These resting places celebrate life.

Despite its irreverent title, the recent book 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die is quite specific about appropriate behavior in graveyards. “Rule number one is be respectful,” Loren Rhoads writes. "Even cemeteries that are closed to new burials deserve to be treated like something precious and irreplaceable, because they are."

Cemeteries are, by their nature, full of stories, which is what Rhoads wanted to tap into when creating the book. "Our relationships with the places we visit can be deepened and enriched by learning the stories of those who came—and stayed—before us," she writes.

The book spans burial sites across the globe and through the ages. In the remote Scottish Hebrides, at Reilig Odhrán on the Isle of Iona, ancient, worn gravestones mark the resting places of Irish, Scottish, and Norwegian kings. Argentinian First Lady Eva Perón is buried in La Recoleta, a cemetery in Buenos Aires. In Iran, the grave of 12th-century mathematician and writer Omar Khayyám is marked with a towering, geometric 20th-century monument.

The book doesn't just focus on the resting places of famous figures. Some are there for beauty alone. Barcelona’s Poblenau Cemetery contains a sculpture of young man, collapsed to his knees, in the tender embrace of a winged skeleton. Known as The Kiss of Death, it is both beautiful and unsettling—both work of art and memorial. Sydney’s Waverley Cemetery sprawls across 40 acres of oceanfront land, where headstones and monuments tumble towards the water. And in Romania's Merry Cemetery, bright blue grave markers hold paintings of the deceased. These monuments both create atmosphere and hold important symbols.

Cemeteries are monuments to death, but also sites of contemplation and appreciation of life. "There's nothing like visiting a cemetery to give you a little perspective," writes Rhoads. Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the book, which was released in October 2017.

This story originally ran on September 15, 2017.

The London Library combed through its shelves to track down his marginalia.

Bram Stoker never traveled to Transylvania. But, while researching and drafting Dracula, he seems to have made frequent trips to the London Library.

There, books transported Stoker to the region in the Carpathian Mountains, and he brushed up on geography, cuisine, and superstitions. He also apparently left his mark on some of the library’s volumes.

Stoker applied for library membership in 1890, seven years before he published his vampire novel. As he leafed through the books, Stoker took meticulous notes. That’s how scholars know that he perused The Book of Were-Wolves, in which Sabine Baring-Gould relates the tale of a lycanthrope “big as a calf against the horizon, its tongue out, and its eyes glaring like marshfires.” To conjure the picture of lonely castles at the top of jagged hills, Stoker turned to books such as An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. Stoker's notes were rediscovered in 1913; in 2008, the scholars Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller compiled them into a book, Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula. When the library’s development director, Philip Spedding, saw this volume, he decided to work backwards and see which of the books Stoker referred to were still in the collection.

Spedding found 26 of them, and many bear annotations that jibe with Stoker’s notes. The marginalia mainly consist of lines, crosses, and dog-eared pages—the sort of marks you might make in a textbook if you’re cramming for a quiz.

There’s very little handwriting on the books’ pages—and where there is, “it is more difficult to confirm that this is Stoker,” writes Julian Lloyd, the library’s head of communications, in an email. “Occasional comments are not recorded in the Notes for Dracula in the way the marginalia is (where he identifies specific passages and then puts exact pencil markings against them).”

Regardless, the library's staff now believes that Stoker’s Transylvania tale has roots in London. “It is not fanciful to suggest that his extraordinary tale of the Transylvanian undead has many of its origins in the quiet confines of St. James’s Square,” Spedding said in a news release. Now that the word is out, the library has removed the books from open shelves, lest they tempt souvenir seekers. “We’ve now put the books in our safes,” Lloyd writes.

While we’re not suggesting that you emulate Stoker’s scribbles in library books of your own, the little scratches are a fun reminder of the way that books open worlds to readers—and help writers create entirely new ones.

Families poured offerings through vessels directly installed into graves.

The living have long offered libations to the dead, at once to appease people they thought might haunt them in the afterlife, honor those they loved, and provide sustenance for them beyond the grave. The act of pouring liquid (most likely water or beer) on graves was prevalent in the ancient world: It spread from Egypt to other parts of Africa and eventually Greece, where mourners typically doused a small amount of wine on the ground before sharing the rest among themselves.

The ancient Romans took the practice of pouring out libations to a new level, though. (In fact, the very word libation comes from the Latin word libare, which means "to taste, sip, pour out, or make libation.") They believed that through their bones or ashes, the dead “consumed” whatever food or drink the living offered. So they built “libation tubes” into graves that directly connected living relatives to their ancestors below. The idea was that the liquid didn’t have to seep through the ground to get to their remains, and could instead flow directly to them.

Typically, the Romans crafted terracotta, lead, wood, or imbrices (curved tiles used on the roofs of houses) into tubes of varying diameters. During their burial, the deceased would be placed in a pit lined with tile. More tile would cover the body in a tent-like fashion, with the libation tube held in place by soil. These tube vessels then easily allowed the living to offer up wine and foods to the deceased on holidays throughout the year.

Historians believe that the Egyptians were the first to offer libations to their dead. Yet it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the practice began, since liquids poured directly on the ground would have disappeared thousands of years ago. The first evidence of libations dates back to when the pyramids were built. Back then, Egyptians poured a little beer on their loved one’s grave, drank the rest, and broke the pots they brought it in, leaving the shards behind. Other Mediterranean cultures soon adopted the practice of pouring liquid on the graves of deceased family members. The 3,000-year-old tomb of Phoenician King Ahiram bears a curse referencing libation tubes, and Greek graves have been discovered with them. Emulating the Greeks, Romans incorporated libation tubes into their funerary rituals.

Not every Roman grave had a libation tube, according to Dr. Tracy Prowse, an associate professor of anthropology at McMaster University who heads the excavation of the Roman cemetery at Vagnari, Italy. Many graves did, though, and the practice transcended social status and age: It didn’t matter whether the deceased was rich or poor, and some children even had libation tubes installed in their graves.

Prowse, who also wrote the book Burial Practices and Tombs in the Roman World, says that the libation tubes are covered by 2,000 years of soil, so it’s not easy to find them. During excavations, though, they're often the first indicator of a grave nearby. When she or the students she works with encounters a libation tube, they excavate carefully around the tube to expose the entire tomb, remove it to access the burial, and then analyze the soil’s content.

Despite finding seeds, bones, grain, and other offerings inside the tubes, archaeologists aren’t entirely sure what libations were made of (as it’s hard to determine what was buried with the deceased versus dropped through the libation tube later). Both archaeological and textual evidence indicates grain, wine, oil, incense, and flowers were offered to the dead. But as Robin M. Jensen, a professor of theology at Notre Dame University, points out, “very little data exists to indicate the actual kind of food consumed at the grave” after the initial burial.

It's known, though, that families offered the first libation at the cena novemdialis, a feast marking the end of the nine-day mourning period following the loved one’s death. They would gather at the grave, prepare a meal onsite, and share that meal with the deceased through the libation tube. If they could afford a mausoleum, family members would gather inside to share a meal, which might have included pork, chicken, and bread, while others would eat near the grave. In either case, part of the meal would be given to the dead through the libation tube.

Then, beginning on February 13, families returned to the cemetery for Parentalia, a nine-day festival where people honored their ancestors. During this time, relatives shared wine and bread at graves, offered libations to the deceased, and left flowers on their tombstones. The privately-celebrated Parentalia concluded on February 21 with Feralia, a public commemoration of the dead. The following day, Romans celebrated family with gift exchanges and even more feasting at Caristia, a celebration of family past and present. At that time, the living might return to a loved one’s graves to offer libations again.

Romans also offered libations during the festival of Lemuralia, a time when they appeased malevolent spirits (known as lemurs) with beans, a food associated with death. Romans who didn’t want to take the chance that their ancestors might become hungry and pester them for food took the opportunity to offer libations then as well. The living also put libation tubes to use at Rosalia, the annual festival of roses, and on the deceased’s birthday. Whatever the day or reason, libation tubes helped bridge the gap between life and death in more than just a literal sense.

“The main point was to maintain an ongoing relationship with the dead, so the family would sit and have a meal at the grave site and share that meal with the deceased,” Prowse explains. “Romans believed that they had to keep the spirits of their ancestors content, otherwise they might become vengeful. Offering proper rituals and libations was a way to keep them happy.”

Christians eventually put an end to libations—they considered the practice pagan—but not immediately. In “Drinking with the Dead? Glasses from Roman and Christian Burial Areas at Leptiminus (Lamta, Tunisia),” a 2017 article for the Journal of Glass Studies, archaeologist and associate professor Dr. Allison E. Sterrett-Krause noted that glassware associated with ritual libations was found in the Roman cemetery’s Christian section. This discovery suggests that drinking and feasting with the dead still happened there as late as the fifth and sixth centuries. During a 1990s excavation on the grounds of Lichfield Cathedral in England, archaeologists found a libation tube that led to the buried remains of an 11th-century priest, as well.

Today’s graves may not have libation tubes, but that hasn’t stopped people from honoring their loved ones with drinks. In parts of Russia and neighboring countries, mourners still pour vodka on graves. Throughout Africa, libations not only commemorate deceased ancestors but also invite them to participate in public gatherings, including festivals and weddings. In Japan, offerings of sake libations at Shinto shrines aren’t unheard of, and some Chinese communities pour rice wine or tea in front of tombstones. References to “pouring one out” on a grave or “tipping to” deceased friends often appear in contemporary American culture, too. What’s remained universal, though, is to lift a glass and toast to the memories of those who have gone before us.

Sea burial is a way to save space in a dense city, but runs counter to funeral traditions.

In April 2007, on a cloudy day punctuated by occasional showers, 70 passengers climbed into a boat off the shore of Hong Kong, holding their loved ones’ ashes. As they passed by the islands known as the “Brothers," prayers were murmured, and 11 peoples’ cremated remains were cast into the waves.

When these remains, piled in biodegradable bags, slid down a chute and into the water, they became Hong Kong’s first government-sanctioned sea burials in decades, and a clean break with tradition.

Speaking to the South China Morning Post, family members described various reasons for choosing this type of send-off. For a 78-year-old woman from a fishing family in Tung Chung, it felt like a way of coming full circle—returning, one last time, to her roots. “She loved the sea very much,” her daughter, identified only as Ms. Kwok, explained. “She used to catch fish in this region a lot.” For the family of a single man who had prized independence, it symbolized something he had always strived for. “He loved freedom,” the man’s younger brother, a Mr. Yuen told the paper. “Scattering his ashes at sea can finally give him freedom.”

For the Hong Kong government, it was a relief. Dead bodies take up a lot of space, and the city has been running out of it.

