Monsters might be fictional characters in books and movies, but these ominous, otherworldly creatures are often linked with real-life places.

On the cusp of Halloween, here’s a look at spots around the globe where their legends (and hopefully not their physical being) still linger.

Godzilla

One of the few movie monsters that didn’t have a literary ancestor, Godzilla was created in 1954 at Toho Studios in Tokyo for the very first film featuring the radiation awakened giant reptile.

Emerging from the silver screen, Godzilla appears at several spots in modern Tokyo including a statue in Hibiya Godzilla Square and a menacing mural on the outside of Toho Studios in Setagaya (which has produced 33 Godzilla movies over the last 70 years).

But nothing sends a chill down your spine like the life-sized Godzilla head leering down from the roof of Toho Cinema in Shinjuku. For a closer look, grab a meal at the 8^th floor café of the Hotel Gracery Shinjuku with its Gojira (to use its Japanese name) diorama and access to the rooftop terrace that supports the colossal head.

King Kong

The super-sized simian was also created for the movies, the famous 1933 flick starring Fay Wray as the damsel in distress and ranked as one of the top 10 best horror movies of all time by Rotten Tomatoes.

It almost goes without saying that the Empire State Building is the best place to channel the spirit of the lovelorn primate. Among new observatory museum exhibits launched in 2019 is a “Kong” room — a 1930’s style office with Kong sneering through a window and his two giant hands punching through the walls.

Dracula

Upwards of 500 films have featured vampires and more than a fifth of those have revolved around the greatest bloodsucker of them all — Count Dracula.

From the original Nosferatu in 1922 and Bela Lugosi’s classic portrayal to the stylish Francis Ford Coppola version, Transylvania region is always the lair of the infamous vampire.

That’s because Irish author Bram Stoker — who introduced Dracula in 1897 in his bestselling Gothic horror novel — set the story in the Romanian region and based the title character on notorious 15^th-century Romanian warlord Vlad the Impaler (a.k.a. Vlad Dracula).

Although it’s only loosely linked to Vlad, Bran Castle in the Carpathian Mountains has established itself as Transylvania’s official “Dracula’s Castle.”

Bran Castle celebrates Halloween each year with a costume garden party and creepy castle tour with a warning that visitors should “Be cautious if you suffer from claustrophobia, are sensitive to intermittent lights and loud noises or carry children in your arms!”

Werewolves

From the Greeks and Romans to ancient India, the werewolf has featured in myth and legend for thousands of years.

British lycanthropes have stalked the Welsh woods (The Wolf Man, 1941) and caused havoc in London’s Piccadilly Circus (An American Werewolf in London, 1981). Yet France is the epicenter of stories that revolve around supposedly real werewolves.

In the 1760s, the Lozère region in southern France was terrorized by the wolf-like Beast of Gévaudan, which supposedly killed and consumed around 100 people. And they’re back! More than 130 wolves from Canada and elsewhere roam Le Loups du Gévaudan wolf sanctuary in modern-day Lozèr.

Then there was the Werewolf of Dôle, a hermit who was convicted of lycanthropy and burned at the stake in 1573 after confessing to murder and cannibalism.

Frankenstein

Both the monster and the scientist who created him are named Frankenstein, and both were born on a stormy summer night in 1816 at Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva .

A group of young British Romantics were vacationing at the villa, among them Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his future wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. In keeping with the spooky weather, Byron who dared everyone to write a ghost story off the top of their heads and present it to the group the following day.

Mary Shelley’s contribution was the tale of a mad doctor who fashioned a living being from miscellaneous dead body parts, published two years later as the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. A book that in 1931 inspired the first of many Frankenstein films.

Located in a leafy, lakeside suburb of Geneva, the privately owned Villa Diodati can be viewed from the street but is not open to the public. However, there’s a much-photographed statue of the monster in the city’s Plainpalais as well as Burg Frankenstein in Germany’s Rhine Valley, where a real-life mad scientist once lived.

The Mummy

The first-ever movie monster, the mummy starred in the 1899 French silent film Robbing Cleopatra’s Tomb. Since then, the swaddled stalker has appeared in more than 70 films including Boris Karloff’s immortal 1932 version and the modern Mummy franchise starring Brendan Fraser.

The mummies of ancient Egyptian kings, queens and nobles reside in museums around the world. But nothing tops a visit to the Valley of the Kings where many of the mummified monarchs were entombed or the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC) in Cairo, where 22 royal mummies are safeguarded.

Phantom of the Opera

French author Gaston Leroux blended fact and fiction to create the music-loving title character of his 1911 novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, a story later spun into numerous movies and an award-winning stage musical.

The truth was a fire that killed or maimed more than 100 people at the Opéra-Comique in Paris while the myth was a rumor that a mysterious masked man lived beneath the Palais Garnier (a.k.a. Paris Opera).

If you can’t catch a performance, take an opera house tour. Best bet for phantom aficionados is the “Mysteries of the Palais Garnier” tour which takes place outside normal opening hours when the vast structure is eerily empty — just how Erik (the Phantom) liked it.

Creature from the Black Lagoon

Many of the second unit shots for this 1954 creature feature were filmed at Florida’s Wakulla Springs State Park near Tallahassee.

The amphibious “Gillman” is long gone but the lagoon is flush with other sorts of aquatic life including alligators and turtles throughout the year and manatees that migrate into the park from the Gulf of Mexico during winter.