Author: Dylan

Horsetail Fall’s Fire Fall

The highest fully-airborne waterfall in Yosemite which for a few minutes on a few days each year, turns a luminescent fiery orange

Horstail Fall is seasonal waterfall which flows in winter and early spring. The fall comes off the El Capitan mountain in two distinct streams and drops some 1570 feet onto steep slabs spraying up in a mist before continuing down another 500 feet to the bottom of the mountain.
But as beautiful as the fall is by itself, it is the few days every year during the last two weeks of February when it becomes the “fire fall” that people wait for. As the sun sets, and dips behind the horizon line, everything will begin to go dark and it will seem, for a moment, as if the firefall has failed to ignite. But as the last of the sunlight disappears it will hit and reflect off the falls at the exact right angle creating a spectacular, if short lived, effect which looks like a beautiful flowing cascade of fluid fire.
Bizarrely, Yosemite Park used to actually create “fire falls” by pushing huge piles of coals off the edge of a cliff. These were an incredibly popular tourist sight from the 1880s all the way through the 1960s when the park realized this was a fire hazard (which seems kind of obvious) and stopped. Luckily this natural phenomenon was able to pick up where the park rangers left off.

Read more about Horsetail Fall’s Fire Fall on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Natural Wonders, Watery Wonders, Fiery Wonders, Intriguing Environs, Optical Oddities
Location:
Edited by: Dylan

North Korea’s International Friendship Exhibition Hall

A bizarre collection of gifts to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il from the despots of the world

If you are a iron-fisted despot, or terrorist organization, what do you get another tyrannical dictator as a gift? It would seem, judging from North Korea’s “International Friendship Exhibition Hall” that going with a dead animal is always a safe bet.
Located in the UN recognized biosphere reserve of Mount Myohyang, North Korea’s “International Friendship Exhibition Hall” is an exercise in contradictions. First off, for North Korea, one of the most isolated countries in the world, having an “International Friendship Exhibition Hall” itself is a bit of a contradiction. In essence it amounts to an enormous collection of gifts given to Kim Il Sung, and his son Kim Jung Il by various other communist, terrorist, and despotic regimes.
Among the over 100,000 items gifted to the Kim’s are: Green railway cars from Mao and Stalin, a bronze tank from the USSR headquarters in East Germany, a gold cigarette case from Yugoslavia’s Tito,a 25-watt boombox from the People’s Republic of China Communist Party which seems kind of cheap, considering, a gem-encrusted silver sword and reproduction of a Moslem mosque from Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat, and an antique gramophone from China’s first premier Zhou Enlai.
This isn’t to say the US has never given anything. Yet another of the contradictions of the “International Friendship Exhibition Hall” is that gifts have indeed been given by the democratic western world, albeit only a few, and are proudly displayed. The circumstances of the gifts form the US are unknown and probably date to Kim Sung’s era, but include a book, vase and mirror, three pewter and silver pieces, and two homemade art objects. One can’t help but wonder who made these “art objects” and what they could possibly be. Among the other gifts from the west is a basketball signed by Micheal Jordan, and given (for what reason it is unclear) by Madeleine Albright.
One of the more bizarre gifts are perfect copies of the black limousine cruisers seen in “The Untouchables from Soviet leaders Georgy Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganina. Obviously less concerned with impressing North Korea, Gorbachev sent only a Glass vase with the Communist star on it. Mongolia sent silver chopsticks, while the Chairman of the Journalist Association of Kuwait sent a pen set.
From various Industrialists trying to woo Kim Jung Il: a robot drink server, wooden mace, astronaut’s suit, Sony Walkman, Casio keyboard, Yamaha organ, football signed by Pele, and an old Apple computer — which seems like someone might have just been getting rid of their trash — and once again with a somewhat unimpressive display, a tiny rubber ashtray from the Hwabei Tire Factory in China.
But by far the most popular theme for gifts given by one dictator to another is taxidermy. Fidel Castro gave a crocodile-skin briefcase, and Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator who was overthrown and killed by his own people, gave a bear head mounted on a red satin pillow. Lebanon gave Water buffalo-horn handles and the president of Tanzania gave an ivory lion. The National Black United Front gave Kim a small butterfly collection, at some point Canada gave Norht Korea a polar bear skin, and someone gave a tiger claw positioned as to be tearing through an American map.
Of course, the most creative and unusual of the gifts, belongs not a dictator or even a head of state, but naturally, a revolutionary. The Sandanistas of Nicaragua donated an upright grinning alligator, holding out a wooden tray of cocktail glasses. It comes with a matching ashtray.
While to an outsider the museum represents a bizare collection, with a remarkable amount of kitsch, ashtrays, and uninteresting consumer goods, it is not outsiders that are the intended audience. North Koreans have almost no contact with the outside world, and this is one place in which they are allowed to see many of the goods from around the world. The aim is to convince them that their leaders are universally admired and lavished with gifts.
One of the halls gaurds is noted as having noted the basketball signed by Micheal Jordan and saying “When the general plays with that ball, it proves that he controls the whole world in his hands.” For that North Korean Guard, Kim Jung Il really does hold the whole world in his hands.

