The Atlas Obscura Podcast

Since settling down in the small town of Union, Maine, the Japanese-born ceramicist Hanako Nakazato has shaped her pieces around her endlessly surprising, largely untouched environment. 

It's Maine Week on the show, so every day we're introducing you to someone from that great state — people who live, and work, and get inspired by Maine’s rugged beauty. This episode was produced in partnership with the Maine Office of Tourism.

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We meet Becky Sigwright, who captains a wind-powered boat that’s been sailing around Maine since before the invention of the telephone. 

It's Maine Week on the show, so every day we're introducing you to someone from that great state — people who live, and work, and get inspired by Maine’s rugged beauty. This episode was produced in partnership with the Maine Office of Tourism.

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We're working on a listener-powered episode about travel resolutions and we want to hear yours!

What are you hoping to change about the way you travel or move through the world? What inspired this resolution? Maybe you wanna travel to a new continent. Maybe you are learning a new language for an upcoming trip. Maybe you are planning to be more adventurous and less organized about where you’re going. Or maybe you’re planning to travel less internationally and explore your city or town more. Whatever it is, we want to hear about it. 

So give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message telling us your name and story. Our mailbox will cut you off after three minutes so please call in if you get disconnected. Or better yet, you can record a voice memo and email it to us at Hello@AtlasObscura.com

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Experience the Orfield Anechoic Chamber: a room inside a concrete bunker that was once known as the quietest place on earth.

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The Unclaimed Baggage Center in Alabama bills itself as “the nation’s only retailer of lost luggage.” If you’ve ever lost a bag during air travel, it probably wound up there - along with many other treasures and oddities.

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We go to the Westman Islands off the southern coast of Iceland and meet the heroes who save young birds that have wandered from their nests every summer. 

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We get out our passports and visit The Republic of Slowjamastan, a nation built on good vibes, good music and a dream of eliminating one very popular type of footwear. 

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Hear from the caretakers of a ghost town in Bolivia that was once the world's highest ski resort.  

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/abandoned-chacaltaya-ski-resort

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In honor of Lucia Day on December 13, we’re diving into the origins of a Swedish holiday tradition which evolved from sinister pagan lore to a celebration of light, warmth and music.

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About 400 miles south of New Zealand, on the subantarctic Campbell Island / Motu Ihupuku, stands a Sitka spruce whose nearest neighbor is 170 miles away.

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/worlds-loneliest-tree

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Gastro Obscura’s senior editor Sam O’Brien returns to the podcast to go deeper with us on her strange beat – recipes etched into gravestones. We probe how food can help heal and remember those we’ve lost.

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We visit the taverns of colonial America to take a frothy sip of the hot ale flip and how it helped pave the way for contemporary mixology.

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Empress Anna’s Ice Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia was the site of an incredibly strange wedding. Was it a cruel joke? A strategic power move? Or something else?

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Mexico City is known for its museum and art scene. The collection at El Museo del Juguete Antiguo – The Antique Toy Museum – encourages visitors to lean into their imaginations – and reflect on the rich history and culture in this city.

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This is how you do Christmas in the desert. Every year, the city of Chandler, Arizona creates a Christmas Tree made entirely of the diaspore of this Western plant. 

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Seltzer has been around for thousands of years. And one factory in Brooklyn, New York called the Brooklyn Seltzer Boys is preserving the history of this simple drink.

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Around 60 people live full time in the town of Helvetia, West Virginia. But once a year, the population swells to 20 times its size – when masked revelers dressed as moons, suns, monsters, possums, and everything in between descend. This is Fasnacht, a Swiss-German celebration of Fat Tuesday that was brought to the area by immigrants in the 19th century. In the 20th, Fasnacht almost died out…before being revived by two creative local women.

This episode is brought to you in partnership with West Virginia Tourism. The next Fasnacht will be celebrated on February 14, 2026 (time to plan a combo Fasnacht-Valentine’s Day trip?) For more information check out the event’s Fasnacht website and Facebook event page.

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In the early 1920s, walking around Orange, New Jersey at night, you might have seen young women coming out of a factory, with hair, skin and clothes softly glowing in the dark. Some called them “ghost girls.” Newspapers would later call them “radium girls” because the glow on these women came from radium-based paint that they used to make glow-in-the-dark watches for the US Radium Corporation. They thought it was perfectly safe to work with radium, maybe even healthy. They’d soon find out it wasn’t.     

