Anya Gruber

Nov 11, 2024 | sapiens.org | Anya Gruber

✽It’s the year 2065. West Africa’s cool seasonal rains wake Abena. She rides her bike to work, where she pushes investment in cultivating insects as renewable protein sources. Abena reflects on the stories she learned from her grandparents. Long before, they had to survive swarms of locusts, harsh winds, and failing crops because the People Across the Sea had poisoned the Earth in pursuit of ever-newer iPhones and other disposable frivolities.

Jan 4, 2024 | atlasobscura.com | Anya Gruber |Nathaniel Scharping |Colin Dickey |Kate Golembiewski

Last year, we peeled back the layers of hauntings, spirits, and demons to explore what lurks behind the legends. From scientific explanations for eerie sights and sounds at a haunted penitentiary to a psychoanalyst’s unconventional theory for one man’s belief in a supernatural mongoose, our stories examined the why behind each bump in the night and whisper in the rafters.

Oct 10, 2023 | atlasobscura.com | Anya Gruber

In 2003, a wine cabinet in Portland, Oregon, somehow made headlines. The owner of the foot-and-a-half-tall wooden bit of decor, Kevin Mannis, had listed it on eBay alongside an elaborate story. He claimed that the cabinet had previously been owned by a Polish Holocaust survivor and was inhabited by a powerful demon known as a Dybbuk.

Jun 26, 2023 | atlasobscura.com | In Maine |A Thread |Anya Gruber

Think of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—what comes to mind? High school English class? If you’re a fan, maybe “Paul Revere’s Ride” or “A Psalm of Life”? Beyond being one of America’s most famous poets, the twice-married Longfellow, who died in 1882, also holds an iconic and unlikely place in queer history. Steps away from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is Longfellow House, a stately Georgian home owned by his family (and eventually a trust they established) from 1843 to 1972.

May 8, 2023 | atlasobscura.com | Anya Gruber

This story was originally published on SAPIENS and appears here with permission under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license. One day last fall, when Kerri Klein was photographing gravestones at Burial Hill Cemetery in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a mother who is blind and her child approached her. They asked Klein if she could show them the monument to the General Arnold shipwreck, the majority of whose crew of more than 100 were killed in a storm in 1778.