For some people, there is an inexplicable allure to those structures that have for a long while stood empty. It might be the prospect of finding something valuable that was forgotten or simply the excitement of going somewhere no-one else had been to in an age.
Either way, there are some people that enjoy exploring abandoned buildings. Often, though, buildings have been deserted for a good reason. Even if that's not the case, over time they nevertheless tend to become hazardous. Here are some of the scariest tales told by people who risk spelunking in abandoned buildings.
45. That's All The Luck You Get
I found a doomsday prepper's bunker once. It had been abandoned a long long time with weeds breaking through the concrete ceiling. Nothing in there was older than 1994. I was an idiot kid at the time and didn't think, "Oh gee, I'm 30 feet underground in a concrete shell that's unstable." Instead, I decided to rip down some of the hanging ceiling crap to try and see how badly the ceiling was damaged. I caused a cave-in and was only able to get out by pure dumb luck.
44. What Does The Train Say?
43. A Message In A Haunted House
42. Where Did They Come From, Where Did They Go?
There's an abandoned factory near me and it is about 15 stories tall. It's a huge labyrinth of conveyor belts, stairs, ladders on the walls, chambers, etc. We know the city homeless crash there and there's remnants of hard drug use everywhere. My friend and I went there last week and we were wandering around (not exactly sure where we are) when we heard men talking. Instead of hauling butt out of there, we continued in the direction of the voices up and down ladders, crawling over and under conveyor belts. We never found them. Sounds anticlimactic, but never finding the interlocutors was probably the spookiest. Where did they go?
41. This Isn't The Cave Of Wonders
Photo by Sergey Nikolaev on Unsplash
40. The Men In The Masks
Went to a closed up mental hospital in my city with some friends at night. Everything was cool until we got to the basement, where there were 5-meter wide and 4-meter high lit tunnels going far to both directions. We headed down one end and found a huge active generator, then we went the other way and as we were about to hit another intersection, we saw two men wearing full green attire and face masks walking at the end of one of the corridors at 2 AM. We got out of there real quick.
39. He Probably Just Wanted To Be Friends
38. Drowning In The Dark
37. Mysterious Footsteps
36. The Skeleton Key
35. Bump In The Night
Some friends and I went into the old hospital in our city once, which has since been demolished, and it was huge! Anyway, we went down some stairs, like service stairs which were metal and obviously the public didn't use when it was open. As we descended we came across a dark room. We used our torches to look around and noticed a small bedding area. Above it on the wall there was spray paint that read "WE ARE THE THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT!" Suddenly we heard an almighty crash. I've never run the heck out of somewhere so quickly.
34. Bring A Respirator!
I was exploring this really awesome abandoned Victorian-era mansion-turned-mental-asylum. It had everything; a stone ballroom, indoor fountain, huge staircase at the entrance that looked straight out of Resident Evil, a tower, patient rooms, the works. What made it even cooler was that I had stumbled into the place totally by accident. I had been exploring a nearby building on a whim and as it turned out it connected to the mansion.
I had been in there for at least an hour, maybe more, and I only had a few rooms left to explore. I walk into a big one on the top floor of the place and the first thing I see is a sign that says something along the lines of "WARNING: Extremely high levels of asbestos in this area. Respirators must be worn. If you have been exposed go to [nearby hospital's ER] immediately."
33. Silo Climbing And Falling
In this complex are missile silos that go 10 stories into the ground. Most of them are filled up with water and other nasty stuff. Around the sides of these silos are all the old pipes and air ducts hanging off the walls. Being the dumb guys we are, we liked to climb on them to get to otherwise inaccessible rooms. My buddy held the light for myself and one other. As we climbed, my friend lost his footing and fell about 30 feet into the water below. He didn't surface for about 15 seconds--the 15 longest seconds of our life. He was able to grab some pipes and climb up to us and we helped him out. He left everything he had besides his pants and shirt there because we didn't know what there could be in that water. He had cut his leg pretty bad on something in the water and we rushed to a hospital. We got there in time to get the cut cleaned and luckily it did not get infected (we did not tell them we were exploring the silos, we told them that he had fallen at a construction site. I know this was probably stupid but we did not want to get in trouble). He got a really bad cold for the next few weeks.
