Hell’s Museum

Hell’s Museum is located within Haw Par Villa in Singapore and is dedicated to how different cultures have imagined death, judgement, and the afterlife. Opened in 2021, it frames its exhibits around beliefs, rituals, and iconography connected to what happens after we die, drawing material from multiple traditions.

The best-known section is the Ten Courts of Hell, a vivid, graphic series of dioramas rooted in Chinese folk religion and Buddhist-influenced ideas of karmic punishment. The displays are intentionally confrontational, depicting moral “crimes” and their consequences in a way designed to instruct through fear and shock.

Beyond the Ten Courts, the museum expands into broader themes of mortality, funerary customs, and afterlife concepts, using multimedia and interpretive panels rather than historical artefacts alone. The experience is part cultural education, part visceral encounter with the imagery of punishment and moral accounting.