Un mapa de lugares místicos y anómalos
Edificios abandonados, zonas anómalas, leyendas y lugares místicos de todo el mundo — en un solo mapa.
282 lugares
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Ver todoTriángulo de las Bermudas
Una zona del Atlántico occidental entre Florida, las Bermudas y Puerto Rico, asociada desde mediados del siglo XX con desapariciones inexplicadas de barcos y aviones.
Fuerte de Bhangarh
Las ruinas de una ciudad india del siglo XVII, declarada oficialmente por el Servicio Arqueológico de la India el lugar más embrujado del país: la entrada está prohibida después de la puesta de sol.
The Valley of Death in Kamchatka
A narrow hollow at the foot of Kikhpinych in the Kronotsky reserve, discovered in 1975: dead animals and birds are found on its floor regularly, and people who linger there become dizzy and weak. The answer was found almost at once and turned out to be chemical — hydrogen sulphide and other gases seep from fissures and pool in the hollow in still weather. The valley is still lethal and closed to visitors, and the name stuck long before the explanation did.
The Devil's Settlement near Kaluga
A rock outcrop in the forests of the Kaluga region, wrapped in stories about the devil building it in a single night. The place is interesting without them: goblin's gold moss, which glows in the dark, grows on the stones, and ferns live in the crevices that have no business at this latitude — relicts that survived the ice age in the rocks' microclimate. The botanical anomaly is real, and the explanation for it was found later than the legend was.
The Black Lady of Nesvizh Castle
Belarus's best-known ghost is Barbara Radziwiłł, the Polish queen who died in 1551 at twenty-nine. The story goes that her husband Sigismund Augustus was so undone by her death that he had her spirit summoned; the rite went wrong, and she has walked the galleries of the family castle at Nesvizh ever since. The castle is real and on the UNESCO list, tours run daily, and the Black Lady is the one exhibit that does not appear in the museum inventory.
The Adzhimushkay quarries
Limestone workings outside Kerch where, from May to October 1942, a garrison of soldiers and civilians held out after the city fell and they went underground. The Germans blew in the roofs and pumped gas into the galleries. Of some thirteen thousand people, a few hundred survived. The diaries found in the workings afterwards are among the hardest documents of that war. Part of the quarries is a museum today; the rest is closed, because remains are still being found there.
The White Caver
The underground counterpart of the Black Climber, known to everyone who goes into caves across the former Soviet Union. What makes him white is calcite, settled on his clothes over years below ground. Meeting him traditionally means the party has lost the route. Cavers have a half-joking initiation rite for newcomers in which he is described — a rare case of folklore whose carriers know perfectly well it is folklore, and which is none the weaker for it.
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 Dead Road
Construction Projects 501 and 503: the Salekhard–Igarka railway, driven across the polar tundra by prison labour between 1947 and 1953. After Stalin's death the work was abandoned in a single day. Some seven hundred kilometres of track remain in the tundra, along with locomotives, bridges and camp compounds with their watchtowers and barracks — all still standing, because removing it would have cost more than leaving it. It is called the dead road not for its ghosts: it leads nowhere and never did.
Myasnoy Bor
A tract of land outside Novgorod where the encircled Soviet 2nd Shock Army was destroyed in the spring and summer of 1942. The dead are counted in tens of thousands, and a great many of them are still unburied — search teams have worked here every season since the 1980s. Stories of voices, footsteps and the sounds of fighting in this forest are known to everyone who has been there. This is the case where the folklore needs no explaining: the place is exactly what it is described as.
Kapustin Yar
A missile range in the Astrakhan region, closed off since 1946 so thoroughly that the full set of stories grew up around it that grew around Area 51 in the United States: downed craft, underground hangars, tests of unknown machinery. Some of the rumours have an obvious source — rocketry really was tested here and a nuclear device detonated in 1957, and for years any flash over the steppe had no official explanation. The range is still in operation.
The Shushmor tract
A remote stretch of forest and bog where the Moscow, Vladimir and Ryazan regions meet. Its reputation is old: people were disappearing regularly on the post road here as far back as the late nineteenth century, and the district authorities tried to find out why. In Soviet times the stories gained a stone structure somewhere in the thicket that nobody has found since. The place is genuinely hard to cross — peat bog, no landmarks and no signal — and that explains a good deal of the reputation, though not all of it.