CREEPIEST PLACES TO VISIT IN BOGOTA
by: Sara Novoa 10B
Bogota is a city with a vast historical value, and since it is a place that has gone through various battles, massacres and violent events, it´s no surprise that there are hundreds of legends throughout Bogota of ghostly happenings and chilling hauntings. So with no further due, we’re going to examine five creepy and haunted locations in Bogota, Colombia´s capital.
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San Juan de Dios Hospital
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This is one of the oldest hospitals in Latin America, dating back from 1723, and it was later abandoned. The former workers and their families roam the hospital, waiting for their work to be recognized, which gives a sad feeling to the place.
A lot of paranormal activity and supernatural phenomenon has been registered. Some examples are moaning sounds coming from the delivery room and sightings of a nun´s ghost that roams the hallways, and specially the morgue.
The Central Cemetery
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Crowds of people visit this cemetery every day to visit their loved ones, but also to visit famous or important people’s graves. One of them is Julio Garavito (he´s on the twenty thousand peso bill). He was a Colombian astronomer and mathematician of the XIX Century. Many visit his grave to ask his spirit for economic aid, or to deposit money under their mattress.
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The place that is said to be the most haunted in the whole cemetery is “El Caracol”. This is a stairway where much paranormal activity has been captured. The most famous example is the appearance of the Bodmer sisters. The Bodmer sisters passed away in 1903 due to a disease known as “blue blood”. They haunt the people who see them in their dreams until the day they die. If you want to visit the central cemetery, there’s free entrance every last Sunday of the month.
The jail in the National Museum
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Did you know that the National Museum used to be Cundinamarca´s prison?
This building is 192 years old, and when it became a prison in 1876, terrible torture and suffering occurred, and they were lived by their prisoners, especially during the period of the Thousand Days' War.
It has truly scary landscapes, sometimes you can enter the cells and evidence what the prisoners saw while they were being tortured. The guards of the place claim that they have heard blood curdling screams at three in the morning.
The suicide lake
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If you visit the Tequendama cascades and ask the locals about the “Lago de los Suicidios” they will probably go away, but sometimes they will talk about the rare occurrences that happen around the area. Many people have taken their lives by throwing themselves into the lake, and afterwards are said to disturb the people who frequent the cascades.
Something that definitively adds to the eeriness of the place is the “Virgin of the Suicides”, a figure of the virgin that is placed over a boulder on the cascade and is said to protect the souls of the ones that committed suicide in the place.
La Candelaria
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“La Candelaria” is a historical neighborhood in downtown Bogotá. The architecture of the old houses, churches and buildings makes it one of the most alluring places in Bogota, but at night it transforms into one of the creepiest places in the whole city. Many haunted places are located among the neighborhood, here are some examples:
“El Edifico del Sol” is a place where many people were tortured by the Administrative Department of Security (DAS) to obtain information. The people who live close to the building, say they often hear the cries of men and woman. “La Bruja” is a restaurant that used to be dungeon in the fifties. The place obtained its name because of a woman that lost her son in the dungeon, and later on lost her life under suspicious circumstances in the same place. The employees claim that they often see moving objects. And finally another restaurant, “La Mansion del Duende”. In this restaurant there´s also another spirit that roams the place. It is the spirit of a small child named Baltazar. This boy was thrown into a well inside the house (current restaurant) by his mother. He isn´t as malicious as the other spirits that I have mentioned, he only plays around with the guests, and due to that and his small size he is called “elf”.
AN AVENTURE IN MONGUI
by: Luisa Perdomo 10A
It was a cold spooky night in Mongui, Boyacá. The air was cold and a gigantic full moon was shining in the sky. That night Colombia had a soccer match against Chile for “Copa America.” We were invited to a little place that the Mayor arranged for us to watch the game as a reward for the work we did at the school we were fixing.
We had a great time there until the moment Colombia was losing, and we knew there was nothing we could do about it. Additionally to the scoreboard, it started raining in the stadium where Colombia was playing. This wasn’t like any other storm, it was an electric one and it is actually pretty dangerous for the players. For this reason, they had to extend the halftime for about 30 or 40 minutes, but we couldn’t stay longer in that place since it was almost 11 o’clock. As a result, Jorge Benavidez told us we had to go back to the school we were staying at.
We were all devastated by the results of the game and also very tired. We knew that the next day was going to be very long, because we had only two more days to finish all of our work in Santa Ana school. We walked up the hill which took us 5-10 minutes, and we wanted to go to our resting spots really bad when suddenly Noel had the brilliant idea of telling us the supernatural experiences he had there a couple of years ago, when he was a teenager. I was freaking out because I get a little bit scared with this kind of things. Luckily, Nancy Espitia encouraged us to be brave, so we followed her advice, swallowed our fears and walked farther.
When we got there, we stood around Noel so he could start narrating the stories that indeed were creepy. When he was younger, he and his friends witnessed these events that have no explanations. He told us that when he stood in the place we were he saw little floating lights at the other side of the road. That meant witches were coming to get him, however, those witches weren’t human beings, they showed themselves as parrots, so no one could discover they were witches. They started flying around him and pecked his head, and some minutes later his tongue was tremendously swollen and he felt he couldn’t breathe.
He got very excited every time he told us a story and each one of them was getting worse and worse. The next story he told us, happened at midnight while he and his friends were hanging around the hill, knowing the risks they were taking. They played cool like nothing was happening, but suddenly a tornado came from the other side of the road and blew them away from the place they were, scaring them terribly.
The one that got on my nerves for the rest of the night was the story about another witch. Noel told us that one time, he was with his friends searching for adventures at 12 am. They were walking up the hill when they saw someone standing outside a house´s door. They stared at him for some minutes, and at the end, Noel and his friends realized it wasn’t what they thought it was, a human size doll for New Year´s. They got closer to the person and it vanished. They looked to the other side because they heard something strange and when they turned again the witch was gone! Just like that. He wrapped it up with a headless monk that walked around a school seeking for someone to scare.
With that we went back to our school not wanting to go to sleep, since we were very scared. In that moment, I realized supernatural events exist even in the most unexpected places like Mongui.