Sea burials have long been practiced by navies, and private citizens in countries around the world scatter ashes into the water. But Hong Kong wants to see sea burial become one of its primary funeral practices. First, the government began promoting cremation in the 1960s, when the city’s cemeteries reached capacity. Instead of buying a cemetery plot, families could reserve niches in a columbarium—often a hillside city of the dead that looks something like a stadium, with tier after tier of niches large enough to hold two or four sets of ashes.

Now, more than 90 percent of Hong Kong’s dead are cremated, but the columbaria are nearly maxed out, too. A spot in a public columbarium costs HK$3,000 (US$382), with a four-year wait. A place in a private one runs roughly HK$1 million (US$127,500), and families may have to wait up to eight years. By many estimates, the city will need an additional 400,000 urn spaces by 2023, partly because residents tend to balk at the idea of new columbaria opening in their neighborhoods. To meet the demand, architects have gotten creative with proposals. One design firm imagines a skyscraper holding 15 stories of human remains. Another suggested a cruise ship that could store 48,000 urns offshore. Meanwhile, the city’s Food and Environmental Hygiene Department has spent the last decade trying to convince residents that the ocean can be a final resting place.

It hasn’t been easy. That first year, in 2007, few families seemed interested in burying their relatives at sea: The government received only 160 applications. (These are usually approved within a few days.) According to Hong Kong’s internal news service, sea burial increased fivefold between 2007 and 2015—but with more than 40,000 deaths in the city each year, the practice still represented less than 2 percent of funerals. Because so many residents are elderly, the city’s funerary infrastructure will soon be even more pinched. Annual deaths are projected to exceed 50,300 by the end of the decade.

On the occasion of that first sea burial, in 2007, Chan Fukchi, a spokesperson for the funeral company Hong Kong Warm Heart, suggested that people would come around to the idea over time. “Sea burial is an environmental and natural method,” Fukchi told the South China Morning Post. “I believe it will be popular in 30 years' time, just like when cremation was first introduced 30 years ago.”

Other experts have been more skeptical. A decade after the government began promoting it in earnest, “I don't think the sea burial is attractive to many people,” says Bobo Hi-Po Lau, a psychologist at Hong Kong Shue Yan University who specializes in end-of-life care. In the hierarchy of burial options, she says, sea burial is well below cremation niches or gardens of remembrance, where relatives scatter ashes among grasses and flowering shrubs.

People now joining the elderly population may be increasingly receptive to green burial options because of concerns about costs and the desire to be more environmentally friendly, Lau says. Even so, “a major issue about sea burial is that people feel that there is not a fixed place which they can visit the deceased,” she says. When ashes are scattered in a garden of remembrance, by contrast, the government inscribes a small plate with the deceased’s name. “It is a like a tiny niche, but with no urns behind it,” Lau says, but it provides a memorial site for families. Sea burials, on the other hand, can leave mourners unmoored, she adds. Meanwhile, some district councils have protested sea burials on the grounds that they make for an unsavory experience for swimmers, or could impact waterfront property values.

The pressures of urban land use are also running up against long-standing traditions and beliefs, explains Lily Kong, a social scientist and president of Singapore Management University, in an essay in the anthology Place/No-Place in Urban Asian Religiosity. It’s hard to square sea burials with the belief that “ashes of the deceased ancestors should not be mixed with those of others,” at the risk of “lost souls” or “misfortune for descendants,” Kong writes. "The traditional Chinese culture stipulates that a good death requires a fixed place for worship and the soul should be ‘housed’ in somewhere permanent,” Lau says. Dominic Lau Kit-yan, chairman of the Funeral Business Association, told the South China Morning Post in 2008 that many locals would prefer to wait for a funeral niche instead of dropping remains into the ocean—even if that meant years. Families sometimes keep cremated remains at home, or deposit them in niches in mainland China or the United States.

Still, the government is doubling down on its efforts to persuade people to consider the ocean as an option. Nearly every Saturday, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department operates a free ferry route that shuttles mourners to designated burial areas. Cremated remains can enter the water at specific coordinates east of Tap Mun, east of Tung Lung Chau, and south of the West Lamma Channel. The ferry changes course in the presence of fishing vessels or a pod of the dusty-rose dolphins that are native to the area.

Sea burial is also getting an image makeover. In 2014, the department held a competition for secondary school students to design posters promoting green burial, and has since plastered subway stations with placards reading, in English and Chinese, “Scatter ashes at sea/Join the boundless and be free.”

The promise of freedom also underpins a recent promotional video produced by the department, starring television host and newspaper columnist Benny Li Shun-yan. In it, a seagull soars, white against a robin’s egg sky. The gray-blue sea reaches out toward infinity, and gentle waves lap, endlessly, on a rocky shore. Shun-yan gazes out over the water and describes scattering the ashes of his father in-law, who loved to travel. “When his ashes were drifting further away in the ocean, I felt like he had gone to another world, to continue traveling freely,” Shun-yan says in the spot.

The video is peppered with clues that the government is doing more to meet the conflicting demands of planning and tradition. A flurry of flower petals—yellow, pink, and white—drifts toward the water, reminding viewers that the government recently adjusted regulations to permit mourners to throw a handful of flowers into the water along with the ashes. (Other rituals that accompany many burial services on land, such as burning paper money or other offerings, are still prohibited at sea.) Starting in 2014, the ferry service also began offering return trips during the Qinming Festival, or the “grave-sweeping” holiday during which many families visit gravesites or columbaria to tidy up and leave offerings. The remains would be long-gone, of course, but the boat ride preserves some semblance of the ritual. There are also dozens of memorial websites where visitors can burn digital incense and candles, and leave virtual food and wine, though Lau isn’t convinced these are a satisfying proxy for the real thing, which also helps to strengthen familial bonds.

Shun-yan, in the video, skips stones into the water. There is no horizon in sight. One of the pink-and-white ferries slices across the frame, in front of a dense cluster of high-rise buildings. They’re as blue and silvery-gray as the sea itself—a reminder of the limited space on land and the vastness of the water. That’s where some people, at least, will spend eternity.

Atlas Obscura readers share their hungriest final wishes.

In a wide variety of cultures around the world, food and drink plays a key role in honoring the memories of loved ones who are no longer with us. In some cases it's a widespread practice, such as the Chinese tradition of leaving oranges on headstones. Other times it's unique to the person, such as the mysterious bottles of cognac regularly left on the grave of Edgar Allan Poe. In honor of Grave Week, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us what foods or drinks they'd like people to leave on their own graves. Your answers were revealing, poignant, and made us kind of hungry, all at once!

Many of you chose a favorite dish, like one reader's simple request for mutton ribs. Others picked a treat that holds special emotional resonance, like mom's special iced tea. Oh, and an awful lot of you said to just leave some whiskey. So much whiskey...

Below, we've compiled a collection of some of our favorite responses. If death is just the next great adventure, these people won't have to embark on an empty stomach.

Perfectly Ripe Avocados

“They are so hard to attain in life, maybe in heaven they have good avos?” — Katy Rose, Cape Town, South Africa

Ben Heggy's Chocolates

“Ben Heggy's chocolates are to die for! Having Heggy's chocolates on my gravestone won't help me, but others might enjoy them. An aunt introduced our family to Heggy's when I was a child, bringing them home from Canton, Ohio, when she visited a friend who lived nearby. She brought bags and bags (or so it seemed to me as a child) and generously shared. Her bags contained a variety, but milk chocolate peanut patties (peanut clusters without cream inside) and milk chocolate-covered marshmallows were my favorites. I rediscovered them in a candy shop in Columbus, Ohio, nearly 30 years later (nearly 40 years ago now) and fell in love with them all over again. Long live Ben Heggy's chocolates! I think it would be generous if there were a bowl on my grave marker where people could place the individually-wrapped chocolates, along with a sign saying, ‘Please help yourself.’” — Nancy, Ohio

Pea Soup with Garlic

“Because it’s my favorite hangover cure.” — Radomír Dohnal, Czech Republic

Kraft Macaroni and Cheese

“It’s always been my comfort food. When I lost everything and was hungry, I was always able to treat myself to a box of it for two or three meals!” — Ginny Mitchell, Southern Oregon

Taco Bell

“Nothing spices up a mood or occasion quite like Taco Bell can.” — Diana, Boston, Massachusetts

Côtes du Rhône, Duck Confit, and Camembert

“Remembrance of an incredibly romantic dinner my partner and I had in the Latin Quarter in Paris, under an awning, as rain slowly fell just beyond.” — Dave, Atlanta, Georgia

Iced Tea (Made the Way My Mom Taught Me)

“Until I was in my late teens, I didn't realize that most people considered iced tea to be a sweet drink, or at least a sweet-ish drink. I grew up drinking iced tea that's incredibly sour for most people's taste. The recipe I've settled on uses a cup of lemon juice in a gallon of tea. I thought it was an old family recipe, but my mom told me that she just started making it that way because she liked it. And now, this is the iced tea my daughter drinks, so our sour tooth runs in the family. My mother-in-law calls it ‘poison tea,’ though, so it's definitely not easy to convert people.” — James Callan, Washougal, Washington

Hot Pastrami Sandwich

“I’ve lived much of my life outside the United States in countries that do not have delis or places to get a hot pastrami sandwich. But, for me, a hot pastrami sandwich, which my family had most every Sunday lunch, represents the wonderfulness of immigrant America.” — David Evans, Hong Kong

A Roaster Full of Pyrizhky

“Pyrizhky is my ultimate Ukrainian comfort food; it far surpasses even pyrohy (pergoies) for flavor and sheer enjoyment of eating.” — Kenneth Kully, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

A Chilled Six-Pack of Hard Cider in Glass Bottles, a Giant Platter of Piping-Hot Chicken Wings with a Dozen Assorted Sauces and Dressings to Dip Them In, Several Rolls of Good Bread, and a New York–style Cheesecake with Passionfruit Drizzle. Yes, A Whole Cheesecake.

