Are you a fan of Halloween and haunted places? Are traditional ways of spending time while traveling not enough for you? If yes, then trip to Poland with a little bit of a thrill may be a great idea!

Lost places…Image by Michael Gaida from Pixabay

You probably will not able to find much information about haunted places with chilling stories in Polish guidebooks…Places with a terrible past, stories repeated by the locals so often that legends mingle with the truth! I will try to give you few ideas here!

First, take a look at the skull chapel (also called “the chapel of bones”) I wrote about a while ago:

Would you step inside this Polish chapel made out of skulls?

This would be a great place to start!

Another place that may give you chills is the abandoned Zofiówka psychiatric hospital located near Warsaw. If you dare, you can enter the building of the old Zofiówka asylum, located in Otwock. The Zofiówka asylum was founded in 1907 and was intended for mentally ill Jews. During the liquidation of the ghetto in Otwock in 1942, the Germans killed about 110-140 patients of this hospital in the nearby forest as part of Aktion T4 (a program implemented in the Third Reich, involving the extermination of disabled people). The rest of the patients were taken to concentration camps. Some medical staff managed to flee in an ambulance to Warsaw, and those who remained committed suicide. However, the building was not abandoned completely until 1998, after closing a sanatorium that had been functioning there after the war. The locals still hear disturbing moans and footsteps in this Warsaw haunted house, and many of them swear that they saw blurred faces in the forest, surrounded by a strange glow…!!!

If you enter the hospital building, red inscriptions on the walls may catch your eye. It probably is a little creepy to see signs like “Behind you”, “I see you!” or “He craves your blood”!

Next hunted place would be great for myself and my 2 daughters…since we are going to be dressed up as 3 witches from Hocus Pocus this year!!! And it is Łysa Góra in the Świętokrzyskie Mountains. Legend has it that Łysa Góra was once a meeting place for witches who flew there for the Sabbath. It was there, at the top of the mountain, that they would light their bonfires and brew their poisons. And when the rooster crowed at midnight, the witches would sit on their brooms and fly down from the mountain, carried by the breeze.

Image by Kevin Phillips from Pixabay

The beliefs about the witches’ Sabbath were probably related to the Slavic rite of burning the June fires, which took place on Łysa Góra.To this day, scholars studying demonology cannot reach a consensus as to the days the witches’ Sabbaths were allegedly held on. According to some, these unusual meetings only took place on Saturdays, while others think that the Sabbaths were held as often as three days a week. The Sabbaths themselves in fact could be simply celebrations of pagan holidays, such as Kupała Night.

There is one more place I wanted to tell you about: Nawiedzony dom (hunted house/horror house) in Kraków, Wola Justowska. When passing by this mysterious building you will immediately feel a breath of terror on your neck. You can recognize the abandoned house in the Wola Justowska district by the fact that… a tree is growing through its roof! The building’s surroundings also do not raise positive associations: the plot is infested with weeds, the fence is tangled with barbed wire, windows and doors are boarded, and the gate is wrapped with chains.

The story of this haunted house in Kraków dates back to the 1990s when a man supposedly hanged himself there. Shortly afterwards, a series of bizarre events occurred in this place. First, a married couple lived in the house, but they only lasted a month – the young couple moved out immediately after their car started by itself and drove forward in the garage.

The next daredevils were the owners of a jewellery company who opened their shop in that house. After some time, they noticed that for some inexplicable reason, the gems in their drawers were crushed time and time again. Then there was an IT company, which also did not stay too long – something constantly burned their computers and threw monitors on the floor.

Today, this haunted hous is locked up tight. However, pedestrians occasionally notice lights and dancing shadows in the windows. If you have the courage, you can stroll the nearby streets after dark to see if these legends are true…

Did I manage to encourage you to visit any of these places? Or maybe there are some of you that have already done it? Let us know in comments below!