Our Weird and Wonderful World ft. Dylan Thuros

Atlas Obscura began as a website and global community to catalog and celebrate the world's unusual and obscure places, stories and foods. Since 2009, it has expanded to include six books, group adventures around the world, a Youtube Series and a podcast! Today, we have the immense pleasure of speaking with Dylan Thuras, co-founder of Atlas Obscura to talk all things weird and wonderful. Atlas Obscura Podcast: Listen HereDanielle’s AO ProfileListen to Watch Her Cook on Apple and Spotify! Follow us on InstagramFor the latest NPAD updates, group travel details, merch and more, follow us on npadpodcast.com and our socials at:Instagram: @‌nationalparkafterdarkTikTok: @‌nationalparkafterdarkSupport the show by becoming an Outsider and receive ad free listening, bonus content and more on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. Want to see our faces? Catch full episodes on our YouTube Page! Thank you to the week’s partners! Naked Wines: To get 6 bottles of wine for $39.99, head to NakedWines.com/NPAD and use code NPAD for both the code AND PASSWORD. Hello Fresh: Use our link to get up to 10 FREE meals and a free item for life. Trova Trip: Use promo code NPAD at checkout to save $50 on your next adventure. Host URL Traveler URL Rocket Money: Use our link to get started saving. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

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• 1:19Cassandra Yahnian?

  Hi, everyone. Welcome back to National Park After Dark. I'm Cassie.

• 1:23Danielle LaRock?

  And I'm Danielle. And today's episode is "I'm Losing My Mind."

• 1:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yes, Danielle is very, we're both very excited for this episode, but Danielle in particular is very excited. There's some, there's some moments in life that just come full circle, and this is definitely one of them.

• 1:40Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. And it's so funny, because we just had, we just did our monthly livestream a couple of days ago over on Patreon, and Atlas Obscura got brought up for legitimately the first time in a livestream. And we were about to have an interview, this episode that is all about Atlas Obscura. And we're talking to Dylan, the one of the co-founders of Atlas Obscura. And I wanted to say it so bad. I wanted to be like, you don't even know.

• 2:09Cassandra Yahnian?

  We did hint at it though. If you join our live streams, we like to drop some little sneak peeks to things. Pretty, pretty often I would say, and we definitely hinted that this episode was coming out pretty soon.

• 2:21Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, I can't keep my mouth shut. So if you're a Patreon member, you know everything.

• 2:28Cassandra Yahnian?

  Literally, quite literally.

• 2:29Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 2:29Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, we're super excited because as you said, we're talking to Dylan Thuris today. He is the co-founder and creative director of Atlas Obscura. And if you know anything about Atlas Obscura, it began as a website and global community to catalog and celebrate the world's unusual and obscure places, stories and foods, which it still does. But since its inception in 2009, it has significantly grown. The Atlas Obscura world has expanded to include six books, including titles like Atlas Obscura Wildlife, The Explorer's Library and Gastro Obscura. They host adventures around the world, have a YouTube series, and they have a podcast that we were recently on.

• 3:11Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, they, they have it all going on and it's kind of been Cassie and I's holy grail when it comes to travel, especially because as you're all aware, we like weird things. We like kind of off the beaten path things, points of interest that aren't usually on a top 10 list of to sees and to do's when you're looking somewhere. But chances are, if you type in your location or your destination or somewhere you want to go into Atlas Obscura, you're going to come up with a bunch of other things to add to your list that you may not have ever necessarily seen before or heard of before.

• 3:51Danielle LaRock?

  But going back to Dylan, he also hosts the Atlas Obscura podcast and hosts the Emmy award winning show, Small Town, Big Story, which is a video series that reveals singular celebrations, local lore, and hidden histories around the country. He's a three-time New York Times bestseller and a seasoned traveler. He's been to over 30 countries and hundreds of locations.

• 4:13Cassandra Yahnian?

  Very cool.

• 4:14Danielle LaRock?

  Together with Josh For, Dylan built Atlas Obscura to change how travelers perceive and plan their travels. Since launching, Atlas Obscura has become one of the most influential travel publications of the last two decades. Their site gets over eight million visits a month.

• 4:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  Wow.

• 4:31Danielle LaRock?

  I account for a few of those.

• 4:32Cassandra Yahnian?

  People like weird things.

• 4:35Danielle LaRock?

  And all of those people are eager and curious travelers looking for their next grand and strange adventure. So today Dylan joins us to chat all things Atlas Obscura and to share a bit of a national park adjacent story that remains an enduring mystery to this very day. So with that, Dylan, welcome to National Park After Dark. Thank you so much for being here.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Hi Danielle, hi Cassie. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to talk to you guys today.

• 5:04Danielle LaRock?

  We are so, when I tell you, I like had a jaw on the floor moment when we first got connected because I'm like, Atlas Obscura, you've got to be kidding me.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  That's very nice. That's very nice.

• 5:16Danielle LaRock?

  I have used Atlas Obscura since 2019 is when I first created my profile.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 5:22Danielle LaRock?

  But Cassie and I use Atlas Obscura all the time. So before we get into that and you, we have a story for us today as well.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  Yes, I do. I do.

• 5:33Danielle LaRock?

  Tell us a little bit about you. Like, who is Dylan? How did you create Atlas Obscura? Tell us everything.

