All places
The full catalogue of approved places — abandoned buildings, anomalous zones, UFO sightings. Sort by rating, recency or discussion, and narrow it by category.
494 places
Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle (also known as the "Devil's Triangle") is a loosely defined oceanic region in the western North Atlantic, conventionally demarcated by points connecting the Bermuda archipelago, Miami (Florida), and San Juan (Puerto Rico). Encompassing an area of roughly 1 to 1.5 million square kilometers, the sector encompasses the Florida Straits, the Bahamas, and portions of the Sargasso Sea. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the zone became the premier global archetype of maritime and aviation lore, reputed across popular culture for the unexplainable disappearance of dozens of vessels and aircraft.
Bhangarh Fort
Bhangarh Fort is a monumental late-16th- to early-17th-century abandoned fortified city located in the Alwar district of Rajasthan, India, situated at the base of the Aravalli Range bordering the Sariska Tiger Reserve. Encompassing the ruins of a multi-tiered royal palace, stone bazaars, defensive bastions, and ornate Hindu temples, the complex is designated as a Monument of National Importance by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and is globally famous as "the most haunted place in Asia."
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (officially the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station, or ChNPP) is a decommissioned nuclear energy facility located in the Vyshhorod Raion of Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine, along the Pripyat River and a man-made cooling reservoir, roughly 3 kilometers southeast of the abandoned city of Pripyat and 18 kilometers northwest of Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, the site suffered the most catastrophic reactor breach in nuclear history (Level 7, the maximum on the INES scale), which destroyed Reactor Unit 4. Today, ChNPP is a specialized decommissioning site enclosed by the monumental New Safe Confinement arch structure.
The "Blue Whale"
The "Blue Whale" phenomenon (also known as "Death Groups," "f57," "Quiet House," or "Wake Me Up at 4:20") is a viral digital urban legend, an international moral panic, and a destructive social-media alternate reality game (ARG) that originated within the Russian-speaking web (principally the VKontakte platform) in late 2015. Between 2016 and 2017, the narrative of a clandestine syndicate of online "curators" systematically coercing hundreds of teenagers into self-harm across a 50-day sequence triggered massive public panic, prompted reforms in Russian criminal law, and gained global infamy as a supposed worldwide cyber threat.
Kashkulak Cave
Kashkulak Cave (colloquially known as the "Cave of the Black Devil" or the "White Shaman's Cave") is a karst cavern system in the Batenevsky Ridge of the Kuznetsk Alatau mountains, situated in the Shirinsky District of Khakassia, Russia. Featuring a three-tier network of galleries descending to a depth of 49 meters with over 800 meters of mapped corridors, the site earned notoriety in the late Soviet period as an anomalous subterranean hotspot where explorers and scientists experienced acute panic attacks, disorientation, and waking hallucinations.
Tsaritsyno and the Rejected Palace
The Tsaritsyno State Historical, Architectural, Art and Landscape Museum-Reserve is an expansive imperial palace and park estate in southern Moscow, commissioned in 1775 by Empress Catherine the Great. It stands as Europe's largest complex built in the Russian Gothic (pseudo-Gothic romanticism) style and represents one of the most dramatic architectural sagas in Russian history: the nearly completed grand residence was abruptly rejected and ordered dismantled by the Empress herself, leaving the site as a romantic, unfinished ruin for more than two centuries.
The Sukharev Tower and Jacob Bruce
The Sukharev Tower was a masterpiece of late-17th-century Russian civil architecture, formerly standing at the junction of Moscow's Garden Ring, Sretenka Street, and Prospekt Mira. Commissioned by Peter the Great and designed in the ornate Naryshkin Baroque style, the 60-meter-tall red-and-white monument functioned as a ceremonial city gate, the administrative birthplace of the Russian Imperial Navy, and the nation’s first astronomical observatory. In folk memory, the landmark is permanently tied to one of Peter's closest intellectual confidants, Field Marshal Jacob Bruce, who was mythologized as the supreme warlock and sorcerer of the Russian Empire.