Read more about North Korea’s International Friendship Exhibition Hall on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Museums and Collections, Unique Collections, Hunting and Taxidermy, Cultures and Civilizations , Rites and Rituals, Follies and Grottoes
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Edited by: Dylan

The Big Well

The United States largest hand-dug well, with a new museum on the way

Kansans, it seems, have dug themselves into a hole, and they couldn’t be happier about it.
Boasted as the world’s largest hand dug well, and known as “The Big Well” it was begun in 1884, with farmers, cowboys and transients in crews of 10 to 15 working from sun-up till sun-down using only shovels, picks, a half barrel, pulley and rope to dig the well. Their pay was 50 cents to a dollar a day.
At 32 feet wide and 109 feet deep, it is indeed a very big well, though despite its claim, the Big Well isn’t quite the largest hand-dug in the world. The Pozzo di S. Patrizio or St. Patrick’s Well, built in 1527 in Orvieto, Italy, is larger as 200 feet by 42 feet, but it is certainty the largest in the US.
Recently named on of the 8 wonders of Kansas, the residents of Greensburg have long been proud of their well, but maintaining it hasn’t always been easy going. The well was a popular stop in the 1970s and 1980s, with thousands of visitors stopping by each year to throw a coin, shoe, or other lucky item into the bottom, (in the 90s the town hired divers to clean the bottom of the well and a silver onyx crucifix was found) and many buying the two dollar ticket to take a journey down into the well. But by the 1990s it seems that the well’s supply of tourists had dried up.
Even worse in 2007 a tornado, destroyed almost the entire town, including the Well’s visitor center, leaving only a few buildings and, of course, the well itself. But what was initially a disaster became a chance for Greensburg to put themselves and their well, on the map. The town began rebuilding as the most “environmentally friendly little town” in America. Solar panels and composting toilets were installed and with the help of TV show “Planet Green,” which was about the towns recovery and conversion to green tech, the town began to receive attention and visitors many of whom made a stop by the Big Well.
Greensburg decided that as well as renovating the town, it was time to renovate the Big Well and a 3 million dollar museum has been planned. Not all the residents are so sure though that a fancy museum will attract enough visitors to come to the Big Well to make it worth the cost. Nonetheless the plans are moving forward and hopefully, the new Big Well Museum will do well, big time.

Read more about The Big Well on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Subterranean Sites
Location: Greensburg Fire Department, Kansas, US
Edited by: Dylan

National Library of Israel’s Hidden “Stalag” Collection

Hidden out of public view in the National Library of Israel is a collection of “Stalag’s,” 1960s Nazi themed porno paperbacks written and consumed by Israelis

