Last year, shortly before Halloween, some pals went on a haunted/spooky/some third adjective tour in Georgetown, a recovering industrial neighborhood here in Seattle. I missed it, I was in Tampa and ended up a bit too close to a Sarah Palin rally for my likings, that's all I needed to set the tone for my Halloween. I wish I'd been able to attend the Seattle tour, those things have a way of sticking with you and now, every time we buzz through Georgetown -- there's a coffee house I like there -- my husband points out haunted brothels and places where other unseemly events took place.

There are, oh, hundreds of places that market themselves as spooky, you got yer Salem, Massachusetts, home of the witch trials, you got yer Tower of London, a bad place to end up if you were in Henry VIII's court, you got yer Winchester Mystery House in California, a rambling unexplainable place on a terrifyingly expensive piece of land...

It always amuses me to go looking for round ups of scary/spooky/that third thing I can't think of destinations on the web because they're everywhere, everyone has a ghost story in their town, everyone has a haunting of some kind.

From this post on the Fayetteville Feed I learned that the Waffle House franchise is haunted though the wiki link is kind of unsatisfying.

Go on, just pick one at random. No matter how newly established, or how close to a church it may have been built, any and all Waffle Houses are haunted … True fact. Wiki it.

The Governor's Mansion in Florence, Alabama has a haunting, too, according to The Flor-Ala.

The legend says that on rainy nights, around midnight, one can hear a piano playing funeral music and can see the mounring family walking down the winding staircase to attend the soldier's funeral.

On the Genre Traveler (hey, who knew, but I guess it makes sense that such a thing exists!) there's a list of, you guessed it, the scariest [fill in the blank] in the US:

The haunted houses and attractions on these lists aren’t your average neighborhood decorations. Each haunted attraction costs up to $1 million to construct, uses professionally trained actors, Hollywood make-up artists and the latest technology to transport people into an insane, realistic and horrific environment that rivals any horror movie set.

Purple Slinky has another list of scary scary places -- in the US and England, mostly.

Some believe that their presence lingers long after their death due to emotional trauma. Others believe that something more sinister is at hand. Whatever the case may be, here are some of the scariest places on earth, and they just might make a believer out of you.

Fear is a subjective thing, I suppose. I'm sure the scariest place I ever stayed was that hotel that seemed to be doing a sideline in meat products, I kid you not, where the dining room was full of taxidermied animals, the waitresses has a look of battered weariness about them and the ruddy manageress wore a big apron and looked like it would be nothing for her to turn you into pate. Sure, it was all in my head, but that place gave me the willies.

What's the scariest place you've ever been?

Pam blogs about travel and other adventures at Nerd's Eye View.