Geography Buffs Reveal The Earth's Unexplored Areas, Feared By Locals

Dr. Seuss had it right... "Oh the places you'll go!" The world is a vast place full of endless secrets yet be discovered and secret places that should be undiscovered for everyone's safety and because they are downright creepy! Just because a certain area holds history, myth and legend doesn't mean we have to experience it all first hand. Some stories are just better left to the imagination. Like swimming with sharks, have you NOT seen "Jaws?" No thank you. Let's just sip a Mai Tai and watch the volcano.

Redditor _horsecave wanted the world to be aware of some geographical issues... _What are some places on Earth that are still unexplored because locals fear them? And what are they afraid of?

LET IT FLOW...

I lived in the northern part of the Republic of Congo in a town called Impfondo. It was extremely remote. Only accessible by boat or plane. There were many villages surrounding our city that were even more remote and only accessible by a dugout canoe. One of these places was Lake Tele. The locals would talk about an animal or monster called mokele-mbembe. In Lingala, the tribal language, it meant, one who stops the flow of water. They basically thought it was a huge dinosaur that lived in the water there. They would describe it like we would a brontosaurus. They were terrified of where it lived because there were old legends that it would kill people with it's eyes and if anyone ate it's meat it would kill the whole village. It was hard to explore that part of the country because people tended to avoid it.

In South Africa, there is a cave system known as "The cradle of mankind" because the most austrailopithucus remains have been found there. People are allowed to go on guided tours of the caves.

At the bottom of the main cave, there is an underground lake/water system. The SA government has banned any diving exploration of the lake. This is because, years ago, a group of divers became trapped and ran out of air.

The Padmanabhaswamy Temple

The last area cannot be opened: 1. if so, something cataclysmic will happen 2. supposedly there's a ton of isolated snakes who've been breeding in the darkness for ages...have fun with that. 3. The door doesn't seem to have a way to be opened so there'd be some destruction.

However, there's a benefit of this-- the other temple rooms that have been opened, the riches have pretty much been siphoned off by family and government corruption. So the question is: who owns what amounts to a national treasure? a single family, or India as a country, and how best to protect that.

All throughout the world, wherever there are glaciers, there are crevasses. Massive ones. Ones nobody ever even knows exists because they're under snow, ones that look like a small hole but open up into massive chasms you could never climb out of, etc. The fear, obviously, is never coming back out.

An example of a really scary place full of them is near the base of Everest from the south side: the Khumbu Icefall.

It's the start of a massive glacier, and it moves fast enough that it's constantly changing. People actually do climb over the top of it as part of the primary route to climb Everest, but actually going down into the crevasses is something you absolutely avoid.

And even if you did go down and explore one day, a few hours later everything could be very, very different.

The catacombs under Paris. There are about 150 miles of maze-like tunnels under the city. Only a small portion gets toured by the public. People have ventured deep into them and would go missing for days.

The Ploutonion at Hierapolis emits toxic gas intense enough to kill most living things in moments, and was assumed to be a gate to the underworld. In a rather illuminating display of their culture, rather than avoiding the Cave of Painfully Slow Asphyxiation, the Romans turned it into a tourist attraction at which one could purchase a live animal to throw in or meet Oracles of Pluto who had been through into the cave and lived.

Most of the worlds Blue Holes are unexplored because they are dangerous. They are deep underwater sinkholes, hundreds of feet deep one is over 900 feet deep that generally have a toxic layer acid part of the way down.

Not really unexplored, but in Japan there are many keyhole shaped burial mounds. Many date back to the 3rd century, but with few exceptions the government won't allow excavation.

There's a huge sinkhole behind my old house in Kentucky. Kentucky is absolutely full of caves. Anyways, it has a river flowing at the bottom and through a tunnel, so there's two cave entrances that nobody in my neighborhood had the balls to go into. My mom's friend visited one day, and she's a geologist so she's huge into caves and wanted to see. I brought her there to take a look. She basically glanced at it and was like hell no we'll die if we go in there.

The current is very strong, and the rock surrounding it looked very eroded to her. She said it's at high risk of collapsing, and the current would sweep us under underground either way.

I wish she had brought more of her tools and stuff, supposedly she could've put in like a sonar buoy to see how far it goes.

