Olivier Le Carrer - Atlas of Cursed Places: A Travel Guide to Dangerous and Frightful Destinations

W ith regard to curses, mankind has had a close shave. The very first pages of the Bible give a pretty clear idea of the wretched atmosphere in which the world was created. In the book of Genesis, God, infuriated by Adams disobedience, utters the words Cursed is the ground for thy sake! (3:17) and informs the first human that, instead of dwelling in the Garden of Eden, he will be compelled to tire himself out working an unproductive earth in order to survive. In what looks like a general curse on the heads of all future Earth-dwellers, Adam is spared no detail of the difficulties his new status will bring: In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken (3:1719).

For many of Earths seven billion human beings, vestiges of the Creators initial fit of pique are still, to this day, all too visible. And by no means in every case is it because the land is low-lying or barren. Since the time of the Old Testament, humanity has found more effective ways of damning itself, coming up with bizarre town planning concepts and inventing all manner of jobs, one more disagreeable than the lastin mines, factories, industrial fishing, and call centersin other words, devising an almost infinite number of hells that no god or demon would ever have dared to contemplate back in the day.

The cases described in this book are a reminder of how much the woes of a place owe to mankinds overactive imagination. The curses uttered by the prophets of the past, awe-inspiring as they might be, were always reassuringly abstract: Only those lacking the good sense to simply ignore them were bound.

Not all cursed places are the same. There are three main rationales for awarding this distinctly off-putting appelation. The classic one, the one closest to the original sense of the word, is of course bound up with admonitions of a mystical order. Particularly abundant from antiquity to the Middle Ages, it has to be said that this category is treading water today due to a lack of authors capable of reinvigorating the genre. However, the tradition is being maintained in certain regions thanks to the zeal of readers the good old sacred texts. Edifying examples of this tendency can be found in the Middle East.

In parallel with the decline of the religious strand, a preternatural variant has experienced undeniable success over the last two centuries. This is the supernatural or paranormal phenomenon, which is capable of unleashing the most dreadful events in peaceful backwaters that have done nothing to upset anyone. From the Bermuda Triangle to the Amityville house of horrors, these are the most fascinating cases, as they are open to the wildest interpretations.

The second category of cursed place invites less controversy but is even more daunting. It consists of places that, for a variety of entirely natural reasons (appalling climate, proximity of an irascible volcano, colonies of unfriendly beasts, uncultivable land ), enduringly blight the lives of the local populations or present a real danger to local people and visitors alike.

The third, and no less daunting, category comprises locations that have been rendered uninhabitable by human activity. The causes may be varied (pollution, criminality, financial upheavals, insoluble border disputes ) but the results are virtually identical: hellish living conditions for the inhabitantsand, whats more, no real hope of change, the perenniality of the problem sadly being a key characteristic in this as in the other categories. It goes without saying that the three major categories of cursed place can also come together at the same siteto the enormous misfortune of all concerned.

Taking all the above into consideration, the reader may well wonder what virtue there is in concerning oneself with these unwelcoming places. The following pages will provide unsuspecting tourists with all the information they need to avoid being trapped in an impossible location by an unscrupulous tour operator. They also offer inquisitive souls a remarkable summary of the terrifying yet enthralling complexity of humanity, enabling them to draw the consoling conclusion that, although Everest and the moon may already have been conquered, many mysterious places remain to be explored and understood in the world below.