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The Forgotten Stories Behind Presidential Campaign Buttons - JSTOR Daily

2026-10-21T13:45:00.000Z

The race was on. It was the fall of 1960, and the candidates were on the presidential campaign trail. The polls gave Nixon the lead, and talk of a historic debate with Kennedy was in the headlines. Campaign buttons were everywhere: “Pat for First Lady,” they shouted in red, white, and blue.

The Pat pins are rare evidence of this often-forgotten face-off between Pat Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy as their husbands vied for votes in the 1960 election, just one of the many unexpected stories that emerge from the Muhlenberg College Donald Poppe ’59 Presidential Campaign Button Collection, an archive of more than 1,200 pins shared via JSTOR.

“Pat for First Lady” portrait button of Pat Nixon.

Campaign buttons and other swag, former New York City mayor Ed Koch once said, “are the sparkle and glitter of which our campaigns are made.” Donald Poppe would likely agree. Poppe acquired his first campaign button, in support of Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a teenager in the 1950s. The most contemporary items Poppe added to his vast collection before donating it to his alma mater were from 2020: Trump and Pence promised to “keep America great” while Biden and Harris pledged to “build back better.” (Items from the 2024 campaign have since been included.)

Over the decades, Poppe obtained pins from every presidential election since inexpensive, mass-produced campaign buttons were introduced in the 1896 contest between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. The 1896 specimen in the collection represents the older, more formal era of campaign jewelry, with the names McKinley and Hobart embossed in metal alongside a raised elephant head motif, while the 1900 one would be right at home at today’s political rallies: a round, printed portrait of McKinley set under celluloid, produced by Whitehead & Hoag Co., the company that pioneered the style.

Many of the faces and names in the archive are familiar presidents, almost-presidents and frequent also-rans. The slogans are often familiar, too. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump both told voters they would “make America great again” and, when running for a second term, that they would “keep America great.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s pins echoed John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, reading “We want / We need Biden-Harris.” Slogans were even reused in the same contest. Voters in ’68 could be forgiven for being confused about who, exactly, was the “winning team.” Some enterprising button maker produced nearly identical pins trumpeting the strength of the Democratic ticket, the Republican ticket and the far-right American Independent ticket.

"Reagan in '80/Let's Make America Great Again" red, white, and blue portrait button.

"Make America Great Again/Trump/Pence/2016" yellow, red, white, and blue jugate button.

"Keep America Great/Re-Elect Reagan-Bush in '84" red, white, and blue jugate button.

"Keep America Great!/President Donald Trump/Vice-President Mike Pence/Vote Republican" gold, red, white, and blue jugate button.

"We Want / We Need Kennedy" red, white, and blue portrait button.

"We Want / We Need Johnson" red, white, and blue portrait button.

"We Want/We Need/Biden/2020/Harris" green, blue, white, and red jugate button.

"A Winning Team / Humphrey - Muskie" red, white, and blue jugate button with stars.

"A Winning Team / Nixon - Agnew" red, white, and blue jugate button with stars motif.

"A Winning Team/Wallace-LeMay" red, white, and blue jugate button.

But the real fun of the archive is the glimpses of political moments that were as ephemeral as the buttons that memorialize them were meant to be.

What, for instance, was the platform of the “No Jelly” caucus, which had something to say about both Nixon and McGovern in 1972? Selling candy bars during a snack downturn, it seems. The bright yellow buttons advertised each candidate alongside a new peanut butter, puffed rice, and chocolate treat named “No Jelly.” (Of the moniker and the campaign stunt, The New York Times wrote, “the less you try to find some meaning for them, the better off you’ll be.”)

“S O B Club” white button with blue lettering.

Why, exactly, would you advertise your membership in the SOB Club? It was the smart move in April of 1962, if you, like Barry Goldwater, were thought to be a likely rival to Kennedy in ’64. The New York Times had reported that the normally calm Kennedy, in the midst of a tense negotiation over steel prices, had groused bitterly to aides, “my father always told me that all business men were sons-of-bitches but I never believed it till now!” In response to the slight, Goldwater, speaking at a business luncheon, proposed the SOB Club, and soon Republican leaders around the country were sporting such pins.

“Adlai / Estes and Joe Smith” red, white, and blue lapel clip.

And who on earth was Joe Smith, listed as a third running mate on a 1956 Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver button? Smith first made an appearance at the Republican National Convention that year when a Nebraska delegate named Terry Carpenter, who opposed Nixon’s renomination as vice president, named the fictional Joe Smith instead. “Joe Smith is a symbol. I was out to prove whether this was an open or closed convention,” Carpenter told the press after formally voting, along with the rest of the RNC, for the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket. Carpenter planned to retire the stunt—but Joe Smith caught on with Democrats, who cast him as an everyman forgotten by the Republican Party. “We want the Joe Smiths,” Adlai Stevenson said at a press conference. For a few weeks, Stevenson renamed his campaign plane the “Joe Smith Express,” fundraised with the Joe Smith name, and campaigned around the country with real Joe (and Josephine) Smiths.

“We Want Mamie” red, white, and blue portrait button.

Sometimes, though, these ephemeral campaign stunts presaged a lasting shift in presidential politics, as with the “Pat for First Lady” campaign in 1960. Pat Nixon wasn’t the first candidate’s wife to appear in campaign swag—as evidenced by the “We want Mamie” button in support of Mrs. Eisenhower in the collection—but she found a then-unusual independence and prominence in the Nixon campaign. In addition to her own slogan, campaign swag and even a song, the Second Lady made her own speeches and was celebrated by supporters with “Pat Nixon Week” in October 1960.

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The press loved the new angle, and the opportunity to portray her as running against the less-frequently-seen Jacqueline Kennedy, who was then pregnant with her son. (It’s unclear if the Jacqueline Kennedy button in the archive comes from this “race,” but it is unlikely, given the misspelling of “Jaqueline” that it came from the Kennedy campaign.) This more public role for candidates’ spouses would become the norm in subsequent elections.

“America’s First Lady / Jaqueline [sic] Kennedy” red, white, and blue portrait button.

Pat Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy never did get to debate, though. The idea, seemingly proposed by an AP reporter in the aftermath of the influential televised debate between their husbands, was dismissed by Pat Nixon, who was certain the press would focus on the same trivial things they did in daily coverage of the women: “I would be willing to debate something of great value, but I do not think clothes are important and should be an issue.”

The post The Forgotten Stories Behind Presidential Campaign Buttons appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and the Spirit of the Humanities - JSTOR Daily

2026-10-20T13:55:00.000Z

The night that inspired Gothic literature

In 1815, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia released a massive cloud of ash and particulates, large enough to affect global weather. Temperatures plummeted, causing frosty conditions and torrential rain across Europe, North America, and Asia for months. The result? Failed crops, widespread hardship, pestilence, and famine.

Against these events, we begin in 1816—known also as the “Year Without a Summer” or “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death.” At a mansion near Lake Geneva, Switzerland known as the Villa Diodati, a gathering took place. Lord Byron, accompanied by his traveling physician John Polidori, hosted writers Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin), Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Claire Clairmont. Clairmont, Byron’s mistress and mother of his unborn child, had orchestrated the introduction between Byron and the group. The timing of this get-together, however, was far from ideal. For three days, the group remained indoors, confined by the unseasonable and mysterious inclement weather.

To pass the time one evening, having already read aloud eerie and violent narratives like those in Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès’s Fantasmagoriana, Lord Byron presented the group with a challenge: to write chilling tales of their own. From this spirited competition emerged two progenitors of modern horror, science fiction, and fantasy.

The spark of being: A birth of Gothic masterpieces

Victor Frankenstein observing the first stirrings of his creature. Engraving by W. Chevalier after Theodor von Holst, 1831. Wellcome Collection.

This meeting of minds and its tempestuous backdrop produced three significant works: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, The Vampyre by John Polidori, and A Fragment by Lord Byron. Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont’s participation in the friendly competition did not bear such fruit.

Mary Shelley, the daughter of two highly regarded writers, struggled quite a bit to conjure an idea of her own. She hoped to prove worthy of her patrimony by devising a story that evoked the same fears and concepts as the narratives read aloud by the group. After a time, inspired by conversations between Byron and Polidori around the reanimation of corpses, her story dawned on her as though it haunted her itself—she envisioned a man breathing life into the lifeless, later besieged by the waking result of his efforts. From this image, she produced Frankenstein, one of the most enduring literary works of our time.

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Bride of Frankenstein

Betsy Golden Kellem

October 25, 2023

Drawn from the margins of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, the cinematic Bride of Frankenstein is never just one thing, and she never goes away.

Lord Byron, on the other hand, quickly abandoned his entry for the competition. Dubbed A Fragment and later published against his will in a collection of poetry, the incomplete epistolary story follows the narrator’s companionship with an older man during an eastward journey. The older man, plagued by an unknown illness, requests the narrator bury him and return to the location later, but bids him not to tell others of his death. While the story abruptly ends there, Polidori noted that Byron intended for the older man to return to life as a vampire.

Inspired by Byron’s Fragment and fixated on stories by and about Byron besides, John Polidori began writing The Vampyre. Lord Ruthven, a seductive nobleman modeled after Byron himself, is accompanied by the tale’s narrator and later discovered to be the very vampire described in local legends. This work is considered the first of its kind to neatly package elements of vampirism into a single piece of fiction. It is nearly considered folkloric, with contemporary vampires still mirroring the characteristics of Polidori’s Ruthven.

Illuminated themes

William Michael Harnett, Memento Mori, “To This Favour,” 1879. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

Each of the aforementioned three stories explores questions of life, death, and the unknown—questions relevant to modern readers and the human condition at large. They also speak to broader themes of interpersonal relationships, class dichotomies, and ethics.

Frankenstein, in particular, is a vehicle for a wide span of inquiry. It touches on the moral ethics of scientific ambition, the consequences of assuming what some perceive to be God’s role in creating life, and even the potentially devastating impact of men’s actions on the women in their lives. Shelley’s novel continues to influence conversations around deeply human topics, transcending time to produce literary and philosophical dialogue.

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The Vampyre, on the other hand, can be surfaced in conversations around the predatory nature of ruling classes. The work demonstrates the manipulation of power and privilege, exploring how those of a higher station may exploit the vulnerable. The story also touches on the complex relationships between men, namely the dynamics of dominance, dependency, and betrayal.

In addition, both works can be employed to investigate Romantic fascinations with the supernatural and the unknown. They both embody Gothic tropes of anxiety and repression, questions of agency and free will, and indices of societal decay. Together, Frankenstein and The Vampyre remind us of literature’s power to probe the deepest questions of human existence, offering enduring insights into the ethical, social, and existential dilemmas that continue to shape our world.

Eternal light: How collaboration and creation reflect the humanities

A lady telling a gripping story to young women and children. Mezzotint by Valentine Green after John Opie, 1785. Wellcome Collection.

