Haunted Places Map: 16 Maps of Ghosts, Yokai and Haunted Houses

A search for haunted places on MapIndex finds 541 maps, and the biggest of them come from Japan: two maps of shinrei spots hold 7,084 and 5,911 places, a road-trip list of strange places another 3,291. Elsewhere people map ghosts the way they map anything they collect. One mapmaker turns a 1986 ghost hunter’s guide into a calendar of the nights the dead come back, another rates Miyagi’s haunted spots for fear and for decay, and a research centre in Illinois logs every voice and ball of light reported in a single cemetery.

1. Haunted Places Map USA: 1,103 Ghosts from Alabama to Alaska

   In 2006, several people in Crichton, Alabama, said they had seen a leprechaun hiding in a tree, and it has its own point among the 1,103 places on this map of America’s haunted places, each with a ghost story of a sentence or two. The list runs state by state. In Possum Walk Cemetery, Arkansas, a set of gates is said to be hot to the touch even in winter; at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham the ghost of James “Slag” Wormwood, who fell into a pool of molten ore in 1906, is said to haunt the works. In Whittier, Alaska, where all 160 residents live in the Begich Towers, a hungry ghost rattles around the kitchens. The famous ones are here too: the Winchester Mystery House, the Queen Mary, and the Stanley Hotel, which “inspired Stephen King to pen The Shining”.

   

   Objects

   1,1031,103 points

   Countries

   United States

   Made with

   Google My Maps

2. Ghost Calendar Map: The Nights Britain's Ghosts Return

   On 31 December, the map says, a spectral pig appears at Andover, and a ghost carriage crosses the frozen Loch of Skene west of Aberdeen. This map turns the calendar of Peter Underwood’s The Ghost Hunter’s Guide of 1986 into 114 dated points, each quoting the book. Lady Jane Grey returns to the Tower of London on 12 February, the anniversary of her execution; on Old Christmas Day, 6 January, the ghost monks walk at Glastonbury and the Holy Thorn blossoms. Halloween is the busiest night, from a soldier of the First World War who takes a drink of water at Bournemouth Town Hall to the drowned bells of Whitby Abbey ringing under the sea. Underwood’s other ghost books are mapped the same way, each beginning at the house where he wrote them, with the Borley Bell on its front door.

   

   Objects

   144144 points

   Countries

   United KingdomIrelandUnited Statesand 6 more

   Made with

   Google My Maps

3. Japan Haunted Places Map: 7,084 Shinrei Spots and Their Ghosts

   Every one of these 7,084 Japanese haunted spots names its kind of place and the ghosts seen there. Osorezan, the mountain in Aomori, is a “mountain and forest” spot where an old woman, a woman and an old man have been seen; Tokyo’s Sendagaya Tunnel has a girl, an old man and an old woman. Tunnels come up again and again, beside lakes and dams, hotels and inns, and castle ruins. The categories go down to single objects: the phone box in front of Aoyama Tunnel in Iga, Mie, is filed under “other”, with an animal, a boy and an old woman. Each entry links to its page on ghostmap.jp, and some spots lie abroad, in 35 other countries.

   

   Objects

   7,0847,084 points

   Countries

   JapanUnited StatesUnited Kingdomand 33 more

   Made with

   Google My Maps

4. Bachelor's Grove Cemetery Map: 110 Paranormal Reports

   A two-watt Motorola radio lost its signal for a minute at this spot, and the malfunction never came back “during the rest of the service life” of the radio. The Bachelors Grove Cemetery and Settlement Research Center near Tinley Park, Illinois, has mapped 110 reported events in and around this one small cemetery, each filed by type: Electronic Voice Phenomenon, Plasma Vapor, Ball of Light, Phantom Automobile, Phantom Horse. A camera bag moved by itself near the Fulton monument while a voice on the tape answered “yes”. A parked car with two people holding fishing poles vanishes from rear-view mirrors, and a figure in black, photographed slightly above the ground, was named “Mr. Rippet” by the person who took the picture. Many reports link to a written account.

   

   Objects

   110110 points

   Countries

   United States

   Made with

   Google My Maps

5. Haunted Places Around the World: 1,301 Sites in 136 Countries

   Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, this French-language map says, was built on an old cemetery and is haunted by Poo Ming, the cemetery’s former keeper, whom airport staff claim to have seen in the terminals. Its 1,301 places reach 136 countries, from the Hoia-Baciu forest in Romania, famous since a military technician photographed a “UFO” over it in 1968, to the Akodésséwa fetish market in Togo. The Borgvattnet rectory in northern Sweden, now a bed and breakfast, hands its guests a certificate for staying the night. Gunnuhver, Iceland’s largest geothermal mud pool, is named after Gunna, who lived there some 400 years ago and whose spirit, the story goes, came back after she starved to death to take revenge on her former landlord.