“It makes me feel like I'm having friends over for an evening of role-play gaming and conversation.” — Gigi, Delaware

Olde English 800 and/or Munchies Flaming Hot Peanuts

"I travel with my husband constantly, and I will refuse a trip without those specific peanuts. I can go through three bags on a 10-hour drive. Olde English 800 has been my favorite beer for years. I love it because it sounds fancy, lol." — Aubrey-Lee Morrow, Birmingham, Alabama

Queimada

“It is lit on fire, produces a lovely blue flame, and wards off evil spirits.” — Kalia, Spain

Hot Wings

“I love hot wings. They’re my ultimate comfort food. I’m also known among my friends and coworkers as a bit of a hot wing fanatic considering I did eat hot wings over 70 times in 2017, which averaged to about 1.5 times a week! Doing the math on the specific orders, I ate 460+ wings! I have the receipts and everything! I only hit the wings about 40 times this year but there's still time yet!” — Alexa, California

Rebel Yell and Tab

“No one else drinks it. All mine!” — Diane, Savannah, Georgia

Fruit and Nuts

“Since graves are only important to the living, the fruit and nuts would make no difference to me, as I would be dead. But they would be very nice for birds, squirrels, insects, and other wildlife living in, or passing through the graveyard. And if the fruit were to just rot on the grave, that would be fine too. Compost!” — Kent, Near Portland, Oregon

A Glass of Absinthe

“Lots of special memories about drinking it with good friends, and it might make it easier for them to see my ghost.” — Loren Rhoads, San Francisco, California

Ramen and Merlot

“Quick, easy food my partner and I share on our movie nights.” — Meghan, Phoenix, Arizona

Mutton Ribs

“It's delicious.” — Omer Ehsan, Lahore, Pakistan

Buttertarts and Hot Toddies

“Buttertarts are perfect, and since I'll be dead, guilt free. Hot toddy because a shot of whiskey will keep the cold at bay, and lemon and honey will soothe my aching, dead heart.” — Meghan Wilson-Smith, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Vesper Martini

“It revived my spirits in life, let's see if it has the same effect when I'm gone.” — J. Alexander Greenwood, Kansas City, Missouri

Pizza and Beer

“As a celiac sufferer I can't have either in this world. Please bring it to me in the next.” — Jeremy Dreier, Rock Hill, South Carolina

A Bottle of Trocadero

“When I was 21, I had to flee the country to escape a long-term abusive relationship. I didn't have anywhere near home I could turn to, but I had read in high school that Sweden was a nice place to be, so I bought my ticket in secret, packed my things in the middle of the night, and flew into Stockholm. After I landed, I had no real plan and such little money and I was alone for the first time in my life, but I was safe and I was free. I bought a soda that I had never seen before and when I took that first sip, it tasted better than anything I'd ever tasted. It was bright and fruity and different; the flavors of apple and orange blended together into an entirely new fruit. Its bubbles were playful and so unlike the burning Coca-Cola from back home. Everything about it was a magical reassurance that I had done the right thing and that I was going to be okay. And now, whenever I need to do something new and beautiful and scary, I can nearly taste the Trocadero on my tongue.” — Shayne, Atlanta, Georgia

Bourbon, Particularly in an Old Fashioned

“Life is a celebration filled with pungent, strong, sweet, and bitter nuances.” — Christopher, St. Cloud, Minnesota

A Can of Vernors Ginger Ale

“It tastes like Detroit, where I grew up. I miss many things about my hometown, and there is nothing like Vernors anywhere else. Plus, unlike other sodas, (or pop, as we Detroiters say), it can also be enjoyed hot, which I imagine might be a plus in a ‘grave’ situation.” — Elaine Henry, Sand Rock, Alabama

Sorghum

“The longer it hangs, the better it tastes, and it tastes like home.” — Joy, Taiwan

Pepperoni Pizza and a Milkshake

“Civilization reached its high-water mark with those two glorious creations.” — Chris Estes, Front Royal, Virginia

Sourdough Biscuits

"I started my sourdough starter over 20 years ago. I mostly make bread, but I sometimes make biscuits to bring in for my coworkers. A batch of 30 biscuits will completely disappear within about 30 minutes, so I guess my coworkers like them. I have a tradition of bringing in a double-batch of biscuits and delivering them to everyone in the building on my birthday. I'd like to think that someone would leave a biscuit on my grave in memory of my biscuits." — George Flexman, Indianapolis

November jack-o'-lanterns deserve love, too.

Everyone loves an expertly carved jack-o'-lantern, but the real magic happens after time and age get their hands on them. As carved pumpkins rot, they begin to morph and stretch into fascinating (and often sad) new forms that no human hand could have sculpted. Come November, no matter how amazingly transformed, most Halloween jack-o'-lanterns are simply tossed in the trash, unloved and unremarked on. But this waste cannot continue! Help us honor your withered gourds by sending us pictures of them, before they disappear.

We want to see the sagging snaggleteeth and wrinkled ghosts, the slumped faces and collapsed grimaces, the pumpkins that make you think, “I should probably take that off the porch.” There are few things more poignantly melancholy than the loneliness of a November jack-o'-lantern, so let's make sure their sadness is not in vain.

Fill out the form below to tell us a little about what your pumpkin looked like in its glory days, and then email a picture of your sad pumpkin to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line, “Sad Pumpkin.” We’ll share some of our favorites in an upcoming article. The time of the jack-o-lantern is just about over, but that doesn’t mean that your pumpkins are any less worthy of celebration!

How folk tales and traditional life snuck into avant-garde kids' books in the 1930s.

Natalia Chelpanova was 20 years old in 1917, when the Russian Revolution transformed her country. As an art student, she became part of the new VKhUTEMAS (Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie, or Higher state artistic and technical studios)—the state school also known as the "Soviet Bauhaus." There, she studied under avant-garde artists steeped in ideas about abstract art and the role of art in social movements.

When she started to illustrate children’s books, she used all the hallmarks of the school—simple geometric shapes, cutouts, collages, simplified palettes. In her 1932 Baba-Yaga, the forest is made of simplified pine trees in blue and black, which seem to pop from the page. The cover features six girls wearing headscarves and aprons in red, white, and brown, and forming a simple circle.

When Christine Jacobson, the assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts at Harvard’s Houghton Library, saw the cover, it surprised her.

“It’s a very avant-garde cover,” she says. In the 1920s and 1930s, a golden age of Soviet children’s literature, that wasn't uncommon: Some of the most cutting-edge art could be found in children’s books. But this book told a classic Russian folktale, in which a young girl encounters the witchy Baba Yaga and her walking house. That should have been off-limits. “You have anthropomorphic flora and fauna, magic, evil step-mothers—you have all these things you’re not supposed to have in Soviet children’s work,” Jacobson says.

Most often, the story told about early Soviet kids’ books focuses on their political aims, as propaganda that aimed to inculcate young minds with revolutionary ideas. But part of Jacobson’s job is to help expand the library’s collection with an eye to preserving and elevating works that might have been overlooked because they weren’t made by Western Europeans, or by men. She recently acquired Baba-Yaga, as well as another unusual work from Soviet children’s literature, From Moscow to Bukhara.

These books, which marry older threads of Russian culture with Soviet and avant-garde ideas, don’t exactly fit the dominant narrative about Soviet kids’ books. But preserving the work of the perhaps overlooked women behind these books adds new color and depth to the idea that Soviet children’s book were a perfect marriage of propaganda and art.

“What I liked about these two books was that they were by people I had never heard of,” Jacobson says. “They were by women. And they seemed to be breaking a lot of rules of early Soviet children’s books.”

In the early years of the Soviet Union, authors and illustrators invigorated by the revolutionary spirit reimagined children’s literature, and set to work at the centuries-old task of shaping young minds through simple stories and vivid pictures. In one iconic poster, Lenin has his arms outstretched, imploring the country to “Give Us the New Children’s Book.” Baba Yaga, demons, kings, and queens were out, and planes, parades, and farming were in. These new children’s books leaned on abstract, avant-garde images and are easily identified—just like the iconic Soviet posters—as the products of a particular place, time, and ideology.

Although the revolution created new opportunities for women, children’s books were still written and illustrated mostly by men. In a short period of time, artists and authors—most famously, the team of Vladimir Lebedev and Samuil Marshak—carved out a space for creativity and innovation, during a time of “uneasy equilibrium of politics and art,” as Sara Pankenier Weld, a Slavic literature scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, writes in her work on Russian avant-garde picture-books.

But this was only a brief window, before the pressure of propaganda took over. “Any women who joined avant-garde children’s book illustration after it had been established ... would have had little time to make a unique contribution before this window closed,” writes Weld.

But the books that the Houghton Library uncovered reveal other cul-de-sacs in the story of Soviet children’s books. Chelpanova married a French philosopher and became Nathalie Parain. She moved to France, where she socialized with some of the time’s most influential avant-garde Russian artists. Because her work was published in Paris, she would have been freer than artists back home to choose her subjects. Like other Russian illustrators, she chose avant-garde images to match with her stories. But she ignored Lenin’s dictum and applied that aesthetic to a classic tale, hinting at how the nation's past might connect to its present.

The author of From Moscow to Bukhara, Aleksandra Petrova had a different story. “She’s not of the avant-garde. She’s of the approved artist milieu of the time,” says Jacobson. Petrova was hired to paint murals in a Moscow subway station, for instance, which she executed in the style of Soviet realism.

But in her children’s book, Petrova took a leap. She borrowed from avant-garde artists in her illustrations, using limited colors and bold, simplified figures. But in her choice of topics she, too, drifted from the rules of the new Soviet children’s books. Most avant-garde children’s books showed figures against blank space: The future hadn’t been filled in yet. And many of the books avoided showing scenes of daily life, since reality didn't always stack up to the perfect world promised by communist ideology. But Petrova took a risk and showed scenes of traditional Uzbek life to show how Soviet influence had transformed it. Her illustrations depict schools, trains, and a mosque with a “museum” sign on it, and although it's not overtly anti-revolutionary, the book reveals the ways in which the Soviet Union still treated parts of its domain with a colonial instinct.

“The more you dig into Soviet children’s literature the more you find outliers doing really interesting things and breaking the rules,” Jacobson says. Often, Soviet Russia is understood as a monolith, with the state controlling all human endeavor. There’s truth to that view. It wasn't long before even Marshak and Lebedev, one of the most celebrated teams in this realm, came under pressure to rein in their most bold and creative impulses. But history and people are complicated. And that’s part of a library’s job—to find and save cultural treasures that can help tell a fuller story of how people thought and expressed themselves in the past.

It shows a message, carved in ice, from one polar explorer to another.

Nothing should have been there but ice—the wind-swept ice of Antarctica, stretching to the edge of the sky. For hours upon hours, days upon days, Lou Rudd, a 42-year-old British Army officer, had stared, through dizzying whiteouts, at the desolation. It was December of 2011, and he was part of a race to the South Pole—a reenactment of the contest, a century earlier, between the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and a British party led by Robert Falcon Scott. Amundsen beat Scott by 33 days, and Scott and his four men all died during their return journey.