The Library of Ivan the Terrible
The Lost Library of Ivan the Terrible (known in Russian as the "Libereya") is a legendary repository of ancient classical and Byzantine manuscripts, parchment scrolls, and codices purportedly assembled by Russia's first crowned Tsar, Ivan IV. Popular mythology claims this priceless collection of ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew literature was sealed away inside subterranean brick vaults beneath the Moscow Kremlin, the Alexandrov Kremlin, or the royal estate of Kolomenskoye, standing for four centuries as one of the world's most sought-after literary grails.
The Molebka Triangle
The Molebka Triangle (also known as the M-Zone or the Perm Anomalous Zone) is a geographic area spanning roughly 70 square kilometers in the Kishertsky District of Perm Krai, Russia, situated along the Sylva River near the historic village of Molebka. In the late 1980s, this remote pocket of Ural taiga transformed into the Soviet Union's first and most famous recognized "paranormal zone," becoming a global epicenter for UFO tourism and ufological expeditions.
The Khovrino Hospital
The Khovrino Abandoned Hospital (colloquially known as "HZB" or "The Umbrella") was a notorious Soviet mega-scale unfinished complex, formerly situated at 2 Klinskaya Street in the Khovrino District of northern Moscow. Built in a monumental modernist and brutalist architectural style, the 1,300-bed facility famously formed a three-pointed star from the air that precisely mirrored the international biohazard symbol and the Umbrella Corporation insignia from Resident Evil. For over three decades, the derelict complex served as the ultimate urban exploration mecca in post-Soviet Russia, cultivating extensive dark urban mythology before its complete demolition in late 2018.
The Blue Hand
The Artek International Children's Center (formerly the All-Union Pioneer Camp Artek) on the southern coast of Crimea near Gurzuf. Covering over 200 hectares beneath the slopes of Bear Mountain (Ayu-Dag), the world's largest youth camp complex functioned as the primary creative incubator for Soviet children's oral folklore. Here, around evening campfires and along the Black Sea shore, the quintessential Soviet camp creepypasta—the tale of the "Blue Hand"—was honed and passed down across generations.
The Black Grand Piano
Children's music schools, assembly halls of Soviet pioneer camps, and youth pioneer palaces (anchored symbolically by the Moscow Pioneer Palace on Sparrow Hills). Within Soviet juvenile subculture of the 1970s and 1980s, the classical instrument of bourgeois prestige and musical education transformed into the central artifact of an iconic urban horror legend: the "Black Grand Piano" (or "Black Upright"), which secretly drained the blood of young musicians.
The White Sheet
Dormitory wings of Soviet pioneer summer camps (anchored symbolically by the All-Russian Pioneer Camp "Orlyonok" in the Tuapse District of Krasnodar Krai), boarding schools, and pediatric sanatoriums. Within the confined quarters of communal camp dormitories during the 1970s and 1980s, the urban myth of the "White Sheet" (a close sibling to the "Black Sheet" motif) emerged as a foundational camp horror tale, transforming an ordinary domestic textile into a levitating nocturnal predator.
The Black Curtains
Standard apartments of Soviet prefabricated panel housing blocks (Khrushchyovkas and Brezhnevkas, epitomized by the 9th Experimental Block of Novye Cheryomushki in Moscow), state boarding schools, and summer camp dormitories. Within late-Soviet juvenile subculture during the 1970s and 1980s, the lore of the "Black Curtains" crystallized into one of the most pervasive domestic horror tales, transforming a standard household textile into an autonomous nocturnal predator.
The Red Stain
One of the most widespread Soviet scary stories. A family moves into a new flat and finds a red stain on the ceiling or the wallpaper that will not wash off and will not paint over: every morning it comes through again, a little larger. At night people vanish from the room, one at a time, and after each one the stain is brighter. The moral, in the children's telling, is always the same and always said out loud: they should have called the police at once.
