Newton, Kansas

This little concrete bridge over Chester Creek doesn't look like much by daylight. A low span on a quiet county road between Valley Center and Sedgwick, north of Wichita. But locals have been whispering about it for over a hundred years. The legend goes back to the early 1900s, maybe earlier. A woman named Theorosa is said to have either drowned her baby in the creek below, or lost it here in some terrible moment — versions vary. A Native American ambush. A carriage accident. A mother's grief that never let go. Drivers who come out here at night report the same handful of things over and over again. The sound of a baby crying from under the bridge. A woman in white on the span. Car engines dying right as they cross. Some people say they've felt an invisible force trying to push them off the side. It isn't a tourist stop. There's no plaque, no gift shop, no ghost tour. Just a rural bridge locals still drive out to after dark, to roll the window down and listen. Theorosa has been part of Kansas folklore since before most of the state's official haunted sites even existed. Believe it, don't believe it. It's still out here, and the creek still runs underneath.

This is the farm that the internet accidentally declared digital public enemy number one. In the early 2000s, the geolocation company MaxMind needed a default latitude and longitude for any U.S. IP address it couldn't actually pinpoint. Someone rounded the geographic center of the country down to a clean 38 degrees north, 97 degrees west — and that single coordinate happened to land in the front yard of a private farm just outside Potwin, Kansas. For more than a decade after that, every untraceable IP in America — hundreds of millions of them — pointed right here. Whenever someone used a VPN, committed online fraud, made a bomb threat, or ran a scam, the trail led to this exact spot on Google Maps. The Taylors lived here first. The Arnolds rented the place starting in 2011. Neither family had any idea why the FBI, the sheriff, bounty hunters, angry scam victims, and strangers kept showing up at all hours. People left broken toilets in the driveway. Someone left a death threat. Deputies came back again and again. Nobody could explain it until 2016, when journalist Kashmir Hill traced the mystery back to a single rounding error in MaxMind's database. The family sued. MaxMind eventually moved its default point to the middle of a lake. But many databases still hadn't updated for years. A tiny lazy shortcut in a few lines of code, and one quiet Kansas farm became the address of every anonymous crime on the internet.