Rudd and his companion were following Amundsen’s route, while a rival party was tracing Scott’s. Both journeys were more than 800 miles, traversing a place where temperatures sank to -70 degrees Fahrenheit and winds gusted up to 100 miles per hour. On this day, Rudd was trailing far behind his companion, whom he could not see in the distance. Yet he noticed something carved in the ice sheet. He was accustomed to wind-sculpted formations, which resembled violent waves, but this seemed different—a neatly arranged pattern of etched lines, some straight, others curved. They looked like an archaic drawing. Rudd, physically depleted and bleary-eyed, wondered if he was seeing a mirage. He skied closer, until the markings came into focus: they were distinct letters. He read the gleaming message with wonder. It said, “I AM THE ANTARCTIC."

The message had been scrawled with a ski pole by his companion, Henry Worsley. A revered British Army officer who had served tours with the Special Air Service, an elite commando unit, Worsley was a polymath and a devoted family man. As I document in my new book about Worsley, The White Darkness, he was also fascinated by the golden age of Antarctic exploration, especially by Ernest Shackleton. During the early 20th century, Shackleton had failed in repeated attempts to reach the South Pole, and in a later effort to trek across Antarctica, but he had guided his parties to safety, demonstrating uncanny powers of endurance and leadership. Worsley felt a special connection to Shackleton: a relative, Frank Worsley, had been a member of Shackleton’s doomed trans-Antarctica crossing. Henry Worsley, while leading soldiers in battle, had emulated Shackleton’s methods, and he had become a leading authority on the explorer. Still, he wanted to get even closer to his hero—to see what he himself was made of. In 2008, at the age of 47, he set out with two other descendants of Shackleton’s crew on an expedition to the South Pole. After reaching Shackleton’s farthest point, on January 9, 2009, Worsley and his men pressed on to the Pole, completing, in the words of one of Worsley’s companions, “unfinished family business.”

Worsley did not expect to go back to Antarctica, but he found himself drawn once more by what Shackleton had described as “little voices” luring him to the unknown. And, nearly three years later, he orchestrated the Scott-Amundsen race to the Pole. His teammate, Rudd, had never been to Antarctica before. “Henry taught me the dark arts of polar exploration,” he says. How to prepare his kit. How to ward off frostbite. How to prevent starvation. Most of all, Worsley instilled him with that peculiar love of Antarctica, a realm of immense beauty that, at any moment, threatened to take your life.

Upon seeing Worsley’s message, Rudd smiled. He knew that his friend felt the spirituality of Antarctica. He also knew that it reflected Worsley’s unassuming style of leadership, like Shackleton’s—a way of playfully offering Rudd something to laugh about in their misery. Rudd got out his camera and, with his trembling hands, snapped a picture. Under Worsley’s guidance, and after a trek of more than two months, the men reached the Pole. They won the race by nine days.

On November 13, 2015, Worsley, hearing again those “little voices,” embarked on his most perilous quest: to trek from one side of Antarctica to the other. It was a journey that Shackleton, a century earlier, had hoped to make before his ship, the Endurance, got trapped in the ice and sank. Worsley, who was by then 55, had added one dramatic modification. He planned to carry out the expedition alone, without any support or assistance—something that had never been attempted before.

Rudd, back in England, carefully followed his friend’s progress. By January 3, Worsley had already crossed the Pole. By mid-January, he was near the finish, history within his grasp. But on January 22, after 71 days of hauling and marching, his body was near collapse. He wrestled with what to do. Recalling how Shackleton had reckoned with his own human limitations, Worsley decided to summon a rescue plane. He was flown to a hospital in Chile, where doctors determined that he was suffering from an infection of the tissue that lines the inner wall of the abdomen. He was rushed into surgery, but the infection spread into his bloodstream. And, to Rudd’s shock, Worsley died of complete organ failure.

Afterward, Rudd reexamined the photograph he had taken that day during his trek with Worsley. It seemed to embody the spirit of his friend, and Rudd, who is now planning his own solo crossing of the continent, read the words aloud to himself: “I AM THE ANTARCTIC.”

They were fashionable and functional, used for dining and self-defense.

In Medieval Europe, all dinner parties were BYO-knife. Except for the occasionally-provided spoon, guests were responsible for bringing their own cutlery to the table. Showing up without a knife would be an awkward, if not outrageous, predicament—one that could leave the ill-prepared diner both hungry and vulnerable. But it probably never happened. Personal eating knives were en vogue.

During the Middle Ages, forks weren’t really part of the picture in Europe. Until the 17th century, sharp, dagger-like knives were used to slice, tear, pierce, and poke whatever was on the plate—from soft cheese to sturdier meat. The first knives to touch meat dishes, in particular, typically belonged to the carver, a professional whose prestige surpassed even that of the cook. According to Bee Wilson, food writer, historian, and author of Consider the Fork, carvers had their own sets of specialized knives, which they selected based on the weapon with which the animal was hunted.

The initial carving and serving of the beast was deemed to be so important, it was given an office in court, known as the Carvership. In Consider the Fork, Wilson includes an eerie 16th-century book excerpt detailing the somber “terms” of an English carver.

“Break that deer

Slice that brawn

Bear that goose

Lift that swan

...Dismember that heron”

But knives weren’t just for professionals. In fact, while carvers made preliminary cuts, broke up large bones, and arranged the dish, the rest of the slicing was up to the diners. This was hardly an odd ask at the time—almost all food was prepared so that it could be picked up by hand, spoon, or the pointed tip of one’s knife—a tool almost everyone had on-hand.

Tucked away in a sheath and strung to one’s belt, a personal dagger-like knife was a quotidian accessory to the medieval European outfit. Though it could be used as a defensive weapon, it's primary purpose was as an eating utensil. One would just as soon leave the house without shoes as walk around without a knife strung from the girdle. In fact, it was so habitually worn, Wilson says, that it was often easy to forget it was there. According to her, one sixth-century text “reminded monks to detach their knives from their belts before they went to bed, so they didn’t cut themselves in the night.”

Not only were they functional tools, they were also personal gadgets tailored to their owner. While meals were shared, with multiple diners often eating from the same plate, knives were far from communal. “You would no more eat with another person’s knife than you would brush your teeth today with a stranger’s toothbrush,” writes Wilson. At the end of the dinner, knives would be wiped down with a napkin and promptly returned to their owners.

But while no one totes a toothbrush on their person, the knives were, in a sense, a garment, and thus often designed to reflect their owners' taste. The handle, where one could really show personal flair, could be crafted from a wide variety of materials, including brass, glass, mother of pearl, and tortoiseshell. Some were plain, while others were engraved with surprisingly sweet images of flowers, doves, apostles, or even babies.

But, for all of the importance that personal knives held in Western culture, they were eventually cut out of European dining, replaced by duller, more impersonal tools placed on the table for no one in particular. Legend has it that, during one royal French dinner, King Louis XII’s chief adviser was horrified by the sight of a dinner guest picking at his teeth with the point of his knife—and demanded all his knives be created blunt. The next king, Louis XIV, followed suit, issuing a nationwide moratorium on the creation of sharp, pointed knives.

The 17th century saw the shift towards blunter, one-sided knives that could no longer be used for stabbing, but rather required a more delicate stroking motion, with a finger draped over the spine of the tool. Forks eventually found their way to the table, too, and by the 18th century, the personal, sharp, eating dagger was all but a dull memory.

Fancy a lamprey pie?

Meet the lamprey, if you dare: slimy, coiling horror of the sea since before there were dinosaurs. At first glance, there's something almost floral about their mouths—until you realize you're looking at a bouquet of tiny fangs some species use to vampirize lake trout and other fish. Appearances nothwithstanding, these primitive, jawless fish were actually delicacies in medieval England (and ancient Rome, and are eaten across Europe today). For the first time, centuries-old lamprey remains have been uncovered in London, near the city’s Mansion House train station.

Fossilized lamprey finds are rare despite their long history on the Earth because these eel-like fish are boneless. Before now, there have been only two other discoveries of lamprey remains in the United Kingdom, in York and southern Scotland. Even their teeth—the parts discovered near Mansion House—are unlikely to be preserved, as they are made of keratin, like hair, nails, and rhino horns. Alan Pipe, an archaeozoologist at Museum of London Archaeology who identified the teeth, suspects that these lasted because they were found in soggy ground near the Thames.

The find leads archaeologists to believe that it was quite a wealthy area in medieval times, because the lamprey was a favorite treat of the rich and powerful for centuries, but not without a cost. King Henry I was particularly fond of them, and is famously said to have died from consuming “a surfeit of lampreys” against his doctor’s wishes. Jean Bruyérin-Champier, physician to 16th-century French King François I, noted that the combination of lampreys with capons was notorious for inducing stomach pains, quipping that “only cooks can kill people, not only with great impunity, but also in receiving great glory from doing so.”

Yet the lamprey retained its royal status. In England, it fell to one city in particular to sate royal hankering. Until 1836, the town of Gloucester sent an annual lamprey pie in tribute to the monarch, and was once fined for dropping the ball with King John. More recently, lamprey pies have been reserved for special occasions. In 1953, the residents of Gloucester stepped back into their traditional role and whipped up a special lamprey pie for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, and followed it up with more for the 25th and 50th anniversaries of the occasion. In 2012, however, on account of lamprey’s disappearance from polluted local waters, Gloucester had to import the fish from the North American Great Lakes—where they are invasive pests—to prepare its gift for the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s ascendance, or the Diamond Jubilee. The Great Lakes Fishery Commission was more than happy to comply.

Such measures may not be necessary by the time Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee rolls around in a few years. British environmental representatives have begun the process of reintroducing lampreys to the Derwent, Great Ouse, Trent, and Wear Rivers. Lamprey is still popular, after all, in Finland, France, Portugal, and Spain. The rivers' other fish are probably less sanguine about the development.

The answer might not sit well with arachnophobes.

Leading up to Halloween, as autumn set into the landscape of Southeastern Alaska, the administrative building at Glacier Bay National Park started sprouting creepy hair. The coarse brown globs would disappear by night and reform every morning, “like a roving mole,” says Ingrid Nixon, the park’s Chief Interpreter.

Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the globs were not hair at all: They were legs, thousands of them. The mole was in fact a massive, tightly-packed cluster of daddy longlegs.

Nixon says the timing was perfect, as it created a creepy mysterious sight in the lead up to Halloween. “I think everybody’s first reaction is eek, because it kind of just creeps you out,” she says. “Then it’s fascinating because in some of the cases, the little bodies are so tucked up, all you see is the legs and it really looks like hair.”

This behavior is common among daddy longlegs (also known as harvestmen), according to Prashant Sharma, an evolutionary biologist at University of Wisconsin, but there’s no straightforward explanation as to why they do it.

