Author: Bess Lovejoy

Dreamed up by a former polar explorer, the Nansen passport was the first legal travel document for refugees. Fridtjof Nansen, an adventurer turned Norwegian diplomat, created the document after becoming the League of Nation’s first High Commissioner for Refugees. In 1922, in response to the refugee crisis in Europe, he created the identity document that bore his name. (That same year he won the Nobel Peace Prize.)

The Nansen passport would go on to restore the right of half a million stateless people—displaced by World War I, the Armenian genocide, and the Russian Revolution—to cross borders and prove their identities. Nansen passports, usually renewed for a year at a time, continued to be issued until the 1940s when they were succeeded by the so-called London Travel Document, created after World War II. While most of those who used the Nansen passport were ordinary citizens, it also proved to be a lifesaver for several famous figures.

1. VLADIMIR NABOKOV

 
On December 15, 1921, the Soviet government delivered an order that denaturalized large segments of the expatriate population. Among their number was Vladimir Nabokov, one of almost a million Russians who had left the country after the revolution. Nabokov travelled for years on Nansen passports. He was among many of the culturally minded Russian emigrés who gravitated to Berlin, where he met and married his wife, also from Russia. She, however, was Jewish, and the couple fled Nazi Germany for Paris in 1937. France had received many Russians after the revolution, and Nabokov’s character Colonel Taxovich in Lolita (1955) is often pointed to as an archetype of the exiled Russian in Paris, forced to accept reduced circumstances and importance.

Nabokov’s provisional documents still often caused him trouble. In his memoir, Speak, Memory he calls the Nansen passport “a very inferior document of a sickly green hue. Its holder was little better than a criminal on parole and had to go through most hideous ordeals every time he wished to travel from one country to another, and the smaller the countries the worse the fuss they made.” In his short story, “Conversation Piece, 1945,” Nabokov’s narrator has a Nansen passport, “tattered sea-green,” missing a stamp “rudely refused” by a French consul. In 1940, Nabokov and his wife Vera left France for the United States, where Nabokov became a naturalized citizen in 1945. After the success of Lolita made his fortune, he spent the end of his life living at the foot of the Swiss Alps on Lake Geneva.

2. MARC CHAGALL

 
Marc was born Moïse Shagal (sometimes given as Moyshe Segal), to a Hasidic Jewish couple in what is modern-day Belarus. The young painter was initially a supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution and actually worked for the government. However, following ideological disputes with other artists and financial problems, he left in the early 1920s for France. It’s unclear exactly when he passed into statelessness, but he seems to have used Nansen passports after his 1923 move to France and before becoming a French citizen in 1937.

While Chagall eventually did earn French citizenship, he would lose his nationality for a second time in 1941. When the Nazis took power, Chagall and thousands of other Jews in occupied France had their citizenship stripped.

Luckily, Chagall was smuggled out of France by sympathetic Americans and lived out the rest of the war in New York. His French citizenship was restored after WWII, and he returned to France, where he remained until his death in 1985.

3. ROBERT CAPA

 
The life of Robert Capa, born Endre Friedmann in 1913, had a wild trajectory. The young Hungarian, already in trouble for his political activity against his own country’s fascist regime, moved to Berlin in his late teens. He lived in Germany until Hitler’s rise to power prompted him to move to France in 1933.

In Paris he met another Jewish refugee, a woman who went by the name Gerda Taro. She inspired his own transformation to Robert Capa, an “American” photographer who had an easier time selling photos to the French press. Together the professional and romantic partners worked to document the Spanish Civil War. Taro was on a solo trip in 1937 when she died in Spain, but Capa went on to cover World War II. He would follow the Allies across North Africa and Europe, including photographing the D-Day landings for LIFE magazine.

After the war, Capa’s life took something of a turn. He occasionally photographed celebrities and dated Ingrid Bergman. While still traveling extensively, he technically moved to the US in 1939, likely on a Nansen passport after his Hungarian citizenship had been revoked as the result of a change in Hungarian law. (He eventually became an American citizen in 1946.) However, he still also pursued work in war zones. He was killed by a landmine in Thai-Binh, in contemporary Vietnam, covering the French Indochina War in 1954. At the time of his death, he was just 40 years old.

4. IGOR STRAVINSKY

 
Stravinsky was born in Russia in 1882. The child of two musicians, he was already widely traveled and established as a ballet composer by the outbreak of World War I. Stravinsky composed for the traveling troupe Ballets Russes, a number of whose members would eventually travel on Nansen passports. The dance company premiered his radically unconventional Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913. After the war began, Stravinsky moved his family to Switzerland.

As far as politics back in Russia were concerned, Stravinsky was a monarchist, so he was not rushing to return home. With his acceptance of a Nansen passport in the early 20s, his biographer Richard Taruskin writes, Stravinsky “renounced his Russian nationality.” Stravinsky moved to France and would subsequently become a French citizen in 1934, move to California in 1940, and earn U.S. citizenship in 1945. His first return to the U.S.S.R. was a highly publicized visit in 1962 as the guest of Nikita Khrushchev, but the renowned composer would live out his rest of his life as an American.

Lately, if you mention clowns, people think of creepy clown sightings or perhaps various political campaigns. But in the mid-1800s, if you said clown and politics in the same sentence, everyone who heard you would think of Dan Rice.

Rice was arguably the most famous entertainer in America in the latter half of the 19th century. Born in New York in 1823, he became a clown, a comedian, an acrobat, a strongman, an animal trainer, a singer, a dancer, an impresario, a political commentator, and an occasional political candidate during his lifetime. He was so famous that some think his trademark look—goatee, striped pants or formal suit with a top hat—may have been one of the models for Uncle Sam’s image (although some evidence also exists to show that Uncle Sam predates Rice).

In Rice’s day, the American circus was in its infancy. In the early 1800s the circus was frequently an animal show, usually centered on equestrian acts. When Rice started in show business in the 1840s, he presented trained animal acts, including “Sybil, the Learned Pig” (also known as Lord Byron) and later his trained horse Excelsior. At one point, he even presented a trained rhinoceros and an elephant who could walk across a tightrope. But Rice also expanded from the basic animal show to add more acrobats and the clowns that we expect in a circus today, helping to give the circus something of its modern form.

As Rice’s circuses became famous, they toured all over the country, by wagon in the East and by boat in the South. When winter came, he moved his shows into cities and indoors into theaters, sometimes drawing thousands. The circus of the 1800s was not for kids, and Rice’s shows were wild and wooly affairs. Performances featured lots of ladies in tight, skimpy clothes and double entendres (or even all-out dirty jokes) flying around the ring. If a fight didn’t break out during a performance or outside of the tent, it was notable. According to legend, the exclamation “Hey, Rube!”—a cry used for decades by circus roustabouts and carnies to call for help whenever a fight broke out—was based on the time a member of Dan Rice’s troupe was caught in a fight in New Orleans and yelled for help to his friend Reuben.

But it was his clowning and commentary that made Rice most famous; to a modern audience, Rice’s act would resemble a stand-up comedy show. He stood in the center ring—at first with one of his animals and later by himself—and emitted a constant stream of comic patter. (Think Robin Williams at his fastest and Jon Stewart at his most political.) He would comment on anything and everything, and exchanged rapid-fire quips with audience members.

As America’s middle class grew and started looking for respectability, Rice gradually began billing his productions more often as shows instead of circuses (by then, circuses were seen as lowbrow entertainment). He also began to call himself “the Great American Humorist.” One of his signature acts was to perform witty parodies of Shakespeare’s plays.

Rice was involved in politics during most of this life, mostly as a commentator, but also sometimes as a candidate. As the Civil War approached, Rice’s political leanings—and his commentary—moved toward the Democrats and away from abolition and the new Republican Party. This was a position that he continued to hold during the war. He ran for the state senate in Pennsylvania as a Democrat in 1864, but lost the election. In 1868, he made a serious run for president, but withdrew from the campaign when he realized that he was unlikely to win. After the Civil War, there were stories that Rice had gone to the White House during the conflict to tell jokes and cheer up Lincoln—but these are probably tales Rice himself spread around.

Rice’s personal fortunes took a variety of twists and turns. He got rich, then lost his money several times over. Later in life, he became an alcoholic and died broke in 1900 in Long Branch, New Jersey. But his memory lives on: The town of Girard, Pennsylvania, where Rice made his home and winter headquarters for many years, still holds Dan Rice Days every summer to honor his legacy.