Part of the mission of the National Library of Israel is to secure copies of all material published in Israel.
Normally this is not a problem, and the collection of the National Library of Israel is unrivaled in the world for its collection of Hebraica and Judaica. But on occasion, collecting everything published in Israel makes for some awkward moments. Point in case, the library’s hidden collection of “stalag’s” or nazi themed porno paperbacks, created and written by Israeli authors and consumed by Israeli teenagers in the 1960s.
Stalag’s were a short lived phenomenon, only lasting a handful of years before being made illegal. Curiously, they reached the height of their popularity during the infamous Eichmann trial. Originally said to simply be translations of English authors, on closer inspection the genre seems to have been fully Israeli. Almost the only pornographic material available, it was purchased by teenagers, often the children of Holocaust survivors.
The plots usually involved female SS officers (non-exisitant in the actual WWII) hell bent on punishing a male, generally American or English, hero imprisoned in her Stalag of pain/pleasure. These books were also heavily influenced by the 1955 book “The House of Dolls” by K. Tzetnik, an anonymous survivor of Auschwitz who wrote about women prisoners forced into prostitution by the Nazi guards. Though received well in the 1950s, the book was later said to be fictional, and has since been recast and is thought of as a precursor to the “Stalag” books.
A particularly famous Stalag was “I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch” which caused such an uproar that all the copies of the books were confiscated by the police.
After two years of high popularity the stalag books were made illegal and largely disappeared from Israeli society , unless of course you go to the National Library of Israel where held in a back room, not available to the public (though accessible if you are a researcher) are copies of “I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch” and many other Stalags, examples of the many strange ways in which culture handles and mixes tragedy, violence and sex into new and strange brews.
A documentary about the Stalag books was recently Written & Directed by Ari Libsker.

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Edited by: Dylan

Gungywamp

Gungywamp is either an archeologists dream or nightmare, depending on how you look at it

Gungywamp in Groton, Connecticut is the kind of site that drives archeologists crazy.
First off it is a very messy story. The site, located in the Connecticut woods less than an hour away from New Haven, consists of multiple stone chambers, rings of stones, piles of rock, Native American artifacts, mysterious etchings, Lithic artifacts, Colonial artifacts, and hundreds or even thousands of years of various settlers adopting and rearranging the site, it is difficult to tell where one historical period ends and another begins.
To add to this the site attracts what might be called archeological conspiracy theories. Among the most popular of these theories (one that crops up at multiple stone sites in the Northeast, see America’s Stonehenge) is that the site is a pre-Colombian settlement build by 6th-century Celtic Christian monks who escaped Ireland to avoid Norse aggression.
While it is easy to dismiss this theory, the confirmation of pre-columbian Norse contact in Newfoundland, and the increasing likelihood that Polynesians may have had contact in South America make it increasing more difficult to dismiss it out of hand. Nonetheless no findings confirming the theory have ever been found by any credible linguists, epigraphers, or archaeologists, making it still a fringe theory at best.
Even less credible theories involving aliens, some kind of ancient peoples, and energy vortexes also surround the site. For the tour guides it is particularly frustrating as on a magnetometer the site does in fact exhibit occasional spikes in electromagnetic activity. This is believed by geologists to be the result of the composition of quartz, granite and magnetite rocks, but that does little to dissuade those who believe Gungywamp to be a UFO influenced “energy vortex.”
What has officially been found at Gungywamp is not much less confusing or mysterious. A lithic stone pounding tool has been found there that dates to at least 1500 B.C, which is pre-tribal Indian. The site certainly has plenty of Indian artifacts which include arrowheads, stone flakes and pottery fragments. The Native American inhabitants may also be responsible for the stone circles which some believe are astronomical tools and which others believe are colonial mill or hide tanning areas.
However, it is the multiple stone chambers that get people the most excited. Thought by most to be root cellars built by colonial settlers, they have some strange properties, including one designed to line up with the equinoxes, so that light shines though a small window. This seems not to fit with the work of colonial settlers. The 30-foot rock ledges, and eagle petroglyph only provide further mystery and confusion to the site.
Whether constructed by Colonial era European settlers, slaves in colonial times, by Native Americans such as the Pequot or Mohegan tribes, or even (however unlikely) by Irish Monks the site will no doubt provide plenty of work, and frustration, to archeologists for many years to come.

