By Malorie Mackey
When people ask me how MaloriesAdventures.com began, they're usually expecting a simple story about a travel enthusiast who decided to start a blog. The reality is far more complex—and infinitely more interesting. This site wasn't born from a desire to document beautiful beaches or luxury hotels. It emerged from my work studying at a political theatre in Belgarde, volunteering on archaeological digs in Cambodia, tracking endangered penguins in South Africa, and from a fundamental belief that the world's strangest places reveal more about human culture than any guidebook ever could.
Finding the Weird in a Well-Traveled World
A decade ago, I had a realization that would change the trajectory of my career. My local guide kept apologizing for taking me to "strange" sites that "normal tourists" wouldn't care about—ancient charnel houses, forgotten monuments with bizarre folkloric attachments, and natural features associated with supernatural beliefs.
"This is what I came for," I told him, watching his expression shift from embarrassment to surprise. "The weird isn't a distraction from culture—it's often the heart of it."
That conversation sparked something in me. As a cultural journalist and member of the Explorers Club, I'd noticed a pattern in my fieldwork: the places locals considered too strange, too unsettling, or too unusual for typical tourism were precisely where I found the most profound insights into cultural identity and belief systems. These were the locations where folklore, mythology, historical memory, and lived experience collided in ways that revealed what really mattered to communities.
So began my deliberate journey to document the world's strangest places—not as curiosities, but as culturally significant sites that deserved serious anthropological attention.
From Field Notes to Digital Platform
MaloriesAdventures.com wasn't initially intended to be a public platform. For the first few years, it was essentially my digital field journal—a place to organize research notes, document unexplained phenomena, and analyze patterns across different cultural contexts. I approached each "weird" site with the same methodological rigor I'd apply to any archaeological dig or ethnographic study.
The transition to a public blog happened almost accidentally. After presenting my research on mythological geography at an academic conference, several colleagues encouraged me to make my findings more accessible to non-specialists. "Your field notes are better than most published travel writing," one professor told me. "People need to see this approach to cultural exploration."
So, in 2016, I redesigned my personal research database into MaloriesAdventures.com, organizing my extensive documentation of unusual sites into categories that visitors could easily navigate: weird mythology, strange natural phenomena, bizarre historical sites, and unexplained cultural practices.
What I didn't expect was how quickly it would resonate with readers seeking something deeper than typical travel content.
The Anthropology of the Unusual
Unlike most travel blogs that focus on practical details like hotel recommendations and restaurant reviews, MaloriesAdventures.com has always centered on the question: "What does this strange place reveal about human culture?"
When I documented the naturally mummified bodies in the crypts of Palermo, I wasn't just sharing macabre photos—I was analyzing how preservation practices reflected changing attitudes toward death and remembrance. My extensive coverage of Germany's Fairy Tale Route went beyond tourist information to examine how landscape shapes narrative and how stories function as cultural adaptation mechanisms.
This anthropological approach to the weird has taken me to extraordinary places that few travelers ever see:
- The remote mountain shrines of Japan's Yamabushi ascetics, where practitioners still perform rituals dating back thousands of years
- The forgotten underground passages beneath Mexico City, where pre-Columbian artifacts intermingle with colonial-era religious symbols
- The hidden "bone churches" of Eastern Europe, where human remains become simultaneously art and memento mori
- The sacred caves of the Swabian Alb in Germany, where some of humanity's earliest art reveals our species' ancient fascination with the supernatural
Each of these locations offered not just a fascinating experience, but a window into how humans across time and space have grappled with the unknown, the unexplained, and the profound.
From Blog to Television
The evolution of MaloriesAdventures.com into the television series Weird World Adventures was an organic extension of my work. After documenting hundreds of unusual sites across five continents, I began to recognize patterns that deserved visual exploration beyond what static images on a website could provide.
"The weird isn't just something you see—it's something you experience," I explained to the production team when we first conceptualized the show. "We need to capture not just the visual elements of these places, but the sensory and emotional dimensions that shape their cultural significance."
Season 1's exploration of America's strangest sites proved that audiences were hungry for content that treated the unusual with scholarly respect rather than sensationalism. With Season 2's international expansion—from overnight investigations at Bran Castle to tracking the Seven Gates of Guinee in New Orleans—we've been able to bring the same anthropological approach to a global audience.
What makes me proudest about this evolution is that we've maintained the intellectual integrity of the original blog. Each television episode is supported by extensive research documentation on the website, allowing viewers to dig deeper into the historical and cultural contexts behind the locations we feature.
The Ethics of Exploring the Strange
Throughout my journey building MaloriesAdventures.com, I've been acutely aware of the ethical dimensions of documenting unusual cultural sites and practices. Unlike many platforms that exploit the "weird" for shock value or cheap entertainment, I've maintained strict protocols derived from anthropological field ethics:
- Respect for cultural ownership: We never share sacred knowledge without explicit permission from cultural stakeholders
- Contextual accuracy: Every unusual practice or belief is presented within its proper historical and cultural framework
- Collaborative documentation: We work with local experts and community members rather than imposing outside interpretations
- Conservation awareness: Our documentation includes information about preservation challenges and sustainability issues
These principles have sometimes meant declining to cover certain sites or phenomena that would have generated significant traffic, but maintaining this ethical framework has been essential to the site's integrity and to my professional identity as an anthropologist.
The Future of Weird World Exploration
As MaloriesAdventures.com enters its next phase, I'm focused on using our platform to document endangered weird sites—places of unusual cultural significance that face threats from climate change, development, or cultural homogenization.
From the rapidly disappearing "witch mountains" of rural China to the flood-threatened oracle bone sites of ancient Greece, many of the world's strangest and most culturally revealing places risk being lost before they can be properly documented and understood.
Working with a network of anthropologists, archaeologists, and local cultural experts, we're creating a digital archive of these endangered weird sites, combining rigorous documentation with immersive visual and audio content that preserves not just their physical characteristics but their cultural significance.
"The weird isn't frivolous," I reminded a university audience recently. "It's often where cultures process their deepest anxieties, hopes, and beliefs. Losing these strange places means losing crucial insights into what makes us human."
Why the Weird Matters
After a decade of documenting the world's strangest places, the question I'm most frequently asked remains: "Why focus on the weird when there's so much conventional beauty in the world?"
My answer is always the same: The weird isn't separate from beauty or culture—it's often where human creativity and meaning-making are most vividly expressed. When communities designate certain places as mysterious, sacred, forbidden, or strange, they're revealing what matters most to them, what they fear, what they hope for, and how they make sense of their existence.
As we continue to expand MaloriesAdventures.com and bring new episodes of Weird World Adventures to audiences worldwide, our mission remains unchanged: to demonstrate that understanding a culture means looking beyond its surface to the strange, the mysterious, and the profound manifestations of human experience that conventional tourism often misses.
Because in my experience as both an anthropologist and explorer, it's in the world's weirdest places that we often find its most profound truths.
Malorie Mackey is an anthropologist, author, and explorer specializing in unusual cultural sites. She is the creator of MaloriesAdventures.com and host of the Amazon Prime series Weird World Adventures. As a member of the Explorers Club, she has conducted field research on four continents and is currently writing a book on endangered weird sites around the world.