In July 2015, Carole Desforges spotted a large, weird creature prowling around the lawn near her home in Plymouth in southwestern England. She thought it was a fox at first, but after a second glance, decided it was much too big, with long, cat-like legs that made it seem more like a leopard or a panther. And it was all black, unlike the foxes native to the region, which are generally red. Carole managed to snap a few shots of the creature before it skulked away. Friends suggested it might be a puma or a lynx.

She wasn’t the first Briton to behold such a sight. Far from it, in fact.

Stories of large felines roaming the countryside have long permeated the culture of rural England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. In his book Rural Rides, written in the 1820s, author William Cobbett wrote about spotting a cat that was “as big as a middle-sized spaniel dog” near the ruins of the Waverley Abbey in London, claiming it was hanging out inside a hollow elm. A few centuries before that, a medieval Welsh book talked about the Cath Palug (“Clawed Cat”), a black kitten who grows into a huge cat and stalks the Isle of Anglesey eating warriors—nine score of them, to be precise. And since the 1930s, the region of Buchan in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, has been home to many sightings of a beast described as a huge black panther. Throughout the centuries, they’ve been known by a few different names: phantom cats, mystery cats, Alien Big Cats or ABCs (referring to the fact that no such animal is native to the area), or British Big Cats (BBCs).

No one’s entirely sure whether these things are real or not, and as you might expect, there are more than a few theories out there. Some cryptozoologists take the “alien” in ABCs quite literally, positing that the cats come from another world and are linked to UFO sightings, while others insist that British big cats are the remnants of Ice Age fauna, having survived in small numbers, as living fossils, for thousands of years. Others, perhaps more reasonably, figure that the British big cats are nothing more than the progeny of escaped pets, as it was fashionable among wealthy people in the first half of the 20th century to keep exotic animals in private homes (that is, until the Dangerous Wild Animals Act banned this practice in Britain in 1976). A lot of people say they’re just stray dogs, and some similarly suggest that the phantom black dog of British folklore, which brings bad luck to anyone who crosses its path, has been conflated with the apocryphal big cats.

But the big cats crop up in modern times regularly, too. Reports of the Beast of Exmoor, described as a gray or black cat standing 4 to 6 feet tall and hunting livestock in the moorlands of Devon and Somerset, began in the ‘70s, and in 1983, a farmer in South Moulton said it was responsible for slashing the throats of more than 100 of his sheep. Other regions throughout England have come with their own phantom cats, most of which are black: The Beast of Burford, the Wildcat of Woodchester, the Fen Tiger of Cambridgeshire. In the Forest of Dean, near the Welsh border, the local legendary leopard is simply known as Boris.

There are so many reports of big cat sightings throughout the UK—about a thousand every year—that there’s even such a thing as the British Big Cat Society, a network of people across the UK who research, catalogue, and analyze stories—and possible evidence—of big cats in the area. “The BBCS enables the public to report their sightings and Big Cat ‘incidents’ to an ‘understanding ear,’” its website explains, “and we can react appropriately where necessary.”

Then there’s Danny Nineham, who works solo with just his “legs and brains,” to analyze cat sightings for various police forces, collecting photos (and feline skulls); he reports that about 90 percent of the BBC sightings are black cats. However, “that’s because black stands out,” Nineham says in an interview on the Scottish Big Cat Trust website. “It’s conspicuous out in the fields, whereas brown blends in more.” In a 2013 interview with the Welsh newspaper Daily Post, Nineham said he received reports of big cat sightings every single day, from people across the country.

Carcasses of animals displaying bite marks similar to those of large cats have also been showing up in British forests for decades. At the Royal Agricultural University in Gloucester, an animal scientist named Dr. Andrew Hemmings has studied at least 20 such animal skeletons, with three of them bearing bite marks that could belong to a big cat. However, it’s hard to differentiate between bite marks left by a dog, badger, fox, or other carnivore and those left by an unknown species of cat whose teeth haven’t been studied. As such, none of the tests have been conclusive.

And speaking of carcasses, a few have turned up as possible culprits as well. A Canadian lynx was shot and killed in Devon in the early 1900s, and its teeth showed that it had spent a significant amount of time living in captivity. Much later, in 1980, a puma was captured in Inverness-shire, Scotland, after sightings spanning several years; it was sent to a zoo for the rest of its life, where it was found to be reasonably docile (it enjoyed being tickled). As well, the skull of a leopard was discovered by a young boy on Scotland’s Bodmin Moor in the 1990s. It was at first thought to be evidence of the terrible Beast of Bodmin, but the Natural History Museum in London determined that it’d been discarded on the moor after being imported to the UK as part of a leopard skin rug.

Despite all of these consistent sightings, it’s apparently been difficult get a clear photo of any of the elusive black kitties. In 2000, an 11-year-old boy had perhaps the closest encounter with one so far, when he was left with long scratches on his face after a juvenile “tiger-like” animal attacked him as he played in a field with his brother in Trellech, Monmouthshire. The boy clashed with the creature after “following a black tail” into the grass, which he thought belonged to his pet cat, Sylvester, and got a faceful of claws for his trouble. Even a subsequent police search by helicopter with heat-seeking devices turned up no trace of the animal.

The British Isles do have a wild member of the cat family that some folks think are being mistaken for BBCs. The Scottish wildcat is found in the highlands in the northern half of Scotland and numbers only about 4000 at most; they’re elusive, living in underground dens and hollow trees. However, they don’t really match the descriptions of these phantom cats. Scottish wildcats aren’t much bigger than a house cat, and they’re certainly not anywhere near the size of the “panthers” and “leopards” that have been reported. They’re also not black—they’re more along the lines of a tabby on steroids.

Meanwhile, it should be said that the United Kingdom seems to have a significant problem with large felines escaping from zoos. Since the late 18th century, dozens of lynxes, caracals, panthers, and pumas have slunk out of their cages (and have mostly been apprehended or killed shortly thereafter).

The debate shows no signs of stopping, seeing as the big cat sightings haven’t either—whether they’re real beasts who’ve been terrorizing the sheep of the United Kingdom for centuries or are just campfire stories made up to scare British children.

The first time humans saw a message written in the sky was during World War I, when pilots in the British Royal Air Force used skywriting to communicate with troops. In 1922, a Royal Air Force captain took the technique to the world of advertising, writing aerial messages in England and New York City. Brands such as Lucky Strike cigarettes, Ford, and Pepsi soon employed skywriters to advertise in the great blue yonder, a practice that continues today.

If you’ve ever looked up at a sky-written message and wondered about the person flying the plane, you’re in luck. Check out these secrets of skywriters for an inside-the-cockpit view.

1. THEY’RE BASICALLY ACROBATS IN THE SKY.

“Your professional sky-writer is a trained aerial acrobat,” famed aviator and skywriter Oliver Colin LeBoutillier wrote in the March 1929 edition of Popular Science Monthly. Besides successfully navigating a plane at 10,000 feet, skywriters must also diagram and memorize each maneuver and perform it with complete precision. They have to write their messages upside-down and backwards, so that it’s legible to people on the ground, and they can’t see what they’re writing when they’re up in the sky. “I’ve been doing it for years and years and years, and still there’s a learning curve,” skywriter Greg Stinis tells Quartz.

2. THEY VALUE BREVITY.

If you find Twitter’s character limit challenging, you’ve probably never written a message in the sky. Depending on weather conditions, a skywritten message will evaporate within a few minutes to a few hours. Because of this time pressure, skywriters need to keep their messages brief. They’re also limited by the amount of fuel and skywriting fluid their plane can hold. Most can only write 10 letters, but skywriter Suzanne Asbury-Oliver and her husband, Steve Oliver, have a modified plane that makes it possible for them to write up to 25 letters.

3. THEY VIEW THEMSELVES AS ARTISTS.

Although they’re highly skilled pilots with tons of technical knowledge, skywriters think of their work as an art form. They begin a job by sketching the message on a piece of paper, planning and diagramming each twist and turn. And once they’re in the air, they have to use their intuition to feel their way around the letters. “The only bad part is that I can’t take my canvas of art away with me. Eventually it fades away. It goes with the breeze,” Stinis says.

4. THEY LOVE HOLIDAYS AND BIG ANNUAL EVENTS.

According to Glenn Smith, a skywriter based in Australia, holidays and big annual events are his bread and butter. “It is the big events of the year that guarantee the work—the Melbourne Cup, the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, and Valentine’s Day,” Smith says. Companies may hire skywriters to advertise during music festivals, movie premieres, and baseball games because the message will get a lot of eyeballs. And Valentine’s Day is a popular day for marriage proposals and other big romantic gestures.

