Top 10 Creepiest Places on Earth: Part 1

With Halloween right around the corner, and me having been super sick lately - and because of that, I probably won't be able to get out to any parties this year - I have decided to do a couple top 10s for you. I'm starting with the top 10 creepiest places (in my opinion) on Earth.

10. The Sedlec Ossuary - The Church of Bones

The Sedlec Ossuary is a small Roman Catholic chapel, located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. The ossuary is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have in many cases been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel. The ossuary is among the most visited tourist attractions of the Czech Republic, attracting over 200,000 visitors yearly.

Four enormous bell-shaped mounds occupy the corners of the chapel. An enormous chandelier of bones, which contains at least one of every bone in the human body, hangs from the center of the nave with garlands of skulls draping the vault. Other works include piers and monstrances flanking the altar, a large Schwarzenberg coat of arms, and the signature of Rint, also executed in bone, on the wall near the entrance.

Chandelier full of bones?! It's probably totally fine...

This macabre style of interior design was the work of Czech woodcarver Frantisek Rint who, for some reason, was hired to organize the church's extensive skeleton collection.

I realize this is the Czech Republic and all, but it has been, like, 30 years. Surely Poltergeist was released out there already. Like, maybe last year or something? Why are they still playing with human bones as if they were Satan's Lego blocks and making them sit through Mass every single day for almost 140 years now? On the Tempting Fate scale, the only thing worse would be to start using some of the skulls as ceremonial mugs or chamber pots.

At this point, does it really surprise anyone that the church became the inspiration for Dr. Satan's lair in the Rob Zombie movie House of 1000 Corpses?

9. San Zhi Resort

What do you get when you cross a series of abandoned, rusting, futuristic UFO-shaped buildings with a series of mysterious deaths covered up by the government? How about the ghost town-slash-tourist resort of San Zhi, located just outside Taipei.

The exclusive San Zhi resort in Taiwan was supposed to be the destination for bored, rich folk who always wondered what it would be like to live inside an over-sized hockey puck. Construction of Pod City started around the 80's but was quickly shut down after a series of mysterious on-site fatal accidents. There is actually very little official information on San Zhi. We can't even confirm how many people died there or if they screamed something about eyeless children eating their souls. The whole thing is shrouded in secrecy.

Currently, most of the information on the complex comes from the locals who - what a surprise - refuse to go near the damn thing. And thus the abandoned 90 pods just stand there, waiting for anyone foolish enough to wander in.

Come on dude, this place looks totally legit.

Wait a second... abandoned resort town in the middle of nowhere, mysterious deaths, lack of any official information... where have we seen this before? OH -

How about our nightmares?

And speaking of Silent Hill...


8. Prypiat

A whole lot of you just got deja vu looking at the above picture. Specifically, those of you who have played Call of Duty 4, as there is an entire level that takes place there. If you thought the idea of a completely silent, abandoned, radioactive city was typical video game apocalyptic fantasy, you were wrong.

Prypiat is in the northern Ukraine and once housed the workers and scientists of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant. Founded in the 70's, it held as many as 50,000 people. Then in 1986 - the year of my birth, according to a footnote in the official Soviet records, there was a small malfunction in the Chernobyl reactor, so for safety reasons the city was evacuated.

Since then, Prypiat has been desolated, its buildings decaying, the giant Ferris Wheel just standing there all alone with nobody to ride it. The city actually had an entire amusement park for the families of the Chernobyl employees. Because when you are living next to a nuclear reactor which was outdated even by 1986 Soviet standards, the only thing on your mind is bumper cars.

The city is located in what is known as the Zone of Alienation, the 30-kilometer radius directly affected by the Chernobyl "minor technical difficulty" over 20 years ago. Despite that, Prypiat is now opened to the public because the radiation levels have apparently went down significantly over the years. We guess we have a different view on radiation than the government of Ukraine. They obviously have a scale for it, while we consider any radiation a very bad thing.

Aside from the inherent risk of getting bit by a radioactive slug and becoming the lamest superhero ever, there is another reason why you will never see us among the tourists occasionally visiting Prypiat.

The freaking nursery. We told you this was a place built for families and wouldn't you know it, they have a nursery, which according to certain claims is currently paved with baby shoes and abandoned dolls. I don't do dolls. At All. Or abandoned things too well. So, Prypiat is basically an abandoned radioactive ghost Soviet baby amusement park.

And - of course - you've probably all seen the horrible movie The Chernobyl Diaries based on the town by now. (Spoiler Alert!)

I can say that I understand why they went with radioactive deformed murderous people... but maybe I was just hoping for zombies, possibly made by radioactivity. I don't know... I feel like I'm ALWAYS hoping for zombies. Just me?

7. Kings Park Psychiatric Center

Yes, it's hard to do one of these articles without putting one or two closed asylums on the list -- hell, you can't find an abandoned mental hospital that doesn't look like its halls echo with the howls of the damned. So I've taken the time and liberty to find the creepiest of the creepy for you.

