All places
The full catalogue of approved places. Sort by rating, recency or discussion, and narrow it down by category.
282 places
Coral Castle
A structure in Florida that the Latvian Edward Leedskalnin built alone over twenty-eight years from limestone blocks weighing up to thirty tons. He worked only at night and stopped if anyone approached. Asked how, he said he had worked out the secret of the pyramid builders. He died in 1951 leaving no drawings and no explanation; an engineering answer is likely and dull, and there is nobody left to test it on.
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.
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.
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.
The Moundsville Penitentiary
A Gothic prison in use from 1876 to 1995, once listed among the ten most violent correctional facilities in the United States. Ninety-four men were executed here and some thirty-six more died in prison violence, including a riot in 1986. The Sugar Shack basement and the dark isolation cells have their own reputation. The building stands across the road from an Adena burial mound, which added another layer to the story.
The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum
One of the largest hand-cut stone buildings in North America, built in West Virginia for two hundred and fifty patients. By the 1950s it held around two and a half thousand, in unheated wards, under a lobotomy programme applied here unusually widely. The hospital closed in 1994. Night tours run through it now, and most of the accounts concern the fourth floor, where the most severe cases were kept.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Bennington Triangle
Between 1945 and 1950 five people vanished without trace in the woods below Glastenbury Mountain: an experienced guide, a college student, a war veteran, an eight-year-old boy, and a woman travelling by bus. Only one body was ever found, seven months later, on ground that had already been searched. Tradition holds that the local tribes considered the mountain cursed and used it only for burial. The town of Glastenbury itself was formally unincorporated in 1937 for want of residents.
The Bridgewater Triangle
A two-hundred-square-mile patch south of Boston, centred on Hockomock Swamp — Wampanoag for "the place where spirits dwell". Every sort of story collects here at once: lights in the sky, Bigfoot sightings, giant birds, ritually killed livestock, disappearances. The cryptozoologist Loren Coleman gathered them under one name in the 1970s, and the triangle has lived as a single anomaly since, though nothing but geography connects the stories.
The Sedona Vortexes
A town among the red rocks of Arizona that people have come to since the 1980s for its "vortexes" — points where visitors hold that the earth's energy surfaces, felt as tingling, dizziness or unusual clarity. Instruments find no magnetic or electrical anomaly at any of them. Sedona lives on it regardless: thousands come each year for the sensation, and most say they got it.
The Superstition Mountains
The range east of Phoenix, wrapped around the legend of the Lost Dutchman's Mine — a gold vein the German Jacob Waltz supposedly found in the 1870s and took to his grave. Dozens of searchers have died or vanished here since, several found beheaded. The Apache hold these mountains to be an entrance to the underworld and warned against disturbing them, a warning gold hunters have traditionally ignored.
The Taos Hum
Since the early 1990s a fraction of this town's residents have heard a low steady hum that the rest cannot hear at all. In 1993, under pressure from complaints, Congress commissioned a study by Sandia and Los Alamos; instruments in the homes of hearers recorded nothing matching the descriptions. The hum is described as a distant diesel engine, it keeps people from sleeping, and there is no shutting it out — earplugs do not help.
The Devil's Tramping Ground
A circle some forty feet across in the woods of North Carolina where almost nothing grows. Local tradition has the devil pacing it at night while he considers how to ruin mankind, wearing the ground bare. Objects left inside overnight are said to be found outside it by morning. Soil analysis found a high salt content, probably natural — but the story is easier to test than to believe, and people still camp here to try.
The Marfa Lights
East of this west Texas town, lights have been watched since 1883: basketball-sized spheres that hang over the desert, split, merge and go out. The cowboy Robert Ellison recorded the first, taking them for Apache campfires. University physicists showed in 2004 that a good share of them are headlights on Highway 67 refracted through layers of warm air. A share — but not all, and it cannot account for the sightings that predate cars.