What's going on there? Well, it's normally considered an instant haunting when you build on top of an old cemetery. But in Prague, they decided to build over a 15th century cemetery with more cemeteries. Prague's Old Jewish Cemetery (this is its actual name) now features 11 cemeteries stacked on top of each other.
As of this day, there are about 12,000 visible headstones around the Old Jewish Cemetery, with an estimated 100,000 bodies buried beneath the ground in up to 12 layers of dead folks like some weird necrotic bean dip.
The cemetery was in use from around 1439 to 1787, in a time when Jewish people from Prague were not allowed to bury their dead outside the Jewish Quarter of Josefov. The Hebrew faith also forbids the moving of headstones, so given just this one place to bury all of their dead, the graves kept piling up until the whole area went from "sacred place of solemn remembrance" to "corpse minefield."
Catherine Murray "Seriously, the ground here is like a pinata full of dead people."
Naturally, the bizarre eeriness of the Old Jewish Cemetery has lent itself to a number of stories over the centuries. For example, one of the cemetery's most famous permanent residents is Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a 16th century rabbi who, according to legend, created the magical Golem of Prague, a monster made from clay to destroy the enemies of the Jews.
CxOxS Judging by the photo, the Golem did not succeed.
The cemetery was also believed to be the secret meeting place of the Elders of Zion, a group of powerful people plotting to take over the world and give rise to the New World Order (although their efforts up to this point seem to have been marginal at best, so maybe they should've met at Showbiz Pizza instead).
#2. Staten Island's Tugboat Graveyard
undercity You can cut the tetanus in the air with a knife.
North of Rossville, Staten Island lurks the Tugboat Graveyard, where the busted, decayed shells of old harbor vessels are kept. From tugboats to barges to ferries, most of the remains there date back to the early 20th century, when the New York harbor was still bustling with life. Now they've all been forgotten and left to rot away in the shallow waters of Arthur Kill, presumably because Scary Boat Bay was already full.
opacity Don't feel sad. When you're not looking they go on adventures and learn the value of friendship.
In 1990, there might have been as many as 200 boats abandoned in the Tugboat Graveyard, but over the years the number dwindled, the ships long ago stripped of any valuable parts by looters, vandals and tentacle phantasms.
undercity Or carried off to a secret treasure cave by a petulant teenage mermaid.
Looking at the pictures, you can almost hear them, creaking and groaning in the lazy currents with the faint skittering of rats and lurking nautical serial killers. Nobody died on these boats, as far as we know, but you can't tell us at least one of these vessels doesn't have a decaying skeleton standing at the wheel.
undercity Pulling the weight of the world behind it.
Actun Tunichil Muknal ("Cave of the Stone Sepulcher") is an important Mayan archeological site in Belize. It was only discovered in 1989, but in the short time since it has already proven itself invaluable as a window into the ancient Mayan culture. And of course by that, we mean this:
That is, one chamber in the cave is believed to have been used for human sacrifices, a theory suggested by the characteristic markings on some of the pottery found inside it. And by "pottery" we of course mean "murdered skeletons."
mybestlifefulfilled If we know our CSI, natural deaths don't cause skull holes.
They've found several skeletons in the cave, and most of them are, uh, small. That is, most of the sacrificed were children.
They were probably sacrifices to Chaac, the Mayan god of rain, during a particularly severe drought. But don't worry -- these kids didn't have their hearts cut out while still alive or anything. No, evidence shows that they were all killed by having their skulls crushed, which is way more genial and to the point. They were dealing with children, after all.
Over hundreds of years, the bones became calcified and fused with the cave floor, which is why modern excavators have just left them there without a proper burial (though seriously guys, maybe like throw a tarp over them or something?). The most famous skeleton in the cave is that of a teenage girl, nicknamed the Crystal Maiden because her bones have partially crystallized and now sparkle in the light.
Joshua Berman Oh, well that's not scary at all then.
Only a few selected guides have received permission from the Belize Department of Archeology to take tourists into the chamber. And you will need a guide, because to get there you have to trek through a dense jungle, swim through a cavern lake, dodge big-ass cave spiders and navigate a labyrinthine ancient bludgeoning cave.
James Snyder / art.co.uk After all this, that cave better have leprechaun gold in it or something.
Once you make it inside, though, you have more or less unrestricted access to the cave's ancient remains. You're free to touch them, take pictures with them, even decorate them with novelty top hats and pretend that they're talking in a British accent. Anything you feel is necessary to get your money's worth of entertainment out of the bones of ritualistic murder victims.
