Quaggas, ibises, and tapirs, oh my!

If you lived in France in 1854, your neighbors probably did not include striped, round-snouted quaggas or strong-haunched kangaroos. Chances are also good you didn't routinely encounter a scarlet ibis, tapir, or peccary. But at the time, a group of zoologists and anatomists, under the auspices of the Société Impériale d'Acclimatation, dreamed of a world where these creatures and many more could be imported to mingle happily on French soil. In a dreamy, single-page chart issued by the printers Bouasse-Lebel around 1854, 75 animals, insects, plants, and trees from around the world share a single pastoral scene, with a cottage in the background and a sunset melting across the sky. The idea wasn’t entirely fantasy, but rather a way to show the variety of species that the society hoped to bring to France.

Acclimatization was hot for part of the 19th century, when societies in France, Britain, and several European colonies dreamed of swapping species back and forth in service of expanding the options for flocks and herds of domesticated animals. (Societies in Australia and New Zealand, for instance, were keen on foreign fish—particularly salmon and trout from Europe and North America—and complained that there were few local animals worth hunting.) Michael Osborne, now an emeritus historian at Oregon State University, has described these efforts to resettle creatures from around the world as a key function of “Europe’s colonial enterprise.” As science writer Cara Giamo wrote in a previous Atlas Obscura article, the driving principle behind acclimatization squared perfectly with the colonial agenda: It was predicated on “the idea that European powers knew what was best for the entire world, and deserved both to spread their own way of life to all four corners of the globe, and to harvest all of the earth’s fruits.” Georges Buffon—an 18th-century naturalist who inspired acclimatization’s champion, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire—could easily have been talking about the entire colonial enterprise when he said of animals, “It is for us to tame and render them subservient to our wants.”

The reasons for selecting a particular species for potential acclimatization ranged from fashion envy—a desire for, say, soft cashmere or Angora wool—to the desire to expand culinary ambitions, writes Harriet Ritvo, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the anthology The Ark and Beyond: The Evolution of Aquarium and Zoo Conservation. In a caption on the chart, its authors claim that they're out to vary and improve food reserves and economic resources. "There’s a mix of alleged motives” behind acclimatization movements, Ritvo says in an interview. Many of its wealthy, estate-owning enthusiasts “really were kind of romantics,” she adds. Some of them “just kind of liked the idea of jazzing up the local fauna.”

The idea of a national Noah’s ark sounded pretty good to many people, and by the 1860s, the French society boasted several thousand members and a sprawling home base, the Jardin D’Acclimatation in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. The attraction was part zoo, part proof of concept. “It included the attractions that had become standard for a zoological garden and were consequently required by the general public—big cats, elephants, and other iconic animals,” Rivto writes in the anthology. “But these constituted only a part of its collection, and not the most important part, at least in theory or principle.” Instead, its custodians considered it “a laboratory for the study of acclimatization” of both plants and animals.

But the garden’s grand acclimatization experiment didn’t last long. Many of the animals were removed the following decade during the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Legend has it that as bellies grumbled across the city, some of the garden’s former tenants were butchered and served by renowned chef Alexandre Étienne Choron: some well-off human residents were reportedly fortified with kangaroo stew, roasted camel, and more. The garden eventually had a spell as a baldly racist “human zoo” that displayed people from all over the world as curiosities.

The trouble with the acclimatization agenda, Ritvo writes, was that many of the plans were too “ambitious and fanciful” to work. The society members often leapt to action with little regard for which how a species might fare—failing to dig into which plants love a drought, or prefer their roots to be waterlogged, or which animals were equipped to handle a French winter. In some cases, species that had been domesticated—anywhere—were thought to be reasonable candidates. “There are some things they couldn’t replicate,” Ritvo says. “If you get an animal that’s used to the savanna in Africa and you bring it to London, it’s probably going to expire.” According to one of the society’s reports, though, it ought to have been easy. The key to helping a species settle in was apparently just “time and patience.”

The plants, animals, and insects struggling to adapt to a changing climate all over the world are proof that it takes much more than that. Overall, “there wasn’t much uptake,” Ritvo says, though a few species did settle in, in various places. European starlings, released in (among other places) New York City’s Central Park, by a Shakespeare enthusiast who wanted to fill North American skies with the feathered characters from the Bard’s plays, now number more than 200 million between Alaska and Mexico, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. More commonly, though, societies struggled, including in their quest to convince local agriculturalists that they needed new stock. “If you’re an ordinary farmer, you’re probably perfectly happy with the cows and sheep and pigs you have already, and you’re not feeling the need to introduce a llama or a bison or anything like that,” Ritvo says. The experiments were also “expensive and risky,” she adds, and many animals died in transit.

The acclimatization frenzy largely fizzled by the late 19th century. But the legacy lives on—some societies are still kicking, but have evolved into natural history organizations—and if you find yourself in Paris today, you can still visit the Jardin. The flower-studded grounds recently got a makeover, and the attractions now include amusement rides, wooden boats, as well as rabbits, guinea pigs, goats, and sheep roving around a charming, thatched-roof farm—named after Saint-Hilaire. Just don’t expect to see any quaggas—those South African zebras have vanished not just from Paris, but from the rest of the planet, too. Today, the chart and garden are pretty monuments to an experiment that could never have gone quite as planned.

The genetics of a Stone Age family with a metal name.

In 1959, a 4,500-year-old family and their battle ax turned up in Linköping, in southern Sweden. Woman, man, child, and dog emerged during an archaeological investigation that also turned up a variety of grave goods. The grave came to be known as Bergsgraven (“Mountain Grave”) and offered a glimpse at a population that little was known about. Over the years, more graves in the region have been found and their dead are now believed to be distinct from other European cultural groups at the time, due to one particular type of item they were often buried with: battle axes. To determine how the Battle Axe Culture (great name for a band) was related to other European cultures of the Neolithic, researchers recently turned to DNA, and published their findings in a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“We have been interested in the Bergsgraven burial for a long time,” says Helena Malmström, a bioarchaeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden and lead author of the study. “It is a very well-preserved, school-book example of a Battle Axe burial.”

Scientists have long been interested in how people dispersed across Europe, and the cultures they developed in different places. Graves are a key source of information for this study, because how people were buried and what they were buried with can be so distinctive. The Corded Ware Culture, also active in the third millennium BC, were named for the decorative imprints on their ceramics, which resemble pressed cords. The Funnelbeaker Culture, which occupied Central Europe about 2,000 years earlier, liked their pots with wide tops.

Because of glaciers, Scandinavia was colonized much later than many other parts of Europe, and as a result, its Neolithic people—and their genetic signature—are distinct. Bergsgraven was a natural place for Malmström and her team to target in their quest to learn more. They analyzed genetic material from the grave as a part of The Atlas of a Thousand Ancient Genomes Project, which is attempting to track the arrival, dispersal, and interrelations of ancient Scandinavians through genetic analysis. “We have thus far unraveled three genetically distinct groups, the Battle Axe Culture, the Funnelbeaker Culture, and the Pitted Ware Culture, ” Malmström says. The Pitted Ware Culture are known of the gouges they made in their pots before firing, so let’s not speculate on which one would win in a fight.

Besides being distinct from the other groups, the genetic information pointed researchers to the people’s roots. The Battle Axe Culture appears to share common ancestry with the Corded Ware Culture, which ranged more widely across Europe. Both groups and their distinctive genetics and cultural signatures—the grave goods—are connected genetically with the slightly older Yamnaya Culture of the Pontic Steppe, north of the Black Sea.

“With the new knowledge on the ancestry of the Battle Axe Culture people, we have come one step further toward the goal of the Atlas Project, to understand the demographic history of Stone Age Scandinavia,” Malmström says. “By analyzing data from more prehistoric individuals in the future, we aim at further increase the knowledge of dispersal, interaction, and admixture between prehistoric groups.”

The Atlas Project is seeking to do what any good atlas does—reveal something remarkable, and tell people about it. Good thing it’s not the battle ax that’s doing the talking.

Start with an ancestral ceremony for human babies. Then add 30,000 people who want to save the endangered, majestic primates.

A baby mountain gorilla’s eyes glow amber amidst the leafy, emerald-green jungle. Here, deep in the lush, shadowy world of Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, it’s the gorillas’ domain. Time slows in the presence of these majestic animals. Sound seems dampened by the thick, balmy air. Only a bird trilling pricks the silence.

The park’s tangled, muddy maze has led a group of hikers to the Susa family, a troop of 26 mountain gorillas—including one newborn—that live on the fog-wreathed heights of Mount Karisimbi, one of the park’s inactive volcanoes. Hulking silverbacks saunter across leaf-littered trails, their massive shoulders seesawing with terrifying strength. Others in the family sigh and guffaw with their arms crossed, as the baby coos and lolls about on the forest floor with his mother.

To know these animals, even for a brief time, is to want to protect them. And every September in Rwanda, tens of thousands of people gather at a riotous festival in hopes of doing just that.

Kwita Izina, a naming ceremony for new baby mountain gorillas—which translates to “give a name”—is modeled after an ancestral tradition used for human babies, and aimed at raising conservation awareness.

“This is an ancient Rwandese tradition, and now we’re doing it for our most treasured animal,” says Rosette Rugamba, a founding member of Kwita Izina and owner of Amakoro Songa Lodge, near Volcanoes National Park. “We’re linking conservation and culture.”

The custom of hosting a naming ceremony for newborns is one of Rwanda’s oldest cultural traditions, widely believed to date back to the foundation of the monarchy, in the 11th century. A week after a child was born, its parents would invite friends and family from their clan—or ubwoko in Kinyarwanda, the country’s indigenous language—to their home to help choose a name. Women and children would prepare food—typically a one-pot dish combining local produce such as cassava, peas, and peanuts—while the men shared sorghum malt beer.

The ceremony would begin with the presentation of the newborn to the clan, followed by a collective prayer to Imana, the supreme being, to protect the family and endow the parents with many more children. Everyone from the tribe’s youngest members to its elders would suggest a name—typically something with an auspicious connotation.

Once the parents chose from the list of proposed names, the clan mothers would erupt in cheering and applause, known as impundu (“happiness sounds”), and a parting beer made from fermented bananas, called agashinguracumu, would be served to the departing guests. The family would be showered with gifts, such as a cow or new linens, and the baby would be allowed to leave the house, and enter the outside world, for the first time.

This naming ceremony is still practiced today, though adapted to contemporary life. Prayers are often directed to a Christian god now, for instance, and might coincide with the child’s baptism. “It’s a big party,” says Rugamba. “Now it’s also a party for our gorillas.”

Mountain gorillas are endemic to this part of the world, spanning the Virunga Massif—a chain of volcanoes that shares borders with Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—and Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. But they’ve long been victimized by humans. Despite Dian Fossey’s storied work to protect these endangered animals from poachers and human-transmitted disease—work that included her establishment of the Karisoke Research Center, in Rwanda’s Virunga mountains, in 1967—the gorilla population steadily decreased throughout the 20th century.

As the 1994 genocide devastated the country’s people—an estimated 800,000 were killed between April and June—it also left the gorillas unprotected and open to more attacks from poachers.

“Three or four years later,” says Jean Paul Karinganire, a biologist at Akagera National Park in western Rwanda, “when Rwandan refugees returned home, they were given land that encroached on gorilla habitat, which further reduced the population.”

But slowly, through a strong park-ranger presence and a vigilant local community, population counts have started to climb. Since Kwita Izina began, in 2005, more than 280 baby gorillas have been named. At the same time, the number of mountain gorillas in the wild has risen. According to the most recent census, in 2016, there were 604 in the Virunga Massif, and 1,004 in all—up from the low-water mark of 242 just a few decades earlier—including those in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.

The naming ceremony has helped bolster these numbers in two ways: by raising international awareness about (and funds for) gorilla conservation, and by keeping the local community involved in conservation efforts, and celebrating their successes. Ninety-four percent of Volcanoes National Park staff come from local villages, whose residents actively help protect the gorillas by maintaining the park’s perimeter wall—which reduces human-wildlife conflicts—and reporting suspicious activities in the area.

In return, 10 percent of Rwanda’s tourism revenue, including the sale of trekking permits to see the gorillas, is fed back into the local communities surrounding Volcanoes National Park. The money is used to build medical centers and schools, supply clean water, and repair roads and other infrastructure.

In September, Kwita Izina was held in Kinigi, a town in the foothills of Volcanoes National Park. Rwandan dancers in vibrant beaded garb moved to the drum-based rhythm of the "Intore," the traditional national dance, whipping their long straw headdresses around like sheaves of wheat in the wind. The hum of the crowd and the pulse of the music grew feverish under the midday sun, until finally, each chosen representative took to the stage—a platform shaped like a silverback gorilla—to share their baby gorilla’s name, chosen from a pool of names supplied by park rangers. Rwandans from all over the country waved the national flag and cheered, as the mythic spire of Mount Karisimbi loomed in the distance.

“I loved every minute of Kwita Izina,” says Karinganire, who grew up in Kigali, the capital city. “I first discovered the gorillas when I was 10 years old and watched Gorillas in the Mist. Then at university, my knowledge about them grew, and since this event started, it increased my curiosity. They’re a species that is so unique and close to us humans. Then I got to see them in person in 2012. It was the best experience of my life.”

For 30 years prior to the first official gorilla-naming ceremony, mountain gorillas were named by park rangers and researchers in Volcanoes National Park, as a way to track the animals and monitor their health. At the ceremony’s inception, Kwita Izina organizers invited the president of Rwanda and his wife, as well as the park’s rangers, to name the gorillas. But as Rwanda’s conservation success story grew, so did the list of attendees.

In 2019, 30,000 people watched as 25 baby gorillas were named by a group of international delegates—selected by a Rwandan government committee for their dedication to gorilla conservation—as well as local delegates who were chosen because of their community impact. This year the group included a young Rwandan boy who constructed a 4.25-mile road by hand for his village in the Karongi District, as well as foreign diplomats and celebrities such as Dutch football legend Louis Van Gaal and British supermodel Naomi Campbell.

Just as human names are carefully chosen and imbued with meaning, so are the gorillas’ names. From the rangers’ pool of suggestions, delegates announced names with meanings such as “excellence” and “leader.” (In 2017, a gorilla was named Macibiri in tribute to Dian Fossey, whom locals called Nyiramacibiri—“the woman who lives alone in the mountains.”)

