The World’s Scariest Places

JOHN STANMEYER/VII/REDUXThe Bali Aga people of Trunyan, Indonesia, “bury” their dead in the open air. After the

corpses have decomposed, the skulls are arranged in orderly rows.

Contents

NICK GARBUTT/BARCROFT MEDIA/GETTYMillions of bats return to roost at dawn after feasting all night on fruit in Kasanka National

Park in Zambia. On the cover: Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, Germany, allegedlyhaunted by the ghosts of 17th-century military men.

IntroductionHaunted HideoutsParanormal PurlieusCreepy CemeteriesHorrifying Hell GatesGhastly Ghost TownsThe End

IntroductionFear Factor

By J.I. Baker

DMITRI KESSEL/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTYNeuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, Germany, is said to be haunted by spirits that predate its

construction. It was built on the ruins of two much older castles by King Ludwig II, whodied under mysterious circumstances.

Built by “Mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria in the late 1880s to honor composerRichard Wagner, Neuschwanstein Castle (shown on the cover of this book)eventually inspired Sleeping Beauty’s Castle in Disneyland. But the Californiatheme park’s ersatz edifice lacks the ghosts that legendarily prowl the halls of itsRomanesque original—specifically the spirits of 17th-century Bavarian generals inmilitary garb who moan as they fly through the air. (It’s the Haunted Mansion—forreal.)

That castle is just a taste of this book’s weird wonders. Here, you’ll find eeriepublic purlieus (Mexico’s temple of death); doorways to hell (satanic caves in West

Wycombe); creepy burial places (the hanging graves of Indonesia); haunted ghosttowns (an abandoned Alaskan copper mine)—not to mention voodoo, vampires,and millions of hungry bats. Shakespeare’s Hamlet famously told his pal that “thereare more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in yourphilosophy,” but the man who marveled at his father’s ghost on the ramparts ofElsinore would probably be shocked by the Chinese demons, volcanic witches,Satan worshippers, and Transylvanian UFOs that fill the following pages.

Haunted HideoutsVisit voodoo spirits in Africa, vampire-infested Venetian plagueislands, and ghosts who wander the world’s most dangerousroad . . . as dogs

PAUL WINDSOR/GETTYKnown as England’s most haunted building, the legendary Tower of London looms over the

River Thames.

The Voodoo WalmartAkodessewa Fetish Market, Togo

ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTYSkulls and heads of various animals, including monkeys, owls, and snakes, are among the

supplies you can find at West Africa’s Akodessewa Fetish Market, a sort of voodoopharmacy.

Buffalo skins, powdered chameleons, human skulls, dried cobras, and dog pawsare just a few of the dubious treasures you’ll unearth at West Africa’s AkodessewaFetish Market, the largest voodoo bazaar in the world. (No doubt Macbeth’s threewitches would easily have scored “eye of newt, and toe of frog” here.) Established in1863, the open-air venue—also known as the Marché des Féticheurs—spreads itswitchy wares over blocks in Lomé, the capital of the republic of Togo.

Originating in West Africa and later following the slave trade to Haiti, voodoo isan animistic religion with a pantheon of loa, supernatural beings that can intercede—for good or ill—in the lives of mortals. Though other markets offer the sametalismans, Akodessewa features on-site healers, known as fetish priests, who can

supposedly cure what ails you by channeling the gods and offering prescriptions—no health insurance required. (Want to improve your memory? Try a powderedmix of ebony seeds, chameleon, and monkey head.)

Lest this all seem sinister to the uninitiated, one guide interviewed for the websiteAtlas Obscura said that the market’s magic is always “white,” not “black.” (In otherwords, it’s not used for evil purposes.) No animals are harmed in the making of themojo, either, he claimed. In the wake of a government crackdown on poaching, forinstance, lions’ heads are strictly off-limits, but less kingly creatures will do in apinch. “It’s like Western medicine,” he said. “When you don’t find a specificproduct, you can use the generic version.”

Halls of HorrorPredjama Castle, Slovenia

REALY EASY STAR/TONI SPAGONE/ALAMY

“You can hear footsteps or voices . . . talking behind that wall after the sun goesdown,” one employee of Slovenia’s Predjama Castle told Ghost HuntersInternational. “If you are the last one, you have to go and check in the castle ifthere’s anybody else in it. I don’t like to be here when it’s dark.”

First constructed in the 1200s in an abandoned Stone Age settlement on a cliffoverlooking the River Lokva, the four-story castle contains the remains of hiddenpassageways, holes for pouring boiling oil on attacking enemies, a treasure chest,and—naturally—a torture chamber. Its walls still hold corpses of enemies whowere sealed within and left to suffocate. “Nobody went down to collect them,”another employee said. (Are they the spirits talking behind the walls?)

Over the centuries, such luminaries as the Knights of Adelsberg and ArchdukeCharles of Austria have called the rocky redoubt home—until it became a museumafter World War II. (It remains a popular tourist attraction.) But the castle’s mostprominent resident was arguably the 15th-century knight Erazem of Predjama,

revered by local folk as a Slovenian Robin Hood who rebelled against thearistocracy and was eventually betrayed by a servant and then killed by theemperor’s men. He is widely thought to be the source of much of the structure’spsychic activity—in other words, despite his death, it seems he never left.

KAROL CZINEGE/ALAMYA stone staircase (above) leads into a cave at Slovenia’s Predjama Castle, which also

contains a dungeon where a torture victim—well, a dummy—dangles from his wrists(following).

JOHN KEATES/ALAMY

Al Capone’s PrisonEastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia

AMY CICCONI/ALAMYA cell in the prison.

“It looked like a heat mirage—a large, shimmering upright blob that was movingslowly to the right,” wrote Alaina Mabaso, a former tour guide at Philadelphia’sEastern State Penitentiary, describing a supernatural sighting in the building’sCellblock 4. The notorious site is also the source of a house legend. Though itsdetails have grown fuzzy over the years, at some point an employee known as Garythe Locksmith was working in the cell when he felt a terrible pressure on his chest—as if a powerful man were gripping him from behind. When he turned around, noone was there, but he later discovered that an inmate had murdered a guard in thevery same spot.

Now a national historic landmark, the penitentiary was established in 1829 byQuakers, who believed the key to rehabilitating criminals was enforced isolation. It

didn’t quite work out that way. Forced to wear masks to deter communication,many inmates went mad, were subjected to torture, or committed suicide.

Where there’s misery and violent death, can ghosts be far behind? Thepenitentiary’s most infamous resident, Al “Scarface” Capone, reportedly thoughtthat he was haunted by a victim of his 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Thesightings continue to this day. One tour guide passed the closed doors of Cellblock12 only to find them wide open moments later. Some visitors have followedmysterious voices—whispers, giggling—and found nothing but dank air.

Though the penitentiary’s administrators take pains to distance the site from itsspooky reputation, they host “Terror Behind the Walls,” an elaborate horror house,every autumn. “We . . . do not claim that the prison is haunted,” one guide told NPRin 2013. “We run a haunted attraction.”

Tell it to the ghost of Al Capone.

COLLECTION OF EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY HISTORIC SITE, GIFT OF THE FAMILY OF JOHN D.SHEARER

“He is a man buried alive,” an outraged Charles Dickens wrote of a typical prisoner inEastern State Penitentiary, where inmates were forced to wear masks to discourage

communication.

STACY PEARSALL/AURORAA decaying cell block in Eastern State Penitentiary, which was once the most famous and

expensive prison in the world and is now a tourist attraction.

Vampire GraveyardThe Plague Islands, Italy

REALY EASY STAR/TONI SPAGONE/ALAMYThe deserted Venetian island of Poveglia was once a burial ground for plague victims.

In 2009, University of Florence anthropologists unearthed a female “vampire”skull—complete with a brick shoved into its mouth—in a mass grave on LazzarettoNuovo, an island in the Venice lagoon. Dating from 1576, the grave containedvictims of a plague that had decimated Venice that year.

Some of the deceased, Venetians believed, were vampires—also called “shroudeaters,” because bacteria in the victims’ mouths corroded the cloth that coveredtheir faces, exposing the teeth. “To kill the vampire you had to remove the shroudfrom its mouth, which was its food like the milk of a child, and put somethinguneatable in there,” according to anthropologist Matteo Borrini. (Hence, thebrick.)

Lazzaretto Nuovo wasn’t the only plague burial ground in the Venetian lagoon. In

1432, the city had established its first quarantine hospital on another island,Lazzaretto Vecchio. Filled with ceaseless groans, foul odors, and smoke fromburning corpses, it was—according to one contemporary account—like “hellitself.” After the plague hit the city even harder in 1576 and again in 1630,thousands of infected people were sent to other Venetian islands—including tinyPoveglia, located between Venice and Lido. Unlike the Lazzaretto islands, whichnow feature guided tours, Poveglia remains uninhabited, overgrown, and shunned.

