The Atlas Obscura Podcast

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.

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Colin Dickey is no stranger to dubious ghost tales. But when he went to Nevada to report at a brothel called the Mustang Ranch, he experienced something that to this day he can’t explain.

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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In the months leading up to Labor Day, a dedicated team of craftspeople and volunteers gather in the Santa Fe Plaza Mall to build…a puppet. Not just an ordinary puppet, but a gigantic, 50-foot tall marionette with moving arms, eyes, and legs. It looks kind of like a big, somewhat-scary, somewhat-cuddly ghost. This ghost will get stuffed with shredded paper, and then around 50,000 people get together to…well, set him on fire.

This…is...

In 1915, a devastating fire destroyed the Chinatown in Walnut Grove, California. In its aftermath, a group of Chinese immigrant residents founded the town of Locke – not just another Chinatown, but a self-sustaining Chinese community nestled in the California Delta. Today, Locke stands as one of the last remaining rural Chinese towns in the United States.

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Today, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk is viewed as the founder of the modern Czech state – a George Washington-like figure. When he died in the 1930s, his final words were sealed in an envelope…which then passed from his son, who died under mysterious circumstances in the 1940s, to a secretary’s flat in Scotland, to being stashed away in the National Archives, with instructions not to open the envelope until 2025. 

This September, the envel...

A girl and her father take a walk in the woods. This essay was written by Emily Lowe and edited by Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha, and originally appeared in Off Assignment.

Plus: Off Assignment is offering a writing course, called The Practice of Imagination. It begins November 4, and you can use code ATLAS20 for 20% off: https://www.offassignment.com/practice-of-imagination  

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A small town in Texas has embraced the story of the visit and demise of an otherworldly being from the 1800s… and what many say is America’s only alien gravesite. 

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/1800-s-alien-gravesite

If you can’t make it out to Texas, check out this documentary about the incident which is online.

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Probably when you think of submarine warfare, WWI or WWII comes to mind. Not… the American Civil War. But oh, they had them back then! Or rather, they had one back then, and it worked exactly one time. Dylan is joined by longtime friend of the show Caitlin Doughty, of Ask a Mortician, to talk about one of their shared obsessions: the candle-lit, hand-cranked, Civil War submarine which has one of the most gruesome undersea histories...

“Founding Fathers” like Washington or Jefferson have gigantic monuments in Washington, statues galore and palatial house-museums. But what about…Thomas Paine? The author of “Common Sense,” the pamphlet that brought the idea of American independence to the masses, was considered a hero after the American Revolution. But then he experienced a remarkable fall from grace, which ended in his burial in a pauper’s grave and…well, some gra...

The Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico has a pretty unusual spiral staircase – it winds round and round like a DNA helix, and has no visible center “bar” for support. But the story of the staircase’s origins is even stranger. It was built by an itinerant carpenter who wandered in from the desert – and 200 years later, we’re still not sure who it was. 

This episode was brought to you in partnership with Visit Santa Fe. Find out m...