32. Abandoned Hospital Locked Door Mystery
On Angel Island in San Francisco Bay there's an abandoned WWII military base that includes an old hospital. You can explore the buildings, but the lower floor staircases have been removed so you can't go up onto the upper floors and potentially be hurt. Well, being reckless 15-year-olds, my friends and I decided to boost the most nimble guy up to the second floor so he could see what it was like up there. Apparently, it was mostly like the rest of the hospital, except there was a room on the third floor that was padlocked shut and had "keep out" painted on the door. He even produced photographic evidence so we knew he wasn't just messing around with us. I have no idea what they'd need to keep locked up on the theoretically inaccessible third floor of an abandoned hospital, and I'm not sure I want to either.
31. A Drop In The Dark
There's an old abandoned mental asylum near where I live which is pretty creepy.
The asylum is huge and because it's pitch black it's easy to get lost in. It's also like a labyrinth inside which makes it very confusing and disorientating. It smells weird and is filled with relics from the past, like hospital beds, machines etc.
But the scariest thing that happened to me personally was during the last time I went. My friends and I walked into a dark room where the entire floor was missing, apart from a small patch directly in front of the door. As I was walking in I almost fell completely down the hole, which was like a 2 story drop. I was literally half an inch from seriously hurting myself.
Photo by Natalya Letunova on Unsplash
30. Not-So Abandoned After All
Broke into an abandoned mansion in my hometown. The place has been empty for as long as I can remember. It stands on a massive property on the side of a busy road, and there is a big lake behind it. I went during broad daylight but the property and hedges are large enough that I wasn't immediately visible from the road. I broke in through a back window. The majority of the house was dark because most of the windows and French doors had been boarded up. It was also really creaky, like an old ship. There was a lot of really ugly late 60s/early 70s furniture, all of it gold or brown or orange. I found some mail in a front room dated around August 1995, so I figured that's when the former owners must've left for whatever reason. In another room I found kid's toys- only they didn't look old but as if someone had been playing with them just recently. In the kitchen I found some empty cans of beans that also looked relatively new and in the pantry there were urine soaked sofa cushions someone had been using as a bed. This is when I started to get freaked out because obviously someone had been there somewhat recently, though not--so far as I could tell at least-- at that very moment.
29. An Eternity In Hiding
Broke into Building 7 a year ago with a few friends. It's an 11 story building and we went all the way to the top where there's a bunch of mechanical equipment. My friends assured me we were fine and no one saw us as there was basically just grass for as far as the eye could see out those windows. We weren't even there to vandalize stuff, we just wanted to explore.
Lo and behold, we finish up, try to go back through the same hole we came in, and all of a sudden my friend motions us to get back in. County police and property security were circling the entire building. My friend had a crowbar which did not help our situation at all (ups it to felony status), so we had to hide out in an isolated room in the middle of the building for an extra 45 minutes, which felt like an eternity.
One friend scouted the rest of the building looking for birds-eye views of the cops as I scouted the first-floor windows and my other two friends essentially cowered on the floor. After the cops had finally left we made a mad dash for the hole and left our dust masks behind. Barely made it out of there.
28. Beware Of Vultures
We got into an abandoned house by climbing a fallen log that had fallen right through the roof and noticed certain things... like an old plastic Christmas tree, moldy books, and a broken bowling ball. We wandered into a dark room away from the fallen tree and tried to let our eyes adjust—and then the worst, most putrid smell hit our noses. It smelt like rotting meat. We started talking and then heard something scurry in the room (which wasn't a big room by any means). The girls started screaming (the one clutched on to my friend which he of course loved) and we heard whooshes of air like something moving past our faces. I had no idea what was happening, just that something real was in that room and we couldn't see it. Eventually, the friend with the flashlight made it in, and we held our breath as he turned it on. In the middle of the room were two vultures with a disgusting piece of carrion just looking at us like we were crazy. Not as scary as it could've been, but it's crazy how we had run into wild animals as they ate and hadn't noticed.
27. No Top Floor At All
There is this small town in the mountains on the way to a ski resort I used to work at and a lot of people go to. It's probably the weirdest town ever. Only one way in and out by a bridge over a river that surrounds the town. Basically, you go there during the day and the place is a ghost town. No one out.
Once night falls, you start to see ladies pushing strollers walking their dogs, etc. There is this old bed and breakfast there that has been abandoned for years. It was built in like 1890 or something like that. It was an Inn for families to stay that had husbands that were loggers back 100 years ago. The story goes that there was this girl Alice, that had a husband who died while logging. She got word that he had died in an accident.
She proceeded to hang herself in the attic of the Inn (I was able to find old newspaper articles and archives that proved this to be true). A lot of people used to say they saw her haunting the halls on occasion after she died. Employees that worked the bed and breakfast before it closed in the '90's reported lots of weird things happening.
