(Photo: Louise Longson/Facebook)

Is that a smile in the sky or are the heavens just happy to see you?

Actually, the answer is neither. On October 25, residents of the small Oxfordshire village of Leafield were treated to a rarely seen weather phenomenon that presents itself as an upside-down rainbow in the sky. But what looked like a smile was actually an event known as a circumzenithal arc.

Circumzenithal arcs, or CZAs, are not rainbows, but rather halos formed when light refracts off of ice crystals hanging in the clouds at high altitude. A similar phenomenon to mock suns or “sundogs,” CZAs form as sunlight curves sharply within plate-like ice particles, entering through a horizontal side, and exiting through a vertical side. This sharp turn cleanly refracts the beam, causing sharper definition of colors than the raindrop-based rainbows it is so often confused for. For the halo to become visible, the sun needs to be at a very specific angle, around five to 35 degrees above the line of the horizon.

Surprisingly, CZAs are actually pretty common, but due to the fact that they are always on the same side of the sky as the sun, and given their specific angle of occurrence, they are often overlooked. The other issue with catching CZAs is that they often occur within cirrus clouds, which can produce obscuring lower clouds.

But even if the phenomenon is not quite as uncommon as it seems, the undeniable whimsy of a multi-colored smile in the sky never fails to seem miraculous. One observer, Louise Longson in Leafield, said that she watched the CZA for 10 minutes until it faded away. Even though the phenomenon was brief, its occurrence managed to capture the attention of everyone from the BBC to the Daily Mirror. Sometimes it’s just nice to see nature smile, although none seem to have realized the unfortunate inverse: if CZAs are the sky smiling down on us, then aren’t rainbows a frown?

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com. 

Portrait of Agness "Aggie" May Underwood. (ca. 1933, Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library)

At a time when most female journalists were writing advice columns and reporting on well-heeled members of high society, Los Angeles newswoman Agness "Aggie" Underwood was harboring a murderess named Hazel Glab.

The year was 1935, and Glab was about to stand trial. Underwood refused to let reporters from competing news outlets track down the accused killer for an interview, going so far as to use her own home to hide her. Eventually, Glab was convicted of murder, but not before Underwood got her exclusive interview.

Little-known today, Aggie Underwood was a gutsy broad who both created and typified the image of the tough-as-nails lady journalist long before it became a film noir trope. In fact, in her 1949 biography, Underwood wrote, "[a]fter covering big-time trials for fifteen years or more, I'm pretty sure I don't act like celluloid newspaperwomen."

Agness Underwood, Herald-Express reporter, at work during Aimee Semple McPherson funeral, interviewing Mrs. Ellen McNeely of Indio. (ca. 1944, Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library, caption by Los Angeles Public Library.)

Born in 1902 and raised in a foster home in Indiana after her mother died in 1907, Agness May Wilson was a gifted, precocious child who nonetheless grew bored with academia and dropped out of high school. At age 16, she moved to San Francisco then relocated to Los Angeles, where she lived at the Salvation Army's home for working women, making ends meet by working in a department store. Following a short stint in Salt Lake City, Underwood returned to L.A. and worked as a waitress before marrying Harry Underwood and giving birth to a daughter and a son.

When Underwood's husband told her they couldn't afford to buy her new stockings, Underwood resolved to get a job and earn the money to buy them herself. Soon, a friend asked if she would be interested in a temp job as a switchboard operator at the Los Angeles Record, and at the age of 24, Underwood embarked on her long and storied newspaper career, eventually becoming the country's first female city editor of a major metropolitan daily paper, the Evening Herald and Express, in 1947.

Agness "Aggie" Underwood at her desk in 1949, two years after becoming the city editor for the Los Angeles Herald and Express. She kept a baseball bat handy in case she needed to keep overzealous Hollywood press agents in line. (Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library, caption by Los Angeles Public Library.)

Throughout her career, Underwood interviewed high-profile folks like Amelia Earhart, attended the autopsy of actress Thelma Todd, and became fast friends with gangster Mickey Cohen. She reported on female prisoners in Tehachapi for a three-part series called "Forgotten Women," and even helped a woman on death row get her sentence commuted to life after the prisoner revealed she was a victim of domestic violence. (She killed her husband in self-defense.)

Aggie Underwood stands in the midst of the newsroom holding an oversized baseball bat. The bat was a gift from her colleagues to commemorate her tenth anniversary as city editor of the Herald; it was inscribed, 'To Aggie, Keep Swinging.' (1957, Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library, caption by Los Angeles Public Library.)

Long neglected in the annals of history, Aggie Underwood has finally gotten her own moment in the spotlight with a photo exhibition at the Los Angeles Public Library: “The First with the Latest! Aggie Underwood, the Los Angeles Herald, and the Sordid Crimes of a City.” In addition to featuring rare photos of Underwood, “The First with the Latest!” chronicles 16 crimes the tenacious reporter covered through photos culled from the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner photo collection. 

Joan Renner, creator of the websites Deranged L.A. Crimes and Vintage Powder Room, is the curator of the exhibit and author of its accompanying catalog. She decided to curate the exhibit on Underwood because of the important role the late newswoman played, not just in L.A. history, but in the history of crime reporting overall. Underwood has also been a major influence on Renner's own work. "Each time I write about an historic L.A. crime I feel like I'm a direct descendant of Aggie's," she says. "She whispers in my ear."

Aggie Underwood, n.d. (Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library)

Perhaps the highlight of Underwood's early career was her work on the 1947 still (officially) unsolved "Black Dahlia" murder. Underwood said she was the first reporter to arrive on the scene after the grisly discovery of Elizabeth Short's bisected body, a crime that shocked the entire country. In fact, Underwood maintained that she knew the identity of the Black Dahlia’s killer, but her promotion to the post of city editor of the Herald-Express ostensibly kept her from verifying and imparting the news to the public.

Renner had the opportunity to speak to one of Underwood's grandsons about the Black Dahlia affair. “He told me that when he and his brothers realized what their grandmother's career had been like, they asked her if she could name the Dahlia's killer," she says. "It was then she told them that it didn't matter anymore because he was dead, and she wouldn't say more.”

As a journalist, "Aggie was out covering everything from earthquakes and floods to murder and mayhem," says Renner. "She interviewed killers and victims with skill and compassion." When Underwood retired from the business in 1968 at the age of 65, hundreds attended her farewell party, which was hosted by Bob Hope. On that occasion, says Renner, "she was overheard to say to a colleague, 'Please don't forget me.' I don't see how we ever could."

“The First with the Latest! Aggie Underwood, the Los Angeles Herald, and the Sordid Crimes of a City” is on view at the Los Angeles Central Library through January 10, 2016.

A spiritualistic séance by Väinö Kunnas (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

This article originally appeared on Motherboard.

Fog still lingered in the séance room from the previous performance when Nicholas Wallace, a magician from Beamsville, Ontario, opened the door. “It’s the spirits,” he joked.

Wearing a plaid shirt and holding a Tim Hortons coffee, Wallace didn’t exactly match the gruesome Edgar Oliver character I had expected. He's not a medium, but he is a magician who has been hosting a live show called Séance since 2013 that puts audiences in "contact" with the dead.

Every show, Wallace chooses a different proxy randomly from the audience as both a catchy hook and a reminder that any Dick and Jane can pull off a "connection." One evening, a nervous audience member refused to be the one to make contact, starting a startled chain reaction with more declining out of fear, and two audience members leaving before the séance began.

Another evening, an attendee pulled Wallace aside after the show, warning that he should have a professional medium on-hand in case something “goes wrong.”

Wallace wasn't worried, however. He doesn't believe in ghosts.

Séance is pure entertainment, and Wallace is still figuring out how to balance the believability of his show. He wants it to be frightening enough to scare his audiences, but not so convincing that someone will try to speak with a grandparent or Marilyn Monroe. Mediums who try to convince audience members that they can really do this are the warped version of his profession, he said.

“Once you see how easy it is, not only to fool people but for people to fool themselves, you’ll either feel responsible to see that people aren’t taken advantage of or fall to the dark side,” he said.

Séances boomed during the mid-19th century. As scientific advancements began to explain evolution, energy and origin, there was increased interest in confirming a life after death, a tension known as the Victorian Crisis of Faith. Science and the soul were by no means rivals, initially. Thomas Edison apparently built a device to communicate with ghosts, while physicist William Crookes and biologist Alfred Russel Wallace repeatedly went to bat for mediums.

There was plenty of room for fraudsters willing to make a buck off both new technology and the classically gullible, however.

Photographs revealing the fraud mediumship of Helen Duncan. The photographs were taken by the photographer Harvey Metcalfe in 1928 during a séance at Duncan's house. (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

William Mumler, a jeweller and amateur photographer in the 1860s, saw a blurry apparition behind in him a self-portrait that he identified as a deceased cousin. Mumler made this his primary business, taking spirit photos of others until being taken to court, with P.T. Barnum of all people testifying against him for taking advantage of people’s grief. Accusations went so far as to claim Mumler broke into the houses of his clients to steal photos of their dead loved ones for source material.

“At the time, photography was pretty new,” said Wallace. “So for a lot of people they’re thinking this could be something about photography they didn’t know. The production of an image was already sort of magic.”

Projections had been popular in the previous century, using magic lanterns to create convincing ghouls, one German practitioner, Johann Georg Schröpfer, killed himself after being driven mad by his own illusions, even though his performances were intended for entertainment. Table-tipping, another popular Ouija-style method, was famously debunked by Michael Faraday, discoverer of electromagnetic induction, when he built a device to show how easily a piece of furniture can be influenced by unconscious muscle movement. (Wallace admits that, growing up, he’d always be the one shamelessly manipulating the Ouija board.)

While you can use gizmos to pull one over on an audience, the biggest part of the sell is merely the psychology, the suggestion. A test held by magician Andy Nyman with levitating a table suggested that even after verbally telling the séance participants to lift the furniture higher, a week later many recalled it was the influence of the dead.

Wallace lost his own faith in phantoms during film school, when a group of paranormal experts he was documenting attributed recorded floating ectoplasm on the supernatural before considering their own chain-smoking habits.

Even if he lacked a belief in the paranormal, Wallace’s interest in horror and bumps in the night predated his tenure as a magician. During a brainstorming session with his director, Luke Brown, who he had worked with previously, he expressed the desire to do a more high-concept performance, and found a séance, for exclusively entertainment purposes, to be a good eclipse between the two. They experimented with some friends in the dark, and found the results effective.

A segment of the show is simply to elaborate on the history and tradition of séances, to further clarify that people in the audience should be there for a good thrill.

Wallace doesn’t want to be confused with “the dark side” of spiritual communication, which is how he views mediums like as the Fox Sisters or John Edward, who made a name in exploiting the insecurities of those who need confirmation of a life thereafter.

Edward, the most popular and recent example of a commercial medium, rose above his critics for a five-year TV run. Even if his methods were nothing new, his plain-clothed presentation and lack of devices gave it a grounding that many could believe in.

That’s why even after hinting the scent of baloney, someone would still approach Wallace afterward asking how he can continue to be a skeptic, despite not only seeing how the sausage is made, but running the whole sausage factory.

Ghosts exist outside of the explainable, which makes them hard to disprove, no matter how many detectors and ectoplasm samples are produced and debunked. They live within the discrepancies of technology, hiccups in audio and video. “It’s the unknown,” says Wallace. “There are no answers.”

All in Your Head is a series that takes a scientific look at all things spooky and scary. Follow along at Motherboard.

Vodou altar during a celebration for Papa Guédé in Boston. (Photo: Calvin Hennick/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

Zombies have infested our culture. There are zombie movies by the hundreds, zombie literature by the thousands and one extremely popular zombie television show. For the most part, though, these ubiquitous undead eaters of flesh are used to entertain, joke and help teach emergency preparedness. However, the origin of zombies is a lot more somber: it emerged from the brutal world of 17th century Haitian slavery.

In fact, Christopher Columbus is directly responsible for the entry of zombies into the New World. In December of 1492, the Spanish explorer and colonizer landed on Hispaniola. He proclaimed the island in the name of Spain and quickly enslaved the native peoples, just as he had done when he had landed two months earlier on today’s Bahamas. But just 20 years after Columbus had arrived, the population of “Indians” decreased from 300,000 in 1492 to 20,000. A new influx of slaves was needed. When the first boat of African slaves were brought to Hispaniola, in 1502, the seeds for today's zombie invasion were planted. 

