The Archive

Barely Scratching the Surface

Every strange place we've mapped and documented.

189 files50 countries

Browse the archive ↓

Mystery of the day

Nazca Lines

Ancient MysteryIca Region, Peru

Read the file →

Results · 188 mysteries

New York, United States
⊙
33 Thomas Street (Titanpointe)
A windowless 550 foot Manhattan skyscraper identified through Edward Snowden's leaked documents as a major NSA mass surveillance hub hidden inside a working AT&T switching building.
Washington, United States
♆
Afterglow Vista
A roofless Masonic mausoleum stands in the woods of San Juan Island, where a limestone baron seated his dead family around a stone dinner table. One chair was left deliberately broken.
California, United States
♆
Alcatraz
The federal penitentiary on a San Francisco Bay island whose 1962 "impossible" escape was never definitively solved, layered on top of decades of guard and visitor reports of ghostly cellblock activity.
Epirus, Greece
❖
Ali Pasha's Treasure
Ali Pasha ruled Epirus from Ioannina for four decades and was killed in January 1822 in a monastery on the island in Lake Pamvotida, where he had taken refuge from the Sultan's troops. The fortune he was said to have hidden before his fall has been searched for ever since. An Italian company dug the area for five years from 1913 and found nothing.
Mexico City (Cuauhtémoc), Mexico
☉
Altar de la Santa Muerte
A life-size Santa Muerte has stood in a glass case on the pavement outside Alfarería 12 since Halloween 2001, when Enriqueta Romero moved the figure out of her house and made a private devotion public. The Catholic Church calls the devotion blasphemy and the army has bulldozed shrines in other cities. This one was left alone.
Pacific Ocean (Howland Island vicinity), United States
∅
Amelia Earhart's Disappearance
Pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart vanished with navigator Fred Noonan over the central Pacific in 1937 while attempting to reach tiny Howland Island during a round-the-world flight, a disappearance that triggered one of the largest air-and-sea searches of its era and has never been conclusively solved.
New Hampshire, United States
✦
America's Stonehenge
A hillside maze of stone chambers, walls, and a grooved "sacrificial table" in New Hampshire has been called both a 4,000-year-old ceremonial site and a 19th-century farmer's root cellars. A century of argument has not settled it.
Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan
☉
Aokigahara
A dense forest on Mount Fuji's northwestern flank, historically associated with yūrei folklore and now requiring unusually careful, respectful treatment because of its modern reputation.
Puno, Peru
✦
Aramu Muru / Gate of the Gods
A seven-meter doorway carved into a sandstone cliff above Lake Titicaca is where legend says a fleeing Inca priest pressed a golden solar disk into the rock and vanished through a portal that opened in front of him, and visitors still press their foreheads into the niche to feel what he might have felt.

Barely Scratching the Surface

Nazca Lines

Results · 188 mysteries

33 Thomas Street (Titanpointe)

Afterglow Vista

Alcatraz

Ali Pasha's Treasure

Altar de la Santa Muerte

Amelia Earhart's Disappearance

America's Stonehenge

Aokigahara

Aramu Muru / Gate of the Gods