5 Spooky and Spine-Tingling Adventure Travel Ideas from Wild Frontiers
With Halloween increasingly stretching beyond October 31, and interest in haunted escapades and adventures accelerating, here are some unique ideas to add to your travel agenda.
Wild Frontiers, the award-winning adventure travel company, founded in 1998 by travel writer Jonny Bealby, has developed some immersive small group tours and unique tailor-made trips, including five of the world’s most chilling adventures for spooky season.
From Transylvania’s vampire legends and Peru’s 200+ ancient mummies to sleeping beside Turkmenistan’s fiery “Door to Hell,” the trips explore the real histories, traditions, and landscapes behind some of the world’s most haunting stories.
For adventure travelers, spooky season doesn’t have to mean a haunted house or ghost tour close to home. Across the world, remote mountains, ancient burial grounds, and desert landscapes have inspired centuries of stories about vampires, spirits, and the supernatural.
Clare Tobin, CEO of Wild Frontiers, comments: “The places that stay with you are often those where landscape, history, and local stories come together. Around Halloween, we tend to think of the supernatural through haunted houses and ghost stories, but traditions surrounding spirits, ancestors, death, and the unknown take incredibly different forms around the world.
“For adventurous travelers, exploring the places behind these stories can reveal a completely different side to a destination. Whether you’re walking through medieval Transylvania, encountering centuries-old burial traditions in Peru or watching the Darvaza crater burn beneath the night sky, the history and stories become part of the adventure.”
Romania: Delve into Transylvania’s vampire legends
Few destinations are as closely associated with spooky season as Transylvania. Wild Frontiers travels through the old Saxon heartlands to Sighișoara, one of Europe’s best-preserved medieval towns, closely associated with Vlad III, better known as Vlad the Impaler. Its cobbled streets, watchtowers, and colorful medieval buildings provide a fitting backdrop for the town’s “blood-soaked legends and vampire myths.”
In Bucovina, travelers discover a lesser-known strand of Romanian folklore at a workshop dedicated to traditional painted eggs. Local tradition holds that the eggs bring luck and ward off unholy spirits, with different colors and patterns used to dispel different forms of evil.
Vacationers can experience both on Wild Frontiers’ Romania: Across The Carpathians To Transylvania small-group adventure.
Benin & Togo: Enter a world of ancestors, masks and Vodun traditions
In Benin and Togo, beliefs about spirits and ancestors aren’t Halloween folklore but part of living religious and cultural traditions. Wild Frontiers’ journey offers an introduction to Vodun, a complex spiritual tradition often misunderstood and sensationalized in Western popular culture.
In Dassa, travelers visit a sacred site where the graves of former kings are believed to be protected by Vodun powers and witness a traditional Egun masked dance, in which colorful masked figures represent the dead. The journey then continues to Ouidah, the spiritual home of Vodun, to visit the Python Temple and the Sacred Forest of Kpassè and to learn about Vodun from local practitioners.
Vacationers can experience these traditions on Wild Frontiers’ Togo & Benin: Voodoo Explorer adventure.
Turkmenistan: Spend the night beside the “Door to Hell”
Deep in Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert, the vast Darvaza gas crater, commonly known as the “Door to Hell,” lights up the night sky. Rather than stopping for a quick photograph, Wild Frontiers travels by four-wheel drive to camp among the dunes beside it.
Guests see Darvaza at sunset, after dark, and again at sunrise, when the glowing crater stands in stark contrast to the surrounding desert. Passing birds sometimes circle above, drawn by its warmth and light.
Darvaza is visited on Wild Frontiers’ Uzbekistan & Turkmenistan: Cities of the Silk Road adventure, which also takes in the historic Silk Road centers of Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Merv.
Peru: Meet the Mummies of the Cloud Warriors
Long before the Inca arrived, the Chachapoya, or “Cloud Warriors”, built settlements across northern Peru’s cloud forests and created extraordinary funerary monuments high in the cliffs. At Karajia, human-shaped sarcophagi have looked out from a rock face around 2,850 meters above sea level for roughly 750 years.
Travelers then explore Kuelap, often dubbed the “Machu Picchu of the North,” a vast pre-Inca complex of about 400 stone buildings, and the 13th-century painted mausoleums of Revash. At the Museo Leymebamba, more than 200 mummies recovered from burial sites around the Lake of the Condors are on display.
These sites are visited on Wild Frontiers’ 13-day Peru: Lost Treasures of the Cloud Warriors tour, which also includes the Sun and Moon Pyramids at Trujillo and the 771-metre Gocta Falls.
Eastern Türkiye: Explore the haunting ruins of Ani
On a remote plateau near Türkiye’s modern border with Armenia lie the ruins of Ani, once one of the great cities of the medieval Caucasus. Ani became the capital of the Armenian Bagratid kingdom and flourished because of its position on important regional trade routes. Today, its ruined churches, fortifications, and other medieval structures are scattered across open grasslands above the Arpa River.
The setting gives Ani an undeniably haunting atmosphere. Travelers can walk among monumental stone buildings that once formed part of a thriving medieval city, now standing largely silent against the dramatic landscape of eastern Türkiye. Wild Frontiers visits Ani as part of its journey through Türkiye’s eastern borderlands, alongside other striking landscapes, including Lake Van, Mount Nemrut, and the foothills of Mount Ararat.
Vacationers can explore the ruins on Wild Frontiers’ Türkiye: Eastern Borderlands adventure.
From the ancient heritage of the Silk Road to the foothills of Pakistan, Wild Frontiers specializes in off-the-beaten-track travel and draws on extensive local knowledge and a wide network of contacts to deliver the best possible experience. They are firm believers that traveling is all about the experience, and the beauty is in the details – the places you stay, the transport and route that gets you there, and the people you meet along the way.
