A standing public record of things that used to exist and no longer do. Anyone may add to it. Entries are ordered by when the last one went, not by when somebody wrote it down.
A three-second chime played at the end of every broadcast day by a television station in Alma, Michigan, from 1954 until the licence lapsed. Six people have written to us about it independently and their descriptions agree. No recording is known.
The last frame inked by hand was finished on a Thursday afternoon. The staff did not know it was the last one. The schedule simply never called for another, and by the time anybody noticed, the ink desks had been taken out.
Wet limestone and creosote, reported as unchanged across ninety years of accounts. The tunnel was sealed and mechanically ventilated during the 2023 works. Visitors since describe cold air and nothing else.
Cristina Calderón was the last native speaker. She gave interviews for decades to people who could not answer her in her own language. She died in February 2022 at ninety-three. The dictionary she worked on survives.
An Icelandic glacier declared dead in 2014 and given a plaque in 2019, addressed to whoever reads it in the next two hundred years. The plaque is still on the rock. The ice is not.
Held in the same square every week since at least 1790, uninterrupted through two wars. It stopped in 2018 because the two remaining vendors were both over eighty and neither told the other they were finished.
It is read by a person, usually within a fortnight. About a third are held for want of a source and roughly one in twenty is declined.