Wisdom and her mate at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in November. (Photo: Kiah Walker/USFWS)

Wisdom is having a baby at the age of 64.

Over the weekend of November 28, Wisdom, a Laysan albatross, landed at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the Pacific Ocean, the Washington Post reports. At the age of 64, she is there to lay an egg and raise the chick that hatches, making her the oldest known bird to lay an egg.

This is a remarkable feat, especially considering the hardy albatross had already earned her place in the record books. At this time last year, Wisdom laid an egg at the age of 63. This bested the efforts of a New Zealand albatross by the name of Grandma, who became the previous record holder several years ago, at the age of 61.

Albatrosses rarely reach their sixties, let alone continue to lay eggs at that age. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the Post reports, Wisdom has birthed and raised as many as 35 chicks. Tagged by the USGS since 1956, she has since flown around three million miles, always returning to the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge to lay her eggs and rear her chicks.

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.

Troy Hartman surfs the skies as his cameraman flies by his side. (Photo: Troy Hartman)

The sport of skysurfing lived a short life.

Watching a skysurf video today, you'd likely guess that it’s a digitally animated stunt. But that person surfing right through the sky? That’s real—that happened. In fact, you could once get a gold medal for it.

When skysurfing debuted as one of the flagship events at ESPN’s first-ever Extreme Games (now X Games) in 1995, it had already been around for around a decade. A few daring folks strapped boards to their feet, jumped out of planes, and gave “surfing the airwaves” a whole new meaning. There were skysurfing stars, skysurfing endorsements. It was a small but global community. But within five years, the sport dropped completely out of sight. How did this insane sport climb so far and fall so fast?

Skysurfing was dreamt up in 1986 by French skydivers Dominique Jacquet and Jean-Pascal Oron. Of all the skydiving disciplines, it was the hardest, says Troy Hartman, a former skysurf gold medalist who competed full-time during the sport’s heyday. In comparison, he says, things like wingsuiting and BASE jumping are “pretty darn easy.”

 Jumping out of an airplane with a board strapped to your feet is a feat that Hartman compares to wrestling an alligator. A skysurfer, having already mastered skydiving, must make around 200 jumps just to gain control of the board before attempting any spins or flips, since the board can change things up in a matter of moments.

Hartman pulls off his signature move, the "Henhouse Surprise." (Photo: Troy Hartman)

Watching someone glide along air currents as a surfer rides a wave is an optical illusion only enabled by clever camerawork, which is why skysurfing is a two-man team sport. A steady camera can keep the surfer completely still in the frame, even as he’s plummeting downwards at a rate of 90 to 160 miles per hour. Unlike with a sport like formation skydiving, where competitors’ consistent fall rates allow the cameraman to just “stay put,” the skysurf cameraman needs to synchronize with every flip, roll, and shift in fall rate. Since camerawork was critical to capturing the artistic merits that determined a judge’s score, a skysurfer would spend more time training alongside his camera-mate than he would alone. 

Troy Hartman saw his first video of skysurfing the very same day he took his first skydive, back as a college student in 1991. (Little did he know that a few years later, he’d invent one of the sport’s most well-known moves, the “Henhouse Surprise.”) Scared to death at the mere idea of skydiving that morning, he ended the day not only determined to keep skydiving, but also to learn to skysurf. That very afternoon, he saw one of the sport’s French pioneers in a Planet Reebok commercial, and it blew him away. “I thought, well God, if this is possible, then why not do it?” he recalls. “I’ve always been the kind of person, I just don’t see any reason not to do something. Hey—if it exists and it’s possible, then why not?”

However, most people still saw distinct reasons why not. Even among skydiving communities, the skyboard was considered a death wish, and no one would let Hartman take one with him on a plane. So he built his own board out of wood, snuck it into a cabin of 30 skydivers, and was the last to jump out. “Of course, I was scared—I was scared to death, having this thing on my feet,” he remembers. “But you know, in the end, I got it basically under control, enough to get my parachute open, and I survived it, and it was the coolest thing ever.”

Hartman rode out the skysurf wave, and at one point was featured in three commercials airing at once, for AT&T, Mountain Dew, and Dr. Pepper. After his Superbowl Pepsi commercial, in which he skysurfs (and drinks Pepsi) alongside a Canadian goose, some folks at MTV approached him, asking, “Are you willing to do a bunch of other crazy stuff?” (His answer? Yes—which led to 42 absurd stunts for Senseless Acts of Video, a precursor to Johnny Knoxville’s Jackass.)

Is skysurfing, perchance, dangerous? Oh yes—very. If a skysurfer loses control, which Hartman says was quite common, they may risk hitting the cameraman with the board or be unable to release it. If the person is spinning or flipping around and the chute opens, it will just wrap up and tangle into a massive knot; a spin can also become so violent that it knocks the person out cold. Hartman has found himself in spins that accelerated so fast that the capillaries in both his eyes burst, turning them completely red. Skysurfers actually taped their arms to prevent blood pooling in the extremities during spins that could lead to them blacking out.

Riding those airwaves. (Photo: Troy Hartman)

The sport had so few teams of two—no more than 12 or 15—and survived for so short a time that one wonders whether it qualifies as a sport or simply a stunt. During its peak years, skysurfing lost several members of its already small crew, though only one of the deaths was from a skysurfing accident—that was Jerry Loftis in 1998, who was the founder of Surflite, the first and only skyboard manufacturing company. A small community shrunk even smaller.

But why did skysurfing disappear? It's a risky sport, but so are wingsuit proximity flying and BASE jumping, and those are both thriving more wildly than ever. While there are still a few individuals here and there who give skysurfing a spin, the practice has become rare, if not nonexistent.

Hartman sees the demise of the sport linked to a lack of money. X Games events survive on big company sponsorships like Red Bull and GoPro, and these companies were turning their money and attention to the more marketable—that is, relatable—sports like BMX and snowboarding. But also, stacked up against easier, less time intensive and less dangerous options, skysurfing already faced a losing battle. As quickly as it appeared, skysurfing faded away into the ranks of street luge, bungee jumping, snow shovel racing, and other ghosts of extreme sports past.

A supraglacial lake on Mount Everest (Photo: C. Scott Watson)

On one side of Mount Everest, the ice is melting so fast that lakes are forming on the surface of glaciers.

As the Washington Post reports, a team of British geologists recently traveled to Mount Everest's Khumbu Glacier, the highest glacier in the world, and found that "for the first time supraglacial ponds on the ice river's surface have coalesced into lakes the length of several football fields."

Elsewhere in the Himalayas, other glaciers have been melting down into lakes, too; the worry is that these lakes will become so large that they will start flowing down the mountain and flood the area below. As ponds and lakes form, they may also speed up the melting of the glacier, the team explains, as they transfer thermal energy from the sun to the ice below. At the Khumbu Glacier, scientists have found ponds in the past; now, the BBC writes, those ponds are joining up to form these larger bodies of water. 

Researching supraglacial lakes (Photo: Owen King)

These changes are linked to climate change. This week's climate meeting in Paris aims to limit the increase in the world's warming, but even if the meeting succeeds, the commitments countries make will not keep global average temperatures from rising to a level that scientists consider dangerous. Right now, the world is heading towards a future where glaciers melt into floods.

Bonus finds: Shakespeare's kitchen, 2.5-million-year-old peach pits, 120-year-old beer 

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. 

This photo essay is one of a five-part series with Atlas Obscura and Olympus. We asked some of our favorite photographers to take a quest with an Olympus E-M5 Mark II camera, and these are the results of their adventures. All photographs in this story were taken with a Olympus E-M5 Mark II with a 12-40mm Pro lens.

Louisiana-based photographer Julie Dermansky first heard about artist Adam Morales while shooting a report on the Bayou Corne sinkhole. As a photographer who focuses on environmental issues, she was intrigued to meet the artist behind the driftwood creations drawn from the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest wetland and swamp in the United States.

On a sunny day in early November, Dermansky visited Adam’s Cypress Swamp Driftwood Family Museum. Morales took her out onto the water, where he collects his driftwood, and gave her a tour of his property and his art. Pieces of driftwood and sculpture crowded the area around his Museum, some of which is for sale, and some, he prefers not to part with. Here is part one of the Atlas Obscura/Olympus series—a glimpse into the work and environment of one of Louisiana's most singular artists. 

Adam Morales at the entrance to Adam’s Cypress Swamp Driftwood Family Museum in Pierre Part, Louisiana. 

Out on the water with Adam Morales, near his museum, among moss-covered cypress trees. The Atchafalaya Basin stretches to almost one million acres.

Adam Morales on his boat. One of the things that makes Morales' sculptures unique is that none of them are carved. They are all either screwed, nailed or tied together. He adds glass taxidermy to many of the pieces. Others are simply found objects that caught his eye. 

Hollow cypress trees on the water in Bayou Pierre Part. “I have a gift for seeing animals in driftwood,” Morales said, which he attributes to God.

Morales' masterpiece—a Statue of Liberty from driftwood. It was lent to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore for a period in 2009, before being returned to its home at the Driftwood Museum. 

