Yellow level — mystical places on the map
Something is reported, and nobody is hurt by it: voices, figures, lights, cold, objects that move, cameras and engines that stop working. This is the level most hauntings actually sit at — frightening to be in, and that is all that was ever claimed.
109 placesAbout the danger levels
Barsa-Kelmes
A former island in the Aral Sea whose Kazakh name means "go and you will not return". As the sea retreated it stopped being an island and became part of a salt desert. In Soviet times it carried stories of time slips: people who left for a day and came back weeks later, watches running behind. They ran in the magazine Tekhnika — Molodyozhi in the 1980s, which is where they spread from. No instrumental confirmation ever appeared, and the place has since become a monument to an ecological catastrophe instead.
The Chuchunya of Verkhoyansk
In the coldest inhabited place on earth, the Yakuts and Evens tell of the chuchunya — a tall man in skins who lives alone, steals reindeer and runs off at improbable speed. In the 1920s enough reports accumulated that the Academy of Sciences sent an expedition under Pyotr Dravert. Ethnographers suggest the figure stands on something real: outcasts and the remnants of vanished clans who took to living away from people.
The Azass Cave and the Kuzbass Yeti
Mountain Shoria in southern Kuzbass is the setting of Russia's loudest wild-man story. From 2009 hunters reported tracks and silhouettes near the Azass Cave, and the regional authorities behaved unusually: a million-rouble reward, an international conference brought here in 2011, and a dedicated laboratory opened at the local university. Sceptics noted how neatly the surge of interest coincided with a push to develop tourism in a depressed district.
The Almasty of Kabardino-Balkaria
The Caucasus is the heartland of the Almasty, the Caucasian wild man: a creature some two metres tall covered in reddish hair which, by the accounts of mountain villagers, comes down to the sheepfolds and takes livestock. In the 1960s Professor Boris Porshnev collected testimony here for the Academy of Sciences and examined the case of Zana, a woman who lived in an Abkhaz village in the nineteenth century and whom locals held to be a captured Almasty. Her descendants were traced into the twentieth century; genetic analysis in 2015 found ordinary African ancestry.
Lake Khaiyr
A lake at the mouth of the Yana, famous since 1964, when a biological station worker, Nikolai Gladkikh, reported a creature on the shore with a small head on a long neck, black skin and a ridge along its back, eating grass. Komsomolskaya Pravda printed it and expeditions followed. The station's director later admitted the story had been invented. The retraction travelled far less well than the report, and Khaiyr is still listed among lake monsters.
Lake Seydozero and the Kuiva
A sacred Sámi lake in the Lovozero massif, on whose sheer cliff a dark human figure nearly seventy metres tall stands out — the Kuiva. The Sámi took it for the shadow of a giant killed for attacking their land, and avoided fishing within sight of the rock. Geologists speak of lichen staining and wet stone in the fissures. Barchenko's expedition came here in 1922 looking for traces of Hyperborea and, by rumour, found something; the material was classified and the man himself shot in 1938.
Ha Long Bay
Fifteen hundred limestone islands in the Gulf of Tonkin. The name means descending dragon: gods sent dragons to defend the Vietnamese against invaders, tradition holds, and they spat out pearls and jade that became the islands. A separate strand is sailors' accounts of a sea creature that French colonial officers reported in the bay in the 1890s.
Bukit Timah and the Monkey Man
Singapore's highest point and a remnant of primary rainforest in the middle of the city. A creature has been described here since 1805, known as the Bukit Timah Monkey Man: grey-furred, about five feet tall, moving on two legs. Reports came in waves — notably during the Japanese occupation, when people were hiding in the forest, and again in 2007, which caused a stir in the Singapore press.
Oiran Buchi
A gorge in Yamanashi Prefecture attached to one of Japan's grimmer traditions. In the sixteenth century, the account goes, when the Kurosawa gold mine was closed, fifty-five courtesans who knew the layout of the workings were led onto a suspended platform above the river — and the ropes were cut. There is nothing to confirm it historically, but the site is formally treated as a place of remembrance, and the bridge has the reputation to match.
The Hakkōda Mountains
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.
Hanging Rock
A volcanic formation in Victoria, known from Joan Lindsay's novel and Peter Weir's film about schoolgirls vanishing on a picnic. The book is written so that many readers still believe the story is true — there was no disappearance. The rock, however, produces exactly the impression described: narrow passages between boulders, an abrupt silence, and the distortion of time sense that many visitors mention.
