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.

Places where somebody looked up, saw something they could not name, and told a policeman, a newspaper or an air force. Some of these are single nights with a file number and a hundred witnesses; some are towns that have been reporting lights for so long they now sell postcards of them. What they have in common is that the report exists and can be read — which is a different thing from the thing in the sky being real.

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.

Cases that are closed. Not «unexplained so far» but closed: the author of the photograph was found, the costume turned up in a garage, the film was taken apart frame by frame, the confession was given while the hoaxer was still alive. The place stays on the map because a legend usually outlives its own debunking — and here the two stand side by side: what was told, and what it turned out to be.

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.