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Creepiest places in the world

In the days leading up to Halloween, no matter if you are walking around businesses or just browsing the Internet, you will find it hard to avoid all the adverts in the theme of Halloween. Of course for most Chinese, without the same cultural roots, this is merely another commercial opportunity for shopping malls and restaurants to push sales and an excuse for average consumers to let their hair down and have some fun. While some people get anxious about how Western holidays are invading China, I can’t help wondering why a festival centered on monsters, evil spirits and things you see in nightmares fascinates people so much, across different cultures. Maybe it is deeply rooted in our minds, the fascination, obsession, fear and endless curiosity of things that are beyond explanation and logic, and realms beyond our reach. 

Although supernatural beings are often confined in story books, TV series or movies, there are genuine places in the world that look like the background setting of true horror stories. Some of these places are forbidden for humans to enter and the others would tempt only the most extreme adventurer. 

so in today’s episode, lulu is going to take you on a very special tour of six creepiest places on this planet.  

But first of all, a very quick explanation, in English, when we want to express fear, apart from using words like scary, frightening, terrifying, there are also words like creepy and eerie. Being slightly different from scary or frightening, these two words focus more on the feeling of uneasiness, you can’t really describe the exact reason, but it makes you feel uneasy and gives you goosebumps. So now, buckle up, let’s start the tour of the six creepiest places in the world.

Tower of London

The first stop is old London town, and if you check up creepy places in London, you will undoubtedly see the Tower of London among the search results. 

With its history of death and torture, is it any surprise that The Tower of London’s said to be one of the most haunted places in not just the capital itself, but the whole of the UK?

Located on the north bank of the River Thames, right next to Tower Bridge, The Tower of London was most famously used as a prison during the 16th and 17th centuries.

There are many things creepy and peculiar about the tower, from the nickname “bloody tower”, its narrow corridors, its gloomy architecture to the ravens that guard the ground. 

In addition to these, it is also known for the ghosts that are believed to walk around there. 

Among them, the most famous one is the ghost of Queen Anne Boleyn, one of Henry VII’s wives. She’s said to haunt the area close to Tower Green, where she was beheaded in 1536, and has also been seen walking the corridors of the tower with her head under her arm!

Catacombs in Paris 

Leaving the Tower of London, let me take you to another great city – Paris. Generally, when people think of Paris, they fantasize about cozy little cafes, grand museums, romantic riverside walks, yet underneath this metropolis, lies a lesser-seen site, the second stop tonight is: the Catacombs in Paris. 

Catacombs are underground burial sites, The Catacombs of Paris are underground quarries of Paris from late 18th Century, now holding the bones of an estimated six million people. In the history of Paris, like in quite a few European cities, during the time of the plague, the city simply ran out of places to bury the dead, so they dug up the old bones from graveyard and sent them to these tunnels underneath the city. It remained a public cemetery till the beginning of the 19thcentury. The catacombs extend a shocking 300 km in total length, now a very small part of it, less than 2km, is a museum for vistors. Imagine the eerie feeling you will get when you go underneath the grand city of Paris, through the dark, narrow corridor with walls made of human skulls and bones. There are probably no other places in the world that will make you more aware of your own mortality.  

Aokigahara Forest

Mortality is an eternal topic and is something that we all need to face sooner or later. However, the next eerie stop will make you wonder how fragile human lives really are. The third stop is the infamous Aokigahara forest in Japan, also known as “Suicide Forest”. 

Whether you have been to Japan or not, you have most likely heard of how important Mount Fuji is to Japanese. Yet just on the base of the famous Mount Fuji lies Aokigahara forest. Every year people come here to commit suicide for reasons unknown. More than 500 people have taken their own lives in Aokigahara since the 1950s. people have hanged themselves among the countless trees of the Aokigahara forest, which is so thick that even in high noon it's not hard to find places completely surrounded by darkness, in Japanese they call it “the sea of trees”.

Due to the special characteristics of this forest, it is very easy to get lost in the woods. There were cases where curious tourists walked into the forest to explore and just disappeared and were never found again. 

Nowadays, in Aokigahara forest, you can find notes saying, "Life is a precious thing, maybe you should reconsider." and "Think of your loved ones." Warning signs that are set to try to change people’s minds, there are also police and volunteers trying to patrol the entrance and try to help people who went there to end it all. Nobody can be sure what truly lurks in that forest that claimed so many lives, so maybe, this is where you shouldn’t let your curiosity lead your way. 

Winchester Mystery House

Stepping away from the dark forest in Japan, let us visit a completely different type of place in the United States. If the first three places are rather frightening, this one is just eerie and strange. Stop number 4 I am taking you to tonight is the Winchester Mystery House.

Located in San Jose, California, this massive mansion is the work of Sarah Winchester, widow of William Winchester, who owned the fortune of the Winchester Rifle company. 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. 

In 1884, Winchester started construction of her new San Jose mansion, which has gone on non-stop for 38 years right until her death.

The end result is a gigantic, sprawling 160-room complex with 40 staircases, 2000 doors and 10000 windows. Designed like a maze, this house has mile-long hallways, secret passages, dead ends, doors opening to blank walls and staircases leading to the ceiling. You can easily get lost in the house, well, it was not built for humans anyway. 

Chernobyl

Now we come to the last stop of tonight’s tour, the first four are all, to some extent, linked with supernatural happenings. However, the last place is more a momument to a man-made disaster. This is the ruins of Chernobyl, the name of a town that is still fresh in people’s memory. 

On April 26, 1986, one of the most devastating tragedies took place in Chernobyl, Pripyat. An explosion occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant killing about 62 people, most of them died from radiation poisoning and 2 died from the blast effects. Most of Chernobyl was evacuated due to high radiation levels but since radiation levels went down, it is now open to the public. Government officials still have visitors wear special protection suits and have an official go with them to make sure radiation levels are stable. Some say the spirits of the residents still haunt Chernobyl. A movie was made about Chernobyl called The Chernobyl Diaries, which features mutant animals and humans who were affected by the nuclear radiation. There was an amusement park that was actually scheduled to open a day before the disaster but instead of children laughing there is forever a creepy silence.