If travel broadens our horizons and horror heightens our senses, then the two combined pack a powerful punch.
From a temple crawling with thousands of rats, to an island swarming with flesh-melting snakes – question-and-answer site Quora uncovered some of the most disturbing, bone-chilling and goosebump-inducing places on Earth.
Looking for an adventure this year? Look no further.
A glacial lake full of human skeletons
In 1942, a forest ranger hiking near India’s Roopkund Lake, perched some 5,029m in the Himalayas, stumbled across a startling discovery: the shallow, glacial lake was surrounded by human skeletons.
Nobody can be sure why these skeletons are at the bottom of a glacial lake (Credit: Credit: Schwiki/Human Skeletons in Roopkund Lake/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Nobody can be sure why these skeletons are at the bottom of a glacial lake (Credit: Schwiki/Human Skeletons in Roopkund Lake/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 4.0)
When summer came and the ice melted, hundreds of more skeletons were revealed, some with flesh and hair still attached. Who, or what, had killed so many people, turning a remote high-altitude lake in an uninhabited part of the Himalayas into a mass grave?
Everyone from locals to expert anthropologists speculated on how Skeleton Lake came to be, wrote Varun Ojha. Theories ranged from epidemics to landslides to ritual suicides.
A 2004 expedition offered more clues. The skeletons were the remains of 200 to 300 people dating to back the 9th Century, and were divided into two distinct groups: a closely related family or tribe, and a smaller, shorter group of locals. They were found with rings, spears, leather shoes and bamboo sticks. Short, deep cracks in the skulls suggested all of the bodies appeared to have died in the same way, from blows to the head from rounded objects, not weapons.
A dark secret lurks at the bottom of this Himalayan lake (Credit: Abhijeet Rane/Roopkund - Mystery Lake/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)
A dark secret lurks at the bottom of this Himalayan lake (Abhijeet Rane/Roopkund - Mystery Lake/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)
All 200 to 300 people, scientists concluded, died from a hailstorm of biblical proportions. Thousands of cricket ball-sized, hard-as-iron hailstones pounded the heads and shoulders of a group of pilgrims and their porters travelling through the area. Trapped in a valley with nowhere to hide, the entire group perished in a mass death that still fascinates fearless visitors to this day.
Travellers to the region can still see the skeletons, although summer is the best time to visit as the bones at the lake’s bottom can only be seen when the ice melts.
An island swarming with flesh-melting snakes
Visiting Brazil’s Ilha da Queimada Grande is forbidden. That’s because the island, located 33km off the state of Sao Paulo, is swarming with venomous snakes.
The snake's venom can cause kidney failure, brain hemorrhaging and many other alarming ailments (Credit: Credit: Danelo-commonswiki assumed/Eyelash Pit Viper 01/Wikipedia/CC BY 2.5)
The snake’s venom can cause kidney failure, brain hemorrhaging and many other alarming ailments (Credit: Danelo-commonswiki assumed/Eyelash Pit Viper 01/Wikipedia/CC BY 2.5)
Snake Island, as it’s called, is home to an estimated 4,000 venomous Bothrops insularis, also known as golden lanceheads, a critically endangered species that got trapped on the island when rising sea levels covered up the land that connected it to the mainland. The Brazilian navy closed the island in the 1920s to protect the snakes from humans – and to protect humans from the deadly snakes. The golden lanceheads grow to more than half a metre long and possess a fast-acting poison that melts human flesh. According to some estimates, there is one snake to every square metre of the island.
“The venom causes a grab bag of symptoms, which includes kidney failure, necrosis of muscular tissue, brain hemorrhaging, and intestinal bleeding. Scary stuff, to be sure,” explained Smriti Iyer.
The temple crawling with black rats
A religious and tourist destination, India’s Karni Mata Temple is a site of both reverence and revulsion. That’s because the famous Hindu temple is crawling with thousands of rodents.
20,000 black rats roam free in India’s Karni Mata Temple (Credit: Credit: John Bazzano/Alamy)
20,000 black rats roam free in India’s Karni Mata Temple (Credit: John Bazzano/Alamy)
The Temple of Rats, located deep in Rajasthan’s Thar desert, houses some 20,000 black rats that are free to roam the place of worship freely. Thousands of religious pilgrims, as well as curious tourists, visit the temple every year, eager for the blessings of the holy rats.
According to local legend, when the stepson of Hindu deity Karni Mata drowned in a pond, Karni Mata asked the death god Yama to revive him. Yama eventually relented, but only under the condition that the stepson, and all of his caste, be reincarnated as rats.
According to local legend, these black rats are the reincarnation of a Hindu deity and his caste (Cr