It may also be haunted. The island’s most famous apparition is “Little Maria,” theghost of a young plague victim who allegedly stands along the water, crying for herparents on moonless nights. In the 1920s, the opening of an insane asylum onPoveglia led to the legend that an evil doctor, prone to administrating brutalmedical experiments, had fallen from the island’s bell tower under mysteriouscircumstances. After the institution closed in 1968, Poveglia was abandoned.

Untouched by both fishermen and gondoliers, the island was put up for auction bythe cash-strapped Italian government in 2014. An Italian businessman eventuallypaid $704,000, but the sale was annulled when the government decided that theamount was insufficient. The businessman was hoping to build a luxury hotel.Maybe he would have had better luck if he’d had orange hair?

REUTERSSuspected vampires were buried with bricks in their mouths to stop them from feeding on

the dead.

The Brown Lady’s LairRaynham Hall, England

CHRONICLE/ALAMYThe Brown Lady was, in life, Lady Dorothy Townshend (above), the 18th-century lady of

Raynham Hall (following), one of the oldest estates in England.

MAJOR GILBERT/ALAMY

The first recorded sighting of Raynham Hall’s famous ghost occurred during a1835 Christmas gathering at the Norfolk, England, estate. Two guests claimed theysaw an aristocratic “brown lady”—named for the color of her brocade dress—asthey approached their bedrooms one night. The next evening, one of themglimpsed the female phantom again, but this time he noticed gaping black holeswhere her eyes should have been. (Not surprising, some of the house’s servantsresigned soon afterward.)

Supposedly the ghost of Lady Dorothy Townshend, whose jealous husband kepther imprisoned in the hall until her death in 1726, the Brown Lady was seen againin 1836 by novelist Captain Frederick Marryat. Trying to prove that the revenantwas, in fact, a hoax perpetrated by local smugglers to keep people away, the writercame face-to-face with the ghost, according to his daughter. “The figure halted of itsown accord before the door behind which he stood,” she wrote, “and holding thelighted lamp she carried to her features, grinned in a malicious and diabolicalmanner at him.”

The world at large didn’t glimpse the putative phantom until 1936, when a

photographer and his assistant were documenting the hall for Country Lifemagazine. While setting up a shot, the assistant later claimed, they saw “a vapouryform gradually assuming the appearance of a woman” coming down the woodenstaircase. The result was promptly published in the magazine and remains—despitehoax allegations—the most famous spirit photograph in history.

PICTURES INC./THE PICTURE COLLECTION, INC.In 1936, this image of the Brown Lady was captured by a photographer for Country Life

magazine.

The Deadly DungeonTower of London, England

CHRIS HAMPSON/NBC NEWSWIRE/GETTYThe “Traitors’ Gate” (above), through which enemies of the state accused of treason wereled to almost certain execution, and the beheading block (following) were among the most

dreaded spots in the Tower of London.

JONATHAN BLAIR/CORBIS/GETTY

“There’s only you and I here,” a disembodied (and ungrammatical) voicesupposedly said to Tower of London night watchman Arthur Crick, who hadstopped along his nightly rounds to rest his feet. “Just let me get this bloody shoeon,” Crick responded, “and there’ll only be you!”

The complex of towers on the River Thames—now home to everything from thecrown jewels to an ax probably used in the last public beheading on Tower Hill—iswidely considered the most haunted building in England.

Construction of the Tower began in 1066 under William the Conqueror. Notsurprising, the most storied part of the structure is the oldest: The White Tower iswhere the ghost known as the “White Lady” wanders, her perfume often smelled atthe entrance to the Chapel of St. John’s. A headless ghost said to be that of AnneBoleyn is sometimes seen near the Queen’s House, close to where she was executedon Tower Green, and the Nine Day Queen, Lady Jane Grey, was reportedly spottedby guards on February 12, 1957, the 403rd anniversary of her death by execution.

Maybe saddest of all are the wraiths of Edward IV’s young sons Edward V andRichard. In 1483, they were sent to the Tower after being declared illegitimate by

their uncle Richard, who may also have had them murdered (he then became KingRichard III). In 1674, the skeletons of two young boys were discovered beneath astaircase, but the brothers’ spirits continue to be seen in white nightgowns,clutching each other in terror.

Transylvania’s Bermuda TriangleHoia Baciu Forest, Romania

DANIEL MIRLEA/SHUTTERSTOCKLegend has it that two trees in Romania’s Hoia Baciu forest are carved with the names of a

man and his fiancée. The latter got lost in the forest and was never found, though her ghostnow appears wearing a wedding dress.

On the afternoon of August 18, 1968, military technician Emil Barnea and hisgirlfriend were picnicking in the Round Meadow—an area of the Hoia Baciu forestin Cluj, Romania—when they noticed a slow, silent, silvery disc in the sky.Grabbing his camera, Barnea took some pictures that single-handedly launchedRomanian UFOlogy—and led to the forest’s reputation as an interdimensional hotspot.

Known as the Bermuda Triangle of Romania, Cluj lies near the foothills of theApuseni Mountains in the country’s Transylvania region. About a four-hour drivefrom Bran Castle—the inspiration for the Dracula legend—Hoia Baciu is filledwith oddly gnarled trees straight out of a fairy-tale illustration. But its reputationrests on distinctly otherworldly phenomenon: red lights, orbs, disembodied voices,

and apparitions—allegedly reflecting the restless spirits of Romanian peasants whowere murdered in these woods. One of the most popular legends involves a five-year-old girl who disappeared in the forest—only to reappear years later, dressed inthe same clothes she was wearing when she vanished. Then there’s the Bride, theghost of a missing woman who supposedly prowls the woods in her wedding dress.

Despite its fearsome reputation, Hoia Baciu remains a popular spot for biking,paintball, and archery, but visitors should consider bringing bacitracin: Wanderersin these woods have allegedly been subject to strange rashes and scratches. And theRound Meadow, where Barnea spied his UFO, supposedly hosts its own horrors:Some claim that nothing can live there because the ground has been charred byinterstellar radiation. In other words: If you picnic here, you may encounter UFOs,but you won’t have to worry about ants.

A Spectral ShipThe Queen Mary, California

MARTIN/FOX PHOTOS/GETTYIn 1936, workers in Scotland’s Clydebank shipyard labored through the night to finish the

Queen Mary (above), now home to many ghosts—including that of a worker who haunts theship’s Shaft Alley (following).

MATTHEW RICHARDSON/ALAMY

Years after the legendary Queen Mary luxury liner was permanently docked as ahotel and tourist attraction in Long Beach, California, a marine engineer namedJohn Smith had an unsettling experience while working aboard the ship late onenight. In a deserted staircase, Smith heard the sound of water rushing and menscreaming—but no one was there.

Later, Smith learned that in 1942 the liner was being used in World War II when itcollided with its companion vessel, HMS Curacoa, on its way to Gourock, Scotland.The Curacoa was immediately sheared in two and sunk, killing 338 men. “The veryarea I heard that mysterious water rushing was the exact same area that wasdamaged when the ship hit the Curacoa,” Smith told Unsolved Mysteries.

It’s not surprising that a nearly 80-year-old ship with more than a thousand oceancrossings and numerous deaths upon it would have a reputation for being haunted.Beginning as a luxury liner in 1936, the Queen Mary was retrofitted as a battlecruiser for World War II and dubbed the Grey Ghost. Many German and ItalianPOWs likely died on the liner, as did soldiers from heat stroke traveling in theMediterranean.

These days the ship’s most haunted spots include the B deck (where a World WarII morgue and an isolation room were located); the engine room; the Green Room;various staterooms; an area known as Shaft Alley; and the former first-class poolarea, which is home to Little Jackie, the ship’s most famous ghost. She is playful andtalkative, her voice having been allegedly caught many times on tape. Sadly, she issaid to remain on the ship because she is looking for her mother, for whom shesometimes cries out.

Of course the grand ship capitalizes on (not to say exploits) its spooky reputationby offering haunted tours, interactive attractions, and séances. There’s even adinner special called Dining with the Spirits, which allows patrons to pairparanormal investigations with more earthbound spirits. Bloody Mary, anyone?

The Road of the DeadLa Paz to Coroico, Bolivia

DAVORLOVINCIC/ISTOCKPHOTO/GETTY“At first many locals did not understand why anyone would bike the road, but now many ofthem ride it on the weekends,” says Derren Patterson of Gravity Bolivia, a mountain-biking

company that arranges trips on the so-called Death Road.

