“You can hear footsteps or voices . . . talking behind that wall after the sun goes down,” one employee of Slovenia’s Predjama Castle told Ghost Hunters International. “If you are the last one, you have to go and check in the castle if there’s anybody else in it. I don’t like to be here when it’s dark.”

First constructed in the 1200s in an abandoned Stone Age settlement on a cliff overlooking the River Lokva, the four-story castle contains the remains of hidden passageways, holes for pouring boiling oil on attacking enemies, a treasure chest, and—naturally—a torture chamber. Its walls still hold corpses of enemies who were sealed within and left to suffocate. “Nobody went down to collect them,” another employee said. (Are they the spirits talking behind the walls?)

Over the centuries, such luminaries as the Knights of Adelsberg and Archduke Charles of Austria have called the rocky redoubt home—until it became a museum after World War II. (It remains a popular tourist attraction.) But the castle’s most prominent resident was arguably the 15th-century knight Erazem of Predjama, revered by local folk as a Slovenian Robin Hood who rebelled against the aristocracy and was eventually betrayed by a servant and then killed by the emperor’s men. He is widely thought to be the source of much of the structure’s psychic activity—in other words, despite his death, it seems he never left.

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LIFE The World’s Scariest Places : Single Issue Magazine – October 13, 2017 – Written by : The Editors of LIFE