Read more about Gungywamp on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Lost Tribes, Incredible Ruins, Subterranean Sites
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Edited by: Dylan

The Utter Inn

A floating underwater hotel, created by a Swedish artist

The Utter Inn has what could be called at best very limited accommodations. It has only one available room houses only two single beds, but those lucky enough to occupy those two beds get a singular experience.
Created by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg, the Utter in is a hotel room / art piece / and marine life observation station all at once. Divided in two parts, part one floats above the water looking like a small cabin, in the design of a Swedish red house and contains a toilet, and a small cooker. But crawl through a hatch on the floor of part one, and you enter the real selling point of the Utter Inn, a bedroom three meters under the water, (essentially an watertight box) with windows on all four sides looking out into the Swedish Lake Malaren.
Located miles from the shore, to get to this small man-made “island” guests are picked up by an inflatable boat at the port, driven out to the hotel and left on their own until the next day. Other than the row boat which is provided (for exploring nearby natural islands) there is no way back.
Guests spend their time, watching the sunset, passing boats and birds overhead and sipping wine… provided they were smart enough to remember to bring some along. In the morning they awake to the sight of fishes feeding just feet away from their bedroom windows.
Remember however, this isn’t the tropics so don’t expect rainbow fish, more like pike and perch doing what they do naturally completely oblivious to the strange visitors peering at them from within a very unusual hotel.

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Edited by: Dylan

Larry Spring School of Common Sense Physics

94-year-old man teaches his own “common sense” laws of physics

It is hard to know what to make of 94-year-old Larry Spring. Born in 1915, as a boy Larry took an interest in radio and airplanes, going on to become a pilot during WWII. Upon returning from the war Larry owned his own television sales and service shop, and took a renewed interest in the science behind radio waves.
In 1954 Larry says he independently verified the speed of light using comparison dipole antennas and a field strength meter. This was to be the beginning of the creation of what Larry Spring calls his “common sense physics.” Put simply Larry believes and teaches a view of physics based on the idea that light is neither particle nor wave but a “magnesphere,” a pure magnetic sphere of alternating polarity that drives electrons. Among his theories are “spring atoms” and that heat is the result of electron activity within the atom not friction from their movement.
Of course all of this is arrived at without peer review, and 94-year-old Larry would readily verify he is not a physics professor or mathematician. Larry sees this as his strength and why he is able to think “outside the box.” In his own words “I’m just playing around with the basics. It works and it’s not in the books.”
A lifetime of being a science outsider has led Larry to a somewhat cynical sense of humor about mainstream physics. He has made a number of cartoons and one about peer review reads “There are no peers for new discoveries. To judge something a peer would have to know about it. If a peer already knew about it, it would not be a new discovery.” Whatever one feels about his scientific theories, his dedication to self-education, and the ability of one man to attempt to make new discoveries is impressive.
Larry occasionally gives classes from his Fort Brag studio which features a window display of many of his “Common Sense Physics” models and inventions. His self published books, inventions and other items can be purchased as his website: http://www.larryspring.com

Read more about Larry Spring School of Common Sense Physics on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Strange Science, Repositories of Knowledge
Location: Fort Bragg, California, US
Edited by: Dylan

Fete de l’Ours: Festival of the Bears

Take black faced bears with giant clubs, white face barbers wielding axes, hunters armed with shotguns, and mix in a lot of drinking

To the unfamiliar, the “Festival of Bears” or Fete de l’Ours in Prats de Mollo, might at first appear to be A. the lost work of Mathew Barney, B. a highly offensive minstrel show, or C. madness.
While C would be closest to the truth, the festival has roots that go back to the pre-christian legends of this Catalan region of the Eastern Pyrenees. According to the story a young shepherdess tending her flock was startled by a bear, who was actually the devil in disguise and carried away to a nearby cave where — like any good bear-devil — he intended to seduce her and steal her virginity.
The virgin-shepherdess prayed to the nearby chapel Notre Dame du Coral (the Christian elements were likely grafted onto the story somewhere along the way) and the bear was unable to go near her without howling in pain and frustration. Local woodcutters heard the cries, came hither, thwarted the bear-devil, and saved the shepherdess. The end of the story (which trails on a bit after the saving of the shepherdess) ends with a hermit and a boy setting a trap for the bear and the bear falling to its death..
But it is the way in which the legend is acted out which makes this festival a particularly amazing sight.
Essentially the young people of Prats de Mollo, are either a bear, a barber, or a hunter. If you are a bear (usually a job assigned to the most in shape of the residents) you cover yourself in a coating of soot and oil turning yourself a jet black, and are provided with a large club or stick. The hunters meanwhile are given the reassuring combination of a gourd of ’good wine’ and a shotgun filled with blanks. Finally if you are a barber you are covered in flour and dressed in white with a lace bonnet, though you still get to be armed with a heavy chain, One barber each also carries an axe, a “botifarra” or locally made blood pudding and a basin. These will come in handy later on.
Once everyone has been provided with their appropriate accoutrement, and is sufficiently sauced (heavy drinking is a large part of the festival) three shots ring out from the Fort Lagarde and the madness begins.
The bears run immediately run out into the crowd stick swinging overhead and begin wresting spectators to the ground and smearing them in the black goo they are covered in. The hunters are in close pursuit, swinging their wine and firing shotgun blanks into the air. The crowd is going wild.
After this goes on for a while the ’hommes en blanc’ or ’barbers’ intervene, catching the bears in their chains. The bears are forced to sit down and are covered in black pudding (representing soap) and “shaved” by the axe returning them to human form.
The final piece is a mad dance circle in which bears, hunters and barbers all dance around in a frenzied fury until a gunshot is fired and the bears fall to the ground “dead.” Three days of partying follow.

