The Descending Hand Sculpture, created in 2022 by local Dallas artist Andrew Z., serves as a powerful tribute to the unsung hands that shape our modern world. Suspended dramatically from the ceiling of the Operators Club, its raw and industrial aesthetic immediately captures attention while conveying a deep respect for human labor. By intentionally leaving the sculpture unfinished, the piece visually mirrors the ongoing, grueling work required to build and sustain the infrastructure we rely on every day. It transforms a simple physical form into a striking symbol of endurance, prompting visitors to pause and reflect on the quiet dedication woven into the spaces around them. This thoughtful execution elevates an industrial installation into a genuinely moving artistic statement, leaving travelers with a renewed appreciation for hard work and craftsmanship. Located in the heart of Downtown Dallas, our lounge offers handcrafted cocktails, modern elegance, and sweeping city views. Whether you’re here for a night out, a private event, or just great conversation over drinks, The Operators Club delivers a refined experience above it all.

At the heart of South Main Plaza in Mt. Vernon sits an unexpected menagerie: a fountain crowded with painted cast-aluminum dogs, watched over by a cat, a pony, two pairs of birds, and, inexplicably, an apple. At the very center sits a golden bone, and the cat, smart enough to know better, keeps itself perched safely out of the spray. It all started when Gambier resident Phil Samuell saw photos online of a similar dog fountain in Toronto’s Berczy Park, designed by landscape architect Claude Cormier. He liked it enough that he and his wife, Mary, and their golden retriever, Sandy, made the trip to Toronto to meet Cormier and see the real thing. That visit is what got the idea rolling to bring one home to Ohio. The fountain doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s just a bunch of dogs (plus a cat, a pony, some birds, and that apple) caught mid-splash around a big golden bone, and it’s become the kind of spot where people linger, trying to spot every animal hiding in the water.

Parallel worlds are nothing unusual in pop culture. Most films and publications stem from the horror genre; portals into other worlds and dimensions usually portend nothing good for those who open them. One thinks of the “Upside Down” or shadow world in Stranger Things. Clive Barker’s Hellraiser also plays with the idea that there are portals which can be opened with the Lemarchand configuration cube—with very detrimental consequences for the curious adventurer. The Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once creates exceptionally entertaining chaos through constant dimensional leaps. But would you desperately want to break open the walled-up door in the dark basement of the abandoned house in the middle of a forest? The project Kcymaerxthaere by the American author, artist, filmmaker, and designer Eames Demetrios, born in 1962, is significantly more peaceful yet no less original. Kcymaerxthaere is a parallel universe that overlaps and interacts with our linear reality. Demetrios seeks out special, real places across the entire globe that have been created through the action and interaction of the inhabitants of Kcymaerxthaere. These spots, often extraordinary and art-infused jewels, are like interdimensional outgrowths of the other world that have embellished the here and now. Eames Demetrios marks these places with uniform, large metal plaques. On these, the imaginary history of the location is recounted in the local language and in English. The project spans the entire globe; it certainly doesn’t hurt that Eames Demetrios is the heir and custodian of Charles and Ray Eames’ design classics and is thus equipped with the necessary resources. It stands to reason that the original mini-republic of Užupis in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius is the site of a story from Kcymaerxthaere. Created by artists, this republic features its own government and constitution, a mermaid (or rather, river-maid), as well as a backpacker Jesus and trumpet angle—and is nothing less than the City of Justice within the Kcymaerxthaere cosmos. The local commemorative plaque describes a fantastic tale about a boy from the sea who, after ignoring warnings, was washed away by a giant wave. On his journey, he encountered the persecuted Eliala Mei-Ning, whose unique song created a city of justice around her and protected her from her pursuers. Eventually, at dawn, Eliala moved on to her next refuge, while the boy still had a long way home ahead of him. Moreover, the fiction of Kcymaerxthaere is a guarantee for a beautiful and special place at the spot where the portal signs are mounted. Or perhaps it is like the wonderful science fiction satire Bugonia by Yorgos Lanthimos: perhaps Eames Demetrios is the only one in this world who knows the truth. It would be a good explanation for why there are such beautiful places in this world…… and so terrible ones.