Driftwood sculptures of Pierre Part swamp people. Many episodes of the TV series Swamp People are filmed in the Atchafalaya Basin. 

Adam Morales relaxes on his porch. Next to him is some of his equipment, and one of his best selling series of works, his owl sculptures. 

A wooden path leads to the swamp behind the Museum, where Morales has countless sculptures and densely laid out scraps of cypress driftwood he has collected, that are all for sale. The piles of dried driftwood are sorted and labeled, with everything from birds to human body parts to guitars.

Julie's cat Little Kitty took a shine to the owl sculptures that Julie purchased. She bought five owls and Morales gave her a sixth as a lagniappe, a cajun word for bonus. Morales' work can only be bought in person as he is not set up digitally to collect payments and make shipments. He is, however, open to visitors.

On the night of October 24, 2015, Atlas Obscura and Green-Wood Cemetery invited 900 guests Into the Veil for an exploration of the 19th-century cemetery's expansive grounds. 

Equipped with a map just barely visible in the moonlight, guests made their own way along the winding paths and encountered surprise performances, unusual entertainment and incredible access to rare historic crypts and tombs.

To document the event, Atlas Obscura teamed up with Addison Post and P. Nick Curran of Loroto Productions. The duo captured what Curran called the “strange ambience of the evening" in the enchanting video above.

Dinosaur murals on the exterior of the Best Western Denver Southwest. (Photo: Ayleen Gaspar/flickr) 

Greg and Meredith Tally had been running their Lakewood, Colorado Best Western for about 10 years when they decided it was ready for a revamp. It was a “perfectly fine” hotel, says Meredith, but the couple decided the place needed some personality. There were some obvious options for themes; the Red Rocks Amphitheater was nearby and attracted guests en route to concerts by the likes of Neil Young, Idina Menzel and Lana Del Ray. They could have gone with a rock theme and hung guitars and signed headshots on the walls. Or maybe they could have done a racing themed hotel in honor of the also nearby Bandimere Speedway.

“We had a beige box commodity in our hotel,” says Greg. “But we didn’t want our hotel to taste like chicken. We wanted it to taste like pterodactyl.”

The Tally’s hotel (which is in a suburb of Denver) is also in the middle of a dinosaur hot zone. Within a few miles are both Dinosaur Ridge, a famous fossil area where many of the first large Jurassic dinosaur skeletons—including Apatosaurus, Allosaurus and Stegosaurus—were found, and the Morrison Natural History Museum, which showcases Colorado’s dinosaurs. So in 2012, the Tally’s began a $5 million remodel to turn transform their property into a dinosaur hotel, reopening in April 2013. 

Dinosaur bone in sandstone in Dinosaur Ridge, just a few miles from the hotel. (Photo: James St John/flickr)

“Tasteful was our watchword,” says Greg. “We wanted this to be—even with the dinosaurs— something that a businessman or woman would feel comfortable walking in the door and conducting business with a client and not feel like they were staying in some sort of romper room.” 

The history of dinosaur-themed roadside attractions are a kitschy one; a prime example are the very not-scientific Cabazon Dinosaurs, a pair of massive statues near Palm Springs, California that scored major roles in “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure”. (And today is home to a creationist museum.) The Tally’s wanted to avoid that tail-dragging, cartoony legacy and go for a more scientific feel. So they turned to scientists.

They reached out to the Morrison Natural History museum and consulted with curator Matthew Mossbrucker on the project; they even talked to world-famous paleontologist Robert T. Bakker, in order to make sure their hotel felt more like a museum than a theme park.

The results are understated—but also riddled with dinosaurs.

Eddie the Edmontosaurus, a  replica was made from the original collected from the Ruth Mason Dinosaur Quarry north of Faith, South Dakota. (Photo: Courtesy Best Western Denver Southwest)

A pteranodon weathervane festoons the hotel’s roof. Upon entering the lobby, guests are greeted by a fossilized desktop at the check-in counter, studded with the imprints of ancient nautilus. Behind the counter is a massive stegosaurus skeleton embedded in rock. The hotel is decorated with museum-quality casts of fossils from the renowned Black Hills Research Institute in Hill City, South Dakota. There are curio cabinets stuffed with vintage brass dinosaurs and antique science equipment. There are many skulls, including “Eddie” the Edmontosaurus, “Jim Bob” the Allosaurus, and “Butthead” the Pachycephalosaurus. Reproductions of watercolors by Arthur Lakes, a 19th century teacher and geologist who discovered the first fossils at Dinosaur Ridge, adorn the guestroom walls. At breakfast, amateur paleontologists man a fossil table where guests can interact with artifacts.

 And, ok, there is a little kitsch.

Upper hind legs of a Brachiosaurus on display at the hotel. (Photo: Ayleen Gaspar/flickr)

“Stanley the stegosaurus is out front,” says Meredith. “He’s not scientifically accurate 100 percent, but he is cute.”

Guests can also devour loaded nachos at the in-hotel restaurant Paleo Joe’s, which features a fossilized wood bar.

Meredith’s favorite extinct resident is Sophie, a 40-foot Tylosaurus skeleton that “swims” across the roof of the breakfast room. Sophie is so large,her head is mounted outside the room above the entrance. A reproduction, she began life as a movie prop in the National Geographic movie Sea Monsters.

The reception desk. (Photo: Jimmy Thomas/flickr)

“The coolest thing about her is that you can look up and see her big vertebrae and her ribcage and then inside her rib cage you can see some smaller vertebrae and a smaller ribcage,” says Meredith. “And that was her lunch. She was fossilized with her lunch still in her stomach and that’s just really cool, I love pointing that out to people.”

The Tally’s joint passion for dinosaurs was sparked in 1997 on a drive they took from Texas to Colorado after their wedding. They stopped off in Houston to go to Six Flags and then went to see The Lost World: Jurassic Park at a theater. Something clicked, says Greg and they “started buying as many dinosaur books as we possibly could and learning all about dinosaurs.” Greg has even been on a few paleontologist-supervised fossil digs, and in photos on the hotel site he looks like he’d be at home in Jurassic Park, sporting a brimmed hat and leather jacket. 

So far, the gamble seems to be paying off. About 15 percent of the hotel’s visitors are now comprised of “vocal, passionate and opinionated” fans that come for the dinosaurs. The hotel’s Facebook page has accumulated 86,801 likes. (This is undoubtedly thanks in part to a cartoon about the hotel on the very popular webcomic The Oatmeal; a perk the Tally’s earned for donating $35,000 to the comic author’s Indiegogo campaign to open a Nikola Tesla museum.)

A model Stegosaurus outside the hotel.. (Photo: Jimmy Thomas/flickr)

And the Tally’s aren’t done with their dinosaur additions. Next up, they plan to decorate the bottom of their swimming pool with a mosaic mural of the Cretaceous Seaway in the style of an ancient Roman tessera designed by paleoartist Larry Felder.

“We could actually have a place where people could swim with the sea monsters,” says Greg.

A street in Chuqicamata, a once-thriving mining town. Now it is deserted, with rumors of shadowy figures crossing the streets late into the night.  (All Photos: Margot Bigg)

Many people think of ghost towns as relics of the Wild West, dusty, run-down, and completely uninhabited save for the odd prickly cactus or drifting tumbleweed. Others look at these barren former towns as reminders of dashed hopes and fading aspirations. After all, the transition from regular town to abandoned ghost town often involves a tragedy–such as a war or natural disaster–or a sharp economic downturn.

But it was neither famine nor loss of fortune that transformed the township of Chuqicamata into but a shell of what was once a thriving mining community.

Located just outside of the city of Calama in Northern Chile’s copper-rich Atacama Desert, the Chuqicamata Township is one of the world’s newest ghost towns, earning the status less than a decade ago. 

The Chuqicamata Township is one of the world’s newest ghost towns.

The township is situated at the edge of the Chuqicamata copper mine, the world’s largest open-pit copper mine, which dates back to 1915.  The mine is 2.67 miles long, 1.86 miles wide, and 2,953 feet deep, and looks something like a giant, earth-hewn amphitheater.

The town and the entire operation, operated by Chile’s state-owned copper mining company Codelco, was, until very recently, a 25,000-person strong community of miners and their families. However, due to high levels of pollution in the form of dust and smelter fumes, Codelco was obligated to relocate the thousands of families living in the community to the nearby city of Calama, a process that took three years and millions of dollars to complete.

A Pinnochio statue guards the township's permanenty empty playground. 

A ghost town is all that remains, complete with a church and block after block of abandoned homes and businesses. A stroll through the empty streets reveals old restaurants with corrugated tin roofs and peeling paint jobs, boutiques with wind-battered signs, and a shrine to the Virgin Mary, all framed by heaping mounds of desert earth. At the center of the town stands the old school, fronted by a rusting playground featuring an enormous statue of Pinocchio, sitting mouth agape, his colorful paint job not yet faded by the overpowering sunshine.

And like with all good ghost towns, urban legends about the possibility of hauntings have begun to emerge among workers in the area. Some have reported seeing lights on in houses without electricity and shadowy figures crossing the streets late into the night.

Codelco relocated thousands of families to the nearby city of Calama between 2004 and 2007.