5. THEIR CUSTOMERS PAY THEM LARGE AMOUNTS …

Skywriting is a costly enterprise. Because skywriters must pay for a high-horsepower plane, plane maintenance, fuel, and skywriting fluid, which can cost $10 a gallon, a typical job costs thousands of dollars. And the price can quickly go up. Asbury-Oliver tells Bloomberg that the most expensive part of skywriting is transporting the airplane to the job. “It costs about $2 a mile to move the airplane. If we’re in Tucson, Arizona, and [clients] want something in San Francisco, we have to charge them for mileage.”

6. … BUT MOST SKYWRITERS NEED A SECOND JOB.

For Smith, who owns an engineering company, skywriting is not a full-time job. “My primary income is from my engineering business—you wouldn’t be able to run an airplane, run a family, and pay a mortgage out of skywriting. You do it because you have a passion for it,” he says. Today, because fewer companies are hiring skywriters, only a few people are able to earn enough to make it their full-time job. “We always have called [skywriting] a lost art because it was dwindling when I started and it still is dwindling … There’s really just a handful of skywriters left,” Asbury-Oliver tells The Atlantic.

7. TYPOS ARE THEIR GREATEST FEAR.

Because skywriters don’t have the luxury of using erasers or pressing the delete key, complete precision is a major job requirement. Although skywritten typos and misspelled hashtags do happen, it’s rare for a professional with years of experience to make a mistake. When mistakes do happen, though, a pilot might draw a line through the error and start the message over. And in a large city, millions of people will see the typo before it evaporates.

8. A CLOUDY DAY MEANS THEY CAN’T WORK.

Because skywriting fluid appears white, cloudy days mean that a skywritten message won’t be visible. Skywriters aim to work on clear, cool days with high humidity and minimal wind. Since weather can be unpredictable, most skywriters won’t promise that your message will be written at an exact date and time. “We need at least a three-day window to get their message up there,” Oliver explains.

9. THEY’VE CAUSED TRAFFIC JAMS AND CAR ACCIDENTS.

Skywriters have the power to turn heads, stop traffic, and distract drivers. Because skywriting appears slowly, letter by letter, people often try to figure out what the message is as it’s being written. “When people see [skywriting], they literally slam on their brakes in green lights and stick their heads out the window,” Asbury-Oliver says.

10. THEY KEEP THEIR TRADE SECRETS CLOSE TO THEIR CHEST.

Because skywriting has historically been a highly competitive field, skywriters have carefully guarded the technical secrets of their job. Oliver tells mental_floss that there’s no certification program and no written training manual. Aspiring skywriters, even if they’re highly skilled pilots, must learn the craft from someone who knows it already. Asbury-Oliver, who worked for Pepsi’s skywriting program until it ended in 2000, couldn’t reveal trade secrets to anyone without violating her contract. And today’s skywriters, such as Stinis, try to keep the business in the family—his father taught him how to skywrite, and he taught his son.

11. SKYTYPERS HAVE BROUGHT SKYWRITING INTO THE DIGITAL WORLD.

Traditional skywriting differs from skytyping, a digital form of skywriting in which multiple planes (usually five) use a centralized computer system to quickly and accurately create a message. Stinis’s father Andy patented skytyping in the 1960s, and Stinis’s company uses the technique, which is similar to dot matrix printing, to create automated messages. Skytyping requires less artistry than regular skywriting because the planes rely on a computer (rather than pilot) for much of the work.

12. THEY LIKE SOCIAL MEDIA.

Social media has boosted skywriting’s popularity. With Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, Snapchat, and Instagram, people around the world can see a skywritten message even as it’s being created, the messages reach more eyeballs, and they can be preserved for far longer. Although the message is lost when the smoke vaporizes, the internet is forever.

13. THEY TRAVEL ALL AROUND THE WORLD FOR WORK.

Because skywriters are few and far between, companies are often willing to pay them to travel. It takes time and money to transport a plane, though, so Stinis and his son Stephen own planes in Spain, France, and South Africa. Stinis has done jobs in Japan and Dubai, and Oliver and Asbury-Oliver have skywritten messages in all 50 U.S. states, Mexico, Canada, and El Salvador.

14. WE MAY SEE COLORED AND GLOW-IN-THE-DARK SKYWRITING IN THE FUTURE.

Although it is possible to skywrite with colored (rather than white) fluid, it’s more difficult to work with. For over four decades, Stinis’s company has experimented with dyes to produce colored smoke, but hasn’t found a functional, cost-effective solution yet. If the technology progresses, we may regularly see colored skywriting—or even glow-in-the-dark skywriting for nighttime use—in the future.

We all like to get a sense of where we are in the world. Observation towers—the ones we climb to get a good look around—provide us with the opportunity to survey the beauty of the land for miles without having to scale treacherous mountains. Sometimes, though, the thing you’re looking out from can be just as interesting as the view itself.

1. PENNINE TOWER

By today’s standards, Pennine Tower, near Lancaster, England (above), is much more interesting to look at than the view it boasts. Erected in 1964 and opened the following year, the tower forms part of a rest stop on the M6 Motorway and acts as a halfway point on a drive between London and Edinburgh. The incredible 72-foot brutalist tower was originally home to a 24-hour restaurant and observation deck—used to look at the motorway below and glimpse the future of road travel.

It’s since earned the honor of becoming a Grade II listed building in the UK for reasons of historic and architectural interest, with its citation from Historic England stating that the tower is “reminiscent in form to an airport control tower, evoking the modern glamor of 1960s air travel and also drawing on the progressive urban movement of this period of constructing towers with restaurants and observation platforms.” Sadly, due to changes made in fire safety regulations in the UK, the tower has been closed to the public since 1989, but some urban explorers have still managed to find their way inside.

2. TUBORGFLASKEN

No, you’re not seeing things—that indeed is a giant beer bottle. Built by Tuborg Brewery in 1888 and standing at a modest 85 feet tall with an observation deck in the bottle top, Tuborgflasken was built for display at the Nordic Industrial, Agricultural, and Art Exhibition in Copenhagen. It also helped to announced the advent of bottled beer to the people of Denmark. Originally it contained Denmark’s first-ever mechanized elevator, but that has since been replaced by a much more maintenance-friendly spiral staircase. The bottle has since moved from Copenhagen and sits proudly in the town of Hellerup, Denmark, returning to Copenhagen just once in 1988 for its centenary celebration.

3. FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S GAS STATION

This may be cheating a bit since it’s not so much a tower as an observation deck, but when Frank Lloyd Wright designs something, you can’t ignore it. Originally included in Wright’s design for the utopian Broadacre City, the gas station is the only structure from those plans to come to fruition, albeit in the relatively unassuming town of Cloquet, Minnesota.

The gas station was made a reality in 1956, after Wright designed a house for a Cloquet native named R. W. Lindholm. Lindholm happened to be in the oil trade, and seeing an opportunity, Wright convinced him to open a gas station in his hometown. One of the most notable elements of this gas station, which is still in operation today, is the second floor glass-fronted observation lounge. All part of Wright’s automobile-focused vision of the future, in which he claimed the gas station was “the future city in embryo,” which would “naturally grow into a neighborhood distribution center, meeting-place, restaurant … or whatever else is needed.”

4. SELJORD LOOKOUT POINTS

Just over 100 miles west of Oslo, Norway lies Lake Seljord—a perfect example of picturesque Norwegian scenery, but postcard views aren’t the only thing you’ll see here. Dotted along the shoreline at various points you’ll notice wooden periscope-like structures standing 39 feet tall and facing inward towards the lake. Built in 2011 and designed to blend in with the landscape around them while still managing to be gorgeous pieces of minimalist architecture, these towers serve as more than just higher vantage points for natural beauty; they’re used to look for monsters.

That’s right, Lake Seljord is allegedly home to a serpent-like monster named Selma, Norway’s answer to the Loch Ness Monster and a cryptid so intertwined with the folklore of the area that it appears on the Seljord Coat of Arms. It turns out that building these towers may well have been a smart move, as in 2012 a 17-year-old girl captured footage of what she believes to be Selma from her vantage point on one of those very towers.

5. MUR NATURE OBSERVATION TOWER

Who says scientific study has to take place in a lab? The Munich-based architectural film Terrain certainly doesn’t believe so, as they’ve built an observation tower with art, nature, and science in mind. Modelled on a double helix, this beautiful structure juts out above the treetops near the river Mur in Gosdorf on the border of Austria and Slovenia. At 89 feet tall, it offers amazing views of the surrounding landscape for any hikers willing to climb the 168 steps, but it also serves as a place of scientific observation for the Mur Nature Reserve’s river renaturation project.

