The world offers a great abundance of amazing places: breathtakingly beautiful natural wonders, culturally significant sites, and unforgettable cities and villages, many of which we’ve already showcased. As Halloween draws near, we feel a change of tone is in order – so here are some of the world’s scariest places you can actually travel to:
10. Lome Voodoo Bazaar
You’d probably think voodoo comes from the Caribbean, but it actually originated in Africa – and the great Bazaar in the Togolese capital of Lome seems to be the modern epicenter of the practice.
This unusual market has everything you need for everything from healing spells to presumably conjuring up demons. There’s a large number of, umm, produce on offer, from herbs to animal limbs and especially great number of animal heads. Even without the voodoo spells or curses, the sight of the stands filled with various parts from horses, crocodiles, monkeys, snakes, and many other creatures is certainly a bizarre, dread-inducing image.
9. Beelitz Heilstätten Sanatorium
There’s something really creepy about abandoned buildings, perhaps because they are glaring illustrations of the chaos and decay that is the destiny of all things. This feeling is even worse when the place used to be a hospital, a place you know people once suffered and died in.
Once such place is Beelitz Heilstätten, an old tuberculosis sanatorium and nursing home located on the outskirts of Berlin. It was closed in 2000 after being in use for about a century (Adolf Hitler himself was treated there, after an injury sustained during the First World War) and although it has since fallen into disrepair, there’s still plenty to remind people of its previous use. The secluded site has also seen a number of gruesome murders over the years, both before and after it was abandoned, which adds another level of foreboding to the place.
8. Amsterdam Torture Museum
In addition to extraordinary works of art, literature, music, and architecture, Europe also has a rich heritage of torture methods and instruments, one that deserves a museum of its own.
One of the best such places where one can get up close and personal with the sadistic means by which justice was done in the past is the Torture Museum in Amsterdam. Just mentioning the names of instruments like “The Skull Cracker”, “The Rack”, or “The Inquisition Chair” are enough to make chills run down your spine – and the uneasy feeling grows when you consider the fact that this was the way people treated other people not too long ago.
7. Aokigahara Forest
Lying in the shadow of the majestic Mount Fuji, Aokigahara holds the unenviable title of world’s most popular suicide spots. Dozens, sometimes even more than one hundred people end their lives in the forest every year, a lot of the times by hanging. Many bodies are thus left suspended by the tree branches, giving the place an even creepier feel, so much so that annual searches have to be carried out by the police to clear the place. Authorities have placed signs in Japanese and English asking people to reconsider (with messages like:”Your life is precious” or “Think it over one more time”), but this doesn’t seem to have had any effect.
6. Connecticut Museum of the Occult
Established by famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, the Connecticut Museum of the Occult is a little house of horrors – whether you believe their ghostbusting credentials or not.
The museum houses the extensive collection the Warrens gathered in more than six decades of examining numerous haunted places across America. Among these items are voodoo dolls, mummies, magic mirrors, and mysterious books, but the star of the show is certainly a creepy doll named Annabelle, which is supposedly haunted and “responsible” for at least one death. Whether or not this is actually true and it really does still move and growl at visitors as the owners claim, it is certainly not an image you want in your head while alone in the dark (see below and tell us what you think!).
5. Sedlec Ossuary
Sedlec Ossuary, located beneath a church in the eponymous Czech town, looks like something out a horror flick or a deranged serial killer’s basement. It contains the bones of as many as 70,000 people exhumed from local cemeteries, arranged as some kind of strange decorations. The centerpiece is the nightmarish chandelier of bones hanging from the ceiling, which is said to contain at least one of every bone in the human body.
4. The Gate to Hell, Derweze
You know something really leaves an impression on visitors when it is known as the Gate to Hell. Derweze is a small village in the Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan which also happens to lie in the middle of an area rich in natural gas.
In the early 70s, geologists drilled into a cavern filled with natural gas, which collapsed prompting those in charge of the site to burn the poisonous gas discharge. The fire was expected to use up all the fuel within days, but more than four decades later the 230-foot wide hole in the middle of the desert is still burning.
3. La Isla de las Munecas
Let’s face it: dolls and clowns are scary. And while we’re thankful there’s no place (at least to our knowledge) where clowns roam freely among the general public, there is a place where countless dolls are strewn among the foliage, an island near Mexico City called La Isla de las Muñecas (The Island of the Dolls).
Scattered around the canals in the Xochimilco borough of Mexico City, these dolls were gathered by a local man called Julián Santana Barrera, who said he put them there to keep away evil spirits after he found the corpse of a dead girl in the water – which is just about the creepiest thing you’re likely to hear all day (if it wasn’t for the rest of this article, of course).
2. Paris Catacombs
The Catacombs are a dark underworld beneath the City of Lights. The word itself – which has quite an eerie feel about it – initially described the underground tunnels dug beneath Rome where the dead were laid to rest.
The Paris Catacombs were established over two centuries ago, when there was literally no more room in the French capital’s cemeteries, so millions of skeletons had to be moved into the old mines beneath the city. It is a dark, narrow underground maze with walls made entirely of carefully arranged human bones (mostly skulls and femurs), some of them set an almost artistic way – like a heart shape made out of skulls embedded in the wall.
Visitors entering the ossuary are greeted with the chilling message Arrête, c’est ici l’empire de la mort (Halt! This is the empire of the dead!).
1. The Smoked Mummies of Papua New Guinea
The Anga people in the remote Morobe highlands of Papua New Guinea have a very weird way of remembering their dead: instead of burying them, they mummify them by smoking and afterwards place them in bamboo cages, from where they overlook the valleys and villages below.
We won’t go into details regarding the entire process –suffice to say, it is very efficient, with remains as old as two centuries reportedly scattered among the cliffs. And although the area is indeed quite secluded, it is by no means inaccessible, even for the casual tourists just wandering around those parts, who could easily find themselves face to face with one of these mummies.
