Several governments and intelligence agencies are operating secret prisons. The fact that these facilities do not officially exist means they are well-protected from the prying eyes of human rights agencies and the courts. Torture is often the norm in these places, and detainees are kept in inhumane living conditions.

Various world governments don’t want you to know about the following secret prisons. Some were closed down before or after they were exposed, while others remain unconfirmed, with the governments in question denying their existence.

10 Salt Pit
Afghanistan

The Salt Pit is a secret CIA-run prison in Afghanistan. It is one of the several prisons set up by the CIA after the 9/11 attacks and was intended to hold people suspected of having links with terrorists. Torture was par for the course at the Salt Pit, and prisoners were often subjected to inhumane punishments and conditions, including mock executions.

The Salt Pit used to be a brick factory before it was turned into a black site. Its cells are small and without windows or toilets. All that the prisoners have to relieve themselves is a bucket. Inmates are stripped naked and made to sleep on cold concrete floors. CIA operatives always keep loud music playing as a form of psychological torture.

Dr. Ghairat Baheer, who was held at the prison for six months, revealed that CIA interrogators tied him to a chair and sat on his stomach. Another, Gul Rahman, who later died in custody and remains the only verified death at the prison, experienced more violent punishments. He was stripped naked with his hands chained over his head while he was repeatedly beaten and drenched with buckets of water.

Rahman died of hypothermia on the morning of November 20, 2002. He was half-naked. The CIA did not return his body to his family or inform them of his death.^[1]

9 Camp 7
Guantanamo Bay

While the prison at Guantanamo Bay is already infamous and controversial in its own right, it also has its own secret prisons, which are even more controversial. One such place is Camp 7, which was built in a hidden location, away from the main prison. Camp 7 was so carefully hidden that no one knew of its existence for two years after it opened in 2006. The few who did never talked about it.

When its existence was revealed, journalists were not allowed to visit. The Red Cross was allowed in, on the condition that it never publicly speak about what it saw. Camp 7 was home to 15 prisoners the CIA considered “high value detainees.” One was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who is fingered as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

The CIA has been accused of torturing prisoners at Camp 7. During a tribunal hearing, one of its inmates, Ramzi Bin al Shibh, complained that his cell always vibrated and made some strange noises. The US military denied all accusations of psychological torture and claimed Shibh was just hearing things.

In 2014, Pentagon confessed that Shibh was hearing real noises but said it was the result of the prison falling apart. It claimed Camp 7 was originally constructed as a temporary structure and asked Congress for $49 million and $69 million to work on its drainage and foundation. Congress refused to allocate the funds.^[2]

8 Penny Lane
Guantanamo Bay

Penny Lane was another secret prison at Guantanamo Bay. Opened in 2003, the prisoners held there enjoyed a life of luxury. They lived in cottages, complete with a very comfortable bed, kitchen, patio, shower, and television. They could also request for additional luxuries, including pornography.

The fact that the inmates held in Penny Lane enjoyed a life of luxury shouldn’t be very surprising. The place was exclusively reserved for confirmed terrorists undergoing training as double agents. After their training, they were released and allowed to return to their terrorist cells, where they sent inside information back to the CIA.

This information was used to prepare drone strikes against targets of interest. In exchange, the CIA gave the terrorists millions of dollars in payment. The program was not a total success. Some of the terrorists rejoined their cells and never reported back to the CIA.

Some also became unwilling double agents after the CIA threatened to harm their children. Al-Qaeda itself knew the CIA would attempt to turn some of its people taken prisoner into double agents and had reservations about members released from Guantanamo Bay. The double agent program ended in 2006.^[3]

7 The Resort
North Korea

The Resort is the Penny Lane of North Korea. Its inmates are not terrorists but blacklisted relatives and officials of the North Korean oligarchy. It is not located on a remote island, either, but close to a town called Hyanghari, just 50 kilometers (30 mi) away from the Chinese border.

