Current Strange

CURRENT

There Is a River Under Forest Park and Nobody Talks About It

August 22, 2026

Last August, a camera crew went underground beneath Forest Park and found something most St. Louisans have walked over their entire lives without knowing about. More than thirty feet below the ground in Forest Park sits a system of tunnels that are part of the River Des Peres, where over four miles of its nearly ten-mile path sit beneath the city. You are walking above a river right now and you don’t know it. That’s the whole story, really. Everything else is just details.

CURRENT

Wind Phones and the Next Strange Thing St. Louis Cemeteries Could Do Right

April 10, 2026

A wind phone is a disconnected telephone placed in a quiet public space so grieving people can say what they still need to say to the dead. Which sounds either absurd or deeply humane, depending on whether you have ever had unfinished business with someone who is no longer available for callbacks. The idea began in Japan, where Itaru Sasaki created the original wind phone in 2010 after losing his cousin. After the 2011 tsunami, the installation became a place for mourners to speak into grief without pretending grief needed to make sense. Since then, versions have appeared in cemeteries, churches, parks, and memorial gardens across the United States and elsewhere. The line goes nowhere. That is the point.

CURRENT 📌

The Old Courthouse Reopens, Still Looking Better Than the Country It Helped Reveal

April 10, 2026

The Old Courthouse reopened on May 3, 2025 after extensive renovation, which means one of downtown St. Louis’ most elegant buildings is once again available for the public to walk into and feel complicated inside. The restoration added the sort of things nineteenth-century buildings eventually need if we expect actual humans to use them: an elevator, updated HVAC, fire suppression, accessibility improvements, restored architectural details, and new exhibits. In other words, the Old Courthouse now has air conditioning, which is perhaps the single most radical modernization any Missouri landmark can receive.

CURRENT 📌

The Lake in Benton Park Is Leaking Into the Underworld

April 10, 2026

Benton Park Lake has been losing water into sinkholes, which is exactly the sort of sentence that makes St. Louis feel less like a city and more like a cautionary geology exhibit. The problem drew wider attention in 2024 and 2025 as the lake’s water level visibly dropped and sinkholes opened nearby. By July 2025, the Missouri Department of Conservation had issued an emergency fish salvage order because the water loss had become severe enough to threaten the fish population. The official explanation was plain: sinkholes close to the lake were siphoning water away. The unofficial explanation is that the ground under St. Louis continues to behave like it has secrets.

CURRENT 📌

Bellefontaine Cemetery, Still the City's Best Gothic Day Trip

April 10, 2026

Bellefontaine Cemetery keeps getting rediscovered by people who seem mildly shocked that one of the best places to walk in St. Louis is also full of the dead. That reaction is fair, but historically uninformed. Bellefontaine was designed in the rural cemetery tradition, which treated burial grounds not just as storage for mortality, but as landscapes of beauty, reflection, horticulture, and status. In other words, it was always meant to be visited. The strange part is not that people now treat it as a destination. The strange part is that we briefly forgot.

CURRENT

The Race That Was Decided by One Vote

April 9, 2026

Last Tuesday, April 7, 2026, St. Louis held its municipal elections. Most of them were decided by comfortable margins. One of them was not. Downtown St. Louis will be represented by Chris Kyle, who defeated incumbent Bill Otto for a seat on the Board of Aldermen by a single vote. One vote. In a city of 300,000 people. In a race that will determine who represents the people who live and work in the shadow of the Arch, who walk past the Old Courthouse where slaves were once sold on the steps, who sit in the restaurants and bars of what used to be a railroad terminal and before that was a frontier.

CURRENT

Six Flags Is Gone. The Internet Has Opinions About What Comes Next.

April 9, 2026

Six Flags St. Louis opened in 1971 as Six Flags Over Mid-America. It has been a summer institution in this region for 55 years. In March 2026, Six Flags Entertainment Corporation sold it — along with six other parks — to a real estate investment trust called EPR Properties for $342 million. A Florida-based company called Enchanted Parks will operate it starting next season. The new name: Mid-America by Enchanted Parks.

CURRENT

The St. Louis Tornado of 2025 Came for the Vacancies

March 12, 2026

On May 16, 2025, an EF3 tornado tore through north St. Louis in minutes. It left behind a particular kind of wreckage that said something uncomfortable about the city it hit. Of the more than 1,000 homes damaged to the point of needing demolition, an estimated 500 to 600 were known to be vacant — some long before the tornado touched down. An even higher number, around 1,407 that the city inspected for tornado damage, were believed to be either definitely or likely vacant.

CURRENT

The Monkeys of North St. Louis — A Mystery the City Eventually Stopped Trying to Solve

January 21, 2026

In January, St. Louis briefly became a city where monkeys were loose in the streets. Or were they. The St. Louis City Health Department first received reports of four monkeys on the loose near O’Fallon Park in north St. Louis on January 8. They were spotted on Redbud Avenue. Animal control officers searched Thursday and Friday but did not find them. The zoo helped identify the species: vervet monkeys, native to sub-Saharan Africa, known for their grayish-green fur and black faces. Intelligent. Unpredictable. Somewhere in north city.

CURRENT

Bubblehead Road Is Real, It's in St. Charles County, and Nobody Fully Agrees on Why

March 5, 2025

Streetlight Road in St. Charles County has been called Bubblehead Road for at least forty years. The name appears on no official map. Local teenagers have been driving it at midnight looking for something indefinable since before any of them were born.