6. PYRAMIDENKOGEL TOWER

This may be the highest tower on this list, sitting at 2700 feet above sea level at the peak of an Austrian mountain called Pyramidenkogel. It also holds the title of being the world’s tallest wooden observation tower, at 328 feet tall. It isn’t the original tower though; the original was built in 1950 as a war memorial, before being replaced in 1968 by a futuristic-looking concrete monolith. That tower was eventually demolished in 2008 and in 2013 the latest incarnation of the tower was opened.

Boasting some pretty incredible views from the observation deck is one thing, but the tower itself is worthy of some lasting glances—a beautiful, twisted helix design that almost seems to flow upwards from the ground below. That’s not the best part though: Pyramidenkogel tower is home to Europe’s longest covered slide. Spiraling down the center of the tower for almost 400 feet, you can expect to reach a speed of around 15 mph, which is pretty fast when it’s just you in a huge metal tube on top of a mountain.

7. JUBILEE TOWER

You’d think having a share of the Alps would be enough of a thrill for Austria, but they really love their observation towers. Jubilee Tower (or Jubiläumswarte as the locals call it) is situated on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria. Originally there was a wooden tower built on this site in 1898-’99 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I, but it only lasted a few months before a storm destroyed it, leading to one being erected out of steel shortly thereafter. In 1956 that tower was replaced by the one you can climb today. Sitting at a cool 1500 feet above sea level, it offers views of up to 100 miles away on a clear day. Third time’s a charm, huh?

8. KNOXVILLE SUNSPHERE

Despite what you saw on The Simpsons, the Knoxville Sunsphere isn’t actually full of gorgeous wigs. Don’t let that disappoint you though—this is a 266-foot tower with a 75-foot wide, 24-karat gold orb at the top of it.

Built for the 1982 World’s Fair, the Sunsphere instantly became a Tennessee icon. Its orb is made from 360 glass panels coated in 24-karat gold dust and allegedly costing $1000 per panel to make. Boasting a 360-degree observation deck and restaurant, it was initially a popular attraction. Sadly, its popularity waned and the Sunsphere fell into disrepair and neglect for most of the ’90s. A brief attempt at reopening in 1999 didn’t help matters, but it never really left the public consciousness, appearing in Knoxville sports team logos, on postcards, and even on state driver’s licenses. Finally, in 2007 the Sunsphere’s panoramic views of Knoxville were reopened to the public and the tower has been operating ever since.

9. CANTON TOWER

Canton Tower is currently the tallest building in China. It sits on the banks of the Pear River in the Haizhu District of Guangzhou and is an eye-watering 1954 feet tall. Open since 2010, one of the coolest features of this tower is the observation deck, which is officially referred to as a “Horizontal Ferris Wheel Bubble Tram.” Essentially a series of pods (or bubbles) on rails, a group of people can sit inside a single bubble as it travels around the circumference of the building at 1492 feet above the ground.

10. BA i360

i360 is British Airways’ new observation tower, built along the coastline of Brighton, England. Billed as a sort of vertical pier and costing £46 million (around $59 million) to build, it stands at a gigantic 531 feet tall, making it the world’s tallest moving observation tower. Up to 200 passengers are free to roam around what is essentially a giant glass donut as it ascends to a height of around 450 feet, offering panoramic views of the British coast. The tower hasn’t had the most successful of launches however, with 180 passengers getting stuck up there for two hours in September. Still, we’re sure they appreciated the prolonged look at the view.

Think of Abraham Lincoln’s family, and Tad or Mary are likely to come to mind. So don’t blame yourself if the names Sarah or Thomas Lincoln don’t exactly ring a bell. But though they’re much less known, both of Lincoln’s siblings helped make him the man—and president—he eventually became.

Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln had three children: Sarah, Abraham, and Thomas, also known as Tommy. (Yes, Lincoln was a middle child, a fact that makes his future rise to fame even more noteworthy.) Sarah was born in 1807, two years earlier than Abraham. In 1812 (some accounts say 1813), tragedy struck the Lincolns when their third child, Tommy, died at just three days of age. It is not certain what killed Tommy, but infant mortality was high in that era, especially on the frontier. Lincoln only mentioned Tommy a single time during his public career, but his death must have deeply grieved his family.

Together, brother and sister attended what was known as a “blab” or ABC school, a kind of early primary school common in frontier states like Indiana, where the family moved in 1816. Instead of featuring age-separated classrooms or expensive books or pencils, such schools used a strictly oral curriculum. The “blab” part came from teachers who recited rote lessons to the kids, who in turn blabbed them back. That back-and-forth didn’t necessarily provide a great education (and given that the school charged tuition, it probably cost the Lincolns dearly to send them there), but it was enough to instill the basics in both Lincoln kids.

But more grief was on its way for the Lincolns. Just two years after making the rough journey to Little Pigeon Creek and building a cabin there, Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy, contracted “milk sickness” after drinking milk from a cow that had been poisoned by white snakeroot, and died.

Abraham and Sarah were devastated. Though she was only two years older than her brother, Sarah tried to be a mother to Abraham. She also inherited the chores expected of the woman of the house, caring for her brother, father, and a cousin who lived with them.

Just a year later, their father left brother, sister, and 18-year-old cousin at home as he hunted for another wife. When he returned with a new wife, Sarah Bush Johnston, both brother and sister were so dirty and unkempt that she scrubbed them clean. Johnston had three children of her own, and with the help of a new mother and in a house with three stepsiblings, the Lincoln children went back to a life of hard work and sporadic education.

Abraham’s sister Sarah was known in her community as gentle, intelligent, and kind. She married in 1826 to Aaron Grigsby and became pregnant. But during her delivery, she died unexpectedly at age 21. Lincoln never forgave the Grigsbys, whom he apparently blamed for not calling the doctor in time to save his sister. A few years later, in response to the fact that the Grigsbys did not invite him to a family wedding, he lashed out in the form of a biting, satirical poem about the event that culminated in a raunchy verse about two men who get married.

 
Though Sarah is thought to have affected Abraham deeply with her intelligence and commitment, he seems to have been less impressed by his stepsiblings. In 1851, he wrote his stepbrother John Daniel Johnston a scathing letter denying him a loan of $80 and observing that “I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day’s work, in any one day.”

The letter is tinged with humor amidst the bitterness, like many of Lincoln’s missives, but it suggests that his non-Lincoln siblings never stole his heart the way his big sister did. Though Sarah never lived to see his accomplishments, she helped him mature into the person he eventually became—one who met life’s challenges with perseverance and, when needed, a bit of sarcastic wit.

It was 1964, and the U.S. presidential race was getting ugly. The incumbent president, Democrat Lyndon Johnson, had launched a campaign to shame Republican nominee Barry Goldwater for advocating the use of nuclear weapons in the ongoing Vietnam War. His campaign featured the famous “Daisy Girl” ad—which showed a little girl moments before a nuclear explosion—to imply that Goldwater was going to blow up everyone’s kids. But Goldwater struck back with a secret weapon: beloved movie star Ronald Reagan, who delivered a very popular TV speech backing the Republican candidate, in an effort to yank the undecideds back into the Goldwater’s corner. Things were touch-and-go.

Amidst the turmoil a quirky new candidate emerged, running as an independent write-in on the previously unheard-of Best Party: A Jewish housewife named Yetta Bronstein.

Despite the fact that no one had ever heard of her, Mrs. Bronstein got tons of media coverage right off the bat. Exuberant and chatty with a cartoonish Bronx accent, she was featured on dozens of radio shows every week, making some pretty weird promises. Among the perks Bronstein offered to her voters were a national game of bingo to decide which citizens need to pay taxes, free bagels, and a mink coat in every closet. She proposed to take members of Congress off of their salaries and put them on earned commission, and to allow guns in the home, but decrease the velocity of their bullets by 95 percent. She also wanted to spike the Senate drinking fountain with “truth serum” and to put a naked photo of Jane Fonda on U.S. postage stamps in an effort to ease the deficit—and give a break to people who couldn’t afford Playboy.

But even as Bronstein spouted one wacky policy idea after another, it seemed as though the press was taking her seriously. Not one interviewer ever suggested that the whole campaign might … just possibly … be a hoax.

