This hilltop warren of monastic dwellings is the result of centuries worth of Mongol attacks.

Knights Templar are visible inside this stunning Cistercian abbey.

The remains of this misplaced church were moved here stone by stone.

Centuries before the modern seismograph, Armenian monks measured quakes with this tilting pillar.

Inspired by a dream, a hermit carved out a home in this sandstone bank to live a life of contemplation and prayer.

A once-luxurious, now abandoned hotel in the Italian Alps.

An unsettling painting of three faceless sisters that is surrounded by history and legend.

A fairytale island floats in the middle of Italy's little-known Lake Orta.

For hundreds of years, this huge figure has been blessing visitors before they explore his body.

Buddhist monk remarkably preserved because he started the mummification process while still living.

At the crypt of St. Mary of Eulogies and the Dead you are left alone to ponder mortality among piles of skulls.

This monastery built into a cliff hides a perfectly preserved hermit in a glass coffin.

A sculpture garden built by a retired durian farmer.

Surat Thani's official flower—and the world's largest—smells of rotting meat.

Self-mummified monk who wears sunglasses and has become a gecko hatchery.

The largest greenhouse in the world is home to over one million types of plants.

Hidden in a grotto 26 feet below Nottingham's oldest hotel, this stylish subterranean drinking den is notoriously hard to find.

The world's first underground farm is in a World War II bomb shelter beneath the streets of London.

A charming 17th-century alley is lined with secondhand bookstores and antiquarian shops.

The mysterious, fantastical woodland inspiration for "The Lord of the Rings."

This shop and gallery is a modern-day cabinet of curiosities, unassumingly positioned along an urban thoroughfare.

A 300-year-old tea shop that brought tea to the English people, not to mention the Queen herself.

One of the few remaining casualties of the London Blitz, this destroyed church has become an enchanting public garden.

London's creepiest cemetery was once the site of dueling magicians and mobs of stake-carrying vampire hunters.