An illustration of Columbus landing on Hispaniola in 1492. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Tales of the walking dead likely originated in Central and West Africa, where many of Hispaniola's slave-ships were sailing from, but the monster's character was undisputedly shaped by the singular brutality of slavery in what is now present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Sugar and coffee plantations grew to dominate the island, all on the backs of slave labor. All of this growth, however, came at the expense of nearly half a million African slaves.  

Life was merciless for a slave on a sugar cane plantation. Overwork, starvation and violent repercussions were commonplace. Death rates were sometimes three times as high on a sugar cane plantation than any other type of plantation. Birth rates were very low due to, as one source described it, lack of “appetite or energy for sexual intercourse.” There was no freedom, no privacy and little hope. Every bit of a slave’s life was controlled–morning, noon and night, day in and day out. The afterlife and religion became their only chance at salvation.

“To become a zombie was the slave’s worst nightmare: to be dead and still a slave, an eternal field hand,” writes Haiti expert Amy Wilentz. 

A French map of Hispaniola, 1723. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

One of the most prominent religions of that period was Haitian Vodou, a close relative of the West African animist religion Voodoo. The religion, which is still practiced today, emphasizes the ability to interact with and cultivate a culture of harmony with the dead. Death is revered in Haitian Vodou culture, taken as something that continues one’s existence, rather than ending it. If all traditions, customs and ceremonies are followed, the soul transitions from one stage of the afterlife to the next after dying. If not done in correct fashion, though, the soul becomes susceptible to the whims of a sorcerer-for-hire known as a Bokor.

The Bokor is a traditional priest “who can work with both hands,” who can do both good and evil. Using magic, spells and potions, they can help lost souls find their way to the afterlife and heaven. In 18^th century Haiti, heaven was an escape from the harsh realities of the New World and a chance to return to the African homeland. It was also a way to exact revenge on the ones that deprived them of their freedom in the first place. By leaving their physical lives behind, the slaves were leaving the grip of their owners. But the Bokor could also act with evil intentions and reanimate these souls for their own personal gain. They could turn them in zombies.

An Haitian Vodou banner. (Photo: Thomas Quine/flickr)

A zombie, or zonbi, in the Vodou religion, is once again a slave; a being that does not have any control of their own actions. The evil Bokor could use these slaves to do their bidding, be it fieldwork or for murderous tasks. Stuck between the physical world and the afterlife, these zombies are restless, unsettled and angry. Yet, there is nothing they can do–this hopelessness is a harsh metaphor for the slavery that Haitians were trying to escape. The threat of becoming a zombie inspired much fear in the slave community. 

While the idea of spiritual zombies can certainly spark terror, the possibility of becoming a physical zombie horrifies. On the fringes of Vodou, there are Haitian folktales of Bokor murdering people simply to reanimate them as zombies. Through the use of magic, spells and a powder called coupe poudre, the traditional sorcerers are said to be able to enslave actual humans for their zombie army. While the concept of zombificiation seems fantastical, the stories are still so prevalent in Haitian culture that scientists have studied and written about the phenomenon.

What they found is actually rather shocking–the coupe poudre is made up of naturally occurring toxins, possibly including the poison tetrodotoxin, which likely comes from the puffer fish. When this powder is administered, it can cause disorientation, aggressiveness, paralysis, face wounds and, eventually, death. In other words, an American pop culture vision of a zombie.

Religious symbols and paintings in Haiti's National Cemetery. (Photo: USAID/flickr)

In the early 1980s, Harvard-trained botanist Wade Davis became famous for immersing himself into Haitian culture to see how to create a zombie. He witnessed the preparation of the zombie poison, which included not only puffer fish and toads, but human remains as well. He was also able to find interview several "zombie patients," those who were able to escape their zombie servitude. What Davis heard was a horrific tale of people being administrated poison, declared dead, buried alive and then dug up by their oppressor. As described by Davis in a 1983 Journal of Ethnopharmacology article:

The victim, affected by the drug and traumatized by the situation, is immediately beaten by the zombie maker’s assistants. He is then bound and led before a cross to be baptized with a new zombie name. After the baptism, he is made to eat a paste containing a strong dose of a potent psychoactive drug (Datura Stramonium), known in Haiti as 'zombie cucumbers,' which brings on a state of psychosis. During that intoxication, the zombie is carried off."

Davis' 1985 book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, was modeled on the experience of Clairvius Narcisse, a Haitian man said to have been turned into a zombie after ingesting tetrodotoxin. It became a best-seller, and Wes Craven adapted it into a horror movie a few years later.

In American pop culture today, it is the zombie that is feared. In Haitian culture, where zombies originated from, it is not the zombie that inspires horror. It is the fear of becoming a zombie slave again. 

At the North Pole on April 6, 1969. Left to right: Roy ‘Fritz’ Koerner, Ken Hedges, Allan Gill and expedition leader Sir Wally Herbert. Said Sir Wally of the journey, "It seemed like conquering a horizontal Everest." (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection) 

In 1962, Sir Walter “Wally” Herbert, the British polar explorer, began planning what some regarded as "the last great journey on earth": a crossing by foot over the frozen Arctic Ocean, from Alaska to Norway. His preparations began in 1966 by spending four months in Greenland with the Inuit before crossing to Canada. As he left, the Inuit showed him a map on which they had marked all the places he was most likely to die.

On February 21, 1968, Sir Wally led the British Trans-Arctic Expedition from Point Barrow, Alaska. His team consisted of explorer Allan Gill, glaciologist Roy ‘Fritz’ Koerner and SAS Medic Dr. Ken Hedges, along with 40 huskies. The first part of the voyage was marked with a round the-clock watch over the shifting ice, where “mobility was our best guarantee of survival”. After crossing nearly 1,180 miles of drifting ice, they established a camp in the center of the Arctic Ocean, which became known as Meltville. The plan was to make two different encampments in summer and winter to account for the changes in the pack ice as they moved toward the North Pole.  

The Arctic Ocean is the middle sea of a circumpolar landmass, some 5 million miles of shifting ice. This chart shows the meandering track of Sir Wally Herbert’s expedition, 1968–69. (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection) 

But conditions were not in their favor. The ice-stream was drifting around the Pole, not towards it. They stayed at Meltville for 235 days, until February 1969, when the ice floe they were camped on shattered. For the next leg of their journey, the team travelled through temperatures averaging -40 degrees Fahrenheit, before finally reached the North Pole on April 6, 1969. Upon arrival in freezing conditions and wind, they planted a Union Jack and had a brief celebration with a beef stew. As the weather improved, they moved on to Svalbard, Norway, and completed their 3,800-mile expedition on May 29, 1969.

At the end of this extraordinary feat of endurance, Sir Wally and his team had spent 464 days on ice. They had lived with freezing temperatures, menacing polar bears and weeks of total darkness. The conditions of this treacherous journey and the desolate beauty of the frozen Arctic can been seen in a new book Across the Arctic Ocean: Original Photographs from the Last Great Polar Journey. Complete with essays from explorers and scientists, the book is a testament to the bravery of the British Trans-Arctic Expedition team, the perilous conditions they lived under, and the magnificent, disappearing landscape that may never be crossed again. 

Like ‘astronauts who tread for the first time on some virgin planet, the British Trans-Arctic Expedition marched across a wasteland never crossed by man,’ wrote True Magazine.  (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection) 

Explorer Sir Wally Herbert in the early stages of his Arctic crossing, February 1968. (Photo:© 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection) 

By May, ice conditions were extremely hazardous and the polar bears, menacing. This polar bear charged and was shot just 15 ft. away. (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection) 

Roy ‘Fritz’ Koerner donned a wet suit to measure the underside of floes. His detailed study of the arctic ice during the journey was instrumental in subsequent climate change discussions. (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection)     

Polar explorer Allan Gill. (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection)     

As the group headed into March the sun rose ever higher. With the ice still hard and the days longer, this was a good time for sledging. (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection)   

The story of Sir Wally Herbert’s Arctic expedition actually began in the ice of Antarctica, where he learned the skills of traveling by dog and sledge and navigating by the stars. (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection)         

The Arctic Ocean is covered by a thin and brittle skin of ice, one of the most variable and unstable of all physical features on the Earth’s surface. (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection)   

The Reclus hut was no more than a box—steeply roofed, with two windows, a door and three primus stoves. The group was stranded there for a month. (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection)     

In the summer of 1960 Sir Wally Herbert had to scour the west coast of Greenland for dogs and persuade the Inuit hunters to sell them. He came to admire the Inuit greatly. (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection)       

Roy ‘Fritz’ Koerner in front of ‘Meltville,’ the group’s insecure summer hamlet of two pyramid tents and large mess tent fashioned out of parachutes.  (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection)        

The journey that Sir Wally Herbert and his companions took has never been repeated.  (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection)    

Roy ‘Fritz’ Koerner, the group’s expedition glaciologist, measuring the thickness of the floe. (Photo: © 2015 The Wally Herbert Collection)   

The cover of the book Across the Arctic Ocean: Original Photographs from the Last Great Polar Journey, published by Thames & Hudson.  (Photo: Courtesy Thames & Hudson)

Halloween sound effect albums never go out of their crrepy, goofy style. (Image: Youtube)

A chain rattles, and the wind blows. A skeleton moves its bones, and a woman shrieks. A wolf growls and a ghost whispers in the darkness.

Halloween, amirite?

The Halloween sound effect album is a staple of the holiday almost as inextricably linked as trick-or-treating. Each year people buy Halloween sound effects albums with a reliable seasonal furor that is usually only seen in the sales of Christmas music.

But where do all these spooky sounds come from? Who is out there torturing screaming victims and creating ominous soundscapes? Polite English musicians, for one.

“Halloween sounds are timeless, I think. An old Disney Halloween album is still as popular as ever, and although the market has been saturated in recent years, the sounds themselves do not go out of fashion as far as I can tell.” says Leigh Haggerwood, a professional media composer and musician who has created six Halloween albums himself, as well as a number of others under contract for third parties. “The most popular album I’ve produced to date is Halloween Horror–Scary Sounds and Music. It sold over 50,000 copies in one week back in 2009 and was higher than Thriller in the iTunes chart at one point," says Haggerwood.

The history of modern sound effects can be traced back to the live radio plays of the 1920s. Live sound effect creators would stand in the studio breaking light bulbs, clapping wooden boards together, and shaking panes of sheet metal to recreate sounds like breaking windows, slamming doors, and growling thunder. A 1931 annual produced by the BBC defined sound effects broadly as “everything that comes out of a loud-speaker, except what is usually classed as “Music” or “Speech.” Within that wide definition, the art of sound effect creation and the foley arts began to evolve. That same year, America got their first full time sound effects department, which is credited as having been a driving force in the development of the industry as a whole.

Jumping ahead to the late 1950s, vinyl records allowed people bring albums of sound effects home. Novelty records by the likes of Spike Jones featuring funny monster songs and spooky stories set to eerie effects became popular. However, possibly the first record with a track of just spooky sounds seems to be a record released by Disney in in 1964 called Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. The album features effects that are now Halloween staples like moaning ghosts, barking dogs, clattering chains, and screaming victims, interspersed with short, often comedic, vocal segments that established them. “Disney’s Haunted House album which was [re]released in 1995 seems to have become a staple in the USA in particular," Haggerwood says.

Over the next decade, the cottage industry of Halloween sound effect albums exploded as the number of albums being produced increased. Today, a quick Amazon search for “Halloween sounds” pulls up over a thousand albums, with another 500 listings in the digital category. “Due to the availability of cheap recording devices, and the easy access to selling in online stores such as iTunes, there has been a huge influx in copycat albums over the past five years,” notes Haggerwood, “When I first released Halloween Horror in 2008 it was one of only a handful of horror albums on sale.”

So what does the creation of a Halloween sound album even look like in the 21st century? Surprisingly, not that different than it would have in the 1920s.

Even with all the changes and technology and increased competition, when creating an eerie soundscape, Haggerwood still sticks to the basics. “The main elements are shock factor and creepiness,” he says, “It’s good to find a balance between eerie drones and ambiances that sound weird, and intercut them with fast, loud and shocking sounds like snarls, bangs and screams.” From cemeteries to torture chambers, Haggerwood picks specific sounds to fit the theme he’s working on bringing to life. “So, for example, a cemetery would utilise the sounds of crickets, owls hooting, and gentle wind as a background, then I would use gravestone sliding sounds, zombie moans and shrieks, and footsteps to bring the scenario to life," he says.

