What could be more fun for kids than a play structure located mere footsteps away from buried corpses? On the other hand, it might be sort of genius because there’s no way the kids who are playing at that particular location are going to be begging for “just five more minutes,” especially if the sun is going down.

So yeah, someone in the town of Huntsville, Alabama decided that they should build a playground next to the Maple Hill Cemetery, you know, so kids could laugh and play in the most inappropriate way possible while the adults visited the gravesites of lost loved ones. Great idea. According to Atlas Obscura, this playground is now whimsically known as “The Dead Children’s Playground,” and the reason is because the swings have been seen moving by themselves, and ghostly orbs have been spotted there, too, along with the specters of children playing at hours when mortal children are usually hiding under their bed sheets worrying about monsters in their closets. So city planners, take note — if you build a playground in a cemetery, the only kids who are going to play there are the ones who haven’t quite made it all the way to the other side, and now don’t have a reason to because you gave them a stupid playground. Nicely done.

This legend has been around for a really long time, but it’s worth repeating here just to break up the monotony of terrifying child ghosts who lead you to your doom and/or touch your hand and stuff. These particular ghosts actually seem to be good samaritans, so that’s a nice change.

If you haven’t guessed already, we’re talking about the San Antonio railroad children. These are supposedly the spirits of kids who were killed by a train when their school bus stalled on the railroad tracks. According to Legends of America, these child ghosts still hang around the tracks waiting for other cars to stall (or to be parked there in neutral) … and they will helpfully push your car off the tracks if they sense you may be in danger. Don’t believe it? Cover your bumper with talcum powder and tiny handprints will prove that ghosts were responsible, though frankly it should be enough that you parked your car on the railroad tracks and then it moved ALL ON ITS OWN. But hey the handprints make the story creepier, so whatever.

Not everyone believes this story — evidently, there are no records of any such accident actually happening there, and the ground at the spot is probably inclined in such a way that a car would naturally roll if left on the tracks. Sooo … not super plausible, but timeless.

And because Ireland is full of castles that are also full of ghosts, here’s another one for you. Athcarne Castle in Meath, Ireland, was built in 1590 and is located just six miles from the site of the Battle of the Boyne. If you’re not well-versed in British history, that’s where James II got his butt kicked in 1690 (he fled to France shortly afterwards and never returned to England). James’s ghost is one of many who haunt Athcarne — he slept there the night before the battle, and he evidently spends his afterlife there, too, wandering around the grounds thinking about all the things he could have done differently.  

According to Curious Ireland, James isn’t Athcarne’s only ghost. Witnesses have heard the screams of dying soldiers and have seen the phantom hanged man, but those aren’t the sorts of ghosts you came here to read about. The most terrifying ghost at Athcarne is a little girl, who was seen in modern times by a laborer who described her as a “demented girl with blood-covered hands.” It does sound like she’s only been seen the one time, though, and let’s hope it stays that way.

All deaths are tragic but if every one of them resulted in a haunting then hauntings would be boring. You’d be constantly elbowing your way past spirits in line at Starbucks, shouting at phantom Priuses in rush hour traffic, and shooing black-eyed children out of your bathroom. Fortunately, it’s mostly the people who die tragically who end up becoming ghosts, and the most tragic deaths of all are murders. And when it’s the murder of a child, then you really can’t blame that poor kid’s spirit for not being able to figure out where to go next.

The ghost of May Hawes, for example, is still hanging around East Lake Park in Birmingham, Alabama. She was 8-years-old in 1888, when a pair of boaters found her corpse in the lake. Authorities later found the bodies of May’s mother and sister in a nearby waterway. Her father had recently left town so he could get married to the woman he killed his family for, which wasn’t at all suspicious at all. 

According to Ghosts and Ghouls, poor May still haunts the shores of East Lake, looking for her mother and sister. Witnesses have seen her, too, sometimes floating above the water and sometimes drifting just under the surface. She’s so well known, in fact, that some locals will throw carnations into the water on Halloween to honor her spirit.

Somehow, disembodied voices are even scarier than apparitions. Well, maybe it’s a toss-up, but let’s just agree that disembodied voices are terrifying, especially when they are the disembodied voices of wailing children.

Nicknamed “Crybaby Bridge,” the Van Sant Bridge in Pennsylvania is not the only bridge with this sort of ghostly reputation — so-called “crybaby bridges” appear all over America, but this one is especially creepy. According to Atlas Obscura, a young woman whose name no one remembers hung herself from the rafters of Van Sant Bridge, but not before she flung her newborn baby into the water. This was back in the days when having a baby out of wedlock was considered shameful, and she’d evidently been rejected by her family after they learned of the pregnancy. And murder-suicides are, as everyone knows, pretty much a shoo-in for a long-lasting haunting. 

If you want to experience this one in person (and who wouldn’t!) just park your car in the middle of the bridge and roll down the window. Some witnesses say you can hear the cries of a distressed infant, and as a bonus, you can also hear the sound of the dead woman’s toes brushing the top of your car as she swings back and forth on her phantom rope. To be fair, some people think the crying sounds come from red foxes. Though probably not the sounds coming from the roof of your car, soooo…