Haunted places with histories creepier than the ghost stories
Every haunted place has a ghost story. The ghost story usually has a name, a date, and a sad ending.
The records almost never match it.
Six places follow. For each one, we put the ghost story next to the paper trail. We don’t rate the ghosts. We check the files.
The Paris Catacombs hold six million people
Most of them were moved at night.
For six centuries, Parisians were buried at Les Innocents, near the central market. By 1780, it was overflowing. That spring, a basement wall next door gave way under the weight of the graves, spilling bodies into a neighbor’s property, per Smithsonian Magazine.
In 1785, the Council of State ordered the cemetery emptied. It took 12 years. The ghost stories are about the dead down there. The real story is about the dead up there.
Eastern State Penitentiary was built to make men sorry
Philadelphia, 1829. Eastern State’s idea was simple: total solitude. Prisoners were kept apart and wore hoods when moved.
Prisoner number one, a farmer named Charles Williams, was led in with a hood over his head. Charles Dickens visited in 1842 and called the system “rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement.”
The ghost stories star Al Capone, who, according to one ghost-tour company, was haunted by a man named Jimmy Clark. The system itself was abandoned in 1913.
Danvers State Hospital sat on a hill with a reputation
The legend says the hill was cursed. Hathorne Hill was once home to Judge John Hathorne, a figure in the Salem witch trials.
No evidence supports the curse. A paranormal site admits the story “cannot be substantiated by history.”
The record is worse. Danvers opened in 1878 for about 450 patients. By the late 1930s and 1940s, it held more than 2,000, per Wikipedia. Some were kept in the basement. It closed in June 1992.
Sloss Furnaces has a famous ghost named Slag
No record shows Slag ever lived. He’s the cruel foreman said to have fallen into a furnace. Even a ghost-hunting guide admits no one has produced evidence of his life or death.
What’s documented is convict leasing. Alabama leased out prisoners, more than 90 percent of them Black, to industry, per the state corrections history. By 1894, Sloss was working 589 convicts. It used them in its mines until June 30, 1928, when Alabama became the last state to end the practice.
In the mid-1890s, convicts made up about 36 percent of its mining workforce, according to one rail history. Medical care was minimal.
Hashima looks like a ghost town because it is one
Hashima, off Nagasaki, is called Battleship Island. Mitsubishi ran a coal mine there. Its concrete apartment blocks are now empty.
During World War II, conscripted Koreans and Chinese prisoners of war worked there under brutal conditions. Estimates of the dead range from 137 to about 1,300, per Wikipedia. A Korean commission confirmed 122 Koreans died on the island.
In 2015, Japan won UNESCO listing. Its ambassador acknowledged Koreans were brought against their will. In 2021, UNESCO found Japan’s information center on the sites insufficient.
Pennhurst opened in 1908 as a home
By the 1960s, it was something else. Pennhurst State School, in Spring City, Pennsylvania, was built for about 500 people with disabilities. More than 10,000 would live there over eight decades.
In July 1968, reporter Bill Baldini aired a five-part series, “Suffer the Little Children,” from inside. A lawsuit followed. The court found Pennhurst overcrowded, understaffed, and reliant on restraints, seclusion, and drugs, per one summary.
It closed on December 9, 1987. Today it’s a tourist attraction, with ghost tours.
The bottom line
At Sloss, the ghost named Slag has no paper trail, and the convicts do. Pennhurst closed in 1987, and its ghost tours began after.
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