Sharma says one thing scientists do know is that the behavior happens more often in dry weather, such as the Alaska autumn, when humidity drops along with temperatures and the days get shorter. Daddy longlegs are prone to drying out, he says, so bunching together allows them to create a microenvironment. “It’s kind of like body heat, but it’s body humidity,” he says. “They are huddling together to maintain that.”

Another possible reason could be for protection. Because they don’t have venom or spin silk (two traits that make them distinct from spiders), they might cluster together to ward off predators. Daddy longlegs can release a stinky secretion, and if the whole group does this at once, it is more effective. “They may have more powerful repugnatory secretions by virtue of having so many individuals releasing this really stinky smell at the same time,” says Sharma.

Daddy longlegs are also nocturnal, so when they pack together during the day, they are resting. Sharma says the animals in the middle of the aggregation will hold onto the side of the wall with their mouths, and the outer layer of individuals will latch on with their famous long spindly legs. At night when they disperse, they go scavenging or hunting for small insects.

Sharma says that while the behavior is common, the clusters of hundreds found this month in Alaska are bigger than usual. A more common sight would be a group of 20 to 40. The biggest grouping ever recorded was more than 300,000 individuals found in southwestern China in 2005, and there are many YouTube videos of massive writhing balls of daddy longlegs on the internet (click that link at your peril). Sharma says their usual aggregation sites are the sides of trees, inside caves, and on walls with crevices, such as the Glacier Bay National Park building.

Nixon says visitors, who came to the park looking for majestic glacier vistas, were surprised to find a building sprouting legs. “Forget about those grizzly bears, let’s just show you these daddy longlegs,” she says, laughing.

But, Nixon adds, reveling in the unexpected is part of what nature is all about.

“Nature is so full of fascinating surprising things, and so the fact that we’re all leaning closer and saying, ‘Gosh why are they doing that?’ It’s one of those cool things,” she says, “Nature just keeps us guessing.”

We speak to those who have made the nigh impossible journey.

Remoteness and isolation are always relative. A half day’s drive from the city can feel incredibly removed; a place without cellphone service can feel isolated. But by any standards, Inaccessible Island, which is a real place that’s really called that, is one of the most remote and isolated places on the planet.

“It's like a giant wedding cake, with very very steep cliffs, just dropping off straight into the sea,” says Brian Gratwicke, a biologist with Smithsonian who has, well, accessed Inaccessible Island. Imagine a big slab of rock, plopped into the freezing and unforgiving South Atlantic, about equidistant from Argentina and South Africa. There is one short, narrow, pebbly beach on which you can land little boats, but the sea there is so rough, and the landing so difficult, that there are only a few times a year when it’s even possible to visit. It is part of an archipelago, called Tristan da Cunha, that’s considered the most remote, isolated populated archipelago in the world, but only one of the islands is populated, and it sure isn’t Inaccessible.

People who go there, and a slowly increasing number of people are doing so, are drawn by this very fact. Tristan da Cunha is not a place that would appeal to most tourists; the weather is harsh and changeable, the islands are mostly the tips or vents of undersea volcanoes with a few flat pasture-lands, and there isn’t much to do there. The entire idea of going is because these islands are so remote, so untouched, and so hard to get to. “It's more bragging rights than anything else to have been to such a remote settlement that's so isolated,” says Chris Howarth, an Australian program manager who has been to Tristan da Cunha twice. (She likes taking wild expeditions for vacation.)

The archipelago is made up of five islands: Tristan, the main island and the only populated one; Nightingale and its two tiny surrounding islands; and Inaccessible Island. There is a sixth (Gough Island) that’s legally part of Tristan da Cunha, but at 245 miles away from the main island it’s kind of its own thing.

Here’s how you get there, if you even can get there, which is hardly a guarantee. You board a ship from either Cape Town, South Africa, or Ushuaia, at the southern tip of Argentina. These places are extremely far apart, and Inaccessible Island is located roughly halfway between then, in the doldrums of the South Atlantic Ocean. You cannot fly there. You can’t really fly anywhere near there. And that’s not “can’t” unless you are some kind of crazy rich person who can just make things happen with money. “Can’t” means it cannot be done.

So you board this ship, which is probably either a fishing vessel or a research vessel, or maybe a big commercial cargo boat. It takes eight days to get to Tristan da Cunha, the archipelago of which Inaccessible Island is a part, if you’re going nonstop, which not every ship does. “Not many people have the ability to entertain themselves for that long at sea,” says Howarth.

The only permanently inhabited island in the archipelago is Tristan. There are a couple of guest houses, and a government house, but most tourists will not sleep there; there are no hotels or beds-and-breakfasts or Airbnb. Most will instead sleep on the ship, anchored offshore. To get from your ship to Tristan, you can either take a little dinghy or a helicopter, but if you don’t have access to a helicopter, pray for good weather. The harbor is minimal, with little protection from the fantastically rough chop. There’s no beach, no marine walls to break the waves. “It's perfectly within the realm of possibility that you show up at Tristan and four days later you're still sitting in the ship off Tristan,” says Greg McClelland, a biologist who focuses on island ecology and who actually lived on Tristan for the better part of a year as a science and policy advisor.

To go to Inaccessible Island, you need permission from the island government; it is officially an overseas territory of the United Kingdom, but in reality, as with many remote territories, it’s self-governing. Take your boat 28 miles southwest, get back in your dinghy—no helicopters this time, even if you do have one—and, again, hope. McClelland says it’s really only possible to land on Inaccessible Island for a week or so each year, probably around December and January.

Inaccessible Island has one small beach, made up of pebbles, that provides a non-ideal but technically possible place to land a boat. There’s a small research cabin on one end of the beach, used every once in awhile by scientists. For most people, that’s where the trip to Inaccessible ends. “You can't go anywhere. You can land on this little beach, walk up to one end, come back down again, and then have to get into the Zodiac [a little inflatable boat] again to get off the island,” says Howarth.

It is a very long way to go for a ten-minute stroll.

Inaccessible Island, and Tristan da Cunha as a whole, has fascinated people for hundreds of years. Though it was first sighted in 1506, nobody landed on any of Tristan’s islands until (we think) 1643. Few landed there for another hundred or so years, until the late 18th century when a few naturalists explored little bits of the islands. After some failed attempts, the permanent settlement began on the island of Tristan in 1817, when a British soldier asked to be left behind there with his family. From there, some shipwrecked sailors ended up on the island, and some women from South Africa or elsewhere in the South Atlantic ended up there as well. Today, there are about 250 people on Tristan, all of whom live in the only settlement on the island, called Edinburgh of the Seven Seas. Everyone I talked to reiterated that the Tristanians—they call themselves Islanders—are not interested in adding new residents.

Inaccessible is a different story. It was first sighted in 1656, and the first known landing wasn’t until 1803. But the history of the island gets extremely weird in 1871, when two Moscow-born German brothers, Gustav and Frederick Stoltenhoff, decided to settle on Inaccessible Island and operate a trading business, mostly of seal pelts. Eric Rosenthal describes their misadventures in a 1952 book called Shelter From the Spray. “If ever an island deserved its name, it would seem that Inaccessible did,” writes Rosenthal. “Its vast square summit rose like a wall above the little ship as she tossed about at her moorings off the western side.”

The Stoltenhoffs, fresh out of reluctant service in the Franco-Prussian War, had landed on Tristan once and heard tales of another island, nearby and uninhabited. A Tristanian had told them of a harvest of 1,700 seal pelts on Inaccessible the year before, a treasure trove of money. So the brothers decided out of a sort of Robinson Crusoe-type lust for adventure, as well as valuable seal pelts, to live on Inaccessible Island for awhile.

Their two years on Inaccessible were completely miserable. They had no idea how to build shelter, did not know how to catch or skin a seal, forgot to bring vital supplies like rope and candles, had their fishing boat and house repeatedly destroyed by weather, and, by their accounts, were screwed with by mean Tristanians who came by every few months, stealing their supplies and shooting the wild goats the Stoltenhoffs relied on. The brothers brought a dog and a few puppies; the dogs fled and became feral within a few weeks.

Surviving mostly on penguin eggs and wild boar they described as disgusting (when they could even catch one), the brothers survived, clumsily and improbably, through two full winters. From the book: “‘The penguins are coming ashore!’ Gustav shrieked with delight. ‘If only we can get at them.’ Whether through their own weakness, or the superior instinct of their prey during the first few days, they failed to kill a single bird. Instead they found themselves pecked and once or twice even knocked over by the vigorous antics of their opponents.”

After two years of being physically bested by penguins, having killed only 19 seals (the pelts of which they traded for some biscuits), and every few months refusing to be rescued, the Stoltenhoffs gave up and went home. Having already been named and featured in atlases, Inaccessible couldn’t be named after the Stoltenhoffs, but a tiny rock nearby did not have a name when they were rescued, and was named Stoltenhoff Island, after them. Nobody since the Stoltenhoffs have tried to live for any real length of time on Inaccessible Island.

Today, when people go to Inaccessible Island, it’s mostly because it is such a remote, unknown, untouched place. But there’s one other reason. “One of the things that really excited me as a biologist was getting to see flightless rails,” says Gratwicke. Inaccessible Island is home to the world’s smallest flightless bird, the Inaccessible rail. It is...not a particularly beautiful bird, being small and dark brown, with a sharp little bill it uses to mostly eat insects. “When we got to Inaccessible Island, it was pretty amazing, because none of the birds had any fear of people,” says Gratwicke. “They would walk right up to you and nibble on your fingers.”

It isn’t always easy to see the rails, though there are plenty of them on the island. “You can walk along for a bit and not see them, but if you play their call, it turns out there's one a couple meters from you in every direction,” says McClelland. The rails have survived, unlike other small flightless birds, because, amazingly, there are exactly zero land mammals on Inaccessible Island. It’s fairly common for islands, especially isolated ones, not to have any endemic mammals; unlike birds, there isn’t really any way for mammals to get to many of these islands.

But ships, when they arrive, bring pests, especially rats and mice, which can absolutely decimate bird populations. Rats have been established on Tristan for a century, and they prey on eggs and young birds that have evolved no protections against them. Tristanians have an annual rat-hunting day to try to control their population, but it’s not easy. On Inaccessible? Not a single rat.

Inaccessible Island is a great place to see all kinds of birds, really. The Stoltenhoff brothers certainly didn’t eat all of the penguins there; today, there are large populations of northern rockhopper penguins, as well as vast quantities of shearwaters, petrels, and several species of albatross.

Other than that it’s sort of what it seems like: a big rock in the middle of nowhere. That’s not necessarily a slight; it is what it is. And the name certainly remains accurate.

"Sabino" is the oldest wooden, coal-burning steamboat that still operates in the United States.