Many elements of the day hark back to the traditional naming ceremony used for people, from the jubilant applause to the gala dinner where the gorillas, and those working to conserve them, are recognized and toasted with local beer and wine.

The decision to extend Kwita Izina, an ancient familial tradition, to the gorillas, is a symbolic torch set aflame, signaling to the world that the life of a mountain gorilla is as deserving of care and attention as a human one.

“The gorillas need my protection,” says Karinganire. “I love them, and I love how my country has taken a leap in conserving them.”

Santa Barbara's weird underbelly, in miniature.

Santa Barbara doesn’t have many dive bars. But those that do exist in this idyllic beachside town have one thing in common: Chances are, they’ve been shrunken down into a lifelike, diorama-sized watering hole, complete with tiny features like barstools, beer taps, wine bottles, and weird art clinging to the grit of the walls.

These miniature bars are the creation of Michael Long, a local artist who turns some of the area’s most beloved haunts into handmade works of hyper-detailed assemblage art.

“The grimier the better,” Long declares between sips of an IPA at Elsie’s Tavern. Fittingly, it’s this eccentrically decorated, cash-only dive that first inspired him to recreate bars when he worked here in the late 1990s.

“I enjoy making things that are grittier and more worn,” says Long. “So trying to make something that is beautiful or ornate becomes a real challenge. I like the darker side of things.”

These replicas of bars—including local favorites like Elsie’s, The Pickle Room, and The Mercury Lounge—are part of Long’s ongoing assemblage art series depicting the interiors and exteriors of buildings. Built with a mix of raw materials and found objects, each of these structures feels like it could be a miniature movie set. Think Wes Anderson, but with fewer vibrant colors and more cigarette stains.

This unique, three-dimensional artwork has gained Long some local notoriety and Instagram praise. Long, who cofounded a small, bizarrely decorated art-studio space call The Rondo, has had his work featured in galleries and exhibitions across town. But it’s the bars that seem to generate the most enthusiasm.

“Bars attract like-minded people,” says Long. “It creates a camaraderie that you don’t get at home or at school or at the gym.”

Peering into one of these boxes, it’s hard not to get sucked in by the details: beer cans, plants, refrigerator magnets, wine glasses dangling above a worn-looking bar. Even the warm light of the mini-bulbs used to illuminate each interior helps it feel more like the real thing.

In Elsie’s Tavern, Long has his mini-Elsie’s diorama with him. Patrons stop in their tracks, do a double take, and walk up to the box to marvel at how realistically it emulates their surroundings.

“Getting started is the hardest part,” says Long. “Once I get started, I can knock it out pretty quickly.” He often begins by sketching the room. From there, each box takes about 24 hours to complete.

“It’s like a big, backwards puzzle,” he says. “I create all the pieces and lay the entire thing out. Then I take it apart, paint each piece and let it dry.” The painting stage is where much of the grit and stressed-looking texture of these miniature environments comes from.

Finally, Long glues and nails everything back together, this time with a more true-to-life feel. “Once it’s all colorized, it all of the sudden becomes like a little movie set,” he says.

About 90 percent of each box is hand-fabricated using materials such as wood, epoxy, and wire. In one case, Long used leaves to make fake trash. In another, he used part of a vintage photo slide to create backlit windows. One model even features a neon “OPEN” sign made of small-gauge luminescent wire that actually lights up. While he’s got barstools and cash registers down, it’s these unique details—plants hanging in Elsie’s, or the intricate, Chinese lantern-style lights inside the historic Pickle Room—that require more experimentation.

To add beer cans, drinking glasses, and record players, Long tracks down miniature objects from other artists or flea markets. These toy-like objects provide fun, eye-catching realism, but Long uses them sparingly.

“I try my best not to make it look like a dollhouse,” he says. “I want it to give an emotional feel rather than be a photorealistic model.”

This feels less surprising once you learn why Long first built dioramas, long before he glued together any miniature barstools: his nightmares.

Born in Santa Barbara, Long spent much of his childhood moving from place to place. This frequent, disruptive relocation appeared to have a side effect, he says: recurring nightmares in which he never quite knew where he was. The confusion often followed him into a sudden, sweaty state of consciousness.

At five years old, Long started building paper-based “dream boxes” that emulated the rooms in his nightmares. “There were a lot of bloody basements and doors that went to nowhere.” He realized it had a cathartic effect. Once replicated in 3D, the dreams would stop.

Decades later, Long found himself back in Santa Barbara, an affluent vacation town better known for its postcard-worthy beaches and pricey restaurants than hole-in-the-wall drinking spots or weird art. Still, it’s here that Long has set up shop as the self-appointed, epoxy-armed documentarian of the town’s unpolished, weird underbelly.

“There are all of these cool little bars off to the sidelines that are really for the locals,” he says. It’s these hidden gems that seem to resonate the most with people—even if you have you squint to see the details.

The Eastern hellbender looks like a long, slimy potato and is sometimes called a snot otter.

North America’s largest amphibian, the Eastern hellbender, looks like a long, slimy potato and goes by many names: snot otter, lasagna lizard, mud puppy. “They’re not as squishy as you might think,” says Anne Puchalsky, a freshman at Pennsylvania State University who has become an unlikely champion of the species. Hellbenders are a kind of salamander, but to Puchalsky, they stand out from their aquatic brethren. “They’re breathtaking,” she says.

Puchalsky and her friends are largely responsible for the Eastern hellbender’s newest moniker: official state amphibian of Pennsylvania. It all started, strangely enough, with a plastic model of a hellbender. His name was Harry.

When Puchalsky was still in high school, she and several classmates signed up for a science program called the Student Leadership Council, which is hosted by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “We’re an environmental organization, so we have a lot of random artifacts floating around: canoe paddles, anchors, hellbender models,” says Emily Thorpe, who coordinates the program at the foundation’s Pennsylvania office. When the students saw the model, Thorpe says, “they started asking questions about hellbenders.”

To find answers, the students turned to the Clean Water Institute at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. There, Dr. Peter Petokas and his colleagues have spent two decades researching the elusive hellbender.

Hellbenders are introverts. They spend most of their lives in cool mountain streams under “rocks the size of cars,” Petokas says. Until recently, “no one seemed to know about the hellbender in Pennsylvania. No one knew where they were or how they were doing.”

As Pekotas discovered, the hellbender was not doing well. Like all amphibians, “hellbenders breathe through their skin,” Pekotas says. “Any changes in the water will be reflected in the health of the species itself.” He and his team found that pollution, warming water, and impounded streams were causing a significant decline in their population.

After a decade of field research that yielded some concerning conclusions, scientists at the Institute switched gears from discovery science to applied conservation. They began raising hellbenders from eggs, microchipping them, and releasing them into the wild. This work required them to construct artificial shelters for the amphibians. In other words, they had to move around massive slabs of rock. “These shelters weigh a lot,” Pekotas says. “It’s hard work, it’s wet work. And we needed a lot of help.”

That’s when Thorpe and her students happened to call. They volunteered to help build shelters and learn about the hellbender from the experts. Students spent time in the field building habitats, learning all the while about the challenges that the hellbender and other aquatic animals face today. They began to brainstorm how they might call attention to the issue of worsening water quality in Pennsylvania.

One idea they kept coming back to was a campaign to designate the hellbender as the official state amphibian. About half of US states have one, and Pennsylvania did not. “It seemed bipartisan,” says Emma Stone, outgoing president of the Council and now a freshman at Mansfield University. “We didn’t have a state amphibian, and the Eastern hellbender is not another state’s amphibian. We thought, ‘Who’s going to say no?’”

The campaign kicked off at a Panera in the suburbs of Harrisburg. Over sandwiches, and with samples of similar legislation as their guide, six high school students drafted a bill that touted the hellbender as “a positive symbol for water quality in the state.” With a convincing bill in hand, the students began seeking a sponsor in the Pennsylvania State Senate, someone who would introduce it for a vote. They found that champion in Senator Gene Yaw, a Republican who chairs the state’s Chesapeake Bay Commission.

Of course, he wasn’t going to sign on without asking some tough questions of his own. “I told them, let's be honest about it, they were looking for some sucker to introduce a piece of legislation in the middle of a budget crisis, and we’re going to talk about a salamander,” Yaw later said in a news conference.

Luckily the students had done their homework—literally. “He challenged us to see how much we knew,” recalls Stone, “and how much we cared.” The students made an impression. “These are a bunch of bright kids,” Yaw said when he introduced the bill to his colleagues. “They’ve got some good ideas. They studied this.”

It took six months for the bill to pass the Senate and move to the House. But that’s where the gears of civic progress ground to a halt. Representative David Reed, also a Republican, quickly introduced a bill that aimed to make an entirely different creature the official state amphibian: the Wehrle’s salamander, a small, plum-colored amphibian discovered in 1911 by a naturalist from Indiana, Pennsylvania.

“It was offensive,” says Hanna Ryon, a senior at Biglerville High School outside of Gettysburg. “We took it personally.” For more than a year, the now-contested bill languished in a House committee. Undeterred, the students launched a public relations campaign to drum up support for the hellbender. “We found out quickly that people love free stuff,” says Ryon.

There were Hellbender Defender t-shirts, temporary tattoos and sugar cookies. Students kept knocking on doors and calling their representatives. They continued wading into Pennsylvania streams, planting riparian buffers and building hellbender shelters. During a meet-and-greet at the Pittsburgh Zoo, they even got to meet the amphibian of the hour. “I know they’re really ugly,” Ryon says of the first time she laid eyes on a hellbender. “But I got choked up.”

Despite their persistence, when the 2018 legislative season ended, the hellbender bill died in committee. At the next Council meeting, the students took stock. Thorpe remembers asking them, “Do you want to keep doing this?” The students were unanimous. “They didn’t think long about it. They wanted to move forward.”

The 2019 session opened without Representative Reed—he had given up his seat to run for US Congress—or any mention of the Wehrle’s salamander. This time around, the bill flew through the Senate, and a few months later the House took up the vote. In a famously partisan state, it passed with overwhelming support from both parties, 191-6.

On April 23, Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, wore a blue Hellbender Defender t-shirt as he signed the bill—the same one that high school students wrote in a suburban Panera—making the Eastern hellbender Pennsylvania’s official state amphibian. Emma Stone sat beside him. “It was so surreal,” she says. “We were high schoolers.”

While the designation was a major victory, Thorpe is quick to point out that it brings with it no special status or state protections. The fight to help the Eastern hellbender must continue. “We can do better, and we can do more,” she says.

The Council already has a new mission. They’re promoting the Keystone 10 Million, an initiative that aims to plant 10 million trees in the state by 2025. One of its goals is to improve water quality for threatened species like the hellbender. “People say, ‘You’re too young to make a difference,’” says Ryon. “But now we know that’s not true.”

Matt Lambros is inspired by abandoned theaters—and their potential for revival.

Today, the United Artists Theatre in downtown Detroit is vacant, crumbling, its future uncertain, but on opening night in 1928, it was packed with “lots of high hats, plenty of low gowns and the best in town,” according to Variety. Actress Gloria Swanson supposedly pressed a button from Palm Beach to part the new curtains in Detroit to show her silent film, Sadie Thompson. The outlandish style—dripping with chandeliers, tapestries, and ornate plaster—was described as “Spanish Gothic.” It had glory years of first-run films, and darker days with more adult-oriented fare, before closing in 1971. After an auction of its furnishings—including those almost absurd chandeliers—it was used as a warehouse and a recording studio, until it graduated into its current role as one of the ruins that are providing the backdrop to the city’s revival.

The theater and other cinema relics are featured in architectural photographer Matt Lambros’s upcoming book, After the Final Curtain: America’s Abandoned Theaters. Neglected temples to the movies have long been central to Lambros’s practice—he shot little else for 10 years, has published two other books on them, and is a long-time member and on the board of directors of the Theatre Historical Society of America. What inspires his devotion? “My inspiration comes from the fact that most of the theaters I visit are largely forgotten,” writes Lambros, 36, in an email. “My generation grew up going to multiplexes and for the most part have no idea that people went to the movies in what are essentially palaces, so I felt like I needed to share that.”

These movie palaces were fixtures of American cities large and small for the first half of the 20th century, providing suitably wondrous escapist backdrops to the celluloid fantasties of their screens, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But by the late 1950s, as urban populations declined, seats in these huge spaces grew hard to fill, and the Hollywood studio system that had created them had also fallen apart. Some found second lives as performance and event venues, but many fell into disrepair or were demolished.

Lambros spoke to Atlas Obscura about how he started photographing theaters, the ups-and-downs of such spaces, and how creepy they are sometimes.

What was your first encounter with an abandoned theater?

I’ve had an interest in abandoned buildings in general for as long as I can remember. I actually started filming various abandoned mental hospitals along the East Coast before focusing on theaters. Each of the hospital complexes was designed like a mini, self-sustaining city. They had their own power plants, farms, housing, and entertainment, which usually included a theater. Those were always my favorite parts of those buildings, but they weren’t as ornate as the ones I photograph now. The first ornate one that I photographed was St. Alphonsus Hall in Boston. Unfortunately, it was gutted a few years ago.

You also study the theaters you photograph, and contribute a lot of time to getting some of them restored. What inspires that preservation work?

These theaters were an important part of the history of the American motion picture industry, and some of them are being left to rot. I’m happy to do whatever I can to help an organization looking to restore one of them, but in many cases there isn’t one. So I tell the theater’s story through the pictures on my site.

What is the biggest challenge in documenting these abandoned spaces?

I’d say my biggest challenge is finding the owner’s contact information, and convincing them to let me into their unsafe building.

I imagine lighting must be difficult. How long does it take to set up your shots, and what are you shooting with?

Ideally, I’d like to spend at least six to eight hours photographing a theater. That’s not always possible, so I have a number of safety shots. I’ve been doing this long enough that the gear in my camera bag has gone through a number of revisions. I can and have been in and out of a theater in less than an hour. I don’t like to do it that way, but I try to be respectful of the building owner’s time. I’m currently using a Canon 5DS with a variety of lenses.

The Orpheum Theatre in St. Louis on the current cover of After the Final Curtain actually looks pretty intact. What’s the story behind that place?

The Orpheum Theatre in St. Louis was actually restored about 16 years ago, and was a functioning performing arts center until 2012. The owners went bankrupt, and the building was purchased by Jubilee World, a Christian ministry, a few years later. They told the press that they plan to reopen it, but nothing has happened yet.