We used to go there and try and scare ourselves. I kid you not, one time we were shining flashlights in the top window, and slowly one of the curtains opened and stayed open for a few seconds then slowly closed. Note that the top floor no longer existed because it collapsed years earlier. There was no way anyone could be on the top floor. Pretty creepy.
26. Boards I Didn't Walk On
I used to read electric meters for a living way back in the day. One of my stops was at an old high school where the gymnasium had been converted into a broom factory. Since I love history, I asked the management there if I could check out the school itself. It was really cool seeing the vintage 1930's desks and old furnishings, as well as finding musty old books lying about. The scary part was when I came to a classroom where the floor was caving in, a full six feet in the center, and all the furnishings had slid into the sagging middle. It wasn't really scary until I felt the floor tremble beneath my feet and heard boards cracking... from the hallway I hadn't entered from.
25. Almost Caught A Very Bad Guy
Summer of 1992 we were exploring the old abandoned airport hangars at Republic Airport on Long Island (the hangars are no longer there). One night we were exploring and at some point, a pickup truck drove right near us. It freaked us out because it was meant to be desolate and so we take off.
We returned a few days later and everything was roped off. We saw signs for a toxic waste dump site or something along those lines. That's not the freaky part. Here's the freaky part...
Right around the same time, Joel Rifkin had been arrested for killing 17 people. When he was caught he had bodies in his vehicle. His vehicle was a pickup truck and he had been dumping bodies at the abandoned airport hangar! We were probably been within a few feet of bodies as we had explored most of the hangar.
Still freaks me out thinking it was probably his pickup truck we had seen that night...with bodies in tow.
24. A Cold Stream In The Dark
My cousin was working as a security guard when he called me up one night to come to check out the closed down wool mill he was working at. This place used to employ thousands of people. We went around the whole place checking things out--the boardroom was really nice with a huge fancy wooden table and really nice wood panels on the walls.
We spent a good couple of hours in the working parts of the building and then made it down to the basement area which was massive and dark. Eventually, we came across this metal door that would have looked at home in a sunken submarine from 50 years ago. We tried to open it and though the accumulation of years worth of rust made it difficult it did not prove impossible. When we finally got it open the creaking noise it made in the darkness of what was on the other side of the door sent chills down my entire body. Turns out there was a stream running under the entire mill building and we had found the access door to it.
When we opened the door it seemed to pull a lot of the air out of the area we were standing in and the temperature dropped a fair bit, it was one of the freakiest feelings I've ever had.
23. Writings, Hobos, And Asbestos. Oh My.
I went to a lot of abandoned buildings in my hometown (Montreal). One time a friend and I went exploring one of the biggest abandoned buildings in all of Canada (also one of the creepiest). When we got in it was like a maze and took us hours to make our way through to the interesting part of the building. Eventually we came across a set of rooms that were really isolated. One of them had "behind you" written on the wall but the creepiest one was the one room that was completely covered from the inside (no windows) with strange writings on the wall (nobody knows what they mean) and an old chair that looks like someone is sitting right on it. Needless to say, we got the heck out of there.
There's also the time where a hobo almost stabbed us and the time we walked on a pile of asbestos.
22. Creepy Copper-Hunter
Years ago my friends and I tried to enter a very old, abandoned psychiatric hospital. It was on a crisp winter morning and everything was silent. We didn't even hear the birds sing, only the soft sound of our shoes on the mud. We looked up at the massive building. All the windows were broken and the dead ivy almost covered the entire facade. There was only one way in - we had to climb the stairs outside of the building, then, on the third-floor level, we were supposed to go through a hole in the wall. One bad step and we could fall all the way down.
But we didn't enter because through that hole I saw the clear silhouette of a man with an ax in his hand. I couldn't see his face, but he was definitely looking at me. I told my friend to run, as I saw him coming towards us. We ran away for some time until we reached the town. Then, after a shaky cup of coffee, we decided to go back. Why? We were stupid teens. But we stayed outside, on the ground floor. I looked through the side of a massive, metal door, and I saw the man again. I could see that he had put some bags on the ground, with metal tools inside. It was pretty obvious now: he was looking for copper. We decided to circle around the building one last time, frustrated over having wasted our time. But as we started to leave we heard the man running towards us from inside the building. He hit the metal door with his ax several times with all of his force and we ran away a second time.
