Muncaster. Fortune castle
The history of the majestic mystical English castle of Mancaster is not even centuries old, but millennia. The castle was erected on the foundations of a fort that belonged to the ancient Romans. Since 1208, only one old Penington family has completely owned the castle. This hospitable clan once sheltered King Henry VI as he wandered the surrounding fields in despair after losing a battle. In gratitude, the king gave the chapter, John Pennington, a personal cup and predicted that, as long as the cup remained intact, the Penningtons would be lucky. The Chalice of Henry VI is still kept in the castle of Muncaster and is known as the "Luck of Muncaster".
During its long history, the monumental structure was completed many times, rebuilt and restored, but some places of this castle remained unchanged. The famous Tapestry Room of the castle has never been used as a living room, but this is where the famous ghosts of Muncaster prefer to appear.
• Also in the castle you can meet the ghost of the court jester - Tom Ful. This ghost, loudly slams doors and loves nasty tricks. It is Tom who is credited with all the problems that sometimes occur here: a burning wiring, a broken window, a jammed lock. Truth be told, Tom Ful was actually a vile personality. During his lifetime, he liked to sit on a spreading tree by the road. If the traveler, asking for directions, did not like the jester, he sent him instead of the necessary place straight to … quicksand, where the unfortunate man was awaiting inevitable death.
There are always a lot of tourists, and some connoisseurs of antiquity stay here for the night. Once such a group, for lack of free space, was put to bed in the Tapestry Room. In the morning, the frightened tourists said that they could not close their eyes all night: children's crying, heavy steps, sad sighs and strange smells every now and then arose in the room!
More often in Muncaster you can meet the White Lady - the ghost of the housekeeper Mary Bragg, who served in the neighboring estate. In Muncaster, Mary had a favorite of the servant. But another woman had a look at the footman who had won Mary's heart. It was she who somehow sent two strangers at night for the housekeeper who were supposed to accompany Mary to her beloved who was sick. Mary went with them and … disappeared, and later the body of a girl in love was found in the river.
You can often meet the White Lady not only in the castle itself, but also on the road leading to it. Sometimes motorists, in front of whom the silhouette of a young woman suddenly appears, get scared: they think they have hit a man. But the victim who ran out onto the road … dissipates in fog.
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Island of dolls. "Children's hell"
The doll is a funny kind children's toy that personifies a warm family hearth for girls. But the Island of Dolls in Mexico is associated only with the negative, because all the dolls on this gloomy island look like dead people or characters from horror films.
Almost all the trees in this corner of tropical paradise are hung with dozens of intact but mutilated dolls, as well as parts of their bodies. Such a "puppet hell" on the island was arranged by only one person - Don Julian Santana. Santana was a man of heavy temperament who “worked” on the Island of Dolls for half a century. He left his family, home and work to devote himself entirely to one hobby: collecting old dolls and hanging them on the trees and fences of the island.
What pushed Don Santana to such a strange hobby? They say that with the help of toys he wanted to appease the spirit of a drowned little girl. It is unlikely that a child, having seen this terrible exhibition of no less than a thousand old, dirty, disfigured dolls, would have experienced any bright feelings, but the hermit did not stop stubbornly going about his business.
• An impressionable person should not visit the Island of Dolls. He makes such a strong impression that the case may end with more than just a swoon. The creator of the gloomy museum of discarded toys in 2001, too, drowned in one of the canals around the island, like the one to which he dedicated the first doll brought here. Today, the eerie "museum" is supervised by members of the Santana family, and the order in the "exposition" is maintained by voluntary donations from many tourists.
The man exchanged old toys for vegetables and fruits grown on the island, or looked for discarded dolls in the trash heaps of Mexico City. The hermit assured that each of the dolls has an astral connection with one of the drowned women. In fact, in this part of Mexico, in an area full of canals, unattended young children often fall into the water and drown without waiting for help.
In the evenings, at dusk, the dolls of the island seem to come to life: they sway in the wind and seem to whisper to each other. Tourists claim that the dolls seem to hypnotize living people with their dead eyes, resembling those terrible drowned women who have just been pulled out of the water. To ward off obsession, locals advise lighting candles in front of the dolls and reading prayers.
The dwarf mansion. Small house of great horror
In the state of Texas (America), thrill-seekers will definitely be shown a local attraction - a mansion located in San Antonio, where a terrible story took place at the beginning of the 20th century.