Devil's Hole in Nevada. It also has endangered pup fish.

Recently, an ancient city was discovered in the vicinity/in the forest area in Rio Platano, Honduras. Recently, because the cartels have such a big hold over it, that its simply impossible to go in there without dying or worse. So much history that could await along that river, not found because of drug lords.

"La Ciudad Blanca" I believe it was called.

The bottom of the Cave of the Crystals in Mexico! The cave is naturally so hot and filled with water most of the time, it can't be fully explored. But the pictures are gorgeous from when people did go in!

There's an area in Tibet called the Tsangpo Gorge that allegedly has a massive hidden waterfall that only appears to people who have reached nirvana. Last I checked, the Chinese don't allow people to explore the area much but that may have changed by now. There's a book about it written by a guy named Ian Baker who did two expeditions into the gorge.

Hades' Gate or the Gate to Hell in Denizli, Turkey. Supposedly, there's so much carbon dioxide coming out of the entrance of the ancient site that anything that gets close to it dies from asphyxiation. Scientists have determined because this cave sits along a fault line, that the carbon dioxide filled it from an opening in the Earth's crust.

This is a local one to me... In Kent, UK, there are tunnels which supposedly run underneath the county town of Maidstone. People have found entrances and gone in, but they're usually too long/dark and flooded. Nobody knows quite why they're there. Rumours say they connect places that were important when they were built, including an old asylum that was demolished in recent years, where iirc there was found an entrance to some tunnels.

Additionally, there's an air raid shelter in the Maidstone Grammar School that hasn't been entered for many, many decades. The entrance is very thoroughly gated off, and old students say it was an entire underground school with multiple rooms designed classrooms so that even in the event of an air raid, students could continue learning. There's even stories that behind the boards were secret rooms where the kids could hide if the Nazis sent a ground force into England (Kent is on the southern coast and near to London, so it'd be where the Nazis would logically land from France), even if that doesn't make much sense. The shelter is off-limits now and me and my friends spent all our years there trying to get in, but the school didn't want to accept responsibility for any kids getting hurt down there.

The inside of Australia's Black Mountain.

This thing is pretty much just a giant pile of boulders with massive internal caves that can't be mapped. (To my understanding they can change over time as well due to collapses.)

People go in and never return.

The Nahanni National Park in Northwest Canada, also known as"The Valley of Headless Men." There are no roads leading in and it is only accessible by boat or plane. Ancient tribes of the Nahanni Valley were afraid to settle within the region as they believed it to be an evil, haunted place inhabited by various spirits, specters, and devils.

In the 18th century, Europeans began arriving to the area looking for gold. In 1908, two brothers Willie and Frank McLeod pushed farther into the valley looking for gold and disappeared only to turn up beheaded. More beheadings and mysterious deaths began occurring over the years. In 1945, a trapper appeared to have been flash frozen despite evidence of having a fire going and clutching a pack of matches.

Many others just simply vanished never to be found. Around 44 people had vanished under unknown mysterious circumstances by 1969. To this day there's no answer to what was responsible for the beheadings or the disappearances. The area is so forbidding and remote that very few people other than adventurous rafters ever attempt to explore it. Despite being a National Park, Nahanni Valley is almost completely unexplored.

Houska Castle was built to cover up "the opening to hell" a seemingly bottomless pit from which the demons of hell would crawl out at night to wreak havoc. Located in the Czech countryside. Before the castle was built to seal this entrance to hell prisoners who had been condemned to death were thrown in. Scary my dudes

Bottomless lakes in New Mexico are what they sound like. Some of the small lakes have "no bottom" and feed underground rivers and streams stretching hundreds possibly thousands of miles. Trackers have been tossed in and found days later in the Gulf of Mexico. They have claimed many lives of careless swimmers and the dangerous lakes are now sealed off. I swam in the safe ones nearby but always felt kinda creeped out.

Perhaps my favorite and that is closest to me is the former nuclear jet testing labs in the Dawsonville forest in Georgia. They are abandoned now. Some people have explored there, but back in the 50's, there was naked nuclear testing (no protection barrier) which means there is concern for high levels of residual radiation. That said, the bunkers still exist, rumored to be complete with furniture and other things untouched since it was abandoned.