21. Altar Of Sad
Me and a friend were doing some location scouting for a post-apocalyptic movie and so we went to this park in Sodus, New York. There's a bunch of abandoned buildings in there from this old Girl Scout camp. Many were smothered in graffiti and decay. After a ton of hiking we finally found this one lone cabin on the shores of the lake. Inside we found the saddest Satanic altar ever. No, really. There was a faded pentagram on the floor, a few tiny bungee cords here and there (I don't know why either) and a couple of candles. I guess the Satanists wanted red candles but they could only afford white ones, so they put rear bike reflectors behind them. I guess it's pretty hard to worship Lucifer in this economy...
20. Flying Chairs And Screaming Dames
The PA Abandoned Turnpike is a stretch of road that was meant to be part of the Turnpike in Pennsylvania but was abandoned in the 1960s when it was basically bypassed by the I-70.
Well, a couple buddies and I (accompanied by our ladies at the time) took a road trip up to the old Laurel Hill Tunnel and decided to check it out. So we parked off a woodland trail and hiked what felt like 2 miles at a 90-degree angle up to the abandoned work site. Now, it's like 2 am at this point but we're just getting to have fun. We started walking the 13-mile stretch of road and came to one of the overpass tunnels that had what looked like a heating/AC building attached. This thing is old as heck, too. It's sheet-metal and green, like your grandpa's tool shed out back. To get inside, there was a brick stairwell to the side and an old-school iron staircase that looked like a fire-escape.
So we started to clamber up the stairwell when all of a sudden a damn chair came flying down and crashed at the level above us. It terrified the crap out of us. The scariest part about the whole thing, though, was that the ladies of ours (who didn't climb the stairs with us and waited at the bottom) let out the most blood-curdling screams. Their screams not only echoed through the stairwell but they told us that they screamed because they were hit with a blast of wind that had no business being there. Needless to say, we never-bloody-went-there-again.
19. The Things We Do For A Good Picture
I spent nights over a couple of years taking long-exposure photos in the Northampton State Hospital. It was a terrifying activity all by itself (I never got used to the creaks and moans of the old buildings, the sounds of the occasional junkie squatter freakout, the soft, dangerously rotten condition of the buildings) but I only stopped after I went through a weak stair & fell down the rest into a foot of standing, cold, fetid water and mush.
I was knocked out & woke up in pitch darkness, camera and tripod and flashlight missing somewhere in the dark with absolutely no idea where I was. Confused and totally freaked out, I ventured further into the black wetness before I cleared up enough to remember the stairs somewhere behind me. I had to feel along the walls and tried to ignore the crushing claustrophobic fear that my imagination was inducing.
At any moment I expecting to feel a corpse hand grab mine. The walls were covered in damp muck and peeling paint and I was lost. I eventually found stairs and warily mounted them to a locked metal door. I decided since I was hurt and lost that it might be worth calling out for help, hoping the lone security guard might hear me. I'd be arrested, but damn it. I made a peep, which came out a godawful croak that echoed through the darkness like nothing I'd ever heard.
I had to go back down into that stuff or sit at on this stupid landing until maybe it might get light when the sun rose in a couple of hours. Unlikely though as it was a sub-basement. I was whimpering (all burly 6'4, 250 lbs of 23-year-old me) and my legs were warm - I realized I'd peed myself. I eventually mustered the courage to forge on but I felt like Jodie Foster at the end of Silence of the Lambs.
I eventually found another set of stairs, pushed open the door into an unfamiliar corridor, kicked my way out of a plywood covered window and resolved that I could borrow a camera until the end of the semester. I wasn't going back in there - a resolve which lasted about 6 months until a friend slipped me a key to the Belchertown State School grounds. He instructed me to bring a hard hat and clipboard & tell any security that I was on a survey crew taking night measurements.
18. Bloody Tourists
We liked to take people down there who have never seen it and give them tours. We even mapped it out and studied the history of it to give them a real cool experience. We were taking a few girls down there. In total it was 6 of us. We got down into one of the main rooms from which there are multiple tunnels branching off. Right at the entrance to the tunnel that led to the silos there was a hatch door that had broken off the wall and was laying on the ground.
There was a decently sized puddle of blood around it. We touched the blood (with gloves on) and deduced that it could not have been more than a few hours old. There were splotches of blood leading away from the puddle too. The most unnerving part was that it led DEEPER into the complex, not out of it.
