Green level — mystical places on the map
Real places with nothing on their record — nothing that is reported to have happened to anybody. A history, a rumour, an atmosphere, a building with a past: the story is about the place itself rather than about what it does to whoever walks in. Most of the catalogue sits here, and that is the honest answer rather than a dull one.
101 placesAbout the danger levels
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Roswell
On 8 July 1947 the army airfield at Roswell issued a press release saying it had recovered a "flying disc". Hours later the statement was withdrawn and the debris called a weather balloon. It would have been forgotten if participants had not started telling it differently in the late 1970s; by the 1990s Roswell was shorthand for cover-up. In 1994 the Air Force admitted the balloon was not meteorological but part of Project Mogul, listening for Soviet nuclear tests — a truth forty-seven years late, which by then convinced nobody.
Metro-2
A secret metro line that officially does not exist — Moscow's most durable urban legend. As the story goes, "D-6" links the Kremlin with bunkers, the ministry building on Smolenskaya and Stalin's Near Dacha, and an entrance sits in the basements of Moscow State University's main building, which is said to have as many floors below ground as above. Diggers have published maps for decades that do not agree with one another; the defence ministry has never confirmed anything and never clearly denied it either. The legend runs on that silence: the less that is said, the more detailed the map becomes.
Sedlec Ossuary
A chapel below Kutná Hora in Czechia decorated with the bones of some 40,000 people. In 1870 a woodcarver arranged them into a chandelier, coats of arms and garlands — the chandelier is said to use every bone in the human body.
Catacombs of Paris
An underground ossuary beneath Paris holding the remains of more than six million people, moved from the city's overflowing cemeteries in the late 18th century. The bones are stacked into the walls as patterns of skulls and femurs.
Easter Island
One of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth, holding nearly 900 moai statues. How they were carved, moved for kilometres and raised had a simple Rapa Nui answer: the moai "walked".
Mount Kailash
A peak in western Tibet held sacred by four religions at once — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Bön. It has never been climbed: ascent is considered sacrilege, and pilgrims instead walk a circuit around it.
Arkaim
A circular Bronze Age fortified settlement in Russia's Chelyabinsk region, excavated in 1987 just before it was to be flooded. The archaeological site quickly attracted an esoteric following — visitors come from across Russia "for the energy".
Sacsayhuamán
An Inca fortress above Cusco, built from multi-tonne blocks fitted together without mortar so tightly that a knife blade will not pass between them. How they were shaped and lifted is still debated.
Yonaguni Monument
An underwater formation off the Japanese island of Yonaguni with flat terraces and right angles. Some read it as a sunken city, others as natural sandstone split along its bedding — the argument is still open.
Baalbek
A Roman temple complex in Lebanon standing on a base of megaliths weighing up to 800 tonnes. Exactly how those blocks were moved is not settled — which is what fuels the stream of alternative theories about them.
Göbekli Tepe
A sanctuary in south-eastern Turkey around 11,500 years old — older than farming, pottery or the wheel. Its circles of T-shaped pillars carved with animals upended assumptions about what came first, the temple or the town.
Carnac Stones
Over 3,000 standing stones set in long rows on the Brittany coast around 4500 BC. Why they were raised is unknown; Breton legend calls them a Roman legion turned to stone by Saint Cornelius.
Glastonbury Tor
A Somerset hill crowned by the lone St Michael's Tower, its slopes cut into terraces. It is identified with the legendary Avalon, where the wounded King Arthur was carried, and counted a centre of Britain's Celtic mythology.
Devils Tower
A 260-metre column of solidified magma in Wyoming, the first US national monument. In Lakota and Kiowa tradition its grooves are the claw marks of a giant bear; on film it is known from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Uluru
A massive sandstone monolith in central Australia that shifts from ochre to deep red at sunset. For the Aṉangu people it is a sacred site with its own rules about what may be photographed and where one may not climb.
Giant's Causeway
Some 40,000 basalt columns on the coast of Northern Ireland, formed as lava cooled. Legend has it the giant Finn McCool built the causeway across the sea to reach a rival in Scotland.
Externsteine
A ridge of sandstone pillars in the Teutoburg Forest with a chapel and a 12th-century relief carved into the rock. It has attracted theories of an ancient sanctuary for centuries — from 19th-century romantics to Third Reich ideologues.