Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

“It started the first month that Christina Lee and Michael Saba started living together. An angry family came knocking at their door demanding the return of a stolen phone. Two months later, a group of friends came with the same request. One month, it happened four times. The visitors, who show up in the morning, afternoon, and in the middle of the night, sometimes accompanied by police officers, always say the same thing: their phone-tracking apps are telling them that their smartphones are in this house in a suburb of Atlanta.”

I told Reply All about the mystery, and partnered with them to solve it in a podcast episode called In The Desert.

How an Internet mapping glitch turned a Kansas farm into a digital hell

“An hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.

The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née Vogelman, 82, now rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It’s the kind of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it’s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.

But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor’s land find themselves in a technological horror story..”

This story, first published in 2016 on a now defunct news site called Fusion, is in a purgatory of its own, a victim of link rot, so it’s best read here or on the Wayback Machine.

This story won awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and from the National Press Club.

How cartographers for the U.S. military inadvertently created a house of horrors in South Africa

“The visitors started coming in 2013. The first one who came and refused to leave until he was let inside was a private investigator named Roderick. He was looking for an abducted girl, and he was convinced she was in the house.”

This sequel to the Kansas farm story sent me searching for answers in Pretoria and Durban in South Africa. The problem I’d unearthed in 2016 had still not been solved three years later. Read about it on Gizmodo.