We (being the idiots we were) decided to follow it. It led to one of the silos that did not have much water in it. It dropped about 50 feet into the ground before being too dark to see. The blood was covering the ledge right next to the drop, the rope that chained the drop off, and a bunch of the pipes on the walls. We looked all over for the source hoping that no one was injured. We couldn't find anything so we got the heck out of there real quick.
17. Running In Circles Like A Rat In A Maze
In my small town there was an abandoned hospital right next to our high school, so naturally, we decided to check it out. It had been abandoned for about 5 years. It looked like no one had been in there since. Everything went fine the first time and we were intrigued so we kept going back every day after school.
After about 3 or 4 days we decided to go to the side where all the surgeries and stuff went on, which is on the top floor -though we'd never gone past the first. To get there we had to use the emergency stairwell as the elevators don't work. Everything from the first floor up was pitch dark, so we used our lights on our phones.
Just using our small phone light in the pitch dark hall ways felt like we were exploring a cave system. Well, we checked out all the rooms up on the top floor and kept finding the same thing in each one: completely empty except 1 single chair facing the corner. This creeped us out so we decided to get the heck out of there. Trying to find our way out, we started hearing strange noises that freaked us out.
We got quiet and stopped walking for a second to figure out where they were coming from... All of a sudden something made a loud noise in the air ducts right above us and we started running like never before nor since. If there was something in there that wanted to get us, they could've if they had wanted to. We ran in a circle 2 times before we realized where the stair well was. After regrouping outside we came to the conclusion that it was a rat and an unspoken truce to never go back in there. We spent another 3 years of high school together but never brought it up again.
16. The Vault
There was this office building that was abandoned except for the first floor because of fire safety regulations. This girl and I went in and managed to make our way into some of the higher levels. At first we came across a huge, empty concrete room that looked like a level of a parking garage. The weird thing was that it was -10°F in January, but this room in the abandoned section of the building was heated to 60°F. The rest of the building was freezing. We figured that someone was living there, so we got scared and moved on.
Also in the abandoned wing there was this pitch black hallway with a door at the end and a light coming out from under it. We could barely make out a sheet of paper with the name of some lawyer crudely taped onto the door. Once again- abandoned section, creepy environment, lawyer. Needless to say, we snuck away.
This last part is actually the only part that really truly scared me. We went into the basement of the abandoned wing. The place was archaic to start. Think 20's era Jay Gatsby decor. In addition, it was dusty, the lights flickered, and it sounded like someone else was lurking around. We split up for a minute, and I found myself inside of this tiny room that was completely barren. I called her name and she came over, and it turned out that we were standing inside a giant bank vault. We could have been sealed in until our deaths had someone else been there. That part still gives me the creeps.
15. A Lonely Chair
As we approached, the closest wall of the house was boarded up with plywood and had been spray-painted with things like "Do Not Enter" and "No Trespassing". Let's be honest though...that has never stopped curious teenagers. We inspected the rest of the house's windows and doors to find them all boarded off and nailed shut and so we decided to remove the plywood that was where we assumed the front door would be. Me and two other guys strained to remove this plywood from the front but eventually were able to do so and found the entrance. It turned out to be to the living room where there was another door straight ahead leading into second room. As I stared into the newly opened doorway with adjusting eyes I noticed a dull figure in the middle of the SECOND room and freaked out. At first, I thought it was a raccoon or another woodland creature, but as I continued to stare at this mysterious shape in the dimly lit room it came into focus. Not a raccoon but a small white wood rocking chair, like the one you probably had as a young child. I laughed and described my discovery to my friends as we proceeded into the house.
"There's nothing to be scared about, it's just a chair." I told myself as I strutted into the house. Yes, just a small rocking chair. But as we entered the first room and looked around, we saw that there was no other furniture in there; it was barren. Moving into the second room and towards the chair, we realized that the other room was empty as well except for a cleaned fireplace along the left wall. This chair was the only piece of furniture in the entire two story house! Not only that, but the chair was positioned in the middle of the room and facing the doorway. As I silently freaked out, we searched the house for signs of squatters or other terrestrial life. There were none. With this discovery, we all unanimously decided we'd explored enough for the day and should continue on our run. We carefully placed the plywood back from where we had pried it off the wall, tucked our tails and RAN. Silently for about 8 miles. I'm sure everyone was trying to contemplate the weird discovery we made that day, just like myself.
14. It's Just A Bag, It's Just A Bag
In Kansas City, Missouri there is an old abandoned underground government building near the limestone caves that was severely overgrown with trees and weeds and flooded. We brought a small boat inside so that we could explore the places that were no longer accessible.