While most of the town’s former residents understood the need for resettlement (and ended up in nicer digs than they’d had at the old township), there was some resistance. “Of course it was hard for them,” says Patricio Huerta, a former resident of the township and Codelco employee who brings a slow but steady stream of visitors to the site throughout the year. “They were living for about two to three generations in the same house in some cases,” he explains.

And though it was environmental rather than economic factors that lead to the resettlement of the Township’s 3,000-some families, the process took place during a time of relative production decline at Chuqicamata. Lowered output from the vast open-pit mine has since led Codelco to begin construction on an underground extension that will help the company exploit previously untouched underground mineral resources.

Until very recently, Chuqicamata was a 25,000-person strong community of miners and their families.

Possible ghosts aside, the only full-time residents are a few semi-stray dogs who have become de facto town guards, though nostalgic former residents are invited back every year to, as Huerta puts it “return to their homeland and meet each other once again.” The company also organizes an annual showcase of cultural and social activities on May 18th, the anniversary of the mine’s first day of production.

Although travelers can visit the old township through prior arrangement with Codelco, it’s a far cry from your typical tourist trap of a ghost town—there’s nary a movie set or gift shop in site. Children under six are discouraged from visiting.

Mining safety equipment.

However, that’s set to change in the coming years, and Codelco is currently in the process of figuring out how to transform the township into a full-blown tourist attraction, complete with museums and possibly places to stay and eat.

“The idea is to create a foundation, that keeps the historical and social heritage of the town through museums, expositions…” Huerta explains.

For the meantime, travelers can participate in one of CODELCO’s tours of the old township, held weekdays in English and Spanish (with prior arrangement).    

Statue of Bernardo O'Higgins Riquelme, an independence leader who helped Chile gain its independence. 

An artist's idea of what Scotland's coast looked like about 170 million years ago (Image: Jon Hoad)

Around 170 million years ago, Scotland was warmer, swampier, and inhabited by dinosaurs. Evidence of life in this time, the Middle Jurassic period, is scant, though, and in Scotland, the only fossils found from the period have been random bones and a footprint or two.

All of these fossils came from one place: the Isle of Skye, on the northwest coast of Scotland. Back in April, a team of paleontologists from University of Edinburgh were on the island, looking for more. They discovered, they report in a new paper, "the biggest dinosaur site yet found in Scotland."

This site is 49 feet by 82 feet, and in it are preserved numerous fossilized dinosaur footprints. The scientists discovered these footprints when the tide went out and water was left behind in large impressions in the ground. Those impressions were in a zigzag pattern. All of a sudden, the team realized, they'd seen something like this before. These were dinosaur tracks.

Dino footprints (Photo: Steve Brusatte)

The tracks were very large—about 2.3 feet across—or, as one scientist described them to NPR, like "potholes about the size of trash can lids." The team determined the tracks belonged to a type of sauropod, the dinosaur family that includes the genus Brachiosaurus.

Beyond that, they can't say much about the species of dinosaur that left these footprints behind. But the footprints do give paleontologists new information about how these dinosaurs behaved. Once it was thought they lived exclusively in swamps; more recently, that view was discarded, and sauropods were imagined to live on land. These footprints add evidence that they also spent time in coastal areas and in lagoons—it's not clear why, exactly, but it is fun to imagine giant sauropods frolicking on the shore.

Bonus finds: A butterfly named after David Attenborough, audio of Reagan's press secretary and press corp laughing about AIDS, the seal of a Biblical king, an underwater secret in Fallout 4, W.E.B. DuBois sci-fi

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. 

The cover of "Angora", made from woven rabbit wool bore, with the insignia of the Schutzstaffel (SS). (Photo: Wisconsin Historical Society) 

In 1945, as the Allies were marching through Germany, Chicago Tribune reporter Sigrid Schultz found herself in the lakefront villa of Heinrich Himmler, the vicious head of the Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS. Like any good reporter, Schultz recognized the opportunity of a lifetime and began rummaging around the large home looking, she later wrote, for Himmler’s personal copy of Mein Kampf.

Schultz never found Hitler’s autobiography, but instead found a book tucked away in a large grey trunk. The curious book was a handcrafted photo album, its cover bound in woven rabbit wool, two Sig Runes (the insignia of the SS) stitched across the front, as well as the stitched word “Angora.”

Rabbits in the "Angora" album, which documented the angora rabbit project carried out by the Nazi SS at concentration camps. (Photo: Wisconsin Historical Society)

Inside the album were nearly 150 photographs of bunnies; page after page of well-keep angora rabbits posed alone or with smiling Aryan women or well-groomed SS officers lovingly stroking the bunnies’ pristine white fur. Other pages have photographs of the sanitary, modern huts that the rabbits inhabited, rows of white hutches where the bunnies ate a prescribed diet and received some the best veterinary care available. On the top of one of the pages, beneath three photographs of rabbit hutches, “Buchenwald” is written in elegant script.

The photo album that Schultz had uncovered was some of the last remaining evidence of Project Angora, an obscure program begun by Himmler for the purpose of producing enough angora wool to make warm clothes for several branches of the German military. The project officially began in 1941 with 6,500 rabbits. Rabbit breeding wasn’t particularly new to Germany, the angora had been introduced to the country from the United Kingdom sometime in the 17th century and the country took to breeding the rabbits with a typical German rigor.

Records show that by the mid-1930s there were between 65 and 100 rabbit breeders registered with the state. Himmler must have seen the native resource as a boon of sorts; angora wool, a fiber associated with luxurious evening wear, would be an elegant solution for keeping SS officers and the German military warm and able to endure rough wartime conditions.

Himmler, who began the angora project, with Rudolf Hess at Dachau in 1936, viewing a scale model of the Dachau concentration camp. (Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 152-08-35/CC-BY-SA 3.0) 

At one point, a Reich Specialized Group of Rabbit Breeders was formed and customized cutlery was produced for the group–along with the scrapbook, the dinner knives from the set are one of the only material objects that seem to have survived.

By 1943, Project Angora had bred nearly 65,000 rabbits, producing over 10,000 pounds of wool. The photo albums shows sweaters produced for the German air force, socks produced for their navy and long underwear for ground troops. It’s hard to gauge whether or not the program was a success, but we do know that the coddled rabbits lived in close proximity to human prisoners.

The well-fed rabbits were housed in some of the Nazi regime’s most notorious concentration camps: Auschwitz, Dachau and Mauthausen, and nearly thirty more camps around central Europe. The contrast between the brutality of the camps, with their cruel disregard for human life, and the well-cared for rabbits is deeply unnerving. This jarring context makes the remnants of the program–the book found by Schultz–seem all the more sinister.

The angora produced by the rabbits was intended for uniforms, such as socks for the Germany Navy. (Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 101II-MW-2064-15A/Vorländer/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Schultz later described the casual cruelty of her discovery:

“Thus, in the same compound where 800 human beings would be packed into barracks that were barely adequate for 200, the rabbits lived in luxury in their own elegant hutches. In Buchenwald, where tens of thousands of human beings were starved to death, rabbits enjoyed scientifically prepared meals. The SS men who whipped, tortured, and killed prisoners saw to it that the rabbits enjoyed loving care.”

Indeed, in one of the photographs, three men wearing the familiar uniform of the SS hold one of the large rabbits housed at Dachau. It’s a striking image: the soft white fur of the rabbit; its clean hutch in the background, the almost loving inspection of the large angora by officers wearing rigid visor caps. Indeed, concern for animal welfare was part of the Third Reich’s representation to itself and the populations they sought to control.

The regime banned vivisection and Hermann Göring described the law as “necessary...to protect animals and to show sympathy with their pain, but it is also a law for humanity itself.” And at Buchenwald, one of the camps where the angoras were kept, the commandant Karl Koch kept a zoo directly adjacent to the camp’s fence. The zoo was kept for the “amusement” of the SS officers and frequented by Koch’s wife, Ilse, a woman infamous for her sadistic cruelty.

The defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials. The Nazi War Crimes Commission heard testimony about Project Angora but no evidence was located. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

It was, perhaps, for this reason, a nagging sense that the world would not perceive his rabbit breeding project as an innovative approach, that led Himmler to hide the existence of Project Angora. At the end of the war, the rabbit hutches were entirely abandoned; the once cared for angoras, left to their own devices. There were rumors that the rabbits had been eaten, perhaps used in stews by the American liberators.

In 1945, the Nazi War Crimes Commission heard testimony about Project Angora, though they were unable to locate any evidence of its existence; virtually all traces of rabbits had disappeared, and the small handmade volume that Schultz uncovered in Himmler’s chateau was unknown to the Commission. It’s not even clear that Schultz herself was completely aware of what was in her possession until decades later.

In 1965, Schultz donated the book to the Wisconsin Historical Society, where it is housed today. Two years later, she wrote a brief essay for the society, the only thoughts about the relic that she ever put on record. In that essay, she cited Himmler’s own words, his insistent reminders that the Third Reich’s humanity was found in their kindness to animals.

