12.
Aokigahara Forest
Aokigahara is a woodland at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan that makes The Blair Witch Project forest look like Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. It probably has something to do with all the dead bodies scattered around.
What Niagara Falls is to weddings, Aokigahara is to suicide. How many suicides does it takes for a place to get that reputation? A dozen? Fifty?
More than 500 fucking people have taken their own lives in Aokigahara since the 1950s.
The trend has supposedly started after Seicho Matsumoto published his novel Kuroi Kaiju (Black Sea of Trees) where two of his characters commit suicide there. After that-always eager to prove they are bizarrely susceptible to suggestion-hundreds of Japanese people have hanged themselves among the countless trees of the Aokigahara forest, which is reportedly so thick that even in high noon it's not hard to find places completely surrounded by darkness.
Also skulls.
Besides bodies and homemade nooses, the area is littered with signs displaying such uplifting messages like "Life is a precious thing! Please reconsider!" or "Think of your family!"
"If you commit suicide here, bears will poop on your corpse."
In the 70s, the problem got national attention and the Japanese government began doing annual sweeps of the forest in search of bodies. In 2002, they found 78. But who knows how many they missed? In all likelihood there probably is a hanged person somewhere in Aokigahara on any given day. You can see some of them here. WARNING, NSFS (Not Safe For Soul).
By the way, if an entire dark forest full of hanged corpses wasn't bad enough, a few years ago some people noticed that a lot of the dead in Aokigahara probably had cash or jewelry on them. Thus began the proud Japanese tradition of Aokigahara Scavenging where people are running around the Death Forest, looking for dead guys to loot.
11.
The Overtoun Bridge
Located near Scotland's charming little village of Milton in the peaceful burgh of Dumbarton, the Overtoun Bridge is a local arch construction where no human beings have ever died in any suspicious circumstances whatsoever over the last few decades.
However, during that span, for reasons we can't begin to possibly understand, hundreds and hundreds of dogs have killed themselves there. It appears that dogs have been plunging off of Overtoun since the early 60s, at a rate of one animal a month... bringing the total number today to around 600 mutts, who for some reason, decided to end it all.
"Please don't make me do something like this again."-Photoshop Department.
And we're not talking about a series of unfortunate accidents that could have been avoided with a simple guard rail. People who actually witnessed the reported dogs willingly climbing the parapet wall and leaping to their doom with dumbass doggy grins on their faces. Whether they were crying blood remains to be confirmed.
Theories on why is this happening have been all over the place, from particularly aromatic rodents to a simple stream of bizarre coincidences. We call bullshit on both seeing as--to paraphrase Ian Fleming--"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action and over 600 is clearly the work of an ancient Sumerian demon or some shit."
"Because, for real, that shit is straight up like eight different kinds of crazy. Shit."
To further drive the point home, it has been observed that certain dogs that jumped off the bridge and survived, fucking climbed back up and THREW THEMSELVES TO THEIR DEATHS ALL OVER AGAIN.
Because the great Overtoun demon's hunger will not be appeased with tries. He demands fresh canine blood, and lots of it.
10.
Winchester Mystery House
In San Jose there is this house. It is a gigantic, sprawling 160-room complex designed like a maze, with mile-long hallways, secret passages, dead ends, doors opening to blank walls and staircases leading to the ceiling.
It's the work of Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune. In the late 19th century, deeply saddened over the death of her husband and daughter, she visited a Boston medium who told her she was haunted by the spirits of all the victims of Winchester rifles. She needed to make peace with them by... always be building a house. As in, never stop building a house, or else she will die. What a nice thing to say to someone who has just lost her family. There is no way this could end with Sarah building a real life version of the Addams Family household.
In 1884, Winchester started construction of her new San Jose mansion, which has gone on non-stop for 38 years right until her death. Despite modern contractors taking about that much time to put in the wooden paneling in your kitchen, the Winchester mansion eventually grew so big you could, in all seriousness, get lost in it. And getting lost was the idea, the crazy twists and turns and dead ends were intended to confuse the ghosts. Sarah was kind of a jerk like that.
Oh, bitch...!
But pissing off vengeful spirits was just one of the many architectural choices for the mansion. The entire Winchester Mystery House was decorated with a constant spiderweb motif--which Sarah believed had some spiritual meaning--and everything from the hooks on the walls to candle holders has been arranged around the number 13, supposedly for good luck. Yeah... for someone trying to free herself from ghosts, Winchester did everything but sacrifice a baby goat to Satan to assure her house will be haunted.