There is a version of Halloween tourism that involves a man in a rubber mask jumping out from behind a plywood wall. It has its pleasures. It is not this. The places below are real. The things that happened in them are documented — in court records, in coroners’ reports, in parish registers, in the diaries of people who were there. Some have ghost stories attached. The ghost stories are almost always less frightening than what actually took place, which is the point. This is not an itinerary. These places are scattered across three continents and you are not meant to visit them all. Pick the kind of dread you are in the mood for, and go. One exception, and it is worth leading with, because this year there is somewhere you can only go now. The one with a deadline For most of fifty years, the artifacts Ed and Lorraine Warren collected sat in the basement of their house in Monroe, Connecticut. Objects from the Amityville case. The mirror. The dolls. Things they believed were actively dangerous and locked away accordingly. The Warrens’ Occult Museum closed to the public in 2019, the year Lorraine died, over a zoning dispute — and for six years the most famous collection of haunted objects in America was simply unavailable. That changed twice, quickly. In 2025 the comedian Matt Rife and the YouTuber Elton Castee bought the house and took a five-year guardianship of the collection. The Monroe house now takes private overnight bookings — the entire property, eight guests maximum, flat rate regardless of headcount, with a paranormal investigation kit and supervised access to the museum itself. Guests sign two waivers on arrival: one for physical liability, one for spiritual. The second lists, among the outcomes the operators decline responsibility for, possession, levitation, and astral projection. No tours, no drop-ins, and a security system that treats the driveway as seriously as the museum. In late August, Annabelle, the Shadow Doll, the Satanic Idol, the Conjuring Mirror and the Devil Made Me Do It dinosaur leave Monroe for Salem. The Haunted Warren Museum opens August 27 at 259 Essex Street — more than a thousand artifacts across thirteen exhibits, a self-guided flashlight tour of roughly an hour, in a four-thousand-square-foot space in the middle of the most concentrated Halloween tourism market in the United States. The Warrens lectured in Salem for years and made artwork about it. And it is temporary. The operators have said there is no guarantee it stays in Salem past December 23 while they develop a permanent site elsewhere. Salem in October, with Annabelle in it, is a thing that has never happened before and may not happen again. If you want the Monroe house instead, the overnight bookings are gone through the end of the year; the next availability is deep winter, which is arguably the better season for it anyway. Ed and Lorraine are buried less than a mile away. If you want documented horror Taunton State Hospital in Massachusetts is a psychiatric institution whose reputation for hauntings is entirely downstream of a documented record of how patients were treated there. The building does not need a ghost. The Outagamie County Asylum Cemetery in Appleton, Wisconsin holds the bodies of at least 133 former patients. Most were buried without names. If you want folklore taken seriously Some places are frightening because of what people once believed, and what those beliefs made them do. In West Virginia, the Greenbrier Ghost marker commemorates Zona Heaster Shue, whose mother testified in open court that her murdered daughter’s ghost had appeared to her and named the killer. The testimony was admitted. The husband was convicted. In Taos, New Mexico, The Three Brujas are three unmarked concrete graves said to hold witches — deliberately anonymous, deliberately sealed. The Selee Satanic Mill Marker in Easton, Massachusetts is a roadside sign identifying the site of an eighteenth-century sawmill whose owner was locally believed to employ Satanic imps. Someone thought this worth commemorating in metal. And Springdale Cemetery in Peoria contains the so-called Witch’s Circle, a formation that has generated more than a century of local explanation. If you want a graveyard The cemetery is Halloween’s most reliable destination and also its most misunderstood. The good ones are not scary. They are strange. Highgate Cemetery in London opened in 1839 as one of the city’s Magnificent Seven, fell into overgrown disrepair after the war, and then in the 1970s became the site of something genuinely extraordinary: two rival occultists publicly feuding over whether a vampire was living in it, drawing crowds of amateur hunters into the grounds at night. Tombs were broken open. Corpses were staked. One of the men was jailed in 1974 for interfering with human remains. Karl Marx and Douglas Adams are buried there, which tells you something about the range. The Georgiana Cemetery on Merritt Island, Florida holds Ethel Allen, murdered at nineteen in the early 1900s in a case never solved. Her headstone is handmade, unlike every other marker there. Someone still decorates her grave, and nobody knows who. The Jackson Grave Houses in North Carolina are small structures built over graves — a tradition intended to shelter the spirit rather than contain it. In Philadelphia, the grave of Joseph Augustus Zarelli marks a boy who went unidentified for sixty-five years. He has a name now. And in Hillside, Illinois, the Spinning Headstone belongs to an ordinary husband and wife in a cemetery otherwise full of holy men and mobsters. If you want more of this: the Atlas holds 189 unusual graveyards in the United States, seventeen catacombs, crypts and cemeteries in Massachusetts alone, and a list of 21 lost and lonely cemeteries — including a Serbian village grave belonging to a man whose 1725 death produced one of the first written accounts of vampirism in Europe. The full graveyards and cemeteries categories go deeper still. If you want to overnight The Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts is the actual house where the actual murders took place in 1892. You can stay in it. People do — including one Atlas Obscura community member who booked it as a romantic weekend away and later married the man she brought. If you love creepy objects Robert the Doll has been causing trouble in Key West for over a century and is the origin point of an entire subgenre. Visitors who photograph him without permission write letters of apology afterward. The museum keeps them. If you want the debunking The most Atlas Obscura thing you can do on Halloween is discover that the story is wrong and the truth is better. Helltown, Ohio is the case study. The internet will tell you about a satanic church, a crybaby bridge, an abandoned school bus full of murdered children, and a mutant python. What actually happened: the village of Boston, Ohio was bought out by the federal government for a national park, the residents were moved, and the houses were marked and eventually torn down in 2016. A town emptied by paperwork is stranger than a town emptied by demons. It’s permanently closed to visitors now; the entry survives as a record. And the Bolton Strid in Yorkshire is the opposite case — a place whose reputation is, if anything, understated. It looks like a stream you could step across. It is the River Wharfe turned on its side, running vertically down a shaft it has carved through rock, with voids beneath the banks. The local claim is that nobody who has entered has come out. There are no hard numbers, which is its own kind of answer. There’s a podcast episode if you want to be properly unsettled before you go. For a structured route rather than a menu, the Ghosts From Mississippi itinerary runs from the grave of a witch who hexed a town, through a candlelit tour of the McRaven House in Vicksburg, to a cemetery statue in Natchez that some say moves at night. A note on doing this well Every place here is somewhere people lived, and in most cases somewhere people died. The line between dark tourism and rubbernecking is almost entirely a matter of what you bring to it. Read the history before you go. Don’t trespass — several of these sites are closed, private, or both, and the ones that are open have rules for reasons. And take the folklore seriously as folklore. The belief that put a ghost’s testimony into a West Virginia murder trial was a real belief, held by real people, in response to real grief. That is more interesting than a haunting. It is also considerably more frightening.

