, it will take more than five and half years for restoration). So, don't expect these one-of-a-kind artifacts in the museum immediately.

The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center Open House is free to the public this Saturday from 10 am to 3 pm.  

Brooklyn Navy Yard's Dry Dock 4, used to build and repair vessels since the Civil War (all photos by author)

Earlier this month, the New York Obscura Society embarked on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard to explore the rich history of the vast 300-acre property. Led by Andrew Gustafson of Turnstile Tours, the tour chronicled the Yard's evolution, which originally served as a shipyard from 1776 to 1965 and is now an industrial park with thriving manufacturing and commercial activity where over 200 businesses employ more than 5,000 people.

The Navy Yard was founded in 1801 when John Adams, at the end of his presidency, quickly authorized the establishment of five naval shipyards, including one in Brooklyn. At its peak in World War II, the Navy Yard employed 70,000 men and women and operated 24 hours a day. In its history, several notable ships were built at the facility, including the USS Missouri, the battleship on which Japan officially surrendered to Allied Forces on September 2, 1945, effectively bringing WWII to a close.

In the Navy Yard's museum at BLDG 92, we viewed historical photographs, listened to oral history clips — including an interview with a female Yard worker — and enjoyed company stories from inside the modern-day Yard. As a bonus, we also explored the 24-acre former Naval Hospital annex, decommissioned in the mid 1970s and since untouched. 

Today, the Yard is committed to sustainability and green technology and is home to the nation's first multi-story, multi-tenanted LEED Gold-certified industrial building. True to its commitment to going green, the Yard employs environmentally friendly features consistently throughout the property, including the nation's first wind and solar powered street lamps, designed by Navy Yard tenant Duggal Eco-Solutions.

The Navy Yard's 40 buildings have been 99% leased for nearly ten years. However, it is now in the midst of its largest expansion since WWII, adding 1.8 million square feet of new industrial space over the next two years. Major tenants include Brooklyn Grange Farms, which operate a 65,000 square foot commercial rooftop farm; Steiner Studios, one of the largest production studios outside of Los Angeles; and Brooklyn Navy Yard Arts, a compilation of artists.

Below are photographs from the New York Obscura Society's exploration of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and follow our events page to join the next adventure. 

 Our tour started at BLDG 92, a museum that showcases the history and innovation of the Brooklyn Navy Yard

Paymaster Building, where Navy Yard workers once lined up for compensation, is now home to The King's County Distillery

Approaching the former Naval hospital

Duggal Greenhouse, a popular venue for events, photo shoots, & rehearsal space, accessible by vehicle or boat. Considered a laboratory in new technology, the Greenhouse utilizes solar energy, organic air purification, & eco friendly building practices. 

Water views from the Duggal Greenhouse

The Navy Yard Hospital annex, to be restored and expanded by Steiner Studios

Building 311, once home to the US Navy Motion Picture Service

The Obscura Society is the real-world exploration arm of Atlas Obscura We seek out secret histories, unusual access, and opportunities for our community to explore strange and overlooked places hidden all around us. 

Join us on our next adventure!

Feast of St. Jude in Mexico City (all photographs by Toni François)

Practically unknown in Mexico before the 1980s, St. Jude Thaddeus has catapulted to the top position among Catholic saints in the country with the world's second largest Catholic population. No other canonized saint rivals the popularity of San Judas, the patron of lost causes. Only the Virgin of Guadalupe and folk saint Santa Muerte can compete with St. Jude for Mexican souls. And over the past decade, competition between the nation's number one Catholic saint and its top folk saint has become very intense, to the point that St. Jude in Mexico is now the only Catholic saint in the world who has a monthly feast day.

Until a decade ago, the green and white cloaked saint only had an annual feast day — October 28 — exactly like his thousands of fellow Catholic counterparts around the world. However, the unexpected arrival of Santa Muerte, a new, heretical grassroots saint personifying death, changed everything. Just a few miles down the road from the famous St. Jude shrine in Mexico City at San Hipolito Church, Santa Muerte pioneer Enriqueta Romero (affectionately known as Doña Queta) has been holding a monthly rosary service dedicated to skeleton saint. It was in response to new competition from Saint Death that enterprising priests at San Hipolito Church decided to initiate St. Jude feasts, celebrated on the 28th of each month.

