I WAS TALKING TO a buddy of mine a few weeks back. He had just returned from a family vacation at Disney World in Florida. I WAS TALKING TO a buddy of mine a few weeks back. He had just returned from a family vacation at Disney World in Florida.
“How was it?” I asked him.
“Scary.”
Scary? The Magic Kingdom? The happiest place on Earth? The land of wishes and dreams?
“Yeah,” he said. “Scary.”
I’ve been to Disney and I get what he meant—sort of—but he was speaking in hyperbole. You want scary? I mean, truly scary? Go to the Aokigahara Suicide Forest in Japan. Check out Lake Nyos in Cameroon or the Chapel of Bones in Portugal. Spend some time in South Africa or Juàrez, Mexico or the Sudan, and you’ll get a clearer picture of scary. A place like Disney might be crowded and expensive, but at least you can spend time there without being freaked the F out. Or dying.
FACT 369 
Among the twenty thousand anatomical oddities on display at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia are a nine-foot-long human colon and a slice of someone’s face suspended in fluid.
FACT 370 Since the 1950s more than five hundred people have taken their own lives at the Aokigahara Suicide Forest near Mount Fuji in Japan, which is littered with bones, makeshift nooses and flowers left by grieving friends and family.
FACT 371 The dangerous border town of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, saw 2,600 deaths from drug-related violence in 2009.
FACT 372 Grozny, Chechnya, was named “Most Destroyed City on Earth” by the United Nations in 2003. Most residents fled long ago; those who remain are under constant threat from local mafia and gangs.
FACT 373 Kinshasa, the capital and largest city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is plagued by gang violence, rape, poor sanitation, disease and constant civil unrest between warring factions trying to control the nation’s diamond mines.
FACT 374 Karachi, Pakistan, is widely known as a human trafficking hotspot and the primary gateway for smuggling sex slaves into the West.
FACT 375 With a yearly average of 1,220 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, Detroit, Michigan, recently topped Forbes magazine’s list of most dangerous cities in America.
FACT 376 Caracas, Venezuela, was dubbed “Murder Capital of the World” by Foreign Policy magazine in 2008.
FACT 377 
There are more than seventy potentially active volcanoes in Alaska.
FACT 378 Alaska has almost twice as many caribou as people.
FACT 379 In 2010, Alaska had the fifth-highest rate of violent crime in the United States.
FACT 380 The most violent volcanic event of the last century was the 1912 eruption of Alaska’s Novarupta Volcano, which created the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes in Katmai National Park. The other Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes was behind my high-school cafeteria.
FACT 381 Three of the ten strongest earthquakes ever recorded in the world occurred in Alaska.
FACT 382 Alaska has about five thousand earthquakes every year.
FACT 383 Suicide was the sixth leading cause of death in Alaska in 2009.
FACT 384 Since 1976, Alaska has ranked in the top five states in the nation for the highest rate of reported rape per capita.
FACT 385 Some towns in Alaska cannot be reached by car. One is Juneau, Alaska’s state capital, which can only be reached by plane, boat or a really big catapult.
FACT 386 Some towns in northern Alaska live in complete darkness from mid-November to late January. In the summer, those same towns have no darkness at all from early May to early August.
FACT 387 Alaska’s record temperatures range from a high of 100°F (Fort Yukon, 1915) to a low of −80°F (Prospect Creek Camp, 1971).
FACT 388 In the winter of 1952–53, Thompson Pass near Valdez, Alaska, got 975 inches of snow.
FACT 389 In 1989, the Exxon oil tanker Valdez hit a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling more than 11 million gallons (41,600 kilograms) of crude oil over 1,100 miles (1,600 kilometers) of coastline.
FACT 390 There are an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 grizzly bears currently living in the lower forty-eight states; Alaska has an estimated 30,000 grizzlies. These will continue to be estimates until they find someone brave enough to go into the woods and count the bears in person.
FACT 391 In the last decade, Alaska has consistently placed among the ten worst states for male-on-female homicides.
FACT 392 From 2002 to 2004, Alaska had the nation’s highest rate per capita of men murdering women, and the state had the second-highest rate per capita from 2005 to 2007.
