not a typo -- people died in the ensuing blaze.

Hey, nobody said the "corruption" that necessitated the island's complete quarantine was of a bureaucratic nature.

the abandoned ruins of the old L.A. County Zoo. Rather than demolishing the place when the new one was built, the city opted to leave it open for the public as a kind of museum, though an entirely unattended one. That's right: You can walk up into the L.A. hills right now and wander through a real life Scooby Doo set, and you won't even be breaking one of those half-enforced "Darn Meddling Kids" laws. If the rusting, empty cages and rotting enclosures again put you in mind of horror tropes, don't worry: You won't be dodging any ghost-rhinos here.

Because animals don't have souls. Everybody knows that, silly vegetarian! It's why eating bacon is delicious, but eating man is a crime. So no spirits here! Why, the worst thing that could happen to you in the isolated, abandoned ruins of the Old L.A. Zoo (still complete with functional cages) is some good old fashioned hobo-rape in the reptile house.

I'm sorry, that sounded theoretical, didn't it? I meant to say that if you go here, you

absolutely will get hobo-raped in the reptile house. That's where Big Raping Jim is currently squatting.

Oh, don't worry -- the name's ironic. (He's not actually that big; he's just really good with knives).

Fallout's vault sections stirred something in the crazy isolationist in you, well you'll be happy to know that those things are plenty real, and they're conveniently located right in the heart of London. All utilities -- electricity, water and phone -- still function just fine, because the tunnels have been occupied at various points in history by codebreakers, soldiers, British Secret Service and eventually the BT Group, a European phone company. The last owners put the tunnels up for sale back in 2008, to the tune of $7.4 million dollars. Though they wanted to keep both the entrance:

... and the name of their prospective buyer a secret, rumors say the latter was a man named Simon Woodroff, who we can only assume is a roguish chap living a seemingly devil-may-care playboy lifestyle, yet plagued by grief, anger issues and a rather unhealthy penchant for winged nocturnal rodents.

the largest bomb shelter in the world, right beneath the streets of Beijing, China. It was intended to house six million people, and it was all interconnected. See, he didn't want his citizens to merely survive a nuclear attack -- he actually wanted the city to continue to function, unimpeded, even as radioactive hellfire rained down from above.

He had chairs and everything; society could go on.

And while that might seem insane to you or I, we have to think of it like ordering Chinese food: You're not supposed to order dishes for each individual, as is customary in the West, you're supposed to order one giant, concrete dish that entire populations can live in together, underground, while the world above crumbles and burns. That analogy may have escaped me a little, but I'll tell you what it won't escape: The labyrinthine maze of Mao's subterranean city.

SSSSEEEEGGGUUUUEEEEEEE!

The bunker was never completely finished, but it's so vast that nobody can tell you how far it was, exactly, from completion. It is widely believed that the tunnels, as they exist now, manage to connect up with all major points in Beijing: Tiananmen Square, Central Station, the West Hills - it has tendrils everywhere. One man documented his recent descent into the tunnels, which he described as being accessible only through an abandoned, nondescript storefront. Once down there, he found this map:

Which showed him where the Compass and Boss Key were, and he got to trekking. He stumbled across the usual stuff at first - damp concrete, brick, a sense of creeping, claustrophobic dread -- until he tried a light switch and found that the half-century old, abandoned underground city still inexplicably gets working electricity.

He forded onward, until, after hours of scrabbling across garbage and debris in the half light of the crumbling tunnels, he turned a corner and walked right into this:

Possibly the most terrifying scenario in which one can encounter mystery underwear.

At the end of that tunnel, a "homeless" family had set up house in the forgotten ruins of this sunken bunker-city, complete with a full working kitchen:

And some lovely house plants -- you know, to spruce up the place.

Plus, supermutants hate and fear our surface flora, as they find their sickening, organic, leafy structures strange and alien. Everybody knows that.

You can buy Robert's book, Everything is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead, or follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Or you can help him on his quest to find more dusty, dangerous, forgotten places ...like your mom's vagina! DAAANNNG.

For more from Brockway, check out Secondhand Nightmares: 10 Horrifying Thrift Store Finds and 6 Near Death Experiences Caught on Video.