10 Creepiest Places on Earth: Part 2

Continued from Part 1. Again, these are all my opinion. I grew up with horror movies, and horror being my favorite genre in just about anything - you could call me a "Scream Queen" of sorts, because if it scared me, it's doing pretty good. I hope to do more top 10s in the future, and this will include movies, music, games, etc. But for now, let's get back to the top 10 creepies places!

5. The Plague Fortress of Saint Petersburg

The city of Saint Petersburg has seen its fair share of horror, from bloodthirsty czars to full-on Nazi sieges. A metropolis with millions of people and a long history, it is no surprise that the city has some dark secrets lurking within its murky underbelly. Sorry, did I say "lurking"? I meant "proudly on display." Because the first shit you see when you enter Saint Petersburg from the sea is a bona fide horror citadel. Fort Emperor Alexander I is a heavily fortified island just off the coast of the city, greeting visiting ships with the kind of middle finger only an ominous, dark structure with 103 gun ports can provide.

The innards of Fort Alexander are a textbook example of the sort of balls-out creepiness that would make the Scooby-Doo gang haul ass at the first creaking door. Its interior design features claustrophobic dungeon corridors, rusty, maze-like iron stairs, and the ghostly huddle of tortured souls, filling your ears with Slavic whispers of the terrifying experiments they were subjected to.

Walk down the lower stairs. You will somehow find yourself on the upper ones, escape impossible.

Because of course there were terrifying experiments. Fort Alexander's ghastly appearance is by far the least threatening thing about it. The place has another, far more widespread name: The Plague Fort. When the late 19th century decided to smack Russia with a sackful of pestilence, the officials took a look at Fort Alexander and decided it would make a mighty fine place for a secret laboratory where their mad scientists could poke at the disease.

Science!

All those creepy corridors and cellars became the playground of old school Russian science dudes from an organization called the Institute of Experimental Medicine, and this was their typical Tuesday:

Now you know what a "plagued camel" looks like.

The actual point of the Plague Fort's research was to produce a vaccine, which the scientists secreted from the lymph of various huge animals (such as horses and, interestingly, camels) with all the lack of kindness and comfort Russian medicine could offer. Still, the work was extremely dangerous: People on the island kept catching the disease (entirely by accident, we're sure).

The Plague Fort operated until 1917, when the freshly Sovieted country took one look at that shit, decided it was too creepy for even them, and promptly shut it down.

4. The Abandoned Takakonuma Greenland Park, Japan

This picture starts off creepy. Is that a doll? We all know how I feel about dolls...

Takakonuma Greenland Park in Japan today stands abandoned not only by people, but also by joy, hope and the foolish belief that life ends in anything but lightless hollow death.

The amusement park first opened in Hobara in 1973 but abruptly closed only two years later. Some say it was because of poor ticket sales, but local lore insists the park was forced to shut down after its rides were responsible for a number of accidental deaths.

Accidental Death?! Who the crap would get on this thing in the first place?!

I don't know for certain because there's virtually no official information available on Takakonuma, a fact which, when paired with the images below, arouses no suspicion of any kind.

What I do know for certain is that the park opened again in 1986 (again, the year of my birth... weird) and remained operational for 13 years, at which point it closed down for good. Nowadays, the derelict attractions stand there alone in the middle of nowhere, gathering rust and being slowly consumed by the encroaching forest.

The trees here are nourished by souls.

By the way, I mean that "middle of nowhere" part literally, as Takakonuma can no longer be found on any official maps. It just isn't there.

In addition to willing itself off of charted Japanese territory, Takakonuma seems to occasionally will itself out of existence entirely with a thick fog that periodically rolls in and completely swallows up the park, providing excellent cover for anyone with a monster mask to Scooby-Doo the living shit out of hapless wanderers. This is provided they can stomach the radiation, seeing as Takakonuma is located just a few dozen miles north from Fukushima, whose nuclear power plant had a spectacular meltdown in the wake of a tsunami.

Really, it would be insulting if you came here and weren't eviscerated by ghosts.

3. The Bird Suicide Grounds of Jatinga

In Assam in northeastern India sits the quiet little village of Jatinga, population 2,500. At first glance, it might not seem like much, but the village has become a real hit with visitors who fly in to Jatinga all the time during the monsoon season. Many of them just drop in and never leave, completely falling for the place. What I'm getting at here is that birds smash themselves to death in the streets of Jatinga.