The Min Min Lights
A town deep in Queensland that gave its name to the lights seen on the roads of the burnt west: glowing spheres that follow a car or a rider and keep their distance for hours. Aboriginal people described them before Europeans arrived. In 2003 the physicist Jack Pettigrew showed experimentally that under a temperature inversion a light source beyond the horizon can appear as a nearby object — an elegant explanation that does not cover every case.
The Blue Mountains and the Yowie
The range west of Sydney, where Aboriginal peoples described a large hairy creature long before colonisation and settlers began writing about it from the 1790s. The Yowie is described in almost the same terms as the North American Sasquatch. The mountains really do smoke blue — that is eucalyptus oil vapour scattering the light, not a legend.
Khumbu, Yeti Country
The valley below Everest, home of the Sherpa, where Western expeditions first met the yeti as something more than a story. In 1951 Eric Shipton photographed a thirteen-inch print on the Menlung Glacier with an ice axe beside it for scale — the picture is still argued over. Khumjung monastery keeps a scalp said to be a yeti's; analysis in 1960 found it was made from serow hide.
Mount Elbrus
The highest peak in Europe and a dormant volcano to which, in one version of the tradition, Prometheus was chained. The mountain has accumulated a body of stories of its own: the Priyut 11 hut that burned in 1998, the bodies of German Edelweiss division troops found where they planted a flag in 1942, and figures in the mist that climbers describe in almost the same words used on Scotland's Ben Macdui.
The Sablino Caves
Disused quartz sand workings outside St Petersburg, mined from the nineteenth century to supply glassworks. Several dozen kilometres of passages remain, with collapses, underground lakes and colonies of hibernating bats. The caves were long ago adopted by the city's subculture: a homemade shrine stands near one entrance, and everyone here can tell you about the White Caver, a ghost that either saves or dooms those who get lost.
Mount Pidan
A mountain in Primorye carrying what is probably the most durable legend of the Russian Far East — the flying man, a winged figure hikers describe on the boulder fields near the summit. The account was first recorded in the 1930s. The mountain is known for more than that: the stone runs on its slopes look in places like masonry, and some local historians insist they are the remains of a Jurchen fortress.
The Patomskiy Crater
A cone of shattered limestone forty metres high in the remote taiga of Irkutsk Oblast, found by the geologist Vadim Kolpakov in 1949. The Evenks called it the Fire Eagle's Nest and kept away. Every explanation has been tried: meteorite, volcanic gas, an underground nuclear blast, a uranium deposit. None is confirmed, and the leader of the 2005 expedition died of a heart attack on the way to it, which did the reputation no harm.
The Kola Superdeep Borehole
The deepest borehole in the world — 12,262 metres, drilled between 1970 and 1992. Science got surprises out of it: water at a depth where there should be none, and microscopic fossils in rock two billion years old. Urban legend added its own: that a microphone lowered into the hole recorded screaming, and drilling was abandoned because of a well to hell. No such recording exists and the project ended when funding collapsed, but the story lives on its own.
The Molyobka Triangle
A stretch on the border of Perm Krai and Sverdlovsk Oblast that became, in the late 1980s, the first Soviet anomalous zone written up in the national press. From 1989 thousands travelled here, reporting glowing spheres, equipment failing, loss of bearings, and "luminous people". The place is linked to old Mansi sacrificial sites. A statue of an alien stands by the village now, and the flow of researchers dried up long ago.
Lake Labynkyr and Its Devil
A lake in the Oymyakon district of Yakutia, one of the coldest inhabited places on earth. The local Even people have spoken of a devil since the nineteenth century: a dark creature with an enormous mouth that drags off reindeer and dogs. The lake behaves oddly in winter, keeping open water at fifty below. Sonar expeditions have recorded large objects near the bottom, and none has brought anything up.
Triglav
Slovenia's highest mountain, named for a three-headed Slavic deity and shown on the national coat of arms. Local tradition places Zlatorog on its slopes — a white chamois with golden horns guarding treasure; the hunter who wounded him died, and flowers grew from the drops of blood that restored the animal's strength. Slovenes have a saying that you are not one until you have climbed it.
Lake Van and Its Monster
Turkey's largest lake, strongly alkaline and nearly lifeless — which makes the monster story an odd one. In 1997 a university teacher, Ünal Kozak, filmed a dark object moving across the surface; the footage went round Turkish television and he wrote a book about the creature. A statue of the monster stands on the waterfront at Van.
The Hessdalen Valley
A Norwegian valley where luminous objects have been observed since 1981, at times twenty times a week. Unlike most such places it has a permanent automated observation station, built in 1998 by Østfold University College, and the phenomenon has been under instruments for a quarter of a century. Hypotheses exist — dust ionisation, a piezoelectric effect in the rock — and none accounts for all of it.