ow exactly all of this — such as the barbers, for example — emerged from the legend, is somewhat unclear.
The festival takes place on the second Sunday of Februar

Read more about Fete de l’Ours: Festival of the Bears on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Cultures and Civilizations , Wondrous Performances, Rites and Rituals
Location: Prats de Mollo, France
Edited by: Dylan

Popcorn Park Zoo

A unusual sanctuary for abused and exotic animals in South Jersey

Established in 1977, Popcorn Park Zoo is a sanctuary for abandoned, injured, ill, exploited, abused or elderly wildlife, exotic and farm animals, and birds.
It houses over 200 rescued animals, and even includes a pet adoption center.
ocated on 7 acres in New Jersey’s beautiful Pinelands, Popcorn Park offers an environment of safety, care, and peace to its residents, a diverse array of animals unfortunate enough to need a rescue, but lucky enough to wind up here.

Read more about Popcorn Park Zoo on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Fascinating Fauna
Location: Forked River, New Jersey, US
Edited by: Dylan

Urology Museum

A fascinating museum dedicated to the under-appreciated medical history of urology featuring some wince inducing devices

Few people take the time to appreciate how far the medicine of urology has come, unless of course you are afflicted with Gallstones. (edit: kidney stones?)
It wasn’t long a go that a gallstone was a life threatening affair. Among the historical figures who suffered from the painful bladder stones are Napoleon Bonaparte, Peter the Great, Louis XIV, Oliver Cromwell, Benjamin Franklin, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and famous diarist Samuel Pepys, who after surviving the operation to remove the stone (an operation that often killed those who underwent it) celebrated the occasion every year with a huge feast.
Benjamin Franklin fashioned a silver catheter for himself and his brother both of whom suffered from the stones. Such was the power of one who could successfully remove the stone that Frère Jacques Beaulieu – a famous French “lithotomist” or one who removed gallstones – name lives on in the French children’s song “Frère Jacques.” That’s right, “Frère Jacques” is quite possibly about a Renaissance era urologist.
It was in fact a rich patient, Brady, a Gilded Age entrepreneur who funded the John Hopkins Brady Urological Institute after being successfully treated for gallstones. Today Gallstones are treated regularly and with little fanfare. With new techniques, surgery isn’t even necessary and the stones can be broken up with sound waves. The William P. Didusch Center for Urologic History located in the American Urological Association’s headquarters (which is still closely tied with the John Hopkins Brady Urological Institute) celebrates this and many other breakthroughs in urology.
Started not by a doctor, but by William P. Didusch a medical illustrator who focused in urology, the museum contains most of Didusch’s original drawings, as well as an impressive instrument collection, with hundreds of scopes, most important among them the collection of nearly 600 cystoscopes.
The Cystoscope, an instrument inserted into the urethra and used by urologists to see the inside of the bladder and urethra, was a revolution in Urology. It allowed doctors to diagnose patients without performing surgery to see what the problem was. However, it is not without some sympathetic wincing that one views the older, and larger of the Cystoscopes. The museum also keeps a collection of urology related historical medical texts, among them the pamphlet aptly and humorously named “Pisse-Prophet.”
Besides the cystoscopes, among the most curious items in the urological collection are walking canes to held catheters, a collection of more than 30 microscopes dating back to the 1700’s, and an enormous “pineapple sized” bladder stone.
The museum has rotating exhibits which have included “Sexuality: Perception and Performance Throughout History” which displayed a jade phallus, anti-masturbation devices (a ring with spikes on the inside) and penile silicone implants from the 1980s, “Fad, Fraud, Future? Quackery and Nostrums in Urology” and currently “Remedies and Recipes” about historical treatments for urological ailments. Many of the items from past exhibits can still be seen on display.
In case the museum really happens to catch your attention and you are qualified, you can join the staff as the museum is currently looking for a curator. Viewing the collection is free but by appointment only.

