When HostelBloggers read Oddee’s fascinating collection of ‘Ghost Towns’ around the world, it sent a bit of a shiver down our (utterly cowardly) spine.
From the tower blocks on the deserted Japanese island of Gunkanjima, to Kolmanskop, the old diamond mining town that has eerily been reclaimed by the Namibian desert, there are few things more unsettling than a town that’s been deserted and left at the mercy of the elements.
Whether abandoned when the nearby resources dried up or in the wake of a disaster (natural or otherwise), ghost towns are spooky for their emptiness. It’s not a natural emptiness, either, but the pronounced sense of absence - and the ‘ghostly’ vestiges of past lives - that really resonate as you creep around the crumbling buildings…
More gruesome tales of Edinburgh, this time from Greyfriars Kirkyard.
But before we get onto it, there’s the (infinitely less interesting) tale of ‘Greyfriars Bobby’ to mention.
Back in 1859 a man died and was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard. Shortly after his death, his faithful-to-the-last Skye Terrier, Bobby, was found to be keeping a lonely vigil at his dead master’s tomb. Cue much cooing (the dog was fed until he, too, shuffled off 14 years later) and eventual Disneyfication.
Now his tomb…
And the cutesy statue outside…
…stand as an everlasting shrine to the sentimental.
But Greyfriars Kirkyard is also the scene of a much more gripping tale:
The lady was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. And she was laid out in all her ceremonial finery in her family crypt.
But her corpse hadn’t been there long before the crypt was broken into by body snatchers (this being the stomping ground of Burke and Hare, after all).
The ghoulish grave robbers started to strip the dead woman of all her valuables, only stopping when they reached one ring that proved particularly hard to remove.
Undeterred, they started to hack at the dead woman’s finger… only the woman wasn’t dead at all! And finding herself laid out in a crypt, having her finger sawn off by body snatchers, proceeded to scream blue murder.
So terrified were the pair at the woman’s Lazarus-like rising from the dead that they fainted, and were arrested shortly afterwards.
Or so the story goes…
And frankly, given a story like that one, old Bobby would’ve had to do a lot more than sit by a grave and brood for 14 years to get HostelBloggers’ full attention!
Where do bad folks go when they die? Darvaza in Turkmenistan, apparently.
Over thirty years ago, geologists accidentally uncovered an underground cavern filled with natural gas. Part of the ground collapsed forming a large flaming crater and now, years later, the hellish vision can still be seen raging away.
Every now and again Englishrussia.com throw up something that’s so uniquely weird, wonderful and often downright creepy that you really sit up and take notice. Their feature on Russia’s wooden houses is a case in point.
Way out in the middle of the snowy woods, these houses are deserted, desolate and incredibly detailed. Inside, gloomy, wallpaper peeling and riddled with damp, they’re sad and more than a bit unsettling.
Not sure how easy they’d be to get to, but it’d undoubtedly be worth the trip!
Every now and again 