Of course recording a zombie’s moan isn’t as simple as going out and recording the undead. Haggerwood often needs to create the effects for his soundscapes from scratch, whether it’s the sound of monsters, birds, or menacing footsteps. “[I] spent a lot of time recording myself breathing, laughing, moaning, rattling chains, asking friends to scream, following circling crows, you name it!” Haggerfield’s methods seem about as simple as they were when live radio players were doing the work: “In the past I’ve borrowed chains from my father’s shed. I’ve hired actresses to spend the afternoon crying and screaming in my studio. I’ve walked through forests recording my own footsteps on leaves, captured the sounds of dripping water, growling dogs, creaking doors and floorboards.”

The sounds on Haggerwood’s albums, while much more hi-def, are essentially the same variety of noises. For instance in his torture chamber track, dripping rot and creaking wood seem to permeate the space, accented by the occasional scream or sound of sawing wood (or is it bone?) Although some sounds have become more prevalent, evoking technological shocks like the ghostly TV static and deep bass growls of Haggerwood’s Poltergeist tribute (one of the musician’s favorites).

Technology has changed some things, though. Most notably, the depth of sound is much greater now than when Haggerwood began. Making a sound louder when it is closer, and more muffled at a distance was once produced by simply changing the distance to the mic, but today sounds can be layered and distanced to create any effect desired. 

In addition to doing more and more sound effects for Halloween apps, Haggerwood is hoping to bring video into his own soundscapes. “In fact my next venture is to create short, scary videos with similar sound designs so that people aren’t left with just an album cover to look at–but that’s obviously a whole new area.” He doesn't sound scared.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon. (NASA/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

This article originally appeared on Motherboard.

According to a 2013 poll, as many as 12 million Americans believe in the possibility that reptilian overlords rule our country—that’s intergalactic, shape-shifting lizards in Congress and on TV. Granted, the lizards-in-people-suits theory is one of the less popular in the nation; according to the same poll, 21 million believe the moon landing was faked. 116 million think climate change is a hoax.

Mock those statistics if you want, but here’s the thing about conspiracy theories: They’re only theories until their hypotheses turn out to be rooted in non-fiction. As one prominent and level-headed researcher, Joseph Uscinski, told The Atlantic last week, “I think every single one has a better than zero percent probability of being true.” Ask any activist who went to a “no-phones meeting” before it was unearthed that the NSA can turn your device on to remotely listen in to your conversation. Imagine what you might have said to someone in 2011 if they claimed Facebook was conducting psychological experiments on them.

Yet in pop culture and, until fairly recently, in psychological research, conspiracy theorists have been painted as mentally ill; psychologists and scholars have at times dismissed them as a “lunatic fringe,” a subculture suffering from a clinically delusional mindset. The dominant internet-age stereotype is of a wild-eyed white dude sitting in his basement, editing surveillance footage down to slo-mo, dotting it with shaky red arrows.

But in the last few years, the way researchers think about conspiracy theories—and the minds that cling to them—has begun to change.

“There’s not that much of a difference, really, between conspiracy theorists and the rest of us,” says Rob Brotherton, whose exhaustive book on the subject of conspiracy theory psychology, Suspicious Minds, is out next month.

According to the author, who holds a PhD from the University of London and currently teaches at Barnard, the qualities that make people believe the truth is out there “are things we all suffer from ... They’re biases that are built into our brains,” whether they affect how we remember meeting our partners or whether we think Osama bin Laden is really dead.

Brotherton’s book covers a broad range of common psychological phenomena, including intentionality bias—the tendency to ascribe motive to animate and inanimate objects—and our brain’s natural tendency to detect patterns, even where a linear relationship may be tenuous.

“Perhaps the ultimate demonstration of the power of confirmation bias,” writes the author, is the so-called “backfire effect,” a phenomenon analyzed over several studies by Dartmouth political science professor Brendan Nyhan.

Essentially, the backfire effect is what happens when you attempt to reason people out of their strongly held beliefs: it’s why explaining Obamacare doesn’t erase some people’s conviction that government-sponsored death panels are on the horizon, and why despite all evidence to the contrary many believe vaccination causes autism.

Such extreme versions of confirmation bias don’t just apply to crazies, though. Last year the researcher interviewed by The Atlantic, Joseph Uscinski, and his co-author Joseph Parent published a book that represented one of the most comprehensive studies of conspiracy thinking to date. Working against the idea that the internet ushered in a unique age of conspiratorial theorizing, they studied over 120,000 letters to the editor sent to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune between 1890 and 2010, as well as online discussions and news posts discussing conspiracy theories before and after the 2012 presidential elections. They also conducted their own extensive opinion surveys.

Their research covered a fantastic number of theories, from the mundane (JFK was assassinated by the CIA, duh) to the obscure (a Congressional plot to kill off domesticated dogs). It also suggested not only that conspiracy theories were just as—if not more—popular before the internet, but that people who believe in conspiracy theories were pretty heterogenous, demographically speaking. Obviously, what sorts of conspiracies people believed in were varied, but as the authors wrote, they “permeate all parts of American society and cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational states.”

(Adapted from Jeremy Eyo/YouTube) 

“Based on this,” they conclude, “it is safe to say that almost everyone believes in at least one conspiracy theory and many of us believe more than one.” The authors’ larger point: that one of the biggest causes of conspiratorial thinking was perceived power imbalances, a way of seeing the world that’s a little more political than pathological.

Uscinski and Parent’s research has been complemented by other recent work on the way that conspiracy theories appeal to our natural talent for pattern detection and paranoia, particularly in moments when we feel we have little agency. Last year, a survey conducted in the Netherlands by Jan-Willem van Prooijen found that a belief in an invented conspiracy—in this case, a cover-up by an Amsterdam city council—was higher among test subjects who had been primed to feel a lack of control over their immediate surroundings. When people feel like they’re powerless (hello, electoral college) they look for simple explanations, often of mythic proportions.

Conspiracy theories tend to reach a truly epic pitch when they’re used to explain massive geopolitical events like 9/11; both Uscinski and Brotherton point to the importance of proportionality bias, a tendency to assume monumental events must have similarly monumental (not to mention straightforward, if shady) causes.

But of course, to complicate matters further, evil forces totally do exist, and conspiracies abound in the modern world. In his book, Brotherton gives one particularly gruesome example: the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, a Public Health Service initiative from the ‘20s to the ‘60s that deliberately infected black Americans with the infection under the guise of treating them for “bad blood,” then actively prevented them from receiving treatment in order to study the long-term effects of the life-threatening affliction.

Not shockingly, black Americans who know about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment are more likely to believe conspiracy theories about the US government—for instance, that it invented AIDs.

“There’s a kernel, if not of truth, of plausibility to most conspiracy theories,” says Brotherton. “There are legitimate concerns over the militarization of the police, the power of government.”

If anything, that image of the Reddit-addicted conspiracy theorist is more a product of advances in telecommunications than a rise in the number of people buying into this stuff. Interestingly, that paranoia (or, if you prefer, skepticism) does tend to remain consistent in certain types of people: it’s been shown that those who believe one set of conspiracy theories are just as likely to believe another, even if the hypotheses contradict each other. For example: you’re more likely to believe Princess Diana is still alive if you also believe she was killed by the royal family.

The internet “has probably changed the character of conspiracy theories,” says Brotherton, allowing for them to unfold in real time, a la the Boston Marathon Bombing—”when you had to write a book about your theory, you had to communicate it at length.” But it hasn’t, as some claim, facilitated a significant change in how many people believe in them.

So what separates a reasonable level of paranoia from true conspiracist thinking? Likely, it’s a matter of how high up you think the conspiracy goes, and whether your worldview hangs entirely on a belief in shadowy circumstances rather than, say, the logic of reality. But, if Brotherton and his colleagues working to dispel the myths about conspiracy thinking are to be believed, the ways in which these theories appeal to our senses are fairly universal.

As Brotherton says, “people want to see the world in these terms, good versus evil. They want to believe we’re ruled by these forces.” At the center, he says, there’s even a hopeful (if far-fetched) message in conspiracy thinking: “[It says], We can identify these people, and we can fight against them.”

All in Your Head is a series that takes a scientific look at all things spooky and scary. Follow along at Motherboard.

Gerard Rijsbrack's "Deer Hunt," from the late 18th century. (Image: Gerard Rijsbrack/Portail des collections des musées de France, Public Domain)

In September 1865, a young Charles Darwin first set foot on the Galapagos Islands and started taking notes. These writings, later published as The Voyage of the Beagle, featured long accounts of the island's geology and wildlife. They contained the kernels of what would become his "Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection," and brought him great acclaim as a keenly observant naturalist. 

But one of the things that fascinated Darwin most about these islands was that the birds of the Galapagos weren't afraid of him. "All of them are often approached sufficiently near to be killed with a switch," he wrote. "A gun is here almost superfluous; for with the muzzle I pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree... It would appear that the birds of this archipelago, not having as yet learnt that man is a more dangerous animal than the tortoise or the [marine iguana], disregard him."

Darwin called these birds "tame," and spoke of their gradual change into gun-fearing skittishness as increased "wildness." In actuality, of course, the opposite was true—the less contact birds had with humans, the more wild and less afraid they were—but his slip-up is telling: we expect small birds to be naturally scared. Indeed, we expect it of all prey animals, from quivering rabbits to wide-eyed deer to trigger-happy herds of antelope. But is this fair? Do most prey animals spend their lives in constant fear? And if not, why not—how do they figure out when to turn their wariness off and on again?

Galapagos tortoises, relatively unconcerned by Galapagos tourists. (Photo: NH53/Flickr)

Two centuries after Darwin's encounters with the unfazed birds, Joel Berger found himself asking the same set of questions. A conservation biologist specializing in large hoofed mammals, Berger was fueled not just by the existentialism of many predator-prey musings, but by a sense of true urgency. As various human interventions rattle the food chain, and previously fixed roles shift, how and why animals get scared determines their survival, Berger explains in The Better To Eat You With, a book-length account of his decades of prey-chasing travel and research. Human decisions (like the extinction and reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone) and accidents (like the arrival of Burmese Pythons in the Everglades) put animals in new kinds of danger, and whether or not they recognize that is often a matter of life and death. 

Like Darwin, Berger is fascinated by "naive animals"—prey who have never met their predators. He sees in them an opportunity to test where threat recognition comes from: whether it's baked into prey DNA, passed down via what Berger calls a "culture of fear," or, as usual with this type of nature vs. nurture question, a mix of the two. If, say, elk are hard-wired to be terrified of wolves, it won't matter whether a whole herd has never met a wolf before—they'll run at the first whiff of one. But if new elk generations need to be taught this fear, and "predator-naive individuals are less fearful than their predator-savvy counterparts," those blissfully unaware elk are in trouble, Berger explains.

A young springbok, mid-pronk. (Photo: Yathin SK/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Finding answers is a multilayered process. First of all, Berger writes, trying to infer an animal's state of mind involves learning to speak its behavioral language, a complex lexicon of movements, noises, and reactions that run the gamut from subtle to obvious. Anxious birds may sing out warning calls, while scared fish school up and flee. A moose fearing danger might retract its ears, or sniff the air slightly faster, while whole groups of frightened antelopes will jump up and down, a behavior called "stotting" or "pronking." "Even bison, despite their massive bodies, sometimes stot when alarmed," sending the whole landscape into nervous tremors, writes Berger. 

Once you can tell whether or not they're scared, the next step is to figure out exactly what scares them. Over the course of long studies of different moose populations, Berger tested all sorts of potential triggers. He brought speakers out to moose territory, played them the calls of wolves, (moose killers), ravens (often found near moose kills) and howler monkeys (across the ocean from moose kills), and compared the moose's reactions. He snuck up on them and tallied how close he could get before they ran away. He goaded them with snowballs mixed with bear poop and wolf urine, to test whether smells alone could spur fear. Berger found that moose that lived near wolves were more afraid of their sounds and scents, "ceasing to feed and preparing to flee." Moose without sharp-toothed neighbors displayed signs of wariness, but when confronted with evidence of the enemy, they browsed on, indifferently. They knew how to be afraid, but not what to be afraid of. If a real wolf had been there, he'd have had an easy meal.  

A pair of moose who made it to adulthood. (Photo: Hagerty Ryan/US Fish and Wildlife Service Public Domain)

Other animals show similar forgetfulness. Alaskan ground squirrels, whose ancestors lived with snakes three million years ago, are only somewhat fearful of snakes today—they run away from and kick sand at them, but not as quickly or effectively as their snake-experienced cousins do. Conversely, elephants and rhinos in Kenya have learned to fear the sound of Maasai cowbells, and baboons hide at the sight of guns. After careful study, Berger thinks mother moose who survive encounters with wolves may teach their new fear to their calves, placing the next generation pretty high on the learning curve.