Read more about Urology Museum on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Strange Science, Medical Museums, Unique Collections
Location: Linthicum Census Designated Place, Maryland, US
Edited by: Dylan

Belhaven Memorial Museum

A monument to the sheer amount of oddities one can collect over a lifetime.

The Belhaven museum is comprised almost entirely out of the collection of one woman, “Miss Eva.”
Her life of avid collecting of began small with a collection of buttons given to her by her mother. Over the years, her collection grew to over 30,000 buttons from around the world. Her interest was not, however, limited to buttons. She collected Christmas memorabilia, period clothing, toys and dolls, china, farm tools and natural history specimens.
Her collection grew to over 10,000 items (not including the 30,000 buttons of course), and at her death at the age of 93, this vast and priceless collection was moved to its current location in the historic town hall. Favorites include a mustache cup and it’s matching saucer which states its motto, “A mustache makes a man. A razor makes a mouse.”

Read more about Belhaven Memorial Museum on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Museums and Collections, Unique Collections
Location: Belhaven, North Carolina, US
Edited by: Dylan

Pomuch Cemetery

In Pomuch Cemetery in Campeche, Mexico once a year the dead are taken out for a cleaning

Many are familiar with the now well known Mexican Day of the Dead Celebration held on Nov. 2cnd each year. A celebration of ones ancestors it has a distinctly fun meets macabre atmosphere with sugar and bread skulls for eating, make-up that resembles skulls, and a day spent in the cemetery telling stories of relatives and friends.
However, in Pomuch Cemetery in the small Mayan town of Campeche, Mexico the connection with the dead goes even farther. Each year on the day of the dead, family members visit the cemetery and ritually clean the bones of their loved ones and place them on display among flowers and new cloth for veneration.
Those who die in Campeche, be they a newborn or an eighty year old, are all buried for three years, and then are dug up on the Day of the Dead (this can be a difficult experience for the family members) to have their bones cleaned and transferred to a wooden crate placed on permanent display in the cemetery. From each year there on out, family members will come every November 1st (specifically for dead children known as Day of the Innocents) and November 2cnd and clean the bones of their fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, and so on.
The custom may date back directly to Mayan practices in which skulls of ancestors were often kept and venerated. Curiously as technology has progressed and entered into our bodies themselves, items like steel hip joints have entered into the remains and must be cleaned differently from the bones themselves.
The ritual which is said to help deal with the pain of death and keep the family together, is also tied to a belief that a poorly taken care of relative can “become angry and wonder lost through the streets.” There is some concern that as the youth of Campeche become more modernized they will abandoned the tradition of cleaning the dead. In the words of one local man speaking of his children “I can’t make them do it, but if they don’t, I don’t know where I’m going to end up.”

Read more about Pomuch Cemetery on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Memento Mori, Relics and Reliquaries, Ossuaries, Catacombs, Crypts, & Cemeteries, Cultures and Civilizations , Rites and Rituals
Location: Pomuch, Mexico
Edited by: Dylan

Hvítserkur

Rising from the sea like a stone monster

Hvitserkur, which translates to mean “white shirt” and derives its name from being covered in Shag and Commerant guano, rises 15 metres, or nearly 50 feet from the sea.
Once the plug of a volcano, over the years the craters surrounding the rock plug gave way to the pounding Atlantic Ocean leaving only the unusual outcropping Hvítserkur behind. Curiously Hvítserkur itself would have given way to the ocean as wel, had its foundations not been shored up with concrete some years ago.
Said to look like a dragon drinking from the water, the Icelandic legend has it that it was a troll who forgot to retreat from the light and was turned to stone in the sunrise. The geological oddity was commemorated on an Icelandic stamp in 1990.

