55. The Worlds Most Haunted Places Part 2

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This episode closes the two-part countdown of the most haunted places on earth, covering the top five. We open in Edinburgh, Scotland — a city that sealed off its medieval streets and built a new city on top of them, leaving the original closes and vaults intact beneath the surface. The South Bridge Vaults, rediscovered in 1985, have been the subject of one of the most rigorous paranormal studies ever conducted.

From Scotland we go to Bohemia, Czech Republic, and Houska Castle — a 13th-century structure with no water source, no town to protect, and no trade route to control, built in the middle of dense forest with outer walls that face inward. It was built over a hole in the ground that medieval sources describe as a gateway to the underworld. The chapel sits directly above the sealed pit and contains a fresco of St. Michael painted deliberately left-handed — in medieval Catholic iconography, the hand of the Devil.

In County Offaly, Ireland, Leap Castle earns the third spot. It is the site of a massacre carried out in the castle's own chapel during a feast, and the murder of a Catholic priest at the altar by his own brother during Mass. In 1900, renovation workers discovered a concealed oubliette off the Bloody Chapel — a spiked pit containing the remains of an estimated 150 people. An elemental is also present: a creature the size of a sheep, moving on all fours in a human manner, with a human face, black empty eye sockets, and a smell of sulfur and decay that arrives before it appears and lingers after it's gone.

Number two, Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania — 51,000 casualties in 72 hours across six square miles of farmland in July 1863. The most paranormally documented site in the United States. At dusk in the Wheatfield, where 6,000 men fell in a single afternoon, figures in period clothing have been reported walking in opposite directions.

We close at number one: Poveglia Island where plague victims were quarantined and burned across three centuries of epidemic — 1348, 1630, and the waves between. The soil is documented at approximately fifty percent human ash and bone fragments. An estimated 160,000 people died there. The bell that was removed from the hospital tower, still rings

SOURCES

Wiseman, Richard. "Hauntings and Psychology." University of Hertfordshire study, Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There. Macmillan, 2011.

Historic Environment Scotland. Edinburgh Castle site documentation and architectural history. Edinburgh: HES

Burke and Hare: Bailey, Brian. Burke and Hare: The Year of the Ghouls. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2002.

Ottokar II of Bohemia and Houska Castle construction: Žemlička, Josef. Království v pohybu (The Kingdom in Motion). Prague: NLN, 2014.

SS Ahnenerbe occult research division: Pringle, Heather. The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust. New York: Hyperion, 2006.

O'Carroll clan history and Leap Castle: Simms, Katharine. From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Political Structure of Gaelic Ireland in the Later Middle Ages. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1987.

The oubliette at Leap Castle: Ryan, Sean. Personal accounts and estate documentation. See also: Costello, Con. A Most Delightful Station: The British Army on the Curragh of Kildare, Ireland. Collins Press, 1996.

Chamberlain and Little Round Top: Trulock, Alice Rains. In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain and the American Civil War. University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Venice plague epidemics and the lazaretto system: Cohn, Samuel K. Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Poveglia Island quarantine history: Norwich, John Julius. A History of Venice. New York: Knopf, 1982.

Psychiatric care in early 20th-century Italy: Foot, John. The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care. Verso, 2015.