Even from the outside, the Dwarf mansion has a different look than the houses in the quarter: it was built for himself and his family by a very small film actor. His wife was also a midget, and the children went to be their parents, so this family did not feel comfortable in houses for ordinary people.
• The mansion was put up for sale, but no buyers were found. Neighbors assure that the house is inhabited by tiny ghosts and from there from time to time you can hear the cries of people crying for help. The house is shown to tourists in our time - many, passing next to the closet in which the bodies of the murdered were hidden almost 100 years ago, say that mysterious scratching sounds are heard from there, as if someone still wants to get out.
In this mansion, every detail was arranged for the convenience of a small family: the steps on the stairs, and the beds, and the height of tables, chairs and ceilings, door handles were also attached at the required height, and all the plumbing of the house was adapted for the needs of a tiny family - everything in accordance with the scale of people whose height was no more than 120 cm.
Next to the mansion there are servants' outhouses - with the same scale, rather corresponding to the houses for the playgrounds. Everything was thought out to the details, but … the owner of the house hired a tall servant! Wasn't this desire a desire to annoy people of ordinary height, who often pointed fingers at the poor fellow in the street?
The servants in the dwarf's house were forced to constantly walk hunched over, and the tiny rooms, which looked more like pantries than ordinary rooms, were capable of causing claustrophobia in healthy people. In addition, the owners pestered the servants, who were faced with the need to endure nagging for the sake of earning money, bringing the unfortunates literally to white heat.
Once a servant, enraged by the dwarf's disdain and ridicule, in a fit of uncontrollable rage, killed the little man with an ax. The rest of the family rushed to run, but they had no chance against the tall servant. He hid the corpses in the closet. Then the maddened servant, before committing suicide, set fire to the accursed house, which brought him so much suffering.
San Antonio firefighters arrived on time and were quickly able to extinguish the fire. When inspecting the mansion, the bodies of the Dwarf family and the corpse of their killer were found.
Skeleton Cave. What is true and what is fiction?
Another mystical place on the planet is located in the impenetrable tropical jungles of Thailand. It is shrouded in a dense veil of secrets: this is the so-called Skeleton Cave. The cave was discovered only at the end of the twentieth century, and now there is no longer any doubt that it was used for conducting magical rituals, and the remains found here belong to people who were sacrificed to the gods by ancient priests or shamans.
The expedition, which was sent to explore the Skeleton Cave, by the American National Association of Anthropologists, faced incredible difficulties: before it, more than one group of scientists disappeared without a trace in these places, teeming with poisonous reptiles and bloodthirsty reptiles. In addition, the surroundings of the cave have been notorious for a long time: locals tell legends about a tribe of cannibals, who also practiced something like a voodoo cult.
When the scientists finally managed to get to the cursed place, the first thing they saw was the remains of the previous expedition, in which every single person died, while all people were killed in a similar way - their heads were broken and their chests were squeezed … The most mysterious thing was that the bodies showed no signs of a struggle, no signs of someone's presence.
When the researchers entered the cave, they were even more amazed: the skeletons of people were literally piled up in heaps, and … all the victims had similar injuries!
However, the most mysterious was yet to come: all night long an incomprehensible noise, like the clatter of many bones, which scientists took for the sounds of a night forest, was heard to the campground. What a surprise the anthropologists were when, upon entering the cave, they found that the skeletons … had changed their location!
• There are many legends about the Cave of Skeletons, including the fact that newly arrived people are killed … by the skeletons themselves. It is difficult to say which of all this is fiction, and which is true, because no one else dared to explore the gloomy cave to the end. No wonder they said that the American researchers, who fled in panic, were most frightened by the fact that the old skeletons in the cave were full of marks of fresh blood!
Anthropologists left two of their group to film the cave at night. But in the morning, their colleagues were found dead, while they were killed in the same terrible way …
Highgate. Jack the Ripper's final home
Around London there is a network of 7 old cemeteries, which Londoners themselves call the "Magic Seven". One of the most notable and famous is the Highgate Cemetery, which was opened for burials in 1869. Architect Stephen Geary created the initial design for the cemetery and also designed the design in line with the Victorian era, and the new necropolis quickly became popular with the London nobility.
