15 49.0138 8.38624 both 0 bullet 0 4000 1 0 horizontal https://www.messynessychic.com 300 4000

Category / Obscure history

The Town Where It’s Illegal to Die

Candy coloured houses dot the icy valley of Longyearbyen, one of the world’s northernmost towns in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, a place with some seriously uncommon protocol. It is illegal, for example, to leave home un-armed in the event of an encounter polar bear. It is also illegal to die. It sounds like a…

Unearthing Hollywood Treasure in an Arctic Ghost Town

Dawson City, Canada’s favourite “living ghost town,” is finally starting to flesh out again after decades of falling into ruin. The Yukon settlement located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle was born from the glory and greed of the Klondike gold rush, and ushered in 40,000 people in just two years. Today, its story…

You’re Invited to the Executioner Island Slumber Party

Look carefully at the heart of the Long Island Sound in the night, and you’ll see it: a flashing white light, piercing the fog every ten seconds or so to steer boats away from the deadly shores of Execution Rocks. These are the icy waters where the British drowned their prisoners during the revolutionary war,…

Brooklyn’s Best Kept Secret: A Wes Anderson Versailles

You know that great aunt who arrives early, and overdressed, to parties? The one who smells like powdered Shalimar, and guards every single family secret under layers of costume jewellery with her life? That’s Grand Prospect Hall personified. The four-story banquet hall is the last outpost of Victorian grandeur in New York, and for nearly…

A Day in the Life of Mrs. Grim Reaper

She only comes around once in a lifetime. Travel to any small village in Sardinia, and you may still hear hushed tales of the accabadora; “angel of death”; the women chosen by their community to live out their days veiled in black, and charged with the task of ending the lives of others at the mercy of their cudgel.…

A Brief Compendium of Medical Quackery

The rise of accessibility to medicine in the 19th century was a beautiful thing, but it also opened the gates to a deluge of medical scams and quackery. If you were lucky, they were harmless scams. But more often than not, treatments included addictive and life threatening ingredients. Today, we’re diving into a brief compendium…

The Toilet Duty Dukes and Duchesses of England

Those precious moments of alone time in the bathroom are priceless to many of us, and yet strangely enough, it was one of the few luxuries the King and Queen of England could not afford. Until as recently as the 20th century, the British monarchy appointed what was known as the “Groom of the Stool”, a courtier responsible for…

The Gender Fluid Secret Soldiers of the American Civil War

Today’s subject choice originated by stumbling across a photograph of Albert D.J. Cashier, born Jennie Hodgers in 1843. He served for a full 3 year term after enlisting in the Union army at the age of 19 and fought in over 40 battles against the Confederate Army. When the war was over, Albert continued to live as a man in…

Forget the Scenic Route, Take a Detour Down a Corpse Road

Walk with us, as we follow ancient trails where the living once carried the dead. We’ll be traversing Europe’s rural landscapes via a network of so-called “corpse roads”, occasionally marked with crucifixes and low stone benches, cutting across windswept hills, overgrown pastures, gushing rivers and rocky brooks. In Britain alone, 42 of these little-known funerary…

We Just Walked into America’s Strangest Egyptian-UFO Cult

Not long ago in Georgia, black and gold pyramids stood proudly on the 476-acre compound of Tama-Rey. It was the holy “Land of the Sun,” a place where the self-declared God, Dr. Malachi Z. York, manipulated thousands of nationwide followers in the “Nuwaubian Nation of Moors” to believe they were cosmic purveyors of an extraterrestrial…

NEWER POSTS 1 … 9 10 11 … 55 OLDER POSTS