That brings us to Long Island, New York, where you'll find the closest thing we have to a real life version of Arkham Asylum. The abandoned Kings Park Psychiatric Center - or, as they called it, the Lunatic Farm - is just the kind of place where you could imagine deranged clowns and animal-theme villains roaming the halls. It almost has a Season two American Horror Story feel... but without the aliens. That was just stupid.

Least necessary sign ever.

The idea behind the first version of the site in 1885 was rather noble. Instead of the nightmarish Tim Burton wet dream that it became, the Suffolk County facility was supposed to provide a rural breath of fresh air where patients could go relatively unconfined.

Even now, it gives off that "unrestrained lunatics" aura.

There was just one problem: As the Big Apple chewed on its residents' sanity, the asylum just kept filling with patients, and as their numbers grew, the staff's goodwill toward them faded. By 1954, Kings Park had essentially become the overcrowded madhouse prison it had been specifically created to fight against. In fact, with 9,300 patients, the 125-room building, 800-acre asylum was actually bigger than the neighboring town. Because nothing bad could ever come of keeping over 9,000 criminally insane people just one shanked prison guard away from overrunning downtown New York.

Some days, they ran out of applesauce. Bloodshed ensued.

Today, the complex stands in a state of abandon, partially reclaimed by nature, and, if you believe in ghosts, completely reclaimed by the vengeful spirits of its patients - especially the ones from its most lobotomy and electro-shock-therapy-happy era. People report sightings of ghostly sobbing maidens, sudden temperature drops, and poltergeist activity. There are even rumors of hidden torture chambers in its many underground tunnels. Who are we to argue?

Oh, did we mention that the place has its own graveyard? Well, it does. And yes, it's said to be haunted by a ghost that chases trespassers away.

Hundreds of bodies, but the gravedigger laid one plaque and then fled.

Although the various terror buildings of Kings Park are technically restricted from the public, spelunkers routinely demonstrate they're easy as shit to get into. Here's how they look from the inside:

Meanwhile, the area itself serves as an unofficial extension of a nearby state park, routinely allowing unassuming weekend hikers to accidentally stumble into their worst nightmares.

6. Picher, Oklahoma

Here's one for ya, Okies - and it's right in our backyard. Today, Picher is known as the Tar Creek Superfund site and is considered uninhabitable, although a few holdouts remain. It is one of, if not the worst, industrial environmental disaster in the United States, and one of very few industrial exclusion zones on the planet. Other notable examples are Fukushima and Pripyat/Chernobyl - one of which we discussed earlier. Yes, we have a Chernobyl in our own backyard.

From 2000 to 2010, Picher’s population dropped from over 1,600 residents to twenty. The town was destroyed by the mining industry and here's why:

Picher was a huge mining town. Most of the residents worked in these mines and the mines itself is what kept the city alive. When mining, the waste, known as “chat,” was disposed of in huge mounds right on the ground, creating huge artificial hills. The chat is toxic, and the fine grains from the chat piles blow all over town, settle on everything and people breathe them in. So this was health problem number one. Not only were the people who worked down in the mines exposed, but now so was the whole town.

Second, when it rains, runoff from the chat piles gets into the local water supply, as does water from abandoned mineshafts where there are no longer any pumps to keep them from flooding, and the town water becomes hazardous to drink. So pollution of the water is health problem number two.

Lastly is the undermining of the town. The lead and zinc mined in this area was gathered from huge caverns excavated underground by the miners. It was later found the mines had been excavated so close to the surface that tree roots could be seen on the roof of the caverns in some cases. But why did they undermine the town so harshly? Because Picher was one of the largest suppliers of lead for WWI and WWII, and they wanted as much as they could get out of it. Portions of Picher collapsed into massive holes which had compromised the ground. Health issue number three comes by possibly falling to your death or being sufficated by one of these sink holes. That would suck.

Here's one of Picher's sink holes caused by mining to close the the surface.

 In 2006, the Army Corps of Engineers determined 86% of Picher’s buildings were dangerously undermined and subject to collapse. Therefore, the town was evacuated. Most of the townspeople relocated, but some, who had made the place their family home for generations refused to move. I'm still not 100 percent sure how some of these people could live here without the functionality of the town itself, and then all the health problems on top of that. Who would want to stay? There were major buyouts offered to the people who remained, some tripling what their homes were worth, but they still refused to leave.

If that weren't bad enough, in 2008 an F4 tornado hit Picher and damaged 150 homes. Most of the homes were vacant from the evacuation, but like I mentioned above, some people remained. When the tornado took their homes, the insurance companies and the state itself refused to rebuild their homes because the town had already been declared unsafe to live in, they wouldn't condone people living in it. So those people who refused that triple buy out lost everything with the tornado, and most had to leave with their tail tucked between their legs. And still, some remain, but live in rubble.

Is this the church from The Walking Dead Season 5 Episode 2? Yeah, I think it is...

I'm sorry, but to me, abandoned anything is creepy. There's a reason it's abandoned, ya know! Just don't mess with it!

Also, here's a short video from CNN - and the town was featured on Life After People as well. You can find that on Netflix.