Have you had any unusual or surprising experiences while shooting?

Pretty much every theater I’ve photographed has a ghost story or two associated with it, but I’ve never come across anything that didn’t have a rational explanation. On one of my first trips to the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, I kept hearing a lot of banging backstage. It sounded like someone was hitting something with a large piece of metal. The noise would start, then stop for a few minutes, and start up again in another section of the building. It turned out that there was a homeless man living in the backstage area, and he was trying—unsuccessfully—to scare us out.

Is there a theater that you haven’t shot yet that you really want?

My bucket list has gotten pretty short, but it would have to be the Warner Grand Theatre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was designed by Rapp & Rapp, an architecture firm from Chicago. They were responsible for designing some of the most ornate theaters in the country, including the Kings in Brooklyn, and the Uptown in Chicago. The theater closed in the early 1990s, and is currently being restored to become the new home of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. I wasn’t able to make it inside before construction began. Luckily, it’s being completely restored, and will reopen next year. So I will be able to shoot it, just not in an abandoned state.

Do you have a favorite?

My favorite theater is the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. It was abandoned for almost 40 years, and reopened in 2015. I was able to photograph it while it was abandoned, being restored, and after it reopened. Being able to watch one of these buildings return to life after so long is the most rewarding part of this project. I’ve been able to shoot a few more restorations since then, and hope to capture more in the future.

New research has found that indigenous clam gardens are more productive than current practices.

Twelve-thousand years ago, the glaciers receded from modern-day British Columbia, leaving the land to bleed silt into the sea. In the salty shallows hugging the coast, bivalves struggled to survive, growing slow and dying small in the fluctuating temperatures of the newly thawed ocean. Their shells fell to the floor and built up on beaches, forming layers of calcium carbonate that, today, archaeologists in galoshes dig through, deciphering the story of this land in clamshells.

One of these archaeologists is Dana Lepofsky, an ethnobiologist at Simon Fraser University who researches the traditional food practices of British Columbia’s indigenous people. She and her colleagues have been digging for clams in the sandy beaches and ancient garbage heaps near British Columbia’s steel-grey sea for years. Their work has traced the co-evolution of the region’s First Nations people and the clams they have relied on as a staple food for at least nine millennia.

Despite clams' significance to Native people, Euro-Canadian archaeologists have traditionally neglected the shells that filled historic First Nations sites across Canada’s Pacific Coast. “We have archaeological sites between three and four and five meters high, mostly made up of clams,” Lepofsky says. “They become background noise, rather than the focus of the study.”

In collaboration with First Nations Canadians, Lepofsky and fellow researchers are turning their attention back to this overlooked staple, painstakingly measuring and radiocarbon dating clam shells from beaches and middens across British Columbia. Their recent paper challenges conventional Euro-American understandings of indigenous people's interaction with clams—and with the natural world more broadly.

Lepofsky and her team found that indigenous Canadians have been successfully shaping the region’s clam populations for millennia. Their work suggest that, from 3,500 years ago to the coming of European colonists, First Nations Canadians managed shallow ocean ecosystems so effectively that shellfish populations grew bigger, lived longer, and were a more productive food source than in contemporary aquaculture.

The study adds weight to a renewed understanding among archaeologists that, contrary to popular belief, North America wasn’t an untouched Eden when European colonists reached its shores—it was full of ecosystems that had been carefully managed by indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

“We either think of indigenous people as full-scale agriculturalists or hunters and gatherers,” Lepofsky says. Instead, people living along the coast of British Columbia took a more sweeping approach. They had long relied on the area’s rich butter clams, which had been growing fatter and hardier since the last Ice Age, as a dietary staple. Around 3,500 years ago, locals realized that by building terraces along the shore, they could create sheltered shallows where shellfish thrived. “They created beaches where there were none before,” Lepofsky says. Local people dubbed these carefully crafted ecosystems loqiweys, or “clam gardens.”

While First Nations people knew the value of these traditional practices, researchers had yet to examine how clam populations under traditional management systems stacked up against current-day aquaculture. Lepofsky and her team found that, even as human populations expanded and began consuming more clams around 3,500 years ago, clam gardens created a shellfish boom. From the advent of clam gardening to its decline under European colonialism, clams grew larger and more abundant than they had before human intervention.

In the last 200 years, however, clams have once against shrunk to the size they were in the lean, post-Ice Age years. “Today, the clams are not fat and happy,” Lepofsky says. Pollution from industries such as logging have contributed. But the main reason is that few First Nations are still building and tending clam gardens. Today’s industrial clam farmers rear baby clams on floating rafts and then bury them in open beaches to mature—a method that Lepofsky's research suggests is less productive than traditional techniques.

Today, the rugged coasts of British Columbia are still shaped by traces of ancient clam gardens. “When the tide goes out, you can’t miss them,” Lepofsky says. And while clam gardening is less common now than it was before European colonialism, the importance of the practice as a food source and means of cultural assertion persists.

When Kwaxsistalla Adam Dick, Clan Chief of the Qawadiliqalla Clan of the Tsawataineuk, was a child in the 1930s, he dug for clams nurtured in the shallow gardens he built. On a remote island in the Broughton Archipelago, his grandparents taught him their language and protected him from being forcibly taken to one of Canada’s infamous residential schools. In those days, Kwaxsistalla and his family caught clams in the shallows and loaded them, sandy and weeping saltwater, into hemlock-covered baskets. Nestled in red-hot coals, the clams steamed until their tender centers popped with juice.

Decades later, Kwaxsistalla worked with a team of archaeologists, including Lepofsky and her colleagues, to collect traditional knowledge. “When you see clam shells up and down the coast, that’s where people lived,” Kwaxsistalla told Lepofsky’s team, pointing to the centrality of clams to his community’s life.

While Kwaxsistalla has since passed away, his knowledge lives on in current efforts to revive clam gardens. While British Columbia’s beaches still contain historic structures—on Quadra island, for example, nine miles, or 36% of the shore, are bordered with human-constructed rock walls—many of these gardens are now neglected. Indigenous communities, environmental advocates, and researchers invested in traditional food practices have formed The Clam Garden Network, part of an effort to reclaim clam gardens as a source of food sovereignty and cultural affirmation for First Nations people.

For Lepofsky, this research is a reminder that the contemporary, Euro-American approach, in which the non-human world is seen as a collection of resources to exploit, rather than as a system we are part of, is neither the only nor the most economically sustainable outlook. Instead, says Lepofsky, “We should look at the past and say, ‘What were the best practices and the most abundant ecosystems?’” As it turns out, the key to fat, happy clams may have already been discovered, 3,500 years go.

A lidar project wants to document the entire planet, before everything changes.

The first photo of the Earth from space was taken in October 1946, from a seized Nazi rocket. It led Clyde Holliday, the Johns Hopkins University engineer who designed the camera on board, to speculate that “the entire land area of the globe might be mapped in this way.” How right he was. Now we can see most of the world in satellite maps at any time on our phones. But those images only tell a partial story—one with two dimensions. Now an archaeologist and a geographer want to accomplish the same thing—a full map of the world, as it really is, unburdened of all the plant growth that conceals the ground—in three dimensions.

Lidar, or Light Detection and Ranging, is a way to generate images of the ground using laser pulses from a plane, which measure the ground elevation below by tracking the time it takes the pulses to return. Where lidar really shines—especially in the world of archaeology—is its ability to see through tree cover. A lidar system sends down so many laser pulses that some of them inevitably make it through the vegetation, so the system can map the land beneath it—revealing topography, ruins, and other human works that aren’t visible in satellite photos and, in many cases, can’t even be seen on the ground. If Indiana Jones had lidar, well, maybe his adventures wouldn’t have been quite so exciting. Lidar can reveal every knobbly protuberance and gouged crevice that we left behind—from single structures to large-scale patterns that would otherwise take many lifetimes to map and understand.

“Right now it’s absolutely amazing to see the 3-D data,” says Chris Fisher, an archaeologist at Colorado State University. “I imagine that 100 years from now, people will use this data like the Holodeck on Star Trek.”

Fisher and his colleague Steven Leisz codirect The Earth Archive, the project that’s trying to cover as much of the planet as possible with lidar’s lasers. Fisher had used lidar to survey the ancient Purépecha settlement of Angamuco, in Mexico’s Michoacán state. In the course of that work, he saw human-caused changes to the landscape, and decided to broaden his scope. Their ultimate goal now is to create a comprehensive archive of lidar scans, including some that are already in existence and more to be added over time, to fuel an immense dataset of the Earth’s surface, in three dimensions. It will have tremendous utility in the short term for finding ancient sites and large-scale patterns, but Fisher and Leisz are taking a long view. With such a tool, they say, when the full impacts of climate change begin to set in, future generations will have a comprehensive understanding of how things once were.

The plan, he says, is to start with the most vulnerable ecological and cultural heritage sites, and go from there. For example, Fisher estimates that the entire Amazon rain forest, where a scourge of forest fires recently made international headlines, could be lidar scanned by plane and helicopter in six years, for $15 million. The next step could be to use some future technology that puts lidar in orbit and makes covering large areas easier.

“Right now we’re not able to put a lidar instrument into the orbit that would give us the kind of resolution we’re requiring,” Fisher says. “Ten years from now, maybe that might not be true. But we can’t wait 10 years.”

“Chris's effort is exactly like what we have been doing,” says Jason Stoker, a geographer with the U.S. Geological Survey who has been working on such a map of the United States over the last few years, “but he has the added complexity of international agreements and international data collection.”

The Earth Archive promises to be a vast and expensive undertaking—probably with future hurdles the team can’t even see now. But Fisher is adamant about its importance.

“I don’t know how to solve the climate crisis, but I know the first step, and that’s the baseline record the Earth Archive would provide,” he says. “You have to be optimistic. Otherwise, you should just cash in your 401k and go to Vegas.”

A French theater director crowdsourced his dream.

Jean-Jacques Megel-Nuber didn’t always imagine he’d be living in his bookshop, but he knew he wanted it to move.

At first, he pictured an itinerant bookstore on a boat. Or in a chalet—appropriate, given his Alsatian roots—but one that was towed behind a tractor trailer. “I didn’t want to wait for people to come to me,” he says. “I wanted to go to them.”

Until four years ago, Megel-Nuber worked as the director of a traveling theater troupe for children, bringing culture and live performance to parts of France that weren’t necessarily equipped for such shows. It inspired him to continue an itinerant lifestyle, but one that carried a mission or project to share with the people he encountered.

Actually making his roving bookstore real, however, required much more effort than he expected. Megel-Nuber—an imposing-looking man with a gentle, natural ease with people—spent six months just trying to conceive of its form and shape.

“Since I was going to be spending a lot of time there, it had to be a space where I felt good, so I couldn’t imagine anything other than wood,” he says. “And it’s logical: After all, books are made of paper.”

Easier said than done. It wasn’t until he connected with Pauline Fagué and Romain Saunier, founders of La Maison Qui Chemine (“The House That Plods”), a company that specializes in mobile tiny houses, that his dream truly took form, with funds raised from international crowdsourcing site Ulule.

Fagué, who designed the project in 2016, says that she took her inspiration from the image of “romantic” libraries. “I thought about Hogwarts, about bookshops with buckling shelves from the weight of old collections, like in Lyon, where I studied,” she says. “These places are true bubbles where you completely change dimensions, surrounded by a cocoon of life that invades you, somehow: the smell of paper, the shape of the bindings promising so many different adventures. I wanted to re-create that in the bookshop. I remember working all night, from the moment Jean-Jacques got in touch, to the next day, when we met for the first time, to show him the first 3-D mockup of his project.”

The final version is simple, but distinctive and unique: The bookshop is 120 square feet inside and is made almost entirely of pine sourced from the Vosges woods near Fagué and Saunier’s former workshop. Porthole windows bring light into the cozy space, which is divided into a reading nook on the right and register area on the left. Beyond the checkout is a toilet and a cooking corner, and above it all is a mezzanine: Megel-Nuber's bed whenever he's on the road. Everything else, as one might expect, is covered in books.

The bookshop is as light and as eco-conscious as possible. To insulate the structure, the team used recycled cotton from Emmaüs, a collective of charity shops founded in 1949 with 115 locations all over France. In lieu of traditional paint, they used a flour-based coating (which also helps with Megel-Nuber’s allergies).

Megel-Nuber stopped by about every 10 days during construction, and lent a hand whenever he could. “I couldn’t do much, because of the insurance, but I sanded, I painted, things like that,” he says. “So bit by bit, I took ownership of it.”

Completing the shop itself was a big step—but there were more to come. Once the trailer was finished, Megel-Nuber needed to fill it. He curated a selection of 5,000 different books of all shapes and sizes to fill its shelves. And that presented some issues. Though the structure could take it, towing 3.5 tons (both trailer and books) is not covered by a regular European driver’s license, so Megel-Nuber needed to train and test for a new one, called a BE license, that allows a driver to pull a trailer of that size.

“It took me 15 months to get it,” he recalls, noting that the test had recently grown harder—and he's not usually one for tests. "It was horrible."

In July 2017, new license finally in hand, Megel-Nuber was ready for the open road, and the assortment of festivals that were familiar to him from his theater days. Organizers were eagerly awaiting the project. “People had been waiting for a while,” he says. “And so I called and said, ‘It’s all good! I can come!’ And it really started from there.”

Today Megel-Nuber tows the shop behind a light commercial Iveco van from town to town throughout his native Alsace and nearby Jura. He attends about 10 festivals of various kinds a year, and he also occasionally parks the shop on village squares—perhaps when someone in the mayor's office has a taste for literature.

Of course, driving an entire bookshop has its challenges. How, for instance, to keep the books on the shelves?

“I asked each one to stay in place while I was driving,” he deadpanned, before showing off the system of panels, secured by elastic, that do the job. Once he arrives, set up is quick—a staircase, some mats—and he tends to stay in one place only a few days before pulling up the stairs, securing the books, and heading home.

Altogether Megel-Nuber spends about four months a year on the road. During that time, he lives in the bookshop itself. The only thing the space doesn’t have is a shower, though he says it’s easy enough to find one at a gym or even the local fire station.

For the remaining eight months of the year, Megel-Nuber works to restock his shelves. In fact, before meeting the writer in the Alsatian village of Mutterholtz, he texted to say he’d be late; he had to drive to nearby Sélestat, where a rarely open Emmaüs was welcoming him to go through their piles of secondhand books—the only kind he sells. “That’s part of my job,” he says. “Sorting through books people didn’t want to keep, but that are still good. That other people might like.”

