I was always interested in, I guess I would say now looking back on death.

I wanted to be a wildlife photographer when I grew up or a veterinarian. I loved animals and I would like go from door to door

getting people to fill out petitions to save the harps seals I was that kind of kid and

I would have animals as pets like lizards I'm not saying about cats here but

lizards or snakes and when they died my father would buy me formaldehyde and I

would put them in formaldehyde and keep them in my bedroom.

This is Joanna Ebenstein.

She's an author, a photographer, a curator.

She's also my friend of almost two decades.

We met back in the heyday of internet blogs back in 2007, 2008.

And we seem to be the only two people on the internet, spending a lot of time writing about things like medical museums and wax anatomical models

and all of these just fabulous interesting, somewhat morbid, sometimes disturbing places and objects in the world.

So we got to know each other online, and when I came to New York, we met in person.

And immediately when I met her and heard about her pickling her pets

in formaldehyde, I knew that I had found a kindred spirit.

That was not very cool then. And I don't know, that is even even cool now especially if you're a girl you know so I I think for a while I was just innocent to the fact it wasn't cool and then in high school this kind of became picking up road kill and learning how to skin birds so I could keep the

feathers and the skins and things like that. And my friends musidly supported this, but I was

always the big weirdo.

I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas Subsura,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we're going to take a journey through death with

Joanna Ebenstein. We hear how this little girl who is interested in a lot of

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