• 5:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. We all share in some way. I think, I think we all share a particular way of thinking about and looking at the world, which is about a love of place. Like, there is something about experiencing the world through location and then the stories and the context that make that location really interesting that I think obviously is deep in, in, in all of our work. And you know, this, I started Atlas Obscura many years ago. My, my co-founder Josh and I started back in 2009. And I think it was a similar origin story to, to you two and National Park After Dark, which is this is stuff that we were just, we were just interested in these kind of weird, out of the way places, these unusual museums, these, you know, sometimes kind of morbid.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  Or macabre locations, you know, ossuaries and medical museums across Europe. And, and so we just, and we felt like this was totally unrepresented in the kind of travel world. Like you couldn't, wasn't in your Lonely Planet guide. No one was telling you these stories. And then you would go to one of these places and you would be like, this is the coolest, most interesting thing I did on this entire trip. So it was born as a total passion project. We just thought, okay, let's, let's, you know, see if we can get this set up. We wrote the first few hundred entries and put it into the world. And, and like you two, I think we quickly found audience of people who said, oh, I, I also enjoy all of these things. I enjoy looking at the world in this way.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  And it's sort of just been honestly, one thing after another from, from there since the last, you know, 15 years, really.

• 7:10Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, it's definitely something like Danielle said before, that we've both used in our own personal travels. And we totally get where you're coming from with that. And we are so appreciative that you created this space because me personally, Atlas Obscura, I first discovered it when I was doing, I moved down south. And I was doing these cross like country trips back and forth. And I was driving these long stretches where I was like, I need, what is around here? Like, what can I do? I need to.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:40Cassandra Yahnian?

  Uh, and I actually started my journey with Atlas Obscura, um, to go visit the world's largest. And so whenever I am somewhere, I look for the world's largest in the locations that I'm at. And Atlas Obscura introduced me to those. So I've been to like the world's largest fork, the world's largest pistachio.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Surprisingly large, some of these things. You're like, oh, that's very big. Well, that's so nice to hear. I'm always just like happy when people use it and then have some fun, interesting experience, whatever the nature of the, you know, whether it's a big roadside attraction or some outsider or project, whatever it is, it's like, as long as people sort of get that little, that little adventure, I think it's like doing the thing it was meant to do.

• 8:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  And it truly broke up my road trip to be like, okay, take a break, do something. You don't have a ton of time, but this is something that's interesting. So now I have a hilarious collection of photos in front of the world's largest.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  And you're gonna have to sometime, you're gonna have to go out to Kansas where there's this this woman Erica Nelson, who created the world's largest collection of the world's smallest versions of the world's largest things. She has also visited all of these giant things. So she went to the giant fork and then made like a tiny version of the giant fork, like it's a model of the model. And then she has the she made like a thousand.

• 9:00Danielle LaRock?

  My mind is blown right now.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  Yes, it's hard to even get your head around.

• 9:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  Kansas, here we come.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:07Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  Are there national parks in Kansas? Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

• 9:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  There's national park sites in Kansas.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Okay, okay.

• 9:15Danielle LaRock?

  I've totally made entire trips off of Atlas Obscura, my trust, you know, just being like, I want to do something totally because I think with travel, you know, it's kind of just you say a location and you kind of if you go into your circle or to Google top five things, it's always the same like four things repeated over and over. And while those are really cool and probably worth seeing.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:44Danielle LaRock?

  It's kind of like been there, done that. Everyone is doing it. And it's kind of like chopping the stream of like all of this tourism into just certain locations when there's so much more to see. And it's just off the beaten path or just hidden or obscure. It's just so cool. It ends up being the best part of the trip, you know, and it creates conversation. Because if you say, oh, I went to New York City and I saw I went to the Empire State Building. Everyone's like, okay.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:12Danielle LaRock?

  So have we. And so it's, you know, millions of other people. But then when you say something random.

• 10:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:17Danielle LaRock?

  You know, down some side street that it's just really cool. But anyway.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  That's very sweet. I really, really, I really appreciate that. And I think in a way, we're both after the same thing, which is like convincing people that like taking the little extra journey, like national parks are a perfect example, right? Like it's not an amazing experience to go to a very crowded national park during high season and be stuck in bumper to bumper traffic and like trying to see the majesty of nature through your car window. But like, if you're willing to go and like hike a little ways in and just put in a Little more effort, you might have this really revelatory experience. And I think in a way, all of this is just encouraging people to like, take that little risk and like, and, and know that there's something good on the other side of it.

• 10:59Danielle LaRock?

  Absolutely.

• 11:00Cassandra Yahnian?

  We clearly talk a lot.

• 11:02Danielle LaRock?

  We hang out way too much.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  Yes, I see you spend some time together.

• 11:06Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Cassandra Yahnian?

  I was going to ask you, how do you pick all of these locations that are on Atlas Obscura?

• 11:14Speaker 04

  From day one, it's a user-generated process, so people send us suggestions. And sometimes it's like a fully written up thing. Sometimes it is just a couple of sentences and a photograph. Like, we sometimes get stuff that's deeply mysterious and we're like, does this exist? Like, where is, what is this? And those just kind of like sit as our own little mysteries in the backend. But, uh, yeah, so people suggest stuff for the most part. And we have, we have editors and folks who work on fact checking and, and, uh, and sometimes write up original places as well. But that's, that's basically the process. It's very community oriented and driven. And I think what's nice about that is you get stuff that you never would have found on your own. You know, like some

• 11:55Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 04

  kid in rural Mexico is like, there's this crazy thing by my house. And it's like, you wouldn't believe this, you know, abandoned freeway overpass that like, never got built to anywhere on either side. So it's like a bridge with no way to get on top of it, standing all by itself, like in a field. And you're like, oh, that, that is interesting. Okay.