It was one, of course, hatched by professional pranksters Jeanne and Alan Abel. The wife-and-husband team in New York City were the minds behind the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA), whose goal was to clothe naked animals in the name of public decency (they were best known for their catchy slogan, “A nude horse is a rude horse”). Somewhat conversely, Alan was also later responsible for the completely made-up Topless String Quartet, whom the Abels claim Frank Sinatra later offered a recording contract after seeing their photos.

In the Yetta Bronstein ruse, Jeanne, a skilled improviser, played the part of Yetta and ad-libbed a lot of her interviews, while Alan occasionally chimed in as her campaign manager with equally absurd bon mots. Because Jeanne was in her 20s and “clearly not a Jewish mother,” she insisted on only booking radio spots and newspaper interviews, never appearing on television. As the hoax snowballed without getting called out, the pair began printing campaign materials and realized they’d need a photo of Yetta in order to sell the joke. They chose a picture of Alan’s mom, Ida, for their posters.

The Abels used a handful of different slogans for the campaign, such as “Vote for Yetta and things will get Betta,” and “If you want simple solutions, then you gotta be simple.” Yetta herself had a habit of bursting out into song during her interviews, specifically her self-promoting jingle (sung to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In”):

“There’ll be a change
There’ll be a change
There’ll be a change in government
When Yetta gets to be First Lady
and also President”

As the campaign rolled on without being second-guessed, Jeanne landed hundreds of interviews, and the Abels got bolder and bolder. They staged political marches in Atlantic City, parading in front of the Democratic National Convention with “Clean Sweep with Yetta” signs featuring Yetta’s face on a broomstick. Yetta also wrote a letter to President Johnson, offering to drop out of the race if he’d take her on as his vice president. She even recorded promotional covers of “Nature Boy” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for some reason, which can be heard on YouTube today.

When November came, although she’d gotten plenty of attention, Yetta failed to win a single precinct (despite demanding a vote recount). LBJ retained the presidency in a landslide. Her failure didn’t deter her from running again in 1968 and publishing a book, The President I Almost Was, in the U.S. and UK while ramping up for her ’68 campaign. She later ran for mayor of New York City and Parliament in the U.K. But she lost every race she entered.

Their losses haven’t stopped the Abels from pranking the country regularly ever since. In 2007, Alan and a friend, Paul Hiatt, picketed the White House lawn as “concerned color-blind citizens,” protesting the Department of Homeland Security’s use of a color-based advisory system; they got as far as Condoleezza Rice, who laughed out loud when she read their flyer. They’ve also pretended to win the lottery at least twice, in 1990 and 2006, attracting reporters as they flashed doctored lottery tickets and staged flamboyant celebrations. Their daughter Jenny, along with her partner Jeff Hockett, wrote and directed a 2005 documentary titled Abel Raises Cain, chronicling her parents’ escapades.

Although it’s been a couple years since their last acknowledged large-scale public hoax—a fake campaign to “stop bird porn” in 2009, aimed at bird watchers they called voyeurs—Alan and Jeanne are still alive and kicking. And of course, with this being an election year, the Abels have been asked whether Mrs. Bronstein might run for president once more. In April, when Jeanne was asked on NPR’s Morning Edition whether Yetta had had any inclination toward throwing her hat (or babushka) into the 2016 presidential ring, she replied, “I don’t think Yetta has a place in this particular election season … The comedy’s already happening.”

Zoos are a constantly evolving workplace. Over the past 50 years, exhibits have gotten increasingly naturalistic, diets for certain species have become more standardized, and captive breeding programs have turned into nationwide campaigns. Yet if one thing’s remained constant, it’s the fact that keeping the animals in our zoos both happy and healthy requires a great deal of time, coordination, expense, and old-fashioned willpower. It’s not an easy job, but most zookeepers say they wouldn’t trade it for the world.

1. PANDAS ARE VERY, VERY EXPENSIVE.

Giant pandas are one of the biggest draws for zoos that manage to snag a pair. But the big mammals also come with an extremely high price tag. Famously finicky, they dine almost exclusively on bamboo. Since these plants don’t offer much in the way of nutritional value, pandas need to consume about 26 to 84 pounds of them every day. Maintaining a fresh supply is a costly endeavor, especially for zoos located in cooler areas where bamboo doesn’t grow as well. The Toronto Zoo, for example, spends $500,000 CDN per year (about $370,000 US) flying in bamboo from a Memphis-based supplier.

Food-related expenses are just the tip of the iceberg: China’s government effectively maintains a global panda monopoly. To put one of these rare, in-demand critters on display, a foreign zoo must lease it from the Chinese for a full decade. During this period, an annual payment has to be made—and the going rate is sky-high. For example, the Edinburgh Zoo is currently paying £600,000 (about $740,000) per year for its resident pair. Across the pond, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C. shells out $550,000 annually in order to keep two adult pandas. By the way, if one of those bamboo-eaters should die because of some human error, China will administer a roughly $400,000 fine.

2. KEEPERS WARN EACH OTHER ABOUT GUESTS WHO DON’T FOLLOW THE RULES.

Using clearly marked signs, zoos warn their guests not to do certain things that might harm the animals. Unfortunately, some people ignore these notices. Glass-tapping is a particularly common offense. While it might not seem like a big deal to human patrons, this can really stress out captive creatures. “Imagine if somebody’s knocking on your living room window all the time,” Bruce Beehler of the Milwaukee County Zoo says. “I think you would be annoyed.” He adds that tossing coins—or, indeed, anything else—into an animal’s enclosure is another big no-no. Not only can these bits of currency get swallowed, they’re also liable to contaminate an animal’s water supply.

When mental_floss interviewed Bob, Terry, and Nancy*—three keepers who work at a zoo in the southern U.S.—and asked them to name their biggest job-related pet peeve, all three cited rule-breaking visitors. “Read signs and listen to keepers,” Bob implores. “If I ask you not to tap the glass, don’t tell me it’s just for fun and you can tap the glass all you like. If a keeper asks you not to stand your child on the railing of an animal’s enclosure, do not put them down and then wait ‘till we walk away. When we see anyone doing something that endangers our animals, we do follow you.”

Security guards are on hand to remove those who ignore repeat warnings. Additionally, zoo staffers will often use their radios to tip each other off about problematic visitors. “Depending on where they are, we might alert the next area down the line,” Nancy explains. “We’ll say ‘Hey, I saw these people disturbing the animals in this area and they’re heading towards your area. Keep your eyes open.’ Each area will then make the call about how serious the situation is and whether they should call security.”

Nancy also told us that she’s personally had to discourage patrons from, among other things, throwing food at gorillas and dropping various objects (money, juice boxes, etc.) into the alligator pool. It should go without saying, but the posted rules are there for a reason. Respect the animals’ homes and you’ll have a more enjoyable visit.

3. LOTS OF ZOO ANIMALS AREN’T ON PUBLIC DISPLAY.

Purchase a standard zoo ticket and you’ll get to see most of the critters in their collection. But you can bet that at least a handful of specimens will be kept from view, stowed away in backroom terrariums or birdcages. “Animals live behind the scenes for a number of reasons,” Terry says. Some of these so-called “off-exhibit” creatures are used for educational purposes, including occasional public shows and private birthday parties. By utilizing animals that most visitors never see, staffers can put together a live creature presentation without emptying any displays in the process.

Nancy adds that the newborn offspring of breeding animals are also sometimes withheld from the public. “If your zoo is breeding a given species,” she says, “then it’s likely that the species is already well-represented in your displays. So you wouldn’t need to put all of the babies in the public viewing areas. Visitors might like to see one or two burrowing frogs, but there’d be no point in having an entire wall full of them.” A good percentage of these unseen infants will probably end up getting shipped off to other zoos.

For the record, certain departments hide their critters more frequently than others do. “Reptile, aquarium, and maybe bird areas are most likely to have larger numbers of animals behind the scenes,” Terry says. “It’s easier to house and hold many small animals than large ones … not a lot of places [have] off-exhibit elephants!”

4. TRANSFERRING ANIMALS BETWEEN ZOOS INVOLVES A LOT OF PAPERWORK.

Bob says that when an animal goes from one zoo to another, a “ton of paperwork” usually travels with it. These documents are loaded with need-to-know details about the critter’s health issues, behavioral tendencies, and the amount of training it’s received.

Unhelpfully, new beasts that aren’t acquired from other zoos seldom come with comprehensive paperwork. “Sometimes their history is a mystery,” Bob admits. “Many zoos will get animals through confiscation from Fish and Wildlife services. I’ve even met a South American tamandua [a genus of anteater] who was found walking the streets of Houston!” Over the years, Bob’s also worked with a cougar that had previously been a school mascot, as well as two bobcats believed to have been escaped pets.

