The Underground World — Caves, Catacombs & Tunnels
Beneath Paris, beneath Kent, below the Pacific — the archive's subterranean canon.
Pioneer Square Underground Tour
B · Seattle, WA, United States — After the 1889 fire, Seattle rebuilt one story higher and buried its storefronts — the sidewalks below are now walkable on tour.…
Edinburgh Castle & the Vaults
S · Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom — A fortress on volcanic rock above haunted underground vaults — home to the best-controlled ghost experiment ever run.…
The Catacombs of Paris
A · Paris, France — Six million skeletons stacked in old limestone tunnels beneath Paris — the world's largest grave, and a magnet for the lost.…
Kiyotaki Tunnel — Kyoto's Cursed Passage
B · Kyoto, Japan — A 1927 mountain tunnel where a mirror-check at night is said to show a woman's face where yours should be.…
The Screaming Tunnel — Niagara's Burning Girl
C · Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada — A narrow limestone tunnel under a rail line outside Niagara Falls — walk in and strike a match, they say, and a girl's scream fills the air.…
The Bell Witch — Adams, Tennessee
A · Adams, Tennessee, United States — America's most documented poltergeist case — a four-year entity siege (1817–1821) endorsed by a future president.…
Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo
A · Palermo, Sicily, Italy — Eight thousand mummified citizens standing in ranks beneath a monastery — Palermo's catacombs, where the dead wear their Sunday clothes in labelled corridors and one little girl st…
Chinhoyi Caves — The Pool of the Fallen
B · Mashonaland West, Zimbabwe — A cobalt-blue sinkhole pool held sacred and feared for two centuries — named for the murdered, said to hold a monster, and still dived by the brave.…
Picton's Mushroom Tunnel — Emily Bollard's Crossing
B · Picton, New South Wales, Australia — A gated 1860s railway tunnel in 'Australia's most haunted town', where a woman killed by a train in 1916 is said to still walk — headless.…
Inunaki Tunnel — The Village That Doesn't Exist
B · Miyawaka / Hisayama, Fukuoka, Japan — Japan's most notorious 'closed village' legend: a 440-metre tunnel sealed with concrete, behind which decades of folklore insist a lawless village stands.…
Mammoth Cave's TB Huts — The 1842 Underground Hospital
A · Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, United States — In 1842 a doctor moved sixteen tuberculosis patients into the world's longest cave to breathe its constant air — five died underground in the stone huts that National Park Service …
Davelis Cave — The Brigand's Cave on Penteli
B · Penteli (Athens), Greece — The marble cave on Mount Penteli above Athens — shrine of Pan, Byzantine chapel, brigand's hideout — where electronics fail, orbs and shadow figures are reported, and where a 1977 …
Spooksteeg — Ghost Alley and the Deathbed Curse of Helena
B · Amsterdam city centre, Netherlands — A metres-long alley off the Zeedijk named on the map as Ghost Alley, where a tanner's daughter murdered her sister out of jealousy, confessed on her deathbed in 1753, and was curse…
Wabasha Street Caves — St Paul's Cellar of Ghosts
B · Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States — Sandstone caves carved in 1859 for brewing and storage, reborn as a 1930s speakeasy, whose ghost tours retell three gangland shootings no coroner ever recorded — the most tourist-t…
Tunnel No. 33, Barog — The Engineer's Last Alignment
B · Barog, Himachal Pradesh, India — On the UNESCO-listed Kalka-Shimla mountain railway, the line's longest tunnel — completed in 1903 — keeps the legend of the engineer who miscalculated its alignment, was publicly h…
Lambi Dehar Mines — The Quarries That Coughed Blood
B · Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, India — Abandoned limestone quarries in the hills above Mussoorie, worked from the British era until the courts shut them in the 1990s — a landscape of ruined kilns and cliff faces where m…
Centralia — The Town on Fire Beneath
B · Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States — A Pennsylvania coal town that has burned beneath the ground since 1962, when a landfill fire lit an exposed seam — the fire outlived the town: condemned by eminent domain in 1992, …
Xinhai Tunnel — Taipei's Corridor of the Dead
A · Wenshan District, Taipei, Taiwan — A 487-metre road tunnel through Zhongpu Hill in Taipei, opened on Lunar New Year's Eve of 1972 on the road that carries the city's funeral processions from its Second Funeral Home …
Belchen Tunnel — The White Lady of the A2
B · Basel-Landschaft / Solothurn border, Jura, Switzerland — The Belchen Tunnel (opened 1970) on Switzerland's A2 carries the country's most famous vanishing-hitchhiker legend: a white-clad old woman picked up before the tunnel portal who va…
Shanghai Tunnels — The Old Portland Underground
A · Portland, Oregon (Old Town Chinatown), United States — Beneath Old Town Portland runs a claimed network of 'Shanghai tunnels' through which men were supposedly drugged and smuggled to ships — a legend born of 1930s newspaper romance, f…
Chase Vault — The Moving Coffins of Barbados
A · Oistins, Christ Church, Barbados, Barbados — In the cemetery of Christ Church Parish Church, Oistins, stands the sealed, empty Chase Vault — scene of the Caribbean's most famous unexplained story: between 1807 and 1820, lead …
Melissani Cave — The Nymph Who Drowned for Pan
B · Sami, Kefalonia, Ionian Islands, Greece — The blue cave-lake under the hill at Sami — the Cave of the Nymphs — keeps one of the oldest heartbreak stories in Greek tradition: the nymph Melissanthi, in love with the god Pan …
Odessa Catacombs — The City's Second City
B · Nerubayske, Odesa Oblast, Ukraine — Beneath Odessa lies the largest labyrinth of hand-cut tunnels on earth — some 2,500 kilometres of limestone catacombs, three levels deep, dug as the city's quarries and lived in by…
Chislehurst Caves — Twenty-Two Miles Under Kent
A · Old Hill, Chislehurst, London Borough of Bromley, England — The great man-made labyrinth under south-east London: some twenty-two miles of chalk and flint workings, centuries of picks attested in the walls, the guided canon naming its passa…