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33 destinations across 22 countries. Filter by category, country and how unexplained you like your travel.
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Bran, Romania
Bran Castle
Bran Castle stands on a rock in a mountain pass in Transylvania, Romania. It was built in the 1300s as a customs post and fortress. It has no real link to Dracula, but it looks so much like the castle in Bram Stoker's novel that it became the most photographed Dracula site in the world.
Pripyat, Ukraine
Pripyat
Pripyat was built in 1970 for the workers of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Almost 50,000 people lived there. On 27 April 1986, the day after the reactor explosion, everyone was evacuated in a few hours. They were told it was temporary. Nobody moved back.
Şanlıurfa, Turkey
Göbekli Tepe
Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey is a set of stone circles built around 9500 BC. That makes it thousands of years older than Stonehenge or the pyramids, and older than farming, pottery or writing in this region. Hunter gatherers carved and raised T shaped pillars up to 5.5 metres tall.
Bhangarh, India
Bhangarh Fort
Bhangarh Fort stands in Rajasthan, India, at the edge of a nature reserve. It was a busy town in the 1600s and then it emptied out. India's Archaeological Survey has put up a sign that stops anyone entering between sunset and sunrise, which is why it is often called the most haunted place in India.
Nagasaki, Japan
Hashima Island
Hashima, known as Battleship Island, is a small concrete island off Nagasaki. Thousands of coal miners and their families lived here in some of Japan's first big concrete apartment blocks. The mine closed in 1974 and everyone left within weeks. The buildings have been falling apart ever since.
Carcassonne, France
Carcassonne
Carcassonne in southern France is a walled medieval city with 52 towers and a double ring of walls. It was almost pulled down in the 1800s and then rebuilt by the architect Viollet-le-Duc, whose pointed roofs are still argued about today. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Estes Park, United States
The Stanley Hotel
The Stanley Hotel opened in 1909 in Estes Park, Colorado, at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. Stephen King stayed one night in 1974, in room 217, and the visit gave him the idea for The Shining. The hotel now runs ghost tours all year.
Roswell, United States
Roswell
In July 1947 something crashed on a ranch outside Roswell, New Mexico. The local air base first told newspapers it had recovered a flying disc, then said it was a weather balloon. That one day turned a quiet farming town into the centre of UFO culture.
Donore, Ireland
Newgrange
Newgrange in Ireland's Boyne Valley is a huge stone and earth mound built around 3200 BC. That is older than the pyramids at Giza. For a few days around the winter solstice, the rising sun shines through a small opening and lights the passage inside.
Venice, Italy
Poveglia Island
Poveglia is a small island in the Venetian lagoon, a short distance from Venice. It was used to hold plague victims, and later held a hospital for the mentally ill that closed in 1968. It has been empty ever since, and it is officially closed to the public.
Lüderitz, Namibia
Kolmanskop
Kolmanskop is a German built diamond town in the Namib desert, near Lüderitz in Namibia. It was rich, then the diamonds ran out, and by 1956 it was empty. Sand has poured through the doors ever since. Some rooms are half full of dunes.
Rothenburg, Germany
Rothenburg ob der Tauber
Rothenburg ob der Tauber is a walled town in Bavaria that still looks medieval, with a complete ring of walls you can walk on. It stopped growing after war and plague in the 1600s, and poverty kept it frozen. Part of it was bombed in 1945 and carefully rebuilt.
Flannan Isles, United Kingdom
Eilean Mòr
Eilean Mòr is the largest of the Flannan Isles, small rocks in the Atlantic west of Scotland. In December 1900 the three lighthouse keepers vanished. The lamp was clean, the table was set, and two sets of waterproofs were gone. No one has ever found them.
Holy Island, United Kingdom
Lindisfarne
Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, lies off the coast of Northumberland in England. A road across the sand connects it to the mainland, but the sea covers that road twice a day. In 793 AD Viking raiders attacked the monastery here, an event that shocked Christian Europe and is often used to mark the start of the Viking Age.
Björkö, Sweden
Birka
Birka sits on the island of Björkö in Lake Mälaren, west of Stockholm. Over a thousand years ago it was one of the biggest trading towns in the Viking world. Today it is grass, low mounds and a museum, with more than 3,000 graves under your feet. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
Brissac-Quincé, France
Château de Brissac
The Château de Brissac in France's Loire Valley is the tallest castle in the country, seven floors high. It has belonged to the same family for over 500 years, and they still live there. It also has France's best known ghost story, the Green Lady.
