Categories

Houses, hospitals, factories and whole towns that people left and never came back to. Some closed overnight on an order, some simply stopped being needed — and wherever the owners' belongings are still lying about, stories about the ones who supposedly stayed are never far behind.

Stretches of ground with a reputation for things going wrong: instruments disagreeing, engines cutting out, people losing their way. A few have an explanation — a magnetic anomaly, escaping gas, an unlucky current — and the rest do not have one yet.

Places tied to one specific apparition: a castle with its nun, a hotel with its guest, a crossroads with its hitchhiker. What matters here is less the story than the fact that it has been told about this exact address for decades, and told the same way.

Points on the map a local tradition has grown around: a lake with a spirit in it, a mountain with a prohibition on it, a stone people still visit to ask for something. Not a scare story but something the people living there count as part of their own history.

Creatures with witnesses, footprints and grainy footage, and not one specimen science accepts. Bigfoot, Nessie, the chupacabra and dozens of local monsters, each with its own river, its own forest and its own swamp.

Legends whose author is known. Some began on a forum, some in a horror-story contest, some in an advertising campaign — and then went out into the world and acquired eyewitnesses. Marked separately so an invention is not mistaken for something people genuinely believe.

Everything that fits none of the other sections: one-off incidents, contested accounts, and places too little is known about to decide what kind of place they are.