We travelled through the back of this abandoned government building until we had reached the very back. Interestingly it looked like a place where semi trucks could pull up and offload whatever they needed, but everything was sealed up and we were way underground at this point. We floated in about 5 feet of crystal clear water when I noticed something at the bottom that looked out of place. It was black plastic, like trash bags, but it had duck tape wrapped around both ends and the middle. The bags resembled a human body, with the duct tape around the feet, neck, and waist.
This bag looked like something straight out of Silent Hill. As we looked at it and wondered what it was, our friend had the bright idea to poke it with the oar/paddle. He reached down and poked the stomach of the bag but was immediately freaked out by how it felt. Then the most unexpected stuff started happening. Bubbles started coming out of the back side of the bag.
First just a few tiny ones and then a much larger set of bubbles up towards the head shaped part of the bag. When the bigger bubbles came out, it carried some debris with it. It looked like the skin of potatoes floating in the water. We are yelling at my friend not to poke it and the bag SITS UP under the water. As soon as I saw the head shaped side of the bag rise, I was done. I was the first to shout but soon everyone else was screaming too.
The boat was rocking and one friend just completely shut down and laid still at the bottom of the boat. Flashlights were getting blocked, it was just way too dark in there now and we had this bag that has decided to randomly start floating up in the water. There's no way this bag should be floating or releasing bubbles and debris, and it almost seemed to bend at the waist when it started to float.
It still freaks me out just thinking about the way the bag started to float up after releasing bubbles. We had just talked about how freaky it would be if it was a human before it started moving. It really took all I had not to panic and just pretend that it was all in my head. I paddled us away from it and we decided we were done. Even as we got further away, you could still see the water turning murky and the ripples coming from the bubbles and movement of the bag. I just wanted to get out.
13. Tiny Torch, Lots Of Tunnels
In Cappadocia in Turkey, there are large areas of very soft rock which has allowed the locals to dig amazing underground cities, caves, dwellings etc.
There is one place in the canyon where the walls are riddled (absolutely riddled, like swiss cheese) with these manmade tunnels, dwellings and so on. They were pretty much deserted. Even though it was an amazingly ancient site, unlike in a first world country you could just wander around at will. There were no barriers, no guards, no guidebooks, no safety warnings. Nothing.
We only had a fairly pathetic little torch. We'd looked down a fair few tunnels and thought they were pretty cool. They had steps leading up to additional rooms and all sorts of things. They were mostly very well made, about maybe 1.5m (5 ft) wide, smooth flat floors, plenty of head-height.
We set off down a tunnel. It went into the ground further than most. It turned a couple of corners and was absolutely, utterly pitch black, as in without the torch you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. We were walking forward side by side looking at the walls when at the last second I realized the floor in front of us looked blacker than it should. I came to a sudden stop and flung out my arm and stopped my girlfriend. We shone the torch down and the floor ended, maybe a foot in front of our feet. There was just a square shaft the width of the corridor disappearing down into blackness. We threw a pebble down and never heard it hit bottom.
No one knew we were there. Even if we had survived falling in no one would have known to look for us through hundreds and hundreds of tunnels.
12. Deerifying
This isn't an abandoned building, but an abandoned couple of floors. My old university's design school is located in an old hospital. The top two or three floors were cleaned but there are still relics from the past like hospital beds and such. Well, I was walking through it with our professor and another student looking for stuff to use for one of our projects when I happened across this small room with no windows and an open door. I looked into it but couldn't make out what I was seeing. I took a second look and noticed a person standing there in the darkness with a deer head.
Turns out, someone had put a mannequin in the dark room with a mounted deer head on top of it. It just absolutely terrified me when I first saw it.
11. Because Zombies
In 2008 when I was 15 me and two friends brandished a couple of baseball bats and explored an abandoned, fenced off warehouse in the middle of town because "zombies."
We barely so much as stuck our head in the doorway when we saw that it was calf-deep full of bags and wrappers and cups. We deduced it to be the squatting location of the homeless guy (who always hung out at the next-door gas station) and decided to leave so as not to disturb him.
The next day we were hanging out at that gas station when he came charging up to us and bellowed "YOU" and we didn't want to see what was going to happen next so we ran across the street to a store to escape. It wouldn't be as scary as an adult but even with two older stronger guys with me it was terrifying for tiny 15-year-old, 4'10", 90lb me.
