Bran Castle, Bran, Romania
A vertiginous hilltop climb leads to a storybook castle that seems to have no horizontal surfaces: Endless stairways and towers are all that is visible. Inside, underground passageways connect dozens of rooms containing rococo antiques and suits of armor. All that’s missing from Dracula’s Castle, as Bran Castle is known, is a stormy night and a lightning bolt to illuminate the scene. A cloud of legend, local folklore, and literary pedigree hang over the dramatic fortress, perched 200 feet above the Romanian town of Bran. The castle has certainly reaped a PR bonanza as the setting for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with a reported 450,000 visitors a year—not bad for an isolated spot in Eastern Europe. The name comes from the notoriously sadistic tyrant Vlad the Impaler, known as Vlad Dracula, who is said to have used the castle as an occasional base of operations. Vlad earned his nickname by hoisting tens of thousands of enemies on stakes; one engraving shows him feasting alone at a table surrounded by a veritable forest of his victims hanging on spikes. Bram Stoker got wind of Vlad’s legend and, after a visit to Romania, modeled Count Dracula’s castle on this one. The castle is quite tourist-friendly, but just be aware that it closes at 4 pm, lest the sun set before visitors are safely away.
Paris Catacombs, Paris, France
Bones and skulls are stacked on either side of a narrow corridor like merchandise at a warehouse—a lot of merchandise. The air is close and cool, with just a hint of decomposition, and there’s rude graffiti dating from the French Revolution, mainly about the king and the feeble nobility. Once inside, you can easily see why Victor Hugo and Anne Rice have set stories in Paris’s famous Catacombs. Snaking some 187 miles through underground passages around the city, only a tiny portion is open to the public—it’s said that the rest is patroled by the legendary cataflics, a special underground police force. Though guided tours are available, it’s more creepy and effective to go on your own, when it’s just you and millions of bones lit by the occasional low-wattage bulb. The catacombs were originally a Roman-era quarry, but when the Innocents Cemetery in central Paris started overflowing to the point of being a public health hazard in 1785, the tunnels came into their present state. Bones were carted off in elaborate nighttime ceremonies, and until 1814 the catacombs filled up with Paris’s dead. You can reach out and rattle the ivory yourself if you like, but the greatest chill is in wondering which of them didn’t die of natural causes.
Winchester House, San Jose, California
The Winchester “Mystery” House is a colossal construction built on a foundation of superstition. It’s said that Sarah Winchester, heiress to the arms company, was told by a soothsayer that the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles would haunt her unless she moved from Connecticut to the West and built a house that could never be finished in her lifetime. Construction started in 1884 in San Jose, California, and kept going nonstop for 38 years until her death. Now the house’s 160 rooms are haunted by her madness and packed with bizarre details: Staircases go straight into the ceiling, doors open onto blank walls, spider motifs abound, and candelabras, coat hooks, and steps are arranged in multiples of 13. Reports of banging doors, footsteps in the night, moving lights, and doorknobs turning of their own accord have been occurring since the house was opened to the public. Tour options include Flashlight Tours every Friday the 13th and Halloween. But you don’t have to believe in ghosts to be blown away by the scale and intricacy of the place, or the folly involved in building it.
Szoborpark, Budapest, Hungary
A towering Lenin addresses a now-absent city square, while Marx and Engels, wearing holy robes and carrying religious-looking texts (surely their own), are crumbling nearby. Budapest’s Szoborpark is a collection of retired Soviet-era iconography just outside Budapest. A pavilion warehousing 40 years of often kitschy, sometimes terrifying, and overdone public statuary, the park is a brilliant solution to the problem that came up with liberation from Soviet tyranny in 1991: What to do with all that official art? While the rest of the former Soviet republics couldn’t get rid of their Lenins fast enough, the Budapesters decided to round them up and put them on display. As you walk around, all those stony stares create the uncanny feeling that you’re being watched. Take a 30-minute public bus ride from the city’s central Déak Tér stop; you have 40 minutes to wander before the bus goes back into town.
Aleister Crowley is perhaps the world’s most infamous occultist, and this now-overgrown stone ranch-style house with hallways full of dark pagan frescoes was once the world capital of his satanic orgies. Or so it was reported in the 1920s. Crowley is now known for his famous fans, including Jimmy Page and Marilyn Manson, and the fact that he appears on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. He founded the Abbey of Thelema—named after a utopia described in Rabelais’ Gargantua whose motto is “Do as thou wilt”—in 1920 in the beach town of Cefalù, Sicily. It became a free-love commune with a dark side: Newcomers were forced to spend the night in the “Chamber of Nightmares,” where, high on hashish and opiates, they stared at frescoes of earth, heaven, and hell. After a British society dandy named Raoul Loveday died of a fever contracted at the Abbey, the press had a field day, leading an embarrassed Benito Mussolini to expel the commune in 1923. Notorious underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger unearthed the compound in 1945 and made a movie there, although mysteriously the film was subsequently lost. The Abbey is now a collapsed semi-ruin, overrun with vegetation, but inside there are some original hellish frescoes that Crowley used to scare his disciples into shape. Intrepid and esoterically minded visitors visiting Sicily can wander the grounds and get some vibes, though no official tours are available.
Mary King’s Close, Edinburgh, Scotland
Hidden below Edinburgh’s medieval Old Town is a series of subterranean streets with an unsavory past. Mary King’s Close is where plague victims were quarantined and left to die in the 17th century, and paranormal activity abounds down there. You might, for instance, feel some gentle tugging at your hands and legs by an unseen force. The cause is believed to be the ghost of Annie, a young girl abandoned by her parents in 1645. More than a hundred years later, in classic horror-tale fashion, a grand new building was constructed over Mary King’s Close, leaving the streets, including the plague ghosts, intact underground. In 2003, the surprisingly well-preserved Close was opened to visitors, drawn by tales of its supernatural goings-on. Tour guides will accompany you down a stone staircase to the vaultlike, oppressive lanes. In addition to Annie’s Room, there are typical re-creations of bygone lifestyles and plague deaths. Just remember to keep on moving, especially when you feel a sudden chill.
Chernobyl, Pripyat, Ukraine
Walk through the abandoned town of Pripyat in the Ukraine, and you’ll find a large-scale crime scene abandoned in a hurry: A nursery full of children’s shoes, and apartment complexes with the morning newspaper, dated April 28, 1986, open on the breakfast table. Two days before, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, minutes away, melted down, but it took 48 hours for the authorities to alert locals and clear them out of the world’s biggest nuclear disaster site. Now that radiation levels are safe for short-term exposure, Chernobyl’s nuclear complex has become an unlikely tourist attraction since opening to visitors in 2002. The power complex is at the center of the 20-mile-radius “Exclusion Zone,” a regrown area of forests now populated by wolves and bears. Reactor #4 is the star of this sad show, today sheathed in a concrete and lead sarcophagus 200 feet high. A tour organization called Welcome to Ukraine offers day trips from Kiev via bus (you’re advised to book two weeks in advance): You’ll tour the forest and get to inspect the plant’s exterior, including mounting an observation post to see the reactor, before walking to Pripyat, which was built in the 1970s and celebrated in official USSR propaganda as the “world’s youngest town.” It died young, but failed to leave a beautiful corpse.
By: RALPH MARTIN