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When you think of Orlando, Florida and the area around it, a certain cartoon mouse might come to mind. But in recent decades the area has also become a destination for Latin American food and culture. Today we visit Coqui Snacks, a cozy snack shop in Kissimmee offering up classic Puerto Rican comfort foods…including a popsicle called a limber, which has a surprising connection to aviator Charles Lindberg.

Learn more about Coqui Snacks: https://www.coquisnacks.com/  and https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/coqui-snacks

If you’re looking for more places to eat in Kissimmee, check out Gastro Obscura’s Latin Culinary trail – a guide to dozens of restaurants offering up Cuban sandwiches, Dominican-Japanese fusion, and more! 

https://kissimmee-latin-culinary-trail.atlasobscura.com/

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You can learn a lot about a person from their hands. In this episode, we hear the story of a doctor who made it possible for us to hold onto the stories of presidents, astronauts, musicians, artists and more… through bronze molds of their hands. 

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/adrian-e-flatt-m-d-hand-collection

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Gastro Obscura writer Sam O’Brien takes co-host Kelly McEvers on a tour of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous tributes to the turkey – and makes her case for why these big, beautiful birds are worth paying attention to.       

Read Sam’s article on the history of the turkey: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-the-turkey-thanksgiving

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Carpets are everyday objects we rarely stop to think about. But they’re far more than decoration or something soft to step on. Each one holds an origin story – threads that run through centuries of history, connecting small villages of master weavers to sprawling, power-hungry empires.

Historian Dorothy Armstrong, author of Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets, takes us on a journey through the surprising and global story of carpets.

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When Elliott Long’s dad started planting a forest of “bottle trees” with trunks of steel and old bottles for leaves, Elliott immediately understood that one day, it would be his job to keep his dad’s forest alive. He wanted nothing to do with it. And then his dad died, and Elliott had a decision to make.

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Atop a mountain in a picturesque Colorado town is the frozen corpse of a Norwegian grandpa. We get the tale of how this came to be, from the person who for years has trekked up and down the mountain for this unique preservation mission. 

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/frozen-dead-guy-days

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Today, we’re sharing an episode from The Detour: a show about going places, that actually goes places. Host Sam O’Brien and geologist Becky Nesel take a trip to the Shawangunk Mountains (aka the Gunks) just a couple hours north of New York City. And Becky shows Sam what makes these mountains unique – including an incredibly rare ecosystem that might be the only one of its kind in the world. 

This episode was produced in partnership with Toyota Trucks.

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We chat with writer Alessio Perrone about what he learned from the people who hunt for Italy’s unexploded bombs, leftover from times of war. 

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/italy-unexploded-ordnance

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Char Adams is the author of Black Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore. She chronicles Black-owned bookstores in America – from David Ruggles, all the way to the stores that opened up in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter uprisings.

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In 1905, a Bulgarian named Stamen Grigorov made a discovery. Inspired by a wave of researchers studying the secret to long life, he decided to put under the microscope a food that he ate daily: yogurt. Today, the Bulgarian bacteria he found is memorialized in a one-of-a-kind museum in his hometown. 

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Reporter Teresa de Miguel joins host Kelly McEvers to talk to her about these floating gardens called Chinapas in Xochimilco, Mexico City. Today, many of these chinampas are vanishing but efforts are being made to preserve them. 

This story Teresa reported was a collaboration between the Associated Press and Mongabay

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A tiny island off the coast of Brazil is known for being a dangerous place … purely because its inhabitants are, well, snakes. But we speak to a researcher who’s seen it up close and says it’s time for this place to shed its reputation. 

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/snake-island-ilha-de-queimada-grande

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We visit a quaint Dutch fishing village and attempt to unravel the mystery that unfolded there… a mystery that involved strange and curious letters and a voyage to the other side of the world. 

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mr-kaors-portrait

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In the 1920s the world was small. This was an exciting time for scientists and explorers. And among these explorers were Ted and Kemit Roosevelt who traveled to China to find a rare animal back in those days, the giant panda. 

Author Nathalia Holt joins us to tell this story from her new book: The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda. 

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About 100 years ago, the Great Lakes were inundated with an unwelcome visitor – the leech-like, blood-sucking, creepy-looking sea lamprey. For decades, a small governmental organization has kept the lampreys (aka Vampire Fish) in check. But now, thanks to federal budget cuts, it's not clear who will win: the Great Lakes or the sea lamprey.

