A forgotten Viking graveyard and 7 more of our most-read stories this month

A blues legend's missing grave, an accidental NYC neighborhood, and more. Email not displaying correctly? View in your browser. October 31, 2019 Sword of Goujian This ancient sword lay in a waterlogged tomb along the Zhang River Reservoir in Jingzhou, China, for 2,500 years, but somehow managed to remain relatively untarnished and impressively sharp. Read More → Found: Viking Graveyard Archaeologists recently discovered a large Viking cemetery about 50 miles west of Trondheim, Norway, at the end of the Vinje Fjord. The site contained the remains of at least 20 burial mounds, including what was once a mound covering a mortuary house. Read more → A Blues Legend’s Missing Grave For guitar fans around the world, the name Robert Johnson has grown synonymous with mystery, even sorcery. Legend has it he traded his soul to the Devil for his musical ability—one of the founding stories of rock ‘n’ roll’s satanic flirtations. That mystery followed him after his death, as no one seemed to know for sure where he’d been buried. But the truth was there all along. Read more → Accidental Neighborhood Located near the border of Queens and Brooklyn beside Newtown Creek, the area known as Haberman has always been there, and yet has always had a population of zero. Its name was leftover from a defunct train station, an example of how a simple mistake when digitizing places in old maps can have the potential to create new ones. Read more → A Nun’s ‘Last Supper’ Plautilla Nelli’s “Last Supper” painting, completed around 1568, is remarkable for several reasons. It’s portable, painted on a canvas that moved several times over the centuries. More strikingly, it is the first-known depiction of the "Last Supper" by a woman. Now, after years of hiding inside a Florence monastery, it was just unveiled in public for the first time in 450 years. Read more → The Vulnerability of Masonic Temples Fires in Masonic buildings like the one that erupted this month at the Masonic Temple in Aurora, Illinois, can be stubborn. The combination of minimal windows, flammable decor, and sometimes lack of upkeep makes them easy targets for flames, as well as tough places for firefighters to wrangle a blaze. Read more → It’s Not Easy Being Green Researchers have long speculated that light exposure and oxygen may have contributed to the darkening process of Renaissance-era paintings. A new study on the once popularly used pigment called verdigris revealed exactly how the green paint faded to dark brown. Read more → Russia’s Retro Lenin Museum Lenin Museum in Gorki Leninskiye, located 20 miles south of Moscow, doesn’t look hi-tech even by 1980s standards. And virtually no changes have been made since it opened. In fact, the same technology that was secretly imported to power it—Apple II computers—is still used today. Read more → Visit AtlasObscura.com · View in Browser · Unsubscribe · See All Newsletters 61 Greenpoint Ave #622, Brooklyn, NY 11222