Hey, everybody. As I record this, I am in a very hot little room in a third-story apartment in Denmark with my whole family. We are traveling for the summer, and it is very hot. It is very summer. It is time to escape this heat. And I'm quite literally going to

take the whole family to the beach today. And we thought maybe we would take the whole podcast

to the beach too. So this week, this summer vacation, we are headed to the beach, but it is,

of course, it is out of Skira. So we are going to very unusual beaches, less sunscreen and splashing and more,

you know, weird shipwrecks, rust-covered machines of war, secret caves, you know, that kind

of thing. There's a lot of really weird, interesting beaches out there,

and I think this week you are going to see exactly what I mean.

So to kick things off, we're going to head to North Carolina,

where a very strange sort of treasure washed ashore and changed a town.

Producer Amanda McGowan has the story.

The seas off of the outer banks of North Carolina can be a sailor's nightmare.

The winds whip in every direction. The weather is unpredictable.

And the sands in the seafloor are constantly shifting underneath you.

And that's not even mentioning all the hurricanes.

For the last 500 years, thousands of ships have met their doom here,

bestowing on this place the ominous nickname, the graveyard of the Atlantic.

And in 2006, this treacherous stretch of coastline saw one of its most unusual cargoes ever wash up.

Let's face it, it's not every day that you have thousands of bags of Doritos wash ash ashore

anywhere.

I'm Amanda McGowan, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

And today, we're taking you to Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks to tell you the story of the 2006 Doritos shipwreck, or, as the locals call it, the shipwreck.

That's after this.

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