In February 1669, the diarist Samuel Pepys visited Westminster Abbey and was shown something extraordinary. A keeper led him to a wooden coffin that had been left sitting above ground for centuries, its lid broken open. Inside lay the body of Catherine of Valois, a medieval queen of England, her face still visible and parts … Read more

At its peak in 2008, TGI Fridays operated more than 600 restaurants in the United States and nearly 900 worldwide. The red-and-white-striped awnings, the brass rails, the Tiffany-style stained-glass lamps, the walls crammed floor to ceiling with old bicycles, street signs, and antique junk, the flare bartenders flipping bottles behind a crowded bar, the roar … Read more

At 10:00 on the morning of October 5, 2018, in a shoe factory on Treasy Avenue in Batavia, New York, an executive named Hundley Elliot sent out a short message. There was no press conference, no farewell party, just a notice that the machines had stopped for good. One hundred fifty-one years earlier, two brothers … Read more

The dress had waited in a drawer for more than two years. It was too fine for a child that age, a Parisian frock bought from a couturier in an occupied city, and Vieve Sabo had imagined her daughter wearing it at the end of the war, when the running could finally stop. That celebration … Read more

The path to the cabin wound higher into the mountains than the clerk had led Millicent Abernathy to believe. When Augustus finally stopped the borrowed truck in the clearing, the place was smaller than she had imagined, a simple structure of weathered logs with a stone chimney and shuttered windows that gave it a closed, … Read more

At 7:23 on the morning of April 7, 1945, lookouts on an American aircraft carrier spotted the Imperial Japanese battleship Yamato emerging from the haze off Kyushu. She was 862 feet long, displaced 72,800 tons fully loaded, and carried nine 18. 1-inch guns capable of hurling 3,200-pound shells over twenty-six miles. She was the largest … Read more

On the morning of February 15th, 1974, Mary Schlice left her apartment in the Kenwood neighborhood of Minneapolis, walked out into a cold that sat well below freezing, and stuck out her thumb at the edge of the road. She was twenty-five years old, carrying a cardboard sign that said Madison, and wearing a long … Read more

In October 1834, a half-starved man with infected wounds stumbled into the small settlement of Grafton, barely a dozen buildings clustered where two logging roads met in what would later become West Virginia. He gave his name as Robert Thatcher. According to the local doctor’s notes, he was possessed of a terror so profound that … Read more

On the 8th of March, 1979, a white Cadillac Fleetwood vanished from a quiet Brooklyn street. And in it, Louis Cafora, 300 pounds of paranoia, and his wife Joanna, 26 years old, blonde, and blissfully unaware of what her husband had done. They disappeared in broad daylight. No witnesses, no bodies, no car. Poof, gone. … Read more