Most of his initial stock he found in about 30 Emmaüs shops throughout France. “And people would give me books,” he says. “They’d say, ‘Oh, I want to get rid of my whole library and start again.’ And they’d give me a thousand books all at once. It was crazy.”

He recalls one 97-year-old woman, who had helped with his crowdfunding campaign but who passed away before the shop was ready. She bequeathed her entire library to Megel-Nuber.

While he currently has about 12,000 books in stock, only 3,000 made the trip to the Avide Jardin Festival in Mutterholtz, where a series of musical performances and a beer garden enlivened one of the last summer days in Alsace. The books that didn't make the journey live in the hallway outside his small apartment in nearby Mulhouse—an arrangement that may or may not have to change.

"Last week, someone moved in [next door]," he says, chuckling nervously. "We'll see … maybe I can claim seniority or something."

This event, centered around street music and storytelling, inspired him to bring his entire collection of fables and folktales. (He also has enough children’s books to turn the entire shop over to them if he wants.)

“I often have a preference for children’s literature,” he says. “But good children’s literature. There’s tons of crap out there, McDonald’s books.

“Sometimes, I turn into an accidental day care,” he goes on. “Parents hanging out, having a drink, and since the kids are on their own, they come in and read comic books.”

As the first concerts of the festival began, visitors wandered up the wooden steps and into the small space, browsing, but often showing more interest in the shop than the books. Megel-Nuber, for as shy as he seems at first, was a genial host, especially when asked for recommendations.

“I’m reading a book right now—I’m only about 30 pages in—but I can tell I’m going to like it,” he says. It’s set in ancient Greece, he explains—one of his passions from his studies in archaeology. He then launches into an in-depth conversation with another client about a German ballet dancer, only to be politely interrupted by a small child asking about the newest book in a middle-grade series.

And yet, despite his eclectic and wide-ranging interests, and the constant presence of so much reading material, Megel-Nuber claims he doesn’t read enough.

“I never feel like I do,” he says. “This month, I read a lot. About 15 books. And in a year … maybe 120? 130?”

“No,” he says, without even a hint of irony. “I don’t read much at all.”

They're hard to reuse, and can be quick to burn.

The fire broke out around 10 p.m. on October 7, 2019, and burned straight through the night. By the time it was extinguished early the next morning, the nearly century-old Masonic Temple in Aurora, Illinois, had been scorched beyond hope of repair.

Fires that erupt in Masonic buildings can be stubborn, because some architectural hallmarks of the structures make them easy targets for flames, as well as tough places for firefighters to wrangle a blaze. For one thing, the interiors tend to be pretty cloistered. Temple buildings have relatively few windows, and none that open up into the ceremonial anterooms that form the heart of these structures. “They’re not quite like anything else: They’re kind of like theaters; they’re kind of like church spaces,” says William D. Moore, director of the American & New England Studies program at Boston University, who studies fraternal organizations in America and wrote the book Masonic Temples: Freemasonry, Ritual Architecture, and Masculine Archetypes. “What’s going on in the lodge rooms is supposed to be private and secret,” Moore says, so there are few portals to the world outside.

Those spaces are also often outfitted with flammable decor, Moore adds. They may be draped with ornamental banners, or stuffed with upholstered wooden chairs and home to grand, ceremonial staircases that fires can easily scale. Aurora Fire Marshal Javan Cross told the Chicago Tribune that the building’s design foiled firefighters’ attempts to snuff out the blaze: They had to funnel water from the above, blasting it from the top of the high-ceiling space. “Normally in a fire, we can shoot water through open windows, but there isn’t many, when you think of the square footage of the space,” Cross said. “Even though some windows were broken, we couldn’t get a tremendous volume of water to hit anything that was burning.”

The other trouble was that the 50,000-square foot Aurora temple, like many other Masonic buildings, had slid into disrepair over the years, as fraternal membership dipped from its 20th-century peak, brothers grew older, and the societies found themselves with massive structures they couldn’t comfortably pay for or maintain. The Aurora building, whose cornerstone was laid in 1922, when the lodge was 1,000 members strong, had a second life as a banquet hall and catering hub before sitting vacant for about a decade, the Chicago Tribune reported. (In its Masonic days, the facility was home to a drill room, game room, and 500-person dining hall.) Aurora Fire Department spokesman Captain Jim Rhodes told the paper that the crew had worried that the disused structure was structurally unsound and unsafe to enter once it was aflame, so they battled the fire from the outside instead of sending teams in.

Freemasonry, which traces its roots to centuries-old European guilds of craftsmen, is one of many fraternal organizations that enjoyed big popularity in the United States. The group's modern history is a little jumbled, but the earliest Masonic organizations in America date to the 1700s, and members still gather for rituals and other activities that celebrate and cement fellowship. (In 2017, there were 1,076,626 full members, according to the Masonic Services Association.) Masonic buildings went up in a flurry between 1870 and 1930, which Moore calls the “great Temple-building period.” During that stretch, "every community had one, at least one," Moore says.

At first, they were humble—maybe a second-floor rental unit above a bank or a dry goods store. Then, as the groups got wealthier, they commissioned their own purpose-built spaces and installed commercial tenants on the first floor to keep revenue trickling in. Around 1900, Moore says, many of the temple organizations dreamed of bigger buildings that were devoted solely to fraternal functions, and also sent a clear visual message: These were impressive clubs, full of impressive men.

Much as churches sometimes jostled to build the biggest spire in town, there was a premium placed on having a handsome, respectable, institutional-looking Masonic building that evoked the gravitas of, say, a courthouse. In early 20th-century, Freemasonry “was a kind of civic religion that represented bourgeois respectability," Moore says. “It was supposed to be this organization that represented all the best people in the community, and that's why the buildings end up looking like civic buildings.” (Many Freemason organizations were exclusively white; several other branches, including Prince Hall Freemasonry, which dates to 1784, were run by men of color.)

The grand construction was a kind of self-mythologizing, Moore says, and also a recruitment tool: "You want the people who are thinking that they’re going to join a fraternity to think you’re the best and the strongest one, with the most attractive building." Membership had been swelling for years, Moore explains, so the organizations thought they’d need to keep graduating to bigger buildings. Detroit outgrew its first purpose-built Masonic temple in just 20 years, and replaced it in 1926 with the largest Masonic temple in the world, write journalists Alex Lundberg and Greg Kowalski, in their chronicle of the building. The 14-story, 1,000-room behemoth sprawls more than a million square feet. Many of the buildings proved to be way too big. “Even before the Depression hits in 1929, people are feeling the economic pinch, so membership starts to level out,” Moore says. “These buildings that they've built expecting that the fraternity is going to continue to grow end up being too large for them."

Many fraternal buildings are facing the same problems today. “There are underutilized Masonic temples all over the nation, all over the state,” Lisa DiChiera, director of advocacy at Landmarks Illinois, told Curbed Chicago. “They are a really difficult building type for reuse.” The buildings “are definitely at risk,” Moore says. “They're being closed down or lost consistently, because society has changed, and the purpose for which the buildings were built no longer resonates with as many people as it did.” The most hulking among them are made out of concrete, marble, and steel, Moore explains, so reimagining the interiors is a heavy lift. Still, some have managed to pull it off—Detroit’s sprawling temple, for instance, is now a hopping concert hall and wedding venue.

Other buildings that were once meeting places for fraternal organizations have found a second act, too: New York City Center, a buzzy, lavishly ornate performing arts hub, began its life in 1923 as a Neo-Moorish meeting space for the the Shriners, formerly known as the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. And in Seattle’s historically black Central District, the Washington Hall performance space, which dates to 1908, was once a gathering place for the Danish Brotherhood—and later for the Sons of Haiti—before a fire swept through and the roof fell into disrepair. Historic Seattle purchased it, reckoned with “decades of deferred maintenance,” including a new roof and an elevator, and reopened it in 2016 after a $9.5 million renovation, says Eugenia Woo, the organization’s director of preservation services. Now, local arts organizations are the building’s tenants. The structure had “really became an anchor to the African-American community, and we didn’t want to change that,” Woo says.

Adaptive reuse is no longer on the table for the Aurora temple. Demolition crews have already begun dismantling the charred building, a process that’s expected to be wrapped in about 50 days and cost somewhere around $780,000, a city spokesperson told the Chicago Sun-Times. As the crew picks through the wreckage, they’ll salvage four columns that once soared above the entrance. A few months from now, those will be all that’s left of the temple.

The leafy green once foretold the future.

On the eve of Halloween, the old lore goes, the veil between worlds grows thin. Spirits walk the earth; magical forces are particularly potent. And to mark and make the most of this spooky-special time of year, Scottish youths sneak onto local farms or into their neighbors’ gardens at midnight, blindfold each other, pull stalks of kale from the ground, then read them, analyzing their length and girth, the quality of their cores and taste, and the amount of dirt caked onto them, to divine what kind of partner they’ll marry. Or at least many did until around the early 1900s.

This was just one of several magical, kale-based Halloween rituals practiced across the British Isles. According to folklorists, some individuals hung kale over their door overnight, then placed it under their pillow the next to prompt prophetic dreams. Children who wanted a sibling could place a stalk of kale outside their parents’ door to nudge a sibling into being. Irish families in particular stuck charms into the colcannon, a potato, cabbage, kale, and onion mash they served on Halloween. Whoever found a ring charm would marry within the year, while whoever found a thimble charm would be a spinster. A woman could also scoop the first and last spoonful into a stocking and hang it over her door—the first man to walk beneath it the following day was destined to be her husband.

The nature and popularity of kale-based rituals likely varied over time and space, notes Celtic studies professor and folklorist Juliette Wood. Regardless, it seems clear that until relatively recently, at least in this one corner of the world, kale was not so much a superfood, as it has been branded in the United States, but an occasionally supernatural food.

No one is sure when people in the Isles started using kale for Halloween divination games. Popular accounts describe these rituals as ancient Celtic practices, but Wood argues this idea doesn’t hold water. For starters, academics have long accepted that there never was a cohesive, enduring Celtic identity or set of rituals and that we don’t know much about ancient regional rituals. More practically, most historians hold that kale did not spread to the British Isles, or become part of regional diets, until the Middle Ages.

The first clear evidence of blindfolded midnight kale picking in Scotland seems to crop up in a 1769 travelogue. The ritual also features prominently in Scottish literary hero Robert Burns’s 1785 poem “Hallowe’en,” an extensively researched and notated work that drew on older poems and firsthand accounts of festivities. From there, it pops up frequently in regional folklore collections. “If it was already established … by the end of the 18th century,” says Peter Maxwell-Stuart, an expert on early modern European magical practices, “it is a reasonable inference that it was older,” albeit by an unclear margin.

We do have a good idea as to why people practiced kale-based divination on Halloween. As the Halloween historian Lesley Bannatyne points out, from the time Irish monks, almost 1,000 years ago, started writing about the festivals that later served as inspirations for Halloween, they consistently noted that they were a time for divination. (Woods adds that similar rituals occur across cultures, and during other transitional times of year, too.) Regional divination practices didn’t require anything fancy or specific, explains Julian Goodare, a historian of folk beliefs at the University of Edinburgh, just something accessible that would yield a truly random, hard to manipulate reading.

Kale fit that bill. A uniquely hearty crop, it and its cousin cabbage were two of the few crops even the poorest residents of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales could reliably grow. In Scotland, kale was so ubiquitous that home gardens are still often called kaleyards. “Even the bells of St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh tolling at 2 p.m. were known as the kail bell,” says food historian Christopher Trotter, “as they called workers without watches in for their midday meal.” Halloween falls right in the traditional cabbage and kale harvest season.

The same logic also explains a host of other Halloween divination traditions based on common foods, such as cracking egg whites into water or dropping apple peels onto the ground (to supposedly form your hidden beloved’s initials).

Most historians believe Halloween divination games were less about serious magical beliefs and more about fun and matchmaking. Much like how bobbing for apples used to be about getting potential suitors up close and personal, you might guide a blindfolded friend to the perfect stalk of kale, or twist the reading, to match the stalk to someone you wanted to set them up with.

Kale divination survived into the 20th century, crossing the ocean with immigrants and appearing in American guides to celebrating Halloween. In the early 1900s, though, cultural makers and shakers sought to make Halloween a systematized and respectable Victorian tradition. Divination and the potential for teenage necking baked into them fell out of fashion in favor of family-friendly community parties and other old traditions, such as costumed mumming for food. Gradually, Halloween became a children’s holiday, focused on juvenile pranks and, eventually, candy. Halloween was left, incidentally, loveless and kale-less.

Of course, between our modern-day obsessions with kale and with reviving pre-modern rituals, it might seem as if there’s space for a kale divination revival. “I’ve heard of a few uses in retro Halloween parties,” says Halloween historian Lisa Morton. But since so few people have kale farms or gardens, the modern version might not be much fun.

“I don’t think the urge to peer into the future will ever leave us,” says Bannatyne. But “maybe kale has seen its day as the vehicle [for that sort of amorous prognostication] come and go.”

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The supernatural has surrounded the guitar virtuoso for decades. 

For blues fans around the world, the name Robert Johnson has grown synonymous with mystery, even sorcery. Throughout his short life, he moved around between Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and didn’t leave much of a trail. His entire body of recorded work consists of just 29 songs (plus 13 alternate takes), recorded during two sessions in Texas. Those songs, however, include some of the most canonical in all the blues—such as “Sweet Home Chicago,” “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” and, of course, “Cross Road Blues."

For more than half a century, fans and researchers have rhapsodized and hypothesized about Johnson’s itinerant lifestyle, untimely death, and iconic songbook. The mythology that swirls around this one man from Hazlehurst, Mississippi, has created its own “cottage industry” of publishing and tourism, says Bruce Conforth, coauthor with Gayle Dean Wardlow of the new biography Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson. As Johnson’s life story seems more elusive, his place in blues history seems more secure.

The most famous myth surrounding Johnson concerns his alleged “deal with the Devil” at a Mississippi crossroads, where it's said he traded his soul for guitar virtuosity. The Devil legend entered popular consciousness in the 1960s (long after Johnson died, in 1938), and is in many ways the wellspring of rock ‘n’ roll’s satanic motifs—from the Rolling Stones through Iron Maiden and beyond. The story’s obviously not true, but that’s hardly the point. The point is that the Devil is in rock music’s DNA, and the stories around Johnson helped put it there.

