You'll find Hotel Sponder on the eastern coast of the Netherlands in this historic

fishing village called Volandam. Volandam is a picturesque place. It is a quintessentially Dutch town. Think windmills and wooden shoes and cheese shops.

The town has become a huge tourist draw for all of this.

But before the bus tours and the cruise ships,

Volandam attracted a different kind of community, a community of artists and writers and painters,

and hotel sponder was at the center of it all.

The owners covered it with paintings and portraits from the 19th and 20th century.

Artists passing through would even exchange a room for an original painting.

For many, many years, this hotel has attracted strange, curious, creative types. So maybe it's that attraction that explains the mystery at the heart of the hotel.

Maybe that's what explains the letters.

Because for decades now,

the hotel sponder has received thousands of handwritten letters, but every single one of these letters is sent from the same sender.

And every single one of these letters has the exact same message.

This is, how are you and how is the weather?

Thank you very much for sending me the information the other day.

Please give my best regards to all members.

Yours faithfully missed a color.

Only that message, nothing else.

I'm Delantheris and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

We're going to talk to a former hotel manager who cracked the

mystery behind these strange and curious letters and as this story unfolds it

will take this hotel manager on a journey far, far beyond this quaint Dutch fishing village.

...