Description & Facts: This small and unabashedly lowbrow museum chronicles historical torture methods in displays that are not for the squeamish. Fans of Middle Age brutality can admire the agonizing “skull cracker,” the limb-dislocating rack, and that most efficient of killing machines, the guillotine.

Truly Creepy: The disturbing illustrations include one of a naked man hung from his ankles like a wishbone and being sawed in half lengthwise. 

Port Arthur Historic Sites, Tasmania

This 19th-century Australian penal colony was once home to thousands of violent convicts sentenced to “hell on earth,” and the dissection rooms here are evidence to that. Awful conditions, vicious floggings and isolation in dark, dank cells led to as many as 2,000 deaths. Tragedy made its comeback in April 1996 when a deranged gunman killed 35 workers and visitors in the country’s worst mass murder to date.
Courtesy of Museum of Death

Truly Creepy: The most-often reported ghost sightings are not of convicts but of a crying woman and young child.

The Museum of Death, Hollywood

This stomach-churning homage to murder, dismemberment, and rigor mortis houses (among other things) a collection of serial killer artwork, photos of horrific accidents and famous crime scenes, and the guillotine-severed head of the murderous Bluebeard of Paris.

Truly Creepy: The self-guided tour takes only an hour, but the truly gore-obsessed can linger over videos of autopsies and actual death footage.

Museo de las Momias, Mexico

Ruben Quinonez This Guanajuato museum’s 111 remarkably preserved mummies were exhumed from the Santa Paula Pantheon between 1865 and 1989. Their facial expressions are especially scary � many seem to be shouting 'No!' � and clenched fists protrude from the tattered clothes. It’s like the prop room for a zombie movie � only real.

Truly Creepy: The tiny baby mummies, dressed in local tradition as 'Little Angels.'

History of the museum

Because of a unique law that is in force in this part of Mexico, graves in the local cemetery have to either be bought for an exorbitant amount or rented every five years. If the deceased’s family fails to pay the rent, the body is exhumed and disposed of to make way for new arrivals.

Through some mysterious process that scientists have not been able to explain, a small proportion of the bodies from this graveyard end up naturally mummified.

Rather than being destroyed by the local authorities, these bodies are put in the macabre Museo de las Momias. Here they join a vast "human library," poised in all possible postures of death, that has been accumulating since the museum was founded in 1865.

Source:travelandleisure.com

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