by Bob Curran
The World’s Creepiest Places
Dr. Bob Curran
Illustrations by Ian Daniels
Contents
Introduction
Bachelor’s Grove (Chicago, Illinois)
Cabell’s Tomb (Buckfastleigh, England)
Capuchin Cemetery (Palermo, Sicily)
Chase Mausoleum (Christ Church, Barbados)
Csejthe Castle (Csethje, Hungary)
Dragsholm Castle (Dragsholm, Denmark)
Eilean Mor (The Flannan Isles, Scotland)
Gore Orphanage Road (Cleveland, Ohio)
Hermitage Castle (The Borders, Scotland)
Hexenturm (Heidelberg, Germany)
Houska Castle (Blatce, Czech Republic)
Leap Castle (County Offaly, Ireland)
Loftus Hall (Wexford, Ireland)
Montpelier House, (Dublin Ireland)
Mortemer Abbey (Normandy, France)
The Old Abbey, (County Limerick, Ireland)
Old Emmanuel Hill Church (Stull, Kansas)
Salimgarh Fortress (Delhi, India)
Spokeveld (Great Karoo, South Africa)
Studley Park (New South Wales, Australia)
Wadi Rum (Southern Jordan)
Warleggan (Bodmin Moor, England)
Waverly Hills Sanatorium (Louisville, Kentucky)
Winchester Mystery House (San Jose, California)
Yumbulagang (Yarlung Valley, Tibet)
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Introduction
“I want to make your flesh creep.”
—The fat boy in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
What makes our flesh crawl? What is it that gives the sensation of cold fingers running up and down our spines or of the hairs on the back of our necks prickling and rising? And why would such sensations be associated with certain places and localities?
The dictionary defines the word creepy as “an unusual or unpleasant sensation of uneasiness or fear as of things crawling or creeping on one’s skin.” Probably we have all experienced such feelings at one time or another—when we are alone and uncertain, when we are in an unfamiliar or perhaps threatening place, when we are faced with the unusual or frightening. “Creepiness” then is a basic response to where we are or what is going on around us, to the unfamiliar or to what we imagine might happen to us. And perhaps it is our ability to respond in both mental and physical terms that holds the key. What if we were to see a ghost, what if we were to feel its touch? If we shiver at these words, then it is both our imaginary and our physical senses that are responding. We can envisage what it might be like. Similarly, with some person who is odd or strange or who has unfamiliar ways about them—the unkempt old man who seems to be following you down the road; the old woman who talks to herself on the bus or subway; the person who “just doesn’t look right” whom you meet on the street; or a neighbor who might behave differently or oddly on a fairly regular basis—we sometimes describe such people as “creepy.” Once again, this constitutes a response (usually instantaneous) to something which we’ve encountered. Our fears or uncertainties about what such people might be or do are manifesting themselves in a physical way. But what about a building or a specific place?
A good number of years ago, I temporarily worked in Belfast and rented a flat in what had once been a relatively prosperous residential area, but which was now in a kind of genteel decline. Each morning, as I walked down to catch the bus into the city, I had to pass, at the very end of the tree-lined street where I lived, a large house that stood at its very end and where my street met a main road. The building stood in its own grounds, well back from the road, and was surrounded by a tall and rather unkempt hedge. The entrance to it was a rusty iron gate, which had obviously not been opened in a long time, and which was secured with a chain and a padlock. It was a solid four-square house, old fashioned but large and imposing in its own way—a sloping ornamented roof and large wood-framed windows. I could imagine that it was the sort of house that would have once been the home of a fairly wealthy and respectable family. Clearly, no one lived there now, for large and heavy main doors were permanently closed and the garden beyond was an absolute tangle into which all manner of rubbish—empty beer cans and paper bags mainly—had been thrown. A couple of the windows had been boarded up and several more were adorned with heavy old-fashioned shutters; two or three peered down almost malevolently on all who passed too close to the rusting gate. The paint and plaster were peeling and an air of forlorn decay hung about the entire dwelling, but this also seemed to give it an air of menace. Each time I passed it on my way to and from the bus stop, I felt a little bit uneasy, as though the house itself were somehow aware of me and followed me as I walked in front of the rusty gate with an unfriendly eye. And as I walked up the street to my flat, I felt the odd and unpleasant sensation all through my body. Sometimes as I passed by, I thought that I glimpsed something or someone at an uncurtained window or disappearing around the corner of a falling wooden garage at the side, but it was probably no more than my own imagination.