Read Katie Thornton’s full story in the New Yorker: https://bit.ly/3WIEz9F

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Artist and architect Danny Shaddick and the rapper Shad have known each other since high school, and they both wound up in Toronto making art together. Now, they’ve made an unusual musical robot that incorporates drums, found objects, and field recordings from around their shared city. 

Watch a short documentary about Danny and Shad, and listen to their original song in full: https://www.atlasobscura.com/hubs/toronto  

This episode was produced in partnership with Destination Toronto. 

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We go to Tokyo, to a particular place that is both nemesis and best friend to all those procrastinators out there. (Yes, we’re looking at you :) 

LEARN MORE: The Manuscript Writing Cafe is open Saturdays and Sundays and you can reserve your seat online. 

https://koenji-sankakuchitai.blog.jp/ManuscriptWritingCafe/

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This San Francisco museum, curated by a super-fan of the Beats, is a shrine to an incredibly influential cultural movement and a destination for folks keeping it alive today.

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Journalist Eliot Stein explores the tradition of the djeli – African storytellers who memorize and pass down oral histories – tracing it all the way back to the Mali Empire. Along the way, he tracked down a modern djeli, who is upholding and remixing the tradition. And he found him in an unexpected place: working in a convenience store.  

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A while ago, we asked you to send us stories about your collections – and we got so many great responses, that we decided to make another episode about it.     

Plus, we want to hear stories about the fictional places you wish were real. Tell us why this place lives in your imagination. What resonates with you about this place? And how did you discover it? Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave us a message telling us your name and story. Or record a voice memo and email it to us at hello@atlasobscura.com

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On the heels of the World Series, Kelly and Amanda discuss an unusual tradition in baseball: the fact that, before each game, every single ball is rubbed with mud sourced from a secret location in the Delaware River Basin.

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Sigmund Freud’s famous psychoanalytic couch is preserved in his final office in London, England.

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/freud-museum-london

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The Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki has been home to an infestation of Chilean recluse spiders for more than 50 years.

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There’s a mansion in New Orleans with a truly horrific past. Author Colin Dickey, who has joined us every Thursday this month, reveals the real life horrors that took place here, its once sadistic owner and its haunted reputation.

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When the city of Buffalo, New York invited landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to town in the late 1860s, they were hoping he’d replicate the success of his most famous design: New York City’s Central Park. But Olmsted had other ideas. Instead of creating one centralized park, he argued, why not make Buffalo a city within a system of interconnected parks? It was a plan that would change the course of urban design.

This episode was brought to you in partnership with Visit Buffalo. Learn more about Buffalo’s park system: https://www.bfloparks.org/

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From long flights to strenuous trips, listeners share stories about traveling with their kids for the first time. 

Plus, we want to hear stories about the fictional places you wish were real. Tell us why this place lives in your imagination. What resonates with you about this place? And how did you discover it? Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave us a message telling us your name and story. Or record a voice memo and email it to us at hello@atlasobscura.com

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A city in Uzbekistan used to be the site of one of the world’s largest seas. Now it’s a dusty reminder of one of the largest and most forgotten environmental disasters.

READ MORE: Visit the Stihia website here to learn more about the music festival that happens in Moynaq, including where it may be this year. And this news article is a good primer on some of the current conflicts and issues in the region.

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We go to the former estate of the Davies sisters, two unusually wealthy Welsh women who traveled the world, fell in love with art, served their country, and then dedicated their home to culture and community.

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/gregynog-hall

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There’s a special tree in Portland that’s full of a city’s hopes, dreams, and wishes.

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/portland-wishing-tree

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The West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville, West Virginia was once a home to thousands of prisoners. Today, it’s a tourist attraction. But its past continues to haunt the town of Moundsville to this day. 

Every Thursday this month, writer Colin Dickey joins us to talk about the cultural history behind some of our favorite spooky legends and creatures.

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Over the course of 50 years, a father and son team made exquisite glass botanical models that would transform our understanding of the natural world. 

Learn more about the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants: https://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/glass-flowers

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Maybe you associate Las Vegas with slot machines more than with pinball machines. But what you might not know is that pinball, today found in every family friendly arcade in America, was once considered a form of gambling – and was the center of a culture war in the US. We go to the Las Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame to play through the history of the game.

This episode was brought to you in partnership with the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. 

Check out the Pinball Hall of Fame online: https://pinballmuseum.org/

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