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Forgotten Heritage: Exploring Italy's Abandoned Castles, Towers and Hospitals
Inside an industrial tower in Northern Italy, looking straight down to the base of the tower to looking up slightly to the central skylight. (Photo: Forgotten Heritage Photography)As the man behind the...
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From Junk to Genius: 5 Found Art Meccas You Can Visit on Obscura Day
Austin's Cathedral of Junk (Photo: alamosbasement on Flickr)Who needs hoighty-toighty museums and snotty art dealers to tell a creator what is beautiful? All across America artists have put aside all...
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Head Space: Behind 10,000 Years of Artificial Cranial Modification
Deliberate modification of the skull, also called the "Toulouse deformity." (Photo: Didier Descouens/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)In 2013, archaeologists working in Alsace, in eastern France, uncovered...
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The Most Unlikely Man to Influence A Generation of Writers: Walking Stewart
An etchng of Stewart from this 1822 biography 'The Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Walking Stewart' (Photo: Public Domain)In their time, the English Romantics were known as a motley crew of...
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FOUND: 9 Mysterious, Well-Preserved Brains
Five of the nine brains (Image: Facebook, via North County News)In the town of Gouverneur, New York, not so far from the Canadian border, a local was out walking her dogs when she found nine brains,...
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The Gilded Age's Only Female Tycoon Lived in Brooklyn To Avoid Taxes
(Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)Hetty Green, the newspapers said, was the richest woman in America.She had so much money that by 1906, when she loaned New York City $2.5 million at the rather decent...
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Hell Will Freeze Over Before We Agree on the World's Hottest Place
Salt formations in Dallol, Ethiopia (Photo: Matej Hudovernik/shutterstock.com)Much like the question of where the geographic center of the United States is, the specific point on Earth that reigns as...
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Inside the Surreal World of Berlin's Design Panoptikum
(Photo: Anagoria/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)Design Panoptikum, the “Museum of Extraordinary Objects,” is a collection of industrial objects curated in a very different way by owner and artist Vlad...
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The Perfectly Preserved World War I Trench
Sanctuary Wood, Ypres, Belgium, where trenches have been preserved since World War One. (Photo: John Gomez/shutterstock.com)The fields of Northern France and Belgium still bear many of the scars of...
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Found: A Bomb That Forced the Biggest Evacuation in Cologne Since 1945
A plane over Cologne in WWII (Photo: 418th Bomber Sqaudron/Jodi Womack/Flickr)Today, in Cologne, Germany, 20,000 people had to evacuate the city after a one-ton bomb from World War II was unearthed at...
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The War on Pinball
On Obscura Day, May 30, join us for a private tour and play session at the Pacific Pinball Museum. (Photo by Michael Moore on Wikipedia)In an age of Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and fantasy games...
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The Spy Who Billed Me
(Photo: Photick/shutterstock.com)In 1961, when a KGB counterintelligence officer showed up at a CIA station in Helsinki, Jeanne Vertefeuille held the keys to the office safe. "Responsibility for office...
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Sprucing Up the Pine Box: Inside Ghana's Novelty Coffin Industry
The Kane Kwei Coffins workshop in Teshie, Accra has been creating and selling fantasy coffins since the 1980s (All photos: Angelica Calabrese)The workshop of one of the most well-known fantasy coffin...
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FOUND: The Jawbones of a Never-Before-Seen Species of Early Human
Very, very old teeth. (Photo: Yohannes Haile-Selassie)In the vicinity of three million years ago, in what's now Ethiopia, there lived some two-legged apes that were going through some very strange...
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Surreal South America: Modernist Photography from the 1930s
'Soapsuds', ringl + pit (Photo: © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola/Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York)The photographers Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola met at Germany’s rigorous Bauhaus school...
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Corpse Brides and Ghost Grooms: A Guide to Marrying the Dead
(Photo: Boston Public Library/Flickr)So you want to marry a ghost.In some societies, it's possible—with a few caveats. Posthumous marriage—that is, nuptials in which one or both members of the couple...
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The World's Only Monument To A Horrible Destructive Pest Is In Alabama
The Boll Weevil Monument in Enterprise, Alabama (Photo: Library of Congress) In Enterprise, Alabama, there is a statue unlike any other in the entire world: A 13-foot woman in Grecian-style robes...
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FOUND: A Gun Linked to 7 Murders Was Sitting in a British Museum
This is an example of a VZ58 rifle, which Irish paramilitaries were supplied with. (Photo: Wikimedia)In February 1992, Protestant paramilitaries killed 5 people in a betting shop in Belfast. The VZ58...
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#ObscuraDay Rolling Round-Up
Obscura Day 2015 has arrived!We've been working diligently at Atlas Obscura for months, compiling unique and wondrous locations around the world and dreaming up unusual events in a widespread call...
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