The Finnish Museum Infested With Gigantic Spiders
A grand old building in the heart of Helsinki, Finland’s Natural History Museum is one of the capital’s premier tourist attractions. It’s also a place where no arachnophobe should ever set foot. The building is home to a gigantic colony of extremely venomous, near-immortal super-spiders.Known as the Chilean recluse spider, the creatures are normally only found in South America. Unfortunately for Finland, some eggs made their way into a shipment of wood chips the museum ordered in the 1960s. They hatched, and the spiders escaped into the museum. By 1970, the place was overrun with them. In 2016, they’re not only still there—there are more of them than ever. The trouble is that the Chilean recluse spider is almost indestructible. Females have been known to survive without food or water for 755 days. They can deal with extreme temperature changes and can lay up to 2,250 eggs in a lifetime. As an added bit of freaky detail, they can grow to up to 10 centimeters (4 in), and their bite will leave you howling in agony (if it doesn’t kill you outright).On the plus side, the recluse spider gets its name by hiding away from humans. In the 50-plus years the museum has been infested, only one bite has ever been recorded. This is extremely good news, as the museum is built above a series of tunnels linking many buildings in Helsinki. The BBC has speculated that it’s only a matter of time before the colony expands outward into other parts of the city center . . . if it hasn’t done so already.
Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields Hotel
From the outside, Lagoon’s Edge in Sri Lanka looks like any normal, tropical hotel. It features large, rustic rooms, a view onto a pristine beach, and a Facebook page that boasts, “Enjoy a soothing holiday and the cool breeze of Nanthikadal lagoon.” If you’re already rushing to book your next vacation there, you might want to hold back a second. While Lagoon’s Edge may be devoid of gigantic Chilean spiders, its location is far from idyllic. It was built on top of the site of the Tamil Tigers’ last stand at the end of Sri Lanka’s long and bloody civil war. In the final government push to eliminate the insurgent group, so many civilians died that the area is now known as Sri Lanka’s killing fields.The scale of the murders that took place here is staggering. In the final weeks of the war, the UN estimated that 40,000 people died, many of them Tamil civilians used by the Tigers as human shields. When government forces moved in, many of the surviving civilians were raped, tortured, and executed. The scale of war crimes committed in the area was so great that both the UN and one of Sri Lanka’s top judges have urged for a criminal tribunal like that for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Perhaps the most shocking part of all this is how quickly the hotel opened over this bloodstained battlefield. The mass killings took place in 2009. Lagoon’s Edge opened for business in 2012.
The Hospital That Nursed Two German Dictators
Sometimes, places are haunted not by anything that specifically happened there but by who they are associated with. Such is the case with the abandoned Beelitz Heilstatten hospital in Germany. Although from the outside, the building looks like any derelict site, the hospital has a dubious historical distinction. It was here that Hitler was nursed back to health following a British mustard gas attack in World War I.To be fair, Hitler spent time in plenty of places before making his famous transition from failed artist to murderous villain. If we were to claim all of them had horrifying secrets, we could’ve just filled this article with 10 buildings from Berlin and schlepped off to an early lunch. What makes the Beelitz Heilstatten special isn’t just that it saved Hitler’s sight (bad move). It’s that the staff seemed to go out of their way to collect German dictators. Many years after Hitler’s reign was over, another Germanic despot was treated here: the East German Communist stooge Erich Honecker. Honecker was the man in charge of the GDR, the man responsible for both the Berlin Wall and the infamous Stasi. After ordinary Germans got fed up with living apart and tore his wall down, he retired to Beelitz Heilstatten to recuperate. If we could only now find evidence the Kaiser was also treated there, that would be a German despot hat trick.
The Innocuous Houses Used By Serial Killers
One of the slightly ghoulish aspects about catching a serial killer is that you then have to decide what to do with their property. While the press and public are caught up in the trial, local officials or landlords have to decide what happens to their former homes. In most cases, this is easy. Many serial killers do their actual killing away from home, so reselling the house isn’t too ethically dubious. In a lot of the cases where people were tortured and murdered on the property, the owners opt for demolition—as happened with the former home of British serial killers Fred and Rose West. But occasionally, the landlord decides to just keep renting it out. That’s how you can wind up living in an innocuous-seeming home that is really a den of unimaginable horrors.In 2015, the London flat where serial killer Dennis Nilsen murdered around a dozen young men went up on the market. It’s far from the only such property available. The former home of the “crossbow cannibal” Stephen Griffiths is currently being lived in by a student, whose only request was that the landlord replace the kitchen where he cooked his victims. In what may well be a piece of accidental satire, the current owner of Jeffrey Dahmer’s former home is specifically offering it for rent during the 2016 GOP convention in Ohio.In short, there are a disturbingly high number of homes out there where people met gruesome, horrifying ends. And they can be yours to live in. It’s a weird world, all right.
http://listverse.com/2016/04/18/10-ordinary-locations-with-horrifying-secrets/