Ghost sightings — mystical places on the map
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.
48 places
Epping Forest
An ancient forest on the boundary of London and Essex, once a highwaymen's refuge — an inn here carries Dick Turpin's name. Over the last century it became known for something else: bodies have been brought here for generations. Police have recovered the remains of several murder victims in it, and the forest has a reputation that makes accounts of figures between the trees sound more plausible than they should.
Alcatraz
The island prison in San Francisco Bay, in use from 1934 to 1963 for men other prisons could not hold. D Block has its own reputation — the isolation cells known as the hole, where prisoners were kept in complete darkness; most of the guards' accounts of screaming come from there, and from cell 14D, where a man is said to have died in a night after shouting that something was in there with him. The bay tribes considered the island a place of bad spirits long before the prison.
The Queen Mary
An ocean liner moored at Long Beach since 1967. Some forty-nine deaths occurred aboard during her thirty-one years of service, including an eighteen-year-old crewman crushed by watertight door 13. In the war she carried troops and once, on a manoeuvre, cut her escort cruiser in half, drowning over three hundred men; stopping to rescue them was forbidden because of submarines. Stateroom B340 is let separately and has a reputation of its own.
The Crescent Hotel
An Arkansas hotel bought in 1937 by Norman Baker, a man with no medical training who announced he had a cure for cancer and turned the building into a "hospital". People came here to die, at considerable expense; Baker eventually went to prison for mail fraud. In 2019 excavation on the grounds turned up buried jars of human remains. The hotel is still open and sells ghost tours.
The Bell Witch Cave
From 1817 to 1821 the family of John Bell in Tennessee was, by many contemporary accounts, tormented by something: pinches and slaps, bedclothes pulled away, and eventually a voice that argued, quoted sermons and finally promised to kill the head of the household. Bell died in 1820 with a vial of unidentified liquid found beside him. Local tradition holds it the only case in American history of a documented killing by a spirit.
Amityville
In November 1974 Ronald DeFeo Jr shot six members of his family in the house on Ocean Avenue. Thirteen months later the Lutz family moved in and left after twenty-eight days, describing green slime from the walls, a swarm of flies in winter, and a voice telling them to get out. A book and the films made the address a byword; later occupants reported nothing, and one of DeFeo's lawyers eventually said the story had been invented over a bottle of wine.
The Lizzie Borden House
The house in Fall River, Massachusetts where Andrew and Abby Borden were killed with an axe on 4 August 1892. Their daughter Lizzie was tried and acquitted, though public opinion never acquitted her, and the rhyme about forty whacks outlived everyone involved. The house is a museum and guesthouse now, and visitors can book the room where the stepmother's body was found.
The Villisca Axe Murder House
On the night of 10 June 1912 eight people were killed with an axe in this Iowa house: Josiah and Sarah Moore, their four children, and two visiting girls. The killer was never found and the case remains open. The house has been restored to its 1912 condition — no electricity, no plumbing — and can be booked for overnight stays. Those who stay most often report children's voices and objects falling.
Waverly Hills Sanatorium
A tuberculosis hospital in Kentucky, in use from 1910 to 1961. The dead were removed through an underground tunnel some five hundred metres long so that living patients would not see them — it became known as the body chute. Estimates of the death toll differ wildly, from around fifteen hundred in the records to sixty-three thousand in legend. The building has stood empty since 1982 and is among the best-known haunted sites in the United States.
The St. Augustine Lighthouse
A Florida lighthouse where, during construction in 1873, the contractor's two daughters and another girl were killed: the handcart they were riding on the rails to the water ran into the bay. Keepers and visitors have reported children's laughter in the tower and a girl in a blue dress ever since. The place is well enough known that television crews come regularly, and the lighthouse staff keep a log of incidents of their own.
The Gettysburg Battlefield
In three days of July 1863 some fifty thousand men were killed, wounded or lost here — the bloodiest battle in American history. Burials were hasty and many of the dead were never identified. Gettysburg has been called the most haunted ground in the country since; the accounts cluster at Devil's Den and the Rose Farm, where people report hearing orders shouted at night and seeing uniformed figures walking where the lines once stood.
The House on the Embankment
The grey housing block facing the Kremlin, built in 1931 for the Soviet elite. During the Great Terror people were taken from it at night: of roughly five hundred flats, more than a third were touched by the purges, and some changed occupants several times over. The legends follow from that — staircases with no numbers on the doors, rooms nobody moved into for years, footsteps along the corridors of empty floors. Residents said they heard furniture being moved in the flat next door at night, when nobody lived there. It is still considered the bleakest residential building in Moscow, and it is the case where the ghost story grew straight out of the documented history.
Ostankino and the Crone with the Staff
Ostankino was built on the ground of an old cemetery, and Moscow's most persistent legend attaches to that fact. In the sixteenth century, when the boyar Sotin set out to plough a field here, a hunched old woman with a staff appeared and told him not to disturb those lying in the earth — or misfortune would find whoever did. She has been "seen" before every disaster in the area since; staff at the television centre recalled her in the days before the tower fire of 2000. People mention her matter-of-factly, the way they mention an omen, and almost nobody can say where they first heard it.
Island of the Dolls
An islet in the Xochimilco canals near Mexico City, hung with salvaged dolls for half a century. Its caretaker said he hung them to appease the spirit of a drowned girl; after his death in 2001 it became a tourist pilgrimage.
Highgate Cemetery
An overgrown Victorian cemetery in north London with gothic vaults and an Egyptian Avenue. In the early 1970s a newspaper frenzy about a "Highgate Vampire" drew crowds of hunters to its gates.
Akershus Fortress
A medieval fortress and prison on the Oslo fjord, never taken by siege. Its dungeons gave rise to Norwegian legends of the dog Malcanisen and a faceless woman said to guard the cellars.
Greyfriars Kirkyard
An old graveyard in central Edinburgh with the "Covenanters' Prison" at its far end. Since 1999 visitors have reported unexplained cuts and bruises — the phenomenon nicknamed the Mackenzie Poltergeist.
The Ancient Ram Inn
A 12th-century house in Gloucestershire, said to stand on crossing ley lines and a pagan site. Reputed one of Britain's grimmest buildings — its owners avoided sleeping on the upper floor for decades.
The Stanley Hotel
A hotel in the Colorado Rockies where Stephen King spent a night in room 217 and conceived The Shining. Staff and guests have reported piano notes and children's footsteps in empty corridors for decades.
The Myrtles Plantation
A Louisiana estate billed as one of America's most haunted houses. Its best-known story is of an enslaved woman, Chloe, in a green turban — undocumented, but persistent for well over a century.
Château de Brissac
The tallest château in France, seven storeys in the Loire valley. It carries the legend of the "Green Lady" — Charlotte de Brézé, killed in the 15th century, whose moaning is said to be heard in the tower at dawn.
Tower of London
A medieval fortress on the Thames with nearly a thousand years of executions and imprisonments. Legend holds that the ghosts of Anne Boleyn and other prisoners still walk its grounds.
Poveglia Island
An island in the Venetian Lagoon that served for centuries as a plague quarantine station and later a psychiatric hospital. Today it's abandoned and closed to casual visitors.
Winchester Mystery House
A sprawling Victorian mansion in California, continuously expanded for decades on the belief — held by its owner, Sarah Winchester — that construction kept the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles at bay. Staircases lead to ceilings; doors open onto walls.