Highway to Hell

Today a little palette cleanser!
After some heavy true crime and hauntings we wanted to do an episode sharing claimed in person paranormal encounters. If you'd like to submit a story- submit to info@montemader.com

As always special thanks to our hellions supporting us on patreon! patreon.com/highwaytohellpodcast
This episode closes the two-part countdown of the most haunted places on earth, covering the top five. We open in Edinburgh, Scotland — a city that sealed off its medieval streets and built a new city on top of them, leaving the original closes and vaults intact beneath the surface. The South Bridge Vaults, rediscovered in 1985, have been the subject of one of the most rigorous paranormal studies ever conducted.
From Scotland we go to Bohemia, Czech Republic, and Houska Castle — a 13th-century structure with no water source, no town to protect, and no trade route to control, built in the middle of dense forest with outer walls that face inward. It was built over a hole in the ground that medieval sources describe as a gateway to the underworld. The chapel sits directly above the sealed pit and contains a fresco of St. Michael painted deliberately left-handed — in medieval Catholic iconography, the hand of the Devil.
In County Offaly, Ireland, Leap Castle earns the third spot. It is the site of a massacre carried out in the castle's own chapel during a feast, and the murder of a Catholic priest at the altar by his own brother during Mass. In 1900, renovation workers discovered a concealed oubliette off the Bloody Chapel — a spiked pit containing the remains of an estimated 150 people. An elemental is also present: a creature the size of a sheep, moving on all fours in a human manner, with a human face, black empty eye sockets, and a smell of sulfur and decay that arrives before it appears and lingers after it's gone.
Number two, Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania — 51,000 casualties in 72 hours across six square miles of farmland in July 1863. The most paranormally documented site in the United States. At dusk in the Wheatfield, where 6,000 men fell in a single afternoon, figures in period clothing have been reported walking in opposite directions.
We close at number one: Poveglia Island where plague victims were quarantined and burned across three centuries of epidemic — 1348, 1630, and the waves between. The soil is documented at approximately fifty percent human ash and bone fragments. An estimated 160,000 people died there. The bell that was removed from the hospital tower, still rings
SOURCES
Wiseman, Richard. "Hauntings and Psychology." University of Hertfordshire study, Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There. Macmillan, 2011.
Historic Environment Scotland. Edinburgh Castle site documentation and architectural history. Edinburgh: HES
Burke and Hare: Bailey, Brian. Burke and Hare: The Year of the Ghouls. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2002.
Ottokar II of Bohemia and Houska Castle construction: Žemlička, Josef. Království v pohybu (The Kingdom in Motion). Prague: NLN, 2014.
SS Ahnenerbe occult research division: Pringle, Heather. The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust. New York: Hyperion, 2006.
O'Carroll clan history and Leap Castle: Simms, Katharine. From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Political Structure of Gaelic Ireland in the Later Middle Ages. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1987.
The oubliette at Leap Castle: Ryan, Sean. Personal accounts and estate documentation. See also: Costello, Con. A Most Delightful Station: The British Army on the Curragh of Kildare, Ireland. Collins Press, 1996.
Chamberlain and Little Round Top: Trulock, Alice Rains. In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain and the American Civil War. University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Venice plague epidemics and the lazaretto system: Cohn, Samuel K. Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Poveglia Island quarantine history: Norwich, John Julius. A History of Venice. New York: Knopf, 1982.
Psychiatric care in early 20th-century Italy: Foot, John. The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care. Verso, 2015.