Even the animals of the Galapagos are figuring this out. The same marine iguanas that once let Darwin throw them into the sea still allow people to come very close to them—but studies show that when humans approach, some iguanas have begun releasing stress hormones and attempting to flee, "albeit inefficiently and largely unsuccessfully." 250 years after Darwin effectively opened the chain of islands to evolution-loving tourists, said tourists are now participating in evolution, slowly instilling fear in the population, drop by drop. In a rapidly changing world, that might be the healthiest thing for them. 

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com. 

In a small town called Bomarzo, 42 miles north of Rome, the woods are full of monsters.

Created in the mid-16th century by Prince Pier Francesco Orsini, the Park of Monsters is a surreal sculpture garden filled with frightful delights. Much of the park's creation story is shrouded in mystery, but what is obvious is that the rough-hewn sculptures, carved directly from the rocky outcroppings, were most unusual for their time. Some have speculated that after returning home from a brutal war only to have his wife die on his arrival, the prince created the park as a way of expressing his grief. 

Left to ruin for over 300 years, the park was rediscovered by Salvador Dalí in 1938 and restored in the 1950s. Today, tourists roam among the giant stone creatures marveling and wondering about what dark influences led the prince to create his park of monsters. 

The Arctic Ocean (Photo: U.S. Geological Survey)

There's basically no place on Earth that humans have not spread plastic. In a new study published in Polar Biology, researchers report on the presence of plastic garbage in the Arctic Ocean, which may have come from a sixth great ocean garbage patch, a vortex of tiny particles of plastic that are hard for humans to see but that ruin those parts of the ocean for fish and other marine life.

The researchers weren't even in the Arctic to check on garbage; they were there to study marine mammals and birds. They just figured they'd systematically look for trash floating on the surface while they were up there. 

The best way to measure plastic trash in the ocean is with a net tow: the ocean breaks up plastic into such small bits, it's not necessarily possible to see from afar. Even the known garbage patches aren't giant islands of tangled plastic bags; they're just places with much, much higher concentrations of plastic particles than other parts of the ocean. People that don't know a patch is there could sail a boat through it and never notice. 

This team used a coarser measure of garbage: from 60 feet up, on the bridge of a ship, or from a helicopter, they tried to spot visible pieces of trash. They found 31 in all—basically just a hint that there's probably much, much more plastic, broken into tiny particles, in this part of ocean. One possibility is that the garbage that the team saw is coming from a patch in the Barents Sea off the northern coasts of Norway and Russia. Models have shown that such a patch would likely form, given the ocean currents and the amount of stuff humans throw in the sea.

As CityLab reports, the Arctic Ocean is already littered with garbage in a different way—on the sea floor, researchers have found piles of other human garbage. And this isn't fun, shipwreck, Little Mermaid human garbage; it's just plastic bottles, bags and other straight-up trash.

Bonus finds: Possibly hobbit cave, ATMs in the woods, Viking treasure

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Get ready for all-woman crew of Russian cosmonauts, moon! (Photo: Gabriel Lascu/Flickr) 

At this very moment, six Russian women are locked in a mock spaceship on a mission to the moon, being closely observed for physical and psychological changes.

The women, all scientists, are part of an eight-day isolation experiment known as Moon-2015, that is being conducted by the Russian space agency Roscosmos. The agency is seeking to understand how women’s bodies respond when subjected to deep-space conditions over a long duration. According to Roscosmos, the findings gleaned during this experiment may help provide the foundations for a 2029 moon mission helmed by an all-female crew.

Russia was responsible for sending the first woman into space—Valentina Tereshkova, who piloted Vostok 6 in 1963—but until now had devoted little time to researching best practices for women into space. The cosmos-crazy country seems to be making up for that oversight now. According to the Guardian, Roscosmos stated that the main objective of the current simulated mission is to “test the psychology and physiology of the female organism.”

The half-dozen female organisms—otherwise known as human scientists Yelena Luchitskaya, Darya Komissarova, Polina Kuznetsova, Anna Kussmaul, Inna Nosikova, and Tatyana Shiguyeva—will conduct about 30 experiments while in fake space. They have been in their spacecraft since 11 a.m. Moscow time on Wednesday. The Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) is monitoring them along the way.

"We believe women might not only be no worse than men at performing certain tasks in space, but actually better,” said Sergei Ponomarev, the scientific director of Moon-2015. IBMP director Igor Ushakov had his own well wishes for the experiment crew: "I'd like to wish you a lack of conflicts, even though they say that in one kitchen, two housewives find it hard to live together."

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to edit@atlasobscura.com. 

Cool costumes, babies. (Photo: Juhan Sonin/Flickr)

Though Halloween comes every year, coolness is forever in flux. This raises the question: how do you succeed at Halloween while also maintaining your suavity? We asked the experts—the students of William Alexander Middle School in Park Slope, Brooklyn—to weigh in.

According to them, there are three stages of Halloween (and childhood). Here is the breakdown.

Stage One: Costumes are the Coolest (infancy to age nine or 10)

Stage One lasts from whenever your parents first start dressing you up as a taco or the Dalai Lama until around fourth or fifth grade. You (your parents) start planning your costume far in advance, and showcasing it on Halloween is probably your (their) proudest moment of the year. Does everyone else realize how unbelievably awesome you look? In Stage One, trick-or-treating isn’t for candy, it’s for compliments, and when they aren’t handed out in abundance, no amount of candy can compensate.

Stage Two: Candy is the Coolest (age nine to 12 or 13)

This stage takes off when inter-child competition shifts from compliments on costumes to quantities of candy. For kids in Brooklyn, Stage Two also entails trick-or-treating with friends rather than parents, which means that your costume is no longer directly correlated with your parents’ sense of self worth. Costumes are merely a gateway for acquiring candy, and in copious amounts; the holding capacity of your candy bag is a higher priority than the quality your costume (shopping bag, pillowcase, or for the real Halloween champions, garbage bags). “It’s kind of like, if you have the most candy, you’re the coolest kid in school,” says Natalia, in seventh grade. Apparently some kids even post their loot on Instagram. 

These rookies don't look like they know what they're doing: Stage One. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

To succeed at Stage Two, you need to have a good sense of the timing and geography of your Halloween-celebrating region. In some neighborhoods, trick-or-treating starts earlier than in others. Milan (seventh grade) once collected candy from 3 to 9 p.m., taking breaks at friends’ houses along the way. Emma says that you have to wait until nighttime, when all the little kids are gone, because otherwise “all the creepy parents are like, ‘Get away from my child!’” The night lasts until whenever the candy runs out and “people are like, ‘Why is everyone still up? Go to bed!’” or as otherwise explained, “all of the old people are like, “Noooo!” Everyone stays up until midnight regardless, says Ethan, since they’ve been eating so much candy.

According to these Brooklyn-based experts, big houses and brownstones are the optimal destinations, more generally known as “the streets with all the rich people.” Also, apartment buildings are great, because you collect maximal candy while covering minimal ground. An understanding of optimal trick-or-treating routes is something that develops with time and a setback to kids who frequently move neighborhoods. Over the years, one learns which houses leave bowls of candy unattended, which hand out “like, full-size Snickers and Hershey’s” (check out Red Hook, apparently), and how to prioritize the dwellings of those you know, for a personal candy network is key. You can even change costumes partway through the night and then retrace your route, unrecognized, thus refilling at the best stops.

Other tricks? If necessary, push people off the steps, says Tati (eighth grade). Also, when someone holds out a bowl and says “Take one,” obviously grab a whole handful.

Sour Patch Kids: Worth their weight in gold. (Photo: Daniel Rothamel/Flickr)

The experts at William Alexander hotly dispute the top-valued confections. Chocolate tends to trump fruit flavors, but Sour Patch and Swedish Fish also emerge as the ultimate treasures. Snickers, Twix, Kit Kat, and Skittles are all generally sought after, while Tootsie Rolls, Almond Joys, unwrapped Skittles, and things with raisins are not. Even worse? “There’s a place on Eighth Avenue that gives out Brussels sprouts! I’m like, uhm—no,” says Tati. There are also the classic pencils and toothbrushes (“so you can brush your teeth after you get the cavities?”) Brussels sprouts make Milan remember something else: “I have a neighbor that gives out—what’s that white broccoli?” he asks. “Oh, yea, cauliflower.”

Not all candy is collected for consumption—much of it is meant as leverage for other things, such as better candy or personal favors. “It’s kind of like dealing drugs,” says Jill (seventh grade). There is a short window for trading; all of it takes place within two, maybe three days of Halloween, often on Halloween night itself. Experienced traders lay out all their valuables, organize them into categories, and then strike deals with siblings or friends. 

Gathering data on the candy bounty for possible trading purposes. (Photo: Nina Hale/flickr)

Stage Three: Chilling is the Coolest (age 13 to age 15-16) 

“There’s like a certain age where you decide, like, you think you’re old enough, and you think you’re so mature,” says Jonathan (eighth grade). That is Stage Three. It’s a middle point between trick-or-treating and your first Halloween party, a high school rite of passage, a thing of rumor and lore (think: Mean Girls).

By this point, Halloween is pretty much an excuse for staying out late with your friends. “Now that we’re older, if we really want a certain kind of candy, we can just buy it ourself,” points out Natalia. Plus, you get annoyed at your parents for hoarding your candy, or hijacking it to curry favor at their office, or, perhaps worse, for dictating your trick-or-treating tactics. “If there’s something that’s like, ‘Pick one,’ I’m supposed to get the Reese’s for my dad,” says Dylan (seventh grade).

The news that no-one wants to see. (Photo: Michael Ocampo/Flickr)

Stage Three is also when being healthy (or for many, simply being skinny) starts to matter. “Candy makes you fat,” says Morgan, who pokes his head in just to drop that piece of knowledge. It’s also when 12-year-olds become teenagers and hooliganism becomes cool. “Sometimes I throw nasty candy at cars,” says Jill. The kids at the rival high school threw condoms, eggs, and shaving cream all over their turf last Halloween. This spurs the experts to discuss the viability of toilet-papering houses. “You can’t really do TP in Brooklyn—you can’t throw it high enough and get it over the brownstones,” says Jonah (eighth grade). “That’s kind of unfortunate, that we have to go so far away for normal houses,” says Liza (eighth grade).

But other pranks are still fair game. Milan shares his secret tricks: chocolate-covered garlic and hot sauce-infused Reese’s cups. The best food prank, apparently, is a mayonnaise ice-cream sandwich.

There you have it—the middle schooler’s inside guide to Halloween and life.

This undead CGI skeleton warrior, made with a program called DAZ studio, is not very scary. (Image: Carioca/WikiCommons)

Maybe it's happened to you: you're minding your own business, clicking around the Internet, when suddenly your screen is invaded by a nightmarish scene. A set of human bones, unclothed by flesh and often rendered disturbingly in some sort of outmoded CGI program, waves a sword, or dances, or pumps iron. One, sitting back in a chair with a watermelon slice stuffed in its gaping mouth; sports a hideous epitaph: "summer 'til I die <3"

It's a nightmare made reality—skeletons are cool on Tumblr (or at least they were last year). But reanimated remains have danced through our books, rituals and paintings for thousands of years. Their particular penchant for horror and humor has helped us mortals get through some of the toughest times in history, from the Black Plague to World War II.

People have brought bones into their lives since at least 7000 B.C.E., when Neolithic humans painted their dead relatives' skulls, stuffed the eye sockets with cowrie shells, and displayed them in their homes as art. In Mexico, Day of the Dead, that well-known skeletal extravaganza, has been celebrated for about 3,000 years. Aztec temples often featured thousands of enemy skulls neatly arranged on racks called Tzompantli, themselves sometimes made of more skulls, and Aztec nobility wore skull necklaces and hung skulls in trees. 

Catrina, a high-society skeleton popularized by early 20th century political cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada. (Photo: Tomas Castelazo/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

In Western literature, the walkin’, talkin’ skeleton can be traced back to Ezekiel 37 in the Old Testament, in which the titular prophet has a spooky encounter in the Valley of Dry Bones. In this chapter, the Lord brings Ezekiel to a valley littered with “a great many bones… bones that were very dry,” and orders him to bring them to life via a specific prophecy. Ezekiel obeys, and as he speaks, “there was a noise, a rattling sound.” Soon, “the bones came together, bone to bone.” Skin and other humanizing features soon follow, but for a minute there, we have one of the earliest undead armies in the Western canon.

