Picture this. You’re walking barefoot on some stunning Australian beach, minding your own business, when you spot this… thing. It’s washed up on the wet sand, looking exactly like a tiny, intricate piece of alien jewelry or maybe a glitchy…
Deep in the Bangweulu Swamps of northern Zambia, a sound cuts across the water that has no business coming from a bird: a rapid, hollow rat-tat-tat-tat, almost identical to automatic gunfire. There’s no shooter hiding in the reeds. Standing motionless…
The Chilling Reason the Catholic Church Authorized an Exorcism on a Duplex In August 1986, an Associated Press wire story turned a modest double-block house on Chase Street in West Pittston, Pennsylvania into a household name. Jack and Janet Smurl…
The Horrifying Reason the Architects of Unit 731 Escaped Justice In 1936, the Imperial Japanese Army built a sprawling, state-of-the-art medical compound in Pingfang, China. From the outside, the facility was disguised as a massive industrial lumber mill. Inside, it…
In late March 1922, Andreas Gruber found a trail of footprints in the fresh Bavarian snow. They led straight out of the dark woods and directly to his farmhouse. There were no tracks leading back. Someone had walked inside and…
January 30, 1962. Inside a strict mission boarding school in Kashasha, a village on the western shore of Lake Victoria in what was then Tanganyika (now Tanzania), three teenage girls started laughing. At first it looked like the kind of…
It began on a sweltering July morning in 1518. A woman named Frau Troffea stepped into a narrow street in the city of Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, and began to violently twist, twirl, and shake. There…
Vienna, winter of 1916. A young woman sits down to write a Christmas card. Her hand hovers over the paper. Minutes pass, then hours. She doesn’t blink. She doesn’t speak. She isn’t dead, and she hasn’t had a stroke. She…
It is a discovery that pushes back the timeline of human engineering by tens of thousands of years. Deep in a Middle Pleistocene sediment layer near Rome, Italy, archaeologists unearthed a cache of tools that, according to traditional textbooks, simply…
The Man Who Became a Cave: The Fate of the Altamura Neanderthal Picture walking across a limestone plateau in southern Italy sometime during the last Ice Age. The ground gives way without warning. You slide down a vertical shaft, ten…