Beyond the Guidebooks: My Decade Exploring Earth's Strangest Places
By Malorie Mackey
"Aren't you scared to go there alone?" This question follows me around the world, from Romanian crypts to Cambodian ruins, from South African penguin colonies to Japanese ritual sites. My answer is always the same: "I'm not interested in the places everyone feels comfortable visiting. I'm drawn to the edges—where comfort ends and cultural revelation begins."
This philosophy has guided MaloriesAdventures.com from its inception. When people discover my website or watch my Amazon Prime series Weird World Adventures, they often assume I started with travel blogging aspirations. The truth is far more academic—and considerably stranger.
When Anthropology Meets the Unexplained
The seeds of MaloriesAdventures.com were planted during my archaeological fieldwork in Southeast Asia. While cataloging artifacts at a Cambodian dig site, I became fascinated not just with the physical remains we were unearthing, but with the local folklore surrounding the ruins. Villagers shared stories about certain chambers we shouldn't enter after sunset, about unusual sounds that emanated from specific corridors during certain lunar phases.
My colleagues dismissed these accounts as superstition. I saw them as cultural data—valuable narratives revealing how communities processed historical trauma, environmental threats, and social boundaries through folklore and designated "strange" spaces.
During an excavation break, I ventured to several sites mentioned in these local accounts. At each location, I applied standard anthropological field methods—detailed documentation, contextual analysis, photographic evidence, and comparative research. The resulting report was deemed "too folkloric" for the archaeological journal we were publishing in.
"This material deserves its own platform," my research supervisor suggested. "You're bridging disciplines in a way that doesn't fit neatly into established academic categories."
That observation catalyzed what would become MaloriesAdventures.com—initially conceived not as a travel blog but as a digital research repository where I could document culturally significant "weird" sites using rigorous anthropological methodology.
The Anthropologist's Guide to the Bizarre
My approach to "weird" places has always been distinctly different from paranormal investigators or thrill-seeking travel writers. When I document naturally mummified bodies in Sicily or centuries-old oracle bones in Greece, I'm asking questions that bridge archaeology, cultural anthropology, and folklore studies:
How do these unusual phenomena reflect changing cultural attitudes toward mortality, prophecy, or the supernatural?
What practical functions do these weird sites serve in their communities?
How do these places encode cultural memory and collective identity?
What can contemporary responses to these sites tell us about modern relationships to tradition?
This anthropological lens sets my documentation apart. A typical travel article about the "bone churches" of Eastern Europe might focus on their macabre aesthetics. My research examines how these ossuary displays reflect shifting theological attitudes toward bodily resurrection, how they visually encoded social hierarchies, and how they functioned as memento mori in communities regularly devastated by disease.
When investigating the "witch mountains" of rural China, I wasn't merely collecting spooky legends but documenting how these culturally prescribed "dangerous places" helped regulate resource use in fragile mountain ecosystems by discouraging over-harvesting of certain plants or animals.
After presenting my research at several academic conferences, I began receiving messages from fellow researchers and curious travelers alike, asking for more accessible versions of my findings. Realizing there was broader interest in this anthropological approach to weird places, I transformed my private research database into a public platform.
From Private Research to Public Platform
Adapting scholarly research for public consumption required developing a new communication style—one that maintained intellectual rigor while engaging non-specialist readers. I organized my extensive documentation of unusual sites into intuitive categories and developed a standardized format for each entry that included:
Cultural and historical context
Documentation of physical features and sensory elements
Local beliefs and practices associated with the site
Scholarly analysis of cultural significance
Comparative examples from other cultural traditions
Practical visitor information with ethical considerations
This structure allowed readers to engage with the content at different levels—from practical travel information to deeper cultural analysis—while ensuring each weird site was presented with appropriate contextual understanding.
What surprised me was how quickly the platform found its audience. University professors began assigning my articles in their folklore and anthropology courses. Documentary filmmakers reached out requesting research collaboration. Travelers emailed thanking me for guiding them to profound cultural experiences they would have otherwise missed.
"Your site filled a void I didn't even know existed," wrote one archaeology professor. "I've been searching for years for someone who takes these 'weird' cultural sites seriously without sensationalizing them."