On one occasion I spoke to my landlady (who lived in the same house as myself) about the house at the end of the street, asking her almost casually if she knew anything about it. She knew nothing (she had only lived in the area for a few years) except that it had always been empty. However, she thought that she had heard that something very nasty had happened there many years before—a murder perhaps, maybe even of a child—but she couldn’t be sure. She, too, admitted that every time she passed by it she always experienced a certain unpleasant feeling—it gave her “the creeps.” From then on, the house took on an even more sinister aspect, and I actually found myself increasing my step as I walked past the rusting gateway. Sometimes as I passed by, I was almost sure that I heard the cry of a child from somewhere close by, and I remembered what the landlady had said about the supposed murder. I imagined that somebody stood at the window in one of those musty rooms to watch me go past and that he or she meant me (or anybody) no good. The feeling that I’d had about the old place seemed to grow stronger—“the creeps” more intense. However, my work in Belfast finished and I moved away and the house at the end of the street was lost in memory. But the feelings about it somehow remained, and I still would remember it from time to time with a slight shudder.
Not so long ago, I had reason to go back to the area; I drove my car along the busy road and passed the end of the street where I once lived. On an impulse I turned my car into it and stopped. The house was still there, but it was very different. It was certainly the same building, but it was now a bright, modernized, family home. The tangled lawn had been cut and tidied, and there were childrens’ toys—a swing and a slide and some bouncy things. The doors and windows had been painted, the stonework had been re-pointed and re-plastered, and a modern garage had been built at the side. A new gate lay open and welcoming. And as I stood there, I realized that there were no “creepy” feelings associated with the place at all. I later asked a man from the area about the house and if there was a history attached to it. He said that he’d never heard anything even vaguely sinister about it—it had been owned at one time by an old couple who had no children and who had let it get “badly run down.” When they had died, the place had passed through the hands of various people, none of whom had actually lived there, and fell further into decay until it was bought and modernized. When I asked about the supposed murder, he shook his head. He’d never heard of any murder connected with the house, let alone the murder of a child or of anything particularly nasty happening there. “The house looked so dilapidated,” he said, “that I suppose people started to make up stories about it.
But there was nothing to them.”
I thought about the house at the end of the street (and several other old houses that I’ve known) when I was asked to write this book. In fact, as it came into my mind, I experienced once again that tingling through my body as I had all those years ago. What is it that makes a place “creepy” and can give us the distinct sensation that I experienced when I passed by that rusty gate? What is it that made it stay in my memory through the years? Maybe some of you know of similar places—maybe even at the end of your own street—that make you feel “uncomfortable.” It doesn’t actually have to be a house though, or even a street—perhaps it’s a particular spot way out in the country or in a woodland or an abandoned factory, but most people that I’ve talked to know of some place that gives them an odd or strange feeling, or gives them a sensation as if their skin were crawling. But what are the essentials of “creepiness”? Thinking about my own experiences, I might venture to make a few suggestions.
The first is that the very appearance of the place provoked an adverse response in me as I passed it. The other houses on the street were inhabited and were usually bright and cheerful with obvious signs of activity all around them. The house at the end of the street, however, was gloomy, decayed, and menacing-looking, the sort of appearance that might be associated with unsavoury activity or with the occult or the supernatural. It was not hard to imagine that it had been the site of some murder or that it was haunted. Just as with the dishevelled woman, talking animatedly to herself and smelling of drink, we all too readily seek for references and make assumptions around what we see. The woman may pester us for money or she might be mad and try to do us harm in some way—or so we think. Our reaction to her is therefore determined by the references and preconceptions that we carry with us and by our own imagination. And it is the same with a house or a place. We don’t usually feel “creepy” in a bright, spacious, modern family home (though in some fictional stories this has sometimes been the case), but the mental and emotional references associated with some old building, dilapidated and sinister looking, lend themselves to such a feeling. Some places genuinely give off an aura of menace and threat whether that is justified or not. And it is here that our imaginations take over—we expect that place to be haunted or for some bizarre or unusual event to occur there, and this forms the basis of our response to such a location. When I walked past the house on my way to and from work, for instance, I had the distinct impression that someone or something watched me from one of the dusty, unshuttered, upper windows. In the back of my mind, I imagined something moving through the unfurnished rooms of the building, waiting for someone to come up to the door to investigate. There was, of course, probably nothing but damp and must in the place. And yet, the very appearance of the house triggered such an impression in me. And I do not appear to have been alone in this respect as my discussion with the landlady verified. Sinister woodlands, lonely forest glades and paths, lonely roads, and gloomy hills also all carry the same sort of aura about them and have the power to provoke such reaction. Sometimes there is no real reason for this. In the countryside where I grew up, there were many abandoned houses, cottages, and barns, set away in inaccessible places that, as a child, I only viewed from a distance. And yet there was a sense of menace about them. Distant stone walls set among gloomy trees often took on a slightly sinister atmosphere in the late afternoon sun and seemed a place where evil might indeed dwell. It would, perhaps, be very unwise to venture there, for who knew what I might see within their precincts? “If that house isn’t haunted” an old man in County Waterford once told me, “then it should be!” Such is the power of the imagination and of impression.