The Resort is believed to hold around 1,000 people. It has so many inmates because prisoners will often move in with their families. While heavily guarded, it does not look like a prison but more like a small town. Prisoners do not attempt to escape, since the living conditions aren’t bad. They don’t perform any hard labor or endure any additional punishment and get free cooked meals everyday.

Kim Song Ae is one of the people suspected of being held at the Resort. She used to be the second wife of the late president, Kim Il Sung. Another suspected prisoner is an aunt of the current president, Kim Jong Un. She is the wife of Jang Song Taek and was taken to the Resort after her husband was executed in December 2013.^[4]

6 Cat’s Eye
Thailand

Also called Detention Site Green, Cat’s Eye was a secret CIA prison in Thailand. For all we know, the site could still be in operation, since no one knows its precise location. Some say it is outside Bangkok, while others say it’s in Udon Thani. However, all agree that it is in Thailand, even though the CIA and the Thai government deny its existence.

Cat’s Eye was exposed in a 2014 US Senate report in which its location was listed as “Country [REDACTED].”

The prison was hurriedly set up in 2002 to hold Abu Zubaydah, a mujahideen fighter suspected to be one of bin Laden’s henchmen. Abu was picked up in Pakistan in March 2002, and the CIA was confused on where to keep him. They wanted a place far away from US jurisdiction and the Red Cross.

Abu was heavily tortured at the prison. For several months, he was the only inmate held there, and his torturers had lots of time to spare with him. He lived inside a box that was no bigger than a coffin and was continuously waterboarded until he fainted. The CIA used him to test out several of their “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which is just a fancy name for torture.

Cat’s Eye’s second prisoner was Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, who arrived there in November 2002. Both prisoners were frequently slapped, stripped naked, and deprived of sleep. They were also slammed against walls in an aptly named punishment called “walling.” Cat’s Eye was reportedly shut down in December 2002, after the CIA moved the inmates to another black site in Poland.^[5]

5 Temara Interrogation Center
Morocco

The Temara interrogation center was a secret prison jointly operated by the CIA and the Moroccan government. Located in Temara, near Rabat, the facility originally opened as a CIA-run secret interrogation center following the September 11 attacks. However, the CIA soon turned it into a prison. The Moroccan government joined in but was more interested in detaining political prisoners.

Zakaria Moumni, a French-Moroccan citizen who was held there for four days for political reasons, said his Moroccan interrogators told him he was in a slaughterhouse and would leave in pieces. Another, Oussama Boutahar, who fought with a Bosnia-based Islamist militia group in the 1990s and in 2003, said the Moroccans told him they were torturing him because the Americans told them to.

A report by the US Senate revealed that the CIA knew Morocco was torturing prisoners at the facility. The CIA complained to the Moroccan intelligence agency, but the complaint only destroyed the relationship between the CIA and the Moroccan government. The CIA also planned on abandoning the Temara site for another prison but later changed its mind. Morocco denies all accusations of torture.^[6]

4 Camp Lemonnier
Djibouti

Djibouti is a small country. It is located in the Horn of Africa alongside several other nations, including the Al-Shabbab- and pirate-ridden Somalia. It is also close to Yemen, which is presently experiencing a disastrous civil war.

The strategic location of the small nation is the reason the US established a military base on its soil. From the base, called Camp Lemonnier, the US launches drone strikes against targets in Somalia and Yemen.

There are also unconfirmed claims that the CIA operates a secret prison at the base. The US Congress reportedly has information about the existence of this facility but has refused to declassify it. Congress is also said to be aware that some of the prisoners held there are innocent.

Mohammed Abdullah Saleh Asad was one of the inmates supposedly held at the prison. He said he was tortured there before he was transferred to another black site in Afghanistan, where he was also tortured.

Mahdi Hashi, another supposed former prisoner, said he was taken to the prison after he was kidnapped by CIA agents in Mogadishu, Somalia. He claimed he was arrested because he refused to spy for British intelligence.^[7]

3 Unnamed Gay Prisons
Chechnya

Chechnya is a Muslim-majority autonomous region of Russia. It has been involved in series of wars with Russia in an attempt to become an independent nation. To end the recurring wars, Russia granted it autonomy. Today, Chechnya has its own head of state, Ramzan Kadyrov, who Russia leaves to do as he wishes.

