Everyone likes a good scare now and then, makes us remember that we are still alive. Gets the blood pumping and all that.
Sometimes though, it goes a little too far. Be it actual danger, or our minds playing tricks on us, it doesn't matter, sometimes you get so scared you become physically sick. This is what we are looking at here. Thrill seekers, take note, because these are some of the creepiest places around the world.
Some of these stories are pretty scary, and not for the faint of heart, but if you are confident in your bravery, read on.
You have been warned.
29. Sounds like a job to die for
One year I worked in a haunted house that was inside a building that used to be a funeral home. The morgue was downstairs and still had the drawers. My job was to lay in the drawer and pop out when people walked by. Laying in a cramped drawer, in the dark, on cold metal, with flashes of lights and screams in the distance was probably the creepiest place.
I scared so many people, including a middle school aged kid who straight up pooped his pants and a hammered college chick who peed. So it was kind of worth it.
I actually enjoy scaring people. The next night I got to work the hallway that leads people into the morgue. It was narrow enough to kind of ninja climb up it by putting feet and hands on both walls and I was able to get pretty parallel to the ceiling. People would walk right below me and I would either yell or drop down behind them. I only did that for half an hour before my arms got tired... and got kicked in the groin. Over all a much better experience than the drawer.
28. Sounds like fun
An abandoned mental institution in New Jersey. My friend brought us there and we wandered the grounds and went to a few buildings, including the morgue. The offices still had patient files and the pediatric area still had kids artwork. It had been abandoned for about eight years at that point. It was really creepy and also really sad.
27. Better safe than sorry
I went to a rest stop at 1 am outside Springfield Illinois a few years back. Went to the restroom and there was blood everywhere. It looked like something got slaughtered. I have never high tailed it out of somewhere so quickly beforehand.
This occurred at a rest stop along hwy 55 outside of Springfield. This was a very old rest stop (not a gas station).
26. Brain surgery seems terrifying to me
Operating room for brain surgery.
It's freezing cold, they wheel you up to this stainless steel bed with a cage you put your head in. They tighten down clamps on your head so it can't move. Then knock you out.
You wake up multiple times over a 4.5-hour surgery, semi-conscious, eyes closed but you can say "I hear you guys", or snap your fingers and hold a finger up like "waiter", and the anesthesiologist hits you with a dose.
After they're done, they poke a giant needle (ice pick) into different facial muscles to make sure they didn't break anything. Poking it into a muscle causes subconscious flinching and they look at the muscle group flinching to make sure each category is still rigged up. I had a bunch of scabs and taped cotton balls across my face and scalp. Then they seal up your skull and sign off on it.
They use reciprocating saws and similar power tools to carpenters, it's morbid, terrifying, cold. But it can give you your life back. I spent 2 nights in the hospital and was driving to work 7 days later feeling like a million bucks.
25. It's like a 6th sense where you know someone else is around
I had a friend who cleaned out and sold foreclosed homes for a living. He once took me on a ride to a house he had to photograph for the bank after it had gone into foreclosure. From the moment we got there, it was unsettling. It was in the area of a ski resort, and the neighborhood was wealthy, but once we stepped inside, it was clear that it had been used as a kind of boarding house for resort staff. Numbers outside each of the bedroom doors, large closets/ weird spaces turned into bedrooms. The place was filthy, with black garbage bags everywhere, pizza boxes, booze bottles, like clearly a party house for staff, but recently abandoned.
At one point, I was on the ground floor, and my friend was in the basement when I suddenly got full body chills. I was standing in the kitchen and there was a bathroom next to it with the door closed, and I somehow knew that there was someone hiding in that bathroom. At the very same instant, my friend called me down to the basement where he had found a back corner that had been converted into another sleeping area. There was a television still on, just showing static, and a kitchen knife on a crate next to the mattress. That was the moment I stepped directly behind my 6’4”, 300lb friend and told him we had to get out of there.
I’m pretty sure the home was being used as an illegal boarding house for undocumented resort workers, and I honestly felt bad for the terrified kid who was still squatting in the basement, but I sure didn’t want to find him.
Pixabay
24. I can't imagine how you would just walk away from a place and leave everything there
Forest Haven is an abandoned insane asylum in Maryland. It’s posted no trespassing and technically patrolled by guards, but in reality, it is very easy to get into. I was there two weeks ago with my Significant Other, exploring and taking photos. There are 22 buildings on the property, all just wide open and abandoned, covered in collapsed ceiling tiles, broken glass, and graffiti. There is still furniture in some of the rooms, and if you delve deep enough into the property, you can still find patient records that were left behind when they closed.
