Marilyn Manson knew their secrets: he recorded his breakthrough album Antichrist Superstar (Interscope, 1996) in the mansion where Sharon Tate was brutally murdered, and again invoked these hidden currents with Holy Wood: In the Shadow of the Valley of Death (Interscope, 2000), employing magician Harry Houdini's home.

You too can experience the dark psychological power wrought by negative architecture if you know where to look (and what to observe). For starters, why not visit the Parisian catacombs in France, and the evocative Winchester House near America's Silicon Valley?

Many European cities are home to miles of underground graves filled with bones of ancient souls who were more than likely martyrs - men and women that held on tightly to their unpopular beliefs and paid the ultimate price with death.

Catacombs, also known as subterranean mausoleums, spread out for miles beneath the world's most majestic cities, twisting and turning, leading to endless nooks and crannies knee high in skeletons. Messages chalked upon these hell-holes's walls in a variety of languages, are pathetic replacements for what should be handsomely etched gravestones built on ground six feet to the north.

A few beautifully orchestrated Web sites offering photographs taken from the spookiest corners of the catacombs have popped up on the Internet. However, for the most part, these miles and miles of Hell on Earth are unknown and never seen, except in nightmares.

The "legal" entrance to the subterranean burial sites in Paris are right across the street from the Metro. However, daring mortals traveling in packs will often sneak into secret entrances located in the random manholes scattered up and down the city streets. A French group once ventured beneath the concrete in search of a missing person whose camera had been found in the catacombs with a reel of haunting film still intact. Of course, this hobby is ill advised. Only those with balls of steel and hearts of glass need stand in line.

On America's western coast stands a mansion so bizarre that it is northern California's most visited tourist attraction. Carpenters and other handymen built the Winchester House in 1884 as instructed by Sarah Winchester, the heiress to the Winchester Rifle fortune.

A fancier of the occult, Sarah was told in several seances that her newly acquired six-room home in the then little-known farming community of San Jose (now Silicon Valley) was possessed by evil spirits. These spirits had come a-knocking to let Sarah know that they weren't happy about her late husband's involvement with gun making. She would have to do as they say in order to make amends, and her residence still shows these psychic scars.

To keep her "sanity," Sarah followed the directions delivered to her by the good spirits, and had her infantry of helpers aid her in the life-long process of building. When she died in 1922, the Winchester mansion covered six acres and contained 160 rooms - each more quirky and weird than the next. There are stairways that lead nowhere, doors and cabinets that open into walls, skylights on the floors and a chimney that ends inches below the ceiling.

The mansion exudes the malign presence that Roger de Lafforest identified: an objective manifestation of its creator's perplexed mind. Sarah repeatedly used the number 13 in her design: rooms with 13 windows, 13 fireplaces in one suite, 13 holes in the kitchen drain, and so on. These creations were supposed to confuse the evil ghosts so that she could hide from them if necessary.