As seen in these stunning photographs of St. Jude's annual feast day on October 28, 2014, the celebrations of the patron of lost causes are wildly colorful affairs with devotees from all walks of Mexican life, but especially the working classes, lugging life-sized statues of the holy man, and many others dressed in his trademark green and white garb, which are two of the three colors of the Mexican flag. What really stands out at the monthly fiestas attended by thousands is the presence of marginalized teens and 20-somethings, hundreds of whom are huffing glue and smoking marijuana on the sidewalks that abut the temple. Ironically, the saint who is depicted with the flame of the Holy Spirit on his forehead, has a reputation for healing drug abusers. In fact this has been an important part of the ministry at San Hipolito Church, which now promotes a line of St. Jude bottled water. 

The strong contingent of marginalized youth and even criminals makes San Judas every bit as fascinating the Bony Lady down the road. In theory, one of Santa Muerte's strong appeals is that since she isn't a Catholic saint, some devotees feel freer in asking her for unsavory favors. However, it turns out that even though he is a canonized saint, Jude is also often asked to perform miracles that aren't up to Christian standards of morality. This has become such a concern to the Catholic Church that in 2008 the Archdiocese of Mexico City released a statement warning against such unorthodox practices. One such unorthodoxy is the belief by more than a few devotees that when St. Jude is represented with the staff in his left hand, he is open to prayers and petitions that he would never consider with the staff at his right.

Mexico's top photographer of the country's religious landscape, Toni François, and I recently collaborated on a Santa Muerte story in Tepito. Her photoset below is the most compelling I've ever seen of the celebration of Mexico's most popular Catholic saint.

All photographs by Toni François, with more here. 

Dr. Andrew Chesnut is Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and is author of the only book on Saint Death in both Mexico and the US, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint. David B. Metcalfe and he direct Skeletonsaint.com, a site dedicated to news and analysis of the fastest growing new religious movement in the Americas.

Dancers at the Dance-O-Mat in Christchurch, New Zealand (all photographs by the author)

The two dancers shuffled through songs on their iPhones, deciding which track they would dance to next. Their stage was behind them, a polished wooden square situated at the center of a vacant lot in Christchurch, New Zealand. Huge yellow speakers leaned out from all four corners, turned up high.

Then it was decided. The next song would be Bruno Mars' "Uptown Funk."

Plugging her phone into a washing machine on the edge of the dance floor, one of the dancers, Grace Cabell, checked the coin slot on the side of the machine then pushed play. Across the front of the machine was a label: "Dance-O-Mat."

"You just have to put two dollars in and the machine plays your songs through the speakers," she told me. "Luckily someone else must've just put money in. We don't have to pay!"

The performance unfolded for a select audience of passersby, including a Canadian tourist who promptly left his two friends to join in. Funky bass lines and Mars' high tenor reverberated among nearby pillars of concrete and mangled steel.

The remains of the Christchurch Cathedral, with the Chalice sculpture celebrating the city's 150th anniversary visible behind.

The Dance-O-Mat is just one example of the artistic projects brought to the city by Gap Filler, an urban regeneration initiative founded after the September 2010 earthquake to fill the void of destroyed buildings. When a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck the Canterbury Region of the South Island in February of 2011, the project became one of several independent and government initiatives regenerating the city center. Now, Christchurch is host to murals, portable planters, a diverse array of sculptures, and other temporary exhibitions.

"People are really stepping up," said Cabell, who works as a reporter for The Christchurch Star. "The city council is out of funding, so it's great to see so many volunteers and artists bringing life to the city."

Nearly four years after the Canterbury quake, Christchurch still bears the scars of the deadly natural disaster. To the outside eye, it's as if the town is in an eerie limbo.
Businesses are starting to reopen and trickles of artistic vitality light up select spots in the city with splashes of color against a concrete backdrop. Tourists who visit turn their cameras on the city's wreckage as much as on its main attractions.

