Who was here before you?

Every street has stories: the people who lived there, the buildings that burned, the riots and the hauntings, the oddities nobody talks about anymore. Here Before Us puts them on a map, right where they happened.

What you'll find

• Historic places, from landmarks to buildings you walk past every day.
• Dark & controversial history: crimes, disasters and injustices, told with care and with sources.
• Weird & curious places: hauntings, follies, secret tunnels, legends.
• Lost places: what used to stand where you're standing.
• People who lived here: notable residents recorded in Wikidata, and memories added by the people who called these streets home.

Your stories

The best history isn't in any archive: it's the night the power went out on your block, the bar your grandparents met in, the house everyone said was haunted. Tell your story about any place, add a photo from then or now, and share it: every story gets its own page and a beautiful card for social media and group chats. Readers react with 🤯 👻 ❤️ 😂, and the stories people love most rise to the top of Trending. Members who know a memory is true can vouch for it, and its verification meter shows exactly how well-supported it is.

Start with a city guide

Our San Francisco guide and Los Angeles guide gather each city's best-documented haunted, dark, weird and vanished places, self-guided paths from the Zodiac and Vertigo to the Black Dahlia and Hollywood's golden age, and the stories people are telling now. The map works everywhere, though: zoom in on any town and we'll gather its history for you.

Paths, tours and your passport

Follow a curated path like the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco or Hitchcock's Vertigo, build your own and publish it, or let us put together a tour of the best places near you with turn-by-turn directions. Stand at a place and it's stamped in your passport; walk every stop of a path and earn badges along the way.

Where the stories come from

The map starts with places documented on Wikipedia and Wikidata, and it fills in automatically wherever anyone looks. Every place shows why it is on the map, quoting its article, so a label like "dark" or "lost" is never a mystery. Then it's up to you: mark where you lived, and add the history you know. Community additions are labelled as such, and anyone can flag something that's wrong.

Real memories, never invented

Everything here is real. Alongside the stories people share, we've added first-person accounts from the archive: Enrico Caruso waking in the Palace Hotel as the 1906 earthquake struck, Jack London watching Union Square burn, Mark Twain on Third Street as a building front "fell sprawling across the street", Charles Lummis walking into Los Angeles at midnight after 3,507 miles on foot, and Harris Newmark hurrying to the scene of the 1871 Chinese massacre. Each is quoted word for word from a published original (public domain, published before 1930), credited, and linked so you can read the full account. Before an archive memory is added, its quote is checked against a fresh copy of the original; if a single word differs, it's refused. Every story also says why it's here: what makes it dark, weird, lost or historic.

Built on open data

Here Before Us stands on the shoulders of open projects: OpenStreetMap for the map and addresses, Wikipedia and Wikidata for places and their stories, Valhalla (run by FOSSGIS) for directions, Leaflet for the map itself, and the Cormorant Garamond typeface. Thank you.

Say hello

Ideas, corrections or a story we should tell? Email hello@herebefore.us or send us a message.