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Nine Places Our Social Discovery Group Colleagues Swear Are a Little Too Spooky
What makes a place spooky? Is it the building itself, the stories people tell about it, or the way our imagination fills in the gaps? Would you feel uneasy walking through an abandoned hotel where children once spent their summer holidays? ⍨
We asked our colleagues to share the places they find frightening, strange, or simply unforgettable. 〠 Their answers took us from a haunted Welsh castle to an abandoned resort in Turkey, from Czech churches to a cemetery in Vietnam. Six colleagues, nine places, and very different ideas of what makes a place scary.
Some have visited these places.
Others are still gathering the courage. And sometimes, the most frightening thing is not what you see, but what you think you see.1. Haunted by Reputation: When a Place Is Scary Before You Arrive
Some places have a head start when it comes to being frightening. Before you even arrive, someone has told you about the ghost, the strange noise, or the person who disappeared around a corner. After that, an ordinary creak is never just a creak.
Craig y Nos Castle in Wales is one such place. It was once the home of celebrated opera singer Adelina Patti, who bought the estate in 1878 and lived there until her death in 1919. The castle later became a tuberculosis sanatorium, treating patients for decades.
The stories are specific.
Nurses who worked there reportedly described passing someone on a staircase, only to find nobody there. In the former children’s ward, investigators say they have heard small footsteps, laughter and the sound of bouncing balls.
The singer herself is said to haunt the castle as the “White Lady”, and former patients remembered older children scaring younger ones with her story while the building was still a working hospital. In her private theatre, her singing has reportedly been heard long after her death.
Leah Thomas, Deputy Head of Customer Success Team at Social Discovery Group, has never visited the castle, but that hasn’t stopped it from getting under her skin.
Her imagination is clearly powerful. Once, after her husband made her watch the science-fiction horror film The Fourth Kind, Leah spent the night asking him to remove a moth from their bedroom. The poor insect had simply come towards a lamp. Leah, however, suspected it might be connected to an alien abduction.
“If you’re expecting me to wander around a haunted castle, I’ll need my husband, daylight and a getaway car with the engine running, “ Leah continues.
Leah isn’t alone in being frightened by a place she hasn’t visited.
Anastasia Bocharova, HR Business Partner, has a different problem: the Czech Republic has so many haunted places that she had to pick a top three. Two of them she has not seen yet.
️ One is the __Baroque Kuks Hospita__l in eastern Bohemia, built between 1707 and 1715 and decorated with Matthias Bernard Braun’s statues of Virtues and Vices. It was abandoned for a long time, is now a popular tourist site, and is wrapped in ghost legends anyway.
️️ The other is Svojanov Castle, known for stories of footsteps and creaking doors, and popular with ghost hunters who spend the night.She also mentions the abandoned Velichovský hospice, where incurably ill people, people with disabilities, blind residents and patients with mental illness were once cared for by the Sisters of the Holy Cross. It is empty now.
Sometimes, the reputation arrives before the visitor. Sometimes, history is enough.
2. Left Behind: When Abandoned Places Remember Better Days
Abandoned places have a particular talent for making ordinary things look strange.
A swimming pool becomes a dark pit. A children’s attraction becomes a sculpture garden nobody asked for. And a holiday resort starts looking like the set of a film in which the guests vanished halfway through dinner.Polina Alova, Content Producer, found exactly that atmosphere at Naturland Resort in Kemer, Turkey.
The resort covered around 130,000 square metres and offered far more than a typical beach holiday. There were hundreds of rooms, an aquapark, a mini railway, a funicular, a farm and an assortment of unusual attractions. It closed in the 2010s, leaving behind a sprawling complex that gradually fell into disrepair.
Polina remembers the giant animal statues scattered around the grounds. Some were cracked; others had lost their heads. There were enormous mushrooms, fairy-tree sculptures and even a Noah’s Ark. The funicular cars were shaped like dogs.
It sounds like someone gave an architect an unlimited budget and one instruction: make it unforgettable.
They succeeded. Just not in the way anyone might have expected.
The most interesting part came when Polina told her friends about the place.
Some of them had stayed at Naturland as children. They remembered family holidays, not a ghost town. For them, the resort was a happy part of growing up.
For Polina, it was an eerie landscape of broken giraffes and forgotten attractions.
In Huế, Vietnam, Polina found another abandoned attraction: Hồ Thủy Tiên, a former water park built around a lake. Its centrepiece is an enormous dragon whose once-bright exterior has darkened with age.
Visitors could climb inside the dragon and look out through its open mouth. What was designed as a viewing platform became something far stranger as the park deteriorated.
The site’s status has changed over time, so its current accessibility should be confirmed before visiting. Earlier reports described plans to restore the park, but that is not the same as confirming that every attraction is open to the public.
What stayed with Polina was not only the dragon but the thought that a place like this could be given another life rather than simply forgotten.
She returned to the dragon. The abandoned setting had become somewhere worth revisiting, not avoiding.
Not every abandoned building offers a happy ending.
3. Death as Architecture: When the Beautiful and the Macabre Meet
There is a difference between seeing death represented and standing in a room decorated with human bones. Anastasia Bocharova, HR Business Partner, knows which side of that line she falls on.
The Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic, is famous for its interior decorations made from human skeletal remains.
The chapel’s history stretches back to the Middle Ages, when the cemetery serving the local monastery became too crowded. Over time, bones were gathered and stored in the ossuary.In the nineteenth century, woodcarver František Rint arranged many of them into elaborate decorative forms, including the famous chandelier.
The remains are often estimated to represent around 40,000 people, although exact figures vary by source.
For some visitors, the ossuary is an extraordinary work of art and a reminder of mortality. For Anastasia, the experience was much less comfortable.