• 12:15Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, it's really funny that you say that because I was actually recently on Atlas Obscura and I was just looking at stuff in my area. And one thing came up that I've been to before and I was like, how did they know that this is here? Because it is so far. Yeah, it's like, it's off of a trail in the middle of the woods. And it's a place that I've hiked a few times and is actually one of the only, I solo hike a lot. And this one particular place is one of the only places I've been afraid to be out in.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  What was it?

• 12:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  So it is, I didn't know this at the time and Atlas Obscura actually helped, uh, bring some reference to the location that I was in.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 12:54Cassandra Yahnian?

  I was out there and I just kept getting these really weird feelings. And it's this trail that it's called Little River State Park and it's in Vermont. And I was walking on it and I just kept getting these really eerie feeling like I'm being watched. I something is going on. And the first time I had it, I was like, I'm being paranoid, but I'm gonna leave. And then I went back again and got the same exact feeling, went back again, got the same feeling again. I'm like, what is going on here? And Atlas Obscura has this whole written out thing of the history there. Like, how do they know this is here? It's the middle of the woods. And there was an old town there and there was 50 people, essentially a dam. There wasn't a dam here and there was a huge flood and 50 people drowned

• 13:37Cassandra Yahnian?

  in the same location that I was walking through. And it kind of connected the dots for me where I said, oh, I'm getting vibes of like this horrible tragedy that happened here. And and there are information signs, but they're like really, uh, they don't say much. It's just like here used to be a town, but a flood came through.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  They gloss over the like terrible tragedy, massive amounts of death and disaster. Right?

• 14:02Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yes.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  Well, I'm glad we, we, you know, we had a real deep cut. Sorry that it was such a creepy, but I guess it's great in your zone, right? Like, that's good. Okay.

• 14:12Cassandra Yahnian?

  It validated my feelings.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, maybe with that in mind, uh, let me tell you another one of these stories about a place where you might get that sense of something very ominous or something terrible happened.

• 14:30Danielle LaRock?

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• 15:00Speaker 04

  Okay, all right. I am, I am super excited to tell you this story. Uh, it's, I would say it's relatively well-known, I guess, in the world of kind of strange, mysterious, unsolved cases, but it's, it's sometimes known as the case of the Isdal woman. And the Isdal woman was discovered in 1970 in Bergen, Norway. Are you two familiar with this case at all?

• 15:25Danielle LaRock?

  Not at all.

• 15:26Cassandra Yahnian?

  No, not well-familiar for me.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  Okay, cool. Good. I'm glad, I'm glad. I'm, all right. So I'm gonna start, before we get into the case itself, I, I wanna give you like a little background on sort of the, where it is, where we are in the world, and kind of what's going on like at this time period. So we'll start with the place. We'll start with the, like, the very beautiful, natural location that we are in. So this area is just sort of outside of Bergen, Norway, which is one of the larger cities in Norway. I'm actually gonna be there this summer. I'm really excited about it.

• 16:00Cassandra Yahnian?

  Norway's like number one bucket list place for me, so.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  I'm so pumped.

• 16:04Cassandra Yahnian?

  I'm already into this story.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. So this, this takes place in this beautiful, you know, kind of fjordsland, these mountains, and, and there is this kind of infamous narrow ravine that, that comes down the eastern shoulder of, uh, Mount Urekin. Probably saying that wrong, but it's, it's, you know, this mountain is, is the highest of the city's seven mountains. And even, you know, on a, on a spring afternoon, it's, it's chilly. The, the birches sort of grow at strange angles, and the place has actually long had a kind of a reputation. They call it, in Norwegian, they call it Death Valley.

• 16:43Danielle LaRock?

  Oof.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  And there's, there's a number of ways for the, Ista len means Ice Valley, but it's got this, this nickname as Death Valley. And it's relatively famous for the sort of sudden fog that will come up. People have accidents there relatively regularly, fatal falls, and, and they say that in the Middle Ages, the Death Valley name comes from the notion that in the Middle Ages, people would go here to commit suicide. So it's got this kind of. Dark aura, just to begin with. So this is, this is where we are. Beautiful Norway environment, you know, salt air being blown out of fjords. It's kind of blue, black scree underneath your boots, this rock, you know, loose rock. And then this kind of like eerie foggy death valley. So this is, this is the kind of scene we're in.

• 17:28Speaker 04

  And this case begins in the 1970s, in 1970. And this year is like a big year in the world, you know, Apollo 13 has like just come back. A lot of crazy stuff going on in the news, you know, jetliners are being hijacked by militants, Jordanian militants. We're still in the, very much in the Cold War. The Soviet Union has just landed a little rover, an unmanned rover on the moon. And people are sort of freaking out about that. Beatles broke up. Anyway, this is all going on. And, and Norway itself is undergoing a very strange transition at this time in history. So 1970, you know, people forget because Norway feels very rich and fancy these days.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  But for most of its existence, it was broke. They were like kind of subsistence farmers, like they did not have a major big industry. Fishing, you know, fishing was the major big industry. But in 1970, relatively recently, they've found this field of oil, like an enormous pocket of crude and that it was commercially viable. And so soon, not long after this case, they would start pumping this oil. And basically Norway would go from this kind of broke backwater to this big, you know, energy superpower, really rich country. And so there's a lot going on and not just that Norway is a founding member of NATO.

• 18:54Speaker 04

  And they share this almost 200 kilometer border with the Soviet Union. And so the Cold War is very active. There was a Bergen crime novelist who wrote that this case, he wrote this case happened during the Cold War and there were definitely a lot of spies in Norway, including Russian spies. And so this is all the background into which we come to this case. And the case, well, maybe Before I go on, I don't know, is like any, just get any questions, anything we should cover before we get into the, the discovery?

• 19:23Danielle LaRock?