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Edited by: Dylan

The Anatomical Machines of Cappella Sansevero

These “anatomical machines” are only one of the many strange items in this Italian crypt

Once the private place of worship for Sansevero family, and then transformed into their burial chapel, this church museum holds some very strange and astounding objects.
It was under the eccentric hand of Raimondo di Sangro, the Prince of Sansevero, that the Cappella Sansevero began to form the collection it has today. The head of the Neapolitan masonic lodge, Raimondo di Sangro was a true Renaissance man, an ardent disciple of the sciences, practitioner of alchemy, a mystic, inventor and polyglot.
The prince spoke numerous languages including Arabic and Hebrew, and invented, among other wonders, a hydraulic device, an “eternal flame” using chemical compounds of his own invention, and a carriage with wooden horses which, apparently, could travel on both land and water.
To the townsfolk, this all seemed a bit…dark wizardish. A “black legend” arose about the prince and local rumors flew that the prince could create blood out of nothing, that he was a Rosicrucian, (as a Mason he was close enough) and that he had people killed in order to carry out his dark experiments. (It only added to his dark reputation that a grizzly murder, with which the Prince had nothing to do, took place in his family home.)
Ignoring the speculation on his evil ways, the Prince went about his business collecting an interesting set of artistic and scientific objects. Among these were two “anatomical machines” showing a man and a pregnant woman. (There was once an anatomical fetus displayed as well, but it was stolen from the museum.) Built on real human skeletons, these fleshless bodies represent the veins, arteries and musculature in amazing detail. Long thought to be made by an early form of plastination, they were recently discovered to be made — with the exception of the human skeletons — of beeswax, iron wire, and silk.
The anatomical “Adam and Eve,” was made by anatomist Giuseppe Salerno, and meant to illustrate the viscera, and arterial systems of human beings. But they also furthered the “black legend” around the prince, and many believed that the prince had two of his servants killed to use their bodies in the construction of the models.
Other interesting objects in the Crypt include the sculptures “Veiled Truth” and the “Veiled Christ.” The “Veiled Christ” is a particularly bizarre looking sculpture made from a marble, which distinctly resembles Han Solo encased in Carbonite. The Veiled Christ inspired a number of its own “Black legends” including that the Prince had invented a process for the “marblisation” of real human bodies.
Between the family crypt covered in masonic symbols, the anatomical machines, and the unnerving “veiled” sculptures, it is not difficult to understand why the Prince was surrounded a “black legend.” Then again, this may have been just how the mysterious alchemist Prince wanted it.

Read more about The Anatomical Machines of Cappella Sansevero on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Medical Museums, Strange Statues, Memento Mori, Relics and Reliquaries, Catacombs, Crypts, & Cemeteries
Location: Globe
Edited by: Dylan

Unit 11 in the Everglades

A failed, unbuilt suburb that has been going feral for decades.

58 miles of roads crisscross 1500 acres of marshy forest in western Palm Beach County, FL. The hundreds of blocks are home to Everglades fauna such as deer, alligators, and wild boar, along with exotic plants and birds.

Read more about Unit 11 in the Everglades on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Ghost Towns
Location:
Edited by: Dylan

Vaux’s Swifts at Chapman School

Tens of thousands of tiny birds swarm into one school chimney every fall

Vaux’s Swifts, small insect-eating birds sometimes described as “cigars with wings”, migrate south en-mass each year, roosting as they travel in hollowed trees and industrial chimneys.
Since the mid 1990s, the Swifts have roosted each September in the chimney of Chapman School in NW Portland, Oregon. Each year hundreds of onlookers gather on the lawn of Chapman school, from about an hour before sunset to about a half hour after, to watch the Swifts gather, organize, perform aerial maneuvers, and finally funnel in a black fluttering cloud into the chimney to roost.