This is an extraordinarily tactless sign.

For reasons that are still not fully understood (though almost certainly involve the Thuggee cult and the theft of a sacred stone), around September and October a whole bunch of birds just come plunging down from the sky to their deaths.

The most bizarre part of it all, however, is how precise the whole thing is. The "suicides" always occur between 7 and 10 p.m. and only around a specific mile-long, 200-yard-wide strip of land. The process has gone on like clockwork for roughly the past 100 years. So far, 44 species of migratory birds have been identified as part of the phenomenon, which I reiterate is something scientists still can't fully explain. Some have blamed it on the village's lights, claiming that they confuse the birds and cause them to crash (which would make sense if Jatinga were the only place in the world that had lights, but research indicates this is not actually the case). Other, more sense-making theories suggest the presence of weird magnetic fields and very specific weather conditions, but there's still nothing that the science community fully agrees on.

While that debate continues, the government of Assam is planning to cash in on the suicides by setting up viewing platforms where tourists can enjoy watching a bunch of wild animals brutally killing themselves for no conceivable reason. That seems legit. 

2. Winchester Mystery House

Thanks Google Maps. Now I don't have to go there myself.

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.

Yup. That totally opens from the inside and you could totally walk right out of it to your death.

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.

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.

1. Aokigahara Forest, Japan 

Aokigahara is a forest 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? What if I told you that there could be anywhere from 50-100 suicides per year here? Yes. I said PER YEAR. And the suicides have been taking place for hundreds of years, but it has only been in the last 75 that the rate has increased from around 30 per year to the now almost 100 per year. Do I have your attention now? So, why all the suicides? Well, no one is really sure. Some people think that it's because of the high standards the Japanese set for themselves, others believe that the forest itself pulls people mindlessly in. Whatever the reason, it is definitely my number one creepiest place on Earth. And just so you know, I'm sparing you the most graphic pictures... because even as a horror fan, they gross me out. You can Google those on your own time.

The "Sea of Trees" is one of the most dense forests in the world, which is weird all in itself because this forest has grown right on top of the solidified magma of the last Fuji eruption around 1707. With those two things combined, Aokigahara is a dangerous place to trek because of the uneven ground and underground caves, and with the roots of the trees covering them, you never know where you're stepping. Yet, there are hiking trails - which you would be smart to stick to, and only during the day.

Annually, local law enforcement and volunteers - hundreds of them - go out into the forest to retrieve bodies, and never once returning without at least one. Most often, people hang themselves, but bodies have been recovered from other means of suicide as well, namely overdoses. Because of the forest being so dense, bodies can remain unfound for years, and the local authorities have stated that there are possibly hundreds of undiscovered bodies at any given time, no telling how long they have been there. Something else kind of creepy - around 30 % of the bodies are found with this book close by.

The Complete Manual of Suicide.

Some say that it wasn't until after the publishing of this book - inside it states the Aokigahara is the "perfect place to die" - that the suicides started, but that myth has been debunked since the earliest suicides have been recorded dating back to the 1700's. In those days, which were of drought and famine, the strongest of the family would carry the weakest (usually the elders) out into the forest and leave them do die - or the weak would do it themselves for the sake of the family- sacrificing them to the Forest Demon in order for him to let them survive another year. At least there was reasoning back then, even it if was a horrible and creepy one.

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!"

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. Also, you may be asking yourself what they do with all the bodies they find. Well, they have a couple buildings they take them to... and just kind of stack them on top of each other. Even the police are creeped out by it, and having to have at least one night guard to sit INSIDE the building with them, the police play rock - paper - scissors to see who has to do it. We all know the Japanese love their ghostly tales, and it's said that if no one sits with the bodies at night, they will get up and start walking around, oh yeah, and screaming uncontrollably until someone living - who apparently has balls of steel - becomes their nightly companion. They believe that this will happen until they get a proper burial, but there are so many bodies, and some are so badly decomposed that it's hard to identify them, so they remain in the buiding until they are identified... or they decided to have a mass burial?

I think I'm going to leave you with a little creepy math.

Japan's population is about 127,817,277. (This is all of Japan.) 26 people in every 100,000 commit suicide per year. That's roughly 32,000 suicides per year, around 100 of which (confirmed) take place at Aokigahara. Compare that to it's murder rate - 1 person per every 100,000. 

And if for some reason you feel the need to continue to get your creep on with the suicide magnet places of Earth - here you go.