If you think your commute is bad, consider the drive along Camino de Yungas—aperilously narrow thoroughfare that runs 40 miles from La Paz, Bolivia’s capital, tothe western city of Coroico. Called the world’s most dangerous road, it reaches aheight of 15,000 feet through the Andes cordilleras, its sheer cliffs, waterfalls, andhairpin turns often obscured by dust, vegetation, and cloud forests—not tomention unpredictable weather. Though a new, less perilous, route linking theregions was opened in 2006, the old road—reportedly once the site of 200 to 300deaths every year—is still used.

Wooden and stone crosses mark the spots where travelers reached the end of theirown roads, though locals believe their restless spirits remain. “The stray dogs that

roamed the old road were said to be the souls of the people who died there, sopeople always fed them,” says Derren Patterson, general manager of Gravity Bolivia,which organizes mountain-biking expeditions on the site. “One man told me that hepassed an old woman walking on the road at night and stopped to give her a lift,” hetells LIFE. “She got into the back seat, but as they were talking he looked into therearview mirror—and she was gone.”

For protection, road worriers traditionally make offerings to Pachamama, agoddess revered in the Andes, at the camino’s highest point. “They give her a fewsprinkles of alcohol—also called Pachamama, because it’s used to honor her,”Patterson says. “Many drivers keep a big bottle in their cars.” How does Pattersoncalm nervous bikers who remain unconvinced by the alcohol’s efficacy? “I tell themthat I took my mom down,” he says, “and she loved it.”

The Maze of MadnessGonjiam Psychiatric Hospital, South Korea

JOSHUA DAVENPORT/ALAMY

The ruins of the Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital have been moldering in SouthKorea’s Gyeonggi province since the mid-1990s, when the structure wasabandoned for reasons that remain a mystery. Some suggest that plumbingproblems or financial improprieties were to blame, but urban legends claim (as theyso often do) that the institution was plagued by a series of strange deaths—theresult of horrifying medical experiments that were eventually traced to a homicidaldoctor, who promptly fled to America.

Now the ramshackle ruins are filled with mildewed mattresses, broken windows,and Korean and English graffiti (a single word, KILL, is the simplest and mostchilling). Thanks in part to its sinister appearance, Gonjiam has become known asone of the three most haunted sites in South Korea, the others being a house filledwith disembodied voices in rural Youngdeok, and the Neulbom Garden restaurant,which allegedly closed because ghosts drove the owners out.

It’s not entirely accurate to call the hospital “abandoned,” because—like many

places of its ilk—it has become a frequent destination for trespassing urban thrill-seekers. Though most of them don’t uncover supernatural secrets, some havereportedly been scratched by unseen entities as they walk through these halls. Straycats? Broken windows? Or ghostly patients in dire need of an emery board?

JOSHUA DAVENPORT/ALAMYWhy was South Korea’s Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital abandoned in the 1990s? Financial

problems? Sanitary issues? Or medical experiments conducted by a homicidal doctor?

JOSHUA DAVENPORT/ALAMY

The Screaming Ghosts WellHimeji Castle, Japan

ROBERT HARDING/ALAMYHimeji Castle is the legendary home.

In the early 17th century, during Japan’s Edo period, a girl named Okiku servedthe Lord of Himeji Castle, which stood on a hill overlooking its namesake city inHyogo Prefecture. She was tasked—or so the story goes—with guarding hermaster’s 10 priceless gold plates, but she wanted so much more: She had fallen inlove with her lord.

Given her humble station, she couldn’t dream of revealing her true feelings, butshe remained nothing if not devoted. After overhearing fellow servants plotting herlord’s murder, Okiku told him about the plot. Seeking revenge, the conspiratorsstole one of the precious gold plates—and convinced the lord that Okiku was thethief. The credulous lord promptly had the young girl killed and her body throwninto the castle’s well.

But Okiku’s lovelorn spirit did not rest in peace. Every night, between two andthree a.m., her revenant rose from the well . . . and screamed as she counted theplates: “One! Two! Three!”—all the way up to “Ten!” Unnerved, the sleepless lord

reinvestigated the events that preceded Okiku’s death. When he finally learned thetruth, he went insane.

Well, that’s the legend, anyway. Considered the most beautiful castle in Japan, the400-year-old Himeji—a UNESCO World Heritage site—remains on its hilloverlooking its namesake city, where some still claim to hear Okiku screaming asshe counts the gold plates from two to three in the morning.

FINE ART IMAGES/HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTYOkiku (in an 1800s Japanese print), the servant girl whose spirit allegedly still rises nightly

from a well and howls.

Paranormal PurlieusWhat’s creepier? Millions of bats descending on an Africansanctuary, sculptures with human teeth in Finland, or a wall ofskulls in Mexico? You be the judge

KENNETH GARRETT/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVEA feathered serpent head on the Templo Mayor in Mexico City, once the Aztec city of

Tenochtitlán.

Sinister StatuesParikkala Sculpture Park, Finland

ELENA VASHCHILKO/ALAMYThe reclusive Finnish artist Veijo Rönkkönen created his eerie sculptures in an area of the

country called Parikkala.

In the early 1960s, 16-year-old Veijo Rönkkönen used his first paycheck from aParikkala, Finland, paper mill to purchase—of all things—apple-tree seedlings anda bag of concrete. This simple, unexpected act kicked off the humble man’s 50-yearobsession: the creation of some 500 concrete sculptures to populate an eerie gardenon the grounds of the home where he lived with his parents near Finland’s Russianborder.

Grotesque, unreal, and often downright frightening, Rönkkönen’s folk art showsanimals, aliens, and people with lifeless, missing eyes—and sometimes real humanteeth. Certain figures seem to be self-portraits—including a series of young men inyoga poses that reportedly reflect, and artistically preserve, Rönkkönen’s youthfulbody. But the reclusive sculptor, who died in 2010, never imagined that the work

itself would last. What’s more, he didn’t care if anyone saw it. When asked what hehoped would happen to his statues, he said he wanted them buried, like China’sTerracotta Army.

He was equally uninterested in money or fame. Instead of charging visitors, hesimply asked them to sign a guest book. In 2007, he refused to claim a prestigiousFinnish prize, stating that he didn’t want to leave his house. (His brother accepted itfor him.) Spurred by his growing reputation, collectors and curators inevitablycame calling, asking if Rönkkönen would sell or lend his works. The artist’sresponse? He would have to “check with the statues first.” Apparently, the statuessaid no.

ELENA VASHCHILKO/ALAMY

Russia’s Ruined UFOBuzludzha Monument, Bulgaria

DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP/GETTYA trespasser enters the former House Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party, now

an eerie ruin in the Central Balkan Mountains.

In 1868, Buzludzha peak in Bulgaria’s Central Balkan Mountains was the site of abloody battle between Bulgarian rebels and the Turks who had conquered thecountry in the 14th century. Nearly three decades after the decisive fight, the peakwas the location of a secret socialist meeting that led to the founding of thecountry’s Communist party. Commemorating these events, Bulgaria’s Sovietgovernment ordered the construction of the House Monument of the BulgarianCommunist Party on the site in 1974.

When the odd, UFO-like structure finally opened as a party assembly hall in 1981,it instantly became the most important building in Bulgaria. As concretemonuments to communism go, it was a lavish affair, filled with statues and mosaicsand murals representing Lenin and Marx and a red star-shaped window celebrating(what else?) Mother Russia. But after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989—lessthan a decade after the monument was built—the structure was abandoned to the

elements.Now the isolated ruin looms on its high, windswept peak, like something out of

Interstellar or Alien, its vandalized artwork replaced by graffiti—including ENJOYCOMMUNISM written in the style of the Coca-Cola logo. Despite its remotelocation, the dilapidated site has become a magnet for intrepid explorers in thisplace where men once fought for what they thought was the greater good. “TheBuzludzha monument definitely symbolizes how times and ideologies havechanged,” one Bulgarian tour guide told Lonely Planet. “Some time ago it was themost important building in Bulgaria, and take a look at it now.”

TIMOTHY ALLEN/GETTY

The Temple of DeathTemplo Mayor, Mexico

PETER ESSICK/AURORAA wall of stone skulls is part of Mexico City’s Templo Mayor.

In 1978, electrical workers digging in Mexico City’s historic center uncovered aneight-ton stone carving of the Aztec goddess Coyolxauhqui. Suspecting a majorarchaeological find, the Mexican government controversially decided to destroy thesite’s Spanish colonial buildings and solve the subterranean mystery. This led to thediscovery of the ruins of the Templo Mayor, a.k.a the Great Temple, inTenochtitlán, the Aztec city founded in 1325.

Dedicated to Huitzilopochtil, the god of war, and Tlaloc, the god of rain, theTemplo Mayor was “the Aztecs’ axis mundi,” tour guide Josue Acosta tells LIFE. “Itwas like a giant altar where human sacrifices were made to the gods. The perfectoffering consisted of the flesh and bones of the Aztecs’ enemies. The heads werewar trophies that were boiled and cleaned. Then the insides were eaten before theskulls were set on the stone altars.”