  Now, the scene is set.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 19:25Danielle LaRock?

  And I am sat and ready.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  All right. Okay. So, so it is Sunday, uh, November 29th, 1970. Uh, I looked up some pictures of like Norwegians in 1970. Everybody's so stylish, you know, they like, it's very seventies, but like a little bit Scandinavian influenced, but a dad. Well, yeah, they look good. You're just like, oh, you guys look great.

• 19:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  Seventies, but sweaters.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Seventies, but like cozy sweaters, everything they're wearing back in style. So it's, you know, it's a normal Sunday afternoon and, and a dad is hiking with his two daughters. It's about one in the afternoon and as they're hiking up this relatively pretty remote kind of deep into the side pathways hike. The father smells something. He smells a very strange smell because among the kind of normal smell of like the wet rock and the damp moss. There is this smell of scorched flesh and weirdly there's another scent too. There's almost like this very odd garlicky scent. But, but the first thing he noticed is this, this scent of, of burning. Yeah. Like.

• 20:32Cassandra Yahnian?

  Not what you want to come across in the middle of the.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  No, not what you want to come across at all. And they turn this corner and they find this woman lying, uh, on her back. On this slope of loose rock and she's kind of turned, she's on her back, but her head is like pointed downhill. So it's like an odd way to even be lying. Her feet are pointing uphill, her head is pointing downhill. And more than that, the, the main investigator noted, he said, it was, you know, she was out of the way. Like it was an unusual place to walk. And the first thing we noticed was the stench and this corpse, the stench is because this, the, the corpse has been, um, there's been some kind of fire. The, the corpse is burnt, the arms are rolled up and the fists are like clenched in like in a boxer's pose.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  And everything has kind of been locked in this, in this burned rigor mortis. And very strangely, only the front of her body is burned. Her back, which is against the rock is untouched. Is like not is is as if the fire sort of only came from from one side and not just that around her, someone had arranged all of her personal items, a watch, two silver earrings, a ring, melted plastic bottles that had once held booze, a broken umbrella, a fur hat that was partially singed, no passport, no wallet, all of these materials carefully arranged about on the body and every clothing label, every tag on every little piece of makeup, anything

• 22:00Speaker 04

  that could have been identifying had been stripped away. It was as if it had been placed like some kind of elaborate set piece or scene. Another technician, a forensic technician, wrote that the the placement of the objects looked ritual. It was as if someone had carried out a ceremony.

• 22:19Cassandra Yahnian?

  I was gonna say it really sound like it. It sounds very intentional. I don't know what the reason, all the reasons are behind all of it yet, but it feels very intentional and like there's some type of ritual that's happening here. And it's, it's very off, off putting, I mean, to stumble across that, I can't, I can't imagine.

• 22:39Danielle LaRock?

  I have a bit of a question, maybe that would clarify something for me in my mind. So you're describing the scene and just the front of her body being burnt and singed and a couple of the other items. Did it appear that she was lit on fire at that location? Or was it she was burned elsewhere and her body was placed here in this ritual like scenario?

• 23:04Speaker 04

  This would become one of the fundamental questions because

• 23:07Danielle LaRock?

  Okay.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  What they start to uncover is all of this other, these other causes of death. Although, although you might sort of immediately assume that this is the cause of death, it starts to look like, in fact, there were, there was another cause of death and perhaps this burning or fire happened after the initial kind of, after the other things happened.

• 23:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  Like an attempted cremation kind of thing?

• 23:34Speaker 04

  Yes, or more of an attempt, yeah, an attempt to perhaps make Unidentifiable, right? To render this person totally unidentifiable. And they also in this, they found this notebook there as well that had this kind of mysterious writing in it, almost like code-like writing. So they, you know, the dad and the, and the dad gets in touch with the, the authorities and says, oh, my God, you know, there's something horrible that happened. Come and, and, and, you know, let's, I hope you can find out what's happened to this poor woman.

• 24:09Cassandra Yahnian?

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• 25:32Speaker 04

  So the autopsy results start to only add more layers of confusion to this because they do the autopsy on this woman and she's approximately 35 to 40 some years old. Small, you know, five foot four, pretty athletic, but it becomes evident in the drug toxicology they do that she had taken between 50 and 70 phenomol tablets, which is a very powerful barbiturate. That said, they also, so enough to kill you, basically, like enough to, this is a deadly dose of this, but it also appears, based on her lungs, that she's alive, at least partially, when this fire begins, because there was all this carbon monoxide saturation

• 26:17Speaker 04

  in her blood. And so the pathologist lists the official cause of death as carbon monoxide poisoning combined with ingestion of sleeping pills. But what the actual cause was, it remains this, so some people tried to say that this was a suicide, that you take that many sleeping pills, that this is a thing that was done voluntarily, but the fire really complicates that story, right? You took a ton of barbiturates and then set yourself on fire? Like, that's a pretty extreme measure, and then why are you doing it out here in the middle of the wilderness? So the police start canvassing Bergen with their best sketches that they can make of this woman, who, you know, it's pretty hard to get a good sketch, but eventually they

• 27:02Speaker 04

  are able to pull fingerprints. And they thought, you know, okay, for a while, they're like, the case is closed, like, what are we gonna do? Like, no one recognizes these sketches. The fingerprints, a few days later, show up on two battered suitcases found in an unclaimed locker in the Bergen Central Train Station. And inside the suitcases is this very strange set of stuff. It is very high-end clothing, but with all the branding removed. It's wigs in brown, blonde, red. It's a notebook filled with, oh, that's right, sorry, this is where they find the notebook. The notebook filled with cryptic letter number strings is a bunch of money,

• 27:45Speaker 04

  but like Deutschmarks, Belgian money, Swiss francs. It's a film roll, a pair of heavy blue rubber boots, and the same size and color as one of the melted souls they find at the crime scene. And there was also a partial fingerprint on a pair of glasses that matched this dead woman. So now they have this very strange case that looks like foul play. And these suitcases.