9.
The Sedlec Ossuary
Remember when we said Aokigahara was the Niagara falls of suicide? Well, for centuries the abbot in the small Czech town of Sedlec has been the Niagara Falls for dead people, regardless of cause of death. Ever since someone sprinkled soil from the Holy Land on the local cemetery in the 13th century, people from all over Europe started demanding to be buried there and the Sedlec graveyard kept growing until 1870, when the priests decided to finally do something about all those surplus bones lying around. Something insane.
Bam! Chandelier full of bones!
Today, the Sedlec Ossuary is a chapel famous for being decorated with tens of thousands of human bones. This macabre style of interior design was the work of Czech woodcarver Frantisek Rint who, for some reason, was hired to organize the church's extensive skeleton collection. The results were huge mounds of human remains in the four corners of the chapel, a terrifying chandelier built from every bone in the human body, and a massive skull coat of arms adorning the entrance.
We realize this is the Czech Republic and all, but it has been 27 years, surely Poltergeist was released out there already. Like, maybe last year or something? Why are they still playing with human bones as if they were Satan's Lego blocks and making them sit through Mass every single day for almost 140 years now? On the Tempting Fate scale, the only thing worse would be to start using some of the skulls as ceremonial mugs or chamber pots.
At this point, does it really surprise anyone that the church became the inspiration for Dr. Satan's lair in the Rob Zombie movie House of 1000 Corpses?
8.
San Zhi Resort
What do you get when you cross a series of abandoned, rusting, futuristic UFO-shaped buildings with a series of mysterious deaths covered up by the government? How about the ghost town-slash-tourist resort of San Zhi, located just outside Taipei and inside your worst nightmares.
The exclusive San Zhi resort in Taiwan was supposed to be the destination for bored, rich folk who always wondered what it would be like to live inside an over-sized hockey puck. Construction of Pod City started around the 80s but was quickly shut down after a series of mysterious on-site fatal accidents... or it could have been due to Godzilla attacks for all we know. There is actually very little official information on San Zhi. We can't even confirm how many people died there or if they screamed something about eyeless children eating their souls. The whole thing is shrouded in secrecy.
A hotel? No! This is a... a weather balloon!
Come on dude, don't be a pussy, this place looks legit.
Wait a second... abandoned resort town in the middle of nowhere, mysterious deaths, lack of any official information... where have we seen this before?
We also would've accepted "Our nightmares."
7.
Prypiat
A whole lot of you just got deja vu looking at the above picture. Specifically, those of you who have played Call of Duty 4, as there is an entire level that takes place there. If you thought the idea of a completely silent, abandoned, radioactive city was typical video game apocalyptic fantasy, you were wrong.
Prypiat is in the northern Ukraine and once housed the workers and scientists of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant. Founded in the 70s, it held as many as 50,000 people. Then in 1986, according to a footnote in the official Soviet records, there was a small malfunction in the Chernobyl reactor, so for safety reasons the city was evacuated.
Since then, Prypiat has been desolated, its buildings decaying, the giant Ferris Wheel just standing there all alone with nobody to ride it. The city actually had an entire amusement park for the families of the Chernobyl employees. Because when you are living next to a nuclear reactor which was outdated even by 1986 Soviet standards, the only thing on your mind is bumper cars.
The city is located in what is known as the Zone of Alienation, the 30-kilometer radius directly affected by the Chernobyl "minor technical difficulty" over 20 years ago. Despite that, Prypiat is now opened to the public because the radiation levels have apparently went down significantly over the years. We guess we have a different view on radiation than the government of Ukraine. They obviously have a scale for it, while we consider any radiation a very bad thing.
Aside from the inherent risk of getting bit by a radioactive snail and becoming the lamest superhero ever, there is another reason why you will never see us among the tourists occasionally visiting Prypiat.
The fucking nursery. We told you this was a place built for families and wouldn't you know it, they have a nursery, which according to certain claims is currently paved with baby shoes and abandoned dolls. So, Prypiat is basically an abandoned radioactive ghost Soviet baby amusement park.
Coming Soon to a theater near you!
6.