Steven Johnson, Robert’s grandson and vice president of the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation, says he first became aware of some of his grandfather’s mythology when he was a teenager. He found the stories neither scary nor particularly alluring, but he always felt, he says, that they were concealing or misleading, “that there was truth that hadn’t been told.”

Some decades later, a new yarn was spun—not about Johnson’s life, but his afterlife. No one seemed to know exactly where his mortal remains were buried, and the idea took hold that there were at least three possible gravesites. Though the actual mystery has been cleared up over the years, the myth rolls on. The New York Times boosted it in September 2019, the National Park Service still provides an outdated account, and the rumor continues to travel easily among tourists and blues pilgrims. It just seems to fit: Robert Johnson, that perfectly unknowable spirit of the blues, can’t find eternal rest.

Whatever Robert Johnson’s life lacked in actual magic, it certainly made up for in pure human drama. According to Up Jumped the Devil, Johnson died from poisoning. He was having an affair with Beatrice Davis, a married woman whose jealous husband, Ralph, dosed Johnson’s whiskey with naphthalin—likely without the intention to kill. (The drug was commonly used to subdue rowdy patrons at bars.) What Ralph didn’t know was that Johnson had recently been diagnosed with an ulcer, and the spiked drink proved too much for him in his weakened state. As with all things Johnson, it’s not so simple, since his death certificate names syphilis as the cause of death. Conforth and Wardlow think it’s likelier that the disease was listed to obscure the foul play.

That death certificate—discovered by Wardlow in 1968—states that Johnson was buried at “Zion Church” in Leflore County, Mississippi. But it provides no more information than that, and actually just raises more questions. Was it Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Morgan City, Mississippi? Little Zion Church in Greenwood? The other Mt. Zion Church, which is also in Greenwood? Leflore County is small, but there was a world of possibilities within it—any one of those places, or somewhere else entirely. For decades, the true gravesite was an open question, with scattered anecdotes in place of answers. All that anyone knew for sure was that Johnson was buried in an unmarked grave—just like most African Americans from his region and era.

Things stayed that way until 1991, more than 50 years after Johnson’s death. In April of that year, Morgan City’s Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist (MB) Church dedicated the first big Johnson memorial, arranged by the Mount Zion Memorial Fund (MZMF). The organization aims to preserve historic black churches by erecting memorials to blues musicians—whose remains may or may not lie in unmarked graves at those churches—and Mt. Zion MB could make as fair a case as any. Conveniently, the church is located just off of Highway 7, so its memorial can winkingly quote Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues,” in which he sang, “You may bury my body / Down by the highway side."

While it didn’t amount to actual evidence, that song had helped fuel some of the speculation over Johnson’s burial site. So did the liner notes to 1990’s Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, released by Columbia Records, which suggested that Johnson was buried at Mt. Zion MB. Actual documentation, however, had not been gathered beyond that ambiguous death certificate, and MZMF understood that. T. DeWayne Moore—currently MZMF’s Executive Director, and a visiting historian at Bowling Green State University in Ohio—diplomatically notes that MZMF never claimed to be marking Johnson’s actual gravesite. The memorial is not a headstone, he says, but a cenotaph, or a monument to someone whose remains have not been located.

Moore is frank about what MZMF was hoping to achieve: The organization “leveraged the possibility that [Johnson] might have been buried there” in order to save the church from imminent foreclosure. MZMF’s memorials, he says, are “tools to save the cemeteries and make sure they’re not eradicated, because they’re some of the last elements of cultural heritage that are left to the landscape.” The Johnson memorial got the job done. Mt. Zion MB, and its obelisk commemorating the musician, are still standing—even if Johnson is actually buried elsewhere.

Just two months before that dedication, however, a smaller stone had been set in his honor in the nearby town of Quito, also in Leflore County, outside the Payne Chapel Missionary Baptist Church. Atlanta-based band the Tombstones had sponsored this one, in tribute to one of their musical heroes. This stone does indeed claim to mark Johnson’s grave, on strength of testimony from a woman known as Queen Elizabeth Thomas. A self-identified ex-girlfriend of Johnson’s, Thomas told Living Blues magazine in 1990 that Johnson had been buried at Payne. However sincere Thomas’s testimony may have been, the evidence was always scant—considering, especially, that the death certificate named a “Zion Church.” But for all intents and purposes, Johnson basically now had two memorials resembling grave markers within two miles of each other.

All along, it was just as likely—if not more so—that Johnson was buried elsewhere. Back in the late 1980s, blues researcher and folklorist Mack McCormick located Johnson’s half-sister, Carrie Spencer Harris, who had been living in Memphis at the time of Johnson’s death. Harris told McCormick that, upon learning that Johnson had been hastily buried in a homemade casket, she hired the only black undertaker in the area to reinter Johnson in a higher-quality coffin. And that undertaker, Paul McDonald, kept records.

While rumors of the reinterment prompted speculation that Johnson’s body may have been moved from one cemetery to another, McDonald’s records said otherwise. Verified by McCormick and later by Conforth, the documentation stated clearly that Johnson was buried at Little Zion Baptist Church, off of Money Road in Greenwood. Further corroboration came in 2000 from a Rosie Eskridge, whose husband Tom had dug Johnson’s grave. Eskridge not only identified Little Zion as the burial site; crucially, she also verified the identity of one Jim Moore, who had been listed as the informant on the death certificate, and confirmed the reports of a homemade casket.

Wardlow, the co-biographer and a self-appointed “blues detective,” began his search for Robert Johnson’s death certificate in 1965. From that point, it took him nearly 40 years—with the work of many other researchers and witnesses—to reach a confident conclusion regarding Johnson’s gravesite. Once Eskridge came forward, however, the case seemed pretty decisively closed. Even T. DeWayne Moore, whose MZMF arranged the Johnson cenotaph at a different church, concurs. “As far as I’m concerned,” he says, Little Zion is “where the guy is buried.” Johnson’s headstone at that church has been in place since 2002, and a sign on the Mississippi Blues Trail acknowledges that Johnson “is thought to be buried in this graveyard.”

Yet confusion appears to have lingered. Up Jumped the Devil—which unequivocally maintains that Little Zion is Johnson’s burial site on strength of the accumulated evidence—was only published in June 2019, but much of this information has been publicly available for decades.

“There’s nothing mysterious about” an unconfirmed gravesite in the Mississippi Delta, says Elijah Wald, author of Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. Wald emphasizes that many of Johnson’s neighbors and contemporaries—black, rural Mississippians just a few generations removed from slavery—are also buried in unmarked graves. “That’s about poverty and racism,” not mystery, he says. What distinguishes Robert Johnson “is that a bunch of white people care where he’s buried.”

Johnson’s legend truly began to grow after 1961, when Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues Singers, a compilation of the still-relatively-obscure bluesman’s recordings. The album was met with particular enthusiasm in England, where interest in American folk and blues music had been growing since the end of World War II. Among the young English people who took to Johnson’s music were guitarists named Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, whose bands—among many others—would go on to cover Johnson and educate the whole world of his tremendous influence. (Bruce Conforth, fittingly, was also founding curator of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.)

In his 2007 memoir, Clapton wrote that he “had found the master” upon hearing King of the Delta Blues Singers. Steven Johnson, the musician’s grandson, recalls a similar exchange he had with Clapton, who said that Robert’s playing simulated the sound of three guitars with just one. “I cannot do it,” Clapton told him. “I tried it. I can’t."

Thanks to the satanic flirtations of bands such as the Rolling Stones (and some sketchy documentation), Johnson’s crossroads legend quickly gained international renown as one of rock ‘n’ roll’s mythological pillars. It gave the white audience something it craved, says Wald: the image of the “dark, scary, devilish Delta, which was much more interesting than coming from London or New York.” Over time, the more zealous fans would ask enough questions and generate enough rumors to bring about three neighboring memorials.

This darkly romanticized image of the Delta has, of course, brought tourist dollars to the region and inspired some of the world’s most recognizable rock music. But it also propagates a host of old injustices. It’s racist towards Johnson, who didn’t need the devil’s help to master the guitar. "He just learned how to play the guitar after many years of practice," says Michael Johnson, another of his grandsons and treasurer of the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation. (Admittedly, some of that practice, with his mentor Ike Zimmerman, took place in a cemetery, likely because it was quiet.) It obscures other musicians whose contributions to the genre were similarly powerful, if perhaps less marketable. Howlin’ Wolf, for example, was actually born before Johnson—but because Wolf lived longer, he’s sometimes considered a follower of Johnson’s rather than a contemporary.

To the African Americans who created it, blues was not necessarily “dark, scary, devilish music,” says Wald. Instead, it “was a completely present style,” nuanced, dynamic, even joyful and funny. This became clearer to Wald, who is also a musician, when he traveled to Leflore County to perform at the dedication of the Mount Zion MB cenotaph. The church’s pastor, Reverend James Ratliff, was one of many locals who had first heard of Johnson because of the plans for the memorial.

For Steven Johnson, the stakes are ultimately personal. “That’s my heritage,” he says, “that’s my bloodline. You want the truth to be known.” At the same time, neither Johnson, Conforth, nor Wald wants to see any of the memorials removed. Johnson appreciates that his grandfather’s fans enjoy the mystery. He just wants that mystery—and the history—to be fully understood.

Conforth, likewise, wants to bring flesh and blood back to the ghost story. Explaining his desire to write a myth-busting biography, Conforth says he “wanted Robert to become, or at least try to become, the real person that he actually was, and not the myth that all these people have made him into.” Wardlow concurs, with a point that shouldn’t really need stating.

“The man,” he says, “was a human.”

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Since the 16th century, the spirit has been the country's gold standard.

When Evgeniia Pletneva’s parents built their house in the 1990s, not far from St. Petersburg, Russia, nails, boards, and doors weren’t available in stores. So her mother hung handwritten fliers around town, listing the items they wanted and offering either vodka or money in exchange. Pletneva’s father, a sailor, had visited Germany and picked up five liters of Royal, a grain spirit with an astounding 96 percent alcohol (192 proof) that was then popular in Russia. The couple traded the booze for the materials they needed, throwing in a little cash for zakuski—snacks to be consumed while drinking.

Pletneva, who was around nine at the time, remembers helping her mom and sister carry one of the doors home. Exchanging alcohol for goods “didn’t seem weird, as many people were doing this,” she recalled in a text message. (Pletneva is a friend of the author.) Food was also in short supply, with long lines to purchase what remained on sparse grocery store shelves. “We knew that in villages people were taking vodka as a salary, as money was not really needed,” she added. “You couldn’t buy anything with that money.”

Using vodka instead of cash made sense when actual currency was almost worthless. As the USSR collapsed and hyperinflation soared, Russians referred to rubles as “wooden” money. Some stores stopped taking them entirely, accepting only American baksy, German marks, or British pounds. Shopkeepers priced their wares in dollars; after that was forbidden in 1993, they switched to “killed racoons,” slang derived from the Russian abbreviation for “conditional units,” a term for the equivalent of a dollar. Russians sought out hard currency for its stability and buying power. They also hoarded a product known to hold its value: vodka.

“I have more than 20 bottles at home, and I don't drink at all,” a Moscow laboratory clerk named Dmitri Shmidrik told The Baltimore Sun in December 1991. This “liquid currency,” as he called it, played an essential role in everyday transactions. As the Sun explained, “A repairman will yawn if you offer 20 rubles to get the car fixed or a ceiling plugged. But if you offer a bottle of vodka, the job gets done.”

At the time, there was a shortage of the spirit, caused partly by hiccups in glass bottle production and a trade dispute with distilleries in neighboring Belarus. But even after the supply normalized, vodka underpinned the transition economy. Cash-strapped factories bartered it for materials, and the government even allowed some companies to pay their taxes in booze. In 1998, authorities in one Siberian district gave 8,000 school teachers 15 bottles apiece, in lieu of wages. The initial proposal, according to a UPI report, had been toilet paper and coffins, “but vodka is favored as the only thing that can be freely sold or exchanged for bread and other food.”

Stories like these made headlines in the Western press, illustrating the chaotic turn away from Communism. But vodka barter wasn’t just a product of perestroika; the practice had been going on for hundreds of years. As Mark Schrad writes in Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State, “When times are tough, vodka has always been there—not just as a product to be bought to drown out one’s sorrows, but also as the currency used in the exchange.”

In the 16th century, Schrad explains, agricultural improvements produced booming harvests. Rather than bring their surplus grain to an oversaturated market, many Russian landowners distilled it into vodka, a higher-value product that was also easier to transport. With the tsar’s encouragement, the spirit became popular, replacing beer and mead as the peasants’ drink of choice. The harder stuff was more profitable at government-run taverns that generated revenue for the state. (A museum in St. Petersburg, the Russian Vodka Museum, tracks this history with a large collection of bottles, stoppers, and glasses.)

In rural areas of the Russian Empire, vodka served as compensation for manual labor through a practice called pomoch’, which translates literally to “help.” Farmers mustered the extra hands they needed by offering food during the workday and a banquet afterwards, at which vodka flowed. As the late historian Patricia Herilhy noted in her 1991 paper Joy of the Rus’: Rites and Rituals of Russian Drinking, pomoch’ was framed as a tradition of mutual support, but could also have an exploitative bent. For wealthy farmers, a decent spread and a bucket of vodka were cheaper than paying 20 to 30 poorer villagers in cash. Plenty of workers got hammered at these banquets, but some poured their share of booze into bottles and took it home. The vodka was “the only part of the day’s pay that could be kept,” Herlihy wrote.

The tradition of food and drink in exchange for service carried into the 20th century. Sergei Sotnikov, an interpreter in Moscow (and a former colleague of the author), recalls how his family built a house in 1970s Ukraine, which was then a Soviet republic. His dad’s friends and coworkers helped with the construction; in return, they got dinner and vodka or samogon, home-brewed moonshine. “It would have been very strange if they had said they wanted money,” Sotnikov writes in an email. As a kid, he was sent to a bar with two three-liter glass jars to have them filled with beer for the group. (A note from his father was sufficient for the barkeep to give alcohol to a 12-year-old.) “That was how people lived then.”

