If Hatley Castle’s grand exterior looks familiar, it’s probably because you saw it in a film or television show. Several X-Men movies, the hit series Smallville, and the legendary 80s TV show MacGyver all used Hatley Castle as a backdrop. In 1906, the Canadian Lieutenant Governor, James Dunsmuir, hired architect Samuel Maclure to build a…
In 1962, a seemingly harmless fire started at a landfill in the coal-rich town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. Residents believed the fire had been extinguished until 1979 when a local gas station owner discovered that his subterranean fuel tanks were alarmingly hot. State investigators arrived in Centralia in 1981 after a 12-year-old boy nearly fell into…
When most people think of ghost towns, they imagine dusty towns in the Old West where prospectors flocked hoping to mine gold or other precious metals. However, the Appalachian Mountains in the Eastern United States are home to many spooky abandoned towns. Among these is the Elkmont Historic District located in the Great Smoky Mountains…
According to The Guinness Book of World Records, Sobrino de Botin, located in Madrid, Spain, holds the title as the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the world. Its wood-fired oven has been alight since it was first kindled by French chef Jean Botin in 1725. With its sumptuous wine list and delectable food menu, Sobrino…
Southern Alberta is home to some of the most impressive Native American petroglyphs in North America. Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in Aden, Alberta features stone etchings and paintings that were created over the course of 900 years by the Blackfoot people. Depictions of hunters, spirits, and a few Ford Model T’s are a testament to the…
In 1934, the RMS Queen Mary was launched as a state-of-the-art cruise liner. The majestic Queen Mary catered to elite travelers wishing to experience the pinnacle of luxury. However, when World War II began in the 1940s, the Queen Mary was painted grey and repurposed to transport Allied soldiers and weapons to various battlefronts. Once…
Countless people describe California‘s Mojave Desert as mystical, magical, and slightly uncanny. In the mid-1950s, a UFO enthusiast and engineer named George Van Tassel claimed that aliens from Venus—whom he encountered in the Mojave Desert—assisted him in drafting plans for a domed structure called The Integratron. This structure purportedly harnessed the region’s rich geomagnetic energy….
In the late 1800s, the mining town of Jerome, Arizona, was dubbed one of the wildest and wickedest towns in America. Drifters, gamblers, professional drinkers, and ladies of the night all sought to get rich quick in the shadow of one of the West’s most prosperous copper mines. Business thrived until the 1930s when the…
