Ever since I was a little kid, I've been fascinated by cemeteries and ghost towns, and kept my toes beneath my covers at night in fear of being pulled away by the boogeyman. This led to a love of urban exploration, which I'll honor by offering some spooky places to chew on - just in time for the holidays, where you should probably be drinking eggnog and thinking about something happier.
1. Isla De Las Munecas
Nobody knows the full details of how this place came to be, and most of the stories contradict and don't add up. Supposedly, this island was the home of a life-long hermit who witnessed a girl drowning in the river. He proceeded to place hundreds of dolls around the island to preserve her memory, and just one look at this place should make you never want to watch Toy Story again. It's like if the inhabitants of Sid's room somehow formed their own civilization. All the dolls are rotted and decrepit, and have their eyes poking out like deformed skeletons. If you're feeling up for it, I'm pretty sure they give tours, but I'm not touching that shit with a ten-foot pole.
2. The Winchester Mystery House
Sarah Winchester was terrified of ghosts. It's unknown if she became one herself when she died, but you have to wonder if she'd even find her way out of her house to begin with. Wanting to confuse spirits, she had architects construct doors in her mansion that opened up to nothing, attic crawlspaces that lead to dead ends and hundreds of secret passageways to baffle the ghouls that lurked her property. Again, tours are offered, and this might be a little more viable. There's no creepy dolls involved, but probably more than a few headaches as you're trying to find your way out.
3. Paris Catacombs
Well, there's not much to say here to drive the point home; it's dark, it's hundreds of feet beneath the Earth, and there might be six-million people buried down there. There's walls made of bones and the whole place looks like something out of a first-person shooter game like Quake. Luckily for thrill seekers however, it's very real, and again something I'm not going to touch with a ten-foot pole - actually, a fifty-foot one.
4. Nagoro
We've already visited an island full of dolls, so how about a whole city full of them? This place looks like the set of a goddamn horror movie, and something about the pictures filled me with this mounting sense of dread and revulsion. The whole town is populated by scarecrow-like dolls made by an artist who wanted to commemorate all of the souls that have left the area for greener pastures. If there's an issue with townspeople leaving, I'm not sure these doll-making escapades are doing anything to help.
5. Florida
I rest my case.