Whether through the lens of scientific hubris in Frankenstein or the predatory allure of aristocracy in The Vampyre, the stories brought forth from that fateful gathering in 1816 remain relevant as they continue to challenge readers to consider the consequences of unchecked ambition, the complexities of human relationships, and the social structures that shape our lives. Their enduring presence in literary and philosophical discussions speaks to the core function of the humanities—to explore, question, and better understand the forces that define our existence.

Beyond the inspiration we continue to derive from these timeless stories, the events around their creation also speak to core tenets of the humanities, those of collaboration and human connection. The gathering at Villa Diodati reminds us that intellectual exchange and shared creativity can lead to works that endure over centuries. The humanities thrive on these interactions, as ideas evolve and grow through debate and dialogue.

So, this Halloween, why not embrace that same spirit? Gather your friends, swap ideas, and try your hand at writing a spooky story of your own. Who knows—your own ghostly gathering may ignite something that stands the test of time. As we just learned, some of the greatest stories began with a friendly challenge and a dark, stormy night.

This is a spooky installment of a series that first appeared on the JSTOR Blog about the enduring importance of the humanities. Stay tuned for more insights on why the humanities still matter.

The post Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and the Spirit of the Humanities appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Adele Spitzeder's Banking Swindle - Amusing Planet

2026-10-19T14:46:41.440Z

In 19th-century Munich, a woman with no formal banking experience began promising ordinary people extraordinary returns on their savings. Workers, servants, craftsmen and farmers flocked to her door, carrying the money they had spent years accumulating. Some mortgaged their homes or sold their land to take advantage of her generosity. For a time, the money flowed so freely that her business appeared almost invincible.

The woman was Adele Spitzeder, a former actress who became one of the most notorious financial swindlers in 19th-century Germany. Her private banking enterprise, popularly known as the Dachauer Bank, promised returns of as much as 10 per cent a month. But behind the apparent prosperity lay a simple deception: much of the money paid to earlier investors came not from profitable investments, but from the deposits of newcomers.

Why Washing Machines Took Decades to Catch On - JSTOR Daily

2026-10-19T13:32:49.000Z

A labor-saving device to lighten the domestic workload … wouldn’t that be taken up in a second? The vacuum cleaner and the electric refrigerator certainly were. These were juiced-up variations on familiar things (brooms, iceboxes) and were welcome—if one could afford them. But electric-powered washing machines, which began to be introduced in the 1910s, had a more uphill road to acceptance at even half the price of refrigerators.

It took the hard sell, going door-to-door during the 1920s and 1930s, to get washing machines in people’s homes. As the contemporary trade publication Electrical Merchandising put it, the washing machine “does not add social standing, it has no luxury appeal, and no entertainment value.”

Business historian Peter Scott explains that clothes-washing was the “least popular chore for nineteenth century housewives, owing to the long, heavy, and unpleasant physical labor that hand-washing required.” Those who could passed the task on to domestic workers or commercial laundries. In the American South, in particular, racial and social dynamics were a high wall for the washing machine industry.

“Even working-class white women outsourced washing to black laundresses, reflecting both the low cost of black female labor and the social convention, established in the slavery era, that heavy manual labor was below the dignity of white southern women.”

Laundry, in short, was not (white) women’s work; even with a machine it wouldn’t be ladylike. Maytag, the industry leader, simply gave up selling in the South for the first half of the 1930s. The industry even tried “overtly racist arguments to deter southern white families from using black laundresses.”

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How American Consumers Embraced Color

Livia Gershon

September 18, 2021

Vivid hues in everyday products became eye-popping reality in the early twentieth century.

In response to this social reluctance, washing machine manufacturers and retailers resorted to high-pressure “forced selling,” as they themselves called it. They targeted blue-collar families who couldn’t afford to outsource their laundry. When the Depression undermined this market sector, the industry switched to selling to white-collar families who were, Scott writes, “struggling to maintain a middle-class lifestyle on reduced incomes.” (Since the Victorian period, cleanliness had been a big part of the middle class’s self-image.)

Two other factors pushed back against the rapid diffusion of washing machines. First, there was serious competition from the commercial laundry industry. The power laundry industry did some $700 million worth of business in 1928, the same year sales of electric washing machines for the home reached $108 million. In 1939, there were some 6,733 power laundries and 15,245 hand laundries in the US.

The National Laundry Owners’ Association and the American Washer and Ironer Manufacturers Association alternated between fierce competition—both claimed the other’s machines spread bacteria—and agreed-upon truces (1927, 1933) before another all-out advertising war and sales campaign in 1936.

Second, the semiautomatic washing machines themselves may have taken some of the drudgery out of clothes washing, but they did not really save time. Scott explains that the person washing “had to manually feed each item of clothing through the powered wringers between each part of the cycle.” You could not just close the door and turn the machine on and leave. Rinse tubs alongside the semiautomatic machines tripled space requirements, making for a much larger overall footprint than today’s models.

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Scott notes that Maytag largely controlled manufacturing through royalty licenses during the interwar period. The company “was said to have stronger competencies, and investments, in legal services than in R&D.” That paid off until it didn’t: a 1939 Supreme Court decision found Maytag’s patent claims invalid.

It would take the post-WWII economic boom, with this radical revisioning of the household (and for that matter, society), for the washing machine to triumph in homes across America. “The victory of the washer” over commercial laundries came only in the 1950s. That decade’s fully automatic machines could be left unattended to rinse, spin, and drain. They could also be readily accessed in self-service establishments—the first was called a “washateria,” but “laundromat” gained wider acceptance—for those without the wherewithal or space for their own machines.

The post Why Washing Machines Took Decades to Catch On appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

NEWS: David Tibet presents HALLUCINATE CHILDREN at the DOX Gallery in Prague. - Wyrd Britain

2026-10-19T11:48:00.585Z

David Tibet the creative force behind Current 93 is hosting what he's rather fabulously called a "Gnostic cartoon PickNick', 'HALLUCINATE, CHILDREN' at the DOX Gallery in Prague from 23 Oct 2026 – 4 Apr 2027.

Through music, word and image David has long been one of our great esoteric, visionary artists and this show looks to pull together all those threads of a creative life that has included collaborations with, amongst many others, Steven Stapleton (of Nurse With Wound), Jhonn Balance & Peter Christopherson (of Coil), Michael Cashmore, Youth, Nick Cave, Tiny Tim, Shirley Collins, Andrew Liles and Anohni.

Photo by Ania Goszczyńska

From the gallery's website...

The exhibition Hallucinate, Children is being developed in collaboration with the artist and will present visual works spanning the full arc of Tibet’s career. It will introduce his artistic practice as an autonomous visual universe, closely interwoven with his music, writings, publishing activities, and long-standing engagement with visionary literature, Biblical and apocryphal texts, and marginal currents of spiritual imagination.

Tibet’s work emerges from a broad tradition of visionary art and literature: from John Milton, William Blake, MR James, Count Stenbock, and Thomas Ligotti to the British hallucinatory underground, Christian apocalypticism, and obscure supernatural writings. Hallucinate, Children invites viewers into a space in which the image is not decoration, but a sign: an urgent, unsettling, and strangely tender testimony to a world perpetually on the threshold of revelation.

For those unfamiliar with David's visual art we've previously shared a video made for his exhibition at the California State University, Fullerton, Begovich Gallery titled 'Invocation of Almost' which you can watch at the link below...

https://wyrdbritain.blogspot.com/2022/09/who-is-david-tibet.html?m=1

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

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Shadows Over Cymru: Uncanny Stories of the Welsh Weird - Wyrd Britain

2026-10-16T18:39:42.459Z

Aaron Worth (editor)
British Library

From the peaks of Eryri to hidden valleys and haunted mines, the storied landscapes of Wales have inspired centuries of myth and folklore. Over time, these tales of the unexplained and the Otherworld have formed a unique strain of weird fiction.

Continuing the British Library's 'Gilded Nightmares' series of lavish hardbacks is this rather fabulous collection of stories exploring the darker side of Wales.

One only needs to glance at the Welsh flag to understand the importance of the mythic in Wales; the "land of my fathers" is a place of stories, a land steeped in mysteries old and new. This collection utilises the geography, the mythology and the character of the country to explore it's very nature. The book revels in a country awash with story; a country of hidden places, creatures, people, and gods. Stories by authors steeped in the heritage - Arthur Machen, Dylan Thomas, Richard Hughes - and by those finding inspiration in it - Algernon Blackwood, L.T.C. Rolt, A.C Benson, John Wyndham, Marjorie Bowen - travel the Welsh hinterlands unveiling secrets and mysteries in all the dark, neglected and forgotten corners.

In the hands of these writers, many amongst the crème of the golden age of weird fiction, Wales is a land of uncanny mystery as unforgiving as it is inviting. A place where the fantastical finds itself at odds with the mundane; a land where the supernatural lurks, poised beneath the surface, watchful for the unwary.

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The Women Breaking the Rules of Balinese Dance - JSTOR Daily

2026-10-16T13:45:52.000Z

If you were asked to picture Balinese dancers, the Luh Luwih troupe might not be what comes to mind. Founded in 1995 as an offshoot of a pioneering gamelan wanita (women’s orchestra), the thirty-member troupe is composed mostly of middle-aged women who have “set about performing the all-male genres one by one,” as scholar Catherine Diamond explains.

“The group presents something of a paradox in its choice of name,” she adds. “Luh means female and luwih is the quintessence of femaleness in the positive sense … but the group is demonstrating its ‘femaleness’ by appropriating the male forms.”

As increasing numbers of all-women troupes take on dance forms once reserved for men, Balinese performers are challenging traditional gender roles in the performing arts, Diamond argues. Dramatic dances such as wayang wong, based on the Hindu epic Ramayana, and kecak, or “monkey chant,” have traditionally been off-limits to women. In wayang wong, for example, performers enact fight scenes between monkeys and demons.

But far from shying away from such genres, Luh Luwih has introduced its own artistic innovations. In one kecak performance, for example, the troupe features an all-female chorus and middle-aged women dancers, rather than male vocalists accompanying young women. According to Diamond, Balinese women’s unprecedented participation in historically male performance traditions “has been generally empowering, both musically and socially, while at the same time raising questions about modernity in the context of Balinese cultural values.”

Beyond providing secular entertainment, the performing arts in Bali also have a deep spiritual dimension. Playing gamelan, for instance, can be seen as ngayah, or religious service. This form of ngayah was traditionally reserved for men, while women—who usually stopped dancing after marriage—performed ngayah by making offerings such as rice cakes.

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Where Dance Meets the Spirit World

H.M.A. Leow

August 7, 2026

The history of kuda kepang, the Javanese horse dance whose trance rituals continue to spark religious debate.

Now, women musicians have embraced gamelan as ngayah too. As gamelan wanita has grown in popularity since the 1980s, “women are taking on an additional commitment and responsibility by appropriating areas of artistic expression that had been arbitrarily denied,” says Diamond.