Read more about Vaux’s Swifts at Chapman School on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Fascinating Fauna
Location: Portland, Oregon, US
Edited by: Dylan

Madison Boulder

A Very Big Rock in New Hampshire

Madison Boulder is thought to be the largest glacial erratic – an erratic being a boulder of a certain type of rock that was transported by glacial ice and deposited on bedrock of different type of rock – in North America.
At 23 feet high, 37 feet front-to-back, and 85 feet left-to-right Madison Boulder is estimated to weigh almost 12 million pounds, roughly the weight of 36 blue whales. It was once part of a ledge of Conway Granite and was transported about two miles south to its current location where it now sits on a deposit of Concord Granite.

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Location: Madison, New Hampshire, US
Edited by: Dylan

Moniac Machine

A strange machine made to evaluate the world economy using water and lots of tubes

In 1949, Keynsian economist Bill Phillips (father of the Phillips curve) built the financephalograph, also known as the “Moniac.” Using water to represent money, the massive hydraulic model of the British economy was, for a time, the most complex, and wettest, economics computer in the world.
Besides the one in the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, Moniac machines can also be seen at the Istanbul University, Cambridge University and London’s Science Museum.

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Category: Strange Science, Instruments of Science, Marvelous Maps and Measures
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Edited by: Dylan

Clock Museum

A small museum filled with over 1,000 clocks, and one particular clock calibrated to run until the year 9999

The Viennese Clock Museum is housed in the Harfenhaus (Harpist’s House), one of the oldest homes in Vienna. With around 1,000 clocks in all, there is much to see, from ornate pocket watches, to a 15th-century tower clock, to sundials, to rare Japanese pillar clocks, to grandfather clocks, to Black Forest cuckoo clocks, to a huge clock organ (unfortunately not working at the time of this writing).
Of particular note is the 230-year-old astronomical clock, constructed by an Augustinian friar. Built in 1679, and calibrated up to the year 9999, it is a gorgeous piece of engineering. With layers upon layers of golden gears, and over 30 readings and dials, it is stunning.

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Category: Museums and Collections, Unique Collections, Inspired Inventions, Astounding Timepieces, Long Now Locations
Location: Vienna, Austria
Edited by: Dylan

Kiev Monastery of the Caves and Microminiature Museum

This 1000 year old relic-filled cave monastery and UNESCO World Heritage Site also hosts an amazing micro-miniature museum

The Kiev Pechersk Lavra in Kiev, Ukraine is many things.
Also known as the Kiev Monastery of the Caves, first and foremost it is a a historic Orthodox Christian monastery, built on top of a massive series of tunnels. It is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the one of the largest museums in Kiev with many sub-museums held within it.
Though from a distance it looks like an standard orthodox church it is built on top of a hage and “very complex system of narrow underground corridors” that contain monks living quarters. Travelers in the 16-17th century wrote that “that the catacombs of the Lavra stretched for hundreds of kilometres, reaching as far as Moscow and Novgorod” which, though an exaggeration, helped make the complex famous. The catacombs also contain numerous burials and relics, such the bodies of mummified saints such as Saint Kuksha, Nestor the Chronicler, and Alipy of the Caves, which today are displayed covered with cloth.
Among the museums in the above-ground complex are the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine, a Book and print history museum, a museum of Ukrainian folk art, a theater and film arts museum and the state historical library, but by far the strangest and most curious of the museums is the microminiature museum.
This too has a Ukrainian connection, as the micro miniatures are the work of the world microminiature master Mykola Syadristy. Syadristy was born in Ukraine in 1937 and has been crafting micro-miniatures since he was in his twenties or for nearly forty years. Among his creations are the words “‘Long Live Peace in Ukrainian engraved on a human hair, minuscule portraits of Ernest Hemingway and Yuri Gagarin, what is believed to be the world’s smallest book with 12 pages at an astonishing 0.6 square millimetres, each page filled with the writing and illustration of Syadristy himself.
Among the other items to be seen (all of which must be viewed through a microscope) are a golden chess set on a pin head and the picture of Russian composer V V Andreev etched onto glass and fitted into one half of a poppy seed.

Read more about Kiev Monastery of the Caves and Microminiature Museum on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Miniatures, Microminiature art, Memento Mori, Relics and Reliquaries, Catacombs, Crypts, & Cemeteries, Curious Places of Worship, Subterranean Sites
Location: Kiev, Ukraine
Edited by: Dylan