Isla de las Munecas
Located smack in the middle of a swamp in the heart of Aztec country is the popular tourist destination La Isla de las Munecas, or Island of the Dolls, a name missing at least two adjectives and the word "fucking." To get there, visitors have to hire a guide to take them by boat through the canals of Xochimilco, then to the island itself, all the while making the guide promise on a stack of Bibles that he's not going to abandon them once they reach their destination.
"Seriously, Pablo? We will haunt your ass."
Not that he'd do that, right? It's just an old abandoned island, once occupied by a single inhabitant named Don Julian Santana Barrera, who seemed to have a knack for doll-collecting. So what? Lots of people collect dolls.
Oh. Charming.
The legend goes that years ago a small girl drowned in the canals near the island, and not long after her death, Barrera found her corpse doll floating in the water. Then he found another one. By that point he was hooked on a new and exciting hobby.
One that will cost tourists sleep for decades.
Over the course of the next 50 years, the guy collected thousands of discarded dolls, which he thought would somehow serve as companions for the dead girl. Makes sense. Everyone knows Mexican girls enjoy mutilated trash dolls displayed in gruesome manners meant to simulate acts of torture and suicide. We try not to be too judgmental about other people's cultures.
However, it does seem that the offerings weren't such a success, considering that in 2001 Julian passed away ... by drowning in the same canal as the girl whose ghost he was trying to appease for all those years.
Either that or he was murdered, Chucky-style, by his horrific collection, who then dragged him to the canals to make it look like a drowning.
Guess we'll never know.
5.
Gunkanjima
Gunkanjima (literally Battleship Island) is another name for Hashima, an uninhabited island 15 kilometers from Nagasaki nicknamed for its apparent resemblance to a battleship. From 1887 to 1974, Gunkanjima was a coal mining facility, but the coal mine shut down and everyone left. Still, abandoned islands aren't that uncommon in Japan. Even Gunkanjima is only one of 505 uninhabited islands near Nagasaki. But it's by far the creepiest.
Have you ever wondered what cities would look like if the human population was suddenly wiped out? Wonder no more.
Also, sleep soundly no more.
For over 30 years, the man-made structures on the island deteriorated with hardly any contact with the outside world. The sight of crumbling buildings and grass literally growing up through asphalt was so creepy, in fact, that the island was used for footage in the History Channel's show Life After People.
A documentary that 38 percent of our readers found "comforting."
And the creepy factor doubles once you find out that Gunkanjima was also a forced labor camp for over 500 Korean prisoners during WWII, and you know that some of them had to die horribly violent deaths and are currently seeking revenge on all who dare to enter.
For many years, though, only selected journalists with balls bigger than their heads were allowed to enter, presumably having to sign a "Don't sue if possessed" clause before being let in. Since 2009, however, those restrictions have been lifted, but still only about 10 percent of the isle is open to the public.
The rest is just lousy with Shoggoths.
Some photographers do sneak deeper into the island from time to time, although we would not recommend it. Because of harsh weather conditions, access to Gunkanjima is possible only 160 days a year. So if you get stuck at this remote fortress in the middle of the sea at the wrong time, it might be months before any help can arrive. And you will need help.
This building is called "Guaranteed Demon Ass Rape Heights."
4.
Hellingly Hospital
The first things you need to know about Hellingly are that it's an abandoned hospital in England and the word "Hell" is right there in its name. Like, right there. It couldn't be more obvious that this place were of the devil unless the devil himself showed up in the photos torturing souls in the hallways.
That would actually make some of them less creepy.
Oh yeah. We forgot to mention that this place wasn't just a hospital; it was an insane asylum.
For insane babies?
Hellingly was once a state-of-the-art mental institution designed by a guy named G.T. Hine, who had the dubious distinction of being super good at building insane asylums. This particular one was a biggie: a 63-acre estate with its own rail line, a ballroom, a salon and a water tower, plus a buttload of wards for the kinds of people who, for whatever reason, needed to live in an insane asylum.
But once the place was abandoned in 1994, it took a bullet train to Creepytown. To look at these pictures, you'd think it was abandoned in 1894, not a mere 16 years ago.
The deterioration of the huge facility has been helped along by arsonists and vandals, though some of them have helpfully brightened up the place with graffiti.
3.