We actually found a stack of patient files in a dark, windowless room. It was so surreal, reading about a “severely mentally retarded” man with “a history of schizophrenia” who “talks incessantly.” This patient had a 1-page handwritten summary for every year that he had been in the hospital, and they all started out the same... “Kenny is an almost 45-year old white male with severe mental retardation and a history of schizophrenia. He has been at Forest Haven for five years”. Only the age and duration change from page to page. The first one is dated 1973, and the last page in his file is a printed memorial flyer showing he died in September of 1990. The facility was ordered to close in 1974 but didn’t actually close its doors until 1991. In its last year of operation, there were 9 deaths at the asylum. Kenny was one of them.
The creepiest part? The patient whose file I randomly opened up to, in the middle of a stack of wet, moldering files, sitting on the corner of a collapsing desk in an interior room of an abandoned basement? He shared the same first and middle name as my Significant Other. Just a weird, creepy coincidence in a cold, wet, creepy place.
23. Yeah, I'll pass, thanks though
I was on a family vacation to Atlanta, about 1972. We went to visit some cousins of my grandmother. Twin sisters, never married, in their 80's. The house was in a rundown neighborhood. From the street, you'd think it was abandoned. Overgrown yard, part of the roof caved in, boarded up windows. Inside, it was all antiques, and furniture from the 30's and 40's, slowly deteriorating, and it looked as though they hadn't dusted in years. Wallpaper peeling, old portraits half fallen.
Looking up to the second floor from the stairs, just cobwebs and collapsed ceilings. They said they hadn't been up there in years. And definitely rat noises. They both looked and lived like ghosts, and seemed half mad, very civil and proper but off. As an 8-year-old, I was terrified, especially when one of them joked and said "You should leave him here. He can live with us". I burst into tears, and we left.
22. How does that pass the home inspection
About 5 years ago I was living in a town just outside of Washington DC. The house was a short 2 story house with a basement that was built in the 50s. The whole house has a weird vibe to it, not exactly scary, but unsettling. In 2011, the year that we moved in, the guy that built the house stopped by, he told us that he built the house with his dad and three brothers in 1952. During the building, they found a few skeletons while they were digging out the driveway and of course called the police. Turns out the bodies were union soldiers from the civil war who had most likely been killed during the battle of bull run and buried as the Union army marched back to DC.
Also, the basement was unfinished, flooded constantly, and had a spricket infestation.
21. I mean, it's Salem, after all
My family went house hunting one weekend and we came across one in Salem MA that had been built in the 1700s. It looked it, inside and out. The lady who’d been showing us houses really tried to push us to commit to this one. It was a decent enough house size wise and in pretty decent shape... but none of us could shake the eerie gut feeling we got as we were going through it.
We all admitted that the creepy feeling was the strongest when we opened the basement door. None of us was brave enough to go down. When we got a moment to ourselves my mom said she’d gotten the vibe that bad things had happened in that house. Like, people had been killed or something. We all admitted we’d gotten the same feeling and politely noped right out of there.
20. Crazy to think old churches sit on top of hundreds of dead people
Visited the crypt of a church in Bayeux, France. I was there on a school trip and we could choose whether to go to this historic old church or see the Bayeux tapestry. I chose the church. If I recall they had just found the crypt a couple of years before.
So I was down there by myself, taking pictures, and after a couple of minutes, I started feeling downright nauseous. Like, “I’m going to get sick right here” nauseous. Went upstairs to get some air, and the feeling went away instantly. Creeped me out, and when I went down with the group afterward I felt totally fine.
19. What is a half floor
At my college, there's a weird "second and a half floor" annex between floors two and three of a building on campus. Anyway, in the bathroom on that floor, there's a wooden panel in the wall that you can open. I went in once with some friends, and it was a small alcove with a creepy looking doll and some drawings that look like a kid made them. Very creepy. Reality is warped on that floor.
Photo by Aimee Vogelsang on Unsplash
18. Nothing funny about a ha-ha fence
Personally, the Royal Derwent Hospital in New Norfolk, Tasmania. It's the old asylum, now derelict, partially burned, and partly destroyed by arson. It was the longest continuously operating mental health institution in Australia.