Pavel Syutkin, co-author with his wife Olga of CCCP Cook Book: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine, writes in an email that women in particular relied on vodka to get the help they needed from men after the Second World War. Olga’s grandmother always kept vodka on hand in the ’70s, Syutkin says, “sometimes to pour a glass for a neighbor for helping to bring coal from the cellar, sometimes to a friend who fixed the hinge.” She’d “spend” about one bottle per month on services like these. Those who couldn’t afford to buy vodka for this purpose had to brew their own samogon.

Alcohol was preferred payment for small tasks, Syutkin says, because “it was not a shame to offer a little portion.” Handing someone a single ruble for their work might be seen as humiliating, but “to pour 150 grams of vodka on the same ruble and to serve a sandwich with lard—the guest is pleased, and of little burden to your budget,” he says.

Vodka was a handy medium for the informal, often illegal transactions necessary to survive under Communism. As the anthropologist Myriam Hivon described in her 1994 paper Vodka: The “Spirit” of Exchange, a worker at a collective farm might “sell” a ton of state-owned manure to a villager for private use in exchange for two bottles of booze. For under-the-table deals like these, Syutkin says, vodka was less incriminating than using money. In other cases, “paying” someone in alcohol actually helped you play by the rules. By trading a bottle for assistance ploughing land, for example, a person could get their needs met without running afoul of Soviet laws that prohibited hiring private help, Hivon wrote.

Today, the repairman expects to be paid money. But the concept of booze as a store of value persists. In 2014, the ruble took another nosedive amidst falling oil prices, conflict in Ukraine, and Western sanctions over Russia’s invasion of the Crimean peninsula. Things got so bad that the Russian government lowered the minimum price for vodka. A brand called “Russkaya Valyuta,” which translates to “Russian Currency,” quickly became one of the country’s top sellers.

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Spirit trumpets helped the dead speak above a whisper.

One of the biggest issues with speaking to the dead in the Victorian era—beyond the whole “being dead” thing—was that ghosts could never seem to speak loud enough. Spirits only spoke in whispers—unintelligible spectral babblings that the living human ear could barely hear, let alone decipher. A medium’s solution to this ghostly conundrum? The spirit trumpet—a fancy name for a skinny cone that supposedly amplified the voices of the dead.

Before the spirit trumpet, conversations with ghosts were restricted to more primitive, nonverbal forms of communication, according to Collectors Weekly. Spirits were known to rap on the floor or spell out words in a painfully slow manner, and mediums would speak the entire alphabet out loud until the ghosts stopped them at a certain letter. The advent of the spirit trumpet broke down these linguistic barriers by allowing the dead to speak directly with the living—kind of like a mobile phone for beyond the grave.

The spirit trumpet barged into the séance scene in the late 19th century, popularized by the spiritualist medium Jonathan Koons. In a cabin by his farm in Athens County, Ohio, Koons built a fantastical spirit room wherein guests could witness free public séances conducted by Koons and his family. As Brandon Hodge, a former magician and spirit-communication-device collector and blogger, told Collectors Weekly, Koons’s son Nahum probably invented the spirit trumpet.

According to the mediums who used these tools, the spirit could speak by possessing the vocal cords of the person speaking into the trumpet. Too soft-spoken to really project in a spirit room, the dead required all the sound-amplifying help they could get. While in use, these trumpets would supposedly float around the air, buoyed by the power of psychic energy, according to the psychic researcher William Jackson Crawford’s investigation in the 1919 collection Experiments in Physical Science.

The first spirit trumpets were homemade, either out of metal or cardboard, and resembled simple narrow cones. But as trumpets took off in popularity they became fancier, leading to steel trumpets that could extend or contract via sliding segments that slotted into one another like tubes in a jointed telescope. Some even sported glow-in-the-dark rings at the end. Everett Atwood Eckel, perhaps the best-known manufacturer of spirit trumpets, churned out the first commercialized versions from his tin shop in Anderson, Indiana.

Many Victorian séances shared a predictable itinerary, Crawford wrote. First, everyone would sit down around a circle, pray, and perhaps sing a hymn—all in absolute darkness. Then the summoned spirit would rap on the floor to announce its presence, ranging from slight knocks to thunderous blows that could shake participants’ chairs. Soon after, the table would levitate and, on occasion, spin around or turn sideways. Only after this fanfare would the medium trot out the spirit trumpets. As soon as the spirit left the room, Crawford wrote, the trumpet would come crashing down.

In one séance Crawford witnessed, two spirit trumpets swooped about the room and ushered in a range of nameless voices that ordered the living guests to “sing something,” and to turn a gas lantern away from the psychic—the wish of a very private ghost, of course, and not a manipulative medium.

This story originally appeared on April 10, 2019.

Its spirit culture is unlike any in the world.

Everybody loves a ghost story. Really, everybody. All cultures have some variety of ghost story, by that name or another. But some are more pervasive and deeply ingrained than others. It isn’t really possible to identify the most ghost-heavy culture on the planet—there’s no clear metric for how one would judge such a thing. But few ghost cultures are as powerful and varied as the ones found in Malaysia. The modern English and North American conceptions of ghosts—from the ones under bed sheets to Victorian-garbed, translucent shades to the poltergeist that makes things go bump in the night—feel downright embarrassing in their limits when compared to the great world of Malay hantu.

Hantu is the general term for all ghosts, spirits, and otherworldly beings in Malaysia and among the Malay people of maritime Southeast Asia and its diaspora. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of them, ranging from natural spirits (representations of individual rivers, trees, and lakes) to vampire-type ghosts to leprechaun-like tricksters. Some are good, some are bad, some are to be avoided, and some are like partners to the living. And they coexist with wide range of religions observed by the very diverse people of Malaysia.

With a strategic location straddling the South China Sea, the land of the Malays has been a fluid and multinational place for thousands of years. Malaysia, known by that name or not, has been a vital trading post for huge empires: China, India, the Arabs, the Netherlands, Portugal, England. The indigenous people of Malaysia, called the Orang Asal, practice what the state (and researchers) tend to classify as a type of animism, with various natural objects held as sacred.

And all of those empires left their religions—and their more spiritualist aspects—behind, too. Today Islam is the most-practiced faith in country, but there are substantial numbers of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others. (There were Jews for a long time, too; today, not so much. And ethnic Malays enjoy advantages that starkly stratify society there.) Malay ghost culture is, therefore, a hybrid of spirits, spooks, and haunters from around the globe.

“It certainly has a very big place in the culture,” says Cheryl Nicholas, an ethnographer at Penn State Berks who was born and raised in Malaysia and who has made Malay ghost culture a central part of her research. “Whether or not that continues in the more modern era, I don't know. I still feel the presence whenever I go back.” These ghost stories that imbue the culture of Malaysia seek, as many supernatural or religious stories do, to explain the mysteries of life and help lead a person to a more successful, longer, or more profitable one. Ghosts or spirits vary throughout the country and the culture, but there are some particularly popular individual types or broader categories

One of the most popular types is a sort of vampire-ghost. The pontianak is one that emerges upon the death of a woman during pregnancy or childbirth. She has the shape, usually, of a demonic woman capable of flight, who targets the blood of young children. (Alternatively, the pontianak may prey on men; these stories vary by region and teller.)

There are, in fact, a wide variety of ghosts floating around the concepts of birth and young children. There’s the hantu tetek, a ghost with pendulous breasts who likes to kidnap children just to play with them for awhile. She is used to explain why sometimes a child is found, unharmed, in a weird place, like deep in a bush or up a tree.

My favorite is the toyol, which is usually described as looking like a naked baby, though sometimes as more of a gremlin-baby. The toyol is very different from Western ghosts in a specific way: You can buy one.

Typically one purchases a toyol from a bomoh, or medium. It wouldn’t quite be described as a purchase, since you’d be paying the bomoh for connecting you with a toyol and the spirit itself would be free. Toyol are childlike: mischievous, a little clumsy, a little needy, easily distracted. But they are known as excellent thieves. You can have your toyol go out and steal for you, though Nicholas says it’s sometimes believed that a toyol will only steal up to the dollar amount you paid for it.

“The people in the village use that to explain petty theft,” she says. It also explains why you might see some shiny toys or marbles in front of rural Malaysian houses: countermeasures to distract a thieving toyol and give it something to play with. Nicholas says the best place to find a toyol isn’t in Malaysia, but rather near Mecca, Saudia Arabia. Muslim pilgrims have to discard all the bad influences in their lives for the Hajj, and though toyols aren’t exactly evil, they’re not what one would consider a force for good. In any case, you’ll find toyols near Mecca in the same way you’ll find stained Ikea furniture on move-out day at a college dorm.

The idea of owning a ghost of your own splits particularly hard with the Western conception of spirits as either barely aware of the modern world, or preoccupied with scaring people, or in search of eternal rest. Some Malay ghosts are more like partners to living humans, working side by side as protection—or to do one’s dirty work. Take the hantu polong, a sort of attack ghost used to inflict harm. It must be fed with blood from one’s fingers.

Nicholas’s work cataloging the wonders of Malay ghost culture has turned up dozens of species. There are some that cause specific health issues: The hantu buta causes blindness, hantu cika causes colic, hantu kembung is behind stomach aches. Some are more innocuous: Hantu apu is a party ghost, and so is hantu jamuan, though if it is not invited, it will wreck the festivities. Note to self: Remember to invite the hantu jamuan.

Another interesting aspect of many of these ghosts is the interaction, acknowledgement, or maintenance they require. Hantu lembong is a spirit of swollen growths on trees. Nicholas related a story she had been told about a man who had to formally apologize to this ghost after peeing on one of its trees while on a hike in the forest. If you disturb the soil, you might want to make an offering to hantu jembalang, a spirit of the earth. There are gigantic ghosts who get bigger the closer you get to them, ghosts with the head of a dog, ghosts that break traps to set animals free, ghosts of the moon and the sun and the sea. There are powerful elemental ghosts who should under no circumstances be messed with, and ghosts who throw stones at people for kicks.

“Ghosts are always a plausible explanation for Malaysians,” says Nicholas. A prominent urban bomoh even made international news following the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. He eventually claimed the plane was being hidden somewhere in Southeast Asia by the orang bunian, sort of like invisible supernatural elves.

The robust ghost culture only occasionally runs afoul of modern globalist culture of the industrialized nation. “There is a very distinctive negotiation between the public and the private” regarding ghosts in Malaysia, says Nicholas. When she traveled around the country seeking ghost stories, many people would repeatedly explain, and demand that she understand, that they are good Muslims before acknowledging and revealing all their great ghost stories. But ghosts are simply too entrenched in Malay culture to go away. There are tremendously popular ghost movies released all the time. A Malaysian rapper recently offered a reward for the name of the bomoh responsible for a curse put on him. Bomohs are sometimes used to find missing people.

In Malaysia, it seems, you’re never too far from a ghost. It’s not inherently good or bad, it’s just in the air.

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The Flying Dutchman's long afterlife began with a British power trip.

It’s said that not all who wander are lost, and that’s mostly true. Some are just damned for all eternity—like the crew of the Flying Dutchman, perhaps the most infamous ghost ship to haunt the seven seas.

But before it sailed all seven, serving as an omen of doom for any sailor who saw it, the Dutchman made its name off the coast of Africa—as an English creation dressed up in Dutch clothing, says Agnes Andeweg, a literature professor at University College Utrecht who specializes in Dutch literature and cultural memory.

“I have searched all digitally available Dutch texts published until 1800,” she says, “including a corpus of thousands of letters by seafarers, and there is no mention of the Flying Dutchman—ever. If it was a piece of lore, it was a British piece of lore.”

The ship’s story started spreading in the late 18th century, as the Dutch maritime empire collapsed and the Dutch East India Company dissolved. As some versions of the tale tell it, the Dutchman (De Vliegende Hollander in Dutch) transformed from corporeal to supernatural off the Cape of Good Hope (or Stormkaap)—a notoriously dangerous bend in the maritime route from the Netherlands to the occupied islands of the East Indies, now Indonesia.

Though the circumstances of the ghostly transformation vary—sometimes it’s ascribed to the slave trade, sometimes to murder, sometimes to a broken promise—most every story seems to agree that the ship is damned for all eternity, and that its crew must sail forever, never (or very, very rarely) making it to port.

In an academic paper titled “Manifestations of the Flying Dutchman: On Materializing Ghosts and (Not) Remembering the Colonial Past,” Andeweg chronicles the origins of the mythical ship, from its supposed roots in the Dutch maritime empire to its modern appearances in SpongeBob SquarePants and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, where it’s captained by none other than Davy Jones, the old sailors’ devil (who manifests in the Pirates version as an anthropomorphic octopus-man).

In contrast to that convoluted reimagining, says Andeweg, the Dutchman’s invention by the British was pretty simple. The ship materialized in the written record just as Dutch naval supremacy was waning, and Britain’s was on the rise.

“This historical development is what makes the Flying Dutchman story relatable and comprehensible to a British audience,” Andeweg says. “The ghost makes sense because this audience understands that the [Dutch East India Company] has become something of the past.”

Many have claimed to see the Dutchman over the years (including Prince George of Wales, later King George V). But the majority of those supposed sightings can be easily explained away, most commonly by fata morgana—a mirage that can cause objects on the horizon to morph or hover, floating as so many ghosts are known to do.

“Sailors in the 18th and 19th centuries only had two explanations for the experience of seeing the Flying Dutchman: superstition or madness,” says Nic Compton, a maritime writer whose books include Off the Deep End: A History of Madness at Sea, via email. “Either it was a 'ghost ship' or you were mad if you thought you'd seen it. Nowadays we have a third explanation: science.”

As the British empire declined over the course of the 20th century, so too did the Dutchman’s fame. The ship that once inspired an opera by Richard Wagner and poems by Thomas Moore and Sir Walter Scott faded into relative obscurity before its recent revival in American movies, comics, and cartoons. Andeweg attributes this to two factors: reduced public interest in (and knowledge of) seafaring, and the end of the colonial era.

“We might say that the current relevance of the Flying Dutchman is limited,” writes Andeweg. “But I believe it can still be reactivated—as it was in the Pirates of the Caribbean [movies]. Its [cinematic] relevance may … show how 'we' apparently need to fictionalise or supernaturalise the colonial era.”

In this remote Swiss town, residents spent a lifetime aging a wheel for their own funeral.

Imagine setting aside a wheel of cheese at your wedding. What would it look like if it were served at your funeral?

