The Victoreen Instrument Company was responsible for providing 95% of the instruments used in the Bikini Atoll atomic tests after World War II. These are the tests that helped shape the story for Bikini Bottom (the bottom of the sea at the Bikini Atoll test site)

Coalwood was a rather prosperous mining town from the early to late 1900s. I’m sure you could guess what they mined, but in case you were wondering, it was coal.

During studies, the EPA noticed that the dust blowing around through Picher contained zinc, lead, cadmium and other metals. By the 1980s, the metals had also seeped into groundwater, ponds, and lakes. Children had still regularly used these areas for swimming, which led to learning disabilities, among other problems in Picher children.

In 2002, the Miss USA pageant was held in Gary. During the event, Donald Trump decided to renovate the front of the theater using sheets of plywood to cover the windows. The plywood was painted to depict a false interior, and a marquee was mounted outside the front. The marquee then read “Jackson Five Tonite.” In 2009, after Michael Jackson’s death, plastic signs reading “Jackson Five Forever” were placed on both sides of the marquee.

Back in 2005, a company with some big ideas came onto the scene. A Green Cove Springs-based company by the name of ATLAS Hovercraft Inc. was developing hovercrafts that they had hoped to make commercially available in the transportation of passengers across the St. Johns River, as well as other local waterways.

In 1878, Two Guns became the site of a mass murder of Apaches by their enemies – the Navajo. In an attempt to hide out, and avoid detection, the Apaches crawled into a cave at Two Guns. Unfortunately, the Navajos took notice, and lit sagebrush fires at the cave’s exit, shooting any Apaches that attempted to escape. 42 other Apaches that were not shot were asphyxiated by smoke from the fire. They were then stripped of their valuables. The murder site became known as the “death cave.”

Bombay Beach is surely one of the most interesting towns I have ever visited. The town is situated on the Salton Sea, 4 miles west-southwest of Frink in Southern California’s Sonoran Desert. The entire area is full of oddly calming post-apocalyptic views and various interesting projects left behind by artists, utilizing vacant spaces for creation in numerous expressive ways.

Come September 1953, the school would open its doors for the very first time as a Saint John High School – opened by Reverend Joseph Feicht. Sadly, it was not long before the building would be destroyed by a fire on November 5, 1953.

Things would only get worse for the town, when in April 1983, a landslide dammed the Spanish Fork River, vausing 80,000,000 cubic meters of water to back up, eventually flooding the town.

Sure, the state gets that reputation of being a “boring” place where nothing happens aside from corn farming and people bumping into each other saying “ope,” but Ohio has much more than that.