Allow These 15 Google Maps Images to Freak You Out While They Still Can
There's actually a good explanation for most of them.
Anyone who visits the Martha Chapel Cemetery in Texas via Google Maps may be able to spot two “mysterious” figures, seemingly hanging out on the grounds of the graveyard. In the foreground, a “ghost” girl appears to be peeking out from behind a tree. And according to very reputable news source The Daily Mirror, some people believe they can see a mystery figure in the background of the Street View shot.
The truth is, the image could just be showing something innocuous, like a living little girl playing in the graveyard, who just happened to be awkwardly captured by a Street View camera; like that time a “UFO” was spotted on Street View in San Francisco. And the “figure” in the background could be as harmless as a leaf hanging off of the fence.
Bad photos have been leading to wild theories forever, and low-rez digital images became fuel for conspiracy theories in the video age. With increasing adoption of high-definition video — which, of course, we don’t really have with Google Street View — we lose the images in which we find hidden monsters altogether.
What won’t change is our collective love for a good mystery or scary story. There are quite a few Google Map images that really seem to terrify people or offer the springboard for imaginary terror. Here’s a small selection of the best ones, in no particular order.
15. “Ghost” Girl
Yea, this is pretty freaky at first glance. But it’s very likely this little “ghost girl” is just a strange knot in the tree, or the face of an actual little girl who just happened to be hiding behind the tree when a Street View car drove past.
14. Broken Face
Reddit users report that this creepy broken face on Google Maps is somewhere on the coast in The Hague, Netherlands.
13. Pigeon People
This shot was reportedly taken on a sidewalk along the Tamagawa-josui in West Tokyo, The Mary Sue reports. This weird Street View photo of “pigeon people” has a totally normal explanation, however: it sounds like art students in the area showed up in this spot in masks as a prank. Without that explanation, however, it is a little bit scary for something like this to pop up on Google Maps.
12. “Satanic Symbol” in Kazakhstan
Google Maps captured this image in the Lisakovsk region of Kazakhstan. It might look like a “satanic” symbol and seem a little scary, but according to Emma Usmanova, an archaeologist who spoke with LiveScience in 2013, the pentagram is merely “the outline of a park made in the form of a star.”
11. Haunted Town
According to TheThings.com, thanks to a technical failure, all of New Baltimore, New York looked like this on Google Maps for awhile. If you check out 84 Main Street in New Baltimore on Google Maps now, it looks much more quaint and not seemingly haunted. But old images of the town on Google Maps are still spoken of as some of the creepier photos ever featured there.
10. Dead Body on a Dock
This one was terrifying enough to people that Snopes actually has a page about it. In April 2013, the site reports, a meme spread that claimed if people entered the coordinates 52.376552,5.198303 into Google Maps, they’d spot an image of a man dragging a body down a dock and into a lake, leaving a bloody trail behind.
The dock is actually in Beatrixpark in Almere, Netherlands. Snopes reports that the image is probably just of a few people walking, accompanied by a dark brown dog, and that the “blood” is just red-stained wood that probably got wet, maybe because the dog jumped into the water around the dock. Mystery solved!
9. Giant Pink Bunny
This one isn’t so much terrifying as it is bizarre. Geek.com reports that at the coordinates 44 24’46.22,” N, 7 76’88.63″ W, there’s a giant pink bunny on top of a hill in the Piedmont region of Italy.
If you were just browsing Google Maps and spotted this, it would indeed seem pretty strange. But Geek reports that the art collective Gelatin placed the giant stuff rabbit, called Hase, there as part of a massive art project.
8. Parked Flying Saucer
You may want to believe, but this is another image on Google Maps that has a perfectly normal explanation. This might look like a parked flying saucer, but it’s really just a water tower that looks like a spaceship from the air in Romania.
7. Was He Splinched?
Take a real good look at this guy’s leg. Someone told Thought Catalog in 2017 that they were trying to get a satellite image of the Black Sea, and stumbled across this image of a guy who’s missing half his leg. This is clearly just a technical fail on the part of Google Maps, but it’s pretty scary at first glance. If you check out the coordinates, the image is still there as of August 29.
6. Strange Legs
TheThings.com reports that this is a Google Earth photo of Valeria Lukyanova, the “human Barbie doll,” in front of a pyramid in the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza. No, her legs don’t really look like that, it’s the effect the moving camera has on her as she walks.
5. Guns on Google Maps
Although this photo isn’t terrifying in a “ghost girl in a graveyard” sort of way, it’s still pretty scary to see a guy casually displaying a gun at the Google Maps Street View camera.
4. Mannequins, Not Bodies
This might initially appear to be body parts seemingly tossed into trash cans, but Google Street View World reports it’s just a bunch of mannequins in dumpsters in Chile.
3. Dead Donkey?
Reddit user nelop spotted this donkey on Google Maps back in 2013, according to Business Insider. According to the images, it sort of looks like a Google Street View car hit and killed a donkey somewhere in Botswana. But no worries, Google later reported that the images are misleading; the company claimed that the donkey on Google Street View was actually rolling in the dust, saw the car coming, and jumped up and got out of the way. Thank goodness.
2. “Lago Vermelho”
On a Google Maps survey in 2007, this lake appeared to be a startling blood red color, according to Geek.com. If you take a look at the coordinates of this blood red lake now, it looks like a regular lake. No explanation for the strange sight was given, but Geek.com speculated slaughterhouses disposing of runoff blood may have caused the terrifying sight.
1. Sunken Car
Last but not least, in 2015, employees at a Michigan funeral home were decorating a tree for the holidays when they spotted the roof of a car in a nearby pond, according to news outlet KFOR. Ranker reports that there was a body in the car that had been missing for nine years, and the car was visible on Google Street View the whole time. Now that is legitimately terrifying.