   

   Objects

   1,3011,301 points

   Countries

   United StatesUnited KingdomIndiaand 133 more

   Made with

   Google My Maps

6. London Underground Ghosts Map: 11 Haunted Tube Stations

   At 2 a.m. one night in 2000, a line controller at Liverpool Street, where the CCTV of every station is reviewed, saw a man in white overalls standing on the closed eastbound Central Line platform. This map of eleven haunted Tube stations tells each story at length. The actor William Terriss is said to walk at Covent Garden, the mummy from the British Museum to haunt the tunnels of Holborn. At Embankment the haunting happens in Pages Walk, a tunnel only staff can enter, and at Elephant & Castle the ghost called “The Runner” has only ever been heard: footsteps coming and going after closing time.

   

   Objects

   1111 points

   Countries

   United Kingdom

   Made with

   Google My Maps

7. Ghost Hunters Map: 79 TAPS Investigations, Episode by Episode

   The U.S. Coast Guard asked TAPS to investigate the Race Rock Lighthouse in Long Island Sound, and so begins this map of 79 cases from the TV series Ghost Hunters, each point retelling its episode. New cases come up while Jason and Grant are on plumbing jobs; at the St. John’s County Jail in Florida a guide hears “Good afternoon, Sheriff” as she switches on the robotic mascot, Sheriff JoeBot. The team flies to Ireland for Leap Castle, all but Steve, “who’s afraid of flying”, and visits the Hellfire Caves and the Viaduct Tavern in London. Cases in people’s homes carry “(Unknown Location)” in their names.

   

   Objects

   7979 points

   Countries

   United StatesUnited KingdomIreland

   Made with

   Google My Maps

8. Yokai Map: 482 Tengu, Kappa and Oni of the Kii Peninsula

   The Gobo City museum of history and folklore keeps a mummified crow tengu, and the entry adds that a CT scan found it to be the bones of a bird, probably a kite, and clay. This map files 482 yokai encounters of Wakayama, Nara and Mie in eight layers, from tengu and kappa to giants, mountain hags and oni, each story quoting its source, often a village history or a folklore survey. On Tengudake the villagers once climbed together to pray for rain, rubbing a live eel on the entrance of the tengu’s cave to make him angry; that cave is said to lead all the way to the moat of Wakayama Castle, because a dog with a name tag let into it was found there. Some entries are fresh: one person describes a family of tengu floating over Mount Ōmine, seen from the expressway.

   

   Objects

   482482 points

   Countries

   Japan

   Made with

   Google My Maps

9. Haunted Houses Map: The Scariest Haunt in Every State

   Markoff’s Haunted Forest in Dickerson, Maryland, promises “over one mile of terror in the woods” and claims the longest haunted trail in the USA. This map picks one Halloween haunted house for each state, 51 in all: Reign of Terror in Thousand Oaks, California, with more than 130 rooms, the Frightmare Compound, Colorado’s longest-running haunt, Fright Night in Anchorage. A second layer holds 29 haunts recommended by readers, among them Eeriebyss in Erie, Pennsylvania, with “over 1/2 mile of terror… all under one roof”, and a charity haunted forest in Maple Valley, Washington, whose “‘Soul’ purpose is to scare you for a good cause”.

   

   Objects

   8080 points

   Countries

   United StatesCanada

   Made with

   Google My Maps

10. Kazan Ghost Map: 48 Haunted Places of Tatarstan

    The ghost at 14 Gorky Street in Kazan appears at exactly five in the afternoon, a black figure in something like a monk’s habit, hanging for almost a minute over the old Rodionov estate, and the map notes that the pharmacy is only 50 metres away. This Russian map gathers 48 ghosts of Kazan and Tatarstan. On one alley of the Arsk cemetery a little girl is said to appear every day at eight in the evening. A man in white long johns with dangling ties crosses the street to the Kekin House and walks through its wall. Outside the city, at an abandoned air-defence base that once watched NATO aircraft, people now pick mushrooms where the missiles stood and meet something invisible that follows them.