Music isn’t the only arena in which older women are challenging traditional performance roles. Many now feel empowered to continue dancing—and aren’t content with being limited to the roles traditionally performed by younger women. “[T]he roles for young girls are not satisfying vehicles for some women who seek more suitable representations of their own life experience,” Diamond writes. “One of the ways in which they have attempted to expand their repertoire has been to appropriate male roles.”

Tourism has also reshaped Balinese performance traditions. The island’s economy has become increasingly reliant on visitors drawn to its cultural attractions. Tourists are eager to catch a glimpse of Balinese dance, but their expectations have also altered how gender is performed.

The growth of tourism in the 1960s “greatly stimulated the creation of ‘free dance’ performances” that are “detached from any tie of a dramatic or ritual nature, and just follow each other in a haphazard fashion,” reports Michel Picard. As a result, theatrical works have been adapted as solo dances, while some court dances have been simplified for tourist audiences.

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Tourists’ perception of Balinese dance as feminine may also be discouraging men from performing—potentially creating more opportunities for women to take on traditionally male roles.

Some women are pushing boundaries even further. They reinterpret traditional narratives to take on “coarse or aggressive roles” rather than playing only refined aristocrats. For instance, Cok Sawitiri—whom Diamond calls “one of Bali’s most innovative performance artists and an outspoken social activist”—reimagined the classic story of Panji Semirang in a 2003 solo performance piece, Aku Bukan Perempuan Lagi (I Am a Woman No More).

At the climax of the original narrative, Prince Panji reunites with his consort Candra Kirana after unmasking her male disguise. Cok Sawitiri’s version, in contrast, depicts Candra Kirana as a jilted princess—who, while disguised, seduces both the prince and his female lover. Although Bali has long been a destination for foreign artists and other tourists, Balinese women performers are asserting themselves as far more than models and muses for the orientalist gaze.

By taking on traditionally male roles and bringing new female perspectives to established performance traditions, Balinese women “are creating new fusions that … expand the aesthetic parameters of art identifiable as ‘Balinese,’” Diamond observes.

The post The Women Breaking the Rules of Balinese Dance appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Where to See the World’s Most Famous Preserved Body Parts - Atlas Obscura

2026-10-16T13:29:00.000Z

From Galileo’s middle finger to Chopin’s heart, these body parts have long outlived the rest of their owners.

Sure, you’ve seen a dead body before, but have you ever seen a thumb preserved in salt? How about a saint’s heart shrouded in gold?

Beyond the normal displays of skeletons in medical museums and holy leaders’ bodies in churches and temples, there’s a whole world of bits and pieces to explore. Throughout history, body parts have been taken as trophies during wartime, worshipped as miraculous healing agents, cut off and displayed to honor their owners, or simply saved incidentally by natural processes.

If seeing a whole body feels banal, we recommend delving from the complete corpse to its components. Here are some of our favorites from around the world.

This young girl was embalmed in arsenic in the 1940s. Michelle Enemark for Atlas Obscura

1. National Museum of Health and Medicine - Silver Spring, Maryland

Among the 24 million medical instruments and anatomical specimens housed here are portions of Abraham Lincoln’s skull (and the attached hair), as well as Gen. Daniel Sickles’ amputated leg and the unusual skull of a Civil War soldier who was shot across the top of the head. Other displays include small skeletons showcasing the different stages of a child’s development, a conjoined twin preserved in alcohol, and the mummified head and shoulders of a girl from the late 19th century. The museum is also home to one of the world’s largest neuroanatomical collections, consisting of normal and pathological human brains and comparative mammalian brains.

Traditionally, the challenge is completed using Yukon Jack whisky, but any liquor will work. newsham1 / Atlas Obscura User

2. The Sourtoe Cocktail - Dawson City, Yukon

Many moons ago, miner and rumrunner Louie Linken had his frostbitten toe amputated and preserved in a jar of alcohol ... for posterity. Decades later, it was discovered by a local Yukon captain, who brought it to a saloon (now the Downtown Hotel bar) and started plopping it into folks’ drinks as a surprise garnish. The original toe lasted seven years before a replacement was needed, and since then, a whole foot’s worth of toes have been donated to the bar. For those who dream of joining the Sourtoe Cocktail Club, there’s only one rule: “You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but the lips have gotta touch the toe.”

The man has been lovingly nicknamed Pete Marsh. Mike Peel/CC BY-SA 4.0

3. Lindow Man - London, England

Scientists believe that this 25-year-old man died somewhere between 2 B.C. to A.D. 119. The bog he was found in left him remarkably well preserved, allowing for close study of his skin, hair, and internal organs. (The last meal in his stomach? Unleavened bread made from wheat and barley.) Examination of the man also revealed that his death was quite brutal, with head indentations, broken ribs, and a slashed throat indicating a prolonged struggle. It’s unclear whether his death was cold-blooded murder or part of a ritual sacrifice; either way, he clearly drew the short straw. Today, you can visit him at the British Museum to investigate his untimely demise yourself.

Alvez pushed dozens of people to their deaths from a walkway atop an aqueduct. Rafaela Ferraz

4. Preserved Head of Diogo Alves - Lisbon, Portugal

The head of Portugal’s first serial killer and one of its last men to ever be hanged now bobbles in a jar, passed by the unfazed medical students and professors of the University of Lisbon. When Alves met his demise in 1841, phrenology was an exciting, up-and-coming field, and Portugal’s eager phrenologists pleaded for his head to be preserved for study. By examining his skull, they believed they could determine why he killed so prolifically and ruthlessly. Did this pan out? Not really. (By 1843, phrenology was formally labeled a pseudoscience.) However, it’s a unique addition to an otherwise standard anatomical theater, sitting right next to a diaphanized hand.

Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed Einstein’s autopsy, took his without permission. (Einstein wished to be cremated.) Courtesy of the Mütter Museum

5. Mütter Museum - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

This collection inside the College of Physicians has everything: 2,000 objects removed from people’s throats, conjoined twin skeletons, the remains of a 7-foot-6-inch man, and, most notably, slivers of Albert Einstein’s brain. Displayed across 46 microscope slides, these strands have been studied extensively over the years, with some scientists suggesting that Einstein’s brain architecture gave him the “combinatory play” of image he claimed was essential to his discoveries. Others look at it and see ... just regular old brain matter, in less-than-ideal condition after its multiple trips across the country.

St. Bonaventure is said to have exclaimed, “O blessed tongue, which has always blessed God and caused others to bless Him, now it appears evident how great were your merits before God!” Anton Diaz / Our Awesome Planet

6. St. Anthony’s Tongue - Padua, Italy

St. Anthony was a renowned speaker during his lifetime, traveling across France and Italy preaching the word of God. Thus, it’s fitting that the one nondecomposed part of his body (exhumed in 1263) was his tongue. The saint’s tongue and jaw are now housed at his namesake basilica in Padua, displayed in ornate gold reliquaries that allow him to keep spreading the Gospel, even in death. The building itself is also a marvel, combining Romanesque, Byzantine, and Gothic architectural styles and housing artwork by Giotto and Donatello.

The prince died during the siege of Saint-Dizier in 1544. Patrick/CC BY-SA 2.0

7. Transi de René de Chalon - Bar-le-Duc, France

Before Prince René de Chalon passed away at the age of 25, he specified that he did not want his dead body to look beautiful. Au contraire: René wanted to be remembered as a rotting corpse, with dried skin flaps and a hollow carcass. His wishes were granted in this grotesque, white-stone statue inside the Church of Saint-Étienne-le-Vieux, created by Ligier Richier in 1547. The heart-shaped reliquary in the statue’s hand once held the shriveled remains of René’s own heart; however, the heart was lost (or stolen...) during the French Revolution. Nevertheless, the ghoulish artwork is a dark reminder that all of us will go from “dust to dust.”

A marker for the heart contains a bust of its owner. Eric Grundhauser for Atlas Obscura

8. Chopin’s Heart - Warsaw, Poland

Composer Frédéric Chopin’s dying wish was that his heart be sent back to his native Poland rather than buried with the rest of his body in his adopted home of Paris. And what is family for if not to deliver on such requests? Chopin’s sister, Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, plucked out his heart before his interment, then smuggled it to Warsaw in a jar of booze. Placed beneath the city’s Holy Cross Church, the heart became a point of pride for Polish nationalists, so much so that the Nazis took it during World War II to weaken the country’s morale. (Thankfully, Germany returned it after the war.)

The church claims to have a seal attesting to the relic’s authenticity. hbambas / Atlas Obscura User

9. St. Valentine’s Shoulder Blade - Prague, Czechia

The shoulder bone of St. Valentine was supposedly brought to the Saints Peter and Paul Basilica in the 1300s by Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, though it was not discovered until 2002, when church members found it while organizing the basement. Ever since, the shoulder blade has been on permanent display, with a special Mass honoring it on Valentine’s Day. Since many churches have claimed parts of St. Valentine over the years, there is some doubt about the authenticity of the bone. Whether this decorated shoulder belonged to the real saint or an imposter will likely remain a mystery forever, but regardless, it’s a wonderfully weird symbol of love.

These preserved fetuses have severe genetic and developmental anomalies, supposedly from the mothers’ alcohol consumption. ahvenas / Atlas Obscura User

10. Museum of Sin - Tambov, Russia

Forensic pathologist Yuri Shchukin has put his decades of morgue experience into this passion project: over 700 body parts and organs showing the ruinous effects of vice. Within his collection you’ll find such novelties as embryos from drinking and drug-taking mothers, the severed finger of an unfaithful husband, and a horn that supposedly sprouted from the head of a robber. A Latin inscription at the entrance reads: “This is a place where the dead teach the living.”

According to the museum, the finger is part of “the celebration of Galileo as a hero and martyr of science.” Marc D. Roberts via Flickr, CC BY 2.0

11. Galileo’s Middle Finger - Florence, Italy

Almost a century after Galileo was laid to rest, an antiquarian and an anatomist removed his middle finger, along with two other fingers and a tooth (why, exactly, is anyone’s guess). The finger was soon handed over to Florence’s Laurentian Library and, eventually, the Museo Galileo, where it is still on display today in an egg-shaped glass case with a marble base. A commemorative inscription by astronomer Tommaso Perelli reads: “Spurn not the remains of the finger by which the right hand measured out paths of the sky, pointed to orbs never before seen by mortals.” In 2009, Galileo’s middle finger had a heartwarming reunion with his newly authenticated index finger, thumb, and tooth.

Legend has it that when the smugglers were stopped and searched by guards, the head transformed into rose petals. Giovanni Cerretani/CC BY-SA 3.0

12. St. Catherine’s Severed Head - Siena, Italy

When Saint Catherine died in 1380, her hometown of Siena wanted to keep her body but knew that Rome wouldn’t give it over willingly. So, the Sienese got creative: cutting off her head, putting it in a paper bag, and sneaking it past the Roman guards (praying for Catherine’s protection all the while). Upon their safe arrival back in Siena, these smugglers placed the head inside an ornate reliquary in the Basilica of San Domenico, where it remains today. Catherine’s thumb, too, is on display at the basilica, though her foot is all the way in Venice.