“The tools used for the grooming of the rabbits could have come out of the showcases of Elizabeth Arden,” she wrote, contrasting the posh Manhattan salon with the savagery of the camps where the Angoras were housed. The comparison captured the brutal surreality of Project Angora and its remnants.

Ice Storm 2015 has started to melt. Power on, uverse not. #icestorm#mustang#oklahoma@reedtimmerTVN@KyleSalomonMNpic.twitter.com/HV9T8j7tMo

— bbatter (@barbiereif) November 29, 2015

Last week, central Oklahoma was hit by an ice storm that caused Governor Mary Fallin to declare a state of emergency as trees were wrenched to the ground and over 100,000 homes lost power. Cars, plants, street signs, and anything else sitting outside became encased in ice.

When this ice began to melt, some residents saw some pretty strange spectacles. Twitter user @barbiereif, captured a photo of a coat of ice sloughing off a speed limit sign that had been totally covered. As the intact layer of frozen water began to slide off, it revealed a carbon copy of the street sign, numbers and all.

The frosty weather also caused unusual sights in Topeka, Kansas, where whole sheets of melting ice slid off of a gas station awning one by one, crashing down on vehicles like huge panes of glass. Fortunately, no one was hurt. 

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. 

One of the five heart reliquaries (Photo: Rozenn Colleter/Inrap)

A recent radiological discovery has found that even noble hearts can be diseased.

The story begins in Rennes, France, in 1369, when the Dominican order began building a church and convent. The place was active for centuries, until the 18th century and the French Revolution, after which it was handed over to the military. 

In 1991, the church became a historical monument, and in 2011, archaeologists started a year-and-a-half long excavation of the site's covent, gardens and courtyards. In the 9,500 square yards they examined, the team found evidence of many burials—including five lead coffins and heart-shaped reliquaries.

Those reliquaries had the embalmed hearts of nobles inside them. Recently, radiologists examined the hearts themselves and found evidence in most of them of the same sort of heart diseases that plague people today.

Reliquaries are often associated with saints: some Christians believe that the containers holding the body parts of holy men and women possess spiritual powers. In the Middle Ages, it was also acceptable for noble people to have certain organs extracted and preserved in reliquaries. That's the case with these hearts: one, for instance, belonged to Lady Louise de Quengo, married in the 17th century to a knight. She was buried wearing religious vestments and holding a cross. 

Bonus find: Secret passage under an Aztec temple, 

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. 

In the back row on the right side, a young man wears his beard in the style favored by those who supported a united Italy: sideburns united by a strip beneath the chin. (Photo: Alfredo Calabrese Archive)

Facial hair is a critical element of the construction of personal and group identity. A stroll through hip areas of Brooklyn and a stroll through office hallways in the Financial District reveal vastly different styles of beards, mustaches, and sideburns. These different styles help to locate people within certain sociocultural identities; you’d be hard pressed to find a Wall Street banker with a waxed mustache.

This assertion of identity through one’s facial hair has a long history. Greek and Roman philosophers distinguished themselves from politicians and laypeople by sporting beards, and even distinguished among themselves by their school of thought and the style associated with it.

The Epicureans wore styled and trimmed beards; the Stoics wore big, full beards; and the Cynics wore shaggy, dirty beards, “to show their disdain for the political, physical world and their rejection of its norms,” says Christopher Oldstone-Moore, a historian whose forthcoming book Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair delves into the history and politics of beards.

A statue of bearded Socrates outside the Academy of Athens. (Photo: DIMSFIKAS/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

Oldstone-Moore argues that throughout history, beards–or the lack thereof–have been used by religious and political leaders, as well as common men, as essential elements to creating group identity. In the Middle Ages, Catholic priests who chose to sport a beard could be excommunicated by the church, whose canonical laws required priests to be clean-shaven.

When late-17th century Russian ruler Peter the Great decided that Russia needed to modernize in Europe’s image, he forbade Russians from growing beards. Those who resisted his order and defiantly grew their beards were heavily taxed.

In the 19th century, beards reached the apex of their popular use and political symbolism. “There seems to have been quite an elaborate political arrangement according to facial hair,” Oldstone-Moore points out, particularly in France in the 1830s and 1840s.

There were a series of failed uprisings during this period, and beards were a not-so-subtle symbol of allegiance. The conservative royalists were clean-shaven, and liberals, who also supported the monarchy, wore mustaches, with and without sideburns. 

 Don Pasquale and the farmer who worked his land wear similar "divided" beards, or sideburns. (Photo: Alfredo Calabrese Archive)

The republicans, who favored ousting the monarchy in favor of a democratic republic, sported sideburns and sometimes a small chin beard (but no mustache), and moderate republicans wore just the sideburns. Bonapartists, who wanted Napoleon’s crew back in power, nixed the sideburns and wore just a small chin beard and moustache.

But this time around, there were no taxes, no excommunications.“It was just sort of a convention that got established,” explains Oldstone-Moore. “It’s a subtle thing that tells people where your loyalties lie.”

Something similar took place in early 20th-century southern Italy, where supporters of the Bourbon kings–who had been removed from power upon the unification of Italy in 1861, seventy years earlier–wore beards and sideburns as a subtle political statement.  

Portrait of Francis I of the Two Sicilies, painted in 1829, and shown to be wearing his facial hair in two long sideburns. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

In the later years of Bourbon reign, men across Europe styled their facial hair into long, thick sideburns–even King Francis I, Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies from 1825 to 1830, wore long, thick sideburns. Within a few decades, beards replaced sideburns as a popular style, but more conservative, rural men might very well have continued to sport the old-fashioned style, Oldstone-Moore says.

Photos from the 1930s, collected by Italian collector and local historian Alfredo Calabrese (and this reporter’s grandfather), depict an old farmer named Don Pasquale. He wears long, thick white sideburns, a tattered suit, and one gold earring. Don Pasquale, Calabrese remembers, was a small landowner, and his sideburns weren’t for style. Rather, they demonstrated his support for the Bourbon kings who had been ousted in the last century.

When the supporters of the Kingdom of Italy, founded after the unification of the country, arrived in this area of southern Italy, deep in the Apulian peninsula, they ransacked the homes of those who dared express their loyalty to the former southern kings through flags or other symbols, Calabrese explains. So people demonstrated their loyalties in other ways, including through their beards. A divided beard for a divided Italy.  

Italy's Camillo Benso, also known as Count Cavour, wears the beard of unification. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Calabrese says that while some southern landowners styled their beards into thick sideburns that signaled their identity as supporters of the Bourbon kings, others connected the thick sideburns with a strip underneath the chin indicating their support for a united Italy. This style, the full beard or chin beard, had also been worn by cosmopolitan urbanites, like Italy’s famous northern leaders of unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Count Cavour. A united beard for a united Italy.

There aren’t any historical documents that specifically link these facial hair styles to political party or preference, but it’s very plausible that many of the men who wore these styles in the early 20th century were, in fact, using them to assert a specific political identity. By the 1930s, the men who sported both of these styles were in their 80s and 90s.

“These guys are clearly old and old-fashioned,” comments Oldstone-Moore, when asked about the phenomenon. “They’re not 20th century men.” Beards had rapidly fallen out of style by that time, he says, and most contemporary men were clean-shaven.

In defiance of urbanism, in defiance of modernism, in defiance of unity, Don Pasquale divided his beard, styled his sideburns, and subtly declared his allegiance to his heritage and his land. Could today’s bearded Brooklynites be doing something similar? Maybe. If nothing else, they share a love for good Bourbons.  

Beatles impersonators at a gathering of inferior numbers in Liverpool in the late 1990s. (Photo: Green Lane/WikiCommons)

Would the Fab Four be 73.5 times more fab if there were 290 more of them? Mexico City sought to answer that this week, when nearly 300 Beatles impersonators gathered for a record-busting singalong of "Let It Be." Dressed in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band finery, the 294 wanna-Beatles swayed and sang while setting a new world record for most Beatles impersonators in one place.

If you think you can gather more Beatles impersonators, 294 is now the number to beat. But if Beatles aren't your bag, there are plenty of other outstanding records you could attempt to break: most Elvis impersonators (895), most ABBA impersonators (368), most Lady Gaga impersonators (a mere 121), and 300 Kate Bush impersonators (who repeated their record-setting feat just a week ago).

@JMDeMatteis where you there?😉 record # of Beatles impersonators in Mexico MT @franceinfo: https://t.co/BHczWXtzgUpic.twitter.com/yTeKBUQvVP

— Ernesto (@EJFoto) November 29, 2015

But hey, you don't HAVE to try to break the world record for largest number of anything impersonators. You could just let it... well, you know.

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.

The Bhagyalakshmi Temple sits at the foot of Charminar, a longtime symbol of the Hindus and Muslims here sharing the streets together. No one knows how old Bhagyalakshmi Temple actually is, or how it got there in the first place. And the debate continues today. (All Photos: Mary Pilon)

The Bhagyalakshmi Temple could easily be overlooked by the millions of tourists who have visited Charminar mosque, one of Hyderabad’s—and India's—most sacred historical sites.

