Weird Tourism
Final Destination: Japan’s Suicide Forest
by Maledicta | Feb 26, 2018 | Categories: Halloween 365 and Weird Tourism. Tags: Aokigahara, Demon Forest, Japan, and suicide forest. | 1 Comment
San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge is the world’s most popular place to commit suicide. Second most popular is Japan’s Aokigahara Forest, 13.5 square miles of woodlands at the base of Mount Fuji, so dense that it’s known as Jukai – the Sea of Trees. It’s...
Meet the Ghost of Fred Flintstone: Arizona’s Abandoned Bedrock City
by Maledicta | Feb 12, 2018 | Categories: Weird Tourism. Tags: abandoned, Arizona, Bedrock City, and Flintstones. | 0 Comments
Derelict Flintstones theme park still lures unsuspecting tourists to the Arizona desert Though original episodes of the animated TV sitcom “The Flintstones” haven’t aired since 1966, the series lived on in syndication for decades. The poorly animated...
The Vampire Rabbit of Newcastle
by Maledicta | Jan 29, 2018 | Categories: Oddities and Curiosities and Weird Tourism. Tags: rabbit and vampire. | 0 Comments
St. Nicholas Cathedral in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne is guarded by a most unusual gargoyle – the figure of a demonic rabbit with red fangs and claws. (He started out the same color as the surrounding stone and was given a scary paint job later on.) No one knows...
Remembering Edgar: Baltimore’s Mysterious Poe Toaster
by Maledicta | Jan 22, 2018 | Categories: Halloween 365 and Weird Tourism. Tags: Baltimore, cenotaph, cognac, Edgar Allan Poe, Poe Toaster, and Westminster Hall. | 0 Comments
Though it sounds like a kitchen appliance you might use to make a gloomy breakfast, the Poe Toaster is actually part of a longstanding Baltimore tradition honoring the life and legacy of Edgar Allan Poe. The Godfather of Horror Fiction had strong...
America’s Pompeii – The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919
by Maledicta | Jan 14, 2018 | Categories: Halloween 365 and Weird Tourism. Tags: boston, disaster, great boston molasses flood, molasses, purity distilling company, and tank. | 1 Comment
It was an unseasonably warm winter day in Boston, Massachusetts, when one of the strangest disasters in American history occurred exactly 99 years ago this week. The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 was a deadly incident involving the explosion of a massive tank of...
Frozen in Time: The Doomed Citizens of Pompeii
by Maledicta | Jan 7, 2018 | Categories: Oddities and Curiosities and Weird Tourism. | 0 Comments
A few years ago, I crossed an item off my bucket list when I visited the ruins of Pompeii. I’ve always been fascinated by Pompeii; imagine an entire town being frozen in time, buried under a blanket of volcanic ash one summer day in August of 79 AD. But what...
Mothman Road Trip – Point Pleasant, West Virginia
by Maledicta | Jan 1, 2018 | Categories: Oddities and Curiosities and Weird Tourism. Tags: mothman, mothman prophecies, point pleasant, silver bridge, and west virginia. | 0 Comments
Beginning in 1966, residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia described sightings of a terrifying creature they dubbed “Mothman” – a demonic bird with the body of a man, ragged bat wings, and glowing red eyes. Multiple witnesses claimed to have seen the...
Bram Stoker’s Guide to Transylvania Tourism
by Maledicta | Nov 19, 2017 | Categories: Weird Tourism. Tags: Dracul, Dracula, Harker, Impaler, Stoker, Tepes, Transylvania, and Vlad. | 0 Comments
Can Bram Stoker’s Dracula work as a guidebook for a modern-day tourist in Transylvania? Atlas Obscura’s Luke Spencer walked in the footsteps of Jonathan Harker, visiting the same cities, towns, and hotels on his journey to the home of Vlad the Impaler. (Bonus...
Dystopia, Death, and the Growing Popularity of Dark Tourism
by Maledicta | Oct 31, 2017 | Categories: Weird Tourism. Tags: dark tourism, death, disaster, thanatourism, and tragedy. | 0 Comments
Tourists seem to be increasingly drawn to places linked to death, disaster, atrocity, or ongoing socio-political conflict. Visitors are flocking to sites like the 911 Memorial, concentration camp museums, cemeteries and battlefields – and many other...
True Tales of Pittsburgh’s Oldest Graveyard
by Maledicta | Oct 8, 2017 | Categories: Halloween 365 and Weird Tourism. Tags: First Presbyterian Church, graveyard, Pittsburgh, Tarleton Bates, Trinity Burying Ground, and Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. | 1 Comment
Thank you, Haunted Pittsburgh, for sharing this fascinating story from Pittsburgh’s macabre history! Every day, thousands of pedestrians stroll past the imposing churches on Sixth Avenue without realizing they are within a few feet of...