The fun and games ended when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived

in 1519, destroying the Aztec civilization soon after and covering the temple area—now a UNESCO World Heritage site—with structures, such as the MetropolitanCathedral, that likely cover further ruins. In fact, a recent excavation found a towermade of more than 60,000 skulls near Templo Mayor—a monument to ancientmurder in the modern megalopolis.

ISAIAS HERNANDEZ/NOTIMEX/NEWSCOM/ZUMAA human skull in the site’s museum.

KENNETH GARRETT/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVEThe remains of the Temple of Tlaloc, the Aztec god of water and rain.

The Bat SanctuaryKasanka National Park, Africa

NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMYFruit bats flew back to their arboreal roosts just before sunrise during their annual

migration to Zambia’s Kasanka National Park.

Every October, about 10 million fruit bats leave their sanctuaries in, say, Senegaland Cameroon and wing their way to Kasanka National Park in Zambia. There,beginning at dusk each day, the creatures turn the sky above the park’s Mushituswamp a writhing black as they feast on wild loquat, waterberry, and red milkwood.Every dawn, the tired creatures hang upside-down from trees to sleep off their feast—until December, when they disappear as abruptly as they arrived.

The largest mammal migration in the world, the annual bat flight to Kasanka waslong threatened by persistent poaching—until wildlife began to rebound afterprivate owners took control of the area around 1990. These particular bats aren’tout to suck your blood—they eat only fruit—but that’s small reassurance for thosewho fear creatures of the night. The so-called flying foxes (their bodies are ayellowish brown, the color of straw) make those screeching noises bats are knownfor as they fly and have an average wingspan of about three feet, more than threetimes the size of the little brown bats in your hometown belfry. Plus, there aremillions of them. Dracula himself only turned into one, and your average hauntedhouse is host to a few hundred at most. All in all, the Kasanka event is a spectaclestraight out of a chiroptophobic’s nightmare, or maybe an Alfred Hitchcock movie,creepier even than The Birds.

NICK GARBUTT/BARCROFT MEDIA/GETTY

Hitlers WastelandNazi Parade Grounds, Germany

CORBIS/GETTYSeen here at the end of the 1930s, Nuremberg’s Luitpold Arena was part of a large Nazi

complex, all of which is now in ruins.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, declaredNuremberg “the City of Nazi Party Rallies” and kicked off the construction of aparade ground on more than four square miles of converted parkland in thesoutheastern part of the city.

Though the dictator’s plans were typically grandiose, most of the construction washalted when World War II began in 1939, and the complex was never completed.Today, according to Alexander Schmidt, a historian at the site’s documentationcenter, only three elements still exist, in varying states of decay: the partlycompleted Congress Hall, the largest surviving relic of Nazi architecture; the GreatStreet, which became a parking space after 1945; and the Zeppelinfeld, the first andonly finished area, where Hitler rallied thousands from his rostrum with his

poisonous invective. His favorite architect, Albert Speer, promised that themonuments would last 1,000 years, but the site is now covered with litter,overgrown with grass, and fenced-off with signs reading DANGER OFCOLLAPSE!

In 1973, the area was declared a historic monument, posing an ongoing problemfor local officials: Should they preserve it or treat it as “a piece of contaminatedground which should be left to nature” in the words of a member of Nuremberg’sarchitectural counsel. Around 2015, Nuremberg’s mayor proposed renovating thegrounds at a cost of millions—a controversial decision, to say the least. “Better tolet it crumble,” one city resident told Britain’s Daily Mail. “And then one day, if itsmaster builder—and one of the most successful mass-murderers of all time—should make it out of hell to look back at what he created, he can . . . see nothing buta pile of rubble.”

Creepy CemeteriesIn these burial grounds, Peruvian mummies, sculptures madefrom human bones, the remains of children sacrificed toCronus, and Jim Morrison all rest in peace (well, sort of)

WILLIAM WIDMER/REDUXThe healing room, a chapel in New Orleans’s St. Roch Cemetery, is filled with items left by

people who claim their health was improved through the saint’s intervention from thebeyond.

The Monks’ MausoleumCapuchin Crypt, Italy

RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUXThe bones of 4,000 Capuchin monks adorn the walls and ceilings of a crypt beneath Santa

Maria della Concezione, a church in Rome.

In the crypt beneath Santa Maria della Concezione, a Capuchin church in Rome’sVia Veneto neighborhood, five chapels are decorated with the bones of 4,000monks who died between 1528 and 1870. One room is devoted to skulls, another toleg bones, and another to pelvises—all of which are arranged in intricate andelaborate displays, as if by some macabre Martha Stewart. (Some intact skeletonsare displayed in traditional brown Capuchin robes.)

For centuries, the building of bone churches and memorials was commonthroughout the world (in Italy, you’ll find them in Naples, Sicily, and Milan, amongother locations), but for contemporary people accustomed to avoiding the reality ofdeath, these sites can be as difficult to understand as they are to stomach. As PaulKoudounaris relates in The Empire of Death, one American tourist looked at

Concezione’s decor and exclaimed, “These are all monks? What did they do to bepunished like this?” But the displays actually honor the men, whose remains weretransferred to the site after the Capuchins relocated in 1631. Their scatteredpresence on the walls is a sacred memento mori, or reminder of death. One chillingcrypt plaque reads: “What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shallbe.”

The crypt is said to have inspired the Sedlec ossuary outside Prague, and it deeplyaffected such writers as the Marquis de Sade, who wrote that he had “never seenanything more striking.” Mark Twain referred to the crypt’s “picturesque horrors”in The Innocents Abroad, and Nathaniel Hawthorne noted in The Marble Faun thatthe site had “no disagreeable scent, such as might have been expected from thedecay of so many holy persons . . . The same number of living monks would notsmell half so unexceptionally.”

DEAGOSTINI/GETTYRemains in the crypt of a Capuchin monastery in Savoca, Sicily.

Thomas Hardy’s TreeSt. Pancras Old Church, England

JIM DYSON/GETTYThe Thomas Hardy Tree in London’s St. Pancras Old Church was named after the great

English writer, who oversaw the exhumation of bodies on the site in the mid-1860s.

In his 1882 poem “The Levelled Churchyard,” the British writer Thomas Hardydepicts corpses who feel “half stifled in this jumbled patch/of wrenched memorialstones.” These lines, oddly enough, may be semiautobiographical. In the mid-1860s, the future novelist was an architect apprenticed to Arthur Blomfield, whohad been tasked with the exhumation of thousands of corpses buried outsideLondon’s St. Pancras Old Church. Why? Britain’s booming railway industry hadnecessitated the expansion of the Midland Railway line through part of the church’scemetery.

Because tomb-robbing was a common practice at the time, Blomfield asked Hardyto oversee the railroad workers and gravediggers who handled the remains,according to Lester Hillman, academic adviser to the Camden Tour Guides

Association and the Islington Archaeology & History Society. It was a dreary andoften shocking business: One night, a coffin cracked open to reveal a single skeleton—with two heads. Like the other remains, it was placed in a pit on the grounds,over which St. Pancras Coroner’s Court was built and still stands to this day. Theuprooted gravestones were used to support the east boundary of the presentchurchyard, Hillman tells LIFE.

Well, not all of them. At an undetermined date, hundreds of the gravestones wereartfully arranged around an ash tree just east of the church—supposedly by Hardyhimself. Though Hillman doubts Hardy’s involvement, the exhumation of thegraves never escaped the great writer’s mind. In fact, 15 years after the experience,Hardy was reunited with Blomfield, whose first words were, “Do you rememberhow we found the man with two heads at St. Pancras?”

The Hanging GravesLonda, Indonesia

NAFTALI HILGER/LAIF/REDUXThe cliffside coffins of Londa, Indonesia, and human remains inside the cliff’s cave are

guarded by ancient wooden effigies called tau tau.

Hanging from crevices on a cliff face in Londa, Indonesia, are coffins containingthe remains of Torajans, an ethnic group whose long history of burial practices isvividly reflected here. Beginning in the 17th century, the Torajans begansuspending their dead from the rock to avoid grave-robbing by outside tribes. Thehigher any given coffin was placed, the greater the status of the corpse, but time isthe great leveler: Many of the older coffins have fallen to the ground. More recentburials have been slotted into neat recesses cut into the rock.

