The Lizzie Borden murders happened in 1892 at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, now the Lizzie Borden House; her trial followed in New Bedford and she is buried in Fall River's Oak Grove Cemetery.
The route follows the case from the house where Andrew and Abby Borden were killed, to the June 1893 trial that ended in acquittal, to Maplecroft, the Providence shoplifting accusation of 1897 and the family plot where Lizzie was buried in 1927. The Providence and New Bedford pins are city-level; the exact trial building and store are not pinned.
Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is set in Brooklyn, New Jersey and Boston, but it was filmed in Newark, Bayonne, Athens on the Hudson, Lexington, Virginia, and Naugatuck, Connecticut. Ray Ferrier tries to get his children to their mother as alien tripods rise around them.
The route follows the film's flight in story order and shows where each scene was actually shot, from the first tripod to the final reunion. Several stops are film stand-ins, so pins mark towns rather than exact addresses.
The Exorcist is set in Georgetown, Washington DC, and opens in the ruins of Hatra in northern Iraq. The real Exorcist Steps, Healy Hall and Lauinger Library are on the Georgetown campus, and a hospital on Roosevelt Island stood in for a Washington scene.
The route follows the film from Merrin's dig at Hatra to the MacNeil house and the stairs where Father Karras falls.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was filmed on the River Thames, in Westminster Underground station, at the Glenfinnan Viaduct and in Glen Etive in the Scottish Highlands.
The route follows the film in order: the Order's night flight over London, Harry's walk to his hearing at the Ministry of Magic, the Hogwarts Express in the Highlands, the empty glens of the aerial shots and the Thestral flight to the Ministry over the Thames. Interiors were built at Leavesden Studios in Watford, so only the exteriors can be visited.
Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is set around 1790 near Tarrytown, New York, and you can visit its places today: Philipsburg Manor, Patriot's Park, the Old Dutch Church and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
Ichabod rides to a party at the Van Tassel farm, then home through a haunted glen and over a bridge by the church. The route follows his night, with Raven Rock first. Some places are only visitor tradition, and each stop says so.
Seven Samurai was filmed at Toho Studios in Tokyo and in Shizuoka and Hakone, because no single location could cover the whole area.
Kurosawa's 1954 film has one mountain village, but it was stitched together from different places: studio rice fields in Setagaya, a valley above the Tanna Tunnel, a mill site in Izu, a waterfall in Shizuoka and a mountain pass in Hakone.
The stops are approximate because the screen village never existed as one place.
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is set in Tokyo, but most of it was shot in Los Angeles; Shibuya Crossing is the best-known real Tokyo spot.
This route follows Sean Boswell from his Arizona school to the car meets, garages and mountain pass of the film, and shows the Los Angeles locations that stood in for Tokyo, from Hawthorne Plaza to San Gabriel Dam. Several scenes are pinned to the stand-in, not the story setting.
Sanada Yukimura's story runs from Ueda Castle to exile in Kudoyama and a last stand at Osaka Castle, Sanada Maru and Tennōji. He held Ueda against a far larger Tokugawa army in 1600, then died in 1615.
The route follows him from the Sekigahara campaign through exile below Mount Kōya to the Winter and Summer sieges of Osaka. Some sites are marked approximately, because the sources do not give exact spots.
Nansō Satomi Hakkenden (Hakkenden) opens in Awa, today southern Chiba, with Takida Castle, Tateyama Castle and Mount Tomi in Chiba, then Koga Castle and Gyōtoku.
A lord's careless joke to his dog brings down a curse, and eight dog warriors are born from a princess's scattered prayer beads. The route follows the opening tale from the old castles of Awa to Princess Fuse's mountain, then the first dog warriors' duel at Koga and rescue at Gyōtoku.
The novel's Tateyama and Hōryūkaku are not the same as the real sites, so most pins are approximate.
Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, a series of 119 ukiyo-e prints, shows Edo, as Tokyo was then called: Nihonbashi, Kanda Shrine, Shinobazu Pond, Kameido Tenjin, Zōjō-ji and Sensō-ji in Asakusa.
This route follows seven of its views in print order, from Nihonbashi in snow to the gates of Sensō-ji, each tied to a place you can still visit. The Sumida River bridge of the famous sudden shower, and the Nihonbashi stop, have approximate pins.
The Yamata no Orochi myth is set along the Hii River in Izumo, Shimane, with Mount Sentsu named as the battlefield and Yaegaki Shrine and Susa Shrine honouring Susanoo afterwards. The serpent's sword ends up at Atsuta Shrine in Nagoya.
The route follows the Kojiki story: the god Susanoo sees a chopstick floating down the river, meets a family upstream, and defeats an eight-headed serpent with sake. Every location is a traditional identification of a mythical event, not a proven site.
Captain James Cook's third voyage ran from Plymouth Sound by way of Table Bay, Queen Charlotte Sound and Christmas Island to the Hawaiian Islands, where he first landed at Waimea on Kauai and later died at Kealakekua Bay.
The route follows the ships across seven stops: the Cape, a New Zealand anchorage, a coral atoll, and the two Hawaiian landfalls that ended the voyage for its commander. Positions for the bays and the atoll are approximate.