FACT 393 In 2009, Alaska had more occupational fatalities than any other state in America, and the state had the second-highest rate of occupational fatalities in 2010.
FACT 394 The Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964 measured 9.2 on the Richter scale and lasted between three and five minutes.
FACT 395 The 1964 Alaskan earthquake was the strongest in North American history, and the second strongest ever recorded in the world.
FACT 396 The 1964 quake generated a tsunami that devastated many towns along the Gulf of Alaska and caused serious damage along the western coasts of Canada and the United States.
FACT 397 The quake’s death toll was 128—most of them from the tsunami that followed the actual quake—and it caused $311 million in property loss.
FACT 398 Waves of up to sixty-seven meters were recorded during the tsunamis that followed the 1964 earthquake.
FACT 399 Effects of the quake were felt as far away as the Gulf Coasts of Louisiana and Texas, where seiche action in waterways caused minor damage, and in tide gauges in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
FACT 400 Catacombs beneath Paris, France, contain the remains of an estimated 6 million people whose bodies were moved there in the late eighteenth century after the city became overrun with corpses.
FACT 401 Stacked bones and skulls are used as decorative pieces on walls and doorways in the catacombs.
FACT 402 Stephen King was inspired to write his classic novel The Shining while staying at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, which is said to be haunted.
FACT 403 Beneath Edinburgh, Scotland, lies a maze of vaults dating back to the mid-1700s. Once a haven for criminal activity, the caverns are now said to be haunted by ghosts who attack visitors.
FACT 404 If you visit New Orleans, Louisiana, you might want to avoid St. Louis Cemetery #1, especially at night. The graveyard is said to be haunted by the specter of nineteenth-century voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, who often appears as a black cat with red eyes.
FACT 405 A pocket of magma deep below Lake Nyos in Cameroon leaks carbon dioxide gas continuously into the water above. A 1986 explosion on the lake from built-up pressure created a CO2 cloud that asphyxiated 1,700 people. Experts say such an event could happen again.
FACT 406 One sustainability company has ranked Miami, Florida, as the most risky city for natural disasters in the United States.
FACT 407 The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the southern tip of Florida can expect more than sixty hurricanes over a hundred-year period.
FACT 408 From 1972 to 1984, droughts in the Sahel region of Africa caused more than one hundred thousand deaths.
FACT 409 In 2005, the rains of Hurricane Stan flooded Central America and southern Mexico, causing more than nine hundred mudslides. Entire villages were buried; one village in Panabaj, Guatemala, was declared a cemetery after officials gave up hope of excavating the bodies of three hundred missing villagers.
FACT 410 New York City has more residents than the combined populations of Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Hawaii, Delaware and New Mexico.
FACT 411 New York City has more Irish residents than Dublin, Ireland; more Italians than Rome, Italy; and more Jews than Tel Aviv, Israel.
FACT 412 The city is home to more than a million stray dogs and half a million stray cats.
FACT 413 An estimated ten thousand abandoned, orphaned and runaway children roamed the streets of New York City in 1852.
FACT 414 About 1,600 people are bitten by other people every year in New York City.
FACT 415 More New Yorkers die by suicide than by homicide.
FACT 416 About 40 million pounds of dog excrement were deposited on the streets of New York City every year until a 1978 law made it mandatory for owners to clean up after their pets. Now there are only 30 million pounds a year on the streets.
FACT 417 It is illegal to jump off the Empire State Building. There’s a cop posted on the fiftieth floor who hands out citations to people as they fly by.
FACT 418 It is against the laws of New York City for a man to leer at a woman. I know for a fact that this law is not being enforced…
FACT 419 Women may go topless in public in New York City as long as they are not charging money for it.
FACT 420 New Yorkers cannot dissolve a marriage for irreconcilable differences unless they both agree to it. But if they both agree to it, doesn’t that mean their differences are reconcilable?
FACT 421 Because of an ongoing battle with graffiti, New York City made it illegal to carry an open can of spray paint.
FACT 422 The word “hooker” is thought to have originated at Manhattan’s Corlaer’s Hook, a notorious prostitution hot spot in the early nineteenth century.
