Orange level — mystical places on the map
Places where visitors are said to have come to harm: chased, injured, made ill, driven off, kept from leaving. Not deaths, but somebody who went and did not come back the same.
19 placesAbout the danger levels
The Black Climber
A figure in black who appears in the mountains: in some accounts he helps the lost, in others he leads them off the path. The legend is common to Soviet mountaineering as a whole and has been recorded in the Caucasus, the Tian Shan and the Pamirs; each region has its own version of who he was in life — usually somebody who was abandoned on a rope. The story has a practical point, and it explains its durability: it says out loud what actually happens in mountains, and what that world fears more than dying.
The Devil's Cemetery
A clearing in the taiga of Krasnoyarsk Krai, about which the same thing has been said since the 1930s: a round burnt patch where cattle die, machinery fails and people feel ill. The site is linked to the Tunguska explosion, which happened four hundred kilometres to the north. Expeditions have gone out since the 1970s, and the central difficulty is that nobody finds the clearing twice: the descriptions agree, the coordinates do not. Some researchers think the zone existed and has grown over; others think it never existed.
The Mad Gasser of Mattoon
In September 1944 residents of Mattoon, Illinois, began reporting the same thing to police: a sweetish smell in the house, nausea, numbness in the legs, a paralysing weakness. Around two dozen cases were logged in a fortnight. Police, the FBI and chemists found no substance, no traces and no man. The standard explanation is a wartime episode of mass psychogenic illness amplified by the local paper; the alternative points at emissions from a nearby plant. Neither is proven, and the case is a textbook fixture in social psychology.
The Pontianak
A woman who died in childbirth and came back for revenge — one of the central figures of Malay and Indonesian folklore. Her presence is identified by smell: first the sweetness of frangipani, then the smell of a corpse. She is held to live in banana trees, which is why they are not planted right against a house. The city of Pontianak in Borneo carries her name: by tradition its founder laid out the settlement on the spot where he drove these spirits off.
Hanako-san of the school toilet
A girl in a red skirt who lives in the third stall of the girls' toilet on the third floor of a school. You knock three times and call her name; if she answers, it is better not to open the door. The legend has been known across Japan since the 1980s, and its power is in the domestic precision: not an abandoned mansion or a graveyard but a particular cubicle in the building where a child spends half their life. Every school has its own version of who Hanako is and why she is there.
Kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman
A woman in a surgical mask stops a passer-by and asks: am I beautiful? Say yes and she takes the mask off, revealing a mouth slit to the ears, and asks again. The legend erupted in the spring of 1979 in Gifu Prefecture and crossed the whole of Japan within months: schools sent children home in groups, police stepped up patrols, newspapers reported the panic. The roots are older, going back to the Edo period, but the 1979 version was the country's first case of an urban legend requiring a police response.
The Kelly–Hopkinsville goblins
On the night of 21 August 1955 the Sutton family, from a farm outside Kelly, Kentucky, ran into the police station at Hopkinsville and said they had spent hours shooting at short creatures with large ears and glowing eyes that came up to the windows and did not fall when hit. Police went out to the farm, found shot-out windows and screens, and no trace of the creatures. There were eleven witnesses including children, there was no drink in the house, and the family had nothing to gain — they turned down money for interviews. The case remains one of the most argued-over in American ufology.
Bunny Man Bridge
A single-track railway underpass in Fairfax County, Virginia, known locally as Bunny Man Bridge. The legend puts a man in a rabbit suit with an axe here. There is a real basis and it is a modest one: in October 1970 county police logged two reports of a man in a white suit with rabbit ears who swung an axe at people near their cars and broke a window in a house under construction. He was never found. In half a century two police reports have grown into hanged children, an escaped asylum patient and a compulsory visit to the bridge on Halloween night.
Loch Morar and Morag
The deepest freshwater lake in the British Isles — over a thousand feet, deeper than Loch Ness. A creature called Morag appears in local accounts from 1887. The best-known incident is from 1969, when two fishermen said something some thirty feet long struck their boat and one of them fired a rifle at it. The statement was made to police and recorded.
Ben Macdui and the Fear Liath Mòr
Britain's second-highest mountain, where experienced climbers have reported the same thing since the early twentieth century: a sense of presence, the sound of footsteps following in mist, and a panic that drives them down. Professor Norman Collie described his own experience publicly in 1925, at real risk to his reputation. The thing is called the Big Grey Man; an explanation involving echoes and the Brocken spectre exists, and does not convince those it has happened to.
