Top 10 Most Terrifying Museums in the World

Featuring the largest art collection created by serial killers, the Museum of Death in Los Angeles will send shivers down even the toughest spines.

Gruesome crime scene photos and autopsy images will make your stomach churn. The most horrific car accidents will make you never want to drive again. Here, there are rooms filled with funeral paraphernalia and equipment used for embalming, along with images depicting their use, a graphic display highlighting various murder cases, and a room solely dedicated to suicides. If you're still not squeamish after seeing all that, watch the continuous loop video on the museum's display screen, showcasing real-life gruesome scenes and the chilling true story of the notorious wife killer Blue Beard in Paris.

Discover a peculiar and haunting museum found in the town of Guanajuato, Mexico. Here, 111 mummified bodies of men, women, and children are displayed, many with gaping mouths as if forever screaming in agony from being burnt alive. These bodies were initially buried during a cholera outbreak in 1833. However, they were gradually unearthed from their final resting places between 1865 and 1958 by their surviving relatives who couldn't, or wouldn't, pay the taxes to keep the graves.

Mummified Bodies Museum – Guanajuato, Mexico has grown increasingly popular as tourists willingly pay to enter the building within the cemetery to view these remains. While 'admiring' this chilling collection, you'll encounter the world's smallest mummies, including the fetus of a pregnant woman infected with cholera. Some mummies still wear the same clothes they had on when they were burnt alive, while others are naked or only wear shoes or socks. Witnessing the pitiful figures of these deceased individuals laid bare before you, you're bound to experience frequent nightmares thereafter.

The articulate puppets displayed here exude a nostalgic charm, taking us back to ancient pastimes and festivals, yet upon closer inspection, they appear truly eerie. In fact, their use in telling stories about life and humanity, meticulously crafted by artists, still sends shivers down our spines. They tell jokes, roll their eyes, and seem to have human-like thoughts. That's why they've been featured in countless horror films and stories around the world.

One puppet is frightening enough; imagine an entire collection of over 700 puppets like this, sitting silently motionless on glass shelves, staring blankly at you with hollow, soulless eyes. The Vent Haven Puppet Museum is the only place that exclusively exhibits ventriloquist figures and puppets. You'll easily spot intricately carved wooden puppets and their prominent features hanging behind the stage. Their eyes follow you incessantly throughout your museum visit, as if hypnotizing you into becoming their master. Keep calm to avoid screaming and fleeing in terror from this place!

Stepping into the Glore Psychiatric Museum will evoke a sense of danger and utmost vigilance within you. The museum was opened in 1968 in a psychiatric hospital known as 'State Lunatic Asylum #2' in 1874.

Darkness looms over every corridor here. Perhaps it's the echoes of screams from the past, trapped within the four walls, enduring painful treatment methods to rid them of their 'insanity'. Imagine being confined within a giant contraption, known as the 'Hollow Wheel', where patients in the 18th century were made to run continuously for 48 hours until exhaustion. Others were tightly bound to the 'Chair of Quietude' and bled every six months because doctors believed that excessive blood flow to the brain caused mental disorders and needed to be reduced. Some patients were even submerged in ice-cold water baths as a therapy to regain consciousness. There's so much, so much to witness in this chilling museum. The barbaric therapy methods with psychiatric devices, three-dimensional representations of madness, the soulless smiling faces of the mannequins. Here, there are even artworks created by patients themselves, and countless objects extracted from the stomachs of psychiatric patients: 453 nails, 105 hairpins, 115 safety pins, and an array of screws, nuts, buttons, sewing needles, fishing hooks, ... When witnessing all of this, you'll feel fortunate to have been born with a completely normal mind.

This extremely peculiar and horrifying museum is filled with specimens of real anomalies. Musee Dupuytren Museum was opened in 1835 by a renowned anatomist in Paris, who collected diseased and deformed fetuses, skeletal remains, and human organs.

The collection is truly macabre, consisting of 6000 specimens, including jars of liquid containing deformed human body parts, conjoined twins, and newborns with exposed internal organs. There are wax models of human heads with strange tumors, cleft palates, and other terrifying congenital abnormalities. Not to mention the glass jars filled with fluid with human brains floating inside. This museum both shocks and affects your nerves, no matter how tough you think you are.

More than 400 human skulls are on display at the Italian Museum of Anthropology, founded in 1898 by the criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso was obsessed with the idea that criminal behavior and deviant tendencies correlate with the shape and size of each skull. He collected corpses and cut off their heads, using the skulls of soldiers, civilians, criminals, and the insane.

His collection includes full-size skeletons, brains, dissected images, ancient instruments, and weapons used in actual crimes. Additionally, Lombroso's own head is preserved in a separate glass case in this museum. It's truly chilling and makes this museum as terrifying as can be.

The Mutter Museum collects specimens of grotesque pathology, opened to frighten visitors in 1858. Here, you'll find real brains of murderers and epileptics, a portrait of hanging skull boxes revealing how their owners met their end, the plaster-wrapped bodies of the famous conjoined Siamese twins Chang and Eng, and a set of livers the two brothers had to share throughout their lives, plus a skeleton of a 7 feet 6 inches tall giant, enough to give anyone the shivers.

Like the Musee in Paris, there are glass jars containing floating bodies that might resemble extraterrestrials at first glance, along with horrifically deformed victims. And try not to gag at the museum when you see the 9-meter-long colon still filled with feces when it was removed from its owner's body, an actor known as The Great Balloon.

Each person has their own unique fears. While torture devices and skeletons may frighten most people, sometimes the most terrifying things are the tiny ones right beside us. A visit to a parasite museum in Japan will leave you utterly horrified and paranoid about everything around you. Parasites can infiltrate from seemingly harmless avenues: food, water, or even just by walking and breathing... There's nowhere to escape them.

This museum opened in 1953 and is the only place in the world dedicated solely to unsettling parasites. With over 45,000 specimens in its collection, the museum only displays about 300 at a time. Looking at jars filled with the most horrifying bugs, worms, and reptiles and realizing they could invade your body at any time is certainly not pleasant. Witnessing actual photos of an 8.8-meter tapeworm removed from a human body, seeing the corpses of animals ravaged by parasitic invasion, such as a turtle with its tongue replaced by a parasite. Most horrifying are images of a man's penis invaded by parasites, stretching to nearly the length of his foot and swollen to almost the size of his own body. These are the images you can never unsee.