The Assateague Channel is a thin stretch of water on the marshy eastern shore of Virginia.

And every July a crowd gathers on its banks to watch a very unusual,

I guess you could call it a sporting event.

It's the annual pony swim.

Yes, a pony swim.

Every year, Virginia's saltwater cowboys round up a herd of feral ponies that live on Assateague Island and then they swim these

ponies across this narrow channel to the other side which is a place called

Shinkatig. It sounds you know a little unsettling because we don't think of

forces as particularly enthusiastic swimmers, but the ponies seem totally fine

with it. They're like, okay, here we come.

It's not that far of a distance, it only takes like a couple minutes, but still, not

surprisingly, these ponies are local celebrities.

They have made the islands a tourist destination.

They were the subject of a famous children's book in the 1940s called Misty of Shinkatig,

and there's even a taxidermyed Misty in the island's local history

museum.

But the thing is, nobody actually knows how these ponies got here.

I'm Amanda McGowan and this is Atlas Obscura,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, put on your

swimmies because we are diving in with the ponies. And we're also going to

swim thousands of miles away to Haiti, where a recent archaeological find has raised some questions

about how these ponies ended up in Virginia in the first place.

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