The Atlas Obscura Podcast

The Atlas Obscura Podcast is an audio companion to the wildly popular Atlas Obscura website and book series, both of which catalog the world's strangest and most fascinating places. Co-founder Dylan Thuras hosts, joined by Atlas Obscura reporters who fan out across the globe to track down stories about locations you won't find in any standard guidebook. The format is built for road trips in a very specific way: episodes drop Monday through Thursday and run under 15 minutes each. That means you can queue up a handful and burn through them between rest stops. With over 1,300 episodes in the archive, you could drive coast to coast several times before running out of material. The show has a 4.6 rating from over 1,680 reviews, which speaks to how consistently it delivers. Each episode focuses on a single place or phenomenon -- a hidden cave system in Hungary, a cemetery where people are buried standing up, a lake that turns animals to stone. The stories are well-researched and narrated with genuine curiosity rather than forced excitement. Original music by Sam Tyndall gives the whole thing a distinctive atmosphere that sits somewhere between a travel documentary and a campfire story. It's the kind of podcast that will make you reroute your road trip to see something bizarre you never knew existed 30 miles off the highway.