In the quiet harbor of a quaint coastal town, a vestige of America’s maritime legacy grumbles in the water. Jason Cabral heaves coal chunks into a furnace, sending steam into jumping pistons that chug-chug like a train. Black smoke shoots into the sky; a whistle erupts with a scream. Sabino slips away from the Connecticut shoreline and into the Mystic River.

Sabino is the oldest wooden, coal-burning steamboat that still operates in the United States. Built in 1908, the nearly 60-foot vessel harkens to a time when the nation’s highways were rivers and coastlines, not endless stretches of asphalt and concrete. Before automobiles and diesel engines swept the land, thousands of huffing steamboats like this one formed the country’s transportation backbone.

Cabral, a sturdy man with a bushy goatee, belongs to a small crew of engineers and captains who keep Sabino running seasonally at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport Museum. The sprawling complex includes a recreated seafaring village from the 19th century and a towering reproduction of the Pilgrims’ Mayflower. The steamboat is a living exhibit—all moving parts and machinery in an era of flat screens and automation.

“When kids come in, they’re mesmerized by it. They just hang out, maybe ask questions, maybe just listen. That for me is the best part of the job,” Cabral says from down in the exposed engine room, which sits in the belly of the boat. Whirs and hums drown out the sound of lapping waves. “That, and I get to get dirty and work on old machinery all day,” he adds.

Cabral joined the team eight years ago, after he lost his job in Mystic as a land surveyor and struggled to find work during the economic downturn. He took a summer job at the seaport and never left, eventually earning his steam engineer’s license from the U.S. Coast Guard. Now his hands are blackened with grease and coal dust, his arms slightly singed from bumping into boilers.

“I’ve become obsessed with the fire,” he says, raking the blazing coals in the squat black firebox. “It gives me a puzzle every day to solve.” Cabral says the goal is to build a “mature” fire—around two inches thick, preferably with blue flames—so that machinery runs smoothly without building too much pressure or creating excess smoke. The size of the rocks, the wind, and weather all affect the fire’s strength.

Inside the firebox, temperatures can climb to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, ideal for creating steam—and, it turns out, cooking hot dogs and bratwurst for hungry engineers. During the cruise, Ryan Stokes, a young apprentice, experiments with a different snack: frozen potato perogies wrapped in aluminum foil.

A bell tinkles twice above Cabral’s head. It’s the captain, who’s calling for more steam. Captains on modern vessels control speed and thrust by pushing buttons or pulling levers. On Sabino, David Childs can only pull strings and ring bells, instructing the engineer below to adjust the steam to go faster, slower, forward, or in reverse. Everything works on delay. Reading the waves and anticipating the boat’s behavior is its own artform.

“You have to be gentle,” Childs says from the pilothouse on the upper deck. “We’re dancers, not muscle people.” Sabino normally putters along at eight or nine knots but can climb to 13 knots.

Childs, a retiree with white hair and an easy smile, has worked at the museum for 14 years, first as a volunteer painting boats, and later as a captain on Sabino and other historic vessels. He lives at the seaport, too, spending the night on a 30-year-old fishing trawler that he sails north from Florida every summer, chugging along at “bicycle speed” up the Atlantic coast.

For Sabino’s crew, another delicate balancing act is controlling the sooty plumes that escape from the smokestacks. “We try to be respectful to our neighbors,” Childs says. To limit smoke, engineers touch the fire as little as possible when passing other vessels or cruising into town, and they’re picky with their coal supply.

Still, Childs says he occasionally hears complaints from passersby who worry Sabino’s exhaust will dirty their vessels. “We make a mistake, and a poof of smoke comes up, and everyone has a radio on their boat. So they say, ‘Sabino, you did it to me again!’” he says. “But all in all, people applaud us when we go by. They love us.” About 12,300 people sailed on Sabino in 2018, before the exhibit closed for the season in mid-October, the museum says.

Sabino wasn’t such an anomaly when it ferried passengers around coastal Maine in the early 20th century. Smog-choked harbors and soot-lined decks were the norm for decades, until the diesel engine helped clear the air. But diesel, while an improvement, still produces air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions when burned. So now the shipping industry is working to develop vessels that don’t use any fossil fuels on board, including battery-powered ferries and hydrogen fuel cell ships.

Cruising on Sabino is a reminder of how far technology has advanced since the steamboat era, and how far we’ve still to go. “If we can get out of that [diesel engine] to the next level, that will be wonderful,” Childs says. Sabino, meanwhile, continues burning coal—about 40 tons per year, according to the museum, which doesn’t quantify the vessel’s pollution output. (For context, U.S. power plants devoured 661 million tons of coal in 2017.)

Back by the engine room, Cabral lifts a metal hatch on the floor, revealing heaps of black rocks that are brought on board by wheelbarrow. The coal is usually a soft, bituminous type mined from West Virginia or Pennsylvania. “Probably the most difficult thing we have with the boat is finding coal that burns right for us but doesn’t put up a lot of smoke,” he says. Last spring, the crew had to return a batch that was especially sooty and burned poorly.

As a National Historic Landmark, Sabino isn’t subject to modern environmental regulations, meaning the vessel operates just as it did 110 years ago. Dan McFadden, communications director for the Mystic Seaport Museum, says that’s precisely the point.

“We keep operating Sabino with a coal-fired boiler to give people a small glimpse into the days...where boats and ships, railroads, home furnaces, and industry burned coal,” he says. “There is the historic authenticity of the experience, but we also want people to get an idea of the environmental conditions that would have been present in those days, and thus encourage the promotion and use of alternative power solutions today.”

He says the seaport has been fortunate over the years to find people who are committed to running steam engines and steamboats in the modern age. But keeping Sabino fully staffed, with properly licensed crew, is a constant challenge, and crew like Cabral and Childs are hard to come by.

“They’re great storytellers, and they’re great ‘people’ persons,” he says. “They love talking about the boat and her history. They love showing how she operates.”

8,600 bottles and counting.

On paper, Vic Clinco is an assistant manager at US Foods, the food service distributor. But in his free time, he takes on a different identity entirely: that of a hot sauce collector supreme. His Arizona living room is a rogue's gallery of spicy condiments, with shelves on shelves displaying the bounty of his 21 years of collecting. Currently, Clinco owns more than 8,600 sealed bottles of hot sauce. That number increases nearly daily, and Clinco proudly shows off new acquisitions on Instagram.

For Clinco, it's always been about heat. He inherited a love of spicy food from his father and grandfather, "eating jalapeños in the backyard with them, when I was just a kid," he says. But the idea of a sauce collection didn't coalesce until two decades ago, when Clinco's then-girlfriend, soon-to-be wife gifted him some novelty hot sauces. Charmed by their off-color labels, Clinco gave them a place of honor on his countertop. Clinco then picked up a book: The Great Hot Sauce Book by Jennifer Trainer Thompson. "It was basically a picture album of hot sauces from literally all over the world," Clinco says, "I used it as a checklist."

It wasn't long before he had scores of hot sauces. In the early days of the blogosphere, Clinco found other hot sauce fanatics online, and joined the fraternity of "Chile-Heads"—shorthand for people fascinated by hot sauces.

Hot sauce collectors vary in what they want to save. Some want only the products of certain manufacturers, while others seek out limited edition hot sauces. But one reason that Clinco's collection has ballooned is due to his egalitarian taste. When it comes to hot sauce, he wants "the 79-cent ones I find at Hispanic grocery just as much as I do the $350 reserve bottle." He's also absorbed six other sauce collections along the way, and currently has his eye on a large reserve in Ohio. "We're trying to figure out logistics on it right now," he says. Bottles of hot sauce, after all, are delicate cargo.

Clinco is reticent to give hot sauce recommendations, though, and says it depends hugely on individual taste (and pain tolerance.) But he's more forthcoming about some of the treasures in his collection. One is the infamous Blair's Reserve Caldera. Capped with a gold-covered skull, the Caldera consists of three containers of gradually-hotter capsaicin oils stacked atop each other, and stands at nearly a foot tall. Only 499 bottles were ever made, and Clinco says he once saw one selling for $2700. Two other treasures include customized Dan Norton bottles from Hellfire Hot Sauce, one emblazoned with his name. Recently, he picked up a bottle of Paulman Acre SoCaliANTe: a hot sauce made with edible black ants.

Clinco's collection is well-known enough that manufacturers send him bottles to include. (Once, this even resulted in an accusation that Clinco was "cheating" in the construction of his collection, which he laughs off.) But for nearly 20 years, Clinco had a Holy Grail that eluded him: the appropriately-named CaJohns Excalibur hot sauce, which comes in a container shaped like a sword. At a recent Houston hot sauce show, another collector generously gave Clinco an Excalibur. Clinco jokes that he's wracking his brain to find something to give in return.

Clinco often describes his massive hot sauce spread as the world's largest private collection. But is there a larger collection anywhere in the world? He doesn't think so. Currently, he explains, the Guinness Book of World Records has another collection down as the largest: that of hot sauce manufacturer Chip Hearn in Rehoboth, Delaware, but "he has barbecue sauce and salsas that are included in it," says Clinco. He suspects that his collection has surpassed Hearn's in size, especially since Clinco's collection is hot sauce, and hot sauce only. Well, with the addition of a handful of wing sauces, Clinco amends. But there's no hard feelings. "I love him," Clinco says of Hearn. "I've been telling him for years: I'm coming for you. He just giggles."

At the moment, Clinco's collection is displayed with pride in his living room. Someday, he muses, he might need a storage space outside of his home. But for now, he enjoys living alongside the sauce. When we spoke, he was already excited for Halloween, with plans to throw open his doors and windows, to let trick-or-treaters and their parents gawk at all the firepower. Along with candy, he's handing out packets of hot sauce.

Please retain for the next thousand years or so.

In 2013, a press in London printed a limited run of invitations for a party that had already happened. In 2009, the physicist Stephen Hawking had thrown a party, and no one showed up.

There were balloons. There was champagne. There was a giant banner, which read “Welcome, Time Travellers.”

Hawking, who died earlier this year, was conducting a cheeky experiment about time travel. A time traveler, in theory, at least, could attend a party even if the invitation was issued many years hence. If any time travelers did see Hawking’s invitation, though, none of them took up the offer.

The artist print for these invitations is now offered for sale as part of an auction of items from Hawking’s estate. The auction also includes Hawking’s printed copies of some of his most important papers, his medals and awards, a copy of his book A Brief History of Time that’s signed with a fingerprint, the typescript of his thesis, and a bomber jacket.

The proceeds from the sale of one item, the oldest of his wheelchairs that still survives, will go to the Motor Neuron Disease Association and The Stephen Hawking Foundation.