The temple hosts daily prayer and chanting sessions, as well as traditional Buddhist rituals. Zairon/CC BY-SA 4.0

13. Buddha Tooth Relic Temple & Museum - Singapore

This enormous complex in Singapore’s Chinatown was erected for a single reason: to display one of the Buddha’s chompers, supposedly recovered from a collapsed stupa in Myanmar in the 1980s. (Never mind that some experts have called the tooth “definitely not human.”) Whether you believe in the tooth’s authenticity or not, it’s worth a visit to the temple just to take in its surroundings: multiple floors of Buddha statues, dragon snakes guarding sacred relics, and a stunning front prayer hall.

The conditions of peat bogs (highly acidic water, low temperature, little oxygen) are remarkably effective for preserving bodies. SkareMedia / Atlas Obscura User

14. Kingship and Sacrifice - Dublin, Ireland

This permanent exhibition inside the National Museum of Ireland is devoted to Iron and Bronze Age human sacrifices that were deposited in bogs along tribal boundaries, a.k.a. “bog bodies.” The collection includes the Cashel Man, the oldest fleshed bog body ever unearthed, as well as the Gallagh Man, who was strangled by a willow twig rope. Along with the bodies themselves, visitors can view Iron Age artifacts like horse trappings, weapons, utensils, boundary markers, and votive deposits of butter known as “bog butter.”

The gravestone has been set in concrete to prevent people from stealing it. drondinone / Atlas Obscura User

15. Grave of Captain Jones’ Leg - Washington, New Hampshire

Capt. Samuel Jones, a beloved tavern proprietor in rural New Hampshire, was doing construction work one day in 1804 when his leg got pinned between a building and a fence. The resulting injury was so bad that Jones had to have the leg amputated, but he did not despair. Instead, he decided to hold a funeral for his lost limb and bury it in the local cemetery, in part as a precaution against phantom limb pain. When Jones passed away years later, his body was interred elsewhere (theories range from Boston to Rhode Island to the Bronx), but his leg remains here, marked by a simple gravestone.

Ten Poems about Sleep and Dreaming - JSTOR Daily

2026-10-15T13:47:00.000Z

Each time we read a poem, we dream. We leave the everyday world—our jobs, responsibilities, and friendships—and enter into a spell cast by language. “Is all that we see or seem / but a dream within a dream?” Poe famously asked in his poem “A Dream Within a Dream.” Countless poets have wrestled with this question, either writing about dreams directly or invoking them through the dreamlike manipulation of words and ideas. Here are ten poems to read before you fall asleep. As always, all are free to download.

“Dead,” Sarah Harwell
A mother watches her daughter fall asleep. It’s a calm, peaceful scene. Yet Harwell infuses it with emotional and spiritual complexity as she imagines her daughter as one of the dead, “gone to Hades / with her stuffed animals.” By the end, we feel the complicated weight of a mother’s love when she states, “my body seizes when she leaves to go / where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.”

“Summer Sleep,” Marilyn Chin
Chin’s poem begins with a placid image of sleeping in on a summer’s day, one filled with “false emergencies,” then quickly pivots to a dream in which the speaker sleeps in a claustrophobic “one-girl” coffin, and “death coins on the roof.” Here, the dream carries the true emotional weight, and the waking world is what deceives us.

“Dream of Lust,” Louise Glück
A speaker wakes after one of “those nights” and confronts a mysterious, dreamlike figure. What follows in Glück’s poem is a complicated exploration of lust and desire in which “the human body / makes an impasse, an obstacle.”

“My Dream About Time,” Lucille Clifton
In a single lyrical, winding sentence, Clifton creates a disorienting dream of a house that opens to a world that “she has no language for” and where “all of the clocks strike / no.” It’s a prime example of the way poetry can viscerally draw us into the allegorical and strange logic of dreams.

“Dream for Pilate,” Carl Phillips
In his poem, Phillips uses a dream to reimagine Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who ordered the crucifixion of Christ. The result is a poem of moral reckoning in which “you wonder, would you make it, / if you had the driver turn around now.”

“I Wake Early,” Jane Hirshfield
Every day, we wake to a fresh start. The speaker in Hirshfield’s poem wakes twice, inviting us to consider both a physical awakening and a spiritual one. But the waking is not simple. In addition to the morning coffee, with each waking there is “the window / unbroken, transparent” and “the war (my war)” that lingers in the distance.

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” Emily Dickinson
Dickinson’s famous poem is not about dreams in the conventional sense, but about a mind “going numb,” fraying until “a Plank in Reason, broke, / And I dropped down, and down—” It’s a terrifying and hypnotic descent that we can’t help but follow.

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“Survivors,” Timothy Liu
In just eighteen short lines, Liu creates a complicated portrait of two lovers waking beside each other, a stack of self-help books on the nightstand, one of them “reeking of alcohol.” The narrator implores his lover: “Hold me / like a dream that will dissolve / a childhood you never had.” The resulting poem is one of both love and disintegration.

Four Dream Songs,” John Berryman
Berryman wrote two volumes of poetry that comprise his canonical, polyphonic Dream Songs: 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. The poems follow a character named Henry who shares a biographical likeness to the author, though Berryman states Henry is an imaginary character. Here are four in the series.

“Toxicology,” Henri Cole
With disturbing clarity and labyrinthine syntax, Cole lures us into the “nightmare border country of overdoses.” It’s a dizzying, hallucinogenic world of “paranoid dissembling” in which “life undeaths itself.” This makes the poem’s final note all the more surprising.

The post Ten Poems about Sleep and Dreaming appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

The Photographer Who Preserved Everyday Architecture - JSTOR Daily

2026-10-14T13:44:00.000Z

Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864–1952) is considered one of the great women photographers in American history. She made a name for herself as the first established woman photographer in Washington, DC, where she was raised and where she established her first studio in 1894. That same decade, she began working as a photojournalist, with her images appearing in publications like Ladies’ Home Journal and Demorest’s Family Magazine. Later in her career, Johnston turned her eye to vernacular architecture, capturing a quickly disappearing built landscape.

A commission to document Chatham Manor in Fredericksburg, Virginia, drew Johnston’s attention to vernacular architecture. After renovating and restoring their estate in the 1920s, General Daniel Bradford Devore and his wife, Helen Stewart Devore, commissioned Johnston to photograph the property. By this point, Johnston had already photographed other grand American estates, working for families like the Astors and the Vanderbilts.

Alexandria, general exterior view of house, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Hillsborough, King and Queen, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Garst Log Fort, Roanoke, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Clerk's Office, Northampton, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Christ's Cross, New Kent, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Cabell House, Nelson, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Bouch House, Virginia Beach, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Apperson Farm, New Kent, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

While working for the Devores, Johnston was taken by the seemingly overlooked everyday architecture around her in rural Virginia. In his essay on Johnston, John C. L. Andreassen explains that, as she photographed Chatham, she realized that “[t]here had been some photographic documentation of the manor houses in the South, but no such documentation of mills, cabins, small stores, taverns, barns, outbuildings, wagon sheds, cotton presses, corn cribs, meat houses, and tobacco-curing barns which were rapidly crumbling away.” These were the types of buildings she now felt compelled to make the subjects of her work.

Huggins, Virginia Beach, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Road, Alexandria to Middleburg, Clarke, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Rich Neck, Surry, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Raleigh Tavern, Roanoke, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Murray, Virginia Beach, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Mantua, Northumberland, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Losett House, Virginia Beach, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Landsdowne, Spotsylvania, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

The University of Virginia’s Frances Benjamin Johnston Architectural Photography collection shows the results of her efforts to document a changing built landscape for future generations to see and study.

In 1981, the architectural historian Dell Upton wrote in “Ordinary Buildings: A Bibliographical Essay on American Vernacular Architecture” that “[t]he primary data of vernacular architecture are the buildings themselves,” while also noting that “few vernacular buildings have been extensively documented.” Johnston had the foresight to document buildings that she knew would not survive another generation. She was recording the everyday at a time when vernacular architecture was not a popular or prestigious subject of study. Today, the study of everyday buildings, such as homes, strip malls, or office complexes, is commonplace. But widespread scholarly interest in these buildings did not emerge until the 1970s and 1980s.

Road, Alexandria to Middleburg, Fairfax, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Wilmington, Westmoreland, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Wigwam, Powhatan, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Union Hill, Nelson, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Sweet Hall, King William, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Stratford, Westmoreland, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

St. John's Church, King William, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Seven Springs, King William, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Johnston took her documentation of the built environment seriously. Elizabeth M. Gushee describes Johnston’s careful, methodical approach. She writes that “[o]nce on-site, Johnston would scout out the location for a selection of viewpoints and angles. She would frequently wait out a too bright sun or bothersome storms to catch the structure in just the right light. On a good day, Johnston could make as many as fifteen good negatives of a structure, on a bad day, none.”

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Johnston’s work reflected an interest in both those with power and those without. Early in her career, she took portraits of the wealthy and well-known in her Washington, DC, studio while also photographing coal workers in the field. Her later turn to architecture may have changed subject matter, but not her intention. Through her architectural photography, she sought “to preserve a record of the barns, log cabins, inns, and outbuildings of frequently humble origins.” Through Johnston’s lens, ordinary buildings earned a place in the historical record alongside the grand estates of the wealthy.

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Documenting a Disappearing Architecture

The Editors

October 24, 2025

The Heinz Gaube Lebanese Architectural Photographs Collection, supported by an innovative mapping project, details threatened buildings across Lebanon.

The post The Photographer Who Preserved Everyday Architecture appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

What Do Cops Train For? - JSTOR Daily

2026-10-13T13:32:47.000Z

In the 2010s, after Black communities and supporters came together to protest the police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and many others, some reformers and politicians suggested that a remedy was more and better police training. From 2015 to 2018, anthropologist Jessica Katzenstein took a close look at what that might entail, observing trainings conducted at Maryland police departments.

Katzenstein noted that the departments she worked with actively tried to dispel the idea that they were teaching cops to think of themselves as warriors, instead promising to help them serve the community as engaged “guardians.”

A key aspect of this effort is practicing various scenarios, such as responding to a drug overdose call. This is supposed to help officers overcome fears and implicit bias.

However, Katzenstein found that these scenarios are still often dramatic enactments of worst-case scenarios. In one virtual-reality simulation that Katzenstein tried out, an injured woman lies in a parking lot with a little girl nearby, seeming to play with a phone. When the trainee approaches the scene, the girl’s phone turns out to be a gun, and she shoots them.

In another VR scenario, the recruit must shoot a man who draws a gun during a traffic stop. Then, rather than immediately rendering aid, they must keep holding their weapon on him, searching him for another gun, before tending to his wounds.

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Military Policing and Militarizing the Police

Livia Gershon

June 19, 2025

The use of military strategies inside the borders of the United States has long been connected with racial politics.