A small, brightly colored booth resting at the base of the palatial mosque, the temple, like the mosque, draws thousands of visitors—Hindus, Muslims, Christians and other wayward visitors, alike—a day. An active place of worship, it is nestled on streets that have been shared by Hindus and Muslims for centuries, a living symbol of the longtime intersection of the groups here. (Roughly 40 percent of Hyderabad is Muslim and 60 percent Hindu, compared with 15 percent Muslim and 85 percent for India, overall.)

It certainly looks old, if not as ancient as the mosque, which dates back to the 14^th century. But actual age (and with it, history) of the Bhagyalakshmi Temple is a mystery. No one knows how it got there, which sometimes leads to impassioned debate on the streets surrounding it. It’s a striking collision: two major religions sharing space, with the actual history of the sacred sites unknown.

“There’s still a lot of controversy about it,” Bappa Majumdar, the Hyderabad bureau chief of the Times of India said, adding that readers still send him photos trying to support their various claims to the temple’s history. “So far, nothing major has happened there, but there’s religious tension there.”

The temple and the mosque sit in the cacophonous center of this 6.8 million-person city, a labyrinth of antiquated buildings that now double as cell phone accessory shops, a collection of fruit vendors, women walking around in burkas and saris, dust kicked up by the perpetual whirr of mopeds and tuk-tuks. Here, one can haggle over the price of saris and burkas, hear songs in Arabic and Hindi (or Urdu or Telugu), read the Koran or the Vedas.

In 2012, a Hindu paper printed photographs alleging that the Bhagyalakshmi Temple did not exist in 1957 or 1962, but it was there in 1986, 1990 and 1994. One line of thinking is that the temple originated sometime in the late ‘60s, but others think that it is as old as Charminar itself, which was built in 1591, a mere 350 year margin of error. Others argued that the photographs are doctored. Another theory claims that Hyderabad’s founder, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, laid the stones himself, as a nod to the Hindu-Muslim makeup of the city’s early populous.

An article in newspaper The Hindu from 2012 about the controversy. (Photo: Courtesy The Hindu) 

The photo release was precipitated by some protests that turned violent after city workers attempted to put a temporary cover over Charminar. According to The Hindu newspaper, cars were lit on fire and people attacked as the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), a political party, led the charge against the temple. The anger wasn’t just over the temple, which many saw as an authorized structure attached to ancient sacred site. Like many fights, there was a larger issue at stake. The newspaper put it thusly:

“The fight in the name of Charminar is not a warning flare about the condition of just one heritage structure. It is a reflection of persisting state apathy, dismal performance of institutions that manage the city's heritage and the misuse of history for political gains.”

On a recent November afternoon, a security guard stationed outside of the temple explained that its first stone was laid concurrent with that of Charminar mosque in the 1590s. A stream of people were lined up as he spoke, taking their shoes off and traversing the hot asphalt to seek a blessing. Others slowed down mopeds on the roundabout and clasp their hands in prayer from the traffic circle, a spiritual pit stop. He told a tale of a Hindu women given a goat for sacrifice and that she refused to leave her spot. According to the guard, when Indira Gandhi went into office as India’s prime minister in 1980, the temple expanded.

The streets of Old Hyderabad, as seen from the top of Charminar mosque.

Looking into the center of the Charminar mosque in Old Hyderabad, India. Roughly 40 percent of Hyderabad is Muslim and 60 percent Hindu, compared with 15 percent Muslim and 85 percent for India, overall.

Sahasram Pandey, a Hindu priest inside the temple, has sat at the temple for 11 years and was there, as well, cutting up flowers. He generally agreed with the security guard’s account that the Temple has been there for hundreds of years in some form and added a twist—Pandey’s version of the origin story involved a woman refusing to leave the spot. A statue of an idol stood nearby and when asked where it came from and when, Pandey shrugged. “It’s just always been there.”

That differed from the story Mohammed Zaheer Uddin, a storekeeper across from Charminar told. According to Uddin, the temple showed up sometime in the 1980s. “It was just a stone then,” he said. “There was a lady who used it as a deity. People used to stop for a blessing and they built a temple after. It’s pretty new.”

Nearby, another longtime Charminar neighbor, Mohammed Shaw Pasha cut melons with a machete and agreed. He disputed the photographs that had been published in local newspapers over the years—different from the photos that purported to show that it was built after the 1960s—that implied its history was far longer. “It’s pretty new,” he said.

Charminar mosque is located in the heart of Hyderabad, India. 

In the wake of the protests in 2012, Archeological Survey of India (ASI) weighed in. With a set of photos showing the temple didn’t exist in 1952, they categorized the structure as “unauthorized.”

And yet, against compelling photography, the debate goes on. A local politician tweeted that endowment records “clearly” prove that the temple has been around for 200 years. Another held that the temple used to be a statue, one that was damaged by a bus in 1979 but, still, sacred.

A man prays at Bhagyalakshmi Temple.  

A few feet away from Bhagyalakshmi Temple, Sayed Mehraj Hussein, a Muslim priest, guided worshipers to their own altar at the foot of Charminar. Hussein said he had been at Charminar every day for all of his 50 years, he said, and before that, his father and grandfather were there, too. 

Hussein said, too, that the temple stones were far more modern and he heard their original intent was to help keep cars from hitting the mosque’s walls. The smell of incense wafted through the air as he explained that in all of his years at the mosque, there have been minimal conflicts between the two groups of worshippers 

“This is an ancient site,” Hussein said. “People ask how old it is. But it doesn’t affect their prayers.” 

White jumpsuits, military-style. (Photo: Library of Congress)

The jumpsuit has two faces. One comes from world of culture and fashion, everything from Elvis in Vegas to Janelle Monae at the Met Gala. Sleek, bedazzled, garish, constructed from rubber or leather, adorned with everything from feathers to bullets, it is made for anything but utility.

The other image comes from the future. It’s the outfit of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where every citizen has his or her place in the machine, signaled to everyone else by a color-coded jumpsuit uniform. It simultaneously evokes a forward-looking society that’s moved beyond superficial concerns, and a utilitarian past of factories and manual labor. It is practical, purposeful, and completely post-trend. The same uni-garment is at once the future of fashion and the future of non-fashion.

Both faces of the jumpsuit, which at its simplest, is a top and pants connected into one garment, is experiencing a small renaissance. Search “jumpsuit” or “romper” on Modcloth or Anthropologie and the page is populated with dozens of options, and far more than they would have been even a couple of years ago. But unlike bellbottoms or crop tops, every jumpsuit revival brings the promise of something more. “A lot of designers considered the jumpsuit the ultimate evolution of modern fashion,” says Cassandra Gero, Assistant Conservator at the MET’s Costume Institute.

The jumpsuit isn’t just fashion. It also suggests the end of fashion–one garment for all. Is that why it can never stay in style?

Models wearing Paul Poiret's early designs. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

The apparel got its name from parachute jumpers, who would wear durable, one-piece coveralls while launching themselves out of planes. It seems like those would have come first, and fashion would have been inspired by the practical design, but according to Gero, the jumpsuit-as-practical-uniform and jumpsuit-as-fashion-item actually developed around the same time. In 1913, the H.D. Lee Mercantile Company (the company that would eventually become Lee Jeans) released the Union-All, a one-piece denim cover up intended for work. But at the same time, avant-garde designers were inspired by the silhouette, and what it could mean for fashion’s future.

Across the ocean, in 1911, French designer Paul Poiret designed a jumpsuit for women called “the pantaloon gown,” says Gero, basically a dress with loose pants instead of a skirt. “It was very ‘Oriental’ inspired,” says Gero, evoking “harem pants” and similar shapes. Poiret wanted clothes to be modern, elegantly draped, and easy to move in, and is often credited with helping free women from the corset. The pantaloons were scandalous, with couture stalwart Jean-Philipe Worth calling them“vulgar, wicked and ugly!” But it quickly became not all that scandalous. “I think that women have been wearing dresses for centuries, so this one piece garment is not that much of a stretch,” says Gero. “You just bifurcated the legs.”

Utilitarian jumpsuits: WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) Florence Johnson and Rosamund Small were the first two women to qualify as instructors on electrically operated 50-caliber machine gun turrets. (Photo: NARA)

Poiret’s design was pure fashion, but as the decade progressed more designers took inspiration from outfits like the Union-All, using fashion to create a garment that might end the need for fashion. In 1919, Italian designer Thayaht designed the TuTa, a T-shaped garment that he envisioned could be a universal, democratic uniform. In 1920 he published the pattern in La Nazione newspaper, so everyone could make them for themselves. In 1923, Russian artist and designer Rodchenko designed a similar garment, which Vogue called“the revolutionary garment of the new man.” The jumpsuit married fashion, art and politics. It was a collectivist, utilitarian garment born out of the formation of the USSR. It was clothing that spoke of a revolution. With everyone in a jumpsuit, we celebrate“no more the individual, but the value of the community, of the mass.”

It didn’t quite catch on that way. For decades, jumpsuits remained utilitarian, outfitting racecar drivers and parachute jumpers. But that changed–for a while–in the middle of the 20th century. “In the ‘50s you’d see them a little in fashion, with youth culture, but the ‘60s is really where it blew up,” says Gero. The ‘60s is where everything blew up, really. People were rejecting couture and the concept of top-down fashion in general, and were looking for new ways to express themselves. The jumpsuit was a natural product of that fashion rejection, inspired by the same ideas of the avant-garde 1910s. It was anti-fashion, and it embraced everyone.