"People are taking things into their own hands," Cabell said as the song came to an end. But she acknowledged that the repairs are slow, and that the city is far from regaining its former glory.

Grace Cabell (left) and her dance partner, Sally Hoskin gear up to use the Dance-O-Mat.

A Gap Filler sculpture in the same vacant lot across from the Dance-O-Mat.

Behind the lot, the ruins of a collapsed building have been walled off.

Downtown Christchurch

Approaching Cathedral Square. This area may have seen more foot traffic around the time it was reopened in July 2013.

A mural just off Cathedral Square.

An installation surrounding the Cathedral by New Zealand artist Chris Heaphy as part of The Cathedral Square Project. The walls extend for hundreds of meters and are adorned with original graphics. They’re accompanied by a traditional Maori whare (house) made of plants (left).

Flag Wall by artist Sarah Hughes, part of The Cathedral Square Project, offers a splash of color in the damaged Cathedral Square.

Oceans of Alabama (illustration by the author)

Say "Alabama" and the word "fossil" doesn’t immediately jump to mind. That's understandable, the paleontological discoveries made in the Yellowhammer State rarely make the national news. Which is a shame, because Alabama has a rich prehistory that stretches from the Carboniferous shales of the Iron Hills to the Cenozoic clay near the gulf. A jumble of geologic eras are represented in the state, each carrying a wonderful array of fauna, including marine reptiles, weird arthropods, and ancient whales.

Here are four spots that embody the ancient world of Alabama.

The Beast from the Tombigbee
Greene County

The "Artemis" skeleton (courtesy Dana Ehret, Curator of Paleontology, University of Alabama Museums)

The most complete Clidastes mosasaur in the world currently sits in a small case at the Alabama Museum of Natural History in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The skeleton — nicknamed "Artemis" when she was discovered beneath the Hefflin Dam in 2002 — is intact down to the tiniest bones of the flipper, a find that is almost indescribably rare.

Resembling nothing so much as a komodo dragon with flippers, mosasaurs were marine predators closely related to modern lizards and snakes. Some species grew as large as 50 feet, though these leviathans are mostly known from incomplete remains. They were just one of the inhabitants of Alabama's Cretaceous oceans — others included ginsu-toothed sharks, massive long-necked plesiosaurs, and tusked swordfish. But mosasaurs were the top predators of that long ago sea, devouring anything smaller than themselves, including smaller mosasaurs.

Artemis has never been formally studied, but the fossil menageries of the Alabama Chalk have. In 1946, the Chicago Field Museum spent a few months collecting in the warren of chalk gullies known as Harrell Station. They recovered a huge amount of material, including mosasaurs, sea turtles, and the scrappy remains of dinosaurs whose carcasses had floated out to sea. Currently, the Alabama Museum of Natural History owns Harrell Station, and much of their collection from the site is on-display. 

Harrell Station (courtesy Dana Ehret, Curator of Paleontology, University of Alabama Museums)

The Sea Serpent That Wasn't
Clarke County

Basilosaurus in the Alabama Museum of Natural History (courtesy Dana Ehret, Curator of Paleontology, University of Alabama Museums)

In 1834, the discovery of the 40 million-year-old fossil serpent-whale Basilosaurus in southern Alabama set off one of the first great fossil rushes in United States history. Fossil prospectors and poachers flocked to Alabama, looking for spectacular finds. But one of them, Albert Koch, decided to cheat.

Koch, an enterprising con man with some background in science, went across the clay fields of Clarke County in 1845, looking for Basilosaurus remains. The vertebrae of the great whales were common enough in those days that farmers plowed them up in fields, set them to anchor fence posts, and used them for furniture. Koch bought remains here, discovered others there, and went to work. Soon, he was ready to unveil his masterpiece to crowds across America: Hydroarchos, the "water king," a monster stretching 140 feet.