Whoever buys the party invitation, though, has a job to do. “I’m hoping copies of [the invitation], in one form or another, will survive for many thousands of years,” Hawking said. There’s always the possibility that some future time traveler will see it and decide to show up to the party, creating a whole new timeline in one of the many possible universes out there.

Remember when Eve bit into the…fig?!

November 1, or All Saints’ Day, is a festival intended to exalt all saints in the Christian tradition. It’s a national holiday in Vatican City, where Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco made its public debut—on All Saints’ Day in 1512.

Early art historian and Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote of the occasion: “The whole world came running when the vault was revealed, and the sight of it was enough to reduce them to stunned silence.” Little did they know, the most stunning was yet to come, in the form of a detail easily missed: according to Michelangelo, the forbidden fruit wasn’t an apple, but a fig.

Michelangelo’s nine-panel phenomenon, depicting scenes from the Book of Genesis along with countless other biblical figures and allusions, brought the loftiness of heaven down to earth. After four years of back-bending work, the artist had had enough with painting, writing in an extended sonnet: “I've already grown a goiter from this torture/hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy,” and closing with the resigned realization that, “I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.” But Michelangelo’s longing for sculpture work might not have been the only thing frustrating his creative process.

Having been trained as a youth at the Medici family’s humanist academy in Florence, which promoted a blend of Platonic ideals and Christianity, Michelangelo likely would have been comfortable challenging the Catholic Church’s emphasis on being an intermediary between people and God. The symbolism hidden within the frescoes of his ceiling aligns Michelangelo more closely with the philosophy of Renaissance Humanism, the more modern, liberal belief that people could hold a relationship with God directly. His choice to include non-biblical, nude men like the Ignudi (supporting figures in the frescoes, wholly unrelated to the scenes they frame) and an anatomical depiction of the human brain was a subtle move to reconcile the Church’s views with his own, as both examples show an interest in the secular. The Ignudi’s relaxed, natural poses and idealized bodies placed emphasis on the human side of Catholicism. One of the most noticeable artistic liberties Michelangelo took, however, is in the form of figs.

In the central section of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, the artist illustrates scenes concerning Adam and Eve. The panel depicting the “Temptation” and the two characters’ subsequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden, is a notable departure from presiding thoughts in Italy at the time over what type of fruit was the forbidden one. In the Vulgate, the Catholic Church’s official Latin translation of the Bible during the 16th century, the Tree of Knowledge is widely read as bearing apples. In Michelangelo’s fresco, the tree bears figs—a more Judaic interpretation of the text. (It should be noted that Genesis describes Adam and Eve as covering themselves with fig leaves upon their new awareness of nudity, so figs were definitely part of the action in some way.)

Interestingly, figs would come up again in Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel, just at a lesser altitude. The artist’s infamous wall fresco depicting the “Last Judgment” is full of nude figures rather than traditionally clothed ones, and it is this brazen act of biblical revision that spurred the “Fig Leaf Campaign.” At the Council of Trent in 1563, members of the Catholic Church decreed that all lasciviousness depicted in religious art must be covered with carefully placed fig leaves.

The first scientists to describe the animal thought it might have walked.

Arriving on Inaccessible Island—after the inevitable odyssey of getting there—you hear the sound of the Inaccessible Island rail everywhere. The smallest flightless birds in the world, the rails scurry around the vegetation, feasting on worms, berries, seeds, and invertebrates, including a flightless species of moths. During a fieldwork trip in 2011, it took days for Martin Stervander, then a doctoral student at Sweden’s Lund University, to spot one. Even then, “you see something little and dark, running for a second, and that’s about it,” he says.

Catching one, though, proved easy. Usually, when trapping birds, scientists rig a net high off the ground, but for these flightless birds, the net went low. When they played a recording of the bird’s call, it took only a few minutes before a male and female ran straight into the net.

Inaccessible Island rails live only on Inaccessible Island; it appears, as far as any evidence shows, that they never even made it to the neighboring Nightingale Island. “No one really knew the history,” says Stervander, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oregon’s Institute of Ecology and Evolution. With a sample of a rail's genetic material, he aimed to finally answer the most mysterious question about these birds: How did they get to Inaccessible Island to begin with?

The first scientist to describe the Inaccessible Island rail, Percy Lowe, never visited the island himself. He was sent a sample by a clergyman who lived on Tristan da Cunha, the main island in this area. Lowe couldn’t connect it to any existing species, so in 1923 he grouped it in its own genus, Atlantisia, after the fabled island of Atlantis. He believed the bird had come to the island from Africa or South America but theorized that Atlantisia rogersi had always been flightless. In his view, it had arrived on its remote island home by walking over land bridges long submerged under the oceans.

Close to a century later, the science of plate tectonics (a surprisingly recent development in our understanding of the planet’s distant past) suggests that’s not the case. And in a new paper published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, Stervander and his collaborators detail genetic evidence for a very different version of the rail’s past.

After sequencing the genome of the rails caught in their net, the scientists were able to find the Inaccessible Island rail’s closest relative—the dot-winged crake, which lives in Uruguay and Argentina. Both birds are also closely related to the black rail, which is found in South and North America.

One of the main implications of this finding: The common ancestor of these birds could fly. That means that Inaccessible Island rails didn’t walk across impossibly long land bridges to reach their current home. Instead, they flew there, and like many birds confined to island paradises with no predators, they lost the ability to fly over time. (Flying takes a lot of energy and big muscles, so if there’s no reason to fly, it’s more efficient not to.)

It also clears up some of Lowe’s confusion about these birds’ taxonomy. But because the black rail was described first, the somewhat arcane rules of the discipline require that its relatives share its name. In the paper, Stervander and his colleagues suggest that the Inaccessible Island rail should become the Laterallus rogersi.

“We’re quite sad because Atlantisia is a beautiful name with a beautiful history,” says Stervander. (But rules are rules.)

On this one tiny island, there is a thriving population of thousands of what we'll now call Laterallus rogersi, but they are considered vulnerable to extinction. Should a mammalian predator population reach the island, it could make quick work of the scurrying birds. Rails, as a group, have spread over the world, to islands far and wide, and made successful homes, only to have them destroyed by human invasion. According to one estimate, anywhere from 440 to 1,580 species of flightless rails went extinct after humans started colonizing islands in the South Pacific.

People living on Tristan da Cunha are careful to avoid introducing any potential predators onto Inaccessible Island, and the risk is relatively low, given how hard it is to get there. (One of Stervander’s collaborators once had to wait five weeks on a boat to reach his research site.) For now, the rails are safe in a place where few humans are eager to go, even if they’ve long lost the ability to fly anywhere else.

Woolly worms may not be the greatest meteorologists, but they sure are entertaining.

On a cold and drizzly Saturday morning in October, several thousand cars are snaking their way through North Carolina’s winding mountain roads into the town of Banner Elk, a tiny and prosperous village nestled between two ski resorts. Upon first glance, the annual event that draws these visitors looks much like any other outdoor, family-friendly festival this time of year in the American South: kids getting their faces painted; vendors selling quilts, beeswax candles, and muscadine cider; trucks slinging gyros, funnel cakes, and something called “steak-in-a-sac” to hungry people swathed in camo and fleece. But the dozens of families huddled on the hay bales fanned out in front of the rickety yellow main stage are here for a very specific reason (and it isn’t the Elvis impersonator singing “Sweet Caroline”). They’re here to watch the worms race.

On the stage, which is bedecked with cartoonish illustrations of a fuzzy, grub-like character in running shoes and a sweatband, people of all ages—a middle-aged couple, a toddler tip-toeing on a foot stool, a college kid from Durham—are huddled around their respective “lanes,” a three-foot length of vertical string crested with paper name tags bearing honorifics like Dale Wormhardt, Wormy Daniels, and Willy the Wonder Worm. Competitors carefully place their athletes on the string before them and, when the emcee gives his “ready, set, go,” they step back. And it’s off to the races.

Some of the caterpillars inch their way skyward; others refuse to move and loiter in their lanes; a couple of particularly apathetic specimens give up entirely, let go, and drop to the ground. (One child begins to sob when this happens and his caterpillar is lost underfoot; the emcee hastily comforts him and directs him to the “corral,” a bucket at the end of the stage functioning as stash of backup worms.) A few people use plastic drinking straws to blow air on the bugs and, presumably, encourage them to move faster. Every handler claps and cheers for their racers, as do the spectators down on the hay bales, even though from their vantage point it mostly just looks like a stage full of fake mustaches dangling from string like tiny marionettes. In this particular heat, “Eastbound and Down” by Jerry Reed is blaring over the speakers. As the 25 fuzzy dark caterpillars, each approximately the size and shape of a single bushy eyebrow, crawl their way toward the heavens, the lyrics ring particularly true: “We’ve got a long way to go, and a short time to get there.”

This is the Woolly Worm Festival, an event centered entirely around the larvae of Pyrrharctia isabella—also known as the isabella tiger moth, or the woolly bear—and a cultural legend that humans have projected upon the insects for centuries. Folk wisdom, the kind that colored Appalachian culture and practices for centuries (and to some extent, still does), dictates that the woolly worm caterpillar can be used to predict the weather of the following winter, based on the coloration of the black and brown bands on its body: a worm banded in mostly black portends a grim, harsh winter; one sporting more brown foreshadows milder temperatures and conditions.

Other Woolly Worm festivals exist: Beattyville, Kentucky and Vermilion, Ohio each host their own versions of the event. But here in Banner Elk, a ski town, winter weather carries particular economic significance—and now, the event itself does, too. The festival has hosted tens of thousands of visitors and, according to the Mountain Times, generated an estimated $1.4 million in its 40 years. For Banner Elk and the surrounding Avery County, the worm isn’t just an auger of a prosperous ski season to come: it’s a scrap of old mountain folklore made lucrative.

For the rest of the day, the old yellow stage functions as a revolving door for more than a thousand worms competing in seventy-some heats until the quarter finals, the semi finals, and the finals, whose victor is honored as the official winter weather forecaster of Banner Elk. This year’s ultimate winner, named Montgomery County’s Best, predicted for Banner Elk three weeks of below-average temperatures, one week of frost or light snow, six weeks of above-average temperatures, and three weeks of frost or light snow, in that order. (Perhaps more importantly, its owner, Carolyn Thompson, walked away with $1,000 in prize money.)

