Local legends, oral traditions, and mythological figures tied to a specific place.
A life-size Santa Muerte has stood in a glass case on the sidewalk outside Alfarería 12 since Halloween 2001, when Enriqueta Romero moved the figure out of her house and made a private devotion public. The Catholic Church calls the devotion blasphemy and the army has bulldozed shrines in other cities. This one was left alone.
In August 2012, four trainee detectives from Chile's investigative police identified the man this wall has honored since the 1930s: Romualdo Ivani Zambelli, a mechanic stabbed in the heart during a robbery at this corner on August 8, 1933. Some of his devotees had prayed to him as a murdered child. Hundreds of plaques thank him for favors, and they spell his name many different ways.
A forest grown over a lava flow laid down by Mount Fuji in 864, dense enough that it swallows sound. It has a reputation abroad that the prefecture has spent years trying to manage, including by no longer publishing its numbers.
The flame in the middle of the courtyard has run on Baku's mains gas since 1969, when the vents that had fed it for centuries were drained by the oilfield around them. The inscriptions cut over the cells are in Sanskrit, Punjabi, and Persian, left by Hindu, Sikh, and Zoroastrian worshippers who came for a fire that came out of the ground by itself.
Omanis from elsewhere still joke about not stopping in Bahla after dark, and people in Bahla have heard the joke many times. The wall around the oasis is said locally to have been raised in one night by a jinn. The fort at the center was the first Omani site inscribed by UNESCO, went onto the danger list the following year, and reopened in 2012 after a restoration that took two decades.
A black dog reported across East Anglia, and one Sunday morning in 1577 when a storm killed worshippers in two Suffolk churches. A London pamphleteer wrote it up as the devil, and Blythburgh still shows the scorch marks on its door.
Roughly 200 square miles of southeastern Massachusetts named as a cluster of strange reports by one cryptozoologist in the late 1970s. The swamp at its center was called the place where spirits dwell long before he got there.
The enchanted forest of Arthurian romance, identified with the forest of Paimpont in Brittany since the thirteenth century. Its best-known monument is a gilded tree raised in 1991 to mark a fire.
A man in a rabbit costume reportedly attacked people with a hatchet in Fairfax County, Virginia, in 1970. The real incidents happened miles from the railway overpass that internet legend has since adopted as the 'Bunny Man Bridge.'