Today we start a two part series on the most haunted places in the world. This is the bottom 5 of the top 10. Little bit different format here with each individual place having its own haunted story and mini travel itinerary.
Hoia-Baciu Forest in Romania — a 295-hectare forest outside Cluj-Napoca where locals refuse to enter, a circular clearing where nothing grows, and fifty years of documented reports of time loss, physical symptoms, and disappearing photographs. From there we move to Bhangarh Fort in Rajasthan, India, where the Archaeological Survey of India has posted an official government sign prohibiting entry after sunset — one of the only paranormal-adjacent access restrictions at any heritage site in India — and where the ruins of a once-thriving town of tens of thousands have sat completely abandoned since the early 18th century with no adequate historical explanation.
In France, we spend time at Château de Brissac in the Loire Valley, where an eighteen-year-old woman named Charlotte de Brézé was murdered by her husband in 1476, whose killer was protected from prison by his friend the king, and who has been appearing in the castle's north wing ever since. At Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, we examine 141 years of absolute solitary confinement — a Quaker reform philosophy that Charles Dickens called torture in 1842 — and what 75,000 people left behind in those cellblocks. We close in Japan at Aokigahara Forest, the Sea of Trees at the base of Mount Fuji, examining the forest's centuries-long association with death, the documented impact of a 1960 novel on its modern history, and what it means to a search volunteer named Kenji who enters it every spring.
Part Two covers places five through one.
SOURCES
Sift, Alexandru. Field documentation of Hoia-Baciu Forest. Babeș-Bolyai University, 1960s–1970s.
Archaeological Survey of India. Official access restriction signage, Bhangarh Fort, Alwar District. Government of India, Ministry of Culture.
Abul Fazl. Akbarnama. Trans. H. Beveridge. Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1902–1939.
Commynes, Philippe de. Mémoires. c. 1490–1498.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. Chapman and Hall, 1842. Chapter 7.
De Tocqueville, Alexis, and Gustave de Beaumont. On the Penitentiary System in the United States. Trans. Francis Lieber. Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833.
Grassian, Stuart. "Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement." Washington University Journal of Law and Policy. Vol. 22, 2006.
Matsumoto, Seicho. Kuroi Jukai (黒い樹海). Kobunsha, 1960.
Miyaji, Naoaki, et al. "Lava Flow History of Fuji Volcano." Bulletin of the Volcanological Society of Japan. Vol. 49, 2004.
Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Yokai. University of California Press, 2015.

TRIGGER WARNING: We typically don't have trigger warnings since it is a crime podcast, but this episode is ESPECIALLY graphic in topics of kidnapping, torture, and sexual assault. Not appropriate for young listeners.
NEW: Fireside behind the scenes fireside chats available now at patreon.com/highwaytohell podcast with EVERY episode. Get ad free episodes 5 days early and then bonus chats on release day.
In November 1988, 17-year-old Junko Furuta, a high school student in Misato, Saitama, Japan, was abducted by a group of teenage boys led by Hiroshi Miyano, a youth with yakuza connections. She was held captive for roughly 40 days in a house in the Adachi ward of Tokyo in the home of one of her captors, whose own parents were living in the same building and reportedly did not intervene. During her captivity, Junko was subjected to relentless and brutal abuse by four primary perpetrators and others who came and went. She died in January 1989 from her injuries. Her body was concealed in a concrete-filled drum and abandoned, which gave the crime its common name in Japan: the "concrete-encased high school girl murder case."
The legal fallout drew lasting outrage. Because all four main offenders were minors under Japanese law, their identities were initially protected and they were shielded by the juvenile justice system, which prioritized rehabilitation over punishment. The sentences struck many as shockingly lenient given the severity of the crime. Ringleader Hiroshi Miyano received the harshest term at around 20 years, while the others received far shorter sentences... roughly five to ten years, five to nine years, and five to seven years respectively. Prosecutors and the public viewed the outcomes as wholly inadequate, and all four were eventually released back into society.
The aftermath deepened public anger. At least one offender reoffended, including a conviction tied to a violent attack years after his release. Some married and built ordinary lives, reportedly disclosing their pasts to their spouses; one died in 2021 after years of illness and isolation. The case became a touchstone in Japanese debates over juvenile sentencing, victims' rights, and whether protections afforded to young offenders can fail to deliver justice for catastrophic crimes. Decades later, Junko Furuta's name remains a symbol of those unresolved tensions, and her case is still cited whenever Japan revisits how it treats minors who commit grave offenses.
Sources:
Murder of Junko Furuta — Wikipedia
Junko Furuta: Examining the Light Sentences of Her Killers — HowStuffWorks
Where Are Junko Furuta's Killers Now? — ComingSoon
The Junko Furuta Murder Case: Justice Revisited — Tokyo Weekender
Junko Furuta Killer Again on Trial — Tokyo Reporter
The UK's Grooming Gangs and the Lessons Never Learned — Al Jazeera
Rotherham Grooming Gang Scandal — Al Jazeera
Brock Turner Sentence — CNN
Ethan Couch Sentencing — BBC
Heisei Yakuza: Burst Bubble — ResearchGate
Street Youths, Bosozoku and Yakuza — Office of Justice Programs
Japanese Juvenile Law — Wikipedia
Criminal Majority in Japan — European Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies
Tokyo Ghost Hunting — Metropolis Japan
Haunted Places in Japan — TripXL
7-Day Tokyo Itinerary — Rakuten Travel

