Some buildings are a little bit scary.
Cobwebbed halls, creaking doorways and unexplained drafts can be very unnerving at certain times, for certain people.
These buildings are not a little bit scary: they are crap your pants, kick your dear old mum out the way terrifying.
Allow me to be your ghoulish guide, then, to…
Sedlec Ossuary
The Sedlec ossuary, located in Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic, looks fairly innocuous from the outside.
Indeed, until relatively recently (around 1870), the bones themselves did not seem all that threatening. It was at this point that a local woodcarver was brought in to give the place a bit of a tidy.
Unfortunately, František Rint turned out to have a creative approach to his work, and decided that tidying about the place meant constructing a palace of exquisite horror.
Yes, those images are real, and no, you don’t have control of your basic bodily functions anymore.
A macabre tourist attraction to this day, the Sedlec Ossuary shows us all what scarily intense people used to do with their time before Dwarf Fortress was invented.
The Skull Tower Of Niš
Way back when, the Serbian people were ruled by the Ottoman Empire. They were not very happy about this.
During their first uprising, they engaged the Turkish forces at ÄŒegar Hill. Outnumbered and outgunned, the battle seemed hopeless…
…unfortunately for the Serbians, it was.
However, in a final act of defiance, the commander Stevan Sinđelić fired at his own gunpowder depot to avoid surrender and inflict damage to the advancing Turkish army. He became a hero to the Serbs, but what became of his men?
In a grisly act of revenge, the Turkish commander had the heads of his defeated enemies built into an enormous tower of skulls, to serve as a warning.
Ironically, an act intended to subjugate and dominate became a source of pride for Serbia, and the tower was declared a “Monument of Culture of Exceptional Importance” by the Republic of Serbia in 1979.
The skull of Stevan Sinđelić is said to reside there to this very day.
Scientists refuse to comment on whether his vengeful ghost still roams the surrounding countryside, so we are forced to assume that it does.