Ron Brinkmann Go wild. After all, you never knew him.
After tracking down a handful of the world’s most unusual theme parks, we got to thinking about defunct amusement parks, specifically ones that, although officially closed off to the public, are still receiving patrons in the form of urban explorers who risk injury, arrest, unsavory encounters and even radiation exposure for the chance to experience the ultimate in eerie, an abandoned amusement park, firsthand.
Like nightmarish scenes taken straight from Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us,” these parks that filled so many visitors with happy memories (and motion sickness) have now been left to rot in various stages of deterioration after being ravaged by flood, nuclear disaster and poor ticket sales. And although there’s something inherently spooky about abandoned amusement parks, there’s also something beautiful and poetic about them, particularly in the curious way Mother Nature goes about reclaiming landscapes punctuated by idle roller coasters and collapsing funhouses. In some cases, neglected amusement parks have proven to be more photogenic in death than they were in life.
Here you’ll find eight decaying anti-Disneylands — all with fascinating, sometimes tragic stories to tell — captured in all of their haunting glory. (Text: Matt Hickman)
Although some stories differ, it’s commonly believed that Ukraine’s Prypiat Amusement Park closed on the very same day it opened: April 27, 1986, exactly one day after the catastrophic Chernobyl nuclear disaster brought the world to a standstill. Due to the obvious, the entire city of Prypiat, with a population of around 50,000 at the time, was completely forsaken, not just its namesake amusement park. Radiation levels in parts of the park are still dangerously high, but that doesn’t discourage adventurous shutterbugs from entering this particularly chilling section of the Zone of Alienation to get a shot of Prypiat’s iconic abandoned Ferris wheel. Check out more photos here.
When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, park operators at Six Flags New Orleans were in the planning stages of opening a water park. Well, they got one. Severely damaged by Katrina’s devastating floodwaters and forced to close, Six Flags New Orleans, which originally opened as Jazzland in 2000, remains in an arrested state of decay to this day and is perhaps more famous now — thanks in part to numerous camera-wielding urban explorers — than it was when in operation. Home to still-standing Cajun-themed attractions like the Zydeco Scream and the Muskrat Scrambler, the future of the property, now owned by the city of New Orleans, is unclear, although Southern Star Amusement is leading an effort to redevelop that park. Check out more photos here.
While we don’t know much about the history of Okpo Land, a seriously foreboding abandoned fun park perched atop a hill on South Korea’s tiny Geoje Island, we do know this: The park was shut down in 1999 after a number of fatal accidents, the last when a young girl tragically fell to her death from a ride. Immediately after that incident, the owner of the park disappeared and was never heard from again. Although Okpo Land has the dread-inducing looks and disturbing back-story seemingly plucked from a K-Horror film, that hasn’t stopped hordes of fearless urban explorers from making a pilgrimage (this guy even spent the night). Check out more photos here.
This is the amusement park that Our Lady of the Tattooed Eyebrows built. At its height in the mid-1980s, Heritage USA, a Jesus-y theme and water park built by fiery PTL televangelist Jim Bakker and his then-wife, the late Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, was a top American vacation destination on par with Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Then the attendance-damaging trifecta of Jessica Hahn, the IRS and 1989’s Hurricane Hugo hit and not even the Lord himself (or Jerry Falwell) could save the park from closure. Since then, some of the park’s 2,300 acres have been repurposed and redeveloped, but the creepiest castle in all the land, once home to a Christian arcade and go-kart track, remains standing. Check out more photos here.
One of the world’s more photogenic derelict fun-zones, this district of toppled dinosaurs, rusted Ferris wheels and vandalized swan boats operated for 20 years as Kulturpark Plänterwald in the former East Berlin before becoming Spreepark in the wall-toppling year of 1989. Although the reason the park was shuttered isn’t exactly scandalous — good, old-fashioned insolvency — what happened to its former owner, Norbert Witte, is. In early 2002, a bankrupt Witte fled from Germany to Lima, Peru, taking his family and several of the park’s attractions with him. There, Witte tried to open another amusement park but that didn’t work out apparently — in May 2004 he was sentenced to seven years jail time for attempting to smuggle 400 pounds of cocaine back into Germany, hidden in the masts of a “flying carpet” ride. Witte, understandably quite the tabloid fixture in Germany, was the subject of a 2009 documentary film, “Achterbahn,” and is said to live in a trailer parked on the grounds of his failed amusement park. Check out more photos here.