• 28:12Cassandra Yahnian?

  It feels like, yeah, the suitcase, it feels like someone on the run or someone in disguise. You know, just with all the different wigs that are to conceal like who you are. And then all the different money from different places is like they've been trapped. Whoever this is has been traveling a lot. They don't want people to recognize them.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  It's very interesting.

• 28:32Danielle LaRock?

  And the tie of all of that, trying to conceal your true identity in life, kind of is translating into this mysterious death. So that's also an interesting link there.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  Yes, there's, there's a picture being painted of someone with a pretty mysterious background. And I should note that no one has shown up at this point saying, oh, my friend is missing. Or, you know, my, my girlfriend, my wife, my sister, whatever, you know, no one is coming looking. This is all happening because the police are kind of like, who is this person? And eventually, one of the police officers is able to start to decode this little pad of, of notes by checking them against the Norwegian Railway and hotel ledgers. And they're essentially able to, to crack this code.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  And they find that it's basically a code of places that had, they had gone. And they also, they're able to sort of look at, at, okay, some locations that were listed. And it has her going from Paris to October, or sorry, traveling through Paris in October, and then Oslo in November, and Stravenger, and then Bergen also in November.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  There's just a lot of moving around pretty quickly. And then by like basically looking at these ferry tickets and these different, because now they suddenly say, OK, we kind of know maybe where you were and when you were. So the police are able to start putting together a kind of a calendar of her travels, and they're able to start finding her on this journey. But as they do this, it's sort of even stranger. Because what they're finding is that everywhere she's going, she is checking into different hotels and then moving hotels, and she's checking in under like eight different names. And the names are really good. So she was Genevieve Lancia from Luvin, Claudia Tiet from Brussels,

• 30:34Speaker 04

  Claudia Nielsen, also from Brussels, Alexia Zarnmerches, also Brussels, Vera Jarl from Antwerp, Fenella Lorke from Brussels, and Elizabeth Leenhauer, also Brussels. And each of these characters, like she's like recording addresses as she goes, because sometimes to check into a hotel, you got to record. Every address is made up, does not exist, is not a real location.

• 30:59Cassandra Yahnian?

  OK.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 31:08Speaker 06

  It's me, the

• 31:09Speaker 05

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 31:11Speaker 06

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 31:12Speaker 05

  What about a third time?

• 31:14Speaker 06

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars.

• 31:21Speaker 05

  Seems like they just started.

• 31:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 31:27Speaker 05

  Time to read the tagline.

• 31:28Speaker 06

  Fine. No one deals more deals than

• 31:30Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 31:32Speaker 06

  Please stop.

• 31:32Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 31:33Speaker 06

  Touche.

• 31:34Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 31:35Speaker 06

  Priceline.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  So the picture is now they have this very mysterious death. This person who has been moving around a tremendous amount under many different aliases and recording these travels in this kind of coded system. And they're eventually able to track a few of specific incidences.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  Where this woman and what she was doing. So there was a waitress at a place called the Neptune Hotel in Bergen, who they're eventually able to figure out, served this woman. And, and the waitress said of this woman, "My first impression was one of elegance and self-assuredness. She even winked at me as if she knew I'd been staring." And described her as speaking with kind of continental accent, flipping between German and French when ordering. At one of the hotels in Oslo, she changed room three times in one day, complaining of drafts in the room. And the taxi driver who took the woman from the hotel to the Bergen Railway Station was never found. Much, much later, in 91, so 21 years later, there was a taxi driver who said they wanted to remain anonymous, that said they had picked up the woman at a hotel

• 32:45Speaker 04

  and that she was joined by another man for the ride to the train station. But this is, this is, with each thing they discover, it is as if there's sort of this infinite pull of mystery, where it's just like, "Okay, we discovered her identity, except it's one of eight identities." And none of the identities actually point back to a real person.

• 33:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. She feels like some kind of spy or like someone on the run. I don't know. She has, she feels like she has a lot of charm and elegance and she, she feels almost trained in this. It just, it feels like a movie. It feels like an action movie with Angelina Jolie in it. And she's like hopping around all the different countries and, I don't know. She's very interesting.

• 33:29Danielle LaRock?

  See, I don't get the feel of somebody on the run only because I feel like when you say, oh, somebody's on the run, you envision them trying to fly under the radar. You know, yes, concealing their identity, but not, you know, asking to switch their room three times. Someone's gonna remember that, that, oh, that lady was never satisfied because she was cold and she asked three. Like, I think you would suck it up and just be like, I don't want anyone to hear from me. I don't want to make a stir. Or dressing elegantly and for people to notice. You know, people are noticing her and how she ordered her food and like the eye contact she was making with people. Like, this doesn't translate to me, at least from what you're describing,

• 34:12Danielle LaRock?

  as someone that's trying to just slip under the radar and not cause too much draw or attention.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  No, it is like someone trying to evade something, but not necessarily trying to just run away. Because you just run away. You just like go far away and just hunker down. But she's sort of moving in this very intentional, but very strange set of ways. And so, you know, eventually they basically give up. The police say that it is ruled a suicide by ingestion of sleeping pills, which feels like, all right, guys, it didn't really. That's a kind of a real-

• 34:48Danielle LaRock?