At the base of the cliff, you’ll see tombs that look like miniature Torajan houses—a burial custom that began in the 20th century, according to Tim Hannigan, authorof A Brief History of Indonesia. Above them, niches carved into the cliff hold creepy,colorfully dressed wooden effigies called tau tau, which guard the entrances to cavescontaining underground tombs. “No one knows when the tau tau were first used,”Hannigan tells LIFE. “They’re traditionally reclothed annually and given major

repairs every quarter century or so.”You can escape their eerie eyes by following a guide into the cave, where an oil

lamp illuminates coffins and bleached bones in the site’s oldest necropolis. “Thecaves were almost certainly very ancient places of burial—probably long before thearrival of the ancestors of the current inhabitants,” says Hannigan. “Basically, thewhole site reflects a living tradition rather than a fossil.”

NAFTALI HILGER/LAIF/REDUX

RCHPHOTO/ISTOCKPHOTO/GETTY

The Celebrity CemeteryPère-Lachaise, France

JOE SCHILLING/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTYPère-Lachaise is the site of the Charles Pigeon family plot, which is topped by a sculpture of

Pigeon and his wife in bed

In the late 18th century, Paris was running out of places to bury its dead.Cemeteries were overcrowded, and officials were worried about disease, so fournew cemeteries were planned outside the city proper—one of them a 110-acrehillside garden park called Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. Though the necropolis isnow the most famous in the world, no one wanted to be buried there at first.Hoping to drum up interest, French officials agreed to transplant the bodies of suchluminaries as poet Jean de la Fontaine and playwright Molière from oldercemeteries to the new ground.

The great novelist Honoré de Balzac helped popularize the grave gambit by name-checking the place in his work. In 1835’s Le Père Goriot, for instance, the novel’shero, having attended the title character’s funeral, looks out from Père-Lachaise

over Paris—“the shining world that he had wished to reach. He glanced over thathumming hive, seeming to draw a foretaste of its honey . . .”

Before long, burial at Père-Lachaise became a status symbol, reflected by theornate and often creepy tombs that were constructed there. Now part of Parisproper, Père-Lachaise is home to 70,000 burial plots and a veritable who’s who ofthe afterlife, including Jim Morrison, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde—not tomention Balzac, who left his shining world and joined Père Goriot in 1850.

ALFRED BUELLESBACH/VISUM/REDUXMacabre sculptures

BRIAN HARRIS/EYEVINE/REDUXA memorial to the victims of France’s Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

The Church of BonesThe Sedlec Ossuary, Czech Republic

DEA/M. BORCHI/DEAGOSTINI/GETTYThe Chapel of All Saints, part of a Roman Catholic ossuary just outside Prague, may seem

morbid today, but “the bone houses of centuries past were sacred sites,” Paul Koudounariswrites in The Empire of Death.

In the Kutná Hora suburb of Sedlec, about an hour outside Prague, stands aRoman Catholic cathedral containing an underground ossuary filled with morethan 40,000 skeletons. Nothing unusual about that, in theory—except that thesebones have been disinterred and artistically arranged to create chalices, candelabras,candleholders, a family coat of arms . . . and one spectacular chandelier composedof nearly every bone in the human body.

Known as the Church of Bones, the ossuary had its origins in 1278, when the kingof Bohemia sent the abbot of Sedlec’s Cistercian monastery to the Holy Land. Theabbot retrieved a jar of “holy soil” from Golgotha, the hill outside Jerusalem whereChrist was supposedly crucified. Back home, he spread the soil in the church

cemetery, making it a coveted spot for Bohemian burials. At the end of the 15thcentury, when the cemetery was closed, the skeletons were exhumed and piled inthe chapel, where in 1870 a local wood-carver set to turning them into macabreobjects of art. When he finally finished, the artist signed his work—in bone, ofcourse.

Indiana Jones’s FollyChauchilla Cemetery, Peru

ISTVAN KADAR/GETTYIn Peru’s Chauchilla cemetery, just outside the city of Nazca, the dead were mummified by

wrapping the bodies in cotton and then coating them in resin.

JUAN MANUEL CASTRO PRIETO/AGENCE VU/REDUX

Roughly 18 miles south of Nazca, a small city near the southern coast of Peru, liesthe ancient cemetery of Chauchilla, where bodies were mummified, possibly by the

Ica Chincha people, from probably A.D. 200 until at least the 9th century. Afterbeing clothed in cotton and treated with resin, the corpses were dried on woodenposts and placed in 12 open mud-brick tombs, creating one of the largestcemeteries in the Nazca area.

Thanks to the arid desert climate, the mummies are astonishingly well preserved,some sporting shoulder-length hair. More than 20 still remain, but many more mayhave been destroyed over the years. After it was discovered in the 1920s, forinstance, the area was ravaged by grave robbers, who plundered the remains forvaluables.

In 1997, the Peruvian government put a stop to the destruction and worked torestore the site. Now the area is “the only Peruvian archaeological site wheremummies can be seen in their original tombs,” says Ana Maria Cogorno, an experton Nazca culture and a guide with the Aracari travel agency. Along with entirebodies, you’ll find isolated “trophy heads,” some of which were perforated in theback and threaded with rope—possibly reflecting a magic ritual, Cogorno tells LIFE.

The area’s most famous mystery is reflected in the nearby Nazca lines, ancient artdrawn on the desert land that—perplexingly—can be seen only from the air. Alongwith the cemetery, the lines became an important element in Indiana Jones and theKingdom of the Crystal Skull, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, misrepresented both.“Indy is the most confused archaeologist in the world,” one Peruvian blogger said.“I was surprised not to see the Statue of Liberty next to the Mexican temples.”

The Burning PlaceTophet, Africa

LUCAS VALLECILLOS/VWPICS/REDUXThe Sanctuary of Baal Hammon and Tanit is the oldest cult site in what remains of

Carthage, now Tunis.

“There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus, extending its hands, palms upand sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereonrolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.” So wrote a Romanhistorian about Carthage, the Phoenician city-state where wealthy parents weresuspected of sacrificing their children to deities such as Cronus, the Greek god oftime, during the war-torn 4th and 2nd centuries B.C.

In 1921, French archaeologists unearthed infant burial grounds known as tophets(“places of burning” in Hebrew) on the outskirts of ancient Carthage in modern-day Tunisia. They found more than 20,000 urns packed with cremated infantbones, lending credence to the idea that Carthaginian children (from newborns tofour-year-olds) were sacrificed to diverse divinities—including the Phoenician godBaal Hammon and his consort, Tanit. Parental dedications left on stones above

their children’s remains took care to explain that the gods had “heard my voice andblessed me.”

LUCAS VALLECILLOS/VWPICS/REDUXRock carvings represent the children who may have been sacrificed here.

The Chapel of Glass EyesSt. Roch Cemetery, New Orleans

BRANDON ORE/360CITIES.NET/GETTYThe healing room in New Orleans’s St. Roch Cemetery is filled with sometimes gruesome

items left behind by people who claim to have been healed by Saint Roch, the patron saint ofgood health.

In 1867, during the yellow fever epidemic that swept New Orleans, the Germanpastor of Holy Trinity Catholic Church prayed to Saint Roch, the patron saint ofgood health, promising that if no one in his parish died of the dread disease, hewould build a chapel in the holy man’s honor. True to his word, when hisparishioners were spared, the pastor built a Gothic Revival chapel and a cemetery inthe city’s Faubourg Marigny neighborhood.

Though today the church is no longer used, the cemetery’s chapel remains acurious and creepy destination—thanks to a small room filled with prosthetics,thank-you notes, glass eyes, dental plates, coins, crutches, and other items broughtby people who claim to have been cured by the eccentric saint. “Saint Roch will giveyou what you want,” one saying goes, “but he always takes something else away.”

Like many New Orleans cemeteries—indeed, like the city itself—St. Roch isrumored to be haunted. In 1937, according to Gumbo Ya-Ya, a classic book ofCrescent City folklore, a ghost emerged from a tomb and sat on a grave every nightfor weeks. The burial grounds are reportedly also home to the specter of a largehound—appropriate, given that Saint Roch was the patron saint of both good

health . . . and dogs.

The Un-Burial GroundTrunyan Cemetery, Indonesia

JOHN STANMEYER/VII/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVESkulls are lined up near the “taru menyan” tree, whose perfumelike scent supposedly

eliminates the smell of decay in this Bali Aga cemetery in Indonesia.

Between the eastern shores of Batur Lake and the rim of Mount Batur liesTrunyan Village, the isolated home to one of northeast Bali’s conservative Bali Agacommunities. More than most Balinese, who adopted Indian-influenced Hindubeliefs, the Bali Aga retained their original prehistoric traditions, Tim Hannigan,author of A Brief History of Indonesia, tells LIFE. As a result, they deviate frommainstream Hinduism by not cremating their dead—a fact that led to the curiouscustoms seen in Trunyan’s most famous cemetery.