Encountering the Extraordinary
This anthropological quest has led me to some truly remarkable places that conventional travelers rarely encounter:
The hidden mountain shrines of Japanese Shugendō practitioners, where ancient ascetic traditions blend Buddhist, Shinto, and indigenous practices in rituals unchanged for centuries
The "liquid graves" of certain Pacific island cultures, where the dead are returned to sacred oceanic locations through complex funerary traditions that challenge Western concepts of burial
The "mirror towns" of Eastern Europe—communities that constructed parallel villages for their dead, complete with miniature houses, streets, and community buildings
The sacred caves of the Yucatán Peninsula, where ancient Maya cosmology continues to influence contemporary spiritual practice through ongoing ritual use
Each of these locations revealed profound insights into how human societies process existence, mortality, and the unknown. The "weird" aspects of these sites aren't aberrations or curiosities—they're concentrated expressions of cultural values and beliefs that might otherwise remain invisible to outside observers.
Perhaps most meaningful to me personally was documenting the oracle bone traditions across multiple cultures. From Greece to China to indigenous American practices, the remarkable similarities in how diverse societies developed divination systems based on heated animal bones revealed patterns in human cognitive processing that transcend specific cultural contexts.
Television: A New Medium for Cultural Exploration
After years of documenting strange cultural sites through text and photography, I began experimenting with video to capture elements that couldn't be adequately conveyed through other formats—the way light interacts with ancient cave paintings at different times of day, the acoustic properties of ceremonial chambers, the subtle environmental factors that might explain certain "unexplained" phenomena.
These experimental videos, initially created as research documentation, attracted significant attention online. A documentary producer who discovered them reached out after a presentation I gave on endangered cultural sites at an Explorers Club event.
"You've developed a unique approach to this material," she observed. "Have you considered translating this to a broader television format? There's nothing like this currently being produced."
The transition from independent researcher to television host and producer wasn't seamless. Early development meetings for what would become Weird World Adventures highlighted the tension between entertainment expectations and academic integrity. Several production companies wanted to push the content toward conventional paranormal investigation formats, with staged reactions and sensationalized presentations.
I declined these opportunities, holding out for partners who understood that the strength of my approach lay precisely in its anthropological rigor and cultural respect. Eventually, we found producers who shared this vision, recognizing there was an untapped audience hungry for content that treated unusual cultural sites with intellectual depth rather than exploitative sensationalism.
Season 1's focus on America's strangest cultural sites—from the spiritualist community of Lily Dale, New York to the mysterious patterns of the Marfa Lights in Texas—proved this approach could succeed commercially while maintaining scholarly integrity. The show's expansion to international locations for Season 2 has allowed us to document some of the world's most significant weird sites with the production resources they deserve.
Preserving the Vanishing Weird
As MaloriesAdventures.com evolved from personal research project to multimedia platform, my mission expanded beyond documentation to active preservation. Many of the most culturally significant "weird" sites face serious threats from climate change, development pressure, cultural suppression, or simple neglect.
The sacred sinkholes of the Yucatán Peninsula face contamination from nearby resort development. The ancient oracle bone sites of Greece are threatened by increasingly extreme Mediterranean weather patterns. The ritual landscapes of certain indigenous communities risk being lost as younger generations move away from traditional practices.
Recognizing these threats, I've redirected significant resources toward creating a comprehensive digital archive of endangered weird sites. Working with a network of anthropologists, archaeologists, and indigenous knowledge keepers, we're developing high-resolution 3D models, environmental recordings, and detailed cultural documentation that can preserve these places even if the physical sites are lost.
"The weird isn't frivolous or peripheral," I remind audiences during university lectures. "These unusual places often represent cultural keystones—sites where multiple aspects of a society's worldview, values, and traditional knowledge converge in concentrated form."
A Different Kind of Exploration
Looking back on the evolution of MaloriesAdventures.com, what began as an academic project has developed into something I never anticipated—a platform that's changing how people understand the relationship between unusual places and cultural identity.
The greatest reward has been witnessing how this work impacts both academic understanding and public appreciation of weird cultural heritage. University departments now include "unusual cultural sites" in their research agendas. Tourism boards have developed ethical visitation protocols for previously neglected weird locations. Most importantly, local communities have gained new appreciation for cultural assets they previously downplayed or hidden from outside visitors.
After a decade documenting the world's strangest places, I've come to understand that "weirdness" isn't random cultural noise—it's often where the most meaningful signals are found. The places a society designates as unusual, forbidden, sacred, or strange are precisely where its deepest values and fears are most clearly expressed.
As I prepare for our upcoming documentation of Japan's sacred mountains and Sicily's mummification traditions for Season 3, I remain committed to the core principle that has guided this journey from the beginning: the world's weirdest places deserve to be approached with both scholarly rigor and genuine wonder, because they often reveal the most profound truths about what makes us human.
Malorie Mackey is a cultural journalist, Explorers Club member, and host of the Amazon Prime series Weird World Adventures. Her work documenting unusual cultural sites has been featured in academic journals and university curricula worldwide.
