The world’s spookiest attractions
From Roman crypts to Incan mummies, these creepy sites will satisfy your taste for the macabre SLIDE SHOW
Topics: Trazzler, Travel, Halloween, Life News
Let’s start from the premise that the tourism industry is, quite frequently, a freak show. And not just on Halloween … plenty of places keep it surreal all year round. Why? Luring people into your temple, museum, medical school, church or crypt isn’t as easy as you might think. You need a hook.
While severed body parts and corpses may not have a tourist-brochure ring, gore sells. Catholic churches have been collecting bodies and relics for pilgrims to visit for centuries. Little bits of the Buddha are scattered in shrines around the globe. Medical curiosities and oddities fill glass cases and jars in museum sideshows.
On occasion, one man’s stack of musty bones cluttering up a catacomb becomes another’s creative medium, a macabre opportunity to recycle earthly remains into visionary art. Visiting one such place, the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, certainly made an impression on Mark Twain, who described it with delicious detail in his travelogue “Innocents Abroad”: “On the wall were elaborate frescoes, whose curving vines were made of knotted human vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were made of sinews and tendons; whose flowers were formed of knee-caps and toe-nails.” “What you are now, we used to be. What we are now, you will be,” a plaque on the crypt ominously announces in five languages.
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Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
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Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
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Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
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Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
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O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
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Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
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When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
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A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
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Every Sunday, Salon presents a feature from Trazzler spotlighting surprising travel stories from across the globe. Unexpected discoveries and strange, wonderful treasures are condensed into slide shows that entertain as much as they educate.
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