“If in real life, someone holding a gun may not necessarily shoot an officer, in the simulator they almost certainly will,” Katzenstein writes. “And can you afford to wait and see?”

One training officer explained that a situation only “breaks bad” on “1 percent of calls,” but police always need to think tactically about the possibility of being attacked or ambushed.

To avoid an escalating violent situation, recruits learned, it’s important to maintain “command presence,” a display of both strength and professionalism. In theory, this reduces potential danger. In live trainings, volunteers posing as troublemakers behaved obnoxiously but backed down in the face of an authoritative response. If the recruit seemed hesitant, they escalated into violence. Women and smaller people were especially encouraged to mimic masculine traits, lowering their voices and escalating to physical contact quickly.

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Katzenstein argues that the logic of “command presence” assumes a racialized “thug,” “poised to attack the weak and unimposing, who understands only the language of dominance.”

Indeed, instructors explicitly told recruits that they would need to present themselves differently in a poorer, Blacker part of their jurisdiction than in a wealthy, white area. In the poorer area, if officers fail to maintain control “they’ll walk all over you,” one instructor claimed.

By the time Katzenstein ended her fieldwork, many people in protest movements were shifting away from calling for training and toward calling for police departments to be defunded. This only accelerated two years later when George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin—an experienced Minneapolis police officer who was a field training officer for his department.

The post What Do Cops Train For? appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

The Zenith Balloon Tragedy of 1875 - Amusing Planet

2026-10-13T05:02:11.546Z

On a cold April morning in 1875, three men ascended into the sky above Paris in a balloon, hoping to push the boundaries of human flight. Their journey was a scientific expedition, an attempt to explore the upper atmosphere and venture into a realm where few human beings had ever been. But as their balloon climbed higher, the air grew thinner, the temperature plunged, and the simple act of breathing became a desperate struggle. What began as a daring experiment in the conquest of the skies would end in one of the most horrifying tragedies in the early history of aviation.

Depiction of Théodore Sivel, Gaston Tissandier and Joseph Crocé-Spinelli in Zénith's fatal ascent of 15 April 1875. "La Nature", 1 May 1875

The balloon, named Zénith, carried its crew into a hostile world for which 19th-century science had only begun to prepare. At ground level, the atmosphere seemed limitless. But at altitude, it revealed itself as an unforgiving environment where the human body could fail with terrifying speed. The Zénith expedition exposed the dangers of high-altitude flight, and left behind a grim lesson for generations of aeronauts who dreamed of going higher.

The aeronauts of the Zénith were Gaston Tissandier, a French scientific writer and balloonist; Joseph Crocé-Spinelli, a scientist and journalist; and Théodore Sivel, an experienced sailor and aeronaut.

Gaston Tissandier, born in Paris in 1843, was a scientist, author and enthusiastic aeronaut. He had a particular interest in meteorology and the scientific study of the atmosphere. His brother, Albert Tissandier, was also involved in aeronautics, and the two helped popularise ballooning as a means of scientific investigation.

Joseph Crocé-Spinelli, born in 1845, shared this interest in atmospheric research. He had participated in earlier high-altitude experiments and understood the importance of studying the composition and properties of the air. Théodore Sivel, born in 1834, brought considerable ballooning experience to the expedition. His practical knowledge complemented the scientific interests of his companions. It was under his guidance that Zénith was constructed.

Barely a month before the fatal flight, Sivel along with zoologist and physiologist Paul Bert, Joseph Crocé-Spinelli, Albert Tissandier, Albert's brother Gaston Tissandier, and Claude Jobert, successfully completed a long-duration flight lasting 24 hours and 40 minutes.

Encouraged by the success of the flight and the positive coverage in the press, the Société Française de Navigation Aérienne (SFNA) announced that it would organize a high-altitude ascent using the aptly named Zénith, a 3,000 cubic meter balloon owned by Sivel.

At approximately 11:35 a.m. on 15 April, Zénith lifted off from the gasworks at La Villette. They carried an array of instruments with them to study the atmosphere, including an aneroid barometer, a hygrometer and an electroscope. They also carried an oxygen-supply apparatus. Three small reservoirs containing a mixture rich in oxygen were attached to the balloon's basket. Rubber tubes and mouthpieces allowed the men to inhale the gas when required.

The crew understood that oxygen deprivation was one of the greatest obstacles to high-altitude ballooning. At lower elevations, the atmosphere supplied sufficient oxygen for normal breathing. As a balloon climbed, however, atmospheric pressure fell, making it increasingly difficult for the lungs to transfer enough oxygen into the bloodstream.

Diagram of the balloon's ascent from Paris to Ciron. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The men had prepared for the dangers as best they could with the knowledge and technology available. What they could not fully anticipate was how rapidly hypoxia, the condition caused by an inadequate supply of oxygen to the body, could impair their judgement, coordination and consciousness.

By around one o'clock, according to Tissandier's later account, they had passed 5,000 metres. The atmospheric pressure had fallen substantially, and the temperature outside was below freezing. Their instruments were working, and they continued to monitor their physical condition.

As they climbed higher, however, the men began to experience symptoms of oxygen deprivation. At 7,000 meters, Tissandier recorded that Crocé-Spinelli and Sivel had become pale. He himself felt weak and tried inhaling the oxygen they carried, which briefly improved his condition. Sivel then turned to Tissandier and asked whether he would throw out some ballast in order to ascend higher. Tissandier, feeling lethargic because of the altitude and the freezing temperature of −10 Celsius, agreed to the proposal. Sivel proceeded to cut three bags of ballast and the balloon shifted to a quick ascent.

By the time that they reached 7,500 meters, Tissandier could barely move. He described feeling no pain at all, but ‘an inner joy’ and indifference to the increasingly dangerous situation. The lack of oxygen made him delirious. Increasingly debilitated, Tissandier's memory of the events from hereon became even hazier. He remembered trying to reach for the oxygen but unable to lift his arm. Then, looking at the barometer, he saw the pressure at 280 mm and tried to yell out that they had breached 8,000 meters, but the words did not come out from his mouth and he fell inert at about 1.30 p.m.

Sketch depicting Crocé-Spinelli and Sivel, having lost consciousness due to a lack of oxygen, and Tissandier, in the basket of the Zénith on 15 April 1875. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

At 2.08 p.m., Tissandier woke up and saw the balloon descending at a perilous speed. Gathering all the strength he could muster, he managed to cut off a bag of ballast to re-establish the equilibrium before passing out again. After a while he was shaken awake by Crocé-Spinelli, who asked to throw out even more ballast. Fading in and out, Tissandier saw Crocé-Spinelli throw out the respirator, blankets and more ballast, which caused the balloon to rise again.

Tissandier drifted in and out of consciousness. The effects of oxygen deprivation had left him confused and physically incapacitated, and the sequence of events could only be pieced together from his fragmentary memories.

When he regained consciousness again, the balloon was descending at terrifying speed. He tried to rouse his companions by calling their names and shaking them, but neither man responded. Sivel's face had darkened, and blood was visible around his mouth. Crocé-Spinelli, too, appeared lifeless.

The Zénith finally landed at about 4.00 p.m. in the plains near Ciron, 250 km from Paris. Local residents rushed to help the surviving aeronaut. Tissandier was severely weakened, bruised and suffering from the effects of his ordeal. His companions, however, could not be saved. Both Crocé-Spinelli and Sivel had died during the flight.

The ballloon lands at Ciron. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The deaths of Crocé-Spinelli and Sivel raised urgent questions about the safety of high-altitude ballooning. The crew had carried oxygen, understood the dangers of ascending too far and possessed considerable experience. Yet their precautions had proved inadequate.

The central problem was the physiological effect of low atmospheric pressure. At high altitude, the reduced pressure makes it harder for oxygen to pass from the lungs into the blood. The resulting oxygen deprivation can cause headaches, confusion, impaired coordination, loss of consciousness and, in severe cases, death.

One particularly dangerous feature of hypoxia is that it can undermine a person's ability to recognise the danger. Someone who is becoming severely oxygen-deprived may lose the capacity to make sensible decisions or carry out the actions necessary to survive. For balloonists, that could mean being unable to operate oxygen equipment, monitor instruments or manage the balloon's descent.

You might also like:
Pilâtre de Rozier And The World’s First Aviation Accident
The Tragic Death of Sophie Blanchard, The First Woman Balloon Pilot
Salomon Andrée's Ill-Fated Arctic Balloon Expedition

The Zénith expedition also demonstrated that carrying oxygen was not enough by itself. The supply had to be accessible and usable under extreme conditions, and the crew had to be able to operate the equipment while suffering the effects of altitude. The ascent showed how quickly a scientific expedition could become an emergency when the human body began to fail.

The exact sequence of events cannot be reconstructed with complete certainty. Tissandier himself acknowledged that he had spent extended periods unconscious and remembered parts of the flight only imperfectly. Nevertheless, his testimony provided a remarkably direct account of the dangers confronting early high-altitude aeronauts.

Tissandier survived, but the loss of his companions was a profound personal blow. He subsequently documented the expedition and its tragic conclusion, helping preserve the details of the flight for other scientists and balloonists. His account remains particularly valuable because it records not merely the instruments' readings but the physical and mental collapse of the men who made them.

The tomb of Joseph Crocé-Spinelli and Théodore Sivel located in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

References:
# Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira. Martyrs made in the sky: the Zénith balloon tragedy and the construction of the French Third Republic's first scientific heroes
# THRILLING ACCOUNT OF A FATAL BALLOON ASCENT. New Zealand Herald, 26 June 1875
# Disastrous Balloon Ascent. Popular Science

Why English Colonists Called Indigenous Dogs Wolves - JSTOR Daily

2026-10-12T13:36:28.000Z

“What is thought to be one of the earliest recorded wolf attacks” in North America, as described on Wikipedia, occurred on January 19, 1621. Mayflower colonist John Goodman was out for a walk around Plymouth Colony with a spaniel, one of the two dogs that had also made the journey aboard that famous ship. The “little Spannell” freaked out when two big bounding canines approached, but Goodman fended them off with a “paile bord” as Mourt’s Relation, the early chronicle of the colony, put it.

Then, curiously, the big canines “sat both on their tayles, grinning at him, a good while, and went their way.” The problem here, as historian Strother E. Roberts points out, is that this does not sound at all like the way wolves act. Roberts argues that the two canines were not wolves but dogs, domesticated Native American dogs whose ancestors had come across from Asia along with the ancestors of the first peoples of the Americas.

“Rather than observing a confrontation between European domestication and American wilderness, Goodman stood witness to the reunion of two branches of the domesticated canine family tree separate from one another for thousands of years.”

Goodman’s error was perhaps the first of the “almost universal tendency among English writers to misidentify Indigenous dogs as either wolves or some separate race of wild dogs.” The tendency has continued; Roberts cites a 2004 history of wolves in North America in which the Goodman incident is related one more time.

