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Fab Five
34 ~ FireFlyz
Spine-Chilling Sites
There are many places in the world that, for one reason or the other, are eerie enough to
send shivers down your spine.
Fireflyz
looks at some of these nightmare-inducing sites.
Hashima Island is an abandoned island lying about
15km fromthe city of Nagasaki in southern Japan.
It is one of 505 uninhabited islands in theNagasaki
Prefecture. The island’smost notable features are its
abandoned concrete buildings, undisturbed except by
nature, and the surrounding seawall.While the island
is a symbol of the rapid industrialisation of Japan, it also
has a dark history - being a site of forced labor prior to
and during the SecondWorldWar.
The islandwas known for its undersea coal mines,
established in 1887, which operated during Japan’s
industrialisation period. It reached a peak population
of over 5,000 people in 1959. In 1974, with the coal
reserves nearing depletion, theminewas closed and all
of the residents departed soon after, leaving the island
effectively abandoned for decades.
It has nowbecome a tourist attraction of sorts and has
been approved as a UNESCOWorldHeritage Site.
TheHill of Crosses (Kryziu Kalnas) is a site
of pilgrimage about 12kmnorth of the
city of Šiauliai, in northern Lithuania. The
precise origin of the practice of leaving
crosses on the hill is uncertain, but it is
believed that the first crosses were placed
on the former Jurgaičiai hill fort after
the 1831 Uprising, whichwas an armed
rebellion by the Polish against the Russian
empire.
Over the generations crosses and cruci-
fixes, statues of the VirginMary, carvings of
Lithuanian patriots and thousands of tiny
effigies and rosaries have been taken there
by Catholic pilgrims. The exact number of
crosses is unknown, but estimates put it at
around 100,000 and growing.
Hashima Island, Japan
Kryziu Kalnas, Lithuania