Kryziu Kalnas
Kryziu Kalnas started out like any other old Lithuanian hill: green and hilly, not too creepy. But beginning around 1831, the mini-mountain somehow became a hot spot for remembering failed uprisings, lost independence and how much the Soviet occupiers sucked. After years of conflict with the Russian empire, the family members of fallen soldiers turned the little mound into a sort of memorial to their loved ones. And what do you do when you want to memorialize someone? You plant a cross, of course. Or two or three or four.
After 100,000 crosses and crucifixes, shit can start looking creepy.
"Fuck you guys soo hard." - Count Dracula
Today Kryziu Kalnas is a home to enough religious imagery to resemble the universe's cemetery. And the Soviets didn't help matters when they bulldozed the place twice, guaranteeing the Hill of Crosses will be nice and haunted for all eternity. And every time the Soviets bulldozed, the Lithuanians rebuilt with a holy vengeance. Kryziu Kalnas ultimately became a symbol of enduring Lithuanian Catholicism, in spite of the heavy hand of the Soviets. In fact, in 1993, Pope John Paul II came out and blessed the place.
As if it needed it.
2.
Candido Godoi
Way down in southern Brazil, about 20 miles west from El Bumfuck Nowhere, there lies the peaceful little town of Candido Godoi, also known as the twin capital of the world. That's not the creepy part.
After all, we have nothing against twins. And that's good, because Candido Godoi is actually nicknamed "The Land of Twins" because of the unnaturally high rate of identical twin births among its inhabitants. What exactly is an "unnaturally high rate"? About 18 times higher than the world average, meaning that one in five pregnant couples in the town are guaranteed a two-for-one deal on their future bundle of joy.
Here's the creepy part:
Incoming Nazis!
There is a distinct possibility that all those twins are a direct result of the experimentation of famous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
That is the theory proposed by Jorge Camarasa, an Argentinean historian and an expert on Nazi war criminal and Auschwitz chief physician Mengele, aka the Angel of Death. Mengele -- a bona fide mad scientist who was fascinated with twins and fled to South America after WWII -- was identified by Camarasa and a few Candido Godoi elders as the mysterious German doctor who appeared in the area around 1963.
He first posed as a vet but soon started offering medical services to the ladies of the predominately German settlement. Soon after that, the bizarre twin births supposedly started.
Looks like someone is having a great birthday party!
Unfortunately science, being the party-pooping nerd that it is, chipped in by claiming that Mengele couldn't have had the means to orchestrate a genetics experiment of these proportions. Whew!
No, according to a group of Brazilian scientists, the unusually high twin birthrate can be easily explained by inbreeding or exposure to toxic waste.
Or Nazis.
So, take your pick. Either Candido Godoi was an experiment to create a race of perfect Aryan children, performed by a Nazi nicknamed the Angel of Death, or it's "just" a secluded Brazilian town full of identical blonde twins whose hobbies include inbreeding and hanging around toxic waste.
1.
Bones, Bones and More Bones
In the 12th century, the Austrian city of Hallstatt faced a serious problem. Like everyone else in the 12th century, they were running out of room to bury their dead, so they came up with a genius solution: They started renting out graves. Bodies over there were only laid to earth for 10 to 15 years, after which time the bones were exhumed, bleached and displayed in the ossuary.
Before your bones were displayed, your family would totally graffiti the shit out of them.
The reason for this eerily beautiful desecration was the obvious lack of any grave to put flowers on or something. On the other hand, it's way harder to explain the desecration that's going on in Capela dos Ossos, a small chapel in Portugal that in addition to cementing human bones in its walls proudly exhibits two full skeletons (one of a small child) suspended on chains.
The best images are the ones that stay with you when you close your eyes.
The chapel was in fact the work of a single 16th-century Franciscan monk who wanted to make his fellow Christians contemplate the transitory nature of life. Nonetheless, we think he was just trying to be dickhead when he wrote the following over the entrance: We bones, lying here bare, are awaiting yours.
Is that skeleton jerking off? Spooky!
But the unquestionable Grand Masters of recycling humans as building materials have to be the Catacombs of Paris. Located in the remains of Paris' stone mines, the Catacombs were established in the 18th century when the sanitary conditions in the capital became too unbearable even by French standards.
To avoid an epidemic, city officials started gathering human remains from various cemeteries and storing them underground, which was actually a wise and understandable decision. Though why they decided to rearrange them in a style that can be only described as Early Temple of Unspeakable Evil is anyone's guess:
Sweet dreams.
Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a freelance online journalist and Japanese-English-Polish translator. Contact him at c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com
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