If you were lucky, it would look like one of the wheels in Jean-Jacques Zufferey’s basement in Grimentz, Switzerland: shriveled and brown, pockmarked from decades of mite and mouse nibbles, and hard as a rock. You’d need an axe to slice it open and strong booze to wash it down. This is the rare cheese you don't want to cut into when it's aged to perfection. A fossilized funeral cheese means you lived a long life.

Zufferey’s home, high in the Swiss mountains of Val d’Anniviers, is one of the last places you’ll find evidence of this peculiar practice—of keeping a wheel of cheese to be eaten at your funeral.

The Val d’Anniviers, which snakes up the highest peaks of the Swiss Alps, is a case study in how mountains isolate valleys and villages, breeding unique traditions. When Swiss anthropologist Yvonne Preiswerk first arrived to conduct fieldwork here, he noted strange funeral rituals reminiscent of ancient Egypt.

“We are struck by … a special kind of mountain Catholicism,” he wrote in the 1992 paper “Death, the Priest, the Woman and the Cow: Chronicle of Research in the Village.” In centuries previous, he explained, visitors appalled by these pagan practices had labeled the locals “barbaric,” positing that they’d descended from the Huns.

The rituals that shocked them involved a mix of death and cheese. It seems an unlikely pairing, but the landscape offers an explanation. Along the valley’s winding road to the small mountain village of Grimentz, isolated villages cling to the cliffs in the shadows of craggy, glaciated peaks. The ground is rocky and steep. Growing seasons are short and winters are long. To survive the cold, villagers had to preserve nutrient-dense food.

That’s why residents of Grimentz, like people elsewhere in the Alps, breed bovines adapted to the steep landscape, bringing them to high pasture in summer to graze. Pooling abundant summer milk, they make giant wheels of cheese.

To render the wheels sturdy, cheesemakers “cook” the curds to firm them, and press them to expel as much whey as possible. Moisture and heat cause spoilage, speeding up a cheese’s aging process; in the dry, cold mountain air, these cheeses age slowly. While aging can continue for years, most Alpine wheels tend to reach peak ripeness—still pliable, but with plenty of flavor—months later, during the worst of winter when, historically, little else was available. Sliced onto rye bread or melted fireside, cheese ensured a calorie source in winter.

Devotion to dairy has taken different forms throughout the Alps's secluded valleys. “A popular culture of the cow … traverses all moments, objects, and events of the mountain peasant,” wrote Preiswerk. In Grimentz, it manifested in elaborate funerals. After a death, the bells of the deceased’s cows were removed, so that the animals, too, could mourn. Families added a “picnic of the dead” to the casket, which included a bottle of wine, bread, and cheese (as well as sturdy boots, as ghosts were rumored to wander the glaciers after dark).

The same foods comprised the all-important burial meal, which symbolized the reconstitution of the community after its tragic rift. As one of Preiswerk’s interview subjects recounted, the funeral guests were told, “Come to the meal, because the dead man has left enough.”

In a historically poor area, “leaving enough” required advance planning. “There was the ‘cheese of the dead,’” explains Zufferey. “Everyone had a wheel of cheese so that they had something to serve at their funeral.” When the inevitable time came, the chiseled cheese was washed down with vin des glaciers, the local wine.

As the Valaisan Alps modernized during the 1900s, and villages moved away from subsistence economies, fears of cheeseless funeral tables waned. According to anthropologist Claude-Alexandre Fournier, families gradually stopped overseeing funeral rituals at home. “Mortuary knowledge was no longer transmitted,” he wrote in the 2013 ethnography Odette Fournier, Sage-Femme, “thus depriving families of the ‘death equipment box.’” Yet in a few basements scattered throughout the valley, you’ll still find carefully stacked wheels of funeral cheese.

In Grimentz, Zufferey, a tall, soft-spoken man with tiny glasses and a day job at the local department of agriculture, unlocks his basement door, releasing an ammoniated, musty smell. His family, too, had forgotten about their funeral cheeses, until his grandmother died in 1944. That's when Zufferey’s father found two very old wheels in her basement.

Instead of eating the cheeses, whose engravings suggest a production year of 1870, Zufferey’s father decided to preserve them. In the years since, the family has added wheels from time to time, building a collection. Rather than prepping for a funeral, they’re dutifully preserving evidence of a waning tradition—and what might be some of the world’s oldest wheels of cheese.

Zufferey picks one of the wheels, which is now 149 years old, from the shelf. “You can touch it—like a relic in the church,’” he quips. Rock hard and leathery, with a glossy brown surface reminiscent of a bog body, it’s still a bit oily, but sapped of moisture. Its own microbes and molds are likely long deceased. He picks up another, from 1967, engraved with edelweiss flowers. A third, from 1992, depicts a “queen cow.”

Perhaps pondering his own mortality, Zufferey worries about what will happen to his collection in the long term. He’d like to give them to a museum, but can’t find anywhere nearby with proper climate control. “There is no museum of cheese in the Valais,” he says. “It’s bizarre.”

There’s no rush, though. His cool cave cut into the mountainside beneath his family’s wooden chalet seems to be working for these wheels. Zufferey gingerly places them back into their horizontal compartments, ducks out of the tiny basement back into the cobbled village square, and locks the door. Casting darkness on the uneaten death cheeses, he leaves them to await their own fate.

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After an African-American cemetery was bulldozed, families wondered what happened to the graves.

When Laurel Cemetery opened on the outskirts of Baltimore in 1852, its owners advertised a beautiful, peaceful spot, with “high and undulating” grounds, a public chapel, and tree-lined walks. The site had already been used for years for the burial of black servants of wealthier white people. But as the city’s first nonsectarian graveyard for black residents, Laurel Cemetery was supposed to become a place where the luminaries of Baltimore’s black community could be remembered forever.

“All who procure burials here are sure of an undisturbed resting place for all time to come,” an 1858 ad promised.

The life span of that promise fell far short of eternity. Today, the hill is gone. The chapel is gone. The gravestones and walks are gone. On the site of “the city’s most fashionable burying ground,” as the Baltimore Afro American described it in 1951, stands a Food Depot, a discount department store, and a Dollar General, among other commercial buildings.

In the 1960s, over the objections of families with relatives buried there, the cemetery was paved over by developers with political connections. “One day, they put a big plastic fence around the whole thing and started using earthmoving equipment and moving bodies,” says Julius Zuke. A school librarian, Zuke grew up a few blocks from the cemetery, and a couple of years ago he had his students research the site, which has been long forgotten by most of the city.

The developers claimed that they relocated the cemetery, but as Zuke says, “there was always a suspicion in the neighborhood—did they get all the bodies?

For more than half a century, Laurel Cemetery was a fixture in Baltimore. Behind the wall stood the stately headstones of the Reverend Daniel A. Payne, the first African-American president of an American college, and Alexander Wayman, a prominent bishop of the A.M.E. Church. Cabell Calloway, whose descendants include the famous bandleader Cab Calloway, was buried there, along with many of the city’s upper class of lawyers, politicians, and clergymen.

The obituaries of people buried in Laurel Cemetery, which appeared in the Afro American, contain a world of local history. The people buried there included Samuel Owings, “the first colored job printer in the city,” Isaac Jones, “a well known public cook,” and J. Murray Ralph, “one of the few intimates of the late Frederick Douglass.” There was Mary L. Creditt, “one of the first members of the old First African Baptist Church," “Ol” Hebron, “one of the best known men about town,” and Samuel E. Young, who “had probably fed more people than any other caterer in Baltimore.” One of the saddest stories was of Myrtle A. Press, an 11-year-old girl killed by a car on her way to church. Many of the people buried at Laurel were born farther south, before the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. One section was set aside for Civil War veterans—240 in all.

But by the 1920s the grace and beauty of the graveyard had started to decline. Complaints began to appear in local papers. City ash trucks were using the cemetery as a dumping ground, and in 1923 the Afro American reported that the cemetery “was in a deplorable state.” Neighbors had even found cattle knocking over gravestones inside the gates. As the city grew, white families moved into new homes built along the cemetery edge, and they started turning their refuse pails over their backyard fences. In 1929, a photographer for the Afro American snapped a picture of an old refrigerator, an outdoor toilet, and other trash littered among the tombstones.

Although the Laurel Cemetery Company had assured its customers and their families that the resting places would not be disturbed in perpetuity, its owners were not prepared to provide that care. (Few cemeteries created in the 19th century were.) By 1924 the company owed enough in back taxes that the city tried sell off a section of the cemetery, ignoring the inconvenient fact that 200 people were buried there. In 1930, the owners tried to raise capital by turning one corner into a gasoline station. In both cases, protests from the community stopped the sales, and soon a group of lot owners formed an association to protect the cemetery.

“This condition does not exist at Greenmount, Loudon Park, Druid Ridge, Cathedral, or other cemeteries in which our white brothers are laid to rest,” wrote Fearless M. Williams in a letter to the Afro’s editor, “and therefore it should not be inflicted upon us.”

By the end of the 1930s, the cemetery was overgrown and almost wild. Local residents started pushing to have it removed altogether. A neighborhood improvement group imagined a playground there. In 1949, the city approved a proposal to turn the site into a public housing project, but the community killed that idea out of concern that it would lower property values. In the end, the Baltimore Planning Commission decided that it would be impossible to transform the cemetery for some other public use.

Instead, the owners of the Laurel Cemetery Company filed for bankruptcy and quietly began the process of selling the land.

Cemeteries, at base, have a simple function. They cordon off the dead and mark a separate space for human remains. For some, a cemetery is a sacred place; for others, bones have little meaning, and once a person is buried, relatives may never return to their graveside. But for a community, a cemetery can have another purpose. As they commemorate the dead, gravestones preserve a story about a place.

“You can put together the biographical details of individuals and spin an ethnographic story about their lives, their struggles, their achievements,” says Lynn Rainville, an anthropological archaeologist who studies historic African-American graveyards. Sometimes cemeteries are the only remaining evidence of those lives. When graves disappear, the story does, too.

As cities grow, cemeteries that were once on the outskirts come to occupy increasingly valuable land. In New York, for instance, burials below 86th Street were outlawed in 1851, but it’s still possible to find historic cemeteries in the densest parts of the city. Trinity Churchyard, where Alexander Hamilton is buried, is in the Financial District. New York Marble Cemetery is hidden in the Lower East Side. But places where less powerful people were buried often disappear beneath new development. Washington Square Park is built atop a potter’s field. The city’s 18th-century African Burial Ground was built over in the 19th century and only rediscovered in the 1990s during a redevelopment project. (Today it is a National Monument.)

Cities still grapple with the problem of old cemeteries. Austin recently created a Cemetery Master Plan after a local group, Save Austin’s Cemeteries, started pushing for preservation. In Houston, an outcry from families held up the bulldozing of a cemetery sold to developers. Chicago built an airport runway over a 161-year-old graveyard. These days, though, when cities and developers do decide to build over cemeteries, there are often state laws in place that dictate the procedures for exhuming and reburying remains.

Back in the 1950s, though, there were few protections for the dead of Laurel Cemetery. The graveyard was in bad shape, but the land itself had immense value—to those who knew how to unlock it.

The group of lawyers and city officials involved in the sale of Laurel Cemetery seemed to know what they were doing. On paper the cemetery wasn’t worth much, so two city officials formed a real-estate company that offered $100 for it in 1957.

Over the next few months, long-standing obstacles were cleared away, with the help of men who ultimately benefited from the sale. A bill that allowed the land to be condemned passed the state legislature. The city settled a dispute with the federal government over part of the land. The Planning Commission approved rezoning that allowed commercial development.

Before long, the realty company had full control of the cemetery. In short order, the land was sold to a developer, by a pass-through company whose owners and stockholders included many of the men who had made the sale possible. By then, the land was valued at $229,660.

Soon after the relatives of Laurel Cemetery’s occupants learned of the sale, bulldozers were knocking over gravestones. The graves, families were told, had been moved to a cemetery in Carroll County, miles away from the city and inaccessible to most of the families whose relatives were buried at Laurel. Families filed lawsuits to stop the development, and the local NAACP chapter took on the case. The city started an investigation into the officials involved in the sale.

Ultimately, though, there was nothing in the law to protect the cemetery or the families of the people buried there. The development went forward, and soon the beautiful, tree-filled cemetery was replaced by a parking lot surrounded by discount stores.

At first, remembers Zuke, the school librarian, some people in the neighborhood hesitated to shop at the new development. Should anyone be buying groceries in what used to be a graveyard? But soon the memory of Laurel Cemetery faded, and few residents of Baltimore recall that it had ever existed.

But in the 1980s, a local genealogist, Alma Moore, dedicated herself to piecing together the cemetery’s history and documenting the names of the people buried there. (The details above come from her extensive research, published in its fullest form in a 1984 issue of Flower of the Forest Black Genealogical Journal, with co-author Ralph Clayton, a researcher who worked at a local library.) In the course of her research, Moore became convinced that thousands of people remain buried under the shopping center’s parking lot.

Although the graves were supposed to have been moved, one of the lot owners who sued the developers told Moore that the new cemetery does not hold all the bodies buried in the original. That made sense to her. The new cemetery was much smaller, with the headstones clustered together. Plus newspaper accounts from the time of the redevelopment reported the removal of, at most, 500 graves. Moore was documenting the names of thousands of people who’d been buried at Laurel. It seemed reasonable to assume that most of those graves had not been moved. But no one knew for sure.

Then, a few years ago, Ronald Castanzo, an archaeologist and assistant dean at the University of Baltimore, came across an old map that included Laurel Cemetery. It wasn’t that far from the university, so he went over to take a look. He saw the parking lot covering the site, but also a small area where grass had been planted. He asked the company that owned the site for permission to excavate, and in 2015 he and a group of students began a small dig.

The soil in this part of the world is acidic and, over time, eats away at buried bones. But Castanzo and his students found human bones, along with the hardware from caskets—hinges and decorative metal details. They also used ground-penetrating radar to scan the parking lot. “It looks like there are a lot of graves still intact,” Castanzo says. Most of Laurel Cemetery was never moved, but bulldozed and paved over.

Stories like this are not rare, particularly in the South, where small African-American graveyards, left behind by families migrating north, have routinely been razed. “One of the only unique things here is the shenanigans about the purchase,” says Rainville, the anthropological archaeologist. The scale of the graveyard is too. It was rare to have a cemetery of this size set aside for a black community in the 19th century. The scale also makes the loss of the place that much more significant. Laurel Cemetery had a record, chiseled in stone, of a huge swath of Baltimore history. In the course of just a few decades it was—willfully, deliberately—erased.