Location: Kamikuishiki, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan
Years in operation: 1997-2001
Creepy factor: 8
Although Japan has its fair share of uncanny abandoned amusement parks, we think that Gulliver’s Kingdom, a failed theme park based on Jonathan Swift’s classic tale, takes the proverbial cake. Although demolished in 2007, the several-year span when the Lilliputian theme park sat disused and neglected was a high point for the many intrepid urban explorers looking to crawl all over Lemuel Gulliver’s lanky, 147.5-foot-long concrete frame. The park’s closing, the result of poor ticket sales, probably had something to do with its rather unfortunate locale: although located at the foot of Mount Fuji, the park was adjacent to Aokigarah, Japan’s infamous “Suicide Forest,” and in the same village where the Aum Shinriyko doomsday cult, the group behind 1995’s Sarin gas attacks in Tokyo, was headquartered. Check out more photos here.
When Dogpatch USA, a “rustic” theme park based on Al Capp’s Appalachia-stereotyping “L’il Abner” comic strip, finally closed its gates for good in 1993, the park itself must have breathed a giant sigh of relief. During its 25-year run, Dogpatch USA experienced numerous owners, heat waves, lawsuits, legal battles, bankruptcy, fierce competition (curse you, Silver Dollar City!), the fall of hillbilly pop culture and a generation of young patrons who had no clue what “L’il Abner” even was — a lot for an Ozarkian amusement park where the top attractions included Earthquake McGoon’s Brain Rattler. Although some efforts to clean up the heavily vandalized rural property have been made over the years, the park, under interesting new ownership, remains in a state of disrepair. Check out more photos here.
Decidedly more sad than spooky (save for Louie, the Wurlitzer-playing robo-clown), Wichita’s Joyland, a traditional, family-owned amusement park, became the target of rampant vandalism and destruction after closing in 2004. Margaret Russell, who ran the park with her late husband Stanley since the late 1960s, told the Wichita Eagle: “We're sick. Our hearts are just sick. It's not easy, not easy.” Although Joyland may be gone, leaving behind a heartbroken owner, this Heartland institution has certainly not been forgotten thanks to a haunting short film called “No Joy” from Vimeo user Mike Petty and an entire initiative dedicated to bringing back Joyland to its former glory while adding new attractions. Check out more photos here.
Cyriaque Lamar — The Japanese theme park Gulliver's Kingdom was only open from 1997-2001 before a lack of visitors shuttered it. Until its decaying remains were demolished in 2007, the park and its 147-foot-long Lemuel Gulliver statue were prime destinations for urban explorers.
Gulliver's Kingdom was located 2.5 hours away from Tokyo and in the sights of Mt. Fuji. That sounds like prime real estate, but the Kingdom was in a curious neighborhood. Other nearby landmarks included the village of Kamikuishiki (the former location of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult's sarin gas manufacturing facilities) and the "Sea of Trees," a bucolic forest that is also Japan's most popular suicide destination.
Of course, Gulliver's Kingdom brought the disconcerting all on its own. After the park's finances dried up, a giant, dead-eyed model of Jonathan Swift's literary hero laid forever supine, exposed to the elements and Lilliputian graffiti artists. Gulliver and his ghostly playland may be gone, but you can see many photos of his dead duchy over at Web Urbanistand Sleepy City.
Six Flags New Orleans, which closed as Hurricane Katrina approached in 2005 and has never reopened. The sign outside the park still announces that it's "CLOSED FOR STORM."
The theme park was in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, one of the hardest hit areas during Katrina and the flooding after the storm. Though many of the rides still stand, Six Flags says that saltwater from the flood has corroded them to the point that they cannot be saved.
The only ride to survive the flood - Batman: The Ride, which was elevated above most of the floodwaters - was refurbished and moved to Six Flags Fiesta Texas in 2008.
After viewing this video of the rotting theme park, I'm wondering why the City of New Orleans, which owns the land, isn't renting it out as a location for horror movies. Louisiana photographer Teddy Smith shot this video in October, with permission from the City of New Orleans.
As Gizmodo notes, you almost expect to see a horde of zombies come ambling through a scene or two.
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All you art collectors out there. Here is a chance to get a Giclee copy of some of Ian M Sherwin work. Ian is planning on doing a whole series of Marblehead, Massachusetts paintings. His work is amazing.
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