By Patrick Chong
Some people travel for fun, others for excitement, but perhaps the most alarming genre of tourists are the ones who get their kicks from visiting the most horrifying and ghoulish destinations from throughout history. If you plan on going to any of the top 10 most terrifying places on earth, you might just want to adjust your travel insurance cover to incorporate the possible outcomes…
1. Haunted House
Optional travel insurance: cover for potential ghostly nightmares.
The Winchester Mystery House in San Hose, California, is a well-known California mansion that was built continuously for 38 years from 1884 and 1922, and is thought to be haunted. It once was the home of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester. Sarah Winchester thought the house was haunted by ghosts of people killed by Winchester rifles and that only continuous construction would appease them.
2. Eerie Instruments
Optional travel insurance: for accidental execution.
Museum of Execution Instruments, Paris, Fountaine de Vaucluse - Its founder was personally acquainted with the issue – he had worked as an executioner for more than ten years. It comprises execution instruments of all times and nations. At first glance you may consider the giant guillotine to be the most dreadful instrument. But smaller instruments, so ordinary and harmless at first sight, may turn out much more dreadful.
3. Frightful Field
Travel insurance: considered essential for the sinful or senseless.
The field of the Valley of Death in Tibet is full of bones – yogis go there to die; other people to find purification or obtain the secret knowledge. Few return with their original mental state, and it is believed that in the Valley of Death the human sole undergoes a special trial and that sinful or senseless lives are ended.
4. Mortifying Museum
Optional travel insurance: cover for general mental health.
The Museum of Anatomopathology in Vienna is a monument to pathologies, abnormalities, genetic mutations and harsh medieval medicine. Situated in the isolation ward of a former lunatic asylum, even the most cynical tourists agree that this place is horrifying.
5. Chilling Chapel
Optional travel insurance: for bone-related accidents.
The Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic is a small church filled with the sculls of plague victims from the Black Death. The macabre building contains approximately 40,000-70,000 human skeletons. In 1870, Frantisek Rint, a woodcarver, was employed to put the bone heaps into order, and he artistically arranged them to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel. Four enormous bell-shaped mounds occupy the corners and an enormous chandelier of bones, which contains at least one of every bone in the human body, hangs from the centre of the nave with garlands of skulls draping the vaults.
6. Creepy Castle
Travel insurance recommended: against bloodsucking vampires and impalement.
Dracula's Castle in Transilvania, Romania The medieval castle of the famous vampire is situated on the edge of an abyss. After passing through narrow passageways, dark rooms and resonant stone stairs, you find yourself in the bedroom, where, on the big bed with a canopy, the vampire used to suck his victims' blood. This castle accommodated Vlad the Impaler, one of the most monstrous personalities of the Middle Ages, who had impaled hundreds of innocent people.
7. Horrendous History
Optional travel insurance: against historical fascist dictators.
The Auschwitz Museum is on the territory of the former concentration camp where millions died during WWII. In 1947, in remembrance of the victims, Poland founded the museum and by 1994, 22 million visitors had passed through the famous gateway. Not for the faint-hearted.
8. Terrifying Torture-chamber
Optional travel insurance: for torture chambers
Museum of Torture in Mdina, Malta has a tremendous collection of guillotines, tongs for pulling out nails and other instruments of torture. The application of torture instruments is vividly demonstrated by frighteningly lifelike wax figures.
9. Creepy Catacombs
Optional travel insurance: cover for Parisian entombment.
Paris Catacombs, France In the Denfert-Rochereau Ossuary or Empire of the Dead, far below the city streets of Paris, in the quiet, damp darkness, seven million Parisians lie motionless, their skeletons neatly stacked and aligned to form the walls of nearly one kilometre of walking passage.
10. Gruesome Gulag
Optional travel insurance: for disturbing memories.
Millions of people passed through Gulag in the Soviet Union for the twenty years of its existence. The camps had extremely hard conditions; elementary human rights were violated and minor breaches of regime were drastically punished. Mortalities from starvation, diseases and exhausting labour was extremely high. Today, under the northern sky in Solovki, you can see the deserted barracks, tunnels, punishment cells and depositories with prisoners' clothes and shaved hair.
Patrick Chong is the Managing Director of Journey’s Travel. Their commercial travel insurance website, Insuremore, offers cheap travel insurance cover for families, singles, children and skiers with free cover against acts of terrorism and a quick and easy online claims feature.
Source:www.isnare.com |