RoboCop is a fictional, cybernetically enhanced Detroit police officer from the RoboCop franchise. Beginning in 1987 with the film “RoboCop”, the stories of RoboCop center around, Officer Alex James Murphy after he has been cybernetically enhanced and continues to fight crime in Detroit.  In early 2011, the Detroit mayor and his communications team solicited suggestions for improvements to the city. They received a suggestion to erect a statue of Robocop since he would be “…a GREAT ambassador for Detroit.” Within days the idea went viral and a Kickstarter campaign to “Build a Robocop Statue in Detroit” started. After the funding was secured, the work on creating the statue began. Mark Dubeau from Tippett Studio, located the original armor by Rob Bottin and created molds in a partnership with Fred Barton Productions. The life-size armor restoration was 3D scanned and digitally scaled to create the 10 foot tall figure. The company Venus Bronze Works and Owner/ sculpture conservator Giorgio Gikas worked on statue. One detail not depicted in the statue is RoboCop’s gun. Instead, the statue portrays RoboCop in “an inviting and approachable gesture” as opposed to being armed and threatening. After years of setbacks and delays, the statue was finally placed on December 3rd, 2025, standing outside 3434 Russell St., just south of Mack Ave in Detroit’s Eastern Market.

Hidden on a small island in the middle of Mahón Harbour, the Lazareto of Menorca is one of Europe’s largest and best-preserved maritime quarantine stations. Built during the 19th century, it was designed to isolate ships, passengers, and cargo arriving from ports affected by deadly diseases such as plague, cholera, and yellow fever. Long before antibiotics and vaccines, quarantine was one of the few effective ways to stop epidemics from spreading across Europe. The complex functioned like a self-contained world. High walls separated different quarantine areas, while hospitals, chapels, gardens, warehouses, and living quarters allowed hundreds of people to remain isolated for weeks. Every space was carefully planned to prevent contact between those under observation and the outside world. Today, visitors can walk through this remarkably intact complex and explore a forgotten chapter in the history of public health. Surrounded by the calm waters of Mahón Harbour, the island offers a striking contrast between its peaceful setting and the dramatic stories of fear, hope, and survival that unfolded within its walls.