The 1960s also had one huge inspiration: space. Designers were enchanted with Space Age fabrics like nylon, rayon and polyester, which were easy to turn into body-hugging jumpsuits. They were also fixated on the possibility of creating fashion’s future. The jumpsuit could still be the uniform of the working man, only now he might be working on the moon. But even in those science-fiction fantasies, the idea of doing away with fashion altogether permeated the designs. “Wearing one of those utilitarian jumpsuits can be considered anti-fashion, because you’re rejecting the ever changing whim of fashion. You’re putting on a simple, democratic, one piece outfit like a uniform,” says Gero. “But then if you think of it as a futuristic jumpsuit, they tap into that same idea, the same rejection of fashion. Some designers predicted that in the future we’d all be too busy working on more important things to think about fashion, so we’d all adopt the jumpsuit as a uniform. These ideas of modernity and utility intertwine in this whole garment.”

There was also a certain genderless quality to the jumpsuit. The future promised the destruction of barriers between Earth and space, between fashion and anti-fashion, so why not between men and women? The idea of one ungendered uniform for all was enticing to the counterculture of the ‘60s and beyond. The jumpsuit is the perfect vehicle for androgyny, which had always existed but became aesthetically dominant in the 1970s, most obviously in popular music, with artists like Mick Jagger and David Bowie. Gero says the ‘70s were a fashion free-for-all— “people were wearing hot pants to work.” The jumpsuit was not just modern, but in the most suggestive terms, easy. It’s one piece, simple to put on, and just as simple to take off. “There’s this idea if you’re wearing a jumpsuit that zips all the way down the front...you want to unzip it,” says Gero.

Jumpsuits and hair: Queen performing in Brighton in 1977, with Freddie Mercury in a jumpsuit. (Photo: Carl Lender/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

By this point, the jumpsuit has moved past being anti-fashion. You can’t look at a sequin-covered David Bowie number, or watch the internet break after Solange wears a jumpsuit to her wedding, and say it’s still purely something for the everyman, whether on Earth or in space. But at the same time, the jumpsuit is hewing to its utilitarian roots. Coveralls are still worn in factories, and nobody is wearing dresses on the International Space Station. It is that conflict between fashion and anti-fashion, future and past, practicality and ostentatiousness, that keeps the jumpsuit so intriguing.

Ultimately, the jumpsuit’s Achilles Heel might be sewn into both its futuristic and its decorative styles. “I would love if it became the future of fashion, but I don’t think that’s going to happen,” says Gero. The genderless, often baggy uniform is difficult enough to fit on all the body types that it’s intended for, and the fashionable sleek versions are even harder. (This is to say nothing about its real horror: the difficulty in removing the thing for bathroom visits.) But also, we don’t want the end of fashion, and probably never did. We want the jumpsuits that make us stand out, not make us blend in.

Gabriele d'Annunzio reading. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

It can be hard to reconcile the incredible charisma of Hitler written about in history books with recordings of his speeches in which he looks like a madman. Some might conclude that perhaps Germans didn't notice how off-putting he was because his style of declamation was widely used at the time and has simply fallen out of fashion.

But Hitler's speeches weren't normal or spontaneous. Neither were Mussolini's. Both of them were to a large extent imitating one man: an Italian poet named Gabriele d'Annunzio, who lived between 1863 and 1938. He was a war hero and famous libertine, and he essentially invented Fascism as an art project because he felt representative democracy was bourgeois and lacked a romantic dramatic arc.

D'Annunzio was a thrill-seeking megalomaniac best described as a cross between the Marquis de Sade, Aaron Burr, Ayn Rand, and Madonna. He was wildly popular. And he wasn't like anyone who came before him.

A photograph of the shield on the door of Pescara's commune (town hall). The text reads "Citta Dannunziana": d'Annunzioish city. (Photo: Romie Stott)

“You must create your life, as you'd create a work of art. It's necessary that the life of an intellectual be artwork with him as the subject. True superiority is all here. At all costs, you must preserve liberty, to the point of intoxication," d’Annunzio writes in Il Piacere, an ambiguously autobiographical novel published in 1889. "The rule for an intellectual is this: own, don't be owned.”

Italian cultural histories say d'Annunzio brought Italy into the 20th century. More accurately, he introduced Italy to nihilism. He glorified a world of the senses, pleasure and beauty at all cost. (Conveniently, these costs were often fronted by other people. He was continually bankrupt.)

He proposed an ethic of intense feeling, decadent and proto-Futurist: sex and violence, even if they hurt people, were ultimately good because they were beautiful and sensational—the more baroque, the better.

Eleanora Duse, one of d'Annunzio's lovers. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

In his day, d’Annunzio was famous for his romantic escapades–he carried on with the well-known actress, Eleonora Duse, among many others, and detailed his almost compulsive sexual experiences in his fiction–and for writing plays so controversial that they caused fistfights among actors and audience members. One play, La Nave, suggested Italy go to war until the Venetian Republic was restored, a threat the Austrian embassy took seriously enough to protest.  

Once he was famous enough, he got himself elected to the Italian parliament, essentially to prove he was very famous. (That was pretty much his campaign.) Once in Parliament, he used the opportunity to make speeches about how brilliant he was and how democracy was foolish because the average person is dumb.

He felt the state should get out of the way of the brilliant people, plus maybe engage in perpetual imperial expansion because war is a beautiful and glorious crucible. He was not re-elected. But that was fine with him: he found legislating boring and insufficiently ideologically pure. He was still very popular.

Gabriele d'Annunzio, with another officer, 1915. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

When World War I broke out, d'Annunzio immediately urged Italy to take over everywhere. Although he was in his 50s, he went to the front to lead the charge, hopping from service to service. He commanded bomber squads as a fighter pilot. He led daring cavalry campaigns. He led an impossible naval raid that didn't manage to torpedo much of anything, but did leave behind self-aggrandizing propaganda in waterproof ink. He repeated the trick by air, dropping 50,000 leaflets on Vienna. He did not bother to translate them into German. 

D'Annunzio was terribly disappointed when the war ended. He took a few hundred troops and invaded  the former Austro-Hungarian city of Fiume (modern-day Rijeka, Croatia), and declared it an independent country with himself as the ruler. His rationale? The city was 65 percent Italian, and the new state would ostensibly “help” oppressed nationalities around the world, like the Irish, Egyptians, and a few Balkan separatist groups.

Being d'Annunzio, he of course turned it into a sex-positive corporatist libertarian art commune. For 15 months. In the aftermath of a long war of attrition, nobody but d'Annunzio wanted to jump back into battle—and Fiume's eventual nationality was still on the negotiating table.

Rijeka, Croatia, known as Fiume, which d'Annunzio invaded. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

D'Annunzio believed that a country was sustained by faith, not trust. Therefore, instead of trying to govern kindly or honestly, he thought a leader should act like the head of a religion—not simply a pope or grand mufti, but a Messiah. It’s unclear whether he structured his government as a personality cult because he thought it would be effective, or because he was so self-obsessed it was inevitable.

You've seen what it looked like, because you've seen the imitators. D'Annunzio made stylized, inflammatory speeches full of rhetorical questions from balconies flanked with pseudo-religious icons. He outfitted his troops in embellished black shirts and soft pantaloons, and told them to march through the streets in columns, palms raised in a straight-armed Roman salute that would be plagiarized by the Nazis.

He called himself Il Duce. He encouraged his troops to brutalize "inferior" people to rally everyone else's morale, and attempted to found an Anti-League of Nations to encourage continual revolution instead of peace.

Mussolini in 1922. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

No one knows whether d'Annunzio exalted violence because of a Futurist pre-postmodern conviction that new structures could only emerge from complete destruction—modernity lancing the corrupted past like a boil—or whether he simply found the adrenaline arousing. Other of his governing ideals seem incongruously idyllic—music as a central duty of the state, enshrined in the constitution, plus nightly firework shows and poetry readings. In essence, he believed in government by spectacle.

Many artists of the time, including people who really should have known better, thought it was a daring and provocative thought experiment that should be allowed to continue indefinitely. Nevertheless, Italy itself eventually besieged Fiume (or as d'Annunzio styled it, Carnaro) and demanded d'Annunzio step down.

He responded by declaring war on Italy and leading dashing pirate raids to steal supplies. This too was surprisingly popular with the Italian people. The Italian army had to shell the city for five days to force a surrender.

D'Annunzio's birth museum house in Pescara. (Photo: Raboe001/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.5)

D'Annunzio withdrew into semi-retirement after 1922, when an unknown assailant pushed him out a window in Gardone Riviera, badly crippling him. (Or possibly he just fell. He was taking a lot of cocaine.)

Mussolini, by then a rising political star, showered him with money and half a battleship lodged in a hill—either because Mussolini was genuinely a huge fan, or because he thought it was politically expedient to be viewed as a huge fan. (Why a half battleship? Because it makes a cool lawn ornament.)