It is true that Indigenous dogs didn’t look like European dogs. Domestication in Europe had usually resulted in dogs with floppy ears and shorter snouts, classic signs of domestication as cuteification. American dogs had erect ears and longer snouts, giving them a more wolf-like appearance, the common ancestor of all domestic dogs. Indigenous dogs were also great hunters.

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The Surprising Imperial History of the Pekingese Dog

H.M.A. Leow

September 28, 2025

Upper-class British women in the early 1900s participated in a craze for Pekingese dogs, signalling the role of empire in their social identities.

Perhaps more importantly, the settler-colonialists refused to accept that the dogs who lived among indigenous people as companions, guards, and hunters were domesticated. Indians, the English believed, could not domesticate animals since domestication was an art of civilization and Indians were the antithesis of civilization. Claiming the dogs were tamed wolves served the ideological needs of settler-colonialism. Wild animals equaled wild people and vice versa. The English, writes Roberts,

dehumanized the Native Americans in whose communities those dogs lived at the same time that they effectively erased the fact of Native domestication practices from the historical record. Both processes furthered the larger imperial project of impugning Native American nations as uncivilized and, thus, rhetorically legitimized their dispossession.

And the settlers were quite successful at it. The Indigenous peoples of the Northeast were largely erased from the map. And “genetic research on Indigenous canines does clearly show,” continues Roberts, the “replacement of a great majority of the Northeast’s historical Indigenous dogs with those of more recent Eurasian heritage.” But, Roberts reminds us, just as the people were not ultimately extirpated, “despite white scholars’ insistence on their historical disappearance,” the idea of “the complete extirpation of Indigenous dogs should be approached with caution.”

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“It is impossible to say with certainty that no dogs with indigenous heritage still live in New England. Indeed, the clear parallels to the ‘vanishing Indian’ narrative of the late eighteenth through twentieth centuries warn against writing indigenous dogs off too quickly.”

Indigenous dogs would continue to be “misidentified and persecuted” as wild animals “as explorers, traders, and settlers carried their prejudices west with them across the interior of the continent.”

New England and then continental attempts to eradicate Indigenous dogs were “a means to control Native American communities and tame what the newcomers chauvinistically perceived as a threatening wilderness dominated by savage people and their wolfish companions.”

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NEWS: The Lost Occult Books of Victor Neuburg - Wyrd Britain

2026-10-12T06:38:10.274Z

'We will leave the silver moon-flowers of old thought for the gold sun-flowers of our true Apollonian theme ... It is before Dionysus, the maddening one, the disturber, came rudely in the twilight to make the fair, even world, odd and fantastic; the horns thrusting apart the twin thighs of duality. Out of that odd, wild, Bacchic art came Unity, for the order of the old tie was as a chaos to the goat-god...'

- from 'Dionysus and Diana'

Coming soon - with your help - from the resurrected Vine Press is a fascinating sounding collection of 'lost' occult poems from Victor B. Neuburg. Languishing, mostly unread, for over a century this first publication is being marshalled into being by Justin Hopper (author of 'Old Weird Albion'), designer Stefan Musgrove and Neuburg's granddaughter Caroline who dedicated her life to preserving and promoting her grandfather's work.

Justin contacted me recently to help promote the Kickstarter they've set up to fund the publication -

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oldweirdalbion/lost-occult-books-of-the-1920s-relaunching-vine-press

- and kindly provided the information below...

Victor Neuburg (almost certainly), Rites of Eleusis,
London, 1910. (From The Bystander, 1910)

In 1924 the poet, publisher and occultist Victor Neuburg was visited by unidentifiable spirits in his cottage in a small Sussex town. As he later put it, these voices ‘dictated’ poems to him – streams-of-consciousness pieces of prose steeped in esoteric symbolism. He wrote them down, nearly 100 pieces of writing, into the form of a book he called The Water Bearer.

And no one would touch it. None less than Ralph Shirley, the editor of The Occult Review, told Victor that these were unique, wholly original, works, but ‘what publisher would risk it?’

For the next 100 years these poems sat, mostly unread, in a family chest. Until now.

Victor Neuburg is best known as the magical (and sexual) partner of Aleister Crowley; as the man who discovered the poet Dylan Thomas; as a funny name that comes up when mentioning just about any aspect of early-20th century British counterculture. (An anarchist who advocated for gay rights and prison reform; the living connection between the Decadents and the Surrealists; friend to Austin Osman Spare and inspiration to Peter Warlock; early champion of nudists and yoga; the list continues.)

‘Stan’, Dion Byngham, Victor Neuburg, ‘Frank’,
late-1920s likely The Sanctuary, West Sussex.
Photo copyright Justin Hopper.

His published poetry books now sell for hundreds or even thousands, but perhaps his greatest-ever works – those which best espoused his bizarre hodge-podge of occult and spiritual beliefs – have been read by almost no one alive.

We’re publishing these works as one of the last wishes of Caroline Neuburg, the poet’s granddaughter, who dove deeply into them – her copious notes on the symbolism in the works will act as introduction to the book The Water Bearer and Other Lost Works of Victor Neuburg.

You can pre-order, and help make it all happen – a century in the making – through the 30th of October at www.vinepress.co.uk

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Oliver's Ghost - Wyrd Britain

2026-10-11T07:41:46.254Z

'Worlds Beyond' was an ITV series that somehow managed to run for 2 entire years - September 1986 to December 1988 - despite only consisting of 12 half hour episodes. Each of those dozen episodes is purportedly based on stories from the archives of the Society for Psychical Research.

We've featured a few episodes from the series on Wyrd Britain over the years despite them being, on the whole, pretty woeful because I have a bit of a soft spot for them. This, the series' final episode is perhaps the most fun but you probably shouldn't take that as any sort of indicator of quality.

Denholm Elliott is Sir Oliver Beresford reduced to turning his ancestral home into a hotel. His, I assume, first bunch of guests - three American couples - have arrived and he, his wife and the maid are struggling to cope, hindered in no small part by the presence of the ghost of a little girl who keeps making one of the guests sleepwalk into other rooms - and into cupboard doors.

Writer Tony Williamson, who wrote the majority of the series - as well as many scripts for ITC shows including 'The Avengers', 'Department S', 'Jason King' - has thrown all ideas of spooky out of the window and gone for more of a bedroom farce sort of vibe and there're some fun one liners from the harassed Elliott but don't go looking for any chills. I know most don't think of this series at all but, if you do, then think of it as more of a curio than anything else, a curio that was already horrendously dated when it was originally broadcast and one that pretty much deserves it's obscurity but, that said, I'll definitely feature it here again,

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

Stephen Thrower's Coil Playlist - Wyrd Britain

2026-10-09T23:37:13.841Z

From 1986 to 1992 Stephen Thrower made several albums as a member of Coil which are crurrently being remastered and reissued by The Grey Area of Mute - pre-orders are available now for 'Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders)'.

To mark the occasion he was invited to assemble a playlist for the Freak Zone of the music that was being listened to by the three members at that time. The playlist he's curated is delightfully obtuse but sonically cohesive including the likes of Faust, Can, The Fall, The Butthole Surfers, The Residents and others.

Available (at the time of writing) for only another 29 days this is a fun glimpse behind the curtain of a fiercely creative time for the band.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m003227c

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How to Keep Track of Your Sources on JSTOR - JSTOR Daily

2026-10-09T13:44:00.000Z

Finding useful sources is only part of the research process—you also need to keep track of them. In this installment of Research Tips, we’ll explain how to find and record the details that identify your sources on JSTOR and how to save those sources for later use.

Every source, regardless of type, has bibliographic information that identifies it, such as the title, author, or the year it was published or created. Some sources may have more or less information than others, depending on how each source was published or created and what is known about it.

Keeping track of bibliographic information helps you remember where your sources came from. It also allows you to evaluate and verify their credibility, find them again, and properly cite them in your own work.

Finding bibliographic information in JSTOR

On a source’s page, you’ll find the bibliographic information in the top left corner, above the source.

If the source is a scholarly journal article, the article’s title appears in a larger font above the additional bibliographic information. Below the title is the author’s name, followed by the title of the journal, its volume and issue numbers, the month and year the article was published, and the article’s page numbers. Below that is a permalink to the article’s page.

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Sometimes scholarly journals list volume numbers without issue numbers, or they list the year of publication but not the month. Don’t be too concerned if some bibliographic information seems to be missing—it might not have been there to start!

If your source is an image, the image’s title appears in a larger font above the additional bibliographic information. Below the title is a permalink to the source. In the section titled “Item Details,” you’ll find additional bibliographic information such as the image creator or creators, work type, style or period, and the date it was created. Other details may include a description of the image, its physical dimensions, the repository that holds it, and the subjects associated with it.

If your source is a video, the video’s title appears in a larger font above the additional bibliographic information. Below the title are the collection title and a permalink to the source. In the section titled “Item Details,” you’ll find additional bibliographic information such as the date the video was recorded, a description of the video, and the subjects associated with it.

Saving sources

Depending on the citation style you plan to use, you may not need all of the bibliographic information listed, but it’s useful to record it while you’re researching. You may want to keep these details in a notebook or document, especially if you’re taking notes about the source.

But did you know that JSTOR allows you to save sources to your JSTOR account?

On a source’s page, click “Save” to add it to your account. In the drop-down menu, you can choose to save the item to “Workspace” or create a new folder. Creating a new folder with a distinct title is especially useful when you’re working on multiple projects.

If you don’t have an account, you can create a free personal account. Click “Register” on the JSTOR home page and enter your email address. Then follow the verification link sent to your inbox to complete registration.

Understanding bibliographic information and keeping track of it while you research will help you identify and locate your sources and cite them later in your own work.

The post How to Keep Track of Your Sources on JSTOR appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Atlas Obscura’s Guide to America’s Most Haunted Cemeteries - Atlas Obscura

2026-10-09T12:54:00.000Z

Not all the dead rest easy. These 13 American cemeteries have the ghost stories to prove it.

It’s nice to imagine death as an endless deep sleep, but not everyone is so lucky. In cemeteries across the U.S., you’ll find souls whose final resting places are not, in fact, restful at all. Perhaps they died with scores unsettled or, perhaps, their graves were ravaged by greedy developers. Sometimes, heartbreak rendered them unable to move on peacefully; in other cases, they simply couldn’t resist the chance to toy with their living visitors.

One thing is certain: These restless spirits can turn otherwise serene sites into delightfully dark destinations, where the beauty of old headstones and manicured grounds is tinged with something indescribably eerie. When you gear up for your next cross-country road trip, let the energy of spooky season guide you to these cemeteries and graveyards full of folklore, legend, and sinister rumors. They’re slices of history, yes, but they’re also brimming with all things supernatural, sure to turn even the most hardened paranormal skeptics into believers.