Entire stylized streets have been laid in the cemetery, one of which is Egyptian one, on which huge Lebanese cedars grow. It still makes an amazing impression in our time, however, like the place as a whole. Philosophers and economists are buried in Highgate, the founder of Marxism Karl Marx and his entire family, royalty, the famous writer J. Golsworthy, many famous artists, scientists, blue-blooded aristocrats and just adventurers are buried, whose funds made it possible to buy a place in a fashionable cemetery …
According to legend, it is in Highgate that the remains of the famous Jack the Ripper, a serial killer of prostitutes, who have never been caught, are found. Nowadays, the old cemetery looks more like a forest from a terrible fairy tale: huge trees have closed their crowns over the graves, many of which have long been abandoned, and ivy entwines crosses and mausoleums … The necropolis has become a haven for many birds, foxes and hedgehogs, and visitors often complain about something that someone's gazing evil looks on.
In the 1970s, rumors swept through the British capital that the London cemetery was a den of vampires. There were people who allegedly even saw the living dead. Volunteers opened suspicious graves and stuck aspen stakes into the corpses. After such wild incidents, relatives began to brick up the entrances to the crypts.
• Several years ago a strange incident happened here and with the O'Brien couple (from Scotland). Reading the inscription on one of the family graves, whose members died on the same day - May 19, 1899, and reasoning about whether vampires were buried in this mysterious grave with the letter "V" engraved, the couple suddenly noticed … a strange trinity in clothes of the century before last ! The young man, the girl and the old lady looked at the tourists in surprise. "Mrs Jefferson?" - Asked O'Brien's wife, reading the name on the grave, and the old woman immediately responded: “Yes, it's me. Do we know each other?"
But no matter what, the ghosts of Highgate Cemetery are a reality that is hard to dispute. 2005 - astonished sightseers saw on the path … an old lady in brooches! The spirit was so real that it almost did not differ from living people - unless only in dress. The old lady's clothes belonged to a bygone era, and she herself, colliding nose to nose with amazed tourists, slowly melted into the air …
Povelya. Island on bones
Another mystical place on the planet, located very close to the beautiful "city on water", in the Venetian lagoon, where land is literally worth its weight in gold, there is a whole abandoned island - Poveglia. Once the island was built up with beautiful buildings and people lived here, but after a whole series of deaths and misfortunes, Italians, and visitors, began to avoid the island, located just two nautical miles from the heart of Venice - the Grand Canal.
From afar, Poveglia seems cozy and inhabited: this is emphasized by the lush greenery of the trees, the embankment, and the graceful spire of the church bell tower. But as soon as a person steps on the island, horror and confusion rolls over him. Even those who do not know anything about Poveglia feel discomfort on the island, what can we say about those who know the history of this gloomy corner of Italy!
The Italians assure that the lush vegetation of Poveglia was rooted in the ashes of many human remains: it was here in the Middle Ages that poor fellows were brought, who contracted the "black death" - the plague. Even today, fishermen avoid fishing off the island, since human bones polished by the sea, who died from the plague and were not buried according to the church rite, often fall into the net along with the catch. Historians have calculated that a total of 160,000 people died in the plague quarantine on this small piece of land!
At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a psychiatric clinic on the island. The remoteness from the city and vicious inclinations contributed to the fact that the chief doctor of the hospital began to carry out terrible experiments on patients. Finally, the murderer himself also went mad, throwing himself from the bell tower onto the stone slabs of the church courtyard.
• Italy has now put Poveglia Island up for sale to pay off its national debt. The Italians themselves, when asked about the island, only smile sweetly, saying that Poveglia is a great place to relax or set up a fashionable resort. But neither locals, nor vacationers from other parts of Italy are in no hurry to land on the shores of the Poveglia - isn't it for the reason that most Italians are extremely superstitious? Or maybe the rumors that Povella is full of ghosts that can drive anyone crazy, still have a basis?
Nowadays Poveglia is an eerie place with dilapidated houses, dilapidated stone stairs and thickets of wild grapes. No one has lived on the island since 1968, when the last person left the building of the psychiatric clinic, renamed as a homeless shelter.
Rainham Hall. Falsifications are excluded
The family estate of the Marquis Townsend - Rainham Hall in England has been home for more than 250 years not only for many offspring of the Townsend family, but also for the mysterious ghost of a young woman, who, according to British tradition, received its own name - The Brown Lady.
But if ghosts are usually avoided by the camera, then the Brown Lady from Rainham Hall was photographed several times! For the first time, the ghost was filmed by accident: in 1936, the owner of the estate invited the photographer I. Shire to take some photographs of the old interiors of the mansion. The unsuspecting photographer and his assistant were going about their business, when they suddenly noticed … something translucent, descending the stairs! The specialists immediately turned the camera around and began to photograph the ghost, although both were sure that the camera would not capture the otherworldly entity.