Hydroarchos, archival image

In fact, the Hydroarchos only stretched 119 feet, and to the trained eye was instantly identifiable as the cobbled together remains of several different serpent-whales. That didn't stop Koch from successfully selling it for a tidy sum to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who ordered it displayed in the Royal Anatomical Museum over the strenuous objections of its scientists. Koch whipped up another composite a few years later and sold it to a museum owner in Chicago, although this one was properly identified. It was destroyed in the great Chicago fire of 1871.

The real Basilosaurus is nowhere near as large as the fake Hydroarchos, reaching 65 feet. But it was equally formidable, with powerful jaws and long fangs — a worthy successor to the mosasaurs who had ruled Alabama’s oceans 30 million years before. Basilosaurus is now the state fossil of Alabama, and assorted remains (and an impressive complete skeleton) can be seen at the Alabama Museum of Natural History.

Basilosaurus (illustration by the author)

The Red Mountain Cut
Jefferson County

Red Mountain Road Cut (photograph by Greg Willis/Flickr)

The city of Birmingham originally created the Red Mountain Road Cut to build an expressway linking downtown Birmingham to the neighborhoods south of the mountain. But what remained after construction ended was an exposed corridor of multicolored rock bands representing 190 million years of geologic history, more than any other road cut in the United States.

After some frantic lobbying by local paleontologists to stop the state from covering the walls of the Cut with concrete, studies began in earnest. The fossils of the Red Mountain Cut hail from the oceans of the Paleozoic, a vast era of life before mammals or dinosaurs. The earliest rocks represented were laid down 485 million years ago, in the Cambrian, at the dawn of multicellular life. Sponges, ancient corals, and strange sea lilies dot the rocks, the remains of ancient reefs. Also notable are the hard carapaces of trilobites, pillbug-like arthropods that scuttled across the ancient seafloor on rows of segmented legs — including remains of Birmingham’s own trilobite, Acaste birminghamensis.

The National Park Service named the Red Mountain Cut a National Landmark in 1987, and for a time it hosted a small paleontology museum and an open interpretive trail along the eastern cliff, complete with signs pointing out various geological and fossil phenomena. Unfortunately, the site has languished in recent years: the museum closed, the signs fell prey to weathering and graffiti, and the gates to the interpretive trail are often locked. The Alabama Paleontology Society is currently working to get the site restored. The defunct museum's collections are on display at the McWane Science Center in downtown Birmingham.

Red Mountain Roadcut (photograph by Jim Lacefield)

Stephen C. Minkin Paleozoic Footprint Site
Walker County

Alabama Trackways (photograph by James Lacefield)

The most prolific source of Carboniferous trackways in the world sits in the hills of Alabama's Walker County, beneath a cliff of crumbling shale. In 1999, a high school teacher poking around the spoil piles of the defunct Union Chapel Mine stumbled across something quite rare: the preserved footprint of an ancient amphibian. Amateur fossil hunters and professional paleontologists alike soon flocked to the site, hoping to collect everything they could before the mine was reclaimed and the fossils destroyed. Eventually, a deal was worked out with the state that preserves the site in perpetuity.

It's a lucky thing, too, because the piles of black and grey shale that litter the ground beneath the cliff face are a rich source of trace fossils — things like footprints, burrows, body impressions, and other glimpses into past behavior. 315 million years ago, the site was a swampy beach, lapped by warm tides and overshadowed by horsetails as tall and thick as trees. A variety of amphibians skittered along the shoreline, leaving prints in the warm mud, hunting insects and each other. Fish schooled in the tidal flats, scratching gentle furrows in the silt. Worms burrowed, arthropods marched and jumped, and dead leaves fell and were buried. All of these traces were preserved in exquisite detail. Over 3,000 specimens have been removed from the site, among them delicate plant fossils and insect wings, huge and incredibly rare.

The Minkin site is officially closed to visitors, but it's fairly easy to arrange a visit. The Alabama Paleontological Society leads monthly collecting trips, and they're happy to have interested people along. While any scientifically valuable specimens found must be donated to a museum for further study, it's possible to come away with plant fossils or the occasional footprint.