10. Almost Locked Up At The Zoo
In Los Angeles there's an abandoned zoo (Google Old LA Zoo) with cages and concrete faux-landscape intact. I'd been wanting to go for a long time but I waited for my girlfriend to take me because she'd been before.
We were in a dark tunnel crawling through a feeding cage when we heard a voice calling into the exhibit. It was a cop hollering for some guys we passed to come out of the exhibit. He was saying he'd have to report them. We assumed that if we were to be caught we'd just get a warning.
CLLLIIIIICKKKKKKK
"Okay", I thought, that was handcuffs. They're being arrested. We're in a dark tunnel trying to keep our legs away from gated feeding doors the size of a mini-fridge because now there are more cops crunching back and forth across the gravel, sticking their heads into the holes in the chainlink.
We dodged around the dark tunnels trying not to scrape ourselves with any broken glass or steel cable for almost an hour. There was only one way out - which was a blind corner that would put me right in their lap if they were still waiting - so we waited until it was quiet for a while and then I stumbled out: coast was clear. It was an exciting day.
9. Insane Asylum Asthmatics
Two of my close mates and I were exploring an abandoned insane asylum in the suburbs of Sydney close to midnight. Many of the buildings there were construed as early as 1885 so you can understand the kind of infrastructure we were exploring, though the interior had been renovated.
We entered through two grand double doors (that had been warped from its old age and weathering) after the three of us had given them a good push. Once we were in we pushed the doors closed again so the security that drove around the park wouldn't suspect anything. We started walking around and exploring a couple of rooms around the foyer. The place was dead silent, pitch black and creepy as heck as you'd assume an insane asylum would be.
We entered a room that had been surprisingly clean apart from a few things in the very middle of the room. As we get closer and shone our torches (flashlight) we saw a Korean bible sitting next to an ultrasound surrounded by candles and flowers all sitting in what looked like a specific pattern. I assumed it was part of a ritual, although I have no knowledge of that kind of thing. The room still smelt like smoke from the candles and the flowers were far from withering. So it must've been very recent...
We all looked at each other, shook our heads and left the room and went to leave. Once we had gotten back to the double doors we entered through we realized it was much easier to push the doors inward rather than it was to pull them (the doors had expanded due to the weathering), as there was nothing to grip when pulling.
So we freaked out and started jogging as quietly as we could around the building looking for a new exit. We went further into the building. Much of it was fairly untouched as all the graffiti and vandalism were around the foyer (names of patients still above beds and lockers, many documents lying around, some were even hand written).
We made our way down the stairwell to the rear of the building to where the groundfloor/basement was (building is on the side of a hill). It was very dank and cave-like in there as all the rainwater that entered the building saturated itself there. This floor was pretty much one great big soggy hall with a large mirror on one side and piano and single hospital bed on the other.
Upon shining my torch I was pretty sure my friends and I were going to die. Nevertheless, we pried a loose wooden plank barring one of the windows free, broke the window, jumped the fence and got out of there. And to top it all off, BOTH my mates, who BOTH have asthma, had breathing fits while we were running.
8. Thud
One time me and a couple of my buddies went to explore an abandoned alpaca farm. We decided to check out the main house first. All the outside doors were locked so I decided to crawl through a small window in the garage door and then unlock the place from the inside to let my friends in.
It was a split level house so the garage led into the basement. It was pitch black, spider webs everywhere, and reeked of mold. But we didn't care... Abandoned stuff is cool. So eventually I managed to find a sliding door and unlock it for my friends to get in. We were exploring around upstairs for a bit near the staircase to the basement when we heard this loud thud. We all looked at each other as if to ask if somebody knocked something over but no one had. The only way out of the house was through the door I opened in the basement so we had to go back downstairs because we were freaked out.
So as we were walking to the exit we saw where the loud thud had come from. Laying on the ground was a freshly decapitated animal. I'm honestly not sure what kind of animal it was but it was pretty large and its head was missing. As I was in the basement alone and my friends somewhere else in the house there had probably been a crazy guy with an axe looking to cut off the head of one thing or another.
7. Alone With Dark Vibes
I went down there alone once, and only once. Adjacent to the circular silos are these circular rooms that are three stories with each floor connected by a ladder. Outside of one of the rooms was a bunch of water filling a tunnel.
Something about this water was... off. It was much darker and seemed to be more still than any of the other sources of water there. You would drop things in it and through the greenish haze could see them ever so slowly sink to the bottom, sometimes just staying suspended above the ground due to whatever nasty chemicals are in the water.