The snapshot of the ghost of Rainham Hall, walking up the grand staircase in a long dress and wedding veil, caused a lot of noise in the press. The photograph was examined several times, but even skeptics were forced to admit that the photograph was genuine.
Meanwhile, for the Townsends themselves, the next appearance of the Brown Lady was not new: many times she was seen not only by the owners, but also by guests, including King George IV, Colonel Loftus and the writer F. Marriet. It was Colonel Loftus, who had a remarkable talent as a draftsman, who in the morning from memory restored the appearance of a ghostly lady who, with a lamp in her hands, climbed the main staircase.
In the portrait made by the colonel, the owners of the estate recognized … Dorothy Townsend, who died under mysterious circumstances at the beginning of the 18th century. As the wife of one of the marquis, Dorothy hurt herself to death, falling from the steps down. The woman herself fell or someone helped her - it remains a mystery, but since that time, the bringing of the court lady in an elegant dress made of brown brocade wanders around the estate, more often appearing in the place of her death.
• The image of the Brown Lady is not the only reliable image of a ghost. Nowadays, in the age of information technology, otherworldly entities are captured by webcams, especially those that are accidentally installed near places of mystical activity …
Dead lake. Akin to the Dead Sea?
There is a lake on the territory of Kazakhstan, which is called Dead, although its blue water is no different from thousands of similar lakes. But in the waters of the Dead Lake there are no fish, algae, usual for a freshwater reservoir, do not grow, and aquatic insects are also completely absent. You won't even find annoying mosquitoes and flies along its shores, but there is an unusual substance in the water that penetrates even through sealed diving equipment! A diver can dive into the depths of a mystical lake for no more than three minutes: if longer, then even an experienced diver starts an inexplicable attack of suffocation.
• The Dead Sea is one of the saltiest bodies of water on the planet. It also contains no fish, no algae, or even microorganisms, with the exception of a small area where the Jordan River flows into the sea. However, the Dead Sea is known for its healing mud. This unique resort is visited by people with joint diseases and skin lesions that cannot be cured with medication, and the amazing Dead Sea mud often helps to get rid of the disease forever.
The lake is surrounded on all sides by picturesque mountains and is located not far from popular tourist routes, but the local population strongly advises against swimming in the lake, but even coming close to it. However, tourists often underestimate the warnings, considering them a myth, because the Dead Lake collects a terrible tribute from the drowned from nature lovers almost every year.
The water in the lake is constantly icy, even on hot summer days. The drowned people do not emerge after a few days, as in ordinary water bodies, but stand at the bottom of the lake vertically, like soldiers standing at attention.
Erzo. Lake disappearing into nowhere
In the mountains of South Ossetia, in the Kudar gorge, at an altitude of about 1,700 meters, there is a unique lake Ertso - the largest of the karst lakes in the Caucasus. Ertso is surprisingly beautiful, but the secret lies not in the color of its turquoise waters, but in the fact that once every 5-6 years a huge lake … disappears in some unknown place!
Eyewitnesses claim that a couple of times every ten years the lake is rapidly shallowing, and it happens so quickly, as if "someone pulled the cork out of the bath." Of course, Ertso is far from a bath and the water from the lake does not disappear overnight, but in two or three weeks. This mystical disappearance of water cannot be explained either by drought or summer heat, because Erzo can disappear at any time of the year, even in winter, when only a thick layer of ice remains above the depression, and there is no trace of water.
• The length of the ghost lake is small - a little less than a kilometer, the area is about 0.5 km2. The depth of Ertso is a variable value and is absent in all gazetteers, since there is no constant water level. Even in the waters of Ertso there are no fish and in general there are no living creatures, except for newts. Birds also shun the treacherous lake - birds not only build nests away from its shores, but even do not fly up to feed it! People are happy to settle on the shores of the "deceiving" lake, although, according to the testimony of local residents, when the rocks begin to vibrate finely before the water leaves, those who observe this phenomenon for the first time feel uncomfortable.
The pit, left after the water has subsided, sometimes remains empty for several months, but the water can return a week after its disappearance, and even after a few days. Water comes back in the same incomprehensible way as it left, and to this day none of the scientists is able to reliably explain the nature of this mystical phenomenon.
N. Kostina-Cassanelli