Folklore — mystical places on the map

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.

79 places

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Folklore

Ciudad Perdida

A Tairona city in the Colombian Sierra Nevada, founded around 800 AD — six and a half centuries before Machu Picchu. Abandoned during the Spanish conquest and found again only in 1972, by grave robbers who came upon twelve hundred steps climbing through the jungle. The Kogi peoples living nearby consider themselves its keepers and say they never lost it.

Folklore

Lake Titicaca

The highest navigable lake in the world, on the Peru–Bolivia border, from which Inca tradition has Manco Cápac emerging to found their empire. In 2000 an underwater expedition found a stone terrace and a wall some eight hundred metres long on the bed near the Island of the Sun — pre-Inca Tiwanaku construction, now submerged. Offerings are still recovered from the bottom: gold figurines, incense, llama bones.

Folklore

Machu Picchu

An Inca city on the saddle between two peaks at eight thousand feet, built around 1450 and abandoned perhaps a century later — probably to smallpox, which arrived ahead of the Spaniards themselves. The conquistadors never reached it and never learned it was there. The stones are fitted without mortar so closely that a knife blade will not go between them, and the Intihuatana, a carved pillar, casts almost no shadow at the solstices.

Folklore

Teotihuacan

A city that was the largest in the Western Hemisphere by 500 AD and had already stood in ruins for centuries when the Aztecs arrived. They did not know who built it and named it the place where men become gods. Beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, archaeologists found a tunnel in 2003 that had been sealed for nearly two thousand years: thousands of objects inside, chambers with ceilings dusted in pyrite to imitate a night sky, and pools of liquid mercury.

Folklore

America's Stonehenge

A cluster of stone chambers, walls and slabs on a New Hampshire hill whose purpose has been argued for a century. Some read it as a pre-Columbian observatory aligned to the solstices, others as colonial farm structures and a nineteenth-century soap works. The central slab with a channel cut round its edge is known as the sacrificial table; it could equally be a lye press. The site works as an attraction and as an argument that does not resolve.

Folklore

Cahokia

The largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico: at its height around 1100 it held perhaps twenty thousand people, more than London at the time. Monks Mound has a larger base than the Great Pyramid. Mound 72 contained a burial with over fifty young women laid out in rows, almost certainly sacrificed. By 1350 the city was empty, for no clear reason, and it has never been explained.

Folklore

Salem

In 1692 nineteen people were hanged here for witchcraft, one was pressed to death under stones, and several more died in gaol. It began with the fits of two girls and evidence the court accepted without proof — including "spectral" testimony, meaning a claim that the accused's spirit had appeared to a witness. Salem lives on the story openly now: museums, a memorial on the execution ground, and a reputation that fills the town every October.

Folklore

Lake Pontchartrain, at the Gates of Voodoo

The vast brackish estuary beside New Orleans, on whose shores voodoo rites were held through the nineteenth century — most famously Marie Laveau's St John's Eve gatherings at Bayou St John. Traces of offerings still turn up at night: candles, coins, bones. A causeway nearly twenty-four miles long crosses the lake, and from its middle no shore is visible at all — a sensation locals count as its own reason not to drive it in fog.

Folklore

The Site of the Sukharev Tower

The tower stood here from 1695 until it was demolished in 1934, but the legend outlived the building. It housed the School of Mathematics and Navigation, run by Jacob Bruce — Peter the Great's companion, astronomer and engineer, whom rumour turned into a sorcerer. He was said to keep an observatory at the top, to conduct experiments at night, and to have walled a "black book" into the masonry, one that granted power over everything. The book was looked for during the demolition and never found. Bruce's ghost is said to appear on Sukharevskaya Square since, waiting for the tower to be rebuilt.

Folklore

The Bad Apartment on Bolshaya Sadovaya

Apartment 50 at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya — the "bad apartment" of The Master and Margarita, where Woland's retinue takes up residence. Bulgakov lived here in the early 1920s, and the stairwell had its reputation before the novel: residents said people went missing from that flat. After the book was published the entrance stood covered in quotations and drawings for decades — the walls were painted over, the writing came back. There is a museum there now, but the habit of leaving a note for Woland has not gone anywhere, and locals describe the black cat in the courtyard in a tone that is not entirely joking.