Top Four Ghoulish Getaways – The Scariest Places to Visit

Hankering for a haunting holiday? Halloween – the spookiest day of the year - is nearly upon us, so to get Kiwis into the scary spirit, leading New Zealand travel company Adventure World (who specialise in unique holiday packages) have revealed their list of the top four ghoulish getaways – the holidays and spots where you’re guaranteed to have a frighteningly good time.

 

From the ghastly and ghoulish to the downright hair-raising, here’s Adventure World pick of the spookiest places to visit around the world.

 

 

Paris may be hailed as the most romantic city on the planet, but beneath the city’s postcard-perfect surface, lurks an eerily-dark and macabre world that’s anything but.

 

Buried deep underground, the Paris Catacombs are an extensive subterranean labyrinth of dimly-lit tunnels containing the intricately arranged remains of around six million Parisians, transferred here at the end of the 18th century, when the main Parisian cemetery closed due to overcrowding. Utterly fascinating, gruesome and most certainly one-of-a-kind, this underground crypt is a must see for those with a penchant for the grisly.

 

Go there: Discover the dark side of Paris and explore the city’s famously frightening catacombs as you take a trip back in history visiting France’s most famous historical sites, on the 8 day Historic Footsteps Through France tour,priced from $3149* per person.

 

 

Humans have been fascinated by blood-sucking vampires long before the Cullen family of ‘Twilight’ fame hit the scene. In fact, they’ve been traipsing around Transylvania – a small and spooky district in Romania – in search of its famous resident vampire Dracula, for over a century.

 

Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel ‘Dracula’ launched the legend of the nocturnal blood-lusting Count, which is said to be based loosely on the life of Vlad the Impaler, the vicious prince of Vlad who had a penchant for killing his victims using wooden stakes.

 

Even if you don’t believe in vampires (as many Romanians do), Transylvania - with its dense forests, mist-shrouded mountains and gothic architecture - is sure to send a shiver down the spine.

 

Go there: Grab the garlic and sink your teeth into exploring the mysterious and mountainousregion of Transylvania to follow the trail of the world’s most famous vampire on Tauck’s luxurious 12 day Budapest to Black Sea River Cruise. Priced from $6039* per person, horror loving travellers can chose to visit Bran Castle, the medieval fortress often referred to as Dracula's which comes complete with claustrophobic corridors and spine-chilling secret chambers, or take a trip to Vlad’s reputed burial place at Snagov Monastery – set on a tiny Island on Snagov Lake - to see where he ended his days.

 

 

If you want to know more about voodoo and black magic, then there’s no better place to visit than the Sonora Witchcraft Market in Mexico City – undoubtedly Mexico’s creepiest attraction.

 

The Woolworths of the witch world, this is the place where locals and tourists alike converge to buy spooky supernatural stuff like rattlesnake blood, dried hummingbird and voodoo dolls from the many hundreds of shamans, fortune-tellers, witch doctors and voodoo practitioners who come here each day to peddle their wares.

 

Magical mumbo-jumbo, hocus pocus, call it what you will - the Sonora Witchcraft Market – a labyrinth of stalls which covers a few city blocks - is a great place to indulge in some supernatural thrills.

 

Go there: Explore Mexico City with Adventure World’s 3 day Essential Mexico City package, priced from $198* per person. With two nights’ accommodation and a half day tour of Mexico City included, you’ll have plenty of time spare to explore this fascinating shrine to the black arts.

 

 

Shrouded in a cloak of foreboding fog and like something straight out of a Stephen King novel, Bokor Hill Station in Kampot, Cambodia has been dubbed as one of the eeriest places on earth, a reputation that this abandoned Southeast Asian ghost town - which has served as the set for a number of horror flicks - certainly lives up to.

 

Built in the 1920s as an elegant mountain retreat for French officials wishing to escape the intense tropical heat of the lowlands, the hill station was not once, but twice abandoned: first when Vietnamese and Khmer Issarak (Free Khmer) forces overran it in the late 1940s while fighting for independence from France, and again when the Khmer Rouge army took hold of the area surrounding Bokor Hill.

 

Uninhabited ever since, today the former high-class station lies in ruins with its abandoned buildings (built by over a thousand men who supposedly perished after its construction) boasting an unnerving and ghostly feel, which is accentuated by a bright-orange lichen that covers the exterior of its bullet-ridden and decrepit walls.

 

Go there: Delve deep into the fog and visit the bone-chilling ruins of Bokor Hill Station on Adventure World’s private 12 day Saigon to Angkor Wat cycling tour, which showcases the real Cambodia and Vietnam and is priced from $3368* per person.