  Just lapped that on there and said, okay.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:51Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  And she's buried. She's specifically buried in a zinc coffin to preserve her remains for future disinterment. Because it's basically this cold case. They know that they don't know what the hell is going on. And what starts to emerge over the years is exactly the theory, at least. And there are now many, many theories. There's a big Facebook group dedicated to this. There is an amazing podcast series, actually, about this called, I think, Dead in the Mountains? Or Death, no, sorry, Death in Ice Valley. And the main theory that starts to emerge is that she is, in fact, a spy. You know, not long after this happened, this death, the Lilyhammer affair happens, where Mossad agents assassinate the wrong man

• 35:37Speaker 04

  in a Lilyhammer street in Norway. And there's all kinds of kind of Norway becomes this land where sort of the USSR meets the West. And so there's all this stuff coming. And so people started to assume that she maybe was a spy, trailing, you know, the Western coast and that perhaps it was, it had to do with these anti-ship missiles called Penguin missiles that were being tested off of Stravanger. And various other foreign people had been seen in town. And so, you know, this idea became really like popular. But there wasn't hard evidence of it. The notebook, it had sort of her own travels in it, but it didn't have any evidence of like recording rocket trials.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  Her dental work was found to be common in Southern Europe, not sort of Eastern Bloc. So not necessarily someone coming out of the- Soviet Union and no intelligence agency would admit either side USSR or Western admitted to losing a an agent but this you know it remained kind of this unanswered question and the the other theory that started to emerge was that perhaps it was a kind of stage managed death and one of the people said you know who who commits suicide by taking barbiturates and choosing fire as the backup like to one of the one of the investigators said like to pour petrol

• 37:04Speaker 04

  over yourself and set it alight you'd have to carry the can the matches yet no container with gas was found nearby that was big enough so that's how did that disappear and the position of her body suggested that she was lying down when the fire started so it doesn't really it you know suicide seems increasingly unlikely and then this deliberate clipping of every clothing tag and it just made it seem there was some kind of strange like evading identification and then you know some people thought maybe it was a assisted suicide and this also kind of resisted the idea though because no other footprints were found up there just the rubber boots so if someone

• 37:49Speaker 04

  came with her they either stepped only on the bare rock or somehow like vanished into thin air

• 37:55Danielle LaRock?

  could they have carried her

• 37:57Speaker 04

  could someone have carried her

• 37:58Danielle LaRock?

  yeah

• 37:58Speaker 04

  like in her rubber boots oh I like this that's totally yes absolutely

• 38:04Danielle LaRock?

  that was you know if they had teamed up for whatever plan this may be for whatever reason if it was an assisted suicide or something you know whatever or if she was killed and then brought to this location and set on fire you know I feel like someone could easily put on like I guess the question is was she wearing the boots

• 38:23Speaker 04

  they matched yes she was wearing boots that matched like the boots were burned but then they matched to a different pair of boots that was found among her stuff as far as I understand it

• 38:33Danielle LaRock?

  okay because to me I think okay if there's another person involved which it seems like I Don't see a world in which there is not somebody else involved.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:43Danielle LaRock?

  If they had planned this beforehand, either together or she was the victim of a murder.

• 38:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 38:50Danielle LaRock?

  That they carried her wearing the rubber boots. They were wearing the rubber boots, carried her to this location. Because even just like the position she was laying in with her head down, if she was to end her own life, why would you lay down in that way?

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Like with your head down a slope? Like who? No one lays like that. That's not how you lay down.

• 39:09Danielle LaRock?

  But yeah, and then, you know, yeah, and then they just switched boots or whatever.

• 39:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:15Danielle LaRock?

  And that would explain the one set of print. I don't.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:18Danielle LaRock?

  It's just the theory. I don't know.

• 39:20Speaker 04

  I like it. I like it.

• 39:25Speaker 05

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 39:27Speaker 06

  It's me, the.

• 39:28Speaker 05

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 39:31Speaker 06

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 39:32Speaker 05

  What about a third time?

• 39:34Speaker 06

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights and rental cars.

• 39:40Speaker 05

  Seems like it just started.

• 39:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 39:47Speaker 05

  Time to read the timeline.

• 39:48Speaker 06

  Fine. No one deals more deals than.

• 39:50Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 39:51Speaker 06

  Please stop.

• 39:52Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 39:53Speaker 06

  Touche.

• 39:54Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 39:55Speaker 06

  Priceline.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  In the years that have followed, there have been some interesting clues that have opened up. So they actually did exhume her and were able to do an analysis on her. Oh no, actually for this, they didn't have to exhume her. They used, when they did the autopsy, they actually took her jaw. Because of the dental work was pretty unique and they thought that could be an identifying factor. So they were able to test her tooth enamel for certain isotope ratios. And it points her to having come from Southern Germany or the French-German border, maybe like the Black Forest area. And they were able to find sort of a DNA specific group that that is relatively rare in Scandinavia, but common in other parts of Southern Europe.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  However, that is where it stopped. They were not able to get any further. They were able to release an updated sketch, giving a much clearer idea of what she might have looked like with kind of. Pale skin and hazel eyes, but absolutely nobody stepped forward to say, I know who this is. I know what's going on. You know, the other strange thing about all of this is this happened in a very remote, like hard to hike to place in Norway. And, you know, when you take this trail, it's like you're going up this V-shaped glacial cut. And like the rocks are slick underneath. It's, uh, it can get really cold, really quickly. And everything about this woman in her suitcase shows like, you know,

• 41:21Speaker 04

  patent leather ankle boots and like wool dresses and like calf light. She's like a, she's like a creature of the urban environment. So, and the only concession to the nature was those galoshes. And they fit Bergen's weather, but not really the valley's terrain. It was like someone dressed for bad weather, but not for this expedition that led into the wild. And so this is where things remain. Basically every 10 years, the Bergen police run the fingerprints, which they have, and the DNA, which they have in the databases. And nothing comes back. They have their, as of 2020, there is no match. And, you know, people have been looking for, maybe there's something in, in these old Cold War documents.

