History enthusiast tells city's little-known stories through his "Anecdotal Atlanta" Instagram series
To know Will Edmonds is to be able to keep up with him, and if you follow him on social media, you know how much ground he covers in Atlanta.
Edmonds' historical hot-takes, known as "Anecdotal Atlanta," are fascinating, compelling, and consumable. Filmed in bite-sized videos, they're helping Atlantans fall in love with the city and with each other.
"A lot of guys are using my stories for dating, and I'll hear female friends of mine tell me, 'Yeah, a guy was telling me all these stories that I knew that he got from your account,'" Edmonds said.
Edmonds is a Brit who came to the U.S. in 2001 on a tennis scholarship. After college, he eventually moved to Atlanta and began a love affair with a city he just can't quit.
"That's the main criticism I get, or comment is like, 'Why is an English guy doing this?' Right? It's like, well, I've been here 20 years. Like, I don't sound like you, but I've been here longer than most people," he said.
Edmonds went public with his Atlanta romance on social media in 2022, and nearly 100 stories later, you could say it's a marriage made in, well, Atlanta.
CBS News Atlanta's Brian Unger found Edmonds excavating a little-known history of a monorail known as "the Pink Pig."
The Pink Pig ran inside a vacant department store in the Sam Nunn Atlanta Federal Center, formerly a Macy's, but first known as Rich's, and now a MARTA construction site.
And like all of Edmond's tales, there's a surprise.
"And then one year, one of the headlights fell off, and they were like, 'Oh, for fun, let's paint it pink, stick a snout on there, and call it a pig,'" he related.
The journalist and historian does all of this alone, and admits it's getting difficult to find history he hasn't already uncovered or tell in under a minute.
But while the deeper he digs and the harder it gets, there's one thing Will Edmonds hasn't run out of: curiosity.
"That's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the 'Oh wow, that's a cool story!' The anecdotes," he said.
You can find all of Edmonds' true tales of "Anecdotal Atlanta" on his Instagram.