A remote spot accessible only by boat, the cemetery is home to a camplikeassemblage of 11 bamboo cages, each of which contains a corpse. Umbrellas shieldthe bodies in varying stages of decay, while relics of their mortal lives—cigarettes,money, and a few possessions—lay scattered on the ground. When a new corpseneeds a home, the body that was caged the longest is placed on a stone wall below

the nearby “taru menyan” tree, a banyan tree that gives off a fragrance that is said toeliminate the stench of decay. In fact, taru menyan means “nice-smelling” and is—not incidentally—the source of the village’s name.

Being exposed to flesh-eating insects, wild animals, and the elements may notseem conducive to eternal rest, but burial here is considered an honor among theBali Aga. In fact, the cemetery is reserved for married people who died of naturalcauses—signs of a “completed” life—while unmarried people and those who diedof diseases, accidents, and the like are buried elsewhere. “Everyone from thevillage,” one local guide told Kick the Grind TV’s Mike Corey, “we hope to beplaced here.”

The Garden of Good and EvilBonaventure Cemetery, Georgia

DANITA DELIMONT/ALAMYMade famous by the 1994 best-seller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Savannah’s

Bonaventure Cemetery.

“Dead time don’t change for nobody,” said Minerva, the voodoo priestess in JohnBerendt’s best-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. She was referring tothe liminal window between 11:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m.: “The half hour beforemidnight is for doin’ good,” she explained. “The half hour after midnight is for doin’evil.” In Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery, she did both. “Black magic neverstops,” she continued. “Once you start this s--t, you gotta keep it up . . . Or they killyou.”

Perched on a scenic bluff overlooking the Wilmington River, Bonaventure wasbuilt on the site of a Colonial plantation, the last remnant of which—a vine-coveredmound—now lies forgotten among the Victorian obelisks, marble mausoleums,and old-growth oaks that line the dusty avenues. But the cemetery’s most famous

feature—the eerie bronze “Bird Girl” featured on the cover of Berendt’s book—isno longer there, having been moved to avoid vandals in the wake of Midnight’ssuccess.

Bonaventure’s permanent residents include veterans of the American Revolutionand Civil War, the songwriter Johnny Mercer, and the poet Conrad Aiken—not tomention more than a few spirits, including that of little Gracie Watson, who died ofpneumonia in 1889. Visitors sometimes leave toys around the marble likeness ofthe girl and even spy her ghost playing in the grass. The giggling of other childrenand, more distressing, the wailing of babies have been heard here too, and many ofthe site’s mossy marble statues are said to move, grimace, or grin. “The dead,”according to yet another figure in Berendt’s book, “are very much with us inSavannah.”

MARILYN NIEVES/VETTA/GETTYThe cemetery is supposedly haunted by the ghost of young Gracie Watson.

The Mountain of the UndeadOkunoin, Japan

JEREMY HORNER/ALAMYIn Japan’s Okunoin cemetery, statues of Jizo Bosatsu, a kindly Buddhist saint, are

traditionally draped with red bibs by families who have lost children.

On the 21st day of the third moon of the second year of Showa (A.D. 835, in otherwords), the Japanese founder of Shingon Buddhism, Kobo Daishi, died and passedinto nirvana on Mount Koya in Wakayama Prefecture. According to legend, he waslaid to rest in the site’s mausoleum, but when monks later opened the tomb, theysaw that his complexion hadn’t changed and that his hair had grown. This led to thebelief that Daishi never died but continues to meditate, awaiting the coming of thefuture Buddha.

The location of the monk’s mausoleum, Okunoin, is one of the most sacred placesin Japan—not to mention the site of the country’s largest cemetery, a misty, mossyplace containing the remains of more than 200,000 souls. Here, you’ll find woodenmarkers memorializing stillborn babies, a monument erected by a pesticidecompany to honor dead termites, and another commemorating puffer fish that have

ended up as sushi. The cemetery is also known for statues depicting the JizoBosatsu, a bodhisattva (a kind of Buddhist saint), that are draped with red bibs byfamilies who have lost children.

Everything in this 1,200-year-old forest leads to Kobo Daishi’s mausoleum,located past a worship hall illuminated by more than 10,000 lanterns, which are saidto have been burning since the monk’s death. But did he ever really die? Of coursenot, say adherents of Shingon Buddhism, who believe that no one laid to rest inOkunoin is truly dead. Like Kobo Daishi, they’re only waiting.

Horrifying Hell GatesIs a Nicaraguan volcano the entrance to the underworld? Wasthe devil conjured up in English caves? Explore these and othersupposedly satanic sites

DROKEBYT/ALAMYThe 16th-century Spanish conquistadores dubbed Nicaragua’s Masaya volcano La Boca del

Infierno (“the Mouth of Hell”), literally believing that it was the entrance to theunderworld.

The Ghost CityFengdu, China

LEISA TYLER/LIGHTROCKET/GETTYDemonic figures fill China’s Fengdu, the place to learn about the afterlife.

Overlooking the northern bank of China’s Yangtze River, Ming Mountain is theunearthly home of Fengdu, the “Ghost City” that was, according to legend, foundedtwo thousand years ago by two Eastern Han Dynasty officials, Yin Changsheng andWang Fangping. Having fled the material world to devote themselves to Taoism,the men eventually became immortal—or so the story goes—after years of patientstudy. In fact, Yinwang, their names combined, means “King of Hell.” During theTang Dynasty, a temple depicting the horrors of hell was erected on the site,making it their spectral kingdom.

Over time, the temple was joined by shrines representing the afterlife, three ofwhich reflect the arduous tests that some Chinese believe souls must face afterdeath. The locations for the tests are “Nothing to Be Done Bridge,” “Ghost

Torturing Pass,” and Tianzi Palace. Adding to the effect, Fengdu is filled withsculptural depictions of ghosts and demons, many of which are clearly suffering thetorments of hell. The most famous is the “Ghost King,” a giant face carved in therock hill, the largest sculpture ever carved in rock.

Sound like a Disneyland of death? Consider that the city does indeed feature atheme-park ride that gives tourists a firsthand glimpse of what it’s like to go to(Chinese) hell.

CHINA PHOTOS/GETTYIn the Ghost City, tortured sinners are represented by statues.

JAMES WHITLOW DELANO/REDUXA Buddhist temple in Fengdu before it was demolished ahead of construction of the Three

Gorges Dam.

Satan’s CavesThe Hellfire Club, England

ROBERT STAINFORTH/ALAMYThe Diabolic members of the 18th-century’s Hellfire Club congregated in caves.

Beginning in 1748, Sir Francis Dashwood, the 11th baron le Despencer, tried tohelp impoverished workers in West Wycombe, England, by paying them toconstruct a quarter-mile tunnel into the village’s chalky hillside. But charity washardly on Dashwood’s mind when he asked his laborers to excavate secretchambers along the main tunnel—including a banquet hall constructed like acompass that contained niches for Italian statues.

The tunnel terminated in the complex’s so-called inner temple, which was reachedonly by crossing a subterranean stream that Dashwood dubbed Styx, after the riverthat leads to Hades in Greek mythology. Located hundreds of feet below St.Lawrence’s Church and Mausoleum—also constructed by Dashwood—the templeserved as the meeting place for a group known as the Hellfire Club. This notoriousorganization counted among its members such 18th-century British luminaries asthe influential English painter William Hogarth; John Wilkes, a journalist andpolitician; and the Earl of Sandwich.

The club’s “practice was rigorously pagan,” according to novelist Horace Walpole.

In fact, the members were suspected of practicing satanism and sex rites in theirtwice-monthly meetings, during which they supposedly dressed as abbots andcalled the women who visited them “nuns.” Though the club’s predictably decadentdissolution is too complicated to convey here, suffice it to say that its only lastinglegacy comes from the Earl of Sandwich, the putative inventor of the comestiblethat bears his name.

ENGLISH HERITAGE/HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTYThe Medmenham Abbey in West Wycombe, England.

BRIDGEMAN IMAGESMembers of an earlier iteration of the club often met in Somerset House, London.

The Mouth of HellMasaya Volcano, Nicaragua

KAREN KASMAUSKI/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVEThe 16th-century Spanish conquistadores were so frightened by the demonic reputation of

Nicaragua’s Masaya volcano that Friar Francisco de Bobadilla once placed a cross on thesummit.

When 16th-century Spanish conquistadores arrived on the Pacific coast of what isnow Nicaragua, they were terrified by the molten fury of the erupting Masayavolcano. Since few of them had seen a volcano before—least of all an active one—they were easily influenced by the natives’ belief that Masaya was a god. Indeed,indigenous tribes had routinely sacrificed children and virgins to the volcano on thepretext of sending them to “fetch water.” Aboriginal priests also climbed the craterto consult Chalchiuthlicue, a divinatory deity who lived in the lava—“an oldwoman,” one conquistador wrote, “with long and spiky hair, sharp fangs, andbreasts reaching her waist.”