Union Chapel Mine (photograph by Prescott Atkinson)

Miranda Castle (all photographs by the author)

After climbing up a rocky Belgian hillside and a slow walk through a thick forest, an insurmountable beauty reveals itself as turrets peak through the trees.

Miranda Castle, aka Château de Noisy, lies in Celles, in Belgium's province of Namur. A landscape and building right out of a fairytale, the site is photographed and sought after by urban explorers and curious travelers alike.  




Construction on the castle started in 1866. Designed by English architect Edward Milner, it was intended as a summer home for the Liedekerke De Beaufort family. Milner died before it was finished, and the neo-gothic château only saw its completion in 1907 after the clock tower was erected. 


Part of World War II's Battle of the Bulge took place on the property, and for a time it was occupied by Nazis. In 1950, Miranda Castle was renamed Château de Noisy and operated by the National Railway Company of Belgium as a holiday camp for sickly children. It lasted as the camp until the late 1970s.

 


In 1991, the castle was completely abandoned as the costs to maintain it were too much, and a search for investors in the property failed. Today, it still sits weathering and succumbing to decay and vandalism. Parts were heavily damaged in a fire and many areas of the ceiling are now collapsing. Talks of demolition are circulating, so this abandoned treasure may not be around much longer. 

Below are photographs that take you inside this extraordinary ruin:

All photographs by Bryan Sansivero. View his website and Instagram for more images from his explorations.

Rome's 2,500-year history means that even a trip to the corner drugstore turns into a brush with the heritage of insane emperors, antiquity-grabbing cardinals, visionary artists, and power-crazed popes. The city's many libraries offer an intelligent way of making sense of this complex and well-trodden place. So what better way to experience history directly than in quiet contemplation in Rome's "secret libraries"? Here is a list of nine to get you started.

BIBLIOTECA VALLICELLIANA
Via della Chiesa Nuova 18

Biblioteca Vallicelliana (via francigena.beniculturali.it)

The Biblioteca Vallicelliana is almost hidden, its entrance located through a mundane door in the façade of baroque maestro Francesco Borromini's Chiesa Nuova, not far from Piazza Navona. One of those shallow ceremonial stairways that unfortunately are no longer common leads to the library started by Saint Filippo Neri, the founder of the Congregation of Orators in 1575 and an avid bibliophile who put reading, study, and music at the center of his religious practice.

This was one of Rome's first libraries built for public use, and the first in the world to stack books one on top of another vertically due to the invention of the printing press. Its collection includes books banned by the Catholic Church, as well as a bible owned by Charlemagne.

The main reading room today is lined by wooden stacks with a creaky wooden floor, where people come to study the library's manuscripts and archaeological texts. Take a peek at the Sala Monumentale, across the hall from the main reception desk. Designed by Borromini himself and dating from 1644, this huge, high-ceilinged room is lined with two-story wooden stacks, which hide a spiral staircase in each corner that leads to the upper level.

SOCIETA' GEOGRAFICA ITALIANA
Via della Navicella 12

Società Geografica Italiana (photograph by PD/Wikimedia)

Tucked away in a honey-colored 14th-century villa, in a quiet park behind the Colosseum, the Società Geografica Italiana boasts one of the largest specialized collections of maps and geographical books in Europe.

Italy was a latecomer to the wave of exploration that went hand-in-hand with Europe's empire-building in the 19th century. But its earlier preeminence in mapmaking and navigation (think Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus) means this library has a map collection that dates from before the discovery of the New World (Albino de Canepa's 1480 map on Pergamon).

The main reading room is located off of the Mosaic Hall, where an ancient Roman mosaic dug up not far from the library decorates the floor, and 16th-century frescoes on the ceiling depict Spring and Autumn (in the form of a satyr eating grapes). In the reading room, which looks out onto the palms, cypress, and pines in the Villa Celimontana park, about five or six people each day come to thumb through the handwritten card catalogue dating from 1876 (though all of the library's 400,000 books are available digitally through Rome’s central library). The bulk of the collection is dedicated to Italian and international explorers. 

