Halloween has a long story to tell. The ancient pagan holiday of revelry evil forces eventually became quite Christian “eve of all saints”, a very revered in the United States and Western Europe. Today, you can fly to different countries for feeling the real spirit of Halloween. There are several samples of interesting places where you can be pretty frightened even during a bright sunny day. [via travelvivi]1. Museum of mummies, Guanajuato, Mexico
This museum will haunt the visitors into terrible but despite this, the flow of tourists does not decrease for years. The museum was founded in 1853, and has a collection of about hundred dried human remains to be looked at. In contrast to the famous Egyptian mummies , Mexican ones are not having a noble origin and have not been deliberately embalmed. The exhibits are carried from the local cemetery, where relatives of the victims are unable to pay an annual tax for the dead. So, behind the glass one can see bodies that were laid on the ground for decades. And although because of the extremely low humidity and high content of minerals in the local soil, buried corpses do not decompose, they still look terrible.
2. Church of St. Michael, Dublin, Ireland
Church of St. Michael in Dublin was founded in the XVI century and most of all it is famous for its vaults, in which the bodies remain incorrupt even in open coffins for hundreds of centuries. Most of the underground galleries are closed from the eyes of the curious tourists, but some can still be visited. So the tourists with particularly strong nerves can descend into the caves and wander among the open stone coffins, from which mummified limbs protrude. Or, conversely, search for the bodies of ex-thieves and criminals who have limbs missing. If the experience is not enough, then go to the burial of the crusader, whose body was broken in halves to squeeze in a coffin. After lifting to the surface you are quite ready to celebrate the Halloween and it is guaranteed you will be afraid of even a pumpkin with a candle.
3. Catacombs of Paris, France
This place is rather popular among tourists, “on the eve of all saints”, so the visit to the ancient underground becomes a particularly meaningful ritual. One can hardly think of a better place for a holiday, everything you need is your surroundings and the underground, too. Catacombs of Paris are lined with the bones of the dead, like ornaments, dozens of miles of corridors, lined with skulls and femur bone, and only a small part is open to tourists for satisfying their interest. When there was no more room in the cemeteries of Paris, they started deceasing dead men from the catacombs, and for hundreds of years plenty of them were accumulated here. If your nerves are strong enough, you can scare others in spirit of the holiday, and beg them for candies, but do not overdo it.
4. Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague, Czech Republic
Landfill of century-old tombstones in the old Jewish cemetery in Prague looks so terrible that even the acknowledged master of horror, Franz Kafka often sought inspiration here. Since Jews were forbidden to bury their dead outside the station, then over the next five hundred years, the tombs were piled on each other, and now at such a tiny area, there are over 200 thousand graves, the oldest of which is 560 years old.
5. San Bernardino, Milan, Italy
Very modest and unremarkable church from the outside, turns out to be a mysterious place, densely decorated with mosaics of bones and skulls from the inside. When there was no place available in adjacent cemetery (it happened in the XII century) they began to fold the dead in a specially constructed building, which later became a Church!!! And the remains of the dead became a worthy addition to the interior decoration. Do the modern designers, after all this, still seem too ambitious?
6. Castle Dracula, Romania
Located on the border of Transylvania and Wallachia, Bran Castle became famous, and was visited by the crowds of tourists, after Bram Stoker placed here his Dracula and Francis Ford Coppola shot the same film. Built on a hilltop, castle is beautiful enough even without old bloodsuckers. But the chilling stories of guides about the atrocities of Vlad Tepes, who, visited the castle extremely rare, created an ominous atmosphere around the castle.
7. Day of the Dead, Mexico
While the whole Catholic world celebrates “on the eve of all saints “, Mexico celebrates “the Day of the Dead “. Christian traditions, faced with the cults of Maya were distorted beyond recognition, and the relationships of Mexicans to death are very different from ours. This event, particularly brightly is held in Oaxaca, where in the evening of October 31 musicians, dressed as skeletons ,go out to the streets, , and at night the whole country rushes to the graves of relatives, taking tequila, favorite food of the deceased and sugar skulls with their names on their foreheads. The tradition is used to be a way getting reunited with your dead relatives and friends. Children as in European world also enjoy candies except the fact that they are shaped as skulls and dead.
8. Ossuary, Kutna Hora, Czech Republic
In Europe, where there was often no place for the dead, assures are not so rare. But in the town of Sedlec, near the town of Kutna Hora, one of the largest and the most famous is located. About 40 thousand human skeletons used on the creation of the interior. Nearly all internal decorations, including a huge chandelier are made of skeletons parts. Interiors have turned out to be so terrible, that have repeatedly been the scenarios for the films creating the appropriate entourage.
9. Impasse Mary King, Edinburgh, Scotland
Old streets with the dark past were hidden under a new city with the time, but in 2003 the place where in the XVII century, the plague patients were left to die, was opened to tourists. Descending into the dungeon sightseers unanimously declare on the paranormal activity. The tourists are touched by the hands and feet by something invisible, it is believed that it is the ghost of Annie, a young girl whose parents left her there in 1645, particularly impressionable people can even see her ghost.
10. Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France
If you enjoy walking through the cemetery, you will like the Pere Lachaise for sure. Kilometers of headstones, statues, tombs, family mausoleums storing the remains of the greatest representatives of humanity, will be the ideal venue for celebrating the Halloween. The spirits of Jim Morrison and Honore de Balzac buried here as well as tens of thousands of idlers tourists will help to celebrate the fist. It won’t be boring here in the night of November 1, for sure.
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