FACT 423 More than a third (36 percent) of the current population of New York City was born outside the United States.
FACT 424 New York City’s Washington Square Park was once used as a cemetery and as a site for public hangings.
FACT 425 The infamous Hangman’s Elm still stands in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. Look closely and you can see where someone carved, “Archibald was h—”
FACT 426 New York City remained under British control even after the Declaration of Independence was signed.
FACT 427 In the 1700s, New Yorkers owned more slaves than the citizens of any other city in the British colonies except Charleston, South Carolina.
FACT 428 Roughly 37 million people visit New York City’s Times Square every year. All at the same time.
FACT 429 The first Marxist organization in the Western Hemisphere was the Communist Club of New York, formed in 1847 by Joseph Wedemeyer, a friend of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
FACT 430 At only nine feet wide, the house at 75 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village is New York’s narrowest, and was once the home of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.
FACT 431 In the late nineteenth century, thousands of pigs roamed Manhattan to consume garbage; this was the city’s first sanitation system.
FACT 432 America’s first automobile accident occurred in New York City in 1897.
FACT 433 America’s first auto accident fatality also occurred in New York City, in 1900.
FACT 434 The top of the Empire State Building was meant to be a docking port for airships, but high winds made it too dangerous. Only one airship ever docked there.
FACT 435 In summertime, the surface temperature of an average New York City street can reach up to 150°F. Eggs cook at 145°F.
FACT 436 The Empire State Building is estimated to be struck by lightning about twenty-five times a year, though some put the figure closer to a hundred.
FACT 437 On an average weekday, more than 5.1 million people ride a New York City subway. About 3.5 million of them pee in it.
FACT 438 New York City is estimated to have 8 million rats, or one rat per person; others put the figure as high as twelve rats per person.
FACT 439 The name “hot dog” originated on Coney Island in the late 1800s when a German immigrant named Charles Feltman began selling frankfurters from a cart. His competitors started a rumor that Feltman’s frankfurters contained dog meat.
FACT 440 Brazil is plagued with rampant street crime in larger cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo. Tourists are frequent targets.
FACT 441 Common in Brazil are “quicknappings,” where a victim is abducted and forced to remove money from an ATM for his own ransom.
FACT 442 Colombia is the world capital for kidnappings. The government’s National Fund for the Defense of Personal Liberty (Fondelibertad) estimated that 282 people were kidnapped during 2010 alone.
FACT 443 The murder rate in Colombia is also one of the world’s highest, with more than 15,200 killings in 2010. Many victims were local government officials who challenged the drug cartels.
FACT 444 Colombia supplies 75 percent of the world’s cocaine.
FACT 445 Five Catholic missionaries were murdered in Colombia in 2005.
FACT 446 Kidnappings of foreigners are prevalent in Russia, as they fetch higher ransoms.
FACT 447 The presence of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban makes Pakistan potentially dangerous to Americans in particular. In 2008, at least sixty suicide bombings killed more than one thousand people.
FACT 448 The U.S. State Department warns against all travel to Sudan. In recent years, Americans and Europeans in Sudan have been victims of robberies and carjackings; two American Embassy employees were assassinated there in 2008.
FACT 449 Nestled precariously between Israel and Syria, Lebanon is on the U.S. State Department’s travel advisory list due to the presence of Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah militants.
FACT 450 The security threat level in Yemen is high. In 2008, a convoy of tourists was attacked by suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists; two were killed. That same year an assault on the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a left an embassy guard dead.
FACT 451 The State Department restricts the movement of embassy personnel in Algeria because of suicide car-bomb attacks, kidnappings and assassinations aimed at foreigners.
FACT 452 Somalia’s piracy problem and political vacuum—it hasn’t had a proper functioning government in about fifteen years—are two reasons why it remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world.
FACT 453 Somalia’s infamous pirates have been sailing farther afield, into waters where they are less likely to be caught. “Piracy will only continue, if not increase,” says one expert. “The business is lucrative and there’s no real effective military response.”
FACT 454 In 1976, a 7.5-magnitude earthquake killed twenty-three thousand Guatemalans.