D'Annunzio was dubbed Prince of Montenevoso and honorary general of the Air Force. He used his spare time and any spare money to further augment his already grandiose estate, "the shrine of Italian victories," which included an office with an extremely low door so that those entering had to bow to him. He finally died of a stroke in 1938.

Sculptor Arrigo Minerbi made a wax cast of d'Annunzio's face shortly after his death, used to produce this plaster head. (Photo: Romie Stott) 

In Italy, and especially Pescara, his birthplace, he's still very famous. Within two miles of my Pescara apartment, there are two d'Annunzio universities, one d'Annunzio music conservatory, a library, a gymnasium, a chess club, a bakery, a soccer field, and a bus line, not to mention a museum which lovingly preserves his birthplace and old clothes.

For me, it feels like running around a town where everything's named for Charles Manson. For Italians, he's the guy who wrote a poem about cake, who was once the country’s most famous literary figure but has been overshadowed by a few eccentricities.

If you visit his birthplace, you'll see his childhood rocking horse and some beautifully tailored suits. And if you want to move your four-year-old to Milan, Motta Sant'Anastasia, San Vito Chietino, Jesolo, or Lanciano, you can enroll her at a preschool named after Gabriele d'Annunzio. 

An Eastern rat snake, blissfully unaware of the million-dollar lawsuit it's caused. (Photo: John Mikesell/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Hopefully there aren’t too many ophiophobes in the jury on the day Jeff and Jody Brooks show up to court, because it looks like they’ll be bringing a live snake with them—an Eastern rat snake, to get specific.

In December 2014, the Brooks bought a seemingly pleasant house in Beechwood, Maryland. By May, they were suing $1.5 million over an infestation of snakes slithering through tunnels in the insulation stretching all the way between the basement and the roof. After spotting at least eight snakes, which grow to around seven feet long, the couple accused the real estate agent of knowingly selling them a place teeming with serpents. The agent, Barbara Van Horn, has denied the allegations.

Since then, the Brooks have moved out. Meanwhile, both sides of this battle have sought out snake experts to testify on their behalf and to solve the question of whether Van Horn was aware that the house is a winter snake den, or hibernaculum.

Here's your evidence. (Photo: D. Gordon E. Robertson/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

This is the trial of the decade for animal enthusiasts, who can tune in for university biology professors detailing the food and lifestyle habits of the rat snake. Was the house a regular snake hub, or were some of them just passing through? Rat snakes often seek shelter in cozy homes, and are commonly found in Maryland lodgings. 

However, Van Horn’s biologist and expert witness seems to face a losing battle. Families who rented the house before the Brooks moved in reported their own discoveries of snakes, snake skins, and snake feces. One of the previous tenants even called it the “snake house” (otherwise known as Slytherin?). 

Rat snakes come in different patterns, thrive in a number of habitats, and like to burrow, climb, and swim. They eat small rodents, frogs, and even birds, and when frightened, will simply freeze in place. Rat snakes aren’t venomous, and they aren’t out to harm, so really, they’re just quiet, benign guests. Maybe folks should be flattered when their houses are chosen as hibernaculums.  

As for whether a snake shows up in trial, it’s up to the judge what can be brought into court as evidence. Here’s to hoping he or she is an animal enthusiast. 

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.

A copy of the map, from France's National Library (Image: Wikimedia)

In 1612, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain mapped what Europeans then called "la Nouvelle France"—New France, the part of North America that's now the coast of Maine and Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Newfoundland. 

The map he created is now capable of fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars among collectors. Over the summer, a copy was listed by a New York dealer for $285,000. The problem was, it had been stolen, the Boston Globe reports. 

Boston Public Library map curator Ronald Grim saw the listing and recognized that small tears on the map matched tears on one that had been missing from the library. After months of work and evaluation, it was agreed: this map belonged to the BPL. 

Most likely, the Nouvelle France was taken from the library sometime in the early 2000s by E. Forbes Smiley, a map collector and serial art stealer. In his heyday, Smiley was "gregarious, jolly, larger than life," wrote Michael Blanding, the author of The Map Thief. "He spoke with the resonance of an Italian tenor mangled by a nasally WASPish affectation, and projected the air of a jet-setter."

But he was also in debt, and in 2005 was arrested for stealing maps from a rare books library at Yale. He later confessed to stealing almost 100 maps from six different libraries. The BPL was one of his main sources. Its map collection was relatively unguarded, and like many public institutions, the library had trouble tracking everything in its collection; before Grim began work, the it had no map curator.

After Smiley's confession, Grim inventoried the BPL collection, the Globe reports, and found 69 maps missing. Since then, dozens have been located, but 34 are still unaccounted for. The Nouvelle France map was not one that Smiley said he stole, "yet library records indicate he was the last person to view it, on Jan. 2, 2003, before it disappeared," the Globe reports. 

The map is now back in the library, and will be on display through the winter.

Bonus finds: A 1930s letter to Santa, hidden in a chimney; a new species of sand fly

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. 

A crowded street scene on the Lower East Side, 1909. (Photo: Library of Congress)

In 1993, a restoration was underway at 97 Orchard Street in New York City. Beneath the darkened floorboards of one apartment, left unchanged for 50 years, a thin, frayed piece of paper from the 19th century was discovered; with one side printed in English and the other Yiddish, it advertised the fortune-telling specialties of “The World Famous Palmist and Mind Reader”, Professor Dora Meltzer.

The people who found this paper worked at the Tenement Museum, founded in 1988 to teach the history of immigrant life in New York through old tenement apartments in Manhattan. At the time, the Orchard Street building had recently been acquired, and the museum was renovating the apartment to use as a historical teaching tool. Layers of wallpaper were peeled back, and items from the 1800s through the 1930s were found in the apartments during the process, but this particular paper was a contextual mystery.

Who was Dora? What fortunes did she tell her guests, and where did she end up? This sparked an ongoing search for who she was and what her business meant to the Lower East Side’s Jewish neighborhood in the late 19th century.

Dora Meltzer's fortune telling business card: a flyer that advertised her mind-reading abilities. (Photo: Courtesy the Tenement Museum) 

Fortune-telling as a pastime and as a business can be found in a majority of cultures in the world. In New York’s early Jewish immigrant communities, fortune-telling often came with a notion of exoticism, mixing Jewish mysticism with a foreign, sage-like edge. Many Jewish fortune tellers, like Dora Meltzer, used imagery that alluded to a hebrew palm-reading manual dating to the 1500s called Khokhmes Hayad (The Wisdom of The Hand), or drew from the old-world appeal of Eastern Europe, where the practice was likely common in villages.

In Europe, some fortune tellers traveled for profit, including Lyla Terfin, who donned a turban and an elaborate backstory of her powers tracing back to India, but was actually a Jewish woman named Elsa Frankel, from Minsk. Others, like the poet and bohemian Naphtali Imber, toured the United States. Most famous for writing the Israeli national anthem “Hatikvah”, Imber made public predictions as “Mahatma”, some of which creepily came true (that Californian wines would gain esteem, that the sun's rays could be harnessed for power) and others that fell a little flat over time (that Kansas would take part in a new civil war between the Eastern and Western parts of the United States).

For stay-at-home fortune tellers like Dora Meltzer, using details like the title “professor,” and that she “recently arrived from Europe” were enough, and lent her traditional roots and current standards of legitimacy in two fleeting sentences. For 15 cents, her clients could learn when they’d fall in love, when to start their own businesses, or Dora could even guess, as it says in the Yiddish version of her flyer, “how much money is in your pocket.”

The prevalence of fortune-telling was especially relevant as a social and cultural hallmark of immigrants in Dora’s time. New York tenement life was not easy, and opportunities for immigrant workers, who often faced language barriers along with social stigmas from old American xenophobia, did what they could to survive in their new home. With scant support from former networks in their native countries, immigrants sought emotional well-being along with financial security, in whichever ways were available to them at the time.

A photograph of Abraham Hochman and his 'synopsis of the head', from his book The Key to Prophecy. (Photo: Courtesy Jane Peppler/Yiddish Penny Songs)

“What appeals to me most [about Dora Meltzer’s flyer], is that it’s an entrée into a larger dynamic on the Lower East Side, which was new immigrants that needed advice, and who were the people who could guide new immigrants as they adjusted to America,” says Dr. Annie Polland of the Tenement Museum. “Often those people were found within the community–immigrants that maybe had come five years before.”

Working from home as customers filed in throughout the day, wives and mothers were able to meet new people and function almost as therapists, in a pre-talk therapy time. Lawrence J. Epstein writes in At the Edge of a Dream that housewives could also “raise some funds, be relieved of the tenement's isolation, and develop social relationships with others.”

Fortune-tellers of Dora’s era often promised to help with immediate family concerns, namely, the very common issue of immigrant fathers and husbands leaving their families. This was a problem of every immigrant community of the time, but was well-documented in the Jewish community, thanks to a fastidious and beloved newspaper culture among the Yiddish-speaking population. Ehud Manor recants in his book, Forward, that in 1909 the Jewish Daily Forward estimated that 31,000 men left their families. This prompted a “Gallery of Deserting Husbands” column in the paper about who had left their homes, their description, and a call to bring the deserters home to justice.