• 42:06Speaker 04

  They started to release these Cold War files, you know, declassify these Cold War files in Norway. And, you know, things have been discovered. Yes, MI6 and CIA were running listening stations along the coast. They were disguised as meteorological posts. And the Soviets were sailing their fishing trawlers up and down Bergen's harbor, all these antennas picking up signals. You know, could she have been a spy caught between these two nets? Perhaps, but there is no concrete proof. And the, the only, the big kind of break in the case, the, the latest thing to have happened that, uh, has gotten everyone all, uh, Twitter, is somebody started looking into the case again and ended up sort of hiring,

• 42:50Speaker 04

  like a fact checker to dig into more of this and just go deeper and deeper into the material. And it opened up this interesting potential connection with. Like a Swiss banker and we still don't really know whether this is real or not. Like this is new enough and unclear enough that I think it's like really hard to say anything definite. But there is some new breaks in the case that are giving people hope that we will actually uncover who this is, what what she was doing and what happened to her. Because as of today, we just don't know.

• 43:25Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, that's certainly a mystery. I do have, I I mean, everything about it is so interesting and mysterious. And I do have a question for the DNA testing. Are they testing for relatives of her?

• 43:39Speaker 04

  Yes, and it's not, it's not. And also, the DNA has degraded. So they weren't able to get a good enough sample to really do what you would normally do, which is just like find someone who was, because there's got to be someone out there related to her. There has to be a third cousin, whatever. But I think the DNA, at least when they last tested it, was not good enough to turn up these results. So that would be an interesting, perhaps in the, because I think that DNA test happened in 2017. And so almost 10 years later, or the isotope test happened then. I mean, you you could, you could imagine that maybe you could try it again.

• 44:14Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, especially now with all of like ancestry.com and 23andme, you know, more and more people are testing their DNA. So I feel like the probability of finding someone who might have a connection with her is kind of going up as these things become more popular.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  There was one other very interesting theory that an author put out. And it was actually that she was a very high end sex worker and that she was traveling up and down the coast and meeting with important, you know, rich, famous customers, clients, whatever. But, you know, wanted to remain anonymous, didn't want anyone to connect her back to her actual identity. And, you know, that that that was actually what she was doing. It still doesn't explain the murder. To me, it also doesn't explain how she got her hands on seemingly many different passports from many different countries like.

• 45:09Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Speaker 04

  They're certain she had a French passport because she, there's a, there was someone on a French flight. That was an unidentified French national that was registered on the flight. I mean, it's also funny because I think it reminds me that in 1970, people could kind of just disappear in a way that I think is like harder to do now. Like, the fact that she could take flights and not have her name like on the flight register is like kind of a wild thing to think about, but.

• 45:34Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, now they can scan your face and they.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:36Cassandra Yahnian?

  You can't fake, you can't give fake passports. I think that that I, I kind of, it's an interesting theory, but I think that there are definitely some holes in that and that why did she have all these disguises, all these different names? You know, if she's in other countries, no one's gonna know.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  It seems like a long way to go to, to like do something that, you know, you don't need that level of obfuscation. You know what I mean? You're just discreet, whatever. So it's.

• 46:03Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:04Cassandra Yahnian?

  She seems very discreet and not that sex workers cannot be intelligent or anything like that, but it feels like she has like training for whatever this disguise is, which I wouldn't imagine a sex worker would.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  She had medications, she had like an eczema cream where she had scraped off all the identification of it, right? That's just like a level of like hiding your identity. That's sort of really out of, out of, you know, so we don't know. Espionage, organized crime, psychological escape, you know, was she running from somebody? Or accidental overdose and staged disposal? Did she die accidentally? Maybe she overdosed in some scenario, someone panicked, carried, you know, brought her up here, managed to do it without leaving footprints and then staged this grisly scene. I, we may never know. So that's my story for you today. The Isdol woman, one of the great unsolved cold cases of, of all time.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  And a good reason to go to Norway and visit beautiful Bergen and Ice Valley, just don't get mysteriously murdered while you're there.

• 47:08Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, and to put it like, kind of bring it back, it is within a national park.

• 47:13Speaker 04

  It is very close to a national park, but let's, all of Norway is basically a national. It's right next to a national park. It's close enough that I it's, you know, within the, within the striking distance.

• 47:25Danielle LaRock?

  First of all, it's outside, it counts.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 47:27Danielle LaRock?

  Um, but it's funny because our very first episode of National Park After Dark, I, we both covered an episode, uh, story in one episode, which we don't do anymore, but my story was same thing. It was legitimately like less than a mile outside of Acadia National Park. I'm like, eh, first episode.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  It's close.

• 47:46Danielle LaRock?

  It's close enough. Oh, I get it. I'm just giving you shit. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. I for one had never heard of that case. I know you said it's kind of infamous, but it, it totally flew over my head. So.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  I, I think it's, I think it's maybe more famous in, in Europe, but there is a BBC series called Death in Ice Valley. If you are like, oh, this is cool and I want every detail, like this is a very, uh, general, over the top, kind of big picture examination, but it goes, it's like a 10 part series that goes really, really, really deep. Some other books out there that, that you can check out or, or articles that are, are great about it. The Swiss banker thing is, is NZZ.ch that, that gives, it says, in the 50 year old unsolved death in Norway, an explosive new lead points to Nazi allied Swiss banker. So that's kind of the, that's the hot new,

• 48:39Speaker 04

  uh, area of investigation. So we'll see. It may, it may still be solved yet.