Pole to Pole with Michael Palin is a 1992 BBC series that follows the 30-degree east line of longitude from the North Pole to the South Pole, through Spitsbergen, Chernobyl, Istanbul, Wadi Halfa, the Ngorongoro Crater, Lake Tanganyika and Victoria Falls.
The route picks eight stops from the eight episodes, in order, ending at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Several are named only as towns or regions in the series summary, so those pins are approximate.
In 1648 Semyon Dezhnyov sailed from the Kolyma River past Cape Dezhnev and through the Bering Strait, eighty years before Vitus Bering entered the strait in 1728, and ended up wrecked near the mouth of the Anadyr.
The route follows the voyage from Srednekolymsk to the cape, the Diomede Islands, the Anadyr mouth and the winter quarters at Anadyrsk. Some details, including the exact route, are debated, so most pins are approximate.
The first transcontinental railroad began at the Sacramento waterfront in 1863, climbed through Dutch Flat and Donner Pass, and ended at Promontory Summit, Utah, where the Golden Spike was driven on 10 May 1869.
The route follows the Central Pacific's eastward build from California: the groundbreaking, Judah's Sierra survey, the granite labour of Chinese workers and the final ceremony. Some stops are approximate.
Billy the Kid's story runs through southeastern New Mexico: the street of Lincoln, where he fought in the Lincoln County War and escaped the gallows, the stone hut at Stinking Springs, the plaza at Mesilla, and Fort Sumner, where he was shot in 1881.
The route follows Billy from the ambush of Sheriff Brady in April 1878 to his death and burial in July 1881. Lincoln and Fort Sumner can still be visited; some exact spots, such as the saloon and the trial room, are not pinned.
The Cathar story runs through Béziers, Carcassonne and Montségur: six places in southern France where the Albigensian Crusade of 1209 to 1255 left its mark.
The route starts with the fall of Béziers and Carcassonne in 1209, continues through the castles of Lastours and the well of Minerve, and ends at Montségur and Quéribus, the last strongholds. Several stops are ruins or later rebuilds, so what you see is not always the medieval Cathar castle.
Cleopatra's story runs from the palace of Alexandria to Caesar's Forum in Rome, the gate of Tarsus in Turkey and the sea battle off Actium in Greece, before ending back in Alexandria in 30 BC.
The route follows her meetings with Caesar and Antony and her fall to Octavian. Some places are exact and some only approximate; the palace and tomb in Alexandria have no certain location.
Jules Verne's novel sends Dr. Samuel Ferguson across Africa in a balloon filled with hydrogen, from Zanzibar past Lake Victoria, Lake Chad and Timbuktu to the Senegal River and Saint-Louis.
The route follows seven places from the book in order, from the departure port to the Nile source, the desert crossing and the falls of Gouina where the Victoria is lost. Verne's Africa is a nineteenth-century view, and the novel's pins are broad: most marks are areas, not exact spots.
Tomihiko Morimi's The Tatami Galaxy and The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl are set among Kyoto University students, on Kiyamachi Street, the Kamo Delta, Pontochō and the grounds of Shimogamo Shrine.
The Tatami Galaxy replays one student's college years in parallel timelines that always end on a bridge over the river. The Night Is Short follows a black-haired heroine through a night of drinking in Pontochō and a used book fair. The stops are real Kyoto places; the boarding house exists only in the story.
Winter Sonata, the 2002 Korean drama that started the second wave of the Korean Wave, was filmed primarily on Nami Island in Chuncheon, with more scenes at Yongpyong Resort and on the Oedo garden island. Its tale of a first love lost to amnesia sends you to a lakeside city and a snowy ski slope.
The route follows Joon-sang and Yoo-jin from their school days in Chuncheon through Nami Island, Jungdo and Chuam Beach, then ten years on to Yongpyong and the finale at Oedo. Two stops are unpinned: the sources name them without an exact spot.
Bridget Jones's Diary is set and filmed around Borough Market in south London, with Shad Thames, the Royal Courts of Justice and Cornhill on the way. The film moves Bridget from Holland Park to a flat above the Globe pub, where the story begins.
This route follows the film's story through eight London and country locations: the book launch at the ICA, the first date at Shad Thames, the mini-break at Stoke Park, the anniversary party at Syon House and the snowy finale. The film was shot over six weeks in and around London in 2000.
Crocodile Dundee follows a Northern Territory bushman from the billabongs of Kakadu to the Plaza Hotel and the subways of Manhattan. Its Walkabout Creek is really the pub at McKinlay, Queensland; its outback is Anbangbang Billabong and Gunlom Falls; its New York runs from Newark airport to Columbus Circle.
The route follows reporter Sue Charlton and Mick Dundee from the outback to New York, one filming location per scene. A few places stand in for others, and the captions say where.
Eat Pray Love, the 2010 film of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, was shot around Piazza Navona in Rome, at a pizzeria in Naples, in Pataudi, India, and around Ubud and Padang Padang Beach in Bali.
Julia Roberts plays Liz, who leaves a settled life for a year of travel: in the memoir, four months in Italy eating, three in India praying and the end of the year in Bali. This route follows those three legs through the places where the scenes were filmed. The memoir's ashram is unnamed, so the India stop marks only the town where the film shot it.