Dartmoor
The Devon moor that gave Conan Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles: he heard here the tradition of Richard Cabell, a seventeenth-century squire whose coffin was said to have been followed by a pack of spectral hounds. They are called the Wisht Hounds and are still described along the old track. A separate story concerns the Hairy Hands on the B3212, which motorcyclists say grab at the handlebars.
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.
Loveland and the Frogman
The Loveland Frog is a bipedal amphibious or reptilian creature with webbed digits, inhabiting the area around the city of Loveland, Ohio. It first appeared at 3:30 a.m. in May 1955. A businessman was driving along a rural road near the Little Miami River in Clermont County, close to Loveland, when he spotted three bipedal, wrinkled creatures under a bridge. They had webbed hands and feet, as well as no teeth. One of the frogs held up a stick that emitted sparks and gave off the scent of alfalfa and almonds. On August 25 of that same year, Mrs. Darwin Johnson and Mrs. Chris Lamble were swimming in the Ohio River near Evansville, Indiana. Suddenly, Darwin Johnson began drowning and struggling for breath after a scaly hand grabbed her underwater and pulled her toward the bottom. When Chris Lamble swam closer, the mysterious attacker retreated, allowing Darwin Johnson to escape. Since the Ohio River flows through Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Illinois, it stands to reason that the frogs could reach any of these states. In March 1972, police officer Ray Shockey was driving along East Kemper Road when he noticed a four-foot-tall, bipedal, leathery creature with a head and face like a frog or lizard. The creature leaped over the railroad tracks and apparently jumped into the Little Miami River. Scratches were found on the guardrails, though this is hardly proof of the Loveland Frog's existence, as a human would have left identical marks. Two weeks later, Officer Mark Matthews saw a similar frog on the road—four feet long, not counting its tail (which, notably, none of the other reported frogs had). The tailed body was lying on the road as if lifeless, but then stood up, crouched, and moved toward the guardrail. The officer fired a shot, but rather than killing the four-foot amphibian, he merely frightened it away. In 2016, Sam Jacobs was playing Pokémon GO behind the Beth Adam synagogue on Loveland-Madeira Road when he saw a large frog in the nearby river. Jacobs stated he wasn't sure if it was a frogman or just an extraordinarily large frog, but it walked out of the water on its hind legs. He added that he understood how crazy it sounded, but swore to its truth on his grandmother's grave.
Lake Worth and the Goatman
In the summer of 1969 several groups by the lake outside Fort Worth said, in one night, that a white hairy creature covered in scales jumped from a bluff onto their cars and threw a car tyre some fifty feet. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram put it on the front page and hundreds arrived at the lake with guns. Some of the reports were later traced to a student prank. Not all of them were.
Flatwoods and the Braxton County Monster
On 12 September 1952 three boys watched something bright come down on the hill behind the Fisher farm. Going up with one boy's mother and a few neighbours, the group made out a figure some ten feet tall in a torchbeam: a dark pleated body like a skirt, and a red face shaped like the ace of spades, lit from within. It smelled, they said, of metal and burning, and half the party was vomiting by morning. The Air Force put it down to a meteor and an owl. The locals never did.
Point Pleasant, Home of the Mothman
Between November 1966 and December 1967, people in this town at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha reported a winged figure some two metres tall with glowing red eyes — dozens of sightings. The first came from two couples driving past a disused explosives plant at night: the thing, they said, kept pace with their car at a hundred miles an hour. The reports stopped on 15 December 1967, when the Silver Bridge collapsed and forty-six people died — a coincidence that tied the Mothman to premonition for good. A steel statue of it stands downtown.
Golosov Ravine
A ravine in Kolomenskoye that Moscow tells stories about as a place where time comes loose. In the best-known version, a detachment of Tatar horsemen vanished into it during Devlet Giray's raid of 1571 — and in 1621 riders in antique armour appeared at the tsar's gates. Questioned, they insisted they had gone down into the ravine to escape pursuit, hidden in a greenish fog on its floor, and stepped out of it a few minutes later. Fifty years had passed. Two enormous boulders lie at the bottom, the Goose and the Maiden Stone; people still come to make wishes on them, and the fog really does linger there longer than on the slopes.
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.
Wittenoom
An Australian town built around blue asbestos mining, judged so hazardous that it was struck from maps and cut off from the power grid. It is officially the largest contaminated site in the Southern Hemisphere.