The legend sounded downright demonic to the Spaniards. Moreover, the volcanoitself reflected the prevailing European belief that hell was located in the center of

the earth—about 3,555 miles from human civilization, to be exact. (That’s more orless the distance between New York and London, with no offense to either city.) Asa result, the conquistadores dubbed the volcano La Boca del Infierno (“the Mouthof Hell”). But in the end they decided that Masaya was not, in fact, the entrance tothe underworld. Why? In 1615, Friar Juan de Torquemada insisted that hell can’tcontain anything that causes joy (fire and light, for instance)—and, since humansouls aren’t physical, he stated, “there is no need for Hell to have mouths.”

The Crystal SepulchreActun Tunichil Muknal, Belize

JAD DAVENPORT/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVEThe ancient Maya left human sacrifices (above) in Belize’s Actun Tunichil Muknal cave

(following), which they considered an entrance to hell.

BLUE ICE/SHUTTERSTOCK

East of San Ignacio, Belize, after about an hour’s drive and another hour on footthrough the jungle, lies the Tapir Mountain Nature Reserve, the home of ActunTunichil Muknal, the ancient Mayan “Cave of the Crystal Sepulchre.” Discoveredin 1989, the three-mile cavern is reputedly an entrance to the Mayan hell, Xibalba—otherwise known as “the place of fear,” a kingdom overseen by the underworldlords Pus Master, Blood Gatherer, and Bone Scepter, among others. Here, along asubterranean stream, some 13 people (the youngest was just a year old) wereritualistically sacrificed by Mayan high priests at least a thousand years ago. (If thepottery, ritual objects, and pre-Columbian tools found at the site are any indication,they were probably killed between A.D. 700 and 900.)

The battered bones of these blunt-trauma victims are uncannily preserved—nonemore strikingly than those of the so-called Crystal Maiden, the mineralized remainsof an 18-year-old woman who has lain, legs akimbo, in the same spot for centuries.Though scholars aren’t entirely sure why these innocents were slaughtered, theymay have been sacrificed to the Mayan rain god Chac or to one of theaforementioned underworld lords. (They don’t call them Blood Gatherer and Bone

Scepter for nothing.) Whether it involved bludgeoning, decapitation, or theremoval of a still-beating heart from a living victim, human sacrifice was a way of life—and death—among the ancient Maya.

Ghastly Ghost TownsDid you know that an abandoned city lies underneath Seattle, orthat a radioactive amusement park exists in Ukraine?

ENOLABRAIN/ISTOCKPHOTO/GETTYA one-eyed doll stares from a window in Pripyat, the Ukrainian town abandoned after the

1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster turned the area into a forbidden radioactive zone.

The Ghostly GlacierKennecott Copper Mine, Alaska

MARC MORITSCH/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVENever mind the fact that Alaska’s remote Kennecott copper mine produced a fortune in the

1900s—its buildings were painted red because that was the cheapest color.

“I’ve got a mountain of copper up here,” one prospector wrote in 1900, describingthe eastern edge of the Kennicott Glacier in Alaska’s remote Valdez-Cordova area.“There’s so much of the stuff sticking out of the ground that it looks like a greensheep pasture in Ireland when the sun is shining at its best.”

His excitement was well-placed: Beginning in the late 1800s, increasing use ofelectricity, telephones, and automobiles led to greater demand for copper wiring,meaning that a potential fortune was buried in these hills. In 1911, after wealthyindustrialist J.P. Morgan helped finance a railroad to transport the copper from thesite, Kennecott Copper Corporation—composed of five mines and a mill town—became fully operational. (Due to a clerical mistake, the spelling of the site’s namediffers from the glacier’s.)

At the height of the operation, about 600 miners worked long, backbreaking hoursseven days a week for four or five dollars a shift, ultimately delivering an estimated$200 million worth of copper. But prices plunged during the Depression, and bythe late 1920s Kennecott’s “mountain of copper” was running out. The last train leftthe station in November 1938.

Until the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 (itlater became a National Historic Landmark), the tangle of tumbledown buildingsbecame a ghost town. According to legend, attempts to revitalize the area wererepeatedly sabotaged by the spirits of dead miners, who could be heard wailing inthe tundra, among the icefalls, and along the trestle bridges that they died whilebuilding.

The Dead ZoneChernobyl, Ukraine

GIVAGA/ISTOCKPHOTO/GETTYA sign warns of radiation from the Chernobyl power plant, where a 1986 disaster led

workers to abandon possessions, pets, a ship, and a kindergarten.

“There has been an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,” came thewarning over Soviet TV—fully two days after the Ukraine site’s reactor 4 explodedin the early morning hours of April 26, 1986. Caused by flawed design and workerincompetence, the world’s worst nuclear disaster released 400 times the radiation ofthe Hiroshima bomb into the atmosphere, leading to the deaths of 31 people in lessthan three months.

Many more died later—often because of Soviet secrecy. The day after theaccident, for instance, the nearly 49,000 residents of nearby Pripyat, a communitydesigned to house the plant’s workers, were told that the smoke they could see inthe sky was merely “steam discharge.” So they went about their business—until, ofcourse, they started getting sick. Thirty-one years later, Pripyat remains a ghost

town dominated by the ruins of an amusement park that never opened.Though it’s one of the most radioactively contaminated areas in the world, the

1,600-square-mile exclusion zone around the disaster site has become an unlikelytourist destination. You’ll even find a single small hotel in the remains of Pripyat,though its “bread is dry and old,” one Tripadvisor reviewer complained. The areahas also become an unlikely wildlife sanctuary, with boars and foxes moving into aworld that—for humans, at least—remains forever frozen in 1986.

GERD LUDWIG/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

GERD LUDWIG/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

The West’s Wildest SpotBodie, California

GUIDO TRAMONTANO GUERRITORE/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MY SHOT/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICCREATIVE

Once a gold rush boomtown, Bodie, California, is now filled with old slot machines, rustingcars, and abandoned buildings, like the Boone Store and Warehouse, following.

DAVID WALL PHOTO/LONELY PLANET IMAGES/GETTY

“A strange, mysterious country” is how 1913’s California Tourist Guide andHandbook described the area around Bodie, California, then a declining miningtown where you could—the book noted—stay at the Occidental Hotel for $2 anight or at the United States Hotel for $1. (Presumably the former had turn-downservice.)

Founded after four prospectors discovered gold nearby around Mono Lake in1859, Bodie was nothing but a humble mining camp until 1875, when a minecollapse revealed a rich vein of ore, attracting San Francisco speculators. Soon theonce-secluded spot was filled with more prostitutes, dance halls, and thieves thanany other Wild West outpost. “There are at least sixty saloons in the place and not asingle church,” one San Francisco paper carped in 1879. Violence was so commonthat locals would ask, “Have a man for breakfast?” (Meaning, “Was anyonemurdered last night?”)

The first signs of decline appeared in the early 1880s, when ore supplies dwindledas costs began to rise. In 1962, after years of neglect, Bodie became the country’sbest-preserved ghost town when the state of California took over its management,

leading to its designation as a National Historic Landmark and State Historic Park.Though only about 5 percent of its original structures remain, they’re still stockedwith bottles, pianos, slot machines, pool tables, stagecoaches, and, yes, coffins. Butdoes gold remain in them thar hills? You’ll never know: Metal detectors are strictlyforbidden.

The Dragon’s LairHo Thuy Tien, Vietnam

CLAUDIO SIEBER/BARCROFT MEDIA/GETTYA weather-beaten dragon looms over central Vietnam’s Ho Thuy Tien, an abandoned water

park where crocodiles were left behind in cages after the park closed.

No one comes to Ho Thuy Tien by accident. The abandoned water park outsidethe city of Hue in central Vietnam is not in any guidebook; nor is it on any map. Fora long time, the site was a well-kept secret among backpackers in Southeast Asia,who shared directions scrawled on napkins or by word of mouth. But even if youknow how to get there, the roads are rough, and few locals can correct your course,so good luck if you get lost.

The history of Ho Thuy Tien (the name means “Daffodil Lake”) is something of amystery too. Opened in 2004 at a reported cost of $3 million, it struggled financiallyuntil it was abandoned to the jungle a few years later. Now the site’s centerpiece—an enormous dragon—sits atop a moldering aquarium that rises from the lake.Foliage is overtaking the algae-covered water slides, under which crocodiles were

cruelly left behind in cages—kept alive only because locals fed them live chickens.As a destination for urban explorers, Ho Thuy Tien is allegedly more popular now

than it was when it was open. Visitors can explore empty passageways and climbinto the dragon’s maw to gaze out over the lake through graffiti-covered fangs. “Myadrenaline was flowing the whole time,” one traveler told HuffPost, which helpedput the site on the map—well, sort of—in a 2016 story. In the end, Ho Thuy Tiencan feel sad as well as scary, though the crocodiles were reportedly saved by animalactivists who recently moved them to a wildlife park in northern Vietnam.

