World's Creepiest Places

10-27-2007

Instead of a roundup of the trite and not-so-true haunted hotels around the world, Concierge.com decided to write a list of the places that are genuinely the creepiest in the world, from a dive site among WWII wrecks in Micronesia to a tour through the eerie, abandoned town near Chernobyl in the Ukraine. You'd be wrong to dismiss these destinations as merely spooky stop-offs, too. Many have true historical significance (the Paris Catacombs and its links to the French Revolution), while others are destinations of great beauty (the Easter Islands in the Pacific Ocean).

So in the spirit of the season, below are 13 of the world's weirdest destinations.

1) Bhangarh, India
India's Bhangarh, in the Rajasthan region north of Jaipur, is a town with a mysterious history. Built in the 1630s, it was abruptly abandoned ten years later for reasons that are still unclear. Legend has it that after a convoluted series of events involving a princess and a jar of enchanted oil, a massacre occurred and the town was never repopulated. Nowadays there are tourists aplenty by day, but no one stays at night. This might have something to do with the supposed curse placed on the town by a jealous shaman.

2) Mütter Museum, Philadelphia
From the sliced human head floating in a glass case, à la Damien Hirst, to the gruesome collection of preserved presidential tumors and a plaster cast of Siamese twins Chang and Eng (as well as their actual conjoined livers), Philadelphia's Mütter museum is a must-see, especially for those who found the movie Dead Ringers oddly compelling.

3) Truk Lagoon, Chuuk, Micronesia
A ship ripped neatly in half offers a perfect cutaway view of life and death on the high seas. Much of the Japanese Navy's WWII fleet lies in the shallow Truk Lagoon in a volcanic valley in Micronesia, part of the Caroline Islands 3,200 miles southwest of Hawaii. While swimming through the wrecks, you can spot gas masks, sake cups, and the odd "human remain."

4) Sonora Witchcraft Market, Mexico City, Mexico
Witches packed into tightly spaced stalls proffer advice and spells for $10, promising quick ends to poverty and spousal infidelity, while some rather unhappy-looking exotic animals—iguanas, frogs, and wild birds—are for sale in cages. This is the Sonora Witchcraft Market, open daily to pilgrims from Mexico City and far beyond who come to have their fortunes read and attempt to find a shortcut to a better life. The market is a labyrinth of stalls that cover a few city blocks, and it's the regional source for "spiritual" stuff ranging from potions derived from ancient Aztec recipes to Buddha statues.

5) Easter Island, Chile
One of the most unnerving things about the 30-foot carved heads that dot Easter island is that they're not looking out at you as you arrive; the famous unsmiling moai sculptures look inward from the sea, as if guilty of some crime. Perhaps it has something to do with the virtual disappearance of the people who made them. At only 63 square miles, tiny Easter Island is home to more mystery for its size than just about anyplace else on earth. The Rapa Nui people, nearly extinct a century ago but flourishing now, kept no written records of how they moved the enormous moai around the island, sometimes as far as 14 miles, from the volcanic quarry where they were carved.

6) Manchac Swamp, Louisiana
The Manchac Swamp, a.k.a. the "haunted swamp," near New Orleans is a Southern Gothic fan's dream. An imprisoned voodoo queen is said to have cast a curse on these watery surroundings around the turn of the last century, resulting in the disappearance of three hamlets in a hurricane in 1915. The occasional corpse still surfaces in this otherwise untouched bird sanctuary, left alone by commercial development for more than 100 years.

7) Bran Castle, Bran, Romania
All that's missing from Dracula's Castle, as Bran Castle is known, is a stormy night and a lightning bolt to illuminate the scene. A cloud of legend, local folklore, and literary pedigree hang over the dramatic fortress, perched 200 feet above the Romanian town of Bran. The name comes from the notoriously sadistic tyrant Vlad the Impaler, known as Vlad Dracula, who is said to have used the castle as an occasional base of operations. Vlad earned his nickname by hoisting tens of thousands of enemies on stakes; one engraving shows him feasting alone at a table surrounded by a veritable forest of his victims hanging on spikes. Bram Stoker got wind of Vlad's legend and, after a visit to Romania, modeled Count Dracula's castle on this one.

8) Paris Catacombs, Paris, France
You can easily see why Victor Hugo and Anne Rice have set stories in Paris's famous Catacombs. Snaking some 187 miles through underground passages around the city, only a tiny portion is open to the public—it's said that the rest is patroled by the legendary cataflics, a special underground police force. Though guided tours are available, it's more creepy and effective to go on your own, when it's just you and millions of bones lit by the occasional low-wattage bulb. The catacombs were originally a Roman-era quarry, but when the Innocents Cemetery in central Paris started overflowing to the point of being a public health hazard in 1785, the tunnels came into their present state.

9) Winchester House, San Jose, California
It's said that Sarah Winchester, heiress to the arms company, was told by a soothsayer that the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles would haunt her unless she moved from Connecticut to the West and built a house that could never be finished in her lifetime. Construction started in 1884 in San Jose, California, and kept going nonstop for 38 years until her death. Now the house's 160 rooms are haunted by her madness and packed with bizarre details: Staircases go straight into the ceiling, doors open onto blank walls, spider motifs abound, and candelabras, coat hooks, and steps are arranged in multiples of 13.

10) Szoborpark, Budapest, Hungary
A towering Lenin addresses a now-absent city square, while Marx and Engels, wearing holy robes and carrying religious-looking texts (surely their own), are crumbling nearby. Budapest's Szoborpark is a collection of retired Soviet-era iconography just outside Budapest.

11) Abbey of Thelema, Cefalù, Sicily, Italy
Aleister Crowley is perhaps the world's most infamous occultist, and this now-overgrown stone ranch-style house with hallways full of dark pagan frescoes was once the world capital of his satanic orgies. Or so it was reported in the 1920s. Crowley is now known for his famous fans, including Jimmy Page and Marilyn Manson, and the fact that he appears on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. He founded the Abbey of Thelema in 1920 in the beach town of Cefalù, Sicily. It became a free-love commune with a dark side: Newcomers were forced to spend the night in the "Chamber of Nightmares," where, high on hashish and opiates, they stared at frescoes of earth, heaven, and hell. After a British society dandy named Raoul Loveday died of a fever contracted at the Abbey, the press had a field day, leading an embarrassed Mussolini to expel the commune in 1923. Notorious underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger unearthed the compound in 1945 and made a movie there, although mysteriously the film was subsequently lost. The Abbey is now a collapsed semi-ruin, overrun with vegetation, but inside there are some original hellish frescoes that Crowley used to scare his disciples into shape.

12) Mary King's Close, Edinburgh, Scotland
Hidden below Edinburgh's medieval Old Town is a series of subterranean streets with an unsavory past. Mary King's Close is where plague victims were quarantined and left to die in the 17th century, and paranormal activity abounds down there. You might, for instance, feel some gentle tugging at your hands and legs by an unseen force. The cause is believed to be the ghost of Annie, a young girl abandoned by her parents in 1645.

13) Chernobyl, Pripyat, Ukraine
Walk through the abandoned town of Pripyat in the Ukraine, and you'll find a large-scale crime scene abandoned in a hurry: A nursery full of children's shoes, and apartment complexes with the morning newspaper, dated April 28, 1986, open on the breakfast table. Two days before, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, minutes away, melted down, but it took 48 hours for the authorities to alert locals and clear them out of the world's biggest nuclear disaster site. Now that radiation levels are safe for short-term exposure, Chernobyl's nuclear complex has become an unlikely tourist attraction since opening to visitors in 2002.

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