FACT 455 More than three thousand people are believed to have perished within the walls of Beechworth Lunatic Asylum in Victoria, Australia, victims of abuse, neglect and inhumane medical treatments and experiments.
FACT 456 One particularly heinous treatment at Beechworth Asylum was the Darwin Chair, a primitive shock therapy device that spun subjects around so fast that they would bleed from their mouths, eyes, noses and ears.
FACT 457 Opened in 1867 and closed in 1995, Beechworth is now the site of frequent ghost sightings and offers tours to the public.
FACT 458 South Africa has been called the “rape capital of the world” and also consistently has one of the world’s highest homicide rates.
FACT 459 Ten million South Africans are infected with HIV.
FACT 460 The worst natural disaster in U. S. history was the Galveston Hurricane in 1900, which killed more than eight thousand people.
FACT 461 Galveston Island in Texas is reportedly haunted by the spirits of the more than eight thousand victims of the Galveston Hurricane.
FACT 462 Ghosts on Galveston Island are reportedly most often encountered at Ashton Villa—a mansion that survived the storm—and Hotel Galvez, the island’s oldest hotel.
FACT 463 In a 2010 University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, nearly a third of Texans surveyed believed that humans and dinosaurs roamed the Earth at the same time.
FACT 464 More than half of respondents said they disagree with the theory that humans developed from earlier species of animals.
FACT 465 Almost 40 percent of respondents in the University of Texas/Texas Tribune survey agreed with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form about ten thousand years ago.” Are you picturing a caveman with a cowboy hat and boots and his cavewife with giant bouffant hair and big fake boobs? I am.
FACT 466 Texas passed a law in 2009 that requires state public schools to incorporate Bible literacy into the curriculum.
FACT 467 Almost a third (31 percent) of Texas voters believe that their state has the right to secede from the United States and form an independent country.
FACT 468 Seventy percent of Texans support offshore oil drilling; 66 percent support deep-water drilling.
FACT 469 In Texas, 69 percent of likely voters believe that the military should be used at the Mexican border to prevent illegal immigration.
FACT 470 More than half of Texans (56 percent) support a state lawsuit against the federal government to stop the recently passed national health care plan.
FACT 471 About 70 percent of Texans support the death penalty; 49 percent strongly support it. Half of those want to be the ones to flip the switch on the electric chair.
FACT 472 A 2003 poll found that although a majority of Texans support the death penalty, 69 percent of respondents believe the state has executed innocent people.
FACT 473 Is the death penalty applied fairly? In a 2002 Houston Chronicle poll, a majority of Texans (59 percent) said yes, although a lower percentage (43 percent) of Americans agrees with them.
FACT 474 Seventy percent of Texans believe that homosexuality is morally wrong. A majority support amending the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage.
FACT 475 A majority of Texans (63 percent) support their state’s prohibition on recognizing gay marriage.
FACT 476 A 2011 Texas Tribune poll showed that while most Texans want to balance the budget by cutting spending, none of the proposed spending cuts currently under consideration by the legislature was supported by more than 40 percent of respondents.
FACT 477 The Dallas/Fort Worth airport is so large that it has its own city designation (DFW Airport), zip code and public services.
FACT 478 DFW Airport is larger than Manhattan island.
FACT 479 In Texas, it is still a “hanging offense” to steal cattle.
FACT 480 In Texas, you can become legally married by introducing a person as your husband or wife three times in public.
FACT 481 The campus of the University of Texas at Brownsville sits on the site of historic Fort Brown and is said to be haunted by ghosts of victims of a nineteenth-century yellow fever outbreak who were buried there.
FACT 482 In the late 1800s, the town of Aurora, Texas, claimed to be the crash site of an alien spaceship.
FACT 483 In 1991, Channelview, Texas, mom Wanda Holloway tried to hire someone to kill the mother of a girl who was competing with Holloway’s daughter for a spot on their junior high school cheerleading squad. Holloway hoped that the girl’s grief would make her drop out of the competition.
FACT 484 Holloway became known as the “Texas-Cheerleader-Murdering-Mom”; her story gained national attention and spawned two TV movies.
