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
Lagarfljót and Its Worm
A glacial lake in eastern Iceland whose creature is first mentioned in the Icelandic annals for 1345. Tradition has a girl placing a gold ring under a small worm so that the gold would grow; the worm grew instead. In February 2012 a farmer filmed something long moving beneath the ice against the current; a local government committee voted by majority that the footage was genuine, which caused a row of its own.
Seljordsvatnet and Selma
A lake in Norway's Telemark county where a serpent called Selma has been described since 1750. In the 1880s a woman named Gunhild Bjøge is said to have killed a young one on the shore with an axe. The serpent appears on the coat of arms of Seljord municipality — that is, in official heraldry. A sonar expedition in 2000 recorded moving objects on the bottom that it could not identify.
Storsjön and the Great Lake Monster
Sweden's fifth-largest lake, whose creature was first recorded in 1635 in a tale of two trolls boiling something on the shore until a serpent came out of the cauldron. From 1894 to 1986 it was formally protected under Swedish law — a rare case of a state protecting something that probably does not exist. The protection was lifted at fishermen's request; a monument to the serpent still stands in Östersund.
Leap Castle
A castle in County Offaly held by the O'Carroll clan, where in 1532 one brother stabbed another — a priest — at the altar during mass. The room has been called the Bloody Chapel since. During repairs in the early twentieth century an oubliette was opened beneath it, spikes at the bottom; the remains filled three cartloads. Separately there is the Elemental, an entity whose arrival is said to come with a smell of decay and sulphur.
The Hellfire Club on Montpelier Hill
A hunting lodge built above Dublin in 1725, using stone taken from a prehistoric cairn destroyed for the purpose — locals said at once it would end badly. The roof was taken off by a storm soon after. The Irish Hellfire Club later took the building over; accounts of what went on inside vary, and the best-known has a card game at which one of the guests was noticed to have a hoof instead of a foot.
The Edinburgh Vaults
Nineteen arches of the South Bridge, built out from within in 1788 as workshops and storage. Within thirty years damp made them unusable and the poor moved in — no light, no drainage, no ventilation. Burke and Hare are thought to have worked here, selling bodies to anatomists. The vaults were filled in and only reopened in the 1980s; tours run through them now, and visitors' accounts are strikingly consistent.
Chillingham Castle
A thirteenth-century castle in Northumberland on the Scottish border, where captured Scots were held and tortured for centuries — the torture chamber survives with its instruments. Its best-known figure is the Radiant Boy, a bluish glow by a wall of the Pink Room; during repairs a child's bones and a scrap of blue cloth were found bricked into that wall. After reburial, the owners say, it stopped.
Borley, 'the Most Haunted House in England'
An Essex village where a rectory stood that the investigator Harry Price declared, in 1929, the most haunted house in England, renting it for a year of observation. Reports included a nun walking the garden, a phantom coach, and writing appearing on the walls. The house burned down in 1939. It later emerged that Price had probably produced a good share of the phenomena himself — but the reputation outlived both the house and the exposure.
Rendlesham Forest
A Suffolk forest between two US air force bases where, over three nights in December 1980, servicemen reported lights and a landed object three times. The deputy base commander, Charles Halt, recorded events on a dictaphone in the forest itself and filed an official memorandum, later declassified. The Ministry of Defence stated there was no defence significance and the investigation ended there. It is called Britain's Roswell.
Epping Forest
An ancient forest on the boundary of London and Essex, once a highwaymen's refuge — an inn here carries Dick Turpin's name. Over the last century it became known for something else: bodies have been brought here for generations. Police have recovered the remains of several murder victims in it, and the forest has a reputation that makes accounts of figures between the trees sound more plausible than they should.
Bodmin Moor and Its Beast
A granite moor in Cornwall where, from 1978, farmers lost livestock to wounds vets called uncharacteristic of dogs. Witnesses described a large black cat. In 1995 the Ministry of Agriculture ran a formal investigation and concluded there was no evidence of a big cat; a week later a schoolboy found a skull on a riverbank that proved to be a leopard's — though it had come from an imported rug.
Cannock Chase
Fifteen hundred hectares of heath and forest in Staffordshire where, in recent decades, everything has been reported at once: black cats the size of pumas, a "werewolf" seen near the German war cemetery, and a figure with burning eyes. The county police take such calls regularly and log them. An unsolved series of child murders in the 1960s adds its own layer to the reputation.
Cerro Uritorco
A mountain in the Argentine province of Córdoba, the main site of UFO pilgrimage in Latin America. In January 1986 a scorched oval some hundred and twenty metres long was found on its slope, and never explained. Local esoteric tradition places a hidden underground city, Erks, inside the mountain. Thousands climb it on New Year's Eve to wait for lights.
Nahuel Huapi and Nahuelito
A deep glacial lake in Argentine Patagonia where a creature was described long before Loch Ness: the Mapuche were telling the Spanish about it in the eighteenth century. In 1922 the Buenos Aires zoo announced an expedition to find a plesiosaur and the story went round the world. Nahuelito is described as a humped back some fifteen metres long; there are many photographs and not one convincing.
El Yunque
The only tropical rainforest in the United States national forest system, covering the mountains of eastern Puerto Rico. Local accounts have the chupacabra coming down from here to the farms, and place a secret laboratory somewhere in it from which the thing escaped. The forest needs no legend to impress: a hundred and twenty inches of rain a year, permanent cloud, and the sound of coquí frogs, heard everywhere and almost never seen.
Moca, Where the Chupacabra Began
In March 1995 farmers in this Puerto Rican town began finding sheep and goats dead, drained of blood, with two neat punctures in the neck. Within months the count ran into hundreds across the island. Witnesses described a creature the height of a man, moving in bounds, with spines along its back and huge black eyes. A Puerto Rican journalist coined the name — goat-sucker — and in thirty years the chupacabra has spread from Mexico to Chile.
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.
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 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.