Kadyrov has been accused of running secret prisons where gay men are tortured to death. Russia and Chechnya do not tolerate gays. While Russia has introduced laws to keep gays in check, Chechnya prefers abducting them and keeping them in secret detention centers where they are repeatedly tortured, sometimes to death.

Some journalists who reported the existence of the secret prisons in Chechnya have been murdered. Novaya Gazeta, the first paper to report the kidnappings, detentions, and killings, has seen at least six of its journalists killed. Some of its living journalists are still being threatened, and others have even fled the country.^[8]

2 Unnamed Prisons
Ukraine

Between 2014 and 2016, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) operated a secret prison in Kharkiv. The site was used to hold people the agency suspected of supporting or sympathizing with Russia during that nation’s military intervention in Ukraine and the consequent annexation of Crimea.

At the time, the SBU denied the existence of any secret prison and dismissed the accusation as Russian propaganda. The SBU and Ukrainian military launched independent probes into the existence of the facilities, but both closed their investigations without reaching a conclusion.

Mykola Vakaruk was held at the secret prison for about 600 days, during which he was repeatedly tortured. When he arrived, one of his interrogators told him he would receive a blow to the chest for every incorrect answer he gave.

Vakaruk received repeated blows and was kept in a 2-square-meter (22 ft²) cell which was so cold that water turned to ice. This culminated in him losing a kidney. He was taken to a hospital, where he underwent surgery to remove the damaged kidney before he was returned to the prison. He said he was forced to confess that he supported the Russian-backed fighters.

Vakaruk was let go when Ukraine started a mass release of the prisoners due to pressure by human rights groups. He received a paltry 100 hryvnias ($3.80) as compensation, and he and other detainees were threatened never to disclose their experiences to anyone.

The secret prison in Kharkiv was one of the several clandestine facilities operated by the SBU. Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch accused the agency of maintaining other secret prisons in Kramatorsk, Izium, and Mariupol. The Russian-backed fighters were also accused of operating secret detention centers.^[9]

1 Black Jails
China

The black jails are independent secret prisons illegally operated by various Chinese provinces and local governments. Because of the governmental structure in China, citizens are expected to report any grievance to their local and provincial governments.

If they do not get justice, they are allowed to report to the central government at Beijing. The central government itself uses the number of reports it receives to determine the effectiveness of the local and provincial governments.

To avoid getting into Beijing’s black books, the local and provincial governments employed over 10,000 people to hunt, kidnap, detain, and torture citizens who travel to Beijing to make reports. The prisons are usually unoccupied homes, psychiatric wards, and guesthouses.

In 2009, it was suspected that the provinces operated 73 black jails inside Beijing. The central government initially denied the existence of the black jails but later confirmed that they were real.^[10]

Museums are vast places. Some have archives consisting of several warehouses, so it’s not inconceivable to think that some items get lost in storage. But despite their worth, rare and unique artifacts also regularly fall through the cracks. From sounds not heard in 18,000 years to a UFO that was “Britain’s Roswell,” here are unique slices of museum history that were thankfully recovered.

Related: Top 10 Ancient Finds That Will Surprise You Today

10 A Noseless Alexander the Great

In 2019, archaeologists were taking stock at a warehouse belonging to the Archaeological Museum of Veroia in Greece. At one point, they noticed a marble statue half-hidden underneath other items. Sure, the nose was missing, but the face was immediately recognizable—this was Alexander the Great.

The stunning bust had been forgotten in the dark depths of the warehouse for years. Initially discovered in the ruins of a Greek village, the absent nose wasn’t the only damage. Sometime during the 18th and 19th centuries, the head was used as building material on a wall. This covered it with splotches of mortar. At the time of discovery, researchers somehow also missed the fact that the statue depicted the most famous king of Macedonia.