Today the people who rediscovered the story of the cemetery are working to make sure it's not forgotten again. Both Castanzo and Zuke have been considering ways to have a memorial or a historic marker placed on the site. "It’s an important historic site, and it’s actually a huge burial ground," says Castanzo. "We’ll probably never be able to reconstruct everyone that’s buried there." But at least a marker would signal to people what the place once meant, before it became the sort of place that seems to mean nothing at all.

This story originally appeared on January 30, 2018.

This rural region may be the will-o'-the-wisp capital of America.

I’m sitting in my car at midnight, alone on a dirt road in rural Georgia. I’m tired, but I can’t go to sleep. Not because of the bobcats or the wild hogs I’ve been warned about. Not because of the gators or the rattlesnakes. Not because the sounds of night are intensified because I’m alone in the dark, with a three-quarter waxing gibbous moon hanging in the sky.

No, I can’t go to sleep because I’m here to see a ghost. And if I fall asleep, I may not see it—but it might see me. Then, just when I’m about to give up and get the hell out of here, I see a bright, circular light coming toward me from the distance.

Much earlier that day, I drove for four hours from my home in Atlanta to almost nobody’s home in Cogdell, Georgia—a town that consists of just a few buildings on dirt roads, surrounded by timber woods and blueberry fields. Cogdell is in Clinch County, just off the northwestern edge of the Okefenokee Swamp—the largest swamp in North America. Hence the gators.

I came here to see the Cogdell “spooklight,” which has been spotted in the area for at least the past 60 years, and likely farther back than that. And now it may be coming my way.

Spooklights are a global phenomenon described in a remarkably consistent manner in the many places they’ve been spotted. Also known as earth lights, ghost lights, will-o'-the-wisps, and by many other names, they’re generally described as balls of light that float like purposeful balloons. Often they’re found near swamps and marshlands, and associated with ghost stories. Some say they resemble lanterns, and in the days before electricity, were said to lead confused nighttime travelers to their doom.

Most non-supernatural theories on their origins involve phosphorus gases rising from beneath swampy water. The most famous spooklights in the U.S. are probably the Marfa Lights in Texas, or the Ozark Spooklight that appears near the intersection of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. But there are entire books describing other spooklights in more than a dozen states, throughout the U.K., and around the world.

Within an hour or so of Cogdell, there are at least four other documented spooklights—documented internet-wise, anyway—in the towns of Pearson, Axson, Surrency, and Screven. There are also stories about spooklight sightings in Fargo, another small town in Clinch County, and other places just a few miles from Cogdell. You might say that the area north of the Okefenokee is the spooklight capital of America.

The story behind Cogdell’s spooklight is connected to the fascinating history of Cogdell itself. The town was settled in 1914 by a man named Alexander Kelly Sessoms, who gave it his mother’s maiden name: Cogdell. Sessoms, who owned most of the area’s forests, built a sawmill and turpentine still, and brought in hundreds of laborers to work them.

Cogdell was the definition of a company town. At the Cogdell store and post office—long closed but still standing today—employees used what were referred to as “babbitts”: company currency that could only be spent there. Employees lived in company housing, with whites on the north side of the main dirt road and blacks on the south side.

Alongside the main road stood railroad tracks built by Sessoms to move his products between the cities of Lakeland and Waycross (with Cogdell in the middle). One of the tracks’ builders was a self-taught railway and construction engineer named Kince Charles Davis. Though hated by the Ku Klux Klan—for being a black man with a white man’s job—Davis was protected by Sessoms and other powerful local men thanks to his remarkable ability to build a railroad.

Perhaps even more remarkable were the children he raised, including the actor, writer, and civil-rights activist Ossie Davis and his brother William Conan Davis, a food chemist whose formulas for instant mashed potatoes, potato chips, and soft-serve ice cream have influenced the diet of nearly every American.

Today, the tracks are long gone, replaced by GA-122, which runs alongside the dirt road where the spooklight is said to appear—the dirt road where I’m waiting alone in the dark. Only a handful of homes on the north side of the road remain; fewer are occupied. The south side, where the black laborers and their families once lived, has been completely grown over by woods.

The railroad track supplies one of the legends behind the Cogdell spooklight. The story goes that when the tracks were being built, a railroad conductor was hit by a train and killed. The spooklight is supposedly the lantern of his ghost, still swinging in a vain effort to stop the train. Other takes on the Cogdell light talk of a decapitated conductor seeking his lost head, and a servant forever waiting in the dark for the owner of the plantation where he worked.

I drove to Cogdell not only to see the light but also to talk to people who’d seen it themselves. At the office of The Clinch County News—10 miles south of Cogdell, in Homerville—I spoke with Len Robbins, the newspaper’s editor and publisher for the past 25 years.

Robbins hasn’t seen the spooklight himself, but subscriber JoAnn Tomlinson has. Now 73, the retired principal and teacher at Clinch County High School was a teenager living in Homerville back in 1963. One night that year she and her friends packed themselves into two cars and drove up to Cogdell.

When they arrived, around midnight on a moonless night, they crossed the tracks and turned right on the dirt road, drove east for a couple of miles, then turned around and faced west, toward Cogdell. They turned off their headlights and stayed very quiet and still. Then they saw the light.

Tomlinson says it appeared along the edge of the woods on the north side of the road—a beach ball–size mass, 10 or 15 feet off the ground. It floated out of the trees. Then it re-entered the woods. Then it floated out again. “By that time everybody in both cars were scared to death,” Tomlinson says.

The other car, the one she wasn’t in, cranked the engine to flee. But then something even crazier happened. The light—which Tomlinson describes as glowing a mossy green, with a bit of chartreuse—floated over to one of the car’s headlights, as if doing so intentionally. Then it bounced to the other headlight, went beneath the car, and came out under the back of the vehicle, by the license plate.

At that point both cars sped away. As Tomlinson looked back, she saw the light return to the trees.

She says she doesn’t know what the light was—only that it scared the heck out of her and her friends. And that she’s seen it more than once.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” says Tomlinson. “I don’t believe dead people are coming after me. If they were, they’d have got me in the 51 years I have been living out there.” (For most of her life, she’s lived 10 miles down the road from Cogdell, near Arabia Cemetery—a boneyard built on sand that’s nearly white, as if the headstones were simply placed upon a tropical island beach.) “But I do know that I saw that green mass, not once but twice. And the second time my mother was in the car.”

Bonnie Adams grew up in Cogdell, worked at the company store, and is one of the only people still living on the north side of the road. She told me that when she was young, people used to come from all over and knock on her family’s door, asking where to find the spooklight—and annoying her father.

“My dad would come back in,” she recalls, “and he’d say, ‘Another one of those nuts come looking for the spooklight.’" Some of those visitors, she says, came all the way from Texas just to see it.

Adams’s father would joke that you wouldn’t see the light unless you had a good-looking woman with you. Many people told me that back in the day, going out to the dirt road to see the spooklight—some say it’s green, others white, still others orange—was really just an excuse for teenagers to neck in a dark, isolated spot.

But that was only one of many viewing conditions cited by locals. Some say you have to go at midnight, and that you can’t see the light until three in the morning. Some say that there hasn’t been a spotting in 50 years, while others claim to have seen the light in the 2000s. Some say that you won’t see it unless the moon is new; others say it has to be full. Some say if you’re driving, the light—which may arrive accompanied by the sound of a cowbell—will stop your engine (it happened to Adams’ nephew).

I’d been told to take the paved road, drive about two miles east, go past the gator farm, and turn left over the borrow pits, onto one of the dirt turnoffs. Then turn the car around on the old dirt road and face Cogdell, just like JoAnn Tomlinson and countless other teenagers had done.

I sat there, alone. Nobody to make out with. Midnight. The moon neither full nor new. It was October, but as warm as a summer night.

At first I kept the windows closed and listened to the radio. Every 15 minutes or so, a car would drive by, bringing light and relief. But the later it got, the fewer cars passed. After an hour, I turned off the radio, opened the windows, and just listened to the night. I thought about Ossie Davis’s memories of his hometown.

“Cogdell had one country store where the railroad and the dirt road intersected,” he wrote in a memoir co-authored by his late wife, Ruby Dee. “It had two or three churches for black folks, a lot of woods and paths and gatherings of shanties here and there where the black folks lived.

“Cogdell, of course, has vanished; it is no more, gone with the wind carrying down with it all the small things that made it seem that someday it might be a city as big and as important as Homerville.” Even the cemetery had grown over, Davis lamented. Nobody knows where his grandmother is buried.

After more than two hours sitting in the car, with nobody but the crickets for company, I noticed the air suddenly become foggier. That’s when I saw the orange light. It came from over a hill. Not in front of me, but behind me. I spotted it first in my rearview mirror, then nearly broke my neck turning around to see it directly.

Would it bounce off my headlights? Do a subtle dance in the air? Or play the lantern and try to stop a phantom train?

I’d never know. Because after a few seconds, I realized it wasn’t a spooklight at all. It was just another car, driving 45 mph past Cogdell, off to who-knows-where in the dead of night.

In the heart of the Andes, Catholic miners also pray to the devil.

If a miner strikes a rich vein of silver in Cerro Rico, a mountain looming over the Bolivian city of Potosí, it is thanks to El Tio. If a miner is crushed to death by a loose rock in the mountain, it is also the work of El Tio. All the miners can do to sate the ambivalent spirit that guards the mountain in the heart of the Andes is leave offerings. The mines are home to more than 600 shrines in his likeness, which the men ritually soak in liquor, bestow with lit cigarettes, and shower in coca leaves. El Tio also accepts the blood of llamas. The church-going miners are happy to oblige.

The miners of this mountain hold the Christian God in one hand and El Tio in the other. The contradictory syncretism is one that reflects the region’s dark, colonial history and how, within Cerro Rico, little has changed since it was first mined 500 years ago.

It’s no exaggeration to say that El Tio’s dark domain shaped the modern world. The mountain was once home to the greatest silver deposit on earth, and its extraction by imperial Spain on the backs of slaves bankrolled their conquest of the New World and fueled the European Renaissance. By 1600, Bolivian silver had increased the supply of exchangeable currency throughout Europe eightfold; Macalester College Anthropology professor Jack Weatherford calls Potosí “the first city of capitalism.”

Somewhere between four and eight million Quechuan Indians and enslaved Africans died mining the mountain, earning “The Rich Hill” a darker, if not more accurate nickname: “The Mountain That Eats Men.”

The arrival of Spanish Catholics carried with them the seed that likely became El Tio. Jose Ticona, a third-generation miner and local historian of Cerro Rico, says that conjecture passed down from miners of old offer the only clues to El Tio’s origin. The Spaniards likely refused to enter the mines themselves, he explains, instilling order by introducing slaves to the concept of a maleficent Devil. Told that a lack of obedience and respect for the Devil was the root of all misfortune in the mountain, the miners venerated the spirit in a very Andean manner, creating the niche, underground cult of offering and sacrifice that exists today.

Origin aside, the Spanish certainly created the hellish conditions in which the cult of El Tio thrives. And while the work is now voluntary, the job is no less grim. When the state-owned enterprise regulating the mountain decentralized in 1985, over 30 Quechua-run cooperatives began forgoing safety standards to outcompete one another. They employ child laborers to squeeze through tight shafts and mine without coordinating digging paths. More than 600 unregulated mineshafts traversed by 15,000 workers haphazardly pocket the now-sagging mountain, where unpredictable cave-ins claim the lives of dozens of brave men annually. A 2011 collapse at Cerro Rico’s cap disfigured the once triangularly peaked mountain that is literally the centerpiece of Bolivia’s national flag. The tragic irony is that the mountain is now owned and regulated by Quechuans themselves, and still the mountain kills.

“There is a culture of death,” miner Ibeth Garabito told Al Jazeera. To the miners, everything that happens underground is the will of El Tio. “If you don’t make him offerings, he will punish you,” Basilio Vargas explains to his 10-year-old brother in the 2015 documentary The Devil’s Miner. “He eats the miner. He kills him and then eats his soul.”

While crosses adorn the hundreds of entrances to the mines, the largest open spaces within Cerro Rico are occupied by clay models of the mercurial spirit. “A mine cannot exist without its Tio,” says mine boss Saturnino Ortega in The Devil’s Miner. The horned creature with bulging eyes and a sharp goatee sits upright in his throne, naked, with an unmistakable erection. His mouth and nose are often blackened from a lit cigarette that hangs from his lips. It’s a good omen, miners say, if El Tio smokes it all the way to the filter. The relationship is reciprocal. “We don’t just take the silver,” third-generation miner Antonio Potochij tells me. “We pay the mountain with rituals.”

Relieving the mountain of its resources and living to reap the benefits, the miners repay El Tio in instruments of vice. On Tuesdays and Fridays, the miners offer him coca leaves, hand-roll him cigarettes, and douse him in puro, a 96 percent ethanol they dilute with water and drink throughout the day. Cans of beer often litter the ground at his feet, flags draping his horns and shoulders. “Outside, we believe in God, who is our savior,” says Ortega. However, in the narrow, dusty mines of Cerro Rico, “We ask the Devil for favors, sometimes on our knees. Our belief is split into two worlds.”

While Catholic symbols are forbidden in the mines and likenesses of El Tio are shunned by the Church outside, the cult of El Tio does often spill over into broader Potosino festivities. On the first of August, miners and their families gather to pitch blood from a sacrificial llama about the entrance of the mine and their faces before barbecuing the sacred animal. “We bathe the entrance with llama’s blood so he doesn’t drink our blood,” explains one man in The Devil’s Miner. In the tradition of Wilancha, miners push a flaming cart filled with liquor, candy, and a live llama speeding into the mines as sacrifice.

The deification of this spirit is a mark of the region’s identity. The people of Potosí absorbed and transformed Christian mythology in propagating El Tio, writes anthropologist Michael Taussig, “to give poetic expression to the needs of the oppressed.” The retention of these traditions over centuries is a testament not only to the strength of Andean religious culture, but the continued trials of Cerro Rico’s miners. The offerings of liquor, llamas, and tobacco are symbolic; the sacrifice of the mens’ own bodies are not. As long as the fearless miners of Potosí are so exploited, El Tio will be fed.