She describes it as the most disgusting place she has visited, and one she has no desire to see again.
Sometimes, knowing a place is historically significant doesn’t make it any easier to be there. Beauty, craftsmanship and history can coexist with a very real sense of discomfort.
Polina’s experience of death as an architect was almost the opposite.
Near Huế, a coastal village is known for an enormous cemetery often called the City of Ghosts — An Bang Cemetery. Polina estimates that it contains around 3,000 family tombs. The cemetery stretches across the landscape, with elaborate structures in different colours, shapes and styles.
Some tombs reportedly cost tens of thousands of dollars, making them striking architectural statements as well as places of remembrance.
Their scale and detail can be surprising, particularly when compared with the ordinary homes nearby.
One place displays human bones inside a chapel. The other turns remembrance into a landscape of colour and craftsmanship. Both are connected to death, but the emotions they create could hardly be more different.
Perhaps the difference is what we focus on: the remains themselves, or the care people put into remembering those who came before them.
Anastasia Bocharova’s third choice is a place she has yet to visit: St George’s Church in Luková.
St. George’s Church in the village of Luková was built in the 14th century and served the local community for hundreds of years.
Then, in the 1960s, part of the ceiling collapsed during a funeral. Locals took it as a sign that the church was cursed, and stopped coming. Over time, the building was abandoned and left to crumble in silence. 
In 2012, local art student Jakub Hadrava found a way to bring it back. He placed life-sized ghost figures in the pews, each one representing a soul who once worshipped there. Their eerie presence drew curious visitors, and the forgotten church became a symbol of lost history and haunting beauty.
The effect is unsettling in a quiet, almost theatrical way.
The figures don’t chase anyone or step out of the shadows. They simply sit there, like a congregation that has arrived early and is waiting for the service to begin.At the Sedlec Ossuary, the physical reality of death is impossible to ignore. Luková works differently: it only suggests a presence and leaves your imagination to do the rest.
4. Fear of People: When the Atmosphere Is the Story
Not every unsettling place needs a ghost story.
Sometimes, the fear comes from being somewhere unfamiliar, especially when people around you tell you not to go any further.
Yaroslav Sergeev, Chief Operating Officer, visited a port-side neighbourhood in Mumbai late in the evening. His guide and other people who heard about the trip were surprised that he had gone there. The streets were busy, brightly coloured in places and poorly lit in others. The atmosphere felt tense, with activity continuing in the narrow lanes.
At one point, local residents stopped the group and firmly warned them not to continue down a particular alley.
That was a clear signal to respect the people who knew the area.
His experience is a useful reminder that fear doesn’t always follow a predictable script. A place can feel uncomfortable to one person and manageable to another. But personal confidence isn’t a substitute for local knowledge, and a visitor’s sense of calm doesn’t prove that an area is safe.
There is another important distinction here: neighbourhoods are not horror attractions. People live, work and raise families in places that outsiders may see only through the lens of danger.
Their lives are not background scenery for somebody else’s adventure.Sometimes the right response to an unfamiliar place is curiosity. Sometimes it is listening when someone says to turn back.
Maria Khandros, Head of Recruitment, Social Discovery Group, picks the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. It’s a huge seven-storey building with a famously tangled layout. When it opened in 1993, it was planned to hold more than a thousand shops and even a cinema. But a seventh floor added later cut off daylight to the lower levels. Businesses moved out, and large parts of the building were left abandoned.
Today, the cinema is shut. The escalators have stopped and are covered in dust, and a statue of Charlie Chaplin stands alone in the dark.
One floor up, visitors find their way through the gloom by the light of their phone screens, past rows of glass-fronted shops that have long been empty.People describe corridors that lead nowhere, shuttered stores and even a colony of fruit bats. It’s easy to get lost here, and that’s half the fear.
5. The Cyclist in the White Robe: How Legends Are Born
In 2006, Eugene Bandarenka, Project Manager, was staying at a children’s summer camp.. Not far from the camp stood a memorial
cemetery dating back to the First World War.After dark, some of the children would sneak away from the evening disco and head towards the cemetery. It had all the ingredients of a good ghost story: a dark road, an old burial ground and the kind of daring that seems perfectly reasonable when you’re young.
One evening, Eugene and two other children heard that a girl they wanted to prank was planning to visit the cemetery. They decided to get there first, hide nearby and give her a fright when she arrived.
The plan was simple. Find a hiding place. Wait for the girl. Jump out at the right moment.
Then something appeared on the road.
The three children were walking along the dark country lane when they spotted a shapeless white figure approaching from a distance. It seemed to float above the ground. They couldn’t make out any feet touching the road.
For a few seconds, the pranksters forgot that they were supposed to be the frightening ones.
The figure was coming towards them.
It seemed to move quickly, and the closer it got, the harder it became to explain what they were seeing.The girl grabbed Eugene’s arm.
Whatever they had planned for their friend, they were now facing something that looked terrifyingly real.
The figure came closer.
Five metres.
And then they finally saw it.
It was an old man riding a bicycle, dressed in a long white robe.
No ghost.
No supernatural creature. 
Just a cyclist on a country road, dressed in a way that made him almost impossible to identify in the darkness.And that was the end of the haunting ➥ or the beginning of a much better story.
So, what is spooky?
Look at the list again.
A castle haunted by a story, a resort haunted by a childhood, a graveyard that is a place to return to, and a slum that felt calm to the person who visited it. Even the ghost on the dark road was a man going home.
Spooky is not a property of a place.
It is what a place does to you, depending on what you bring with you: what you have heard, who you are with, how much light is left, and how big you look in the mirror.So here is our question for you: what is the spookiest place you have been to, or are too afraid to visit? And would you go?