    

    Objects

    4848 points

    Countries

    Russian Federation

    Made with

    Google My Maps

11. Haunted Tunnels Map: Miyagi's Spots Rated for Fear and Decay

    Every spot on this map from the Tohoku ghost guide Tōhoku Shinrei Annaijo gets two ratings out of five, one for fear and one for how derelict it is. The old Mizukai Tunnel in Tome scores four for fear and one for decay; the abandoned hotel at Matsushima three and three; the Catholic cemetery at Tsurugaya just one for fear. Most of the 56 places lie around Sendai and Matsushima, among them the Ryūnokuchi gorge, drawn as a line, and the site of the Sendai domain’s execution ground. The survey dates are noted too, nearly all from February to April 2008.

    

    Objects

    5655 points, 1 line

    Countries

    Japan

    Made with

    Google My Maps

12. London Ghost Map: 146 Strange Stories of Mitcham and Beyond

    Around 1968, on a night shift at the old Woof and Sabine factory in Tramway Path, a worker saw a short man in a raincoat and a cloth cap disappear through the workshop wall. This Weird Map of 146 stories stays mostly in Mitcham and the suburbs of south London. A silent boy on a bicycle has been seen beside Seven Islands pond on Mitcham Common. In 1959 a shining metallic sphere drifted down by parachute from the October sky, and residents called it the “Thing”; the four faces of the old clock tower rarely showed the same time, and once its hands ran backwards. Most entries point to the local books where the full story is told.

    

    Objects

    146146 points

    Countries

    United Kingdom

    Made with

    Google My Maps

13. Polish Ghost Map: 743 Legends, Spirits and Black Ladies

    The ghost of a cleric haunts one spot in Zamość, “rather calm”, the note says, a nuisance only to the tax office. The Susurrers Project, Projekt Szeptańce, retells Polish legends point by point, most of them in the Lublin region: the church at Otchliny that sank with its congregation of wicked people and can be raised once every hundred years by someone pure of heart, a phantom horse that surprises anyone who lifts a certain roadside stone at Chłaniów, a White Lady who comes with the fog. Some points are stages of a game (“Congratulations! You can save the Innocently Condemned!”), and further layers hold legendary Poles and mysterious tunnels.

    

    Objects

    743711 points, 32 lines

    Countries

    PolandBelarusUkraineand 2 more

    Made with

    Google My Maps

14. Haunted Australia Map: 296 Gaols, Pubs and Asylums

    Hotels, pubs, restaurants, vineyards and golf clubs make up the largest layer of this map, 83 of its 296 haunted places in Australia. The others are sorted just as carefully: gaols and asylums from Sunbury to Z Ward in Adelaide, cemeteries, churches and orphanages, theatres, and a layer for “Parks, Roads, Tunnels, Stations, Lighthouse, Lookouts, Bridges, and a Cave”. Sydney’s Quarantine Station, where close to 600 people died in 150 years, is now a hotel. The National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra was once the Australian Institute of Anatomy, which kept Phar Lap’s heart. In Wallaroo a whole town is haunted, from the Old Bond Store of 1864 to the town hall, where a female ghost appears on stage. Readers on Reddit helped fill it.

    

    Objects

    296296 points

    Countries

    Australia

    Made with

    Google My Maps

15. Tsugaru Yokai Map: 100 Spirits of Hirosaki, in Two Languages

    Persimmons left unpicked on the tree turn, when fully ripe, into Tankororin, a red-faced giant who wanders near Nadeushiko scattering persimmons from his sleeves. This “Tsugaru ghost coffee map” places 100 yokai around Hirosaki and Tsugaru in Aomori, each told in Japanese and English. Yukinko, a snow child, stands by the lanterns of the snow festival. The Azukiarai in the spring of Tomita sings “Shall we eat azuki beans or humans?” and may drag you into the water. The Otoroshi on the torii of a Hachiman shrine drops down with a thud to warn the faithless, and the cats of Kamenokomachi Square, long-lived and loved, hold their meeting and dance once the square is empty.

    

    Objects

    100100 points

    Countries

    Japan

    Made with

    Google My Maps

16. Ghost Map Czech Republic: 38 Ghost Types to Watch Out For

    The Ghost of Grief sits near Ostrava and “always cries”; the Ghost of Stench in Brno comes with a warning that the stench is really very strong. This joking Czech map scatters 38 invented ghosts across the country, each with a single line. The Organic Ghost lives on organic air only, the Black Marketeer will surely rip you off, the Advice Ghost gladly advises even on what it knows nothing about, and the Ghost of Ghosts is marked simply “Watch out, boss”.

    

    Objects

    3838 points

    Countries

    Czechia

    Made with

    Google My Maps