A new assessment determined that the artwork was created in the second century BC, roughly 200 years after Alexander the Great died. The 2,100-year-old statue was eventually cleaned and put on display at the Museum of Royal Tombs of Aigai in Vergina.^[1]

9 A Freakishly Big Sea Monster

In 2023, a researcher examined fossil drawers at the Abingdon County Hall Museum in the United Kingdom when he found a massive vertebra. This chance discovery led to three more vertebrae, all of which had been excavated in Oxfordshire and dated back 152 million years.

But this was no ordinary Jurassic creature. After scanning the fossils, it became clear that the spine bits belonged to a fearsome marine animal called a pliosaur. Looking like a cross between a crocodile and a turtle, they had paddle-like flippers and fanged jaws. Scary fact: those jaws could deliver a bite more powerful than a Tyrannosaurus rex.

This group of apex predators came in different species and sizes. This was the biggest one ever discovered, measuring 32 feet to 47 feet (9.8m to 14.4m) long, making it one of the largest—and scariest—carnivores to ever live in the sea.^[2]

8 A Bizarre Charles Dickens Story

Charles Dickens was a celebrated novelist, but the story in question is not one that he invented. Instead, it starts with a letter he penned on Christmas Eve, 1869. Dickens was distressed because the Great Western Railway Company had not yet delivered his Christmas turkey. The letter demanded to know where the bird was, and eventually, he learned that it had been destroyed in a freak fire.

We might never have known about this incident had it not been for another letter that was rediscovered at the National Railway Museum, where it lay forgotten for decades. In it, Dickens accepted the railway company’s apology and also mentioned that he was treating the whole thing in “good humor.”

Dickens might not have been so forgiving had he known two things. This was his last Christmas turkey (he died a few months later), and railway officials sold pieces of the overly well-done turkey to locals at sixpence a piece.^[3]

7 The Fake That Was Authentic

Some things go missing in plain sight. For decades, the Field Museum in Chicago displayed a sword. Discovered in the 1930s, the artifact came from the Danube River in Budapest. According to its label, the sword was a replica of a Bronze Age Hungarian weapon made during Medieval times or later. In other words, it was an old fake.

In 2022, a Hungarian archaeologist visited the museum, took one look at the sword, and insisted that the weapon wasn’t a replica but instead an authentic piece from the Bronze Age. This prompted the museum’s curator to order an X-ray of the sword. The tests showed that the artifact was forged from the right combination of tin and copper to chemically match other Bronze Age artifacts.

The 3,000-year-old sword was likely thrown into the Danube River on purpose between 1,080 and 900 BC. During this time, people ritualistically discarded weapons in waterways to commemorate a battle or the death of a loved one.^[4]

6 The Real Last Captive Thylacine

According to popular lore, the last thylacine to die in captivity was a male called Benjamin. That’s not true. In 1936, a female Tasmanian tiger was illegally trapped and sold to the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, where Benjamin was also kept. She outlived the male but died four months later of exposure. When the animal passed away, nobody realized the significance of the moment—that there would never be another thylacine in a zoo.

Over time, the truth dawned, but when researchers tried to locate her remains, they were nowhere to be found. Some feared that she’d been discarded after death and thus lost forever. But in 2022, staff at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) uncovered an unpublished report which revealed that the body had been at their own museum all along.

According to the report, the remains were donated to TMAG and stored in the museum’s educational section, not the zoological section where researchers had looked for the thylacine before. Sure enough, when they opened a cupboard in the educational archives, they found the female’s preserved pelt and skeleton. She’d been used in school visits to teach students about thylacine anatomy before being permanently stored away in the 1980s.^[5]

5 Extremely Rare Pyramid Wood

In 1872, a piece of wood was discovered in Egypt’s Great Pyramid. Found within the Queen’s Chamber, the cedar plank measured 5 inches (13cm) long. The artifact was a rare delight, being one of only three items ever to be found inside the Great Pyramid. Needless to say, when the fragment vanished, the loss wasn’t small.

A clue appeared in 2001, however, in the form of an archival record. The document revealed that the fragment had been donated to a Scottish university. Even with the institution’s name in hand (the University of Aberdeen), the wood was nowhere to be found.