BIBLIOTHECA HERTZIANA
Via Gregoriana 28

Palazzo Zuccari (photograph by Sailko/Wikimedia)

The Bibliotheca Hertziana is probably the only library in the world with a front door shaped like a giant mouth. Once inside, visitors step into a glass-walled modern atrium with white travertine marble floors, displaying three floors of open-stack shelves. The contrast with the entrance and the surrounding palaces off the Spanish Steps is a surprise.

The library was founded by Henrietta Hertz, a well-to-do German art lover who came to Rome at the start of the 1900s and decided that Rome needed an art library to encourage study of its ancient and modern treasures. She was bankrolled by a wealthy German industrialist, who set her up at the Palazzo Zuccari in the heart of Rome. Today the collection boasts 300,000 books and 800,000 photos on the history of Italian art and architecture, and is owned by the German government. Researchers tap away at their computers at 80 work stations, enjoying total silence and a view out over the rooftops of Rome towards St. Peter’s.

Photograph by Andrea Jemolo, © Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte

BIBLIOTECA LANCISIANA
Borgo Santo Spirito 3

Biblioteca Lancisiana (photograph by the author)

Located in a complex attached to a pilgrim's hospice and hospital dating to 1198, the Biblioteca Lancisiana medical library a stone's throw from the Vatican. While delightfully shabby, it is planned for restoration next summer.

Visitors pass through a courtyard lined with columns blackened by dirt and age, presided over by a clock with hands shaped like a salamander. The reading room of the library has 16 wooden shelves lining the walls, and old terracotta floors grooved by centuries of footsteps. Two globes by Vincenzo Coronelli, globe-maker for Louis XIV, stand in the center of the room.

The library was founded in 1714 by Giovanni Maria Lancisi, Pope Clement XI's personal doctor, as a place to both study and carry out medical experiments. About 30 people come each year, to study art history (mainly the calligraphy in the 375 manuscripts). The bulk of the 20,000 books on mathematics, philosophy, medical science, and chemistry is from the 1700s. 

Biblioteca Lancisiana (photograph by the author)

BIBLIOTECA CENCELLI
Piazza Santa Maria della Pieta 4

Archive image of the Biblioteca Cencelli

Perched on the Monte Mario hill overlooking Rome, the Biblioteca Cencelli specializes in psychiatry. It's located in the headquarters of Rome's former insane asylum, a big yellow building from 1907 with "Manicomio di Provincia" written across the top. The asylum was closed in 1999, and its 27 pavilions have been adapted for other uses, including a "Museum of the Mind."

Visitors enter through a main gate, walk past a fountain, and go up a flight of stairs to a utilitarian set of rooms that house the library, which has a terrazzo floor and a long wooden table in the middle. The card catalogue has a mix of handwritten and typed cards. In a corner stands the patients' registrar, written in longhand starting from before World War II and ending in 1990, when the hospital stopped accepting patients. 

Students, researchers, and practicing psychiatrists come to read hard-to-find texts by French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, Emil Kraepelin (who developed a classification system still in use today), and Wilhelm Griesinger. Italian doctor Ugo Cerletti, inventor of electro-shock therapy, was a regular visitor in his lifetime.

CASA DEL JAZZ
Via di Porta Ardeatina 55

via Casa del Jazz

This hideaway off the beaten track near the Porta San Sebastiano is at the start of the catacomb-dotted Appia Antica. From the outside, the Casa del Jazz looks like all the other luxury villas spread across this archaeological area. Indeed, before it was confiscated and repurposed in 2005 by jazz-loving former mayor of Rome Walter Veltrono, the fascist-era Villa Osio belonged to a crime boss. 

Nowadays, visitors are free to enter the imposing gate, walk past a fountain, and across the grassy park shaded by towering umbrella pines. The library is open to the public on the several days a month when there are concerts or other events. Visitors can look through rare books and magazines in italian and other languages, as well as listen to recordings and watch music on the library's one television screen.