But it was medieval Europeans who took this bone-on-bone commitment to the next level. Starting in the mid-14th century, the Black Death killed about one-third of the continent’s population. So many people died in every town that, as one Italian survivor wrote, “all the citizens did very little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried,” stacking them in pits “just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese.”

Without modern biology, these suffering citizens didn’t know how to explain their miserable luck. Many people turned to religion, figuring some kind of mass atonement was the only way to be spared. Out of this came the massacre of Jews and other minorities, the rise of cults like the Flagellants—and a whole lot of skeleton art. Religious illustrators who had previously focused on heaven, angels, and other sunny rewards literally turned inward, depicting “a world that emerges from the depths of the earth and the interior of the body,” writes art historian Sardis Medrano-Cabral. Deathbed scenes, in which a sick person received a visit from a rather ominous decomposing skeleton, became common. Certain memorial designers even replaced their tomb-toppers, traditionally idealized carvings of human figures, with sculpted skeletons.

Hans Baldung Grien's "The Young Woman and Death," an example of a 16th century vanitas. (Image: Sardis Medrano Cabral/Museé d’Art Public Domain)

After the plague died down, this taste for macabre realism stuck around, injecting previously decadent art forms with a dose of bare humility. This was best exemplified by the popular vanitas, or “vanity,” a style of painting in which perfectly good fruit, playing cards and young maidens were painted alongside skeletons and skulls, lest viewers forget that all life is fleeting, even still life.

Some of today’s most famous boneheads came out of the plague years and their aftermath, including the grim reaper and the now-canonical skeletal version of the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse. But perhaps the most enduring trope was the “Dance of Death,” or “Danse Macabre,” a kind of very-last-hurrah in which a group of cheerful skeletons tango a diverse group of doomed and damned into Hell.

In the 16th century, German engraver Hans Holbein carved a series of woodcuts based on the Dance of Death. The resulting book was so popular, eleven editions were published before 1562. This page depicts a skeleton coming to take away a merchant. (Image: McLeod/WikiCommons Public Domain)

“There are indications that first the dance macabre was performed, then poetized, then finally painted,” Medrano-Cabral writes. By the time these paintings became commonplace in the mid-15th century, the skeletons had developed a taste for irony, and were often captioned with somewhat humorous dialogue. In one early Dance of Dead textbook, from 1460, a skeleton tells the emperor: “Emperor, your sword won't help you out/Sceptre and crown are worthless here/I've taken you by the hand/For you must come to my dance.”

Less amusing, but similarly crowded, was the “Triumph of Death” archetype—best exemplified by Peter Bruegel the Older’s painting of that name, in which an army of animate skeletons overruns a once-pastoral village and murders everyone in a variety of ways that would make even Wes Craven queasy. 

"Alas, poor Yorick, and poor me"= this skeleton from a popular 16th century anatomy textbook. (Image: Andreae Vesalii Bruxellensis/WikiCommons Public Domain)

Starting in the mid-16th century, the plague now a generations-back memory, death was less of a sentence and more of a cycle again. The human skeleton became an important scientific tool“while retaining long-held connotations,” writes science historian Anita Guerrini. Anatomists worked closely with artists to produce careful engravings of skeletons and skinless “muscle men,” often dancing, holding hands, or engaging in suspiciously mortal contemplation. This positioning added pathos and moral messages to the drawings, and allowed the anatomist and the artist to each practice their skills. By the 18th century, it had become faddish to have a real live skeleton in your office or laboratory, which led to a thriving corpse-stealing, bone-fusing industry (underground, of course).

Eventually, different dark creatures got their eras in the spotlight (vampires in the 18th century; ghosts in the 19th; etc.). The skeleton age didn’t come around again until World War II, when the Allies made a series of propaganda posters that prominently featured skull-headed Hitler, skull-eating Hitler, and Hitler wearing a necklace made of small, decorative skulls. At one point in the mid-1940s, for a mission called "Operation Cornflakes," the U.S. Office of Strategic Services airdropped false propaganda mail in Axis countries, including stamps showing "death's head" versions of the Führer. In another time of uncertainty and death, these stark and unsubtle images were used to rattle the populace into action. 

A postage stamp from Operation Cornflakes. (Image: US Government/WikiCommons Public Domain)

In the past decade or so, we’ve had our own parade of iconic skeletons—Skeletor, certain undead pirates, and a jewel-encrusted platinum skull, to name a few. But today, the skeleton’s grotesque-but-amusing legacy is best unearthed in the weirder crypts of the Internet, particularly on Tumblr, where a bonafide Skeleton War has been raging for a couple of years, aka an online eternity.

The Internet had already loved skeletons for a while, thanks to a 4Chan meme called “2Spooky,” which mostly involved trolling people with videos featuring a 1996 novelty song called “Spooky, Scary Skeletons.” “Spooky, scary skeletons are silly all the same,” the deep-voiced singer intones over a tinny organ. “They'll smile and scrabble slowly by/and drive you so insane!” So which is it? Insanity? Silliness? “It’s semi-serious,” the baritone concludes, reaching into a higher register and sweeping us back into the Danse Macabre.

By the time famed "Weird Twitter" user @dril invented the Skeleton War in 2013, Tumblr was primed to enlist. Soon, there was an ever-expanding mythos, fueled by users eager to participate. When it joined up with another meme—that of the “fuckboy,” a specifically unlikeable jerky dude—it was unstoppable. As the Daily Dot explained last Halloween, it drew on the same culturally repentant and democratic impulses that drove the Black Plague skeleton fervor:

"The overwhelming popularity of the Skeleton War can be broken down into three factors. First of all, pretty much everyone on Tumblr is already in agreement that skeletons are awesome. Second, it’s entertaining to tell ridiculous stories about destroying fuckboys using a skeleton army. And third, the prevalence of plastic Halloween skeletons means that you can easily create your very own Skeleton War photo."

Contemporary Halloween memes tend to walk a fine line between dumb and sinister (2013’s model, which valorized spelling mistakes, is another example). Illustrations from the modern-day skeleton pantheon hit your funny bone and then kind of creep gently up your spine, rather than terrifying outright. Rather than tempering their horror with humor, as in the plague years, it's their insistence that they are scary that becomes funny. 

Some exemplary contemporary skeleton art. (Image: Courtesy Evan Trusewicz/Scary HQ)

Evan Trusewicz, the proud creator of many goofy, gory skeleton-scapes, has spent the past several years moonlighting as the artist for pioneering Facebook page Scary HQ, the self-proclaimed "NUMBER ONE PROVIDER OF SCARY ON THE INTERNET.” Scary HQ was never involved in the Skeleton War—Evan says he might be "a little bit too old" for Tumblr—but Evan has found inspiration in the campy horror movies of his childhood, particularly a 1997 film called Wishmaster. "In the opening scene, this one skeleton becomes conscious and escapes from this guy’s body, and, you know, it’s very very bad,” he says. “It’s not scary.” This, of course, is what makes it so good.

Trusewicz and site creator/writer Jesse go for the same faux-seriousness in their website: whenever anyone expresses amusement at Scary HQ, “we’re quick to shoot them down and make sure that they know that it’s the most terrifying thing that they’ve ever seen,”  he explains. He walks a similar line while making his images, which he constructs on a program called Poser 9. Because the software is old, he had to install it on an old laptop, without any of the amenities he uses in his day job as a photo retoucher. “I just do it on my bed and use a tracking pad, which is really arduous,” he says. “I’m torturing myself while creating these terrifying images.”

Scary HQ considers skeletons “the ultimate monster,” and not just because they are easy to direct with CGI posing software. “Personally I think it’s kind of hilarious because they’re just bones,” Trusewicz says. “And really, what can bones do to you?”

Auschwitz. (Photo: Ambroise Tezenas)

This article originally appeared on Motherboard.

In 2012, as New Orleans was still recovering from the tumult of Hurricane Katrina, residents and politicians did something surprising in a city that was eager to draw visitors again: they began fighting tour bus operators with protests and parking tickets.

On an hourly basis, tour buses were bringing gawking out-of-towners into the Lower Ninth Ward, where the hurricane had inflicted its worst destruction. Locals were tired of their suffering being the subject of tour-goers’ leisure activities, but the tourists were curious about the hurricane’s effects and enticed by a fully guided experience.

Today, ten years after the hurricane destroyed large swaths of the city and displaced millions of residents, local leaders have sought to commemorate the disaster with official events and memorials. And despite local resistance, hurricane bus tours still exist: the “Hurricane Katrina Tour – America’s Greatest Catastrophe” bus tour has 110 reviews on TripAdvisor. Nearly half of the reviews have “Excellent” ratings.

These kinds of tours of places linked to death, disaster, atrocity, or ongoing socio-political conflict have not only rankled locals: they have begun to earn the attention of academics, who have grouped them underneath the label of “dark tourism.” While the scope of the dark tourism industry is difficult to quantify—many of these sites don’t formally offer commercial tours, gift shops, or other goods and services—researchers agree that the number of dark tourists is rising globally, alongside tourism generally: Last year, according to the World Tourism Organization, slightly over 1.1 billion tourists traveled internationally, 51 million more than a year earlier.

New Orleans. (Photo: Ambroise Tezenas)

It’s not just a New Orleans phenomenon. Tourists regularly visit places that have experienced suffering and loss. Instagram documents visitors’ tours of Auschwitz, selfie sticks in hand. Israeli tourists gather at a viewpoint in Golan Heights to watch Syrian rebels and loyalists fight through a pair of binoculars. Last month, a travel journalist in Tokyo launched Dark Tourism, a quarterly magazine whose first issue includes a story about a leprosy sanatorium on a remote section of Japan’s Honshu island, as well as thought pieces on whether the Fukushima nuclear plant should become a tourist center and how to truly define dark tourism.

The question of why people tour these locales has brought together sociologists, geographers and others, who often begin their research with a central focus: where is the line that separates commemoration, celebration, and voyeurism?

“This is where critical approaches and critical social theories can give more insight into why people travel to these places and why locals want to entice people to these places,” says Dorina Buda, an assistant professor of cultural geography at the University of Groningen, and author of the book Affective Tourism: Dark Routes in Conflict. “What’s probably even more important than the motivation part are the emotions that people feel in these places.”

Conventional wisdom says wherever there is political or social unrest, tourism doesn’t exist. But the thoughtful study of these regions reveals that tourism is happening there. In the case of the West Bank, a focal point of Buda’s current research, dark tourism helps local tourists recognize and reflect upon their plight, she says. Foreigners are drawn to the area for its religious significance. Yet two tourism researchers, Gregory Ashworth and Rudi Hartmann, argue that any visit to a site that has experienced tragedy and atrocity is motivated by curiosity, empathy, and horror.

In a 2011 paper titled “The Role of Horror and Dread in the Sacred Experience,” two Australian researchers use the sociologist Robert Hertz’s theories on death to explain the motivation and polarizing emotions tourists feel when traveling to dark places. Under Hertz’s sociological framework, a person begins to reconcile a paradox when he or she confronts death; death signals both an enduring loss and a finite transition. Dark tourism not only becomes a vehicle for paying respect but also a means for overcoming negative feelings about the dark place. The dark voyage is akin to an emotional negotiation process.

Xuankou, Sichuan, China. (Photo: Ambroise Tezenas)

The term “dark tourism” emerged in 1996 when the Journal of Heritage Studies published work by two hospitality management professors, John Lennon and Malcolm Foley. In their book Dark Tourism (2000), Lennon and Foley trace the practice back to tourism related to the sinking of the Titanic: The 1958 and 1997 Titanic movies inspired lay interest in retrieving artifacts from the ship and attending related exhibitions.

Another 1996 paper by the tourism researcher Anthony Seaton sparked academic interest in what he called thanatourism, the practice of traveling to any place where death has occurred, regardless of whether the deaths occurred in living memory. Still other terms are used to describe the nuances of dark tourism: horror, terror, ghost, cemetery, grief, prison, holocaust, ruin battlefield and genocide tourism.

Hurricane Katrina is just one of a number of tragedies being commemorated this year. In September, the $26 million Flight 93 National Memorial museum opened in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where thousands of visitors have come to visit the crash site since 2001. And this year marks 70 years since the end of World War II. London walking tour companies are commemorating the 75th anniversary of the German Blitzkrieg, also in September, while local bars will throw their annual Blitz Party.

“Commemorations are something that we’re supposed to do as a society,” says Buda. “Cemeteries, monuments, museums, places of battles, places where a disaster happened, are always imbued with an aura of patriotic or historic significance. And these national narratives are reinterpreted through a certain lens of perpetual movement, invading history, travel and tourism.” Tourism, she says, is a way of recreating memories and “re-managing” history.