By 2019, the artifact was officially missing for 70 years. During this year, however, an assistant curator at the University of Aberdeen accidentally found a cigar tin in their Asia museum collection. It contained several pieces of broken wood. The splinters were identified as the now-shattered Giza wood, and tests also determined it was 5,000 years old. The age bracket suggests that the plank was used in the pyramid’s construction process and left behind by the builders, not later explorers.^[6]

4 Lost 18,000-Year-Old Sounds

In 2021, researchers released the results of an accidental find. They’d been riffling through the inventory of the Natural History Museum of Toulouse, located in France when they noticed a seashell bigger than a person’s head. The history of the conch was also available. Found in 1931 inside the Marsoulas cave near the Pyrenees Mountains, the artifact once belonged to the Pyrenean Magdalenians who lived in the cave 18,000 years ago.

But the initial study incorrectly assumed the shell was a communal drinking cup with a damaged tip. The new study realized that human hands had altered the tip, drilled holes in the shell, and added a tube-like mouthpiece. This could only mean one thing. It was a musical instrument.

The team couldn’t resist playing the conch, and after an 18,000-year silence, it produced rich notes that were close to C, C-sharp, and D. However, the shell wasn’t limited to three toots. That was just the first experiment, and apparently, it’s capable of a lot more. As a bonus, it’s also the oldest musical shell of its kind known today.^[7]

3 Edison’s Last Breath

Most people know Henry Ford as the man who invented the gas-powered automobile. A lesser-known fact is that Ford was an employee and engineer at Thomas Edison’s company. The two struck up a friendship that lasted over 30 years until 1931, when Edison was on his deathbed. Bereaved, Ford asked the man’s son to capture his father’s dying breath in a test tube and give it to him as a memento.

Ford himself passed away in 1947, and his possessions were stored in boxes at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. Nearly 30 years later, museum employees stumbled upon the test tube and put it on display. Soon, the backstory involving Edison’s “dying breath” spread like wildfire.

The authenticity of the legend remains uncertain. Edison’s son really did give Ford the tube. However, no one knows if he held the container in front of his dying father or whether he merely handed Ford an empty tube that was in the room when Edison died.^[8]

2 Footage Believed to Be a Myth

Among film aficionados, a rumor circulated about the existence of a film showing a Mardi Gras parade from 1898. If real, the clip would be the oldest moving footage of a New Orleans Mardi Gras and the city of New Orleans itself. While many believed the film was just a rumor, Arthur Hardy wanted to recover this rare piece of cinematic history. But after decades of searching, he was ready to give up.

But then Hardy contacted the Louisiana State Museum, and the dominos started to fall. The curator of the museum reached out to the Rex Organization, which assists in organizing the Mardi Gras parade. An archivist with the Rex Organization went on the hunt, and in 2022, he found the legendary footage at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.

The two-minute film shows six floats taking part in the parade on February 22, 1898. The theme was “Harvest Queens”—prompting one float to carry people dressed as pineapples. It also showed Rex, the “King of the Carnival,” on another float and a live bull on a third. Organizers abolished this tradition in the early 20th century, and Mardi Gras parades now carry a papier-mache bovine instead.^[9]

1 The Silpho Moor UFO

In 1957, three men were walking along Silpho Moor near Scarborough when they found what newspapers would later call a “copper-bottomed flying saucer.” The description included a diameter of 18 inches (45cm) and copper sheets bearing strange hieroglyphs. Although expert analysis suggested a hoax, people’s imagination ran wild, and this helped the broken artifact to earn the lofty title of “Britain’s answer to Roswell.”

Then, the fragments disappeared. Almost half a century later, a man visited the Science Museum archives. He was searching the archives for files on aviation historian and UFO enthusiast Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith when he found a cigarette tin.

Inside the box were several pieces of metal and a note that said “alleged UFO bits.” Since the bits strongly resembled those described in the 1957 incident, there’s a good chance that they belong to the object found at Silpho Moor.^[10]