Ransom Riggs

Joined: Nov 21, 2012

Filmmaker, photo hound, author of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Ransom was a daily contributor to mentalfloss.com for many, many years.

Strange Geographies: Portugal's Bone Chapel

Strange Geographies: The Fjords of New Zealand

Vacation to Mars: Antarctica's Dry Valleys

The Haunted History of Venice, Italy's Poveglia Island

Scenes from Vanuatu, the Happiest Place on Earth

Today is the 33rd anniversary of Vanuatu's independence, called by some the happiest place on earth. Back in 2009, Ransom Riggs stopped by to see what all the fuss was about.

11 Terrifying Images of Old Soviet Playgrounds

Actually, they're playgrounds from the former Soviet Union, where people were good at making a lot of things -- tanks, rifles, factories to make tanks and rifles -- but cheerful playground statuary clearly wasn't one of them. The following playgrounds gi

10 Creepy Santas Whose Laps We Want Nothing To Do With

Legions of Santas are currently perched in malls all over the country, waiting for your children to climb atop their laps and whisper to them their most secret desires.

Beautiful, Alien Iceland

Iceland is a landscape that's still being born.

Signing Off

My flossy friends, This week marks five years since I started blogging for mental_floss, and a great five years it has been. It's been a privilege to work with and write for some of the smartest people on the Internet, and to have such a sharp but suppo

What's So Great About 3D?

It's easy to see why 3D is popular from a movie studio perspective: it allows theaters to charge fifteen bucks for a flick that would normally bring in just eight or nine (in LA prices, at least). It's not as clear why audiences should love it. To me, i

Broetry: Poems for the Frat Boy in All of Us

What? You don't have a frat boy in you? Well, you might get a kick out of Brian McGackin's (AKA the "Broet Laureate's") slender-but-fun volume of poems anyway. They include gems like this, a bro-tastic send-up of William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to

What Happens When Your Money Dies

With all this talk of debt, currency devaluation, plummeting markets and creditworthiness, I've lately had visions dancing in my head of dollar bills being flushed down toilets and fed through shredders. Which got me wondering: what happens to our money -

Americanisms

As an American, sometimes it's tough to know which commonly-used words and phrases are particular to America, and sound strange in other parts of the world. There was a fascinating round-up of "Americanisms" on this BBC blog the other day, and I wanted t

Kickstart This: A Documentary About Some Very Speedy Ex-Cons

Sick Mick and the Boys is a feature-length documentary that's been in the works for a few years now, directed and shot by some buddies of mine from film school. And what they've got so far looks great. It's got everything I look for in documentaries: th

The World's Only Analog Blogger

As far as we know, a Liberian man named Alfred Sirleaf is the world's only analog blogger. In the heart of the capitol of a country where most people don't have Internet access and can't afford a daily newspaper, Sirleaf curates the Daily Talk, which is

Hi from Comic-Con!

Today I'm going to be signing copies of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children at San Diego's Comic-Con, so if you happen to be one of the happy mutants that managed to snag a ticket, please stop by and say hello! I'll be at the Quirk Books booth --