Not everyone experiences dark tourism the same way. Tourists may feel patriotism or fascination with a disaster site, while friends and families of victims who are still processing their trauma come to these sites to mourn and to confront other difficult emotions.

“I didn’t find peace when I first came, back in 2001,” said Gordon W. Felt, president of the Families of Flight 93 in a New York Times interview. “Now, when I come back to the memorial, I’m much more at peace. Not to say that the emotions aren’t raw. Not to say that I still don’t harbor anger.”

The study of tourism in general is relatively young: its academic roots can be traced to 1980s, when a pair of University of Calgary tourism researchers, Jafar Jafari and Brent Ritchie, laid down a framework for tourism education. In the United States, there are schools of tourism and hospitality that train students in tourism marketing and management (The World Travel & Tourism Council estimates that the global industry contributes $7.6 trillion in revenues to global GDP every year, and is growing at over 3 percent, faster than the world economy.) But tourism is still not a serious academic endeavor at top research institutions, leaving its darker sides largely unexplored.

“Because what is tourism? You’re going from point A to point B, and you’re sipping margaritas on the beach,” Buda said.

Kigali, Rwanda. (Photo: Ambroise Tezenas)

She and other researchers aim to upturn this thinking. A project at the University of Central Lancashire called the Dark Tourism Institute, of which Buda is not a member, encourages dark scholars to design new research approaches that could ultimately enhance traditional academic disciplines, rather than reuse the critical thinking tools of established social science areas. Two professors of tourism, Philip Stone and Richard Sharpley, started it in 2012 as a place for gathering research partners and producing original research.

This year, a group of American and Canadian researchers proposed a novel dark tourism model: Dystopian Dark Tourism, or DDT for short. The DDT theoretical model analyzes dark tourism in relation to the concept of dystopia, the portrayal of death in the culture, and the visitor’s insecurity and other emotions. A visitor’s sadistic impulses may influence her decision to travel to a dark place, for instance, and traveling in groups makes her feel more secure in the face of terror or death. “This insecurity stems from the prospect of a dystopian world-utopianism gone awry,” the researchers write.

Some of the literature on dark tourism argues that the rise of film, television, and printed media’s influence within the last century is the major driver of individuals’ preoccupation with death and violence. Consequently, the researchers suggest that as people become more insecure about death and society’s relationship to violence, they become more interested in utopian and dystopian phenomena on a global scale. Seeing the physical artifacts of destruction and suffering allows tourists “to confront insecurity about death and society.”

Researchers agree that making dark sites entertaining crosses an ethical line and can be insensitive to those who have suffered there, as evidenced by the reaction of residents in the Lower Ninth Ward. But if the tourism stays within educational limits, and any resulting financial transaction directly benefits the site, then dark tourism can be a positive force in the lucrative tourism industry. Some tour bus operators have claimed to donate a portion of their revenues to redeveloping New Orleans. Even Katrina’s official commemoration events included “Resilience Tours” by land, air, or water, a sure sign that city officials value tourism of its most vulnerable areas as a bread-and-butter industry. But evidence proving the economic impact of dark tourism is not readily available—a problem that researchers like Stone and Sharpley aim to address.

The appeal of dark tourism however has led at least one researcher to begin capitalizing on it: Philip Stone of the Dark Tourism Institute charges the media a GBP 65 ($100) fee for personal interviews. Tourism, no matter how well embraced by academics—and no matter how dark—will always be a commercial institution.

All in Your Head is a series that takes a scientific look at all things spooky and scary. Follow along at Motherboard.

(Photos: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg/Wikipedia)

Fierce German mercenary knight Götz von Berlichingen loved a good feud. As a soldier for hire in the early 1500s, he and his rogue crew of rabble-rousers fought on behalf of whichever Bavarian dukes and barons had the biggest beefs and the fattest wallets.

But all this battling came at a personal cost. In 1504, while fighting in the siege of the southeast German town of Landshut in the name of Albert IV, the Duke of Bavaria, the 23-year-old Berlichingen was hit by an enemy cannonball. Accounts vary over what happened next, but either way, it was dramatic—some say the ball hit Berlichingen’s sword, inadvertently causing him to cut off his own right arm. Others say it was the cannonball itself that robbed Berlichingen of his rapier-wielding appendage.

Regardless of the details, a hand was gone, and the knight had to find a new way to fight. The adjustment didn't take long. Shortly after his unfortunate encounter with the cannonball, Berlichingen began sporting a clinking, clanking right hand made of iron.

Berlichingen's first iron hand, made for him by an unknown artist shortly after the 1504 battle. (Photo: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg/Wikipedia)

The first hand was a basic affair. Two hinges at the top of the palm allowed the four hook-like fingers to be brought inward for sword-holding purposes, but that was the extent of its motion. There was some attention paid to aesthetic detail, though, including sculpted fingernails and wrinkles at the knuckles.

Still, Berlichingen did not allow his newfound lack of manual dexterity to slow him down. He continued to lead his band of mercenaries in battle. His career, wrote Dr. Sharon Romm in an article on false arms in Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery, "consisted of fighting, gambling, and money lending," for which he "gained a reputation as a Robin Hood who protected the peasants against their oppressors." Kidnapping nobles for ransom and attacking merchants for their wares was just part of the gig.

Berlichingen, left, in his standard "no time for your nonsense" mode. (Image: Archiv Burg Hornberg/Wikipedia)

After a few years of fighting with a serviceable yet inflexible false hand, Berlichingen upgraded to a superior model. His second iron hand, which extended to the end of his forearm and was secured with a leather strap, was “a clumsy structure, but an ingenious one,” according to the American Journal of Surgery. 

In contrast to the first hand, it was equipped with joints at each of the knuckles, allowing for a tighter grip. Berlichingen could use his left hand to maneuver the fingers of his right one, so they could hold a sword, quill, or the reins of his war horse. Spring-loaded mechanisms inside the hand locked the fingers into place, in a manner similar to the ratchet-and-pawl system used in handcuffs.

A 19th-century engraving shows the inner workings of the second iron hand. (Image: Christian von Mechel/Wikipedia) 

This second hand, a rare example of a 16th-century prosthetic limb, is still kept at a castle museum in Berlichingen's native Jagsthausen, a small German town of about 1,600 people. As a show of local pride in the defiant knight, the town's coat of arms also features the iron appendage.

"Götz of the Iron Hand," as he became known, kept fighting until the age of 64, participating in campaigns against the Ottoman Empire and in the 1544 Imperial invasion of France. He eventually retired from professional antagonism and penned an autobiography, which he left in manuscript form when he died in 1562, aged 82. Published in 1731, the autobiography inspired one Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in 1773 wrote Götz von Berlichingen, a dramatic play based on Berlichingen's life.

“His protection of the Peasantry around him, and the unbounded popularity which he enjoyed among them, as well as his frequent acts of violence, had made him particularly obnoxious to the princes and nobles,” reads the preface of an 1837 English translation of Götz von Berlichingen. The play uses much poetic license and transforms Berlichingen into a tragic figure who dies young. The knight is depicted as a ferocious yet sensitive soul. Explaining to a friar why he must greet people by offering his left hand to shake, he says: “My right, although useful in war, is insensitive to the touch of love; it is disguised by a glove; you see, it is made of iron.”

The plaque in Weisenheim am Sand. (Photo: Immanuel Giel/Wikipedia)

The most memorable line in the play, however, comes from an apparent real-life response offered by Berlichingen when he was under siege at Jagsthausen Castle. Ordered to surrender, the knight responds with "Er aber, sag's ihm, er kann mich im Arsche lecken," or, roughly, "Tell him he can kiss my ass." This then-uncommon phrase is now known among Germans as the Swabian Salute.

A plaque in the country's southwestern municipality of Weisenheim am Sand displays his immortal words beneath a relief portrait of Berlichingen holding his iron hand to his heart and contemplating his next sponsored squabble.

(Photo: Popel Arseniy/shutterstock.com)

The following is an account of events experienced first-hand.

The rendezvous was arranged for a motel parking lot just off the I-44 freeway in Oklahoma. (“Please beware of this one,” warned a Google review of the motel. “Your life is not safe here.”) A helicopter cruised overhead. Outside, the temperature was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. A man and a woman in a black Jeep Grand Cherokee rolled under an awning.

Ten minutes to go before the drop-off. A man made a beeline toward them, walking fast and with purpose, clutching a Little Caesar’s Pizza pie. He rapped on the glass. “You. Go. Move along. You can’t stay here. This is my hotel.”

The woman in the Jeep stretched against her belt and glared at him: “This is a matter of life and death,” she said. 

“Okay, fine,” he said. “Go in the parking lot. You can stay five minutes.”

Five minutes was just long enough to make the transfer. Soon, a beige SUV pulled up and popped up the cargo bay door: inside, two caged cats were blinking in the September sun: a spry, mostly black tuxedo cat with a white ruff named Tux and a timid orange tabby tom named Luther. The driver and the woman carefully carried the cats from one car to another, brushed the baby tumbleweeds from their grill, waved goodbye, and sent a text to the trip ambassador confirming the transfer.

With that, another leg of Tux and Luther’s journey on Underground Railroad Rescued Kitty Network had begun.

Kitty road tripper. (Photo: Michael Cornelius/flickr)

URRKN is an elegant technological solution to a logistical problem that has plagued animal shelters since their inception: people who want to adopt a cat don’t necessarily live in the same community as the shelter. 

Tux was found shivering behind a housing complex in Holland, Ohio. Given how friendly he was, and the fact that didn’t he didn’t have an ID microchip, didn’t belong to the local crowd of feral cats, and no one came forth to claim him, his rescuers declared him abandoned. The cage-free Maumee Valley Save-a-Pet shelter in Toledo, Ohio took him in, but Tux tested positive for FIV (a feline autoimmune virus similar to HIV), which meant they couldn’t risk keeping him for long or else they might infect the others. They couldn’t let him go either; with FIV in his system, Tux was unlikely to survive another harsh Ohio winter by himself.

Luther’s story was equally tragic. Humane Ohio found him sunning himself in senior housing facility near Lutheran Village. He had a nasty cold and was drooling from an inflamed gum. They trapped him and cleaned him and took him in, but couldn’t keep him. Best Friends Animal Society in Kanab, Utah had room for both critters, but there was a problem: they were 2,275 miles away. So they contacted the Underground Railroad Rescued Kitty Network.

The URRKN provides the essential service of transport as well as matching human with cat, since even if a shelter does find someone willing to adopt from someplace far from home, feline transport over long distances takes time most working adults don’t have. Plus, as anyone who has ever had to capture and cram a terrified uncooperative creature in a carrier 10 minutes before checkout time knows, long-distance travel is taxing on cats and their companions.

Founder and Fairy Cat Godmother Tina LaBlanc knows this all too well. She created the network in 2011 after an airline nearly lost her cat. It brought back horrific memories of an earlier incident.

“Fifteen years earlier an airline lost one of our cats,” she says. “When the unthinkable happened we were offered $7 a pound!” Somebody had to do something about animal transport, she said, “and I realized I was that ‘somebody’.”

In their first year, 2011, the network moved 64 cats, including three during the hectic Christmas season. They’ve since grown considerably—their rescue stories are like catnip to cat lovers—and now have 24,000 members, almost all of whom learned about the organization through word of mouth and members sharing their enthusiasm and pictures of winsome rescues on Facebook. That number includes about 3,000 volunteer drivers who’ve given insurance verification and agreed to follow URRKN’s code of conduct, designed to keep cats and their conductors safe and comfortable during the trip.

The group’s mandate is to “transport rescued kitties to FOREVER HOMES.” (A forever home is a cat’s adoptive family). Some transports, like Tux and Luther’s, take place between shelters, but often the cat is traveling directly to his or her adoptive family. URRKN will even reunite owners with missing pets.There’s a form on their Facebook page to fill out if you ever need to transport a cat. It’s free to use, but money is scarce and it’s run entirely by volunteers, so not every request can be accommodated.

(Photo: Ivan1981Roo/shutterstock.com)

Using Google Maps, a spreadsheet and their community which has members all over the country, URRKN divided Tux and Luther’s trip into two segments: the first went from Toledo, Ohio to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and then, after a week-long stay with a trusted volunteer, the cats traveled to Kanab, Utah. Each segment was broken up into a series of individual legs, each approximately an hour and a half long. The legs were then offered to 3,000 volunteer drivers and hosts (who board cats during their voyage for stays ranging from overnight to a couple of weeks).