In any event, zoos subject all new acquisitions to a mandatory quarantine period. Usually, this lasts anywhere from 30 to 60 days and may take place in an isolated enclosure or at the zoo hospital. “This is to make sure they bring no ailments or parasites to the general zoo population,” Bob says. “If they do show signs it is treated. Once that passes, then the animal is taken to its appropriate new home within the zoo.”

5. FEEDING THE ANIMALS ISN’T EASY (OR CHEAP).

Zoos have high standards when it comes to the quality of their residents’ food. “We’re probably pickier than some restaurants. We have to be very careful because we’re dealing with endangered animals and animals we want to reproduce and live long lives,” Kerri Slifka, the Dallas Zoo’s curator of nutrition, told the Dallas Morning News last year. Nowadays, a growing number of zoos are hiring full-time animal nutritionists to make sure that their critters receive the healthiest possible diets.

Furthermore, in recent decades there’s been a big push to standardize the meal plans for certain species. (For example, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums advises member zoos to feed orangutans a balanced diet consisting of 86 percent produce and 14 percent “nutritionally complete primate biscuits.”) The standardization trend can be traced back to the rise of nationwide breeding programs in the latter half of the 20th century. Under these initiatives, specimens were transferred between different zoos with increasing regularity. As zoological nutritionist Barbara Toddes told the Smithsonian, “Animals need consistency in their diet when they move from place to place. It’s much better for them stress-wise and nutritionally.”

Big appetites are another complicating factor. Consider elephants, which devour 200 to 600 pounds of food every day when fully grown. The cost of feeding a single adult is usually around $15,000 per year. And some animals require specialized diets. In her interview with the Dallas Morning News, Slifka mentioned four Marabou stork chicks that had recently been hatched. In the wild, newborns of this species mostly subsist on the corpses of small animals. To supply its little birds with intact dead prey, the Dallas Zoo paid a pretty penny: By the time the young storks were 110 days old, their food-related expenses had totaled a whopping $10,000.

6. TO PREVENT THEIR CRITTERS FROM GETTING BORED, KEEPERS OFFER WHAT’S KNOWN AS “ENRICHMENT.”

Adequate food and space will keep captive animals alive, but stimulation—both the physical and psychological sort—is what helps them to thrive. “Enrichment” is a process whereby zookeepers prompt their critters into exercising their minds or displaying certain behaviors they’d normally exhibit in the wild. A quick scenery change can make for a good start. At zoos, caretakers occasionally add or remove certain things from their animals’ enclosures, forcing the residents to utilize their natural instincts as they mentally process the alteration. For example, Japanese macaques at the Minnesota Zoo wake up every so often to discover a brand-new leaf pile to dig through. Enrichment can also be aromatic: At Disney World’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, the staff place various perfumes and spices around their tiger paddock. When confronted with odd new smells, the big cats might respond by rubbing, scratching, or marking their territories.

According to the Fort Worth Zoo, enrichment increases the “behavioral choices available to animals.” Simply put, by changing the status quo, enrichment provides animals with the opportunity to make decisions about how to react. Give an elephant a bright-pink volleyball (as the Columbus Zoo did recently), and he might bat at it with his trunk, kick it through a pond, or try to squish it with his feet.

7. ZOO VETS USUALLY MAKE LESS MONEY THAN REGULAR VETS.

You might think that the opposite would be true, but according to data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the American Veterinary Medical Association, vets who work at zoos have a lower median salary than general veterinarians. Why? To begin with, many AZA-accredited zoos are nonprofit establishments. Therefore, vets who work there don’t always make the sort of income that a private practice might yield. Also, since there are only so many zoos in the world, job opportunities are rather limited.

Still, to hear most zoo vets tell it, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more rewarding career. “[There] is an exciting moment every single day,” says Dr. Suzan Murray of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. As chief veterinarian, she’s expected to tackle a wide array of fascinating challenges. “Each one is a little bit different, whether it’s coming up with a treatment for coral, diagnosing a problem in a Burmese python, or visiting an elephant we’re hoping is pregnant,” Murray explains. “Every day offers a bounty of surprises.”

8. ANIMALS IN NOCTURNAL EXHIBITS DON’T ADJUST RIGHT AWAY.

Certain zoos have designated nocturnal houses, thick-walled buildings that allow guests to check out bats, bearcats, civets, and other creatures of the night during normal business hours. By day, they’re usually lit with dim red, blue, green, and yellow lights. But late at night, bright white fluorescent bulbs are turned on. This has the effect of reversing the resident animals’ normal sleep cycles so that they’re more active when zoo visitors are around and sleep when the humans do.

For the critters involved, the transition can take time. “When we get animals from a non-nocturnal building, there is an adjustment period,” Bob says. “Most seem to adapt in about a week’s time. We had one [kinkajou, also known as a honey bear], though, that took over a month to adjust.”

9. CAPTIVE BREEDING TAKES CROSS-COUNTRY COORDINATION.

What do Przewalski’s horse, the Arabian oryx, and golden lion tamarin have in common? Without captive breeding efforts—mating orchestrated in controlled environments like zoos and wildlife preserves—they might be critically endangered, or worse.

One of the ways zoos contribute to conservation efforts is by participating in Species Survival Plans (SSPs). Organized by the AZA, these are rigorously regulated breeding programs for rare, threatened, or endangered animals. The goal is to form a genetically diverse captive population, with member animals usually dispersed among several zoos and/or aquariums. In total, there are almost 500 individual SSPs, each headed by a coordinator.

Craig Saffoe, a curator at the National Zoo, leads several different breeding programs for big carnivores, all done in accordance with the appropriate SSP committee. “The first step is that we have to find two animals that actually get along together and are compatible breeding partners,” he says. “For that, we don’t just look at the current collection at the National Zoo. We look at the whole zoo population within the United States.”

Choosing the right pair is a process that involves working closely with the relevant SSP. “When the Species Survival Plan group gets together, they decide what the best route is to keep the entire North American population genetically healthy,” Saffoe notes. “Once my team and I have worked successfully with the SSP to match two animals on paper … it’s our job then to find out if the animals are actually physically compatible.” More often than not, at least one animal will have to be transferred between zoos before any first dates can take place.

10. THE WORD “DEDICATION” WAS INVENTED FOR ZOOKEEPERS.

Make no mistake, this isn’t an easy line of work to break into. Just ask the San Diego Zoo’s HR department, whose employees report that it’s “not unusual” for them to receive literally hundreds of applications when a single animal care job opens up. If you beat the odds and get hired, note that the average American zookeeper takes home a salary of just $29,000 per year.

Despite all this, keepers can rank among the most passionate and devoted people you’ll ever meet. “Just recently when Hurricane Matthew hit, tons of keepers [in affected areas] slept in their zoos, hunkered down in case the animals needed emergency help,” Bob says. In his eyes, such dedication is the rule, rather than the exception. “We go in at two A.M. to check on new moms … We are constantly researching ways to improve welfare and our own personal knowledge.”

What’s more, zookeepers enjoy a tight-knit community. According to Bob, “Everyone knows someone who works at another zoo and on Facebook, everyone is so supportive. There are closed groups of keepers where new ideas are constantly exchanged and people help support strangers when they lose an old, beloved animal. What we do is so hard and stressful and you always have to fight caregiver stress syndrome, but we power through and I wouldn’t trade this life for anything!”

*Some names have been changed.

All photos via iStock.

On March 19, 1892, the Evening Herald of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania printed a story describing what it called a “horrible superstition.”

A young man named Edwin Brown in Exeter, Rhode Island had been suffering from illness for some time. His mother and eldest sister had died from the same disease, then called “consumption” because of the way its victims wasted away (and now known as tuberculosis). Edwin traveled from Exeter to Colorado Springs—a popular destination due to its dry climate and specialized disease treatment centers—but his health did not improve. While he was away, his sister Mercy also became ill and quickly died.

When Edwin returned home after Mercy’s death, his health declined. His desperate father turned to an old folk belief: When members of the same family waste away from consumption, it could be because one of the deceased was draining the life force of their living relatives.

With a doctor and some neighbors in tow, Edwin and Mercy’s father exhumed the bodies of each family member who had died of the illness. He found skeletons in the graves of his wife and eldest daughter, and a doctor found Mercy’s remains, which had been interred for nine weeks and looked relatively normal in its decay.