ARCHIVIO STORICO E BIBLIOTECA TEATRO DELL'OPERA DI ROMA
Via Firenze 60 

Teatro Dell'Opera (photograph by Matthew Black/Flickr)

Founded in the 1880s to give the newly-unified Italian capital a new opera house, the Teatro Dell'Opera di Roma is less glamorous than its famed elder sisters in Milan and Naples. A small library is around the back of the theater, through a small foyer decorated with marble busts. The collection is specialized on the theater's productions of "opera verista" of Pietro Mascagni and Giacomo Puccini.

Visitors to the two reading rooms can consult the collection of programs, set and costume designs, posters, librettos, press clippings, and other artifacts, as well as books about the history of opera, theater, and fashion. When you get tired of that, there are always the opera recordings.

BIBLIOTECA LUIGI CHIARINI 
Via Tuscolana 1520

La Biblioteca "Luigi Chiarini" (courtesy Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia)

Dictator Benito Mussolini founded the Centro Sperimentale film school in 1935, two years before the Cinecittà film studios nearby, and the fascist-era building housing the school and the library has a lived-in feeling from the wear and tear of the past 80 years. It's is accessed through an open-air courtyard punctured by a huge umbrella pine, and decorated with black and white photo stills from the films of Anna Magnani and Marcello Mastroianni. 

But the collection goes far beyond "just" Italian cinema. Visitors can pore over a complete collection of US fan magazines Photoplay, Motion Picture, Modern Screen, and Screenland, for example, plus old issues of Vogue. The large and comfortable reading rooms are full of film students, and the staff is super helpful. The collection of over 100,000 books, scripts, drawings, posters, periodicals, and so on is currently being digitalized.

BIBLIOTECA STORICA NAZIONALE DELL'AGRICOLTURA
Via XX Settembre 20 

Courtesy Biblioteca Storica Nazionale dell'Agricoltura

Italy would not be the foodie mecca it is today without its agricultural past, records of which are preserved in the Biblioteca Storica Nazionale dell'Agricoltura, a library so large that its keepers at the Ministry of Agriculture don't know exactly how many volumes it contains. They are digitalizing the handwritten card catalog of 700,000 volumes at the rate of about 12 per day. 

The collection started out as a technical and legal resource for the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce in 1860 in Turin, and its rooms are still decorated with the original wooden paneling. It now encompasses books like a guide to medicinal herbs published in Venice in 1545, and an illustrated guide to Roman gardens from 1772. Its complete illustrated ampelography, depicting Italian wine grapes, was reproduced as placemats for Verona’s annual wine fair Vinitaly a few years ago.

For more overlooked biblio-wonders, check out our guides to Secret Libraries of New York, Secret Libraries of London, and Secret Libraries of Paris.

Photographer Will Ellis is the author of Abandoned NYC, which is out today. In conjunction with its publishing, he shares with Atlas Obscura some of his favorite lost New York ruins.  

When you're photographing ruins in New York City, you can’t get too attached — they'll either meet the wrecking ball, fall apart on their own, or in the best and rarest cases, attract the wandering eye of developers and be put to use again. No matter the outcome, it's always hard to say goodbye to these places as I knew them. Here’s six sites I’ve loved and lost over the past three years of exploring this ever-changing metropolis.

DOMINO SUGAR REFINERY
Williamsburg, Brooklyn

 The raw sugar warehouse of the Domino Sugar Refinery, which hosted a blockbuster Kara Walker exhibition prior to demolition

Certainly the most high-profile abandonment on this list is the Domino Sugar Refinery — controversy over the mixed-used mega-development currently underway at the site has been making headlines for years. While the original (landmarked) refinery building will be saved, the packaging plant and raw sugar warehouse already met the wrecking ball late last year.

All told, Domino and its predecessors operated on the Williamsburg waterfront for 148 years. Though it was only abandoned for a little over a decade, the factory quickly became a sought after destination for NYC explorers.