It’s like a relay race: Tux and Luther are the batons and the drivers are the runners. During the journey the drivers keep in touch with the organization’s event ambassadors with apps and by texting updates.

The organization manages every detail of the transfer, down to the custom-designed cat crates that held Tux and Luther. Luther was scared and coiled in a tight amber ball in his cage, but otherwise the two rescues seemed no worse for having traveled nearly a thousand miles. A weeklong stay in Oklahoma City gave them time to stretch and rehydrate before their journey to Utah.

Occasionally URRKN will post a video of a cats’ arrival. In other cases, the underground railroad drivers need to make do with imagining the moment at the end of a journey that involved multiple volunteers and thousands of miles. After bidding farewell to their feline roadtrippers, Tux and Luther's drivers took a moment to envision their charges settling into their new home before getting back online and looking for another cat to save.

Famous suffragette Edith Garrud demonstrates a jujitsu move on a policeman. (Photo: Tony Wolf/Public Domain)

Beneath the folds of their Victorian dresses, the jujutsuffragettes concealed wooden clubs—preparation for hand-to-hand combat with the London police.

The Indian clubs, shaped like bowling pins, were used in exercise classes of the era, flaunted in leg lunges, or alternatively, brandished against cops. When policemen heard that radical suffragettes were arming themselves, they began worrying about pistols and firearms; what they didn’t expect was to be met with an eclectic form of the Japanese martial art of jujutsu (also spelled jiujitsu or jujitsu). The women pulled out their clubs, the police pulled out their truncheons, and the sparring began.

This is a story of female armed resistance that has been little told until recently, when a studio film and a new graphic novel trilogy aim to show the harder side of British feminism.

This contingent of British women fighting—very physically—for votes was officially named the Bodyguard, but they soon earned other monickers through local papers and word-of-mouth like the Amazons and the jujutsuffragettes. They were an underground unit of the Women’s Social and Political Union, trained and organized in response to England’s Cat and Mouse Act, which was an effort to handle the hunger strikes of imprisoned suffragettes in an ethically palatable manner, officially known as the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act of 1913. The Act was the culmination of an intense propaganda war between feminists, who viewed force feeding as torture, and the government, whose response was to release protesters from jail long enough for them to recover their health before tracking them back down to rearrest and re-imprison them on the original charge. 

The Suffrajistus are not here to mess around. (Image: Joao Vieira/Jet City Comics)

And that’s where the Bodyguard stepped in—in between their sisters-in-arms and members of law enforcement, their mission to keep these prison breaks as long as possible. The women of the Bodyguard were extremely fit, willing to risk their health, safety and freedom, and almost always single, since it was considered unfair for mothers to be thrown in jail. They came from the ranks of the most radical suffragettes and studied jujutsu in a network of secret locations, using codenames and whatever subterfuge necessary to keep their activity private from prying eyes.

Jujutsu, a centuries-old form of armed combat, roughly translates to the “art of yielding.” First introduced in Britain in 1898, jujutsu was considered suitable for women, even elegant and feminine. Jujutsu, unlike English wrestling, is not about overpowering someone with force; instead, you skillfully yield to your opponent’s movements and use their weight and strength in your favor. Jujutsu became a kind of metaphor for the women’s suffrage struggle, says Tony Wolf, one of the world’s top experts on archaic martial arts. Since the radical movement was small in numbers, jujutsuffragettes had to rely on skill and trickery to overpower the government.

How has a secret army of radical suffragettes defending their cause against the Man with mixed martial arts remained so unknown until now? Wolf thinks that Suffrajitsu, like many other movements of the time, was forgotten amidst the cultural chaos brought about by the First World War. The 2015 film Suffragette is the first time this movement has been highlighted in popular media, and for the past several years, Wolf and a handful of others have been doing serious research to bring this band of bodyguards back into the popular consciousness.

Who's gonna take this chick on? (Image: Tony Wolf/Public Domain)

Suffrajitsu, released earlier this year, is a graphic novel trilogy set in 1913 and a collaboration between Tony Wolf and illustrator Joao Vieira. It’s the story of the Amazons’ efforts to protect their leaders against arrest and assault, the story of women living in an extremely patriarchal society at the height of what was almost a civil war in England. The first chapter of the trilogy is closely based on real events, while the subsequent chapters diverge into an alternate-history action-adventure story. One of the biggest challenges, says Wolf, was picking and choosing appropriate characters from real life who could have plausibly been involved in the 1913 women’s rights movement and have joined the Amazon team. All but two of the characters are fictional representations of historically real women, who he researched through reading extensive first-person diaries and accounts. Wolf sees Suffrajitsu as a compelling form of “edutainment,” and hopes especially that it will get teenage girls interested in history, martial arts and defense training. 

Wolf, a native of New Zealand, grew up training in martial arts, gymnastics and fencing, and when he started looking for a career, he says he was “basically qualified to be a professional assassin.” Instead, he segued into the entertainment industry, becoming a fight choreographer for theater, film and television. Throughout this time, he was always interested in the unusual history of martial arts, especially a form known as bartitsu that incorporates jujutsu, boxing, and cane fighting, popularized by the revival of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (where it was mislabeled “baritsu”).

Amazons secretly practice their martial arts in a scene from Suffrajitsu, the graphic novel. (Image: Joao Vieira/Jet City Comics)

A small, like-minded community began tracking down obscure newspaper and magazine articles on the subject, and Wolf volunteered to edit the first of two volumes of the Bartitsu Compendium, which led to his discovery of Suffrajitsu. Wolf has since co-directed and co-produced a documentary on bartitsu and written a biography, Edith Garrud: The Suffragette Who Knew Jujutsu. When science fiction writer Neal Stephenson asked him if he would write a graphic novel about the Bodyguard, Wolf jumped on the opportunity to get creative with a trove of themes and information he’d been involved with for so long.

Wolf describes himself as a “very staunchly feminist sort of guy,” and while writing Suffrajitsu, he approached the women as a group of professionals, political radicals committed to an ideological goal. “The fact that they were female was third or fourth in the list of priorities in terms of how I wanted to present them,” he explains. At the same time, he didn’t want it to be “women: good; men: bad.” There were many men who very assiduously supported the radical suffrage movement to the point that they earned their own nickname: suffragents. Suffragents supported these women while they engaged in very aggressive, though non-violent civil disobedience. “These women were very careful and also very lucky that no one was physically harmed in their protests—even the extreme stuff like bombing,” says Wolf. 

The Bodyguard takes on the police! (Image: Joao Vieira/Jet City Comics)

The need for self defense, then and now, is a reminder of continuing power imbalances, says Wolf. In the 1980s, he taught classes in women’s self defense. “A thing I learned from my students was how very vulnerable a lot of them felt,” he says. “I recognized that a lot of women feel threatened doing things that basically guys don’t need to worry about, such as walking down to the store to get some milk. I’d sort of known that intellectually, I guess, beforehand, but working with large number of women over several years really drove that point home.” Now, if he’s walking to the convenience store at night and there’s a woman approaching in the opposite direction, he’ll cross the road to avoid making her feel uncomfortable or threatened. 

This week in Chicago, Wolf is hosting an Obscura Society event to share the story of the Suffrajitsu. It is “a kind of Edwardian soirée,” he says, involving martial arts demonstrations and Q&A. The event will offer certain touches, with pictures of actual members of The Bodyguard in action, popular ragtime of the era, and subtle tributes to the purple, white and green that symbolized the radical suffragette movement.

When asked whether Suffrajitsu has a modern-day equivalent, Wolf is quick to name FEMEN, an Eastern European activist organization. “I’ve been waiting for someone to make this connection, actually,” says Wolf. “The parallels between this group and the suffragette Amazons is quite extraordinary.” FEMEN activists train similarly to the Amazons in 1913, learning self-defense techniques that make it difficult for security guards to easily remove them. They practice active resistance and tend to operate in conditions of secrecy. They’re most known for their topless protests, their basic thesis being that the only way for women’s issues to receive popular attention is for FEMEN women to go topless. Activists will wait for a large televised event to take place, and then stage a radical protest, jump over barriers, strip off their tops, and yell slogans—a reminder that the world still needs jujutsuffragettes.

His and Hers Candypants, in strawberry and watermelon flavor. (Photos: Amazon)

Eating and sex have a lot in common: they’re both necessary human activities that we’ve managed to find pleasure in. With both there’s a concern about contamination and purity; use of orifices; mixed metaphors around consumption like being “sex starved” and multiplicity of meanings of words like “eat” and “meat”. Freud found them to be twin drives. Modern researchers study their shared addictive qualities.

Yet, food and sex rarely literally meet, as the notion of integrating food into sex seems to touch upon some deep revulsion. The flavors of chocolate and bodily fluids just don’t mix. Chewing while in the throes of passion? No thanks.

Perhaps this is why the edible sex accessory industry has remained a mere novelty. This small pocket of the sex industry is responsible for a bevy of products like edible underwear, chocolate body paint, and flavored lube, products that are typically given as joke presents rather than serious sex accessories.

Edible sex accessories began in the heady days of the sexual revolution of the '60s. When they began, every sexual device was relegated to seedy sex stores, or billed as having more respectable uses (think "home massager" instead of "vibrator.")  Even the term “sex toy” is a coy dodge: “We displaced the awkwardness of using machines as sexual aids by turning these aids into novelty objects, or toys,” writes Hannah Smothers for Fusion. But a new crop of expertly engineered, elegantly designed vibrators and dildos is helping to elevate these products into something of a standard home appliance. Are edible sex products going in the same direction, or are they doomed to bachelorette party hell for eternity?

Early sexual lubricants were naturally flavored, because most of them were also foods. Olive oil and aloe were natural choices, and supposedly so was a slippery substance that comes from grating Chinese yam. But these were used as sexual necessities—aloe may taste nice, but the point was its function, not its flavor. It’s not hard to imagine that many people may have incorporated edibles into their lovemaking, but to mark the beginning of edible sex products as an industry, we go to 1969. (Nice.)

The first flavored sex product came out of a wild 1960s party, where Hal Hauser and Joe Bolstad were “getting crazy, and people were getting into Wesson oil,” according to Marla Lee, the President of Kama Sutra, the company they’d eventually found. The men, who were in the advertising business, “were talking about [the Wesson oil] later...and saying that it just doesn’t taste good. It’s slippery but, we can make it better.” Perhaps because they were advertisers, the product came with a lifestyle mission – and a name, Kama Sutra, inspired by the idea that they were bringing back the rituals and sensual experience of lovemaking. “The country was in a bit of despair at the time, and people were searching for something better in their lives,” says Lee. “So they started writing out this copy about this oil, that they had not even formulated yet.” As Hauser put it in a Los Angeles Times interview in 1986, "There was a need at the time for people to touch each other on all levels, this being the most obvious level approaching it.”

A Spencer's Gift Shop, home to novelty gifts for Bachelorette parties. (Photo: Ildar Sagdejev/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Out of that idea came the first edible-on-purpose product, the Oil of Love. It’s described as a “kissable, water-based foreplay oil,” the original flavor of which combined notes of cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla, and chocolate, and which features a warming sensation on the skin. The company quickly expanded with flavored “honey dust” and various massage oils, designed to “startle your sense of touch without offending your sense of taste,” according to a 1971 ad in Women’s Wear Daily.

That ad shows the precarious market position of products like Oil of Love. The early 70s were a changing time for sexual attitudes. The Joy of Sex, published in 1972, formalized an increasing openness in speaking about sexual enjoyment and preferences. Plus, the Kama Sutra name tapped into the Indian orientalism sweeping America. But as much as the sexual revolution marched on, it was a different story when it came to sexual retail. “They were very limited on where the product could be sold and who was willing to have this very racy product,” says Lee. Aside from ads filled with euphemisms and trade shows, Kama Sutra’s products had to be sold in sex shops, where many were still too squeamish to shop.

This squeamishness is part of what began to cement edible products as novelties. They just couldn’t hold shelf space in “respectable” stores, even next to scented lotions or lingerie, if their intent was obviously sexual pleasure. To get into Bloomingdale’s, the edible sex products had to be designed specifically as jokes.

Candypants, the original edible underwear, is a great example of this kind of joke product, and its history is full of technological ingenuity, bizarre court cases, and even spies. The concept was dreamed up in 1972 by Lee Brady and David Sanderson, a couple of artists living in Chicago, who created the undies as a piece of concept art. “My brother always used to say to me ‘oh eat my shorts,’ for ‘fuck off’ basically,” says Sanderson. “And we were sitting around one night, thinking we should come up with something as a joke. And we did.” They made a quick prototype and threw it up in the window of a friend’s shop as a “decorative topic of conversation,” but it ended up being sold to a student at the University of Indiana, who worked for the local paper that had AP syndication. She wrote about it, and through the wire service Candypants became a literal overnight sensation.