The Tulpa
A practice Russian-language imageboards picked up from English-language ones around 2012: an imagined companion, grown over months of daily exercises until it answers on its own and becomes visible to the person who made it. The word is taken from Tibetan Buddhism, where it means something quite different; its present sense was given to it by Western occultists in the early twentieth century. The frightening part of the legend is not the practice but its retellings: the tulpa that stopped obeying, the tulpa that refused to go, and the tulpa that was there first.
The Blinking Windows
A residential high-rise building located at 7 Krasnoznamenskaya Street in the Central District of Volgograd, Russia. Originally converted from an unfinished Soviet hotel complex near the Piramida shopping center, the tower became the epicenter of one of the Russian internet's most viral urban legends of the 2010s: the mystery of the 11th-floor windows that rhythmically flashed into the night for years on end.
The Stickman
A figure assembled from sticks — arms, legs and neck longer than a person's — that stands motionless in the forest and copies the posture of whoever saw it. The legend was born on Russian-language imageboards in the early 2010s and rests on one detail retold almost word for word: the stickman does not attack and does not move while it is watched, and the distance between you closes only in the seconds when you blinked or turned away. In ten years no photograph of it has survived examination.
Ghostwatch on the BBC
BBC Elstree Studios and the suburban district of Northolt in Greater London, UK, are the defining locations of one of the most controversial media hoaxes in broadcast history. On Halloween night in 1992, the BBC aired "Ghostwatch," a mock live investigative special into a haunted council home that triggered nationwide public hysteria, regulatory sanctions, and real-world tragedy.
Alternative 3
Anglia House in the historic center of Norwich, Norfolk, UK—the former central broadcast headquarters of Anglia Television. It was from this building in the summer of 1977 that the network aired "Alternative 3," one of the most elaborate television mockumentaries in British broadcast history, which inadvertently laid the groundwork for modern conspiracy lore regarding secret space programs and elite off-world colonies.
The Beale Ciphers
Bedford County and the city of Lynchburg in Virginia, USA, form the geographic core of one of the most famous cryptographic mysteries in American history. In 1885, an anonymous pamphlet surfaced containing three coded texts purporting to reveal the exact burial site of an enormous cache of gold, silver, and jewels buried in the 1820s by an adventurer named Thomas J. Beale.
The Mary Celeste at Gibraltar
The Port of Gibraltar and the historic Gibraltar Vice-Admiralty Court represent the focal point of the greatest maritime mystery of the 19th century: the saga of the brigantine Mary Celeste. In December 1872, the derelict "ghost ship" was towed into Gibraltar Harbour, where an exhaustive British maritime inquiry took place, laying the groundwork for countless nautical legends and modern conspiracy lore.
The Betz Sphere
On 26 March 1974 the Betz family, walking a burned-over patch of woodland on Fort George Island in Florida, picked up a steel ball some twenty centimetres across. At home it behaved oddly: it rolled about the table, came back to its owner, hummed and made the dog howl. The press announced an alien device. James Randi examined and weighed it and showed that the mystery was an offset centre of gravity and a slightly sloping floor, and that any hollow ball hums. The Navy laboratory at Jacksonville identified the material as 431 stainless steel and concluded it was a ball from a ball mill. The sculptor James Durling-Jones later said he had carried such balls in his van and lost some in exactly that area.
The Crying Boy and the Fires
On 4 September 1985 the Sun printed the story of the Hall family of Rotherham: their house burned to the ground and a cheap print of The Crying Boy by the Spanish painter Bruno Amadio survived on the wall. Firefighters confirmed they had seen such pictures in the ashes more than once. The paper gathered hundreds of letters and staged a public burning of the prints. The explanation was simple and was tested in 2010 at the Building Research Establishment: the prints were made on dense board coated with a fire-resistant varnish and hung on a cord, which burns through first — the picture falls face down onto the floor, where the temperature is lowest. More than fifty thousand copies of The Crying Boy were sold, and most of them hung in kitchens.