Discover Spooky Rocks and Explore Haunted Fossils: 10 Geodiversity Wonders Perfect for Halloween
- Wayne Munday
- Oct 16
- 6 min read
This Halloween, skip the haunted houses and instead explore the world’s most spine-chilling natural wonders, where geology, palaeontology and folklore collide. From the eerie Fairy Chimneys of Cappadocia, Turkey, with their Miocene volcanic tuff spires shaped like witches’ hats, to the fossil-packed deserts of Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, where Late Triassic sandstones preserve mass death sites of Coelophysis, the planet offers a haunting journey through deep time. Australia’s Pumpkin Patch Fossil Site at Dinosaur Cove in Victoria unveils Early Cretaceous polar dinosaurs and pumpkin shaped ironstone concretions, while France’s Jurassic Lagerstätte at La Voulte-sur-Rhône reveals the predatory Vampyronassa rhodanica, ancestor of the modern deep-sea vampire squid. Central Europe’s Witch Hill and Devil’s Heads merge volcanic nephelinite formations with centuries-old sculpture, and the Witch Ground Formation in the North Sea captures Pleistocene glaciomarine history. Iconic North American landmarks like Skull Rock at Joshua Tree and Devils Tower in Wyoming showcase erosion and columnar jointing while Gryphaea or “Devil’s Toenails” and phantom trace fossils immortalise ancient life. Across continents, these spectral landscapes prove that the Earth itself is the ultimate Halloween storyteller.
1. The Fairy Chimneys of Cappadocia, Turkey
In the heart of central Turkey, the surreal landscape of Cappadocia shimmers with geological and mythic allure. Its famous Fairy Chimneys. These slender spires of volcanic tuff formed from Miocene-age ash and sculpted by centuries of wind and rain rise like witch hats from the Anatolian plateau. Beneath moonlit skies, these eerie pinnacles evoke legends and their shapes are seemingly carved by enchantment as much as erosion.
2. Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, USA
Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico is one of the most hauntingly beautiful and scientifically significant landscapes in the American south west. Found among the fiery red cliffs of the Late Triassic Chinle Formation this fossil-rich desert tells a 210-million-year-old story of life, death and transformation. The deep crimson sandstones and siltstones, stained by iron oxides, once formed part of vast floodplains on the ancient supercontinent Pangaea. It was here, in the Whitaker Quarry, that palaeontologists uncovered one of the most spectacular dinosaur mass death sites ever found over a thousand skeletons of Coelophysis, a small, agile predator that roamed these floodplains before being swept away by a catastrophic event.
Alongside these early theropods lie fossils of crocodile-like phytosaurs, primitive crocodilians, coelacanths and horseshoe crabs. These remnants are of an ecosystem teeming with life long before the first mammals appeared. Today, the desert still glows blood-red at sunset, evoking both the fiery drama of deep time and the ghostly echoes of vanished worlds. While local folklore speaks of wandering spirits in the mesas, the true ghosts of Ghost Ranch are the fossils themselves who are the silent witnesses to extinction and evolution preserved in stone.
3. The Pumpkin Patch Fossil Site of Dinosaur Cove, Victoria, Australia
Along Australia’s wild southern coast near Inverloch lies Dinosaur Cove, home to the extraordinary Pumpkin Patch Fossil Site that exposes an ancient polar world of the Early Cretaceous. Here, the Wonthaggi and Eumeralla formations, dating back 100–125 million years, preserve the remains of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and plants that once thrived on the supercontinent Gondwana. The site’s nickname, the Pumpkin Patch, comes from its striking round, orange-brown ironstone concretions, which formed when minerals like iron oxide and calcite crystallised around decaying organic material. These spherical nodules weather out of the coastal cliffs, scattering the shore like a field of stone pumpkins.
Today, erosion by ocean waves continues to expose this prehistoric world, revealing fossils of small, polar-adapted dinosaurs such as Leaellynasaura amicagraphica and Atlascopcosaurus loadsi and the oldest known pterosaur fossils in Australia.
4. The Vampire Squid from Hell
Fossils from the Middle Jurassic Lagerstätte at La Voulte-sur-Rhône in Ardèche, France, reveal a startling picture of ancient cephalopod life and reshape our understanding of vampyropod evolution. Vampyronassa rhodanica, preserved in anoxic seafloor muds of the Lower Callovian (≈164–165 Ma), displays an elongated, oval body with two fins and eight webbed arms, two of which were lengthened and equipped with robust, suction-capable suckers suggesting active predation rather than passive scavenging. This contrasts with its modern descendant Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the so-called “vampire squid from hell” which to day inhabits the oceanic twilight zone and survives as a low-metabolism detritivore in oxygen-depleted waters.