Route 66’s RuinsGlenrio, Texas–New Mexico

REX CURRY/ALAMYRoute 66, created in 1926, eventually turned Glenrio into a tourist way station that included

the Longhorn Motel (above), bars, and cafés.

For six decades, Route 66, the iconic two-lane highway that cut across the countryfrom Chicago to Los Angeles, was the path of westward promise for such travelersas On the Road author Jack Kerouac and Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.But when increased auto traffic led to the creation of Interstate 40 decades later, thetowns that had flourished along the fabled road fell into decline—among themGlenrio, which had straddled the Texas–New Mexico border for almost eightdecades.

The town had its humble beginnings in 1905, when farmers began settling in thearea’s high plains. A year later, the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf Railway lineestablished a local whistle-stop that led to the building of a post office, a hotel,grocery stores, a gas station, and cafés. With the creation of Route 66 in 1926, atourist welcome station was opened, offering water for overheated radiators even as

the town itself became a neon oasis for tired travelers.Seventeen of Glenrio’s old buildings still stand today—including the State Line

Bar, an art moderne–style Texaco filling station, the Little Juarez Cafe, and the so-called First/Last Motel. If you wander down Glenrio’s dusty main street, you’ll findthe remains of Route 66, still following the tracks of the forgotten railroad thatfueled this once-thriving little town.

JOHNNY HAGLUND/LONELY PLANET IMAGES/GETTY

JEREMY NIXON/ALAMY

The Subterranean CitySeattle’s Underground

CHRIS CHEADLE/ALL CANADA PHOTOS/GETTYAfter Seattle was ravaged by the fire of 1889, a new city was built over the original

settlement, which was later forgotten.

Just after 2:15 p.m. on June 6, 1889, a cabinetmaker in a Seattle woodworkingshop was heating glue on a gasoline fire when it spilled, igniting the turpentine-soaked wood chips that covered the floor. Raging for more than 12 hours, the blazeleveled the city’s wooden buildings. In the inferno’s aftermath, residents rebuilt—with brick, of course—on top of the ruins. The streets of the new settlement wereregraded two stories above the original, and the subterranean space became knownas the Seattle Underground.

For a while, people continued using the old ground floors, which were nowbasements lit by skylights. “Bathhouses where lumberjacks and prospectors couldclean up were typical underground businesses,” according to Dietrich Sachs, a guidefor Beneath the Streets, which conducts tours of the area. Outcast Chinese

immigrants likely frequented underground gambling parlors, opium dens, andwhorehouses, all of which were also common aboveground—a fact not lost on anentrepreneurial German immigrant named Friedrich Trump, the grandfather of ourcurrent president, who leased a restaurant that was also a brothel.

In 1907, the threat of bubonic plague led officials to condemn the area, and overtime the existence of the Seattle Underground became nothing but a legend—until1954, when Bill Speidel rediscovered the area while researching the city’s past andbegan conducting underground tours. Unfortunately, the history of the fabledspace will always remain incomplete. “We all know there is more to the story,” saysSachs, “but sometimes the world moves too fast.”

LOST BULLET/ISTOCKPHOTO/GETTY

The Burning MineCentralia, Pennsylvania

SALLY MONTANA/13 PHOTO/REDUXLethal gases emerge from a fissure in an abandoned section of Highway 61 near Centralia,

Pennsylvania, where a 1962 landfill fire eventually forced the evacuation of the town.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Just before Memorial Day in 1962,firefighters in the coal-mining town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, set fire to a landfillwithout knowing that it rested on top of an old strip-mining pit. Left to burn, thefire spread into abandoned underground mines and eventually beneath the townitself. “Through a monumental series of blunders and inadequate attention over theyears, it got to the size underground where it basically destroyed the town ofCentralia and everybody had to move,” David Dekok, author of Fire Underground,told the Associated Press.

By 1983 fissures in the ground were belching out lethal levels of carbon monoxideand carbon dioxide, spurring a relocation program that eventually left the town amaze of cracked streets, smoldering earth, abandoned houses—and an inspiration

for the video game Silent Hill. Signs now warn curious visitors of danger fromasphyxiation and sinkholes, but that hasn’t kept a handful of residents fromremaining. (As of January 2017, Centralia’s total population was around five.) Noone expects the fire to end anytime soon, but experts say the fuel will eventually runout—in about 250 years.

The Forgotten FortressHashima Island, Japan

SANKEI/GETTYMore than four decades after its coal-mining operations ended, Hashima island is now filled

with abandoned apartment buildings and schools.

Known as Midori Nashi Shima (“the Island Without Green”), Hashima is a 16-acre landmass off Japan’s Nagasaki coast. Now an abandoned ruin, it was for a timethe most densely populated area in the world—thanks to the discovery ofsubterranean coal beds in 1810. The Mitsubishi Corporation turned it into amining operation and built a network of concrete structures that housed up to5,250 workers, giving the site a forbidding, fortresslike appearance and leading toyet another nickname: Gunkanjima, or “Battleship Island.” By 1941, Hashima wasproducing 400,000 tons of coal a year, but when the fuel finally ran out in 1974, theisland was abandoned to the typhoons of the surrounding sea.

In 2009, after some of its structures were reinforced, Hashima reopened as atourist destination. Six years later, it became a UNESCO World Heritage site—acontroversial designation, since so many of the miners had been Korean laborers

forced to work during Japan’s colonial rule. During World War II, they were joinedby captive Chinese. “The common stories I heard . . . was that they wereenormously hungry,” one expert told CNN. “The meals were miserable, and whenthey could not go to work they were tortured, punched, and kicked.”

More common deprivations prevailed, too. “There were no bushes, no flowers, wedidn’t even know what the cherry blossom was,” said one former resident. “We toldthe seasons from one another by listening to the wind or looking at the color of theocean and the sky.” Over time, of course, nature had its way: The forlorn ruins ofthe Island Without Green are now overrun with vegetation.

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN/GETTY

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN/GETTY

The End

FRANK MUCKENHEIM/VISUM CREATIVE/REDUXNot everyone—or everything—rests in peace in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Opened in1839, it was once the city’s most fashionable burial ground but was pillaged by vandals in

the 1970s and supposedly became home to satanists, the spectral Woman in White, and thepredatory King Vampire of the Undead.

The World’s Scariest PlacesEDITOR/WRITER J.I. BakerEDITORIAL DIRECTOR Kostya KennedyDIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Christina LiebermanART DIRECTOR Mimi ParkCOPY CHIEF Parlan McGawCOPY EDITOR Joel Van LiewPICTURE EDITOR Rachel HatchWRITER-REPORTER Amy Lennard GoehnerPHOTO ASSISTANT Alessandra BiancoTIME INC. BOOKSPUBLISHER Margot SchupfVICE PRESIDENT, FINANCE Cateryn KiernanVICE PRESIDENT, MARKETING Jeremy BiloonEXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, MARKETING SERVICES Carol PittardDIRECTOR, BRAND MARKETING Jean KennedySALES DIRECTOR Christi CrowleyASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, BRAND MARKETING Bryan ChristianASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, FINANCE Jill EaryesASSISTANT GENERAL COUNSEL Andrew GoldbergASSISTANT DIRECTOR, PRODUCTION Susan ChodakiewiczSENIOR MANAGER, FINANCE Ashley PetrasovicBRAND MANAGER Katherine BarnetPREPRESS MANAGER Alex VoznesenskiyASSOCIATE PROJECT AND PRODUCTION MANAGER Anna Riego Muñiz

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Kostya KennedyCREATIVE DIRECTOR Gary StewartDIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Christina LiebermanEDITORIAL OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Jamie Roth MajorSENIOR EDITOR Alyssa SmithMANAGER, EDITORIAL OPERATIONS Gina ScauzilloASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR Allie Adams

ASSISTANT ART DIRECTOR Anne-Michelle GalleroCOPY CHIEF Rina BanderASSISTANT EDITOR Courtney MifsudTIME INC. PREMEDIA

Richard K. Prue (Director), Richard Shaffer (Production), Keith Aurelio, KevinHart, Rosalie Khan, Patricia Koh, Marco Lau, Brian Mai, Rudi Papiri, ClaraRenauroSPECIAL THANKS Brad Beatson, Melissa Frankenberry, Kristina Jutzi, Simon Keeble,Seniqua Koger, Kate Roncinske, Kristen Zwicker

Copyright © 2017 Time Inc. Bookse-ISBN: 978-1-68330-103-5Published by LIFE Books, an imprint of Time Inc.Books, 225 Liberty Street, New York, NY 10281All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by anyelectronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrievalsystems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer,who may quote brief passages in a review.

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