Larme · CC BY 2.1 jp · Wikimedia Commons

Ghost sightingYellow

The Hakkōda Mountains

added29 August 20261902

Mountains in northern Honshū where, in January 1902, an army unit was almost wiped out on a training march: of two hundred and ten men, eleven survived. A blizzard of exceptional force caught them and some froze standing up. It remains the worst disaster in the history of mountain travel. The place is called one of the bleakest in Japan, and accounts of meeting soldiers on the trail are unremarkable here.

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40.65889, 140.87722

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Ghost sightingYellow

Teke Teke

The upper half of a woman's body, moving on its elbows with the clattering sound the legend is named for. The story makes her a schoolgirl cut in two by a train. Its persistence has a simple explanation: in a country with the densest railway network in the world everyone has a level crossing of their own where the legend becomes local. Like most Japanese urban legends of the later twentieth century it spread by word of mouth through schools, long before the internet.

353 km away

UFO sightingGreen

Hakui, the Town That Chose UFOs

A town on the Sea of Japan coast whose local chronicles record sorabune — sky boats — and which has built a municipal strategy on it. In 1996 it opened Cosmo Isle Hakui: a museum where a genuine Voskhod descent module, a lunar module mock-up and a display on unidentified objects stand side by side. The space hardware is real, bought from Russian and American organisations; this is not a theme park. The town deliberately keeps the two lines next to each other — the documented history of spaceflight and the undocumented stories — and the visitor walks from one into the other through a door. As an approach it is more honest than most places on this list.

549 km away

FictionalWhite

Lavender Town Syndrome

The legend says that in the Japanese release of Pokémon Red and Green in 1996 the music of the graveyard town carried high frequencies that gave children headaches and worse, and that the score was rewritten after a wave of complaints. Only one part of it checks out: the Japanese version does sound different from the international one — but the music was reworked for release abroad for ordinary technical reasons. No medical records, no cases, no names. The story appeared online a decade and a half after the game did.

561 km away

More: Ghost sighting

Ghost sightingYellow

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."

+22

Ghost sightingYellow

The Black Lady of Nesvizh Castle

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Ghost sightingYellow

The White Caver

The underground counterpart of the Black Climber, known to everyone who goes into caves across the former Soviet Union. What makes him white is calcite, settled on his clothes over years below ground. Meeting him traditionally means the party has lost the route. Cavers have a half-joking initiation rite for newcomers in which he is described — a rare case of folklore whose carriers know perfectly well it is folklore, and which is none the weaker for it.