Author: Ms. R.

The good news is that mermaids are real. They’re on the Florida state payroll as such, but to them, it doesn’t feel like work at all. The bad news is they don’t travel. They perform in one place only, a venue of unthinkable circumstance whose singularity cannot be understated. “No one could ever duplicate what we have here,” says John Athanason, gazing from a submerged 400-seat theater into one of the deepest freshwater springs on earth. Weeki Wachee Springs……

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The production studios at 1041 North Formosa Avenue in West Hollywood have a long and glamorous history. In the early 1920s, silent-film stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford bought the complex for their newly established production company, Pickford-Fairbanks Studios. Five years later, the company got a rebrand and became United Artists. In the decades since, the studios, now collectively called The Lot, have hosted everyone from Frank Sinatra to Adam Sandler to Oprah. One of The Lot’s garages, located on……

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Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we visit the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, Poland, the final resting place of famed composer Frédéric Chopin’s heart—smuggled there by Chopin’s sister after his death. Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the way you’ll meet……

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At the Julius Sturgis Pretzel Bakery, bread is historic, salted, and loopy. The establishment is the first commercial pretzel bakery in the United States. And it just so happens that the Sturgis family is the oldest pretzel baking family in the country, as well.  In 1861, German immigrant Julius Sturgis was a spry 26 when he purchased a stone house at 219 E. Main Street in the little town of Lititz. The building, which dates to 1784, soon became……

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In 2012, when moving out of his house, Hjörtur Smárason found in his garage a pair of old, mice-chewed roller blades, tools, boxes, and an untouched bag of food from McDonald’s, still in its paper bag. It had been sitting there for three years after Smárason purchased one last McDonald’s meal, a Big Mac and fries, on the day before the three outlets of the fast food chain in Iceland closed their doors in 2009. Surprisingly to him, the……

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After more than 25 years, Helen’s Bar-B-Q has a reputation that extends far beyond Brownsville, Tennessee. Six days a week, Helen Turner rises in the morning dark to tend the oak and hickory logs, which take hours to burn down to embers. Sometimes her husband, who is now retired, lends a hand, but for the most part, she is accustomed to manning the pit alone. By the time customers roll in, the hog skin has acquired a formidably blackened……

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Due to its extraordinary level of preservation, Stobs Camp is an internationally important First World War site. This rather bleak and exposed Scottish hillside was chosen for its remote location. For many years, it was shrouded in secrecy. The military training camp at Stobs was established in 1902 and became important at the outbreak of WWI. After hosting a series of Officers’ Training Corps, it became an internment camp for various “aliens” and then a prisoner of war camp. The detainees were mostly……

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A deep history of Hispanic heritage runs throughout the San Luis Valley in Colorado, and this is perhaps most evident at the Shrine of the Stations of the Cross in San Luis. Constructed in the 1980s and dedicated in 1990, the Spanish-Moorish style adobe church was created by parishioners of the Sangre de Cristo Parish in San Luis, Colorado, crafted as an act of love and good faith. The shrine also resides atop a mesa and was designed as a place where……

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Banks and pawnshops have been a staple of society for centuries. Nowhere is this more clear than at the city bank in the center of Amsterdam, where an office has been in continuous use since 1614. While the inside is modern, the outside remains true to 17th-century architecture, especially when looking at the text above the door.  The text translates to:  “Have you not money, nor goods, pass this door by. Have you the latter, and miss you the……

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