The busy corner of Rivington Street and Orchard Street, 1915. (Photo: Library of Congress)

This was, at the time, considered an epidemic and social crisis. Men would leave families behind in Europe and start new lives in the U.S., but could also easily leave their city, region, or even their neighborhood and easily claim new identities, shirking their responsibilities to their wives and children, who were dependent on their support. For many women, a desperate recourse was to go to the nearest fortune teller and hope for the best.

Abraham Hochman was one such fortune teller in the Lower East Side of the time. One of Hochman’s specialties was locating missing husbands. “Hochman is listed everywhere…he’s even in the census as a clairvoyant,” says Dr. Edward Portnoy, historian and Yiddishist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. At a recent Tenement Museum talk, Portnoy recounted how in one story, a woman paid the hefty price of one dollar (versus 15 cents) to visit Hochman in order to retrieve her deserting husband. She was told she would find him on a particular street corner at 10 p.m. When she later brought a police officer to the specified location, they found her husband scratching his back on a lamp post–he was likely arrested before being made to pay alimony as reparation.

However, this is not to say that women were the only patrons of fortune tellers: Hochman notably predicted a winning horse in a race for politician Timothy Sullivan, a win that Portnoy notes made Hochman the official psychic of Tammany Hall's Lower East Side branch. It’s possible that fortune tellers, with their broad connections and constant stream of local stories actually did have a solid insight into what was most likely to happen in the local future.

An 1883 phrenology chart. Phrenology was one type of practice used by fortunte teller Abraham Hochman. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Hochman was, to Portnoy’s estimation, one of the most famous Jewish fortune tellers of the day. He was so bold with his business that he wrote his occupation as ‘mind reader’ in the 1910 census, and according to Portnoy’s research was known as “the richest man on Rivington Street”. His success flowed into other businesses, including hotel keeping and even selling his own Passover Haggadah, complete with advertisements for his occult services.

He even released a book called The Key To Prophecy which purports to share his mystic methods, including an ‘astro-biblical chart’ that helped clients answer questions like “should I take dance lessons?” and “is my landlord in love with me?”. Hochman became beloved of the community, which he gave back to with lavish block parties. Hochman advertised a variety of occult practices, from phrenology, the pseudoscience of studying head shapes, to divine personality traits, to palm-reading and astrology, all of which became illegal in New York City in 1911.

Over the years, suspicion of immigrant practices like fortune-telling was equated with fraud and common swindling. A 1909 New York Times article estimated that $10,000 a day was paid to some 1,000 fortune tellers of all cultures at a time when a simple reading typically cost 15 cents, and cautioned that, “the opportunities of the unprincipled person to prey on the ignorance and pathetic truthfulness of these believers in the occult is almost limitless.”

The notion that fortune tellers swindle their customers remains to this day. The crime of fortune-telling changed from being a disturbance of the peace to a Class B Misdemeanor in 1967. The New York law states that except for explicit entertainment-only purposes, “a person is guilty of fortune-telling when, for a fee or compensation which he directly or indirectly solicits or receives, he claims or pretends to tell fortunes,” among other supernatural claims.

A present-day fortune teller in New York's East Village. (Photo: Mike Licht/flickr)

A best-selling tax book, J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2012, even explains tax write-offs for victims of fortune teller fraud, which is grouped into "theft loss" alongside riot losses, foreign government confiscations, and being swindled by friends. Today, as in the past, fortune tellers are both reviled and loved for their services, exoticism, and claimed powers; with private detectives and public outcry competing with the loyalty of the fortune tellers’ customer base.

In contrast to the bountiful accusations of fraud and immoral behavior by fortune tellers that came in the next century, Dora Meltzer was likely a housewife earning some small-time income on the side while connecting to her peers. Her business card is a unique document showing Jewish women advertising their clairvoyant talents, as opposed to men like Hochman, and may shed even more light on the lives of tenement families. Maybe more striking, though, is how a piece of paper that was generally considered undesirable became so curious and important to investigate. Dora’s flyer, for all we know, could be one of many similar advertisements that were disregarded as objects, rather than saved.

“It’s weird, it’s actually amazingly lucky that they found that, because it was probably a relatively common thing, and it was a thing that nobody bothered to save," says Portnoy. "It’s like the stuff people give you on the subway–no one keeps that, you just throw it away. You never think this stuff has historical value."

97 Orchard Street, the site of the Tenement Museum, and where Dora Meltzer was believed to have had practiced fortune-telling. (Photo: Fletcher6/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

For the Tenement Museum, the search is still on, and the museum plans on future public talks about Dora and her peers in the hopes that the publicity lends more clues, as it did before. “Several years ago someone had been in touch because of a blog post that was up, but unfortunately their number was lost,” says Polland. They’ve also been reaching out to leads gained from ancestry.com.

In the past, the museum believed Dora’s first name to be an alias–census records showed that a Meltzer family, but no Dora, lived at the flyer’s address. Recently, that changed: the museum not only found a picture of an older woman named Dora Meltzer from 1919 that could be the fortune teller, but also uncovered census evidence that she lived at Delancey Street, around the corner from Orchard Street, with her husband and children.

Poland speculates that Dora may have used 97 Orchard Street as her business address. She could have been protecting her identity, rushing over from her own house if a customer happened to show–after all, her business hours were broadly advertised as “9 A.M. To 10 P.M.” Or she may have helped her relatives at their home there during the day, making it a practical office.

While Dora’s full identity has yet to be uncovered, there are promising leads: a descendant of former 97 Orchard Street occupants recently approached a Tenement Museum educator after a talk, looking to find more about their family. Their last name: Meltzer.

Update, 12/4: An early version of this article stated that Edward Portnoy works for the Center for Jewish History. Portnoy actually works for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. We regret the error.

A majestic fjord on Greenland's Baffin Island, once home to equally majestic Vikings. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Sometime around the 10th century AD the Vikings traveled north to settle in Greenland. They lived there for around 500 years and then exited the region en masse. Why they left still remains a mystery, but a paper published today in Science Advances throws a wrench in one of the more popular explanations.

One Viking exodus hypothesis puts climate change front and center. The Vikings traveled to Greenland during a period known as the Medieval Warm Period, a chunk of time–between the 10th and 13th centuries–said to be the only known period when temperatures were comparable to the 20th century. Following those 500 years, the temperature dipped back down, in what is now referred to as the Little Ice Age. 

Interestingly enough, the timing of the Vikings’ disappearance from Greenland correlates with this cold front. Did this period of extended warmth and then subsequent cooling cause the Vikings settle in Greenland and then depart?

New research suggests this is probably not the case. In fact, regions north of Europe may not have even experienced such a rise in temperature. The paper posits that perhaps Greenland’s temperatures did not rise during the supposed Warm Period. Looking at glacial deposits, this piece of research shows that the North Atlantic area probably remained cool while those south experienced a slightly warmer climate.

Hvalsey Church, dating back to an ancient, abandoned Norse settlement. (Photo: Number 57/via WikiCommons CC0)

The mystery surrounding the Warm Period has long been a topic of research for climate scientists and archeologists alike. Areas including Europe and Iceland have records proving that such a warm spell occurred. It has been hotly contested whether or not it happened globally. 

“It’s established that Europe was warmer,” explains Nicolás Young, a Columbia glacial geologist who coauthored the paper. But, “oftentimes that concept gets applied as a blanket for the entire North Atlantic region.” Young and his team analyzed moraines—masses of debris collected at glaciers’ ends—to get a sense for just how far-reaching the supposed Warm Period was. Looking at the layouts of these heaps of rocks in Greenland, the team found evidence that the North Atlantic region probably remained cool during the Medieval Warm Period. This means that Viking movements to and from this region likely had little to do with weather. 

The paper shines a light on the Eurocentrism in climate science. Since Europe experienced an extended warm front, some have extrapolated that to be a more widespread event. However, evidence is growing to indicate this was not true. “It certainly wasn’t a global phenomenon,” Young says.

An aerial view of Baffin Island. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

For years, climate scientists have focused on the Medieval Warm Period for parallels with climate change today. While it’s true that Europe and Iceland did see an increase in temperature, its global impact is now being questioned. For example, a 2012 study claims that increased temperature were likely not as drastic as today. And now we have Young and his team’s findings suggesting that the temperature didn’t even drop in some northern regions.

If weather change didn’t cause the Norse exodus, what did? A 2013 study looked into the makeup of Viking remains during their Greenland reign and found social and cultural factors at work. The Vikings settled in these northern regions and exported goods but declining demand for supplies like walrus tusks and sea pelt perhaps made life more difficult for the settlers, reported Der Spiegel. These Greenland-based Vikings also perhaps felt more isolated from their Icelandic roots as ship traffic from Iceland and Norway decreased in the 14th century. These causes likely led the settlers to start making their way back south, in an exodus the researchers at the time described as “an orderly manner.”

Whatever the reason for the Vikings’ exit, Young and his team’s research complicates the weather explanation. Neither surprisingly sunny days nor a mini Ice Age could move the Vikings.