Fewer than 600 standing headstones remain in the cemetery. Collector of Experiences / Atlas Obscura User

1. Colonial Park Cemetery - Savannah, Georgia

Established in 1750, this 6-acre site was Savannah’s primary public burial ground for over a century and contains over 9,000 graves. Many of the city’s earliest settlers are buried here, as well as hundreds of victims of the 1820 yellow fever epidemic. Some believe that when Savannah was overrun by Union forces during the Civil War, occupying soldiers dug up and moved around many of the cemetery’s headstones, also changing the names and dates etched into some of them. Understandably, this ruffled the feathers of the resident spirits, who now float through the cemetery as clouds of light or, sometimes, a green mist just above the ground.

Today, Colonial Park Cemetery is a public park, with haunted tours offered by various companies. While no visitors are permitted to the cemetery at night, some folks sit on benches just outside its fence to watch for apparitions. Some of Savannah’s ghost experts even conduct nighttime EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) sessions just outside the cemetery walls, letting visitors listen to the strange sounds of thousands of spirits.

The first Shaker burial here took place in 1792. ancientspiritguide4u / Atlas Obscura User

2. Harvard Shaker Lollipop Graveyard - Harvard, Massachusetts

This graveyard is weirdly whimsical thanks to its candy-esque cast-iron stakes, which mark the graves of many Shaker Village residents from decades past. The Shakers, a Christian religious collective with tenets of sexual equality, celibacy, and pacifism, settled this area in 1769, turning it into a self-contained society that lasted through the early 20th century.

The town is now a quiet historic district, though this does not mean that its residents have abandoned it; rather, locals have spotted deceased Shakers throughout the cemetery and in the surrounding fields and forests. It is also rumored that the graveyard was built upon a Native American burial ground, causing permanent unrest amongst the original inhabitants.

Some of the headstones have been stolen, while others sit in broken piles. cavalonja / Atlas Obscura User

3. Dean Hill Cemetery - Fitchburg, Massachusetts

Also known as “The Rev,” this one-acre cemetery was established in 1791 as a burial site for Revolutionary War veterans and their families. Tucked away at the end of a secluded backroad, the cemetery is surrounded by worn stone walls, with many of the gravestones so weathered that it’s difficult to read the names on them. However, the people buried here still make themselves known ... over the years, locals have claimed to hear screams and see shadowy figures of Revolutionary War soldiers, as well as a mysterious woman dressed in all white. Legend even has it that, in the late ’80s or early ’90s, a ritual performed here opened a portal between worlds, though who orchestrated such a feat remains unknown.

Many of Wildwood’s older graves have no documentation, adding to its air of mystery. supersizejm / Atlas Obscura User

4. Wildwood Cemetery and Crematorium - Williamsport, Pennsylvania

This cemetery has a unique design: It is split down the middle by a road that supposedly separates the eastern “good” side of the cemetery from the western “haunted” side, where the graves are older and the spirits are more restless. (It’s even rumored to house a banshee, who howls and sings sad songs in the night.) One of Wildwood’s mausoleums has some haunted history behind it, too. As the story goes, a local fireman was terrified of being buried alive and thus designed his mausoleum so that he could open it from inside. Nowadays, you can sometimes hear him moving around, waiting for a chance to stretch his legs on the cemetery grounds.

Wildwood is not only a prime place to interact with the dead but a wonderful place to be at one with nature. In fact, the cemetery was incorporated in 1863 because of the beauty and tranquility of its hilly landscape and then named Wildwood because of its thick woods. Don’t be surprised if you encounter a deer or two while exploring its haunted headstones or spot sparrows and hawks nestled in the trees.

The old graveyard is slowly being reclaimed by the swamp. gemfyre / Atlas Obscura User

5. Frenier Cemetery - LaPlace, Louisiana

About a 30-minute drive outside of New Orleans are the Manchac Wetlands, once home to the thriving towns of Ruddock, Napton, and Frenier. However, in 1915, a hurricane struck the area and destroyed all three, leaving many dead bodies in its wake. At least 29 of the hurricane’s victims were laid to rest in a mass grave inside Frenier Cemetery, but one woman, Julia Brown, was buried 100 yards away from the others. Why?

Brown was a rumored voodoo priestess, and Frenier residents alleged she said she would take the village with her when she died. The day the hurricane hit was the very same day she finally passed ... coincidence or voodoo magic, no one could say. Today, Brown is said to wander past the graves of those who perished in the storm, appearing to nearby kayakers behind layers of fog.

Ethel’s handmade headstone has been decorated with flowers, angel figurines, stuffed animals, and more. Chelgoroth / Atlas Obscura User

6. Georgiana Cemetery - Merritt Island, Florida

Moss-covered live oaks sway in the coastal breeze at this small Florida cemetery just off Merritt Island’s scenic South Tropical Trail. It’s a charming and relaxing spot ... that is, until you learn its history. It was here that, in 1934, 19-year-old Ethel Allen was buried after she was found brutally murdered on the banks of the Indian River Lagoon.

Perhaps because her murder was never solved (and justice was never served to her killer) Ethel still haunts Georgiana Cemetery, with many of its strange sights and sounds attributed to her. However, it seems as though Ethel may split her time between her burial site and the spot she was last seen alive, Ashley’s Tavern, where customers and employees have reported strange activity over the years.

The cemetery is filled with weathered crosses and wooden markers. librarianguish / Atlas Obscura User

7. Old Tonopah Cemetery - Tonopah, Nevada

If a cemetery is next to a Clown Motel, it’s probably safe to assume it’s haunted. Case in point is this relic of Tonopah’s silver days, where many former miners and prospectors are now buried. For the decade it was an active cemetery, from 1901 to 1911, over 300 people were interred here, many of them victims of the 1902 “Tonopah Plague” or the infamous Tonopah-Belmont Mine Fire of 1911. With such gruesome deaths, it makes sense that many of the cemetery’s residents would be on edge, seeking a respite from their underground abodes.

At the Clown Motel, EVPs have captured voices stating, “We mined” and “We died that day, 17 men” (in the mine fire), and guests have reported seeing eerie figures in the night, wandering through the halls or outside between the motel and the gravestones. Whether you hedge your bets and stay for the night or hightail it out of Tonopah before a ghost can grab you, the cemetery is sure to leave you sensing strange energy for days to come.

Alice was in love with a young man of a lower social class, making him unsuitable for her to marry. Collector of Experiences / Atlas Obscura User

8. Alice Flagg’s Grave - Pawleys Island, South Carolina

In All Saints Cemetery, the ghost of Alice Flagg, a young woman who died shortly after being forcibly separated from her beloved, lingers just beside her grave. The plain marble slab bears only her first name, but visitors frequently adorn the spot with flowers and other small tokens of remembrance to help ease her heartbreak in the afterlife. Some even come to make a wish: It’s said that if you walk around her gravestone six times counterclockwise, then six times clockwise, then place a token on the letter “A,” your wish will be granted. When Alice isn’t here at her final resting place, she’s supposedly going up and down the stairs at the Flagg family home or floating through the rows of headstones at All Saints.

The stairs are also said to be the site of satanic rituals. PrahaPixie / Atlas Obscura User

9. Greenwood Cemetery - Spokane, Washington

The staircase at this cemetery has been dubbed the “thousand steps” because, so the local lore goes, people rarely make it to the top. Those who do miraculously climb all the way up will see the faces of the dead men, women, and children buried below or hear their screams and cries ringing out in perpetuity. Some have even reported feeling a light, cool sensation much like rain while looking down from the highest step.

Tempting as it may be to try your luck on these spooky stairs, they are now part of private property and walking up or down them is considered trespassing. However, you can still view them from below by strolling through Greenwood Cemetery, which is itself home to many oddities. Abandoned tunnels under the cemetery, built by railroad companies in the late 19th century, may or may not be haunted by the Chinese laborers who died making them. Rumor also has it that the tunnels house buried treasure, but overgrown vegetation has prevented anyone from finding it.

Local legend also has it that a child serial killer in the 1940s dropped his victims’ bodies in this area. emilydmonson / Atlas Obscura User

10. Dead Children’s Playground - Huntsville, Alabama

Right next to Huntsville’s Maple Hill Cemetery is an interesting site: a simple playground with a swing set and small jungle gym, surrounded on three sides by dense trees and limestone walls. Given its proximity to over 80,000 burial plots, it’s only natural that the site would be slightly (or very) haunted. Over the years, adults and kids have witness swings moving on their own, as well as floating orbs of light. These odd occurrences could, perhaps, be signs from the many children who died during Huntsville’s 1918 flu epidemic. (Some visitors have heard laughing and squealing, so presumably they’re having a good time.)

Despite eventually being turned over to Unitarians, the cemetery was originally built by the Society of Dissenters. asdonkar / Atlas Obscura User

11. Unitarian Church Cemetery - Charleston, South Carolina

Built in 1772, this is the second oldest cemetery in Charleston, with plots and graves overrun by vines, grass, and shrubs in an intentionally wild “cemetery garden design.” The decision to leave the cemetery undisturbed arose from the Unitarian belief in the interconnectedness of all things, living and dead, with natural growth showing how the spirit continues on even after the body is interred. In this case, it seems the spirits are especially active, as unusual occurrences are commonplace in the cemetery.

The identity of the cemetery’s ghostly “Lady in White” has long been subject to speculation, the most popular theory being that she is Annabel Lee, the subject of an 1849 Edgar Allan Poe poem inspired by local legend. In this story, Annabel, a young Charleston woman, carries on a clandestine affair with a sailor before dying of yellow fever. When the sailor is barred from attending her funeral, he keeps vigil for her in the spot they used to meet at night: the Unitarian Church Cemetery. Even if you don’t see poor Annabel, you may spot the cemetery’s other famous ghost, Mary Bloomfield. After her husband left for Boston and never returned, Mary spent the rest of her life heartbroken, and now, in death, she still searches for him amongst the graves.

While many of the other graves in this cemetery are oriented east to west, Caroline’s faces north and south. TaunyaD / Atlas Obscura User

12. St. Omer Cemetery Witch Grave - Ashmore, Illinois

This uniquely shaped gravestone belongs to Caroline Barnes, a young woman who was supposedly executed for magical crimes in the late 19th century. The impossible death date on her grave (February 31, 1882) is seen as proof of her supernatural powers, while the ball atop the grave is believed to be a crystal ball that lights up on the darkest nights. Also, those who’ve tried taking photos of the Barnes family plot say that their film won’t develop (however, pro tip: digital seems to do just fine). No matter the truth of this eerie tale, it has undoubtedly inspired some odd behavior at St. Omer, namely, nighttime rituals that have left the site covered in flowers, coins, and candles.

The cemetery held burials from 1849 to 1880. blimpcaptain / Atlas Obscura User

13. El Campo Santo Cemetery - San Diego, California

Translating to “Holy Field” Cemetery, this small grave site in Old Town San Diego is the last remaining part of what was once a much larger cemetery. As the city grew rapidly in the late 19th century, parts of the grounds were paved over to accommodate streetcars (feeding a theory that the spirits of El Campo are now trapped beneath the concrete). However, white crosses have been painted over parts of the surrounding street and sidewalks to honor some of these disrespected graves, while small brass markers denote others.