• 48:44Cassandra Yahnian?

  Interesting. Well, we'll be keeping our ears and eyes out for any new information that comes up on this one for sure. Cause it definitely, it was a really interesting story and it left me with a lot of questions.

• 48:55Speaker 04

  Cool. Thanks for letting me, thanks for letting me tell it.

• 48:57Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. Thank you for joining us.

• 48:59Danielle LaRock?

  Of course. Yeah. And just before we let you go, I have to ask.

• 49:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:03Danielle LaRock?

  Because of course you're co-founder of Alice Obscura, the, your catalog is just, I mean, you've got thousands of places. You've expanded, you have books, you have group trips, you do trips around the world. Like you have a, obviously you have a podcast that we guested on as well.

• 49:20Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 49:21Danielle LaRock?

  Um, you have a YouTube series and you're quite the traveler yourself. It's always a hard question and we get it asked all the time. So I feel for you, but what is one of the most, I won't put you on the spot and say your favorite place or your favorite experience, but top five, in the top five, what is one of the most memorable, either places or experiences that you've had throughout your travels?

• 49:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, you two would like this too because it's really in a beautiful environment. The one I always cite, the one I think of is a place in Peru called the Cachua Chaca, sometimes called the Last Incan Bridge. And it's about four hours from Machu Picchu. And what it is, is it's this giant swaying rope bridge. But the thing that makes it special is that every single year, the villages around this bridge, the four villages that live there, come together, they cut down, they cut down the bridge and then they weave a brand new bridge. And it's woven out of this kind of grass, this like hay that just grows on the, on the hills there. And they like sort of, they get it wet, you rub it between your hands and then you weave it into this small twine and you weave the twine into rope.

• 50:30Speaker 04

  And eventually they weave this enormous, like hundred, you know, foot long suspension bridge. And they've been doing this, the reason the bridge has this nickname, the Last Incan Bridge, is that they have literally been doing this since the Incan Empire. This is a little piece of the Incan road system and it would have been really an important part, actually, of connecting all these, you know, this is 1,500 kilometers of roads or whatever it was in the Incan Empire. And, and these bridges, you know, connected across these mountainous sort of ravines and gaps. And the bridgekeeper would have been this very important figure who oversaw the creation of this bridge. And so today there is still a bridgekeeper and he is still, like it is run through his family since the Incan Empire.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  So even though every year the bridge is, is a new bridge, in, in this other way, it is this like unbroken connection to this ancient empire. And so I went and I crossed the bridge and I met the bridgekeeper and he showed me how to weave the rope and what to do. And it was, it's just like, it was an incredible experience. I mean, I have, there are many, there are so many others that are very different from that and interesting in some other really different way, but that one always comes to mind when people ask me.

• 51:39Cassandra Yahnian?

  That's really cool. And to have an experience that makes you so connected to such an ancient history and to actually meet the people who, that is their ancestors is, it's a really special experience and it's so different than being like, I saw Machu Picchu. You know, it's like, I actually interacted with the communities in a ceremony that they have been doing for generations. I mean, that's, that's a really, really cool experience.

• 52:07Speaker 04

  It, it was really, it was really special. It was really good.

• 52:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, thank you so much for joining us and taking the time to chat with us and share that story and just tell everyone, you know, what you're up to, where they can find you. Tell us all the things.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, the big thing is, is, you know, the Atlas Obscura Podcast. I think if you like National Park After Dark, you might really like the Atlas Obscura Podcast. It's, it's not, you know, it's a wider array of stuff. Some of our stories are quite cheery and, you know, goofy and fun, but it's, it has the same kind of sense of deep storytelling around locations. And it's just, they're short episodes. It's 15 minutes a day. We make four new episodes a week and we just take you to the most interesting, unusual places all around the world. So come and give it a listen. It's not a big time commitment to try out an episode and hopefully you like it.

• 52:59Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, we agree. Everyone listening, go check out the podcast because it is, I think it's definitely up everyone's alley that's listening.

• 53:06Speaker 04

  Thanks, Cassie. Well, cool. All right. I, this was so, this was so fun. Thank you both.

• 53:12Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, thank you so much, Dylan, for joining us. This is a really interesting and mysterious story to end on. If you're not done wanting to listen to us and Dylan, you're in luck because there is another episode on the Atlas Obscura Podcast where that aired on June 5th that you can go check out. And Danielle and I talk about a story that we've discussed before on this podcast, but we get all really deep into aliens and all that good stuff.

• 53:40Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, aliens never get old. So if you're wanting some of that alien content and want to know more about, you know, just head over to their feed. They have so many awesome stories. They drop multiple episodes a week. Like they're on their game. So head on over there. But we will see you here next week. In the meantime, enjoy the view.

• 54:00Cassandra Yahnian?

  But watch your back.

• 54:01Danielle LaRock?

  Bye, everyone.

• 54:02Cassandra Yahnian?

  Bye.

• 54:03Danielle LaRock?

  Thank you for joining us again this week. If you love National Park After Dark and want to hear exclusive bonus stories, join us on Patreon or Apple subscriptions. Patreon subscribers have access to our National Park After Dark Book Club, live streams, Discord, and much more. If you prefer to watch our episodes, video episodes are now available on YouTube. If you're enjoying the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite listening platform. And to follow along with all our adventures, you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X at National Park After Dark.

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