However, liquid blood was found in Mercy’s heart and liver. Although the doctor said this was fairly standard and not a sign of the supernatural, the organs were removed and cremated before Mercy was reburied, just in case. But the exhumation and cremation did nothing for Edwin Brown’s disease: He died two months later.

Newspapers were quick to connect these folk rituals with vampire legends, especially those of Eastern Europe. Vampire stories from all over were printed on the front pages of 19th-century New England, describing similar rituals in distant locations. Like the New Englanders, people in remote parts of Europe were exhuming bodies when people fell ill, and burning or planting stakes in those that seemed too full of life.

But the New Englanders who took part in these rituals didn’t necessarily believe there was a supernatural cause of their family members’ illness, as author and folklorist Michael E. Bell writes in his book Food for the Dead. Although some may have harbored beliefs about vampires, many were simply desperate, and unwilling to leave untried any remedy that might save the lives of those they loved—even an outlandish or gruesome method.

Tuberculosis was entrenched in the Americas even before the United States existed as a country. President George Washington himself likely fought the disease after contracting it from his brother—ironically, on a trip taken to Barbados in an attempt to treat Lawrence Washington’s illness, according to medical historian Howard Markel of the University of Michigan.

Washington wasn’t alone. Other notable American sufferers of tuberculosis included James Monroe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Washington Irving, John “Doc” Holliday, and Helen Hunt Jackson.

In 1786, when health officials first began recording mortality rates connected to the deadly infection, Massachusetts alone recorded 300 consumption deaths for every 100,000 residents. Between that year and 1800, tuberculosis killed 2 percent of New England’s population. In many cases, living in the same home was enough for the disease to spread throughout an entire family. It was estimated that anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of the U.S. population had latent or active tuberculosis infections.

Today, most people understand that tuberculosis is spread through the air, by breathing in bacteria coughed up by people with active infections in their lungs or throats. There are vaccines, though they’re rarely used in the U.S., and treatments for those who contract active tuberculosis infections.

In the 1800s, however, germ theory was only just beginning to gain supporters among the medical community. Doctors were still arguing over the causes of tuberculosis in 1895, and treatment mainly consisted of leaving large cities like New York and Boston, where the disease ran rampant, for places like Pasadena, California and Colorado Springs, where the climate was supposed to help ease the symptoms. Until the rise of the sanatoria movement (basically, rest-oriented treatment centers) at the end of the 19th century, few medical treatments worked. Even sanatoria only helped some patients.

As tuberculosis spread from the cities out into the countryside, people didn’t know what caused it or how to stop it. In some New England towns, such as Lynn, Massachusetts, it was the leading cause of death, Bell says. Entire families were wiped out, and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to who caught the illness.

It was not a pleasant way to die. Symptoms included wasting, night sweats, and fatigue, and a persistent cough that sometimes produced white phlegm or foamy blood. Occasionally, the cough turned into hemorrhaging. Those who caught it could not know if they would eventually recover, painfully waste away over the course of years, or die in a matter of months from the “galloping” form of the disease. If they did recover, there was always the fear that the illness would return.

“Cholera, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, influenza, and measles were fast-burning epidemics that appeared, killed, and then went dormant as immunities kicked in,” Bell says. Tuberculosis did not. It was an unrelenting fact of life in the 1800s. With no other explanations, people turned to the supernatural to understand the epidemic, and to offer hope of a cure.

Enter the vampire.

The vampire legend may have made its way into New England as an early version of the unproven “miracle cure” for tuberculosis. In 1784, a newspaper published a letter about a foreign “quack doctor” who had been spreading an unusual cure for consumption. According to the letter, when a third member of the Willington, Connecticut family of Isaac Johnson contracted the disease, the quack doctor advised him to dig up two family members who had already died of the illness. The bodies were inspected for any sprouting plants, and the letter writer—who said he was an eyewitness—reported that sorrel was found. The doctor advised the Johnson family to burn the sorrel with the vital organs to remove sickness from his family, an idea the letter-writer called an imposture.

But those who had lost multiple loved ones, and faced losing more, were willing to try anyway.

Anthropologist George R. Stetson later connected the New England beliefs to similar rituals from Russia, Hungary, Prussia, and Serbia, as well as other parts of Europe, ancient Greece and the Caribbean. In his 1896 article The Animistic Vampire in New England, Stetson described the case of one unnamed mason who credited his own health to the ritual. The man had two brothers who had contracted tuberculosis. When the first died, a respected member of the community suggested the family burn his vital organs to save the second brother. The second brother protested and the ritual wasn’t done; he continued to sicken and die. When the mason got sick, the second brother was exhumed, and “living blood” was found. A cremation was held (it’s unclear if it was just the blood or the full body that was burned), and the mason soon recovered.

New England vampires were not the supernatural revenants of novels like Dracula, who rose from the dead as walking corpses to drain blood from the living, Bell told mental_floss. Instead, they were believed to drain the life force of their loved ones through some spiritual connection that continued even after death.

“The ‘vampires’ in the New England tradition were not the reanimated corpses, bodily leaving their graves to suck the blood of living relatives, that we know from European folklore, filtered through Gothic literature and popular culture,” Bell says. “New England’s ‘microbes with fangs’ (as one medical practitioner recently termed them) were, however, just as fearful and deadly as the fictional Dracula.”

If a body was exhumed and liquid blood could be found, or it seemed to be far better preserved than expected, one of a number of rituals were performed, including burning the corpse (and sometimes inhaling the smoke); rearranging the corpse or turning it upside down and reburying it; or burning vital organs like the heart and liver. Occasionally, Bell says, the ashes were consumed by family members afflicted with tuberculosis.

One of the more remarkable cases Bell has discovered is that of the Rev. Justus Forward and his daughter Mercy (no relation to Mercy Brown). In 1788, the minister had already lost three daughters to consumption; Mercy and another sister were fighting the illness. As Mercy Forward traveled to a neighboring town with her father one day, she began to hemorrhage.

Forward was reluctant to try opening the graves of his deceased family members, but allowed himself to be convinced, willing to do anything to save his daughter. His mother-in-law’s grave was opened first, without result. However, he soon found a grave that fit the requirements. Bell relays a portion of a letter written by Forward:

“Since I had begun to search, I concluded to search further … and this morning opened the grave of my daughter … who had died—the last of my three daughters—almost six years ago … On opening the body, the lungs were not dissolved, but had blood in them, though not fresh, but clotted. The lungs did not appear as we would suppose they would in a body just dead, but far nearer a state of soundness than could be expected. The liver, I am told, was as sound as the lungs. We put the lungs and liver in a separate box, and buried it in the same grave, ten inches or a foot, above the coffin.”

The act didn’t save Mercy, Bell says, but Forward’s other children seemed to recover. And the willingness of Forward and his family to attempt the ritual impartially helped to relieve fear in his community, Bell notes: “He ultimately authorized a ritual that, in effect, reestablished social stability, essentially proclaiming that the dead were, indeed, dead once again.”

There were other cases, too:

At the end of the 19th century, Daniel Ransom wrote in his memoirs about his brother Frederick, a Dartmouth College student who died of tuberculosis in 1817. The boys’ father worried that Frederick would feed on the rest of the family, and had Frederick exhumed and his heart burned at a blacksmith’s forge. The cure didn’t work, however, and Daniel Ransom lost his mother and three siblings over the next several years.

In the 1850s, Henry Ray of Jewett City, Connecticut dug up the bodies of his brothers and had them burned when he, too, contracted tuberculosis. In a nearby case, a grave belonging to someone known only as “J.B.” was broken into—possibly by family members or friends, who often conducted the rituals—and the skeletal remains were rearranged into a skull and crossbones shape. Researchers speculate that it might have been done to stop J.B. from becoming a vampire, or because he was blamed for a living person’s illness.

Henry David Thoreau wrote of another case in his journal in September 1859: “The savage in man is never quite eradicated. I have just read of a family in Vermont—who, several of its members having died of consumption, just burned the lungs & heart & liver of the last deceased, in order to prevent any more from having it.”

These tales found their way into newspapers throughout the U.S., along with European tales of vampires, werewolves, and witches, reflecting the late 19th century’s fascination with the afterlife and the supernatural. Such stories from New England may even have inspired Bram Stoker’s story of Dracula.

The rituals continued until Mercy Brown’s exhumation in 1892, 10 years after Robert Koch discovered the bacteria that caused tuberculosis. Eventually, germ theory began to take hold, and contagion was better understood. Infection rates began to go down as hygiene and nutrition improved.