Different flavors of Kama Sutra's Oil of Love. (Photo: Courtesy Kama Sutra)

Brady and Sanderson prided themselves on producing a product that, were you to eat it, would actually be tasty. Their search for a suitable material that would hold its shape like fabric led them to a few different experimental labs, and eventually to an industrial baking company. “The company would make a bag out of [this material] and fill it with yeast and throw it in a vat with liquids,” says Brady. “It was biodegradable and edible, so it would dissolve in the vat.” It was also colorless and tasteless, which meant they could build flavor into it. It took them months to develop the first packaged product, but eventually they built up a factory of 40 employees, and expanded their line to include new flavors and the “Teacups” edible bra.

Unlike Oil of Love, the Candypants marketing strategy did not position this as a product that would bring couples closer together through sensuality. It was an exquisitely engineered gag. The original displays in stores like Bloomingdale’s and Montgomery Ward featured a poster of an old woman with bright red nail polish holding boxes of panties, while the flip side featured a young woman wearing Candypants products. “We were aware that we had two different audiences,” says Brady. Their goal was to make it “naughty and nice,” hinting at what could be done in the bedroom but keeping it light and funny. To stay respectable, they had to stay a novelty.

The success of Candypants proved that there was a market for such novelties, and competitors began to spring up, some which leeched off their supplier. “They saw money coming from somebody other than us, so they started short shipping our supplies,” says Brady. Desperate for a new material, the Candypants founders took a tip from their friend Tokyo Rose, aka Iva Toguri D'Aquino, who had been charged with treason after being suspected of aiding Japanese Axis forces during WWII. At the time, she ran a mercantile exchange in Chicago, and told Brady and Sanderson about a 400  year old factory in Japan that made rice paper for candy wrappings and as a vehicle for medication (in place of the gel caps found commonly in the West). The pair traveled to Japan and struck a deal with the factory—which made, according to them, a superior product. (While they were at it, they also developed “Mighty Mouth,” a dissolving breath strip. It never caught on, but when Listerine breath strips hit the market, they had their suspicions about the inspiration.)

Coupons for Wesson Oil, an early form of lubricant. (Photo: frankieleon (cropped)/flickr)

Candypants also became a cultural touchpoint for sexual liberation, used as proof that as a society we were ready to stop hiding our sexual proclivities. They were even used as evidence in a number of free speech lawsuits. “When cable first started there was this show in New York called Midnight Blue, which at one point featured a black girl taking a bite out of a pair that a white guy was wearing,” explains Sanderson. “And they banned the show and tried to close it down, and it went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and we were Exhibit A for First Amendment rights for freedom of speech. And we won.”

After nearly 10 years, Brady and Sanderson wanted to move on to other projects, and were offered a deal to sell the company. A creepy deal, but a deal: “They sent somebody from Las Vegas, of course, and exchanged a suitcase full of cash. We were so paranoid that we immediately went to a bank and deposited it,” says Brady. Throughout the company’s life, though, Candypants never shed its novelty product status.  “We did some market surveys, and about 85 percent of buyers would never even open the box,” says Sanderson.

By the 1980s the edible underwear market was starting to plateau. A slew of competitors had cropped up, many of lesser quality, while some manufacturers realized they could cross into more mainstream categories. In 1986, Kama Sutra launched a lingerie line. “Part of the reason for the shift, Bolstad says, is a leveling off of demand for its oils, creams and powders,” wrote the LA Times. “Kama Sutra sold $2 million worth of the products last year and company officials believe that's close to the market's limit.” The company even began distancing itself from the lickable sex products of its past, focusing more on scent than taste. By 1996, scented body products and aromatherapy oils were going mainstream, and Kama Sutra was producing tame new lines of bath gels and candles.

Around this same time, though, the Achilles heel of edible products–the fact that they were still, fundamentally, a silly joke—became a strength.. More people were becoming aware of the AIDS epidemic, and sex was getting a dangerous image. Many companies looked for ways to prove, with their products, that sex could be fun and safe at the same time. In 1988, Lifestyles introduced its “Kiss of Mint” condoms, and in 1995, Durex introduced its first line of flavored condoms, which it still produces today. While Durex marketing director Karen Chisholm says the company’s current line of flavored condoms (“Tropical” flavored) are “intended primarily for vaginal sex,” it’s likely that they were first introduced as a way to spice up safe oral sex.

Flavored condoms for sale on Amazon. (Photo: Amazon)

Flavored condoms are still being sold. According to Durex, sale of the Tropical line “has been growing 30-40% vs. prior year.” However, it’s unclear how many of these sales are repeat customers, and how many are teenagers buying them for a one-time experiment or laugh. And at least according to Amazon reviews, various brands of flavored condoms function just fine, but the flavor is still lacking. “They smell good, they taste ok but the mint flavors are too strong and make me have a really unpleasant tingle/ burning feeling,” says one reviewer of ONE Flavor Waves condoms.

That’s partly because it’s hard to balance taste with safety. The ingredients that bring flavor (sucrose, sodium saccharin, aspartame) can also cause yeast infections – or lead to genital irritation, which means figuring out an awkward way to change products in the middle of a sexual encounter. “When you’re having an intimate experience with your partner, the last thing you want is to run to the bathroom to wash something off,” says Lee.

The ideal flavored sexual product is one that can be used safely on (and in) all areas of the body, and that actually tastes good. This is the brass ring the industry has been chasing since 1969, and one that seems increasingly appealing in our artisanal food- driven world. What’s the good of flavored body paint if you have to wash it off before you have sex, but also, what’s the point of flavored body paint if it tastes like artificial banana? The general public has become pickier about good taste. We have aioli on Wendy’s sandwiches and want our ingredients to be organic and naturally sourced. Why would that change when it comes to products we’re licking off each other?

Kama Sutra may be closer than ever to developing that ideal product. Right now, they have products like the “body souffle,” which they have to remind customers not to use as actual cake frosting, and a “body glide” that is safe for genital use but doesn’t have a particularly strong flavor. They’re currently in the testing stages of a product that could combine both: a massage gel that’s “completely kissable” and safe for intercourse.

It’s still an open question, however, whether a product like this could take the edible sex industry out of the novelty retail space. The idea of these products as a bachelorette staple generally confuses Lee, who wonders why newlyweds need tasty additions to their love lives: “Why waste the product on that segment? They’re high on love! It’s fresh, it’s new, it’s exciting.” Kama Sutra envisions these products being for couples down the line, when sex is no longer new, when something else needs to be introduced to break up the monotony. But can potential customers be persuaded to take edible products seriously as marital aids, when they’ve become so accustomed to seeing them as a joke? There’s a big step between sharing a laugh at a jar of chocolate body paint and actually asking your partner to use it.

If there were any time for a boom in the edible sex accessory industry, it’s now. We’re more open and enthusiastic about owning sex toys than ever, and at the same time, we’re increasingly concerned with food. Perhaps, like the sex toy industry, the edibles industry will rebrand itself with high-end products at high-end prices: farm-to-table massage oils, fair-trade fruit leather bras, soylent pasties. Perhaps it will go local, every city with its own artisanal edible panties startup.

Or perhaps there is only so far sex and food can intersect. Eating, after all, is not sexy. For every movie shot of a beautiful woman deep-throating a banana, there’s one we don’t see of her biting down. And for all we wish we could overcome our inhibitions, sex is often embarrassing enough without the addition of mastication. Of the two sides of edible sex accessories – those designed to bring us closer together, and those designed to make us laugh–the gags are still winning. At least they all taste pretty good.

A selection of homecoming mums from Peace, Love and Mums. (Photo: Courtesy Peace, Love and Mums)

The long held stereotype goes that everything is bigger in Texas: louder, brasher, imposing in its vastness. While stale assumptions about places typically don’t ring true, it’s difficult to ignore the larger-than-life qualities of a ritual undertaken at high schools across the state each fall–homecoming mums.  

Sure, everywhere in the country celebrates homecoming with pom-pom waving, face painting, and a giddy queen crowned at the end of the night. Homecoming mums, though, are a distinctly Texan tradition. The importance of wearing this version of an outlandish boutonniere to homecoming is so woven in the psyche of Texas girls that even if a family leaves the state, daughters will order mums to be shipped to their new addresses. The elaborate tradition is a pageantry pit stop somewhere between four-year-olds in full eye makeup competing in talent shows and the eventual reckoning of bridezillas. 

Historically, mums were fashioned by mothers, who learned how to make the contraptions from scratch or simply incorporated more detail onto store-bought versions. Today, mums are far more complicated, with home-based companies like Rebecca Hayes’ outfit Peace, Love and Mums meeting the demand for over-the-top, blinged-out creations.

A mum-in-progress at Peace, Love and Mums. (Photo: Sarah Baird)

Ascending the stairs inside Peace, Love and Mums headquarters (read: Hayes' house), past racks and racks dripping with half-finished mums, I was soon deep in a closet covered wall-to-wall in spools of ribbon and trinkets, getting the run down on the dos and don’ts of homecoming mum protocol. 

It’s been a long time since actual flowers were used, and today the centerpieces of the jangly, stuffed animal-covered creations are silk flowers known either as a single (one mum), a double (two mums), or a triple (three mums). At Peace, Love and Mums, the packages have names ripe with teenybopper appeal, from the “sassy” variation to “YOLO super glam.”

While some younger students arrive with a “go big or go home” mindset as freshmen, it’s generally considered poor form to get a triple mum in the first year. (“You have to have something to build to, you know?” an employee explains.) School colors are the expected spectrum for underclassmen, with silver the hue of choice for most junior mums and gold reserved for seniors. 

“Oh, lord,” exclaims a woman busily hot gluing gold football trinkets to a piece of gingham ribbon. “This one right here deserves the jackass package!” 

A creation in progress at Peace, Love and Mums. (Photo: Sarah Baird) 

The women flash knowing glances and titter into their hands. "We really get to know these kids well because we do their homecoming mums year after year,” Hayes says in a forced whisper. “And you hear…things from the kids or their moms. You hear that they boy has been cheating on his girlfriend or isn’t a nice guy. We've never done it, but we started jokingly saying that we’d put a little sticker of a donkey in the back of the mum for the boys who were being…” 

She makes a hee-haw noise. “That way, they know that we know.”

Pretty much nothing is off limits for attaching to homecoming mums, including feather boas, beads, braided ribbons, bells, lights, dressed up bears, and three-dimensional lettering. The mums (and their male equivalent, garters, worn on the arm) equally reflect the individual’s hobbies—from football to flute and everything in-between—and how much they want to impress their peers. When done up to the nines, mums can weigh 10 pounds or more. At Peace, Love and Mums, a single mum averages about $200. Some girls purchase mums that cost upwards of $600.

The extraordinary intricacy of the Texas homecoming mum ritual isn’t just limited to the mum or garter itself, though. Due to the cumbersome, extremely heavy nature of mums today, it’s almost impossible for girls to wear them as pins like in the past—lest their entire neckline droop to their knees. Instead, they are most often worn around the neck like a massive, feather-and-sequin covered bolo tie. 

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit stars in the film (Photo: Cory Doctorow/Flickr)

In 1928, Walt Disney released a short film, featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a Mickey Mouse-looking fella with a little bit of mischief to him. This was before Mickey was a star: he'd make his appearance in Steamboat Willie this same year.

But for the moment, it was all about Oswald. According to the Guardian:

The film features Oswald in an ice hockey game against a winter wonderland backdrop and has surreal touches with the rabbit at one point removing his ear to make a balloon. There’s also an elephant and a laughing donkey, who gets the puck stuck in his mouth.

But after 1928, the short film, titled Sleigh Bells, went missing and for almost 90 years it was thought to be lost entirely. But recently, as the Guardian reports, a researcher was looking through the archive of the British Film Institute, in search of lost Disney films, and he found this one. It had been in the archive for the past 34 years, after the BFI had acquired a lot of film from a company that went out of business. 

It was dated 1931, though, but a BFI spokesman pointed out there are many movies named Sleigh Bells. So no one identified it as something so special until now—the only remaining copy of this early Disney film.

Not for long, though: Disney's animation studios are working with BFI to restore the film, and it will be show to a wider audience in London, starting this December. 

Bonus find: A missing marathoner

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.