The hiker found the package in 1987, sixty-four years after it was sealed inside the wall. He was poking through the ruins of a two-story building at the center of what had once been a town, a structure whose upper floor had caved in but whose ground-floor walls stood mostly intact. Behind crumbling plaster he … Read more

Emma Rodriguez wiped sweat from her forehead as she climbed the narrow stairs to her grandmother’s attic, carrying empty boxes for the estate sale. The August heat in Savannah, Georgia, was suffocating, even in the shade of the old Victorian house on Liberty Street. Her grandmother, Dorothy Chen, had passed away three weeks earlier at … Read more

The air in the Hofburg stank of incense and candle wax, and the silence was so complete that Helen Vetsera could hear the rustle of her own skirts as she stood before the most powerful bureaucrat in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She had dressed in her finest black, as if mourning attire might shield her from … Read more

On the morning of January 7, 1943, Nikola Tesla died alone in room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel. He was eighty-six years old, nearly penniless, and largely forgotten by a world that had once hailed him as the architect of the electrical age. Within hours of his death, however, the United States government moved … Read more

In the spring of 1889, any woman in England or America could walk into a pharmacy and, for the price of a loaf of bread, buy enough arsenic to kill twenty men. The arsenic trioxide that saturated the Victorian world lived in green wallpaper, in facial creams, in patent tonics, and most conveniently, in the … Read more

On September 19, 1991, two German climbers, Helmut and Erika Simon, were crossing the eastern Alps on the Austria–Italy border when they spotted something protruding from the melting ice. They assumed it was another climber, someone who had slipped and fallen, undiscovered for seasons. They called the authorities. Police arrived, followed by forensic teams. A … Read more

The cold from Dutch Schultz’s hand stayed in Elder Raymond Clay’s shoulder long after the door of Mount Olivet Baptist Church swung shut. It was a Tuesday afternoon in 1935, and the colored light from the stained glass windows fell across the wooden pews in long stripes of red, gold, and amber. Clay stood completely … Read more

Sarah Mitchell had cataloged thousands of photographs in her fifteen years as senior archivist at the Chicago Historical Society, but this one made her stop. It was a sepia-toned portrait from 1909, showing a young mother in an elaborate Victorian dress holding her infant son in a wealthy family’s parlor. The brass nameplate identified her … Read more

That December night, Merritt Vanderslice woke in the dark to a sound he could not name. He wrote down the time later, in the morning: 8:51. It was not a knock at the door, not footsteps. A word, he wrote in his notebook. Someone said one word beside the bed. Not to me, he wrote. … Read more