The Playmobil Boat Sailing 3,000 Miles Across the World

Ollie and Harry Ferguson aren’t your average sea captains. They’ve only got one ship under their command, and a combined age of 15. They’ve never stepped behind the vessel’s helm, but they’ve been hawk-like trackers of its progress. Granted, their ship is barely two feet long and made by Playmobil. The boys released the toy…

Murder in the Blueprints of Frank Lloyd Wright

The legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright never wore his heart on his sleeve. For better or for worse, he dressed up his blueprints in his feelings, and nowhere is that reflex so painfully clear than in his handful of mysterious, pre-Colombian-inspired houses built in California in the early 1920s. You could call them “the…

The Transgender French Spy History Forgot

The Chevalier d’Eon knew how to turn heads. She was charming to boot, and an unmatched swordfighter; an impeccable spy for the French government, and capable of dazzling the Empress of Russia. Above all, she found the courage to publically affirm her identity as a transgender woman — an especially intimidating task in 18th century.…

She Taught Amelia Earhart to Fly

Without Neta Snook, there may never have been an Amelia Earhart. “The Lone Aviatrix” of Iowa had been shattering the proverbial glass ceiling with her plane long before the Earhart took to the skies, and she did it in a plane she assembled in her parents’ backyard. In other words, Snook was the kind of…

The Diva Who Grew Her Own Exotic Kingdom

“Don’t touch. And don’t eat what you touch unless you want to die” are the first words you’ll hear upon entering Lotusland, the exotic, 37-acre kingdom of plants tucked away in the quiet town of Montecito, California. Its roots run three owners and 135 years deep, but it’s the touch of its final, failed opera…

Burning iPhones and Designer Bags on China’s Day of the Dead

It’s common belief in China that people still need money and material goods in the after-life and that ghosts can go hungry or homeless unless the living can give them a helping hand. The Qingming Festival or ‘Tomb Sweeping Day’ comes but once a year, and when it does, it calls for some serious damage to be…

Four Grisly Murders, One Salvador Dali

Note: portions of this article contain graphic text. You couldn’t have concocted an eerier murder mystery if you tried. Yet, history seems to have bookmarked the case of the Missing Women of Perpignan — “Les disparues de Perpignan”, as the French say — with dwindling media attention; a shocker due not only to the case’s bizarre nature, but the fact…

One of Europe’s Greatest Treasures Hides in a Sleepy French Village

Conques was never supposed to be found. Or at least, not easily. The sleepy village had been presiding over the French Midi-Pyrénées mountains since the 7th century, when a monk named Dadon decided it would make the perfect place for sacred hermitage. Not only was the valley close to a legendary Roman spring, but it…

The Mountain Wizard of Woodstock

What happens when you put Rip Van Winkle, Robin Hood and Paul Bunyan in a blender? You get Clarence Schmidt, the iconic outsider artist who spent a lifetime building an eccentric folk art kingdom on a mountaintop in Woodstock… Schmidt was originally from Queens, but he split for the country when he inherited five acres of…

Living the High Life at the Mushroom House

Peering out of the tree-tops in Pittsford, New York is a collection of pods whose aesthetic falls somewhere between Alice in Wonderland and War of the Worlds (if the aliens were hippies, that is). Locals have crowned it “the Mushroom House,” and for a price you can put down roots there yourself… Built in 1969, it was…