FACT 485 Holloway was convicted of solicitation of capital murder in 1991 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but only served six months before being released.
FACT 486 There is a town in Texas named Ding Dong.
FACT 487 The city of Houston is slowly sinking due to the removal of swamp water from deep beneath its surface.
FACT 488 Sam Houston did not want Austin to be the state’s capital; he called it “the most unfortunate site on earth for a seat of government.”
FACT 489 The city of Henderson has an outhouse with its own historical marker. I wonder if it reads, “George Washington shat here”?
FACT 490 Texas was the deadliest state for workers in 2010, with 456 on-the-job fatalities. New Hampshire, with only five workplace deaths, was the safest.
FACT 491 At risk for droughts, floods, earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes and tsunamis, the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra face perhaps more natural disaster hazards than anywhere else in the world.
FACT 492 The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed more people in Indonesia than in any other country. Of the estimated 228,000 total dead, 57 percent (130,000) were Indonesians.
FACT 493 From 1907 to 2004 (before the tsunami), Indonesia lost 9,329 people to drought; 17,945 to volcanoes; and 21,856 to earthquakes.
FACT 494 Because it lies near the North Anatolian Fault, the city of Istanbul, Turkey, and its 12.8 million residents face high odds of being hit by a major earthquake in the next twenty-five years.
FACT 495 The region’s last big quake was a 7.6-magnitude temblor in 1999 that devastated the city of Izmit. The official death toll was around seventeen thousand, but one researcher put the number at forty-five thousand.
FACT 496 A January 2010 study in the journal Nature Geosciences found that tensions along the North Anatolian Fault are building and could trigger numerous small-to-moderate quakes in the coming years.
FACT 497 A popular destination for scuba divers, Truk Lagoon in Micronesia is not for the easily spooked. More than sixty Japanese ships were sunk there by Allied forces in 1944, many with crews trapped inside. Divers of the ruins can spot gas masks, sake cups and the odd “human remain.”
FACT 498 The Winchester “Mystery” House in San Jose, California, built by heirs of the famous gun company, is said to be haunted by spirits of victims of Winchester rifles and by the ghost of mad Sarah Winchester herself, who died in the mansion in 1922.
FACT 499 The odd, labyrinthine construction of the 160-room Winchester House adds to its creepiness: staircases lead into the ceiling, doors open to blank walls, spider motifs abound, and candelabras, coat hooks and steps are arranged in multiples of thirteen.
FACT 500 Once a thriving city built around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, Pripyat was evacuated during the 1986 disaster and is now an eerie ghost town with still-dangerous levels of radiation.
FACT 501 Originally planned as a vacation resort catering to American servicemen, the Sanzhi District in New Taipei, Taiwan, was abruptly abandoned in 1980 after numerous freak construction accidents were attributed to supernatural causes.
FACT 502 In 1944, the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane was destroyed by Nazis, who also slaughtered all 642 residents. Today the abandoned, half-burned village stands as a memorial to the tragedy.
FACT 503 At the Chapel of Bones in Portugal, walls and columns are covered in artistic designs of bones from more than five thousand exhumed skeletons. On one wall a child’s dried corpse hangs from a chain.
FACT 504 In 2011, St. Louis, Missouri, topped the FBI’s list of the most dangerous cities in America, based on statistics for murder, rape, robbery and assault.
FACT 505 St. Louis beat out perennial favorites Detroit and New Orleans to take the dubious prize.
FACT 506 Kidnapping, murders, death threats, drug-related shoot-outs, carjacking, armed robberies and home break-ins are common in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
FACT 507 The murder rate in Caracas, Venezuela, is said to be among the highest in the world, with much of the violence related to drug trafficking.
FACT 508 Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea is the home of frequent rapes, armed robberies and carjackings. Visiting unguarded public sites such as golf courses, beaches, parks or cemeteries can be dangerous for visitors.
FACT 509 While mugging and pickpocketing are the most common crimes against tourists in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, reports of violence against both locals and foreigners are growing.
FACT 510 A corrupt government and the huge gap between the rich and the poor in Guatemala City, Guatemala, make it one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
