Aokigahara is a woodland at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan that makes The Blair Witch Project
forest look like Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. It probably has
something to do with all the dead bodies scattered around.
What Niagara Falls is to weddings, Aokigahara is to suicide. How many
suicides does it takes for a place to get that reputation? A dozen?
Fifty?
More than 500 fucking people have taken their own lives in Aokigahara since the 1950s.
The trend has supposedly started after Seicho Matsumoto published his novel Kuroi Kaiju
(Black Sea of Trees) where two of his characters commit suicide there.
After that-always eager to prove they are bizarrely susceptible to
suggestion-hundreds of Japanese people have hanged themselves among the
countless trees of the Aokigahara forest, which is reportedly so thick
that even in high noon it's not hard to find places completely
surrounded by darkness.
Also skulls.
Besides bodies and homemade nooses, the area is littered with signs
displaying such uplifting messages like "Life is a precious thing!
Please reconsider!" or "Think of your family!"
"If you commit suicide here, bears will poop on your corpse."
In the 70s, the problem got national attention and the Japanese
government began doing annual sweeps of the forest in search of bodies.
In 2002, they found 78. But who knows how many they missed? In all
likelihood there probably is a hanged person somewhere in Aokigahara on
any given day.
By the way, if an entire dark forest full of hanged corpses wasn't
bad enough, a few years ago some people noticed that a lot of the dead
in Aokigahara probably had cash or jewelry on them. Thus began the proud
Japanese tradition of Aokigahara Scavenging where people are running
around the Death Forest, looking for dead guys to loot.
Located near Scotland's charming little village of Milton in the peaceful burgh of Dumbarton, the Overtoun Bridge
is a local arch construction where no human beings have ever died in
any suspicious circumstances whatsoever over the last few decades.
However, during that span, for reasons we can't begin to possibly
understand, hundreds and hundreds of dogs have killed themselves there.
It appears that dogs have been plunging off of Overtoun since the early
60s, at a rate of one animal a month... bringing the total number today
to around 600 mutts, who for some reason, decided to end it all.
And we're not talking about a series of unfortunate accidents that
could have been avoided with a simple guard rail. People who actually
witnessed the reported dogs willingly climbing the parapet wall and
leaping to their doom with dumbass doggy grins on their faces. Whether
they were crying blood remains to be confirmed.
Theories on why is this happening have been all over the place, from
particularly aromatic rodents to a simple stream of bizarre
coincidences. We call bullshit on both seeing as--to paraphrase Ian
Fleming--"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is
enemy action and over 600 is clearly the work of an ancient Sumerian
demon or some shit."
To further drive the point home, it has been observed that certain
dogs that jumped off the bridge and survived, fucking climbed back up
and THREW THEMSELVES TO THEIR DEATHS ALL OVER AGAIN.
Because the great Overtoun demon's hunger will not be appeased with tries. He demands fresh canine blood, and lots of it.
#4. Winchester Mystery House
In San Jose there is this house.
It is a gigantic, sprawling 160-room complex designed like a maze, with
mile-long hallways, secret passages, dead ends, doors opening to blank
walls and staircases leading to the ceiling.
It's the work of Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle
fortune. In the late 19th century, deeply saddened over the death of her
husband and daughter, she visited a Boston medium who told her she was
haunted by the spirits of all the victims of Winchester rifles. She
needed to make peace with them by... always be building a house. As in,
never stop building a house, or else she will die. What a nice thing to
say to someone who has just lost her family. There is no way this could
end with Sarah building a real life version of the Addams Family household.
In 1884, Winchester started construction of her new San Jose mansion,
which has gone on non-stop for 38 years right until her death. Despite
modern contractors taking about that much time to put in the wooden
paneling in your kitchen, the Winchester mansion eventually grew so big
you could, in all seriousness, get lost in it. And getting lost was the
idea, the crazy twists and turns and dead ends were intended to confuse
the ghosts. Sarah was kind of a jerk like that.
But pissing off vengeful spirits was just one of the many
architectural choices for the mansion. The entire Winchester Mystery
House was decorated with a constant spiderweb motif--which Sarah
believed had some spiritual meaning--and everything from the hooks on
the walls to candle holders has been arranged around the number 13,
supposedly for good luck. Yeah... for someone trying to free herself
from ghosts, Winchester did everything but sacrifice a baby goat to
Satan to assure her house will be haunted.