5. Witch Hill and the Devil’s Heads, Bohemia, Czech Republic
Just north of Prague, the enigmatic landscape of Witch Hill and the Čertovy hlavy (Devil’s Heads) at Želízy marry geology and folklore in a way few sites do. Towering sandstone faces partly sculpted by the 19th-century artist Václav Levý and partly shaped by natural erosion stare from a hillside that is the eroded remnant of a composite volcano composed of olivine-poor nephelinite. Rising from marlstone and sandstone of the Bohemian Cretaceous Basin, the hill sits atop much older rocks of the Teplá-Barrandian terrane within the broader Bohemian Massif linking local myth to deep tectonic history.
6. The Witch Ground Formation, North Sea
Beneath the restless waves of the North Sea, the Witch Ground Formation lies hidden a relic of ice, sea and superstition. Formed between the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs this thick layer of glaciomarine clay fills the Witch Ground Graben a tectonic basin sculpted by ancient rifting and later reshaped by ice sheets. Around 20,000 years ago, powerful glaciers scoured the seafloor, carving valleys and depositing fine sediments that now form a single, soft geotechnical unit of silt and clay. As the ice retreated and sea levels rose, marine transgression blanketed the region in sandy muds, creating a time capsule of postglacial change. Sailors once believed witches conjured storms in these waters, but the true forces were geological glaciers and gas vents rather than magic.
Today, the Witch Ground is known for its distinctive pockmarks, circular depressions formed by the escape of fluids and gases through soft sediments. Though fossils are rare, fragments of shells and isolated clasts reveal traces of marine life that once inhabited these frigid seas.
7. Skull Rock, Joshua Tree National Park, USA
Amid the sunlit granite landscapes of Joshua Tree National Park in California, Skull Rock stands out as one of the Mojave Desert’s most striking natural sculptures. Carved from Cretaceous monzogranite formed roughly 75 million years ago, this eerie formation owes its skull-like features to millions of years of water erosion and spheroidal weathering. As rainwater collected in shallow depressions, chemical and physical weathering gradually enlarged them into the hollow “eye sockets” that give Skull Rock its haunting appearance.
The monzogranite, once buried deep beneath Earth’s surface, was slowly uplifted and exposed as overlying rock eroded away, leaving behind the rounded boulders that define Joshua Tree’s surreal desert scenery. At sunset, the weathered stone glows with golden light, its shadows deepening into ghostly forms that capture the imagination of visitors.
8. Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, USA
Rising dramatically from the rolling plains of north east Wyoming, Devils Tower is one of North America’s most iconic geological monuments. A sheer pillar of phonolite porphyry that soars over 250 meters above the surrounding landscape. Formed around 40 to 50 million years ago this remarkable feature began as magma intruded between layers of sedimentary rock cooling slowly deep underground.
Over millions of years, the surrounding sandstone, shale and gypsum of the Spearfish and Sundance formations eroded away, exposing the resistant igneous core that forms the tower today. Its distinctive vertical columns are created through columnar jointing as the magma cooled and contracted to give the formation its striking, almost architectural appearance.
9. Fossil “Devil’s Toenails” – Gryphaea
Along England’s storied Jurassic Coast and beyond, the curved, ribbed shells known as Gryphaea are popularly called “Devil’s Toenails” and date back to shallow seas roughly 190 million years ago. These common marine fossils, composed largely of durable calcite, consist of a large, twisted lower valve that sat half-buried in seafloor mud and a smaller, flattened upper valve that acted as a lid; this distinctive morphology and heavy ribbing made them easy to recognise.
Found from Lyme Regis in Dorset to Whitby and other Yorkshire shores, and even in inland ironstone quarries at Scunthorpe, Gryphaea are often exposed in Jurassic limestones, clays, and beach shingle where waves and erosion reveal fossil-bearing strata. Historically, villagers turned these strange claw-like shells into talismans said to ward off lightning.
10. Ghost Crabs and Phantom Trace Fossils
Across the world’s ancient shorelines, from the Cretaceous strata of Utah to Miocene deposits in Japan, trace fossils called ichnofossils preserve the ghostly movements of animals long vanished. Among the most evocative examples are the burrows and tracks of modern ghost crabs whose nightly excavations in sandy coastal habitats can, under the right conditions, become fossilised impressions millions of years from now. These phantom trace fossils a descriptive term capturing the ephemeral yet enduring nature of these markings include not only ghost crab tracks but also ancient arthropod, tetrapod and even dinosaur footprints or ichnites.
Formed when an animal disturbs soft sediment that is later buried and lithified, these fossils provide a unique window into behaviour and movement rather than the animals themselves.