Inside the room on the top floor was this huge demonic painting. It depicted a girl with her rib cage exposed and her organs falling out, forming the head of another girl below with arrows going through it. There were goat skulls and all sorts of creepy stuff.
I went there alone just once. I sat in that room in the pitch black for about an hour and just listened to the silence. The vibes I got were crazy. Nothing really happened but I had never felt more hopeless, alone or scared in my entire life. I left after about an hour.
Unsplash
6. Barking Mad
5. TB Hospital To Insane Asylum To Children's Park
Went to this park that's in this really ghetto part of town. The park used to be a TB hospital and then an insane asylum. Then it was an abandoned building where many people had died because they would drink and fall down the elevator shaft. Then it became a children's park that remained mostly unused.
There was a department of justice building right in front of it. Now on the other side of one of the windows, there was a this sign (this was midnight btw) that had this like purplish color to it. We parked relatively close to the window. We started to walk away from the building when we noticed a figure in the window. The purplish light was being blocked now unlike before. So it looked like someone was standing in front of it.
It was a government building and midnight so it should've been closed and no one there. And not chilling in the complete dark if there had been security or something. But we were like... wtf. We looked at each other and then looked back. The figure was gone.
We walked toward the building and looked through the window. Other than this sign with the purple light it was 101% dark in there and without a sign of anyone. We looked through this window for a while. Saw nothing. We were like screw it maybe we imagined it or something.
Started walking back towards the park. About 3/4 the way back to the park we all kinda looked back and saw the figure again. It looked like a tall man standing by the window. Just staring at us. But we couldn't make out any features or anything. Just this black figure covering the light from behind him. We kinda freaked out and decided to leave then.
4. Footsteps In An 'Abandoned' Building
Photo by Kev Seto on Unsplash
3. Not So Chill
So one day cruising around North Lakeland me and some friends found what seemed to be the biggest abandoned building any of us had ever seen. It was a 5 story 3 winged abandoned Catholic school--basement and rooftop included. Us being stupid teenagers, we decided to go have a smoke and play manhunt inside.
But to get to the story, we were headed down a corridor with a dead end. We got to the end room and heard what sounded like a metal pot get thrown in the hallway. Terrified we all grab whatever was nearest us for a weapon. The only suitable weapons in that damn room were a stack of canned beans. So we all grabbed canned beans and ran down the hallway to the exit side.
The scary part?? We checked every room in that hallway. After a few seconds, a voice called out. We exchanged some words with some guy and finally he asked "you want a cigarette?" My friend, being an idiot, says, oh he's chill come on and starts walking down the hallway back to the guy. I told him he was being an idiot and he agreed so we turned to leave.
We came in through a window in a room near the end and as we were walking back to it I was the last one in. I kid you not I looked up as everyone got in the door and saw a man start around the corner at the other end of the hallway. My heart stopped, I swear. He had something in his hands. I looked down and saw that ITS A HANDSAW. So I burst into the room and saw that THE FIRST PERSON WASN'T EVEN OUT THE WINDOW YET. So I started shoving everyone out the window. They were just like wtf but I had no time to explain and I just said run. I was the last one climbing out. Halfway out I look back toward the door and there he was standing right at the entrance.
2. Unrealized History
Broke into an abandoned insane asylum years ago.
We found a number of creepy things. Two stand out. The first one we found when we walked into a random room and shined our flashlights around. On the floor in the middle of the room was a white and red box with a medical cross on it sitting on top of a broken record. Part of the box was busted out and there was some sort of organ inside.
The last room of our excursion was a file room. Thousands of patient files had been left inside. Needless to say, we took some. We also took a page from a photo album. They were the only pictures we found in there. Later on, we were at a diner pouring over the crazy stuff we found and my friend takes a look at the pictures only to find that her mom was in 3 out of the 6. Apparently, she had worked there a few decades prior.
1. It's Just Frank
I work in an oil refinery as a firefighter and we have an old part that's been closed since 1998. I was doing my monthly fire extinguisher checks at night and heard a chain valve being turned. Knowing I was the only person in the entire shutdown unit it kinda spooked me. I went and looked around and found nothing. Talking to my fire chief about it he laughed and said that's just "Frank". Apparently, a guy died from a heart attack in the 70's while working a chain valve in the unit. I thought they were messing with me so I did some digging and sure enough it was the only fatality in the plant. Every time I go late at night to do those checks I hear the chain valve but only when I'm on the stairs...once I get up the stairs it stops.
