Destiny Tours

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Destiny Tours (Sydney, Australia)

Fleury Nicola sends this site: “I discovered this website about tours of Sydney, Australia in ‘haunted hearses’ (one of which has leopard print seats!). The tours take you through the most haunted places in Sydney (houses, jails etc) as well as places where other morbid things have happened including ‘crime scenes, sites of suicide, sex, suffering and scandal’. I haven’t actually been on this tour but if anyone morbid is visiting Sydney it’s well worth checking it out. As they say ‘don’t leave the best ride of your life till last’.”

Murambi Memorial Centre

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Murambi Memorial Centre (Murambi, Rwanda)

My goodness – they certainly know how to do museums RIGHT in Rwanda!! Instead of laying out a thousand pairs of shoes or hairbrushes to represent the deceased as our Holocaust Museums might do, in Rwanda, they lay out the actual BODIES!  

I step into the first room. The smell of decay hits me first. The dead are laid out on slatted wooden tables. The partially decomposed bodies have been preserved with lime. It gives them a chalky look. They are shrunken and brittle. At first I don’t see individual bodies, just shapes. Then my eyes begin to focus. It’s not the skeletal remains that are shocking. It’s the stories that are written on those remains. You can see where machetes have sliced off limbs, where clubs have smashed skulls. You can see faces screaming in pain, upper bodies twisted in flight, hands contorted in anguish. Some torsos still have shirts on. Some hands still sport wedding bands. Some of the dead are children. Suddenly I realize the others are waiting for me. This room is just one of dozens. We move on. The next room is similar. And the next.

Talk about a Morbid Must-See!   Thanks to Laura for the suggestion.

Haw Par Villa

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Haw Par Villa (Singapore)

Heather suggests this bizarre attraction in Singapore.  From CNN: “Built in 1937 by Burmese-Chinese brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par — best known for introducing the pain-relieving ointment Tiger Balm to the world — the park has more than 1,000 statues and dioramas vividly depicting Chinese folk tales, myths and Confucian beliefs…  the brothers certainly achieved something unique. Nowhere else in the world will you see a diorama of a woman breastfeeding an old lady — one of the charming displays in Haw Par’s hellishly popular underworld section.  The graphic, sometimes downright terrifying figures make the park a mutant mashup of Gaudi’s Parc Güell, in Barcelona, and a Madame Tussauds wax museum. Its intended purpose? To educate visitors in morality.”

Sounds FANTASTIC!

Wang Saen Suk Hell Garden

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Wang Saen Suk Hell Garden (Bang Saen, Thailand)

A fascinating folk art garden which is sort of the Buddhist equivalent of the Texas “Hell Houses,” depicting the grim reincarnation fate that awaits you if you commit a variety of sins in this life. If you believe in that sort of thing, that is. For me, it’s a wonderful slice of morbidity on earth. I’m not positive on the location, though I did find the following: “The Temple of Hell is located at the end of soi (street) 19 in Bangsaen.” (Thanks to Steve O’ for the suggestion.)

Meguro Parasitological Museum

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Meguro Parasitological Museum (Tokyo, Japan)

Mel informed me of this delightful museum, which is described vividly on TIMEasia Magazine’s website: “Though it occupies only two floors of a small office building, the museum boasts that it displays more specimens of roundworms, hookworms, flukes, nematodes and leeches than any other place on earth—not to mention gruesomely graphic images and descriptions of the havoc they can wreak on humans and other hosts. For sure, no one could possibly leave the museum complaining that there were too few of these creepy objects on show. The formaldehyde-filled glass jars of the often impressively large and malevolent-looking critters put the work of Damien Hirst to shame. Among the must-sees: a dog’s heart with more holes than a wedge of Swiss cheese (thanks to a bad attack of heartworms); a tortoise’s head with leech-ravaged eyelids; and an 8.8-m-long tapeworm extracted from a man who chose the wrong trout to eat raw. Even more weird, all of this is displayed with nonjudgmental cheeriness. The museum even has a gift shop filled with gaily colored, branded souvenirs certain to dumbfound or disgust the folks back home. Our favorite: a T shirt adorned with a menagerie of cartoon parasites and the slogan wonderful world of the worm.”

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

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Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park (Hiroshima, Japan)

The Peace Memorial Park was built to commemorate the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. It is located near ground zero of the bomb blast, and houses the Peace Memorial Museum and many other a-bomb related monuments. The Peace Memorial Museum graphically displays the atomic bomb’s horrible effects on the city and its inhabitants. The Atomic Bomb Dome in the park is one of the few buildings around the epicenter to survive the blast and the only remaining bomb-damaged building in the city. Definitely a must-see for the morbid Japan visitor!