Off the Path

The highest point in Rhode Island isn’t very high. It’s more like a slight incline. But it was a tricky point to reach for many years. You can find it in a small clearing just off a state road – at a place called Jerimoth Hill.

A 60-foot cross looms on a hilltop above the city of Waterbury, Connecticut. It once welcomed visitors to a popular religious tourist attraction. It was abandoned and decrepit for decades. But there are still people who want to rescue Holy Land, USA.

For centuries, people have tried to translate the markings on a 40-ton boulder found on the banks of a New England river. That rock, with its mysterious message, is now housed in a small museum in Berkley, Massachusetts.

Hundreds of crossword puzzle enthusiasts from around the world gather once a year for two days of intense puzzle solving. And it happens in a pretty unassuming place – a Marriott hotel in Stamford, Connecticut.

An eccentric 19th-century New Yorker had a strange fascination -- he wanted to bring every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays to North America. He was very successful with one of them. A little too successful.

The ghostly remains of four towns can be found at the bottom of Boston’s drinking supply. The townsfolk were forced to leave in the 1930s when the state of Massachusetts flooded the area to create a reservoir. But there are many who keep alive the memory of the Swift River Valley.

Two 19th century paleontologists spent decades in a bitter feud to find as many new dinosaur species as possible and destroy each other in the process. Their rivalry led to the discovery of many important dinosaur species we know today.

A young dentist in the 1840s is believed to be the first doctor to use nitrous oxide – laughing gas – to dull pain. But the father of anesthesia met a tragic end. His story begins in Hartford, Connecticut, and ends in New York City.

There’s a place in Manhattan that makes you feel like you just took a trip on the Wayback Machine – to the 1600s, when European settlers first arrived. And you can find it all the way up on the northern tip of Manhattan Island in Inwood Hill Park.

In this special crossover episode, Davis spends some time with Ron Ropiak, host of WSHU’s The Full Story, to share some of his favorite stories, including the history behind the folk song "Charlie on the MTA," the Connecticut connection to "The Great Gatsby" and the notorious Lizzie Borden's Massachusetts home...that's now a B&B.

“The Little Prince” is one of the best-selling books of all time. It was written by a Frenchman, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and translated into 300 languages since its publication in 1943. But the author didn’t write “Le Petit Prince” in his native France – he wrote it in New York. And there’s a wonderful story about a statue of the Little Prince outside a library on Long Island’s North Shore.

The durian is said to be the world’s smelliest fruit. It’s a delicacy in Southeast Asia, but many also find the smell too disgusting – even unbearable. You have to search out places in the U.S. to find durian. On the East Coast, a good bet is New York City’s Chinatown.

You’ve probably seen them – and maybe even dropped in a quarter to look through them at some scenic overlook. They’re at the top of the Empire State Building, next to the Golden Gate Bridge and Niagara Falls. Essentially, they’re binoculars on poles. The factory that’s made them longer than anyone else is in Norwalk, Conn. And its employees crisscross the country to service the machines and collec...

One of the most notorious crimes in American history was memorialized in a grisly playground chant — Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. The Borden family home, the scene of the crime in 1892, is now a bed and breakfast — not for the faint of heart — in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Kate Pierson spent decades on tour as one of the vocalists of the legendary rock group the B-52s. You know – the big hairdos? The surf guitars? Love Shack? Turns out, at the same time, Pierson also collected art, antiques and other decor. That collection is now part of her offbeat side project. A cute little roadside motel – a real-life “Love Shack” – just outside Woodstock, New York.

The musical "Hamilton" has a lot of catchy music and memorable lyrics. Some of the most memorable come from President George Washington. They’re taken almost verbatim from a letter Washington wrote to the oldest synagogue in America, in Newport, Rhode Island, in which he rebuked bigotry.

T.S. Eliot chose four places to write about in his poem “Four Quartets.” Three of them are in England, but one is a nondescript cluster of rocks off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Eliot’s childhood vacation home is now a retreat for writers. The T.S. Eliot Foundation says it hopes other writers can be inspired by the same idyllic seaside setting that inspired Eliot.

F. Scott Fitzgerald set his novel The Great Gatsby on Long Island’s North Shore – with its opulent mansions, beautiful gardens and decadent parties. But some people think Fitzgerald might have been inspired by another location – across Long Island Sound in Westport, Connecticut.

There might be only one Fourth of July parade that has no live music accompaniment. That’s not to say there isn’t music though. And you can find this parade every Independence Day in Willimantic, a neighborhood in Windham, Connecticut.

Cemeteries are not places where you’re likely to find a library – except perhaps one that deals with death. This library is the result of one woman’s quest to change how we think and talk about the subject of death. And you’ll find it – at least for now – in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Lots of songs have been used as anthems for particular causes or movements. But probably only one for a transit system. The song is the story of Charlie, a hapless commuter who finds himself trapped on the Boston subway.

The National Park Service has awarded a $750,000 grant to historic Colt Park in Hartford, the factory Samuel Colt started in the 1800s to make his iconic gun. But in 2018, being a gun manufacturer is not so easy. Remington Firearms recently filed for bankruptcy. But the making of guns has been an intricate part of our history. Back in the mid-1800s, one gun maker went beyond just the making of fir...

Most people have no idea there’s a state park named for Donald Trump. It’s a patch of untended weeds and brush that’s been described as an abandoned wasteland in Westchester County, New York. And it’s pretty hard to find.

There are lots of stories and rumors about secret societies at elite colleges. Skull and Bones is the oldest and most notorious secret college society in America. Not much is known about what goes on at Skull and Bones, but you can easily find its headquarters on the campus of Yale University in New Haven.

It’s one of the world’s great literary mysteries: a 15th century book full of bizarre illustrations of imaginary plants, astrological signs, surreal figures and landscapes. Its origins are unknown, its creator anonymous. And it’s written entirely in an unknown language that’s stumped the world’s greatest codebreakers.