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.
164 placesAbout the danger levels
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.
Teufelsberg
Teufelsberg ("Devil's Mountain") is an artificial hill rising 120.1 meters above sea level within the Grunewald forest in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf borough of western Berlin, Germany. Engineered after World War II from roughly 26 million cubic meters of urban rubble piled directly atop the shell of an unfinished Nazi military-technical faculty, the summit became the location of "Field Station Berlin"—a classified Cold War signals intelligence (SIGINT) listening outpost operated by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and British intelligence. Crowned by weathered white geodesic radomes, the site stands as an iconic architectural monument to Cold War espionage and one of Europe’s premier open-air street art galleries.
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.
Lagarfljót and Its Worm
Lake Lagarfljót (also known as Lögurinn) is an elongate glacial lake situated in the Austurland region of eastern Iceland, stretching roughly 25 kilometers in length with depths reaching up to 112 meters. Fed by glacial meltwaters running off the Vatnajökull ice cap via the turbulent Jökulsá í Fljótsdal river system, the lake is celebrated for the Hallormsstaðaskógur national forest, the dramatic Hengifoss waterfall, and its status as the domain of Iceland's most famous folklore monster: the legendary giant lake serpent known as the Lagarfljót Worm (Lagarfljótsormurinn).
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.
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
The Edinburgh Vaults (commonly known as the South Bridge Vaults) are an extensive subterranean labyrinth comprising approximately 120 stone chambers integrated inside the 19 massive masonry arches of the South Bridge viaduct in the Old Town of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom. Completed in the late 18th century to span the steep Cowgate ravine, the interior chambers were originally engineered as commercial storerooms and workshops. Rapidly rendered unlivable by catastrophic water infiltration, the vaults devolved into notorious subterranean slums, were abandoned and sealed in the mid-19th century, and lay forgotten for over a century. Since their rediscovery in the 1980s, the complex has gained international infamy as one of Europe's most prominent paranormal and dark-tourism hotspots.
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'
Borley Rectory was a demolished Victorian parish house located in the rural civil parish of Borley in Essex, southeastern England, near the River Stour. Erected in the mid-19th century in an imposing red-brick High Victorian Gothic style, the residence achieved international fame during the 1930s and 1940s through the publicized investigations of paranormal researcher Harry Price, who branded it across British tabloids and bestsellers as "The Most Haunted House in England."
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.