Remember when we said Aokigahara was the Niagara falls of suicide?
Well, for centuries the abbot in the small Czech town of Sedlec has been
the Niagara Falls for dead people, regardless of cause of death. Ever
since someone sprinkled soil from the Holy Land on the local cemetery in
the 13th century, people from all over Europe started demanding to be
buried there and the Sedlec graveyard kept growing until 1870, when the
priests decided to finally do something about all those surplus bones
lying around. Something insane.
Bam! Chandelier full of bones!
Today, the Sedlec Ossuary
is a chapel famous for being decorated with tens of thousands of human
bones. This macabre style of interior design was the work of Czech
woodcarver Frantisek Rint who, for some reason, was hired to organize
the church's extensive skeleton collection. The results were huge mounds
of human remains in the four corners of the chapel, a terrifying
chandelier built from every bone in the human body, and a massive skull
coat of arms adorning the entrance.
We realize this is the Czech Republic and all, but it has been 27 years, surely Poltergeist
was released out there already. Like, maybe last year or something? Why
are they still playing with human bones as if they were Satan's Lego
blocks and making them sit through Mass every single day for almost 140
years now? On the Tempting Fate scale, the only thing worse would be to
start using some of the skulls as ceremonial mugs or chamber pots.
At this point, does it really surprise anyone that the church became
the inspiration for Dr. Satan's lair in the Rob Zombie movie House of 1000 Corpses?
What do you get when you cross a series of abandoned, rusting,
futuristic UFO-shaped buildings with a series of mysterious deaths
covered up by the government? How about the ghost town-slash-tourist resort of San Zhi, located just outside Taipei and inside your worst nightmares.
The exclusive San Zhi resort in Taiwan was supposed to be the
destination for bored, rich folk who always wondered what it would be
like to live inside an over-sized hockey puck. Construction of Pod City
started around the 80s but was quickly shut down after a series of
mysterious on-site fatal accidents... or it could have been due to
Godzilla attacks for all we know. There is actually very little official
information on San Zhi. We can't even confirm how many people died
there or if they screamed something about eyeless children eating their
souls. The whole thing is shrouded in secrecy.
Currently, most of the information on the complex comes from the locals
who--what a surprise--refuse to go near the damn thing. And thus the
abandoned 90 pods just stand there, waiting for anyone foolish enough to
wander in.
A whole lot of you just got deja vu looking at the above picture. Specifically, those of you who have played Call of Duty 4,
as there is an entire level that takes place there. If you thought the
idea of a completely silent, abandoned, radioactive city was typical
video game apocalyptic fantasy, you were wrong.
Prypiat
is in the northern Ukraine and once housed the workers and scientists
of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant. Founded in the 70s, it held as many as
50,000 people. Then in 1986, according to a footnote in the official
Soviet records, there was a small malfunction in the Chernobyl reactor,
so for safety reasons the city was evacuated.
Since then, Prypiat has been desolated, its buildings decaying, the
giant Ferris Wheel just standing there all alone with nobody to ride it.
The city actually had an entire amusement park for the families of the
Chernobyl employees. Because when you are living next to a nuclear
reactor which was outdated even by 1986 Soviet standards, the only thing
on your mind is bumper cars.
The city is located in what is known as the Zone of Alienation, the
30-kilometer radius directly affected by the Chernobyl "minor technical
difficulty" over 20 years ago. Despite that, Prypiat is now opened to
the public because the radiation levels have apparently went down
significantly over the years. We guess we have a different view on
radiation than the government of Ukraine. They obviously have a scale
for it, while we consider any radiation a very bad thing.
Aside from the inherent risk of getting bit by a radioactive snail
and becoming the lamest superhero ever, there is another reason why you
will never see us among the tourists occasionally visiting Prypiat.
The fucking nursery. We told you this was a place built for families
and wouldn't you know it, they have a nursery, which according to
certain claims is currently paved with baby shoes and abandoned dolls.
So, Prypiat is basically an abandoned radioactive ghost Soviet baby
amusement park.
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