El Campo Santo is the resting place of several Native American leaders, including Antonio Garra, a mid-19th-century Kupa chief who was executed by a firing squad right next to his open grave. Now, he’s one of the cemetery’s most spotted specters, overpowering visitors with intense chills, feelings of sorrow, and faint whispers. The other most famous ghost here is Yankee Jim Robinson, a drifter convicted of grand larceny for trying to steal a rowboat. Jim was hanged just down the road from El Campo, and his spirit now wanders the grounds, begging for forgiveness.

It All Comes Together in Chattanooga - Atlas Obscura

2026-10-08T18:51:00.000Z

More than once, this musical mecca has reinvented itself around shared spaces.

Chattanooga may be best known for its natural beauty, surrounded by mountains, valleys, and the Tennessee River. This charming Appalachian city is also home to annual music festivals like the IBMA World of Bluegrass and the 3 Sisters Bluegrass Festival. The streets and venues fill with musicians and fans dedicated to upholding the traditions of bluegrass music.

Chattanooga has always been a city of convergence. Long before trains arrived, the river drew people through a narrow passage in the mountains; later came traders, artists, and entrepreneurs. At festival time, bluegrass becomes the city's soundtrack, with impromptu performances and jams ranging all across town. Many of the local hot spots are pressed into service as music venues.

The destinations collected here allow for all sorts of gatherings: a railroad terminal built to serve historic crowds, now repurposed; a riverfront freighted with Cherokee history where folks now gather for performances; and even a whiskey company that rallied the community to change state law. Taken as a whole, they reveal a city profoundly shaped around the possibilities of people coming together.

The train station’s former waiting room now serves as the lobby of the Hotel Chalet. Chattanooga Tourism Co.

Chattanooga Choo Choo — Historic Terminal Station

Begin at the building that made Chattanooga synonymous with arrival. Terminal Station opened in 1909 and at its peak handled nearly 50 trains a day, turning its grand waiting room into a literal crossroads of travelers, soldiers, workers, and families. Passenger service ended in 1970, but the station survived demolition and was reborn as the Chattanooga Choo Choo. Today the former terminal is once again centered around travel: the Hotel Chalet, restaurants, music venues, comedy, gardens, and Station Street all radiate from the old rail hub.

The New Mountain Opry builds on more than 40 years of tradition. Chattanooga Tourism Co.

The New Mountain Opry

On Walden’s Ridge atop Signal Mountain, neighbors, musicians, and visitors have been uniting around music for years, sharing both a room and a repertoire. The original Mountain Opry began in 1979 and spent more than four decades presenting bluegrass and folk music at the Walden’s Ridge Civic Center before being reborn at the historic Bachman Community Center in 2021 as the New Mountain Opry. It lives on as a monthly tradition, with live bluegrass in the old school auditorium.

View of the Tennessee River Gorge from atop Signal Mountain. Lazybookwyrm / CC BY 4.0

Tennessee River Gorge

Follow the river west into the landscape that made Chattanooga a crossroads long before there was a city here. The Tennessee River Gorge runs for roughly 27 miles through the Cumberland Mountains, and archaeological evidence points to human presence here for at least 10,000 years. The river served as a travel corridor, and more recently communities, commerce, military movements, and industry have all depended on navigating through this narrow passage. Today the Tennessee River Gorge Trust protects more than 17,000 acres of the gorge and promotes hiking, paddling, camping, research, and education — turning an ancient corridor into a modern destination for conservation and outdoor life. Among other events, the gorge hosts Chattajack, a 31-mile paddleboard and kayak race. Visitors should also explore Williams Island, home to hundreds of acres of wilderness and only accessible by boat.

Visitors gather for waterfront performances at Ross’s Landing. J. Adams

Ross’s Landing

Ross’s Landing, along the riverfront, was associated with Cherokee businessman and later Principal Chief John Ross, serving as a ferry and trading location. In 1838, it also became a departure point during the forced removal of Cherokee people on the Trail of Tears. An art installation in the park commemorates their forcible departure. Today the riverfront is once again a major public space, with lawns, an amphitheater, a marina, promenades, and interpretive features hosting local events like Riverfront Nights free summer concert series and the Chattanooga River Games. Just upstream, the Walnut Street bridge reopened in October 2026, restoring one of downtown’s best-loved pedestrian connections across the Tennessee River after a major renovation.

The stately Read House Hotel brings a Jazz Age elegance to downtown. Andrew Jameson / CC BY-SA 3.0

The Read House Hotel

Classic hospitality can be found here, at Chattanooga’s oldest hotel. The Read House traces its hotel history back roughly 150 years, while its present interiors lean into the glamour of the 1920s. Its most famous story belongs to Room 311: The room is said to be haunted by the ghost of Annalisa Netherly, a guest from the 1920s. Tours keep the tale alive. The grand lobby and lively barroom conversation make this a hot spot for visitors to share their stories.

Chattanooga Whiskey started distilling here in 2015. Hugo Juarez Photography

Chattanooga Whiskey Experimental Distillery

At Chattanooga Whiskey, the convivial spirit turned into political action. When the company was founded in 2011, state law still prevented distilling spirits in Hamilton County. Its founders launched the “Vote Whiskey” campaign, held public events, and pushed for a change in Tennessee law. The change passed into law in 2013, making legal distilling possible in the city again for the first time in more than a century. Production began at the Experimental Distillery in 2015, and regular tours are available, along with tastings of their signature Tennessee High Malt whiskey.

Bluff View Art District

Set above the Tennessee River in a historic downtown district, Bluff View brings together the River Gallery, sculpture garden, Bluff View Inn, Rembrandt’s Coffee House, Tony’s Pasta Shop, a bakery, patios, paths, and scenic overlooks. The appeal is less a single attraction than the way all of the pieces connect: art leads to coffee, coffee to a garden, and the garden to a view across the river.

Monument and cannons at the Chickamauga portion of the Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park. Laura Bellucci (Happyg0Laura)

Chickamauga Battlefield

In September 1863, Union and Confederate armies collided at Chickamauga in one of the Civil War’s bloodiest battles; the battlefield later became part of the nation’s first national military park. Over time, a second layer of communal memory accumulated here: ghost stories, especially the local legend of “Old Green Eyes.” There are many explanations for this mysterious apparition. One suggests it’s the spirit of a soldier. Another says the ghostly presence was there long before the Civil War. An annual October festival celebrates the legend. It’s just another example of how history and myth can exist in the same remarkable landscape.

Why King Arthur Still Shapes Pop Culture - JSTOR Daily

2026-10-08T13:27:07.000Z

The Matter of Britain has had an enduring influence on popular media, from films and documentaries to commercials and music videos. Avalon, Camelot, the Holy Grail, and Excalibur have found a place in popular music, entertainment, and consumer culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as have Merlin, Guinevere, and other familiar figures.

In 2026 alone, the music video for Troye Sivan’s 2026 single “Party” is set in an Arthurian-like landscape, complete with dramatic cliffs and grasslands and a queer-coded equivalent to the Knights of the Round Table. That summer, fragrance brand Ffern released a short inspired by the legend of The Green Knight. Its color grading recalls dreamy 1980s fantasy films more than the grim, dark cinematography associated with Game of Thrones and fantasy settings from the 2010s onward. In 2027, director Anna Biller of The Love Witch fame will release the fairytale-like feature The Face of Horror, with medieval settings and Technicolor-like visuals.

Arthur and the chivalric culture he evokes remain part of our cultural lexicon, as shown by his continued reimagining in popular media. Examples include the 1981 Excalibur film, which interweaves four narrative threads: the sword in the stone, the Arthur-Guenevere-Lancelot love triangle, the quest for the Holy Grail, and Mordred’s ascent. More recent films include King Arthur (2004), The Last Legion (2007), Arthur and Merlin (2015), and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017).

Excalibur, in particular, became a blueprint for Arthurian-inspired music videos and commercial shorts.

“It might be hard to overestimate the influence of Excalibur for a certain generation of media consumers, film producers, and television documentarians,” write Elizabeth Ferszt and Nathaniel Bump in Arthuriana. They use the music video for New Order’s 2015 single “Restless” to discuss how the Matter of Britain continues to influence popular media, despite the inconsistency in the quality of these tributes. “New Order’s spin on Arthur happily disregards character roles and plot action, and instead offers a lavish, romantic film aesthetic borrowed from the John Boorman film Excalibur,” the authors write. They argue that the video’s borrowed aesthetic signals an Arthurian universe rooted in late-twentieth-century popular media. Its fragmented narrative assumes viewers recognize Arthurian tropes and motifs, which, for the average consumer, may be more closely associated with Boorman’s film, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Disney’s animated classic The Sword in the Stone, or even Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon series.

More to Explore

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Livia Gershon

March 18, 2024

In romantic literature of the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, fainting wasn’t just for ladies.

However, in the case of “Restless,” New Order seems to challenge the cookie-cutter versions of Arthur that have been over-consumed and shared by the middle class in favor of a punk reinterpretation of Arthurian material. “We affirm Arthur’s continued function as a symbol of order and justness in popular media—indeed, his status as a locus of safety and order serves as the source of irony in the fragmented re-telling of the sword and the stone narrative,” they write. Moreover, the video positions “the Arthurian Material as a means to explore the tensions and anxieties that threaten domestic family life and to express a skeptical and suspicious view of the middle-class fantasy of order, justness, and safety that Arthur has come to embody in Western culture.”

The two more recent examples that came after the article’s publication fit the same Boorman-inspired aesthetic paradigm, combining lush visuals with a fairytale-like, artificial color palette. Troye Sivan takes an intentionally classicized and queer approach to the Knights of the Round Table, while Ffern’s short film for its “Green Knight” fragrance offers a gender-bending interpretation of the universe. The film emphasizes the pagan elements of Arthurian myth and uses an elaborate, dreamlike style to emphasize Ffern’s commitment to craft, ingredients, and creativity, as well as its stance against AI.

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Arthur’s legend also serves as a political metaphor, inviting comparisons through familiar stories and symbols. Arthur’s relevance is not limited to one political party. The far-right’s association with it is well documented: Hitler and Himmler, for instance, “obsessed over the Arthurian legends, the Knights Templar, and the Holy Grail,” per Current Affairs, envisioning the Middle Ages as a time of racial and cultural purity. As recently as September 2026, the Northern Italian village of Pietramurata hosted a far-right meetup titled “Ritorno a Camelot.” However, Arthurian imagery has also been used outside Western far-right movements. Ferszt notes how ISIS appropriated it to frame its conflict with the West. The adjective “medieval” was also used—erroneously—to describe terrorists’ actions.

“The Arthurian legend is a ‘receptive vessel waiting to be filled by the aspirations, anxieties, and desires of any individual or group that chooses to appropriate it,” the authors conclude.

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