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Category / Off-Beat & Little Known

A Postcard from London

I‘d stayed away too long. I was born and bred in London and yet, I left the city that raised me without a second thought, a sudden and swift and cold-hearted break. Seven years passed, we had fleeting reunions, but I’d found a new love – Paris – and there wasn’t enough room in my heart for…

The Tiny Island on the Thames That Once Held The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and the UK’s Largest Hippie Commune

Let’s take a walk along the towpath by the Thames, breathing in the heady scent of summer. See that island in the middle? That’s where we’re headed. And I’ve got a map, so I know it’s there! Past the gently bobbing riverboats moored at Twickenham, Until we reach a single footbridge. Here we go… And we’re…

So in Japan, There’s an Abandoned American Cowboy Theme Park

Photographer Shane Thoms makes an excellent point when he says that abandoned theme parks are more fun to visit than active theme parks– especially when they’re creepy colonial cowboy-themed ones wasting away outside small remote towns in Japan. Shane Thoms is an Australian photographer who has a passion for decay, abandonment and disrepair, something he seems to…

Hollywood’s Iconic ‘Gone with the Wind’ Movie Set Has Been Hiding in a Barn for Decades

It was the first ever film to receive more than five Academy Awards, one of which was bought by Michael Jackson when he bid $1.5 million on the 1939 statue for Best Picture. Re-released in theatres in the US eight times, it raked in more than $400 million, which when adjusted for inflation is anywhere between…

Oh, Just an Abandoned Shopping Mall Turned Giant Fish Pond

There was no way I wasn’t going to share this odd little story with you that’s been swimming around on the internet (mind the pun). An abandoned mall, formerly the New World Mall in Bangkok, has become overrun by hungry consumers of a different sort; of a finned and scaly nature… Fish! Thousands of fish have taken up…

Legend of the Button King

The secret life of Dalton Stevens was born in the quiet of 2:00 am, in the even quieter town of Bishopville, South Carolina. (Population = more or less 3,000.) Stevens, then 53, had recently developed insomnia. “I didn’t have nothin’ to do,” he said. Then he picked up a button. He started bedazzling an old jumpsuit…

How Did Einstein’s Brain go Missing for 23 Years in Some Guy’s Basement?

Albert Einstein’s family didn’t think he had a future. He was born in 1879 “with a head shaped like a lopsided medicine ball,” explained journalist Michael Paterniti to Harper’s Magazine over 20 years ago. As we all know, that head became one of the 21st century’s most genius devices. Lesser-known is the fact that it was stolen…

One of the World’s Most Beautiful Castles is also a School for Wizards

I‘m not really sure where to start with Mozna Castle. The middle of old nowhere would probably be quite accurate, but to be more specific, this Baroque behemoth lies in old Bohemia, otherwise known as Upper Silesia, Poland. The castle has 365 rooms and 99 spires. Its historical records only date back to the 17th century but excavations in…

The Doorstep Railway of Hanoi

You might have heard of the Railway Food Market in Thailand but here’s another urban oddity to feast your eyes on. This is the main line railway that passes through the residential old quarter and commercial neighbourhoods of Hanoi, Vietnam. The trains pass through the heart of the city twice a day, just inches away…

Abandoned Route 66: The Tourist Trap Ghost Town

(c) El Toro Route 66; where all those wonderfully off-beat attractions of ‘Roadside America’ culture first sprouted. By the 1920s, Route 66, known then as the National Trail, was fast-becoming the most popular road in the country for Westward pioneers travelling across the Diablo Canyon. A 19th century isolated trading post in Arizona suddenly became a…

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