Jason DeWitt, who teaches skiing lessons at the nearby Beech Mountain during the winter, is scurrying around the stage, wearing a baseball cap festooned in faux caterpillars and a canvas jacket emblazoned with “The Woolly Worm Dude” on the back. “Back before they had meteorology, the farmers up here wanted to get a heads-up on the winter,” he tells me. “They found out years ago, when they looked at a woolly worm, it either has a black body segment or a brown body segment. So they read the worm.” DeWitt acts as a stage administrator for the event; it’s his 27th year of participating. “Winter is very important to us here,” he explains, pointing out the nearby ski slopes encircling the town. They’re barely visible through the fog.

Humans have tried for centuries to guess at the weather, and the woolly worm as winter weather oracle is just one of many time-honored methods. The woolly worm isn’t the only insect saddled with this duty: Foxfire Magazine, the quarterly journal out of north Georgia that covered traditions and practices in Appalachian culture, listed out a dozen other insect prognosticators in a 1970 article, “It Will Be A Hard Winter If.” In addition to the omens on a caterpillar’s body, it says, one can also determine the coming winter’s severity if “there are a lot of crickets in the chimney” and that “three months after the first katydid begins hollerin’, the first killing frost will come.” Attention is also paid to the height of anthills, the migration patterns of butterflies, and the behavior of miller moths.

Even here at the festival, I’m told of other strategies that the old-timers in these mountains swear by: place a bean in a jar for every foggy day in April, and you’ll know exactly how many snow days the following winter will bring. Look for whether bees are building their hives close to the ground or high in the treetops. Melynda Pepple, director of Avery County’s Chamber of Commerce, tells me one of the event’s vendors, a stone carver, even has special rocks that he swears change color before the rain. “Why not?” she says. “I mean, I had a weather poodle growing up.”

It is of little concern to any of the worm’s acolytes, in Banner Elk or elsewhere, that the meteorological qualities of the caterpillar have been mostly debunked.

In 1948, American Museum of Natural History curator of entomology Dr. Howard Curran embarked on an eight-year “study” at New York’s Bear Mountain to find whether there was any correlation between the bands of the caterpillars and the severity of the following winter. Curran’s research was primarily focused on flies (he discovered more than 2,600 species of them over the course of his career), but the woolly bear, and the lore surrounding it, captured the scientist’s curiosity. Dr. David Grimaldi, one of Curran’s successors at the museum, describes the project as “fun science.” By that point in his career, Grimaldi says, Curran had taken up a number of side projects rooted in entomological science, from writing articles to working on exhibitions. “He certainly seems to have taken the woolly bear thing seriously, applying a bit of scientific rigor to a popular tale,” Grimaldi says. “Perhaps he realized that popular legends die hard, and the only way to dispel them was through detailed scientific observation.”

Curran reported his annual findings to the New York Herald Tribune, which published the results each fall. In 1949’s installment, Herald Tribune reporter John O’Reilly rode along with Curran on his October expedition and, in a mock-serious account, detailed the scientist’s methods for hunting and capturing “a goodly number of bears” while driving along the roads around Bear Mountain. That year, O’Reilly reported, Curran collected a sample size of 23 caterpillars and calculated, based on the total number of brown segments divided by the total number of specimens, that the following winter would be even milder than the last. (According to historical weather data, the next January at Bear Mountain brought average temperatures of 34 degrees — precisely one degree warmer than the previous year’s January averages.)

Over the years of this annual reportage, word of Curran’s experiments spread. A tongue-in-cheek column in The Old Farmer’s Almanac in 1962, responding to complaints of unethical meteorological “quackery” from the American Meteorological Society, jokes: “Recently, the Woolly Bears, championed by Dr. C. H. Curran of the American Museum of Natural History … threatened to move in and take over the whole long-range forecasting field, including the venerable United States Weather Bureau.” (As recently as 1998, the Almanac reiterated the worm’s legend in its pages. A quick glance at the comments on this updated web version of the story reveals that the insect still holds a lot of significance for people.)

The Museum’s archives hold roughly 200 letters to Curran from people inquiring about the veracity of the caterpillar’s claims, along with his responses, which kindly but firmly controvert the myth. To one Robert Dice of Curry, New York, he writes in 1949, “Your great-grandfather’s interpretation of the meaning of the bands on the caterpillar is similar to that which I have always heard. I am afraid I am slightly dubious about the accuracy of the animal’s forecasting.” In another from November of 1950, Curran responds to a Massachusetts woman inquiring about whether the woolly bear legend was true, and if so, whether she should start a building project that winter, based on the previous year’s mild forecast. “Scientists really do not believe that they can do so,” he writes. “The Woolly Bears have predicted a warm winter, but I should not like to depend upon them to make a decision about building a house immediately.” And in response to an MIT meteorologist asking for details of the study in 1952, it’s clear that Curran’s research was more hobby than rigid academic endeavor: “Since we did not take this thing seriously, we see no reason to keep the detailed accounts.”

Incidentally, Grimaldi points out, the public seemed to latch on to Curran’s research in a way he couldn’t have predicted. “I think Curran would be surprised today to see how often his name is attributed to support of the woolly bear band width tale, when in fact he debunked it,” he says. But, he adds, “if Curran were living right now, he would also be surprised by the number of people willfully ignorant about science — creationists, flat-earthers, anti-climate science, you name it. So I don't think the great woolly bear controversy would necessarily get him too worked up.”

Given that sentiment, it’s ironic and a little bit heartbreaking to read Curran’s perspective on that 1949 prediction of another mild weather, reported in the Herald-Tribune: “It doesn’t seem possible,” he tells O’Reilly. “If this winter is milder than last, palm trees will be growing in these parts.” He wasn’t entirely wrong.

But here in Avery County, the worm’s lack of scientific credentials doesn’t seem to bother anyone. When I ask a handful of festival-goers whether they really, truly believe in the worm’s prognosticating power, few hesitate to affirm that they do, and several people mention a figure once provided by Appalachian State University: “It’s 85 percent accurate.” (In November 1975, Appalachian State’s student newspaper, The Appalachian, reported that students of the university’s entomology and meteorology departments assembled a “Center for Woolly Worm Study” to compare woolly worms of Western North Carolina with the region’s climatological data, though it’s unclear how long the project lasted or how they arrived at that particular figure.) The festival draws thousands of visitors to the town, generates roughly $50,000 in revenue each year, and makes people happy. The scientific accuracy of the claim upon which the entire event is premised? That’s not really the point.

At the Woolly Worm Festival, an idea that began as an homage to a piece of Appalachian folk wisdom has grown into a nexus of commerce for the town. “I don’t know if you know this, but you can't find a motel room or B&B here this week,” DeWitt tells me. (It’s true—I had to spend the night at a motel the next state over in Johnson City, Tennessee, roughly an hour’s drive from Banner Elk.) “It's a real shot in the arm.”

And indeed, in Avery County, a miniature economy has sprung up around the worm. In addition to the potters, hiking stick carvers, quilters, and slingshot crafters who sell their wares at the event, there’s also the Strickland family. Nan Strickland and her two granddaughters helm a booth a few hundred feet from the stage, where they peddle their own wild-caught worms, along with various worm-themed souvenirs, from tubs strewn with roughage. (You can also purchase a special plastic carrier for your specimen, though many elect to walk around cupping the worms in their hands or perched on their shoulders.) Nan tells me that their family spends the weeks preceding the event traversing mountain backroads in the sunny hours between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. collecting the caterpillars—“they come out more in the sunlight,” she explains. The family sells them for $2 apiece at the event. This year, they brought 254 worms; in years past, their arsenal has numbered closer to four or five hundred. They sell out every year (and during one particularly fruitful festival a few years ago, they left midday to hurriedly replenish their stock). Science may not lend credence to the woolly worm myth, but you can’t argue with that math.

Over to the left of the stage, Dr. William Burrough presides over the official woolly worm first-aid station. Scattered in front of him is a full hospital’s worth of equipment in miniature: a defibrillator, X-ray machine, and MRI, all dollhouse-sized and scattered with faux caterpillars (and a few real ones) in situ. Burrough is a dentist from nearby Ashboro with a practice in Banner Elk and an old-school Southern accent. He is here to provide medical advice to kids concerned about their caterpillar’s health, as well as “certify” that the final race’s winner hasn’t benefited from performance-enhancing drugs. (The festival introduced this policy in 1988.) His loupes, which he uses to examine the worms, rest on the table nearby. I ask him whether, as someone formally trained in the sciences, he believes in the lore behind the worm. “I've got a lot of background in biochemistry, but to be honest with you, I'd have to say ... it's like faith,” he tells me in his slow, Southern drawl. “You just have to believe.”

We're looking for the unique gifts and curious items that you're most excited about this year.

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These fence posts were witnesses to history.

Why would anyone pay upwards of $2,000 for two stodgy old metal fence posts? Well, conspiracy sells. As part of a vast auction of artifacts related to John F. Kennedy, RR Auction in Boston is offering fence posts from the infamous “Grassy Knoll,” said by conspiracy theorists to mark where a second shooter would have helped assassinate the 35th president in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza.

Each post has a distinct conspiratorial significance. One is named for the “Badge Man,” said to be visible just behind the fence in the center of Mary Moorman’s famous photograph, taken on a Polaroid camera within moments of the fatal shot ringing out. See those two, tiny white dots, floating just above the line splitting shady and sunlit parts of the fence? (It's okay if you don't.) If you have an eye for the sinister and secret, then you might see a gleaming badge and the flash of a rifle muzzle, but it's not easy. The post itself isn't visible, but there is a fence.

The “HSCA Fence Post,” meanwhile, takes its name from the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ 1979 report, which concluded that “scientific acoustical evidence established a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John f. Kennedy [sic],” and is a favorite document of the conspiracy-minded. One of those shots, it posited, was likely to have come from along the Grassy Knoll’s wooden fence, and this post appears to have come from somewhere in the range the report outlined. Sure, the committee’s acoustic evidence has been discredited, but why split hairs?

Kennedy assassination conspiracies have proven remarkably resilient, with FiveThirtyEight reporting last year that 61 percent of Americans believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone—with majorities in almost every demographic. Aniko Bodroghkozy, an historian at the University of Virginia who is writing a book about television coverage of the Kennedy assassination, calls herself academically “agnostic” on the various conspiracy theories, despite adding that they lack any form of hard evidence. She also polls her students on the subject, and suspects from that sample that younger people may be less inclined to buy in. The theories, she says, offer baby boomers a chance to make some sense of the turbulent times they lived in. Their elected officials and military brass, she explains, “were lying” about the Vietnam War, and Watergate, after all, “was a conspiracy.”

But there are conspiracies and conspiracy theories, and wisdom is being able to tell the difference. Believer or not, if you’re looking to collect a tangible piece of this American tragedy—and surely a volatile party conversation-starter—you can also bid on a window sash from the Texas School Book Depository building, from which Oswald fired the only confirmed shots of that morning.