The packaging plant of Domino Sugar Refinery, now demolished

MACHPELAH CEMETERY OFFICE
Glendale, Queens

The eerie abandoned office of Machpelah Cemetery in Queens, pictured in 2012.

An admittedly minor entry in the canon of NYC abandonment, this creepy-looking office at the run down Machpelah Cemetery in Queens was best known for its proximity to the gravesite of Harry Houdini. It certainly made for a more atmospheric visit for Halloween revelers making an annual pilgrimage to the final resting place of the famed magician, who died on October 31st.

An interior characterized by wood paneling and bad wallpaper was littered with old burial records; I doubt they were salvaged before the place was torn down in 2013.

The burial site of legendary magician Harry Houdini is visible just beyond the gates.

GLENWOOD POWER STATION
Yonkers, New York

The Yonkers Power Station looms over the Glenwood stop on the Metro-North line.

The Glenwood Power Station has loomed over the Hudson River for over a century. Designed by the same architects as Grand Central Station, the plant was completed in 1906 in conjunction with the first electrification of the New York Central Railroad. After 40 years of abandonment, it developed a questionable reputation for illegal gang activity, and a memorable nickname, "the Gates of Hell."

Today, much of the interior has been cleared away and cleaned up in preparation for its second life as a hotel and convention center.

The perpetually flooded ground floor of the Glenwood Power Station was covered with a foot of Hudson River silt.

BATCAVE
Gowanus, Brooklyn

The Gowanus "Batcave" as it appeared in 2013 just before renovations began.

Originally constructed as a power station for the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company in 1896, the long-abandoned Gowanus "Batcave" has become better known in recent years for its tenure as a squatter colony, graffiti haven, and illegal party venue. Its awe-inspiring interior was one of the most spectacular abandoned sights in the city, but today it's gutted in preparation for a new development.

Thankfully, the structure itself will be saved and transformed into artist studios and exhibition space, which is a bit more palatable than the typical "luxury condominiums" route.

The top floor of the Bat Cave was one of the most impressive abandoned spaces in all of New York City.

SAMUEL R. SMITH INFIRMARY
Thompkinsville, Staten Island

Forty years of neglect left the Smith Infirmary looking like the quintessential haunted house.

The Frost Memorial Tower of the Samuel R. Smith Infirmary was founded in the year 1863 as Staten Island's first public hospital. By 1974, the hospital outgrew the campus, and the property was abandoned. Landmarks declined to designate the structure in the 1980s, despite its architectural and historical significance. As the building deteriorated, it became a hotbed of real estate fraud and a haven for the homeless, but many held fond feelings for the structure — locals called it "the Staten Island Castle."

Local preservationists fought long and hard to save the building, but city engineers determined the place was on the verge of collapse. In March of 2012, the 124-year-old-castle was brought to the ground in a matter of hours.

An ornate central staircase stands out from the rest of the devastated interior.

HARLEM RENAISSANCE BALLROOM
Harlem, Manhattan

Locals are fighting to save the façade of the Harlem Renaissance Ballroom from demolition.

Though it's still standing, the demolition of the Harlem Renaissance Ballroom is looking more and more like a foregone conclusion. Concerned locals and preservationists haven't given up the fight just yet, but owners insist the place is beyond repair — a site visit last year resulted in a broken arm, among other injuries.

This one especially hurts, because the historical value is undeniable, and there are so few physical reminders left of the neighborhood's glory days. As one of the only reception halls available to African Americans at the time it was constructed in the 1920s, the Ballroom held performances by the finest jazz performers of the age. It was also notable for hosting the nation’s first all-black professional basketball team, the Harlem Renaissance Big Five, whose record for consecutive wins has yet to be broken.

The ballroom's interior is said to be "beyond repair."

Will Ellis is the writer/photographer behind AbandonedNYC.com, and the author of the new photo book of the same name, out January 28. Get a free print and a signed copy when you order from him at www.abandonednycbook.com. He is giving a talk at the Morbid Anatomy Museum on the night of February 18th, get your tickets here.