The Atlas Obscura Podcast

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...

1 Dec 202516min

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....

29 Nov 202512min

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 a...

28 Nov 20258min

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 ...

27 Nov 202515min

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 hi...

26 Nov 202522min

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 ...

25 Nov 202514min

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 f...

24 Nov 202517min

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...

22 Nov 202514min