Bess Lovejoy

Joined: Apr 24, 2015

Bess Lovejoy is a former staff editor at Mental Floss, a former editor at Smithsonian.com and Schott's Almanac, and the author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses.

The Dallol volcano in Ethiopia’s Danakil Desert is one of the most unearthly places on Earth.

Skeletons are good for more than just Halloween.

Death is the start of a great adventure.

No, your fingernails don't keep growing after death. Here are 29 other amazing facts about your final exit.

For several decades, a creepy urban legend has circulated in the darker corners of online forums devoted to vintage video games.

Cypress trees covered in Spanish moss in Louisiana's Manchac swamp.

Julia Brown sang, “One day I'm gonna die, and take the whole town with me.”

Some early explorers went looking for an legendary land named “Ultima Thule”—which may have been inspired by Iceland.

These imaginary isles all have a place in world history, literature, or mythology—despite not having a place on the map.

Colonizers did not let the dead rest in peace.

In centuries past, mummies were put to a variety of inventive uses: art, commerce, science, entertainment, and possibly even paper making.

The Apache leader Geronimo had just one request of President Theodore Roosevelt when they met in 1905, but it was a big one.

Elisabeth Demidoff's tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris

Did the Russian aristocrat Elisabeth Demidoff really offer the family fortune to anyone who would spend a year and a day in her tomb?

The new iHeartRadio original podcast is the story of one writer's descent from podcast researcher to its surprising subject.

The Liver of Piacenza, a model of a sheep's liver used in Etruscan divination and unearthed in Italy in 1877.

These divination methods—using chickens, entrails, and even cheese—show our ancestors were pretty inventive when it came to trying to predict the future.