Šiauliai, Lithuania
Hill of Crosses
The Hill of Crosses stands north of Šiauliai in Lithuania. It is a small mound covered with more than 100,000 crosses, left by ordinary people over about 200 years. Soviet authorities bulldozed it several times. Each time, people put the crosses back.
Wycliffe Well, Australia
Wycliffe Well
Wycliffe Well is a roadhouse on the Stuart Highway in Australia's Northern Territory, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere. It calls itself the UFO capital of Australia, and the walls are covered in painted aliens and newspaper cuttings of sighting reports.
Oslo, Norway
Norwegian Maritime Museum
The Norwegian Maritime Museum sits on the Bygdøy peninsula in Oslo, surrounded by other polar and ship museums. It tells the story of a country shaped entirely by the sea: fishing, shipwrecks, polar voyages and the boats that made them possible.
Sedona, United States
Sedona's Airport Mesa
Airport Mesa is a flat topped ridge above Sedona, Arizona, with red rock views in every direction. It is one of the places local guides call an energy vortex, and it is also one of the best sunset and stargazing spots in the area.
Hakui, Japan
Hakui & the Cosmo Isle Coast
Hakui is a small city on the Sea of Japan coast that calls itself Japan's UFO town. It has a serious space museum with real spacecraft hardware, and local records of strange flying objects that go back to the Edo period, long before modern UFO stories began.
Nazca, Peru
The Nazca Lines
In the desert south of Lima, Peru, huge shapes are drawn into the ground: a hummingbird, a monkey, a spider and hundreds of straight lines. They were made between roughly 500 BC and 500 AD by removing dark stones to show the pale soil underneath. From the ground they are almost invisible. From the air they are enormous.
Fairbanks, USA
Bus 142 — The Into the Wild Magic Bus
Bus 142 is the abandoned bus where Christopher McCandless died in Alaska in 1992, made famous by the book and film Into the Wild. So many people got into trouble trying to reach it that the bus was airlifted out in 2020. It is now on display in Fairbanks, and the original site is empty.
Rachel, United States
Area 51 & the Extraterrestrial Highway
Nevada State Route 375 runs through empty desert next to a military base that the US government did not admit existed until 2013. The state named it the Extraterrestrial Highway in 1996. There is almost nothing out here except sky, dust and a small town called Rachel that sells alien souvenirs.
Ruwa, Zimbabwe
Ariel School, Ruwa
On 16 September 1994, around 60 schoolchildren in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, said they saw a silver craft land near their playground during morning break. They said small beings came out. The children were interviewed within days, drew what they saw and mostly told the same story. Nobody has explained it since.
Capilla del Monte, Argentina
Cerro Uritorco
Cerro Uritorco is a 1,950 metre hill above Capilla del Monte in Argentina. Since the 1980s it has been the centre of Argentina's UFO stories, and thousands of people climb it every year hoping to see something in the sky. The town has built its identity around it.
Hessdalen, Norway
The Hessdalen Lights
In the Hessdalen valley in central Norway, strange lights appear in the sky. They can be white, yellow or red, and they sometimes hover for over an hour. Scientists have been measuring them since 1983 with an automatic station. Nobody has fully explained them.
Merritt Island, United States
NASA Kennedy Space Center
Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, is where the Apollo Moon missions and the Space Shuttle launched. It is still an active spaceport. The visitor complex sits next to launch pads that are used today, and you can stand under a real Saturn V rocket.
Amesbury, United Kingdom
Stonehenge
Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in southern England. Building started around 3000 BC and the big stone circle went up a few hundred years later. Some of the stones were dragged here from Wales, roughly 250 km away. Nobody knows exactly why.
San Francisco, USA
Alcatraz Island
Alcatraz is a small rocky island in San Francisco Bay. For 29 years it held some of the most famous prisoners in the United States. The prison closed in 1963 and is now a museum. People come for the history, the view back at the city, and the story of the three men who escaped and were never found.
Oswiecim, Poland
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum
Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland was the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp. More than one million people were murdered here, most of them Jews. The site is now a memorial and museum. It is not a sightseeing stop. It is a place people visit to understand what happened.
Meyrin, Switzerland
CERN & the Large Hadron Collider
CERN sits on the border between Switzerland and France, near Geneva. Under the fields runs a 27 km circular tunnel where scientists smash particles together to find out what the universe is made of. The Higgs boson was confirmed here in 2012.
Bonnybridge, United Kingdom
Bonnybridge
Bonnybridge is an ordinary small town in central Scotland. Since the 1990s it has had a strange reputation: local people report more UFO sightings here than almost anywhere else in Britain. A local councillor collected hundreds of reports and asked the government to investigate. Nothing was ever explained.