Locations associated with ghost stories, hauntings, and reported paranormal activity.
A roofless Masonic mausoleum stands in the woods of San Juan Island, where a limestone baron seated his dead family around a stone dinner table. One column was left deliberately broken.
On June 11, 1962, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin left papier-mâché heads in their bunks and launched a raft of stolen raincoats into the bay; no bodies were ever recovered. Guards and visitors have reported screams and cold spots in cellblock D, particularly cell 14D.
A Hindu Cambodian temple built in reinforced concrete on the desert road out of Cairo between 1907 and 1911, for the Belgian industrialist who was building Heliopolis around it. It stood empty from the 1950s, collected stories about a woman falling from the balcony, and was raided by police in 1997.
A fort built in 1573 below the Aravalli hills, abandoned and left as standing ruin. The Archaeological Survey of India sign that closes it between sunset and sunrise is read as proof of a curse and was issued for crowd control.
Letters arrive at the park office most weeks. They are handwritten, often unsigned, and something is usually rattling inside: a square nail, a shard of sun-purpled glass, a bottle stopper. Each one comes from a visitor who took a piece of Bodie home, had a bad year, and decided the two facts belonged together.
More than 1,200 dead Sicilians, mummified or reduced to skeletons, stand in niches and lie on shelves in the corridors beneath a Palermo monastery, many in clothes they chose. Among them is a girl who died just before her second birthday, so well preserved that visitors swear she opens her eyes.
The mansion on the cliff was built in the 1920s as a hotel for people who came to look at the falls. It closed when the river that makes the falls became the drain for Bogotá, stood empty for decades, and acquired the reputation that keeps its photograph circulating. A foundation restored it and reopened it in 2013 as a museum about the river and the forest.
The bell over the gate was cast in Amsterdam in 1697 and walled up after a soldier hanged himself with its rope. Guards on night duty still report hearing it. The governor who died in his chair on April 23, 1729, is said to have been cursed that morning by one of seven men he had sent to the gallows.
A castle its owners call "one of Denmark's oldest secular buildings," reputedly home to about a hundred ghosts, among them a Scottish earl who died chained in its cellar and a noblewoman said to have been walled in alive for love.
