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One Line Adventures: 2013 in Review and a Look to the Year Ahead
This week in One-Line Adventures, we look back at our favorite travel moments of 2013, and our plans for the year ahead."Before going to Istanbul for ten days in January, [Atlas Co-Founder] Dylan...
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Seven Cemeteries Stranded in Parking Lots
For most people parking lots are no slice of heaven and can sometimes seem worse than any circle of hell, but for others these concrete sprawls are where they spend their eternities. While most...
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Photo of the Week: Obelisk Obsession
In the Photo of the Week feature, we highlight an exceptionally amazing photograph submitted by an Atlas Obscura user.The origins of this strange collection of spires — known colloquially as the...
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11 Lost Wonders of 2013
Vintage view of the Pan Am Worldport (via Save the Worldport)As we gear up for another year of discovering the wonders of the world, we look back at some extraordinary places we lost in 2013. From a...
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The Wonders of Philadelphia: A City's Curiosities Featured in Our Upcoming...
The gloomy, long-defunct corridors of Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary (photograph by Sandi Hemmerlein, Avoiding Regret)This coming Saturday, January 11, the New York Obscura Society is...
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The Modest Victorian Proposal to Electroplate Corpses Into Beautiful Statues
In last week's Morbid Monday, we brought you the strange case of the Fisk mummy coffin— a metal casket shaped like a draped corpse. It turns out that the Victorians' interest in metallic memorials...
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Curious Fact of the Week: How to Make a Bone Chandelier
The unsettling celebrated Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic is best known as the "Bone Church" — and with good reason. It's estimated the bleached bones of between 40,000 and 70,000 dearly departed...
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Relics of the World's Fair: Paris
Illustrated panorama of the 1900 Paris Exposition by Lucien Baylac (via Library of Congress)Say “World’s Fair” and many think of grand culture shows that happened once in a great while, at some time in...
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Blue Holes: A Descent into the World's Hidden Waters
Jacob's Well in Texas (photograph by Patrick Lewis)There are places in the world where it feels like you can swim forever into the Earth. Known as blue holes, the geological phenomenon is when a cave...
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Objects of Intrigue: A Horse Made of Cheese
The cheese horse at the Horniman Museum (all images courtesy Horniman Museum and Gardens)One of the smallest wonders in the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London is a horse made of cheese.The edible...
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The Brutal and Bloody History of the Mesoamerican Ball Game, Where Sometimes...
A ball court in Mexico (photograph by Dennis Jarvis)The Olmecs started it, the Maya tweaked it, and the Aztecs nailed it. The Mesoamerican Ballgame, played with a solid rubber ball — weighing at around...
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Three Sound Installations Making the World a More Magical Place
The Lullaby Factory in London (via Studio Weave)Soundscapes are just as fascinating to explore as any landscape, with each place having its own unique noise composition of movement and activity. Yet...
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Photo of the Week: Cappadocious Carvings
In the Photo of the Week feature, we highlight an exceptionally amazing photograph submitted by an Atlas Obscura user.The Turkish region of Cappadocia is one of the most eye-popping historical regions...
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Relics of the World's Fair: Chicago
The 1893 Chicago World's Fair (via Boston Public Library)From exploring what remains of the World's Fair in Paris, we continue in our World's Fair series by looking at what survives from the fairs in...
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Curious Fact of the Week: When Dental Work Came With Song, Dance, and Cocaine
Before local anesthesia could manage the pain, one early 20th century dentist distracted his patients with showgirls and brass bands. Painless Parker — or Edgar Parker as he was born in 1872 — found...
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Why America's Largest Potter's Field Should Be a Public Park
Burials on Hart Island in 1890 (photograph by Jacob A. Riis, via the Museum of the City of New York) Since 1869, some 850,000 people have been buried on Hart Island in the Long Island Sound off the...
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Of Mazes and Mourning: Getting Lost in an Indian Labyrinth
A view of the mosque attached to Bara Imambara from the top of the labyrinth. (photograph by Kristen Zipperer)It was a summer that felt like forever — perhaps because all we had access to was slow...
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19th Century Celestial Charts That Illuminated the Heavens in Your Home
© National Museums ScotlandA stunning set of 32 celestial charts manufactured in the 1820s was attributed only to a mysterious "lady," and if you held them up to the light you could see the stars.Known...
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Society Adventures: The Harrowing Remains of a Forgotten California Dam Disaster
The dam before the disaster (via documentingreality.com)When it collapsed on March 12, 1928, St. Francis Dam became — and still is — the second worst disaster in California's history, and the greatest...
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One Line Adventures: An Abandoned Amusement Park, Trespassing at the...
Our team at Atlas Obscura is always exploring the overlooked and unexpected, whether in our own backyards or in far-flung locales. In One-Line Adventures, we send out some quick dispatches of recent...
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