Scary Places

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Guanajuato, Mexico, has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1988, thanks to its colonial Spanish architecture, silver-mining history, and sites related to the Mexican Revolution. Its baroque churches, narrow cobblestone streets, and candy-colored houses are postcard-pretty, but the biggest tourist attraction in the central Mexican city is darker and more gruesome than all that: an underground museum of one hundred mummies.

The slack-jawed men, leathery-skinned infants, and other corpses have been luring curious travelers for more than a century. Visitors first paid a few pesos to view the mummies in an underground crypt. Since 1969, they’ve been displayed under spooky spotlights at the Museo de las Momias.

These naturally preserved corpses (no bandages or embalming here) from the 19th and 20th centuries are a revenue generator and a source of local pride for this city about an hour’s drive west of San Miguel de Allende. “The mummies of Guanajuato bring the biggest economic income to the municipality after property tax,” says Mexican anthropologist Juan Manuel Argüelles San Millán. “Their importance is hard to overstate.”


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Tucked away in the small Mexican town of Santa Ana Chapitiro is a grim, yet endlessly festive temple devoted to Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte, the dead saint. A personification of death, Santa Muerte is associated with healing, protection, and safe delivery to the afterlife by her devotees. Despite opposition by the Catholic Church, her cult arose from popular Mexican folk belief, a syncretism between indigenous Mesoamerican and Spanish Catholic beliefs and practices.

Since the pre-Columbian era Mexican culture has maintained a certain reverence towards death, which can be seen in the widespread commemoration of the syncretic Day of the Dead. Elements of that celebration include the use of skeletons to remind people of their mortality. The worship is condemned by the Catholic Church in Mexico as invalid, but it is firmly entrenched among a small percentage of Mexican culture. Unlike “Dia de los Muertos,” which is widely celebrated and is part of Mexican culture. Santa Muerte and Dia de los Muertos are two different and separate things, not to be confused or lumped together.

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The idea of Dudleytown as a haunted location developed gradually and intensified in the 20th century. One contributing factor was the visit by paranormal investigators Ed Warren and Lorraine Warren, who reportedly described the area as being influenced by something dark or unsettling. While their conclusions added to Dudleytown’s mystique, they were anecdotal and not supported by independent investigation.

Popular culture also played a significant role. The release of The Blair Witch Project in 1999 — which centered on a haunted forest — coincided with renewed public fascination in wooded, abandoned locations. Although unrelated, the film’s themes likely amplified interest in Dudleytown and reinforced its reputation as a paranormal hotspot.

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The Darvaza Gas Crater is a large crater in the Karakum Desert of north-central Turkmenistan where thousands of flames fueled by seeping natural gas have been burning for decades. The flaming crater's sights and sounds are frightening enough that local people call it the "Door to Hell" or the "Gates of Hell".

Each dancing flame marks the spot where natural gas (methane) emerges from the walls, from the floor, or from the talus piles within the crater. When the natural gas emerges, oxygen in the atmosphere causes it to burst into flames. People approaching the crater hear the sound of the flames and feel heat that is too intense to stand at some points along the crater's edge. The heat and an odor of combustion can be sensed for some distance downwind. The crater is located near the village of Darvaza, also known as Derweze, in north-central Turkmenistan - about 160 miles (260 kilometers) north of the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat.

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Derweze (Turkmen language: The Gate, also known as Darvaza) Turkmenistan village of about 350 inhabitants, located in middle of Kara-Kum desert, about 260 km north from Ashgabat.

The Darvaza Gas Crater in Turkmenistan. Gas coming from the ground is burning in the crater. The diameter of the hole is about 70m.

Darvaza Gas Crater, Gates of Hell, is a burning gas field near Darvaza, Turkmenistan.

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View of the gas crater at dawn. A tent and a tourist jeep can be seen near the safety railing. The gas crater is a result of engineers drilling the site for oil, but instead, found a gas field which collapsed into a crater. Fearing that the gases would cause danger to nearby towns, they decided to light it up to burn it off. Unfortunately it had been burning ever since.

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Thirty miles outside of New York City, nestled in the Long Island town of Amityville, stands the house forever linked to The Amityville Horror phenomenon. On November 13, 1974, the estate was the scene of a mass murder. Using a .35 Marlin rifle, 23-year-old Ronald J. DeFeo Jr. murdered his parents and four siblings while they were asleep.

Thirteen months later, the Lutz family purchased the home at a drastically reduced price of $80,000 but only lasted 28 days before leaving it. Their spine-tingling tales of paranormal activity—from dark specters to disembodied voices and rancid smells—propelled the 1977 book The Amityville Horror and the torrent of books, documentaries, and movies that followed.

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Frank Burger of Farmingdale, New York takes a photo of the home at 112 Ocean Ave. in Amityville, New York as a group of curious onlookers gather on February 15, 1976. The house is the former home of the DeFeo family, who were murdered by Ron DeFeo. The subsequent owners of the property, George and Kathleen Lutz, claimed the house was haunted.​

George Lee and Kathleen Lutz became the owners of the famous house that would become the source material for the novels and then the films about the Amityville case.​

View of the home of Ronald DeFeo Sr. car salesman, his wife, two daughters and two sons were found shot to death on 11/14/1974. Ronald DeFeo Jr., 23, the only surviving member of the family, who called the police to report the slayings, was being questioned by police. The Amityville Horror is based on this case.​

Real estate photograph of a house located at 112 Ocean Avenue in the town of Amityville, New York March 31, 2005.​

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In the late eighteenth century, when major public health problems tied to the city’s cemeteries led to a decision to transfer their contents to an underground site. Paris authorities chose an easily accessible site that was, at the time, located outside the capital: the former Tombe-Issoire quarries under the plain of Montrouge. The first evacuations were made from 1785 to 1787 and concerned the largest cemetery in Paris, the Saints-Innocents cemetery.

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In 1785, Paris decided to solve the problem of its overflowing cemeteries by exhuming the bones of the buried and relocating them to the tunnels of several disused quarries, which were consecrated as a cemetery. It is estimated that about one million bodies are buried here.

A record number of visitors seek relief in the Paris Catacombs during a heat wave on July 15, 2026 in Paris, France. Around 20 metres beneath the streets of Paris, the renovated sections of the underground ossuary maintain a constant temperature of about 14°C, making them one of the coolest publicly accessible places in the city.

A heart made of skulls in the Paris Catacombs where over six million Parisians were reinterred after the city cemeteries were emptied beginning in the late 18th century.

View of the Paris Catacombs after renovation. After being closed for around six months, the Paris Catacombs are open again - better protected and with new details.

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