But until then, people were often willing to cling to any chance for themselves and their loved ones under the “gnawing sense of hopelessness” those with the disease lived with, Bell says:

“In short, for the pragmatic Yankee, the bottom line was, ‘What do I have to do to stop this scourge?’ The ritual was a folk remedy rather than an elaborated detailed belief system.”

In our “pics or it didn’t happen” era, photographic evidence is often considered to be proof that an event actually took place. This is not necessarily the case, however, with paranormal photography. Almost since the time photography was invented, people have been using the medium in attempts to provide visual proof of existence beyond death. For many, the jury is still out. Here are some of the more famous examples of ghosts supposedly captured by cameras.

1. THE BROWN LADY OF RAYNHAM HALL

The mysterious and perfectly composed photograph of the “Brown Lady” of Raynham Hall is arguably the most famous and well-regarded ghost photo ever taken. The image was shot in September 1936 by photographers documenting 17th-century Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England, for Country Life magazine. One account states that photographer Captain Hubert Provand had his head buried in the focusing cloth (a feature common on cameras at the time) when his assistant Indre Shira glimpsed a veiled form gliding down the house’s grand oak staircase and excitedly demanded that he take a picture. By the time Provand raised his head, the figure had vanished, leading Provand to suggest that Shira had imagined the incident. The development process, however, revealed something unsettling.

The ghost, thought to be that of Lady Dorothy Townshend, has been glimpsed several times since the early 1800s. Although Lady Townshend officially died of smallpox in 1726, more lurid legends later sprung up, including that she was locked in her bedroom by her husband for committing adultery. Witnesses describe the phantom as having an air of madness or menace about it. The specter has reportedly been seen intermittently about the hall since the photo was taken.

2. TULIP STAIRCASE GHOST

As with many ghost photographs, the famous Tulip Staircase Ghost photo was taken by someone who had no idea they had captured anything unusual until the image was developed. Rev. Ralph Hardy, a retired clergyman from British Columbia, was visiting the Queen’s House at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, in 1966 when he snapped a picture of an interesting spiral staircase, known as the Tulip Staircase. Hardy returned home, had his pictures developed, and was showing them off when a friend asked who was on the staircase. Surprised, Hardy said that he had no idea, and that there had been no one when he took the picture. The image has been examined by experts, including some from Kodak, who have confirmed that it has not been tampered with. The identity of the ghost, if that’s indeed what it is, remains unclear, though some have speculated that it’s a maid who supposedly died on the stairs 300 years ago.

3. LORD COMBERMERE

This photo supposedly depicts the ghost of a man who was being interred several miles away at the time it was taken. Lord Combermere had been struck and killed by a carriage in London in 1891, shortly before amateur photographer Sybell Corbet took a picture in the library of Combermere Abbey, the lord’s home. It took about an hour for Corbet to expose the image, and when it appeared on the plate it revealed a man resembling Combermere sitting in his favorite chair. Interestingly, the figure’s legs are missing, which is made all the more spooky given that Combermere’s legs were badly damaged in the carriage accident.

4. FREDDY JACKSON

Some people, whether alive or dead, hate to miss a photo op. Freddie Jackson, a mechanic in the Royal Air Force during World War I, was killed by an airplane propeller around 1919. On the day of Jackson’s funeral, a group photo was taken of his squadron, which had served aboard the HMS Daedalus. Jackson, so the story goes, did not want to be left out of the photo, even after death, and his face can be glimpsed behind the fourth airman from the left in the back row. The photo was not made public until 1975, when it was revealed by retired RAF officer Victor Goddard, who had been in Jackson’s squadron. Many of the details of this much-repeated story, however, have been called into question, along with the photo’s legitimacy.

5. MADONNA OF BACHELOR’S GROVE

This paranormal photograph was taken by the Ghost Research Society of America during a visit to Bachelor’s Grove cemetery in Illinois. The group was visiting the small, abandoned cemetery in a suburb near Chicago in 1991 when inexplicable readings were observed on their equipment. Although no visible ghostly phenomena were observed at the time, a photo taken in the area later revealed a woman in white clothing, described as being “out of date,” sitting on a tombstone. Bachelor’s Grove is reputed to be one of the world’s most haunted cemeteries.

6. CORROBOREE ROCK GHOST

The Corroboree Rock Ghost, also known as “The Watcher,” is said to have been captured on film by Reverend R.S. Blance during a 1959 visit to the Corroboree Rock formation in Australia. Blance claims he was alone at the time he took the photo and only saw the figure after developing the image later. Interestingly, the figure, which appears in a long gown, suggests different things to different people, who have variously described it as a woman in a nightgown, an Aboriginal woman in traditional dress, or a priest. (The rock formation itself holds spiritual significance for local Aboriginal people.)

7. THE GHOST OF BOOTHILL CEMETERY

Terry Ike Clanton, an actor and “cowboy poet” who runs the website TombstoneArizona.com, shot this photo of a friend dressed in 1880s cowboy attire in Arizona’s Boothill Graveyard. Clanton says the unexpected appearance of a strange visitor in the background forever changed his opinions about ghost photos. The figure appears to be a man in a black hat, rising out of the ground in an odd way that suggests that he is either legless or kneeling. Clanton, who specifies that the image was shot on film rather than digitally, says he attempted to recreate the photograph with a person in the background, but the task proved impossible.

8. AMITYVILLE GHOST

This creepy image was allegedly captured in the infamous Amityville house during a 1976 investigation led by paranormal experts Ed and Lorraine Warren. A camera was set up on the second floor landing to shoot black-and-white infrared film throughout the night. Every image was empty of unusual phenomena, save this one. George Lutz, the patriarch at the center of the Amityville Horror story, revealed the photo on The Merv Griffin Show in 1979 and suggested it may show the ghost of John deFeo, a young boy who was murdered in the house before the Lutz family moved in. The authenticity of the photo, along with the Amityville story, has been widely doubted, with some holding that the photo depicts Paul Bartz, who was part of the Warrens’ investigation team.

9. THE GIRL IN THE FIRE

A man named Tony O’Rahilly captured this image of a mysterious girl standing amid the flames as Wem Town Hall in Shropshire, England burned to the ground in 1995. The intense heat of the flames prompted some to argue that no living thing could stand so close and exhibit such composure, leading to the conclusion that the girl must be a supernatural entity. Some town residents assumed the ghost was that of Jane Churn (sometimes spelled Churm), a girl who in 1677 accidentally set fire to her home and much of the town and is believed to haunt the area. O’Rahilly submitted the photo to the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, who in turn consulted the former head of the Royal Photographic Society, both of whom said it hadn’t been tampered with. Others, however, have since debunked the photo as a hoax.

10. THE BOY ON A FARM

In 2008, photographer Neil Sandbach was taking shots at a farm in Hertfordshire, England, for a couple who planned to hold their wedding there. Examining his digital shots later, Sandbach was surprised to see the glowing, ghostly figure of a boy peeking around the corner of a building. The wedding couple later asked staff members at the farm if they had ever seen anything spooky or unusual on the premises and were told that some had, in fact, witnessed the figure of a young boy dressed in white night clothes.

11. WAVERLY HILLS SANATORIUM GHOST

Waverly Hills Sanatorium, an abandoned tuberculosis hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, saw its fair share of sickness and death during its years of operation in the first half of the 20th century. It has since gained a reputation as one of America’s most haunted sites and a destination for ghost-hunters. This image was captured in the sanatorium’s crumbling halls in 2006. Some say the figure resembles Mary Lee, a nurse who hung herself in the hospital after being impregnated by a doctor who later wanted nothing to do with her.

12. QUEENSLAND CEMETERY GHOST BABY

In the mid-1940s, a woman named Mrs. Andrews entered a cemetery in Queensland, Australia to visit the grave of her daughter, who had died in 1945 at age 17. Noticing nothing unusual, she snapped a photo of the plot and was later shocked to see a ghostly female child staring back at her. Researchers have said that the image is likely not a double exposure, as no pictures of children appear elsewhere on the roll of film. The graves of two female children were later found close by and it has been suggested that the photo shows one of their spirits.

13. THE PHANTOM MONK OF NEWBY

 
This strange apparition appeared in a photo taken by Rev. Kenneth Lord in 1963 at Skelton-cum-Newby Church of Christ the Consoler. No previous evidence of paranormal activity had been reported at the church. Especially unsettling characteristics include the figure’s drooping face, which has been interpreted variously as a mask or deformity, and its significant height, thought to be about 9 feet in comparison to the surrounding furniture. Experts have said the photo is not the result of a double exposure, though its veracity is still subject to debate.