In the early 1980s, Hoyt Richards was on track to become the world's first male supermodel. He worked campaigns for Ralph Lauren, Versace, Cartier, Burberry, and Valentino all while being part of a cult that would consume 2 decades of his life.
On a Nantucket beach in 1978, 16-year-old Richards met Frederick von Mierers: older, charismatic, and full of Eastern philosophy, astrology, and talk of the universe's hidden architecture. Von Mierers victims would later say he could make you feel special, seen... and he pulled attractive, vulnerable people into his orbit.
His cult was called Eternal Values, and von Mierers claimed he was an alien "walk-in" spirit, reincarnated from the giant star Arcturus, sent to Earth to prepare a chosen few for the apocalypse he predicted would arrive in 1999. Those who followed him completely, he promised, would be saved by a UFO. The rules were strict: restrictive vegetarian diets, mandatory tanning sessions, total celibacy, and absolute financial surrender. Members slept on futons on the floor, communally, regardless of what they earned outside. Anyone who challenged him faced "slamming sessions" which were group rituals where von Mierers and loyal members screamed insults and tore the dissenter apart psychologically until they submitted.
He sold gems, readings, and stole his followers salaries. Von Mierers died on February 4, 1990, from AIDS-related complications, at his North Carolina compound. He was 43. His followers didn't know he had the disease until after his autopsy a final betrayal for a man who preached celibacy. A Vanity Fair exposé on his gem fraud appeared the same month he died, too late to prosecute him.

Biographical and Background Reporting (2026)
"Who Was Frederick von Mierers? All About the 'Bring Me the Beauties' Cult Leader." Biography.com, 2026.
"'Bring Me The Beauties': New Docuseries Explores 'Eternal Values' Cult." Rolling Stone, 2026.
"'Bring Me the Beauties': Inside the Alien Sex Cult HBO Documentary." Variety, 2026.
"The Untold Saga Behind an Infamous Male Supermodel Cult." The Hollywood Reporter, 2026.
"The True Story Behind 'Bring Me the Beauties' and the Eternal Values Cult." Time, June 1, 2026.
"Who Was Eternal Values Founder Frederick von Mierers?" A&E, 2026.
"Who Was Frederick von Mierers? How Did He Die?" The Cinemaholic, 2026.
"What Was Eternal Values Leader Frederick von Mierers' Cause of Death?" Distractify, 2026.
Hoyt Richards — Wikipedia.
"How Did Male Model Hoyt Richards Escape the Cult?" Primetimer, 2026.
"Where Is Hoyt Richards Now?" MEAWW, 2026.
Living Cult Free — Hoyt Richards biography.
"Fabio Helped Me Escape From a Cult." MEL Magazine / Medium.
"Hoyt Richards: Model Behavior." Nantucket Magazine.
"Why An 'Alien Walk-In' Cult Leader Convinced Elite '80s Models To Flee The Apocalypse." International Business Times UK, 2026.
Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult — Wikipedia. Series overview, crew, and episode structure.
Ruth Montgomery — Wikipedia. Background on the "walk-in" concept and Aliens Among Us (1985).
New Age — Wikipedia. History, belief structure, and cultural penetration of the New Age movement.
HIV/AIDS in New York City — Wikipedia. Statistical and historical context.
"The AIDS Epidemic in the United States, 1981–Early 1990s." CDC Museum Online.
Billy Baldwin (decorator) — Wikipedia.
Out on a Limb — Wikipedia. Shirley MacLaine (1983) and the mainstreaming of New Age belief.
"Supermodel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Cultural and commercial context of the 1980s modeling industry.
Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. W. W. Norton, 1961. The foundational academic framework for understanding cultic control systems.
Steven Hassan, Combating Cult Mind Control. Park Street Press, 1988. The BITE model (Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotional control) referenced in Chapter Three.