A second, and not unconnected, suggestion regarding the “creepiness” of the site lies in the history or traditions of the place itself. A place where a battle has occurred, a prison where inmates have been maltreated, or a site where a brutal murder has taken place are bound to have associations that can stir up reactions within us. Maybe it is down to the idea that strong and often violent emotions have been released—emotions with which many of us can empathise. Similarly, in a place where we hear of strong emotions such as unrequited or frustrated love, we can sometimes experience the same feelings. Tales of a doomed lover, an abandoned bride, or a lost child, all can provoke some sort of reaction that we might describe as “the creeps.” What if these powerful events can leave some sort of emotive imprint on the site where they occurred, and what if we can somehow gain access to this? Is this what we mean by a “ghost” or by a supernatural experience?
But it is not only places where great or spectacular events have occurred that can provoke such response. Areas in which perhaps smaller dramas have taken place do so too, to a greater or lesser extent. A room in a house, a stretch of roadway, or a yard or a field where something unusual has taken place can be just as “creepy.”
When I was much younger, I can recall a great house that stood about 2 miles from where my grandmother lived. My grandfather had worked there as a laborer for a while, and it was owned by an unmarried man; the last of his family who lived there with a housekeeper to look after him. Although I always imagined that he had a great deal of money, in hindsight, I suspect that he didn’t have all that much—certainly not enough to maintain the house which he had allowed to run down. To a child it was a ghostly place, dark and musty with long corridors that seemed to lead nowhere, and damp and moldy rooms off of them where no fires had been lit. Here mildewed family photos hung on the walls looking down on faded furniture and dust. Although it has featured in one way or another in some of my writing, it didn’t frighten me all that much; except for one room. There was an old story that one of the landlord’s brothers, who was blind, had gone mad, and in the way of genteel families in Ireland long ago, was kept locked up in one of the rooms on the top floor where the maids had formerly slept. He had died there in that narrow room, but his sightless ghost still haunted the room, fumbling and scraping its way around on the other side of a locked door. The floor was accessed by a sweep of the main staircase, but because there were now no maids, no one really ever went up there. But I found the sweep of the stairs and the upper story a terrifying place, and, even in my early teens, I experienced a “creepy sensation” every time I was up there. Once as a little boy, I’d gone to the very top of the staircase and had stood outside the door of the “haunted room,” hearing something shuffle and move on the other side of the closed door. Upon reflection it might have been no more than birds that had managed to get in through broken slates in the roof moving about in an otherwise empty room, but to a small child, it was almost certainly something ghostly and with frightening intent. I ran down the staircase, below those frowning, heavily framed photos on the walls, convinced that something mad and blind was following me, reaching out to grab me, and the thrill of absolute terror was tingling all over me. Even writing about it years later, I can still get a sense of that creepy feeling stealing along my spine. Of course, the housekeeper completely dismissed the idea of a ghost in the room when I eventually told her, but I noticed that she kept well away from the upper floor herself. She told me that it was because the floors in the rooms up there were rotten and dangerous—hadn’t one of my uncles fallen through the floor and broken his leg? However, I think that she also had the same creepy feeling that I had experienced up there—for all her talk she was a very superstitious woman. The associations in the room, whether real or imagined, seemed to completely permeate the entire upper stories of that old house.
And something of that same sensation filled me when I passed the house at the end of the street, many years later, especially when I thought that a child might have been murdered there. All the references that I had about the place came into play. At night I thought that I saw a light move from window to window (it might well have been a reflection of the street light) and the nearby cry of a bird or a fox suddenly became the wail of an infant. And I had the impression that somebody somehow came through the gate and
followed me up the road toward my own house. Of course when I turned around, there was nothing or no one there. But the sensation remained. I still imagined that something from the shadowy house dogged my footsteps home.
And perhaps imagination may well be the key to our response. The appearance of a place, coupled perhaps with some notion of its history, triggers our imagination, and we can visualize some horror or threat waiting to confront us. That is what perhaps excites the feeling of creepiness. Before he fell through the rotten floorboards, my uncle—a solid, no-nonsense man—had worked on the ghostly upper floor of the gloomy old house for the best part of a week and, as far as I know, experienced nothing. He admitted the place was dilapidated, badly lit, and claustrophobic, and he knew the supposed story about the ghostly closed room. However, he maybe didn’t have the imagination to turn those references into the “creepy feeling.” So maybe creepiness is a combination of things drawing together into a specific reaction.
At least that’s the explanation that I give you as a psychologist and a philosopher. But what if I’m wrong? What if, despite all the psychological and perhaps glib suggestions, we do possess an innate ability to recognize the supernatural or the encroaching forces of another world? What if the house at the end of the street was haunted by something unpleasant from its past? My friend who told me about the area readily admitted that he didn’t know all of its history, only the more recent stuff. What if some time way back in the past, a child had been murdered there? People can forget, but not old houses.
So whether you are a skeptic or a believer, whether you want to understand more or just want to be plain scared, come with us now and visit some genuinely creepy places all across the world. They cover a wide variety of locations and experiences, and though you may dismiss at least some of them, remember: For many of us there is always some place like the house at the end of the street lurking somewhere at the back of our minds.
