Places Edited by Ella Morton

The floorboard scrawling of a tragic madman is on public display outside a Paris hospital, much to the dismay of its opponents.

This remote island village was in danger of depopulating completely until a tunnel was built to connect it to the rest of the world .

This water-tower-turned-high-end-apartment building was once the site of an early Nazi concentration camp.

The world's most famous donkey lives in this pen.

Discovered after draining a local pond, these ancient man-made caves are still a complete mystery.

This research center for rare prosimians is studying how they sleep to help prolong human life.

This "social palace" housing complex created a relatively stable and self-contained worker's society... for a time.

Hidden within a Netherlands crater is a stone bed that lets those who lie in it see the sky as a curved surface.

A monument to the art of slicing people open.

This Sumatran root bridge took almost 30 years to knit itself together.

This tiny lake temple dedicated to a water goddess seems to float on the surface.

This permanent exhibition celebrates the finest of our heartless automatons both real and fictional.

This historic covered bridge contains a series of macabre paintings that communicate one thing: everyone dies.

A tree that grows parallel to the ground was declared Brooklyn's "crowning curio" by the poet who saved it.

Sitting in the basement of a castle, the largest wine barrel in the world is bigger than most apartments.

Boats must transform into railroad cars to navigate this Polish canal.

The largest single concentration of harmless garter snakes in the world is a writhing Canadian serpent orgy.

An abandoned water sports stadium that has become a haven for graffiti and decay.

One of the largest ancient geoglyphs in the world is a tall desert god used for predicting the weather.

This intricately spiralling forest was created as a monumental work of art.

River pirates, murderous bandits, and serial killers used this Illinois cave as their debauched hideout.

The only remaining collection of flayed figures made by French "madman" Honoré Fragonard.

A colossal floating restaurant built to look like a ancient Chinese imperial palace.

This uber-quaint Polish village is known for its habit of painting elaborate floral motifs on just about everything.