I was allowed to go inside the 'high security' end when on a university group, and it's truly disturbing. Super thick reinforced doors, small, dark rooms with dirty walls, and thick glass windows with curved ledges so you weren't able to sit on them. The rooms I went to overlooked the yard, which had what was called a "ha-ha" fence -- a fence that looked short, but the ground sloped down towards so it was much, much taller than it appears. The high-security end is where people like Martin Byrant (the man who committed the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996) would be held if the Asylum was still operational today, and it shows.
It's an entirely hopeless place to be inside. Given how mental health patients are treated in Australia now, it's pretty disturbing to see how things used to be, and how bleak everything was. And the rotting and decrepit building really helps sell the illusion.
17. Who needs monsters when you have people
The "Killing Fields" memorial in Cambodia. I was there in 2005 so I don't know how much it's changed but there was a huge stack of skulls/bones, blood on the walls etc. The worst part of the tour by far was a huge tree that had about a one-foot indentation in it about two feet off the ground. The guide explained that the indentation was made by picking up children by the feet and smashing their skulls into the tree to kill them so they could save on bullets. It was somebody's job to literally stand there all day picking up children by the feet and smashing their brains out against a tree.
After hearing that I had the most physically sick reaction I've ever had in my life. I started shaking and sweating PROFUSELY. I was drenched in sweat in a matter of seconds. I felt physically sick and couldn't eat or sleep for three days. I couldn't focus on anything. I felt like a zombie. I wish I never would have went there and it's why I will never go to any of the former holocaust concentration camps, or anything remotely like it. I guess I just don't have the stomach for being near places where mass evil against innocents has occurred.
16. Don't anger mother
I went to an interview shortly out of grad school. I’m a librarian, and it was a cataloging job. It was located outside of the city, on a remote country road. There were no other buildings or houses located nearby. The address was a house. I was desperate enough not to turn around and drive away. I get up to the porch, and there was a VERY LARGE dog waiting in the mudroom.
I knocked on the door, and out comes this Norman Bates type, and he starts touring me around the main floor of the house which is set up as an office, explaining to me that “Mother” is the supervisor. The place is musty, and has a Bates motel meets The Office decor. By the time he takes me out the back deck to VERY rusty, dirty white antique deck furniture I’m thinking “What am I doing here. Am I going to be murdered?” And then he gives me a test for cataloging (the most normal thing so far) and once I finish it, explains “Mother”’s rules.
She’s super strict about a lot of things, but especially the dog. No complaints about dog, ever. I go back through the house with him, and sure enough, there is a photo on the wall of Mr. Bates and Mother. I got out of there and ignored further emails from him.
The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t apply to random jobs without researching.
15. This is sadder than anything
I went with the family to see Angkor Wat (Huge temple, an absolute marvel, was featured in Tomb Raider I believe) and stopped in the town center for a bite to eat with our guide. We wandered away from the guide just to explore a bit and we were approached by a young girl (15-16) carrying what looked to be a sleeping toddler; she asked us to buy milk for her baby and we obliged because hey, babies need food.
Just as we were about to walk into the store our guide spots us and tells us to get in his car (we used it for transportation to and from a bunch of temples); the girl then starts screaming profanities at us and the guide and we pile into our car. She started banging on the windows of the car (while still screaming) after the door was closed, and surprisingly enough the toddler still didn't wake up. We asked our guide what just happened and he relayed this to us:
Apparently, in Cambodia (and some other countries), gangs will profit off of trafficking from children with a form of "pity" trafficking. They will take a small child (toddler) and drug them so they look as though they're sleeping; they'll pass the child off to a young girl who will beg for food/money/etc and pose as the toddler's mother. Then, she'll pass the child off to a new girl who will repeat the act. They do this until the child wakes up, will feed them, and then start the process again.
As the toddlers get older they'll be taught to try and sell things to tourists; if they fail to meet a quota they'll sometimes lose limbs (fingers, hands, arms, legs) and will then run a story about how they "stepped on an old landmine." This is actually somewhat possible as the country is still reeling from the impact Pol Pot had and there are still unearthed landmines, but the issue is that <1% is close to the main city/Angor Wat which is where a majority of these children were.
We were shocked, to say the least; this seemed kind of far fetched but What else would we believe? When we went into town the next day (with our guide) what did we see? The same toddler being passed to a different girl, still knocked out, still in the same clothing.
Definitely creepy. I loved Angkor Wat and thought it was beautiful, but I don't plan on going back there any time soon.
14. Let's just focus on the tasty burger
Earnestine and Hazels in Memphis. Old Blues bar that Ray Charles played at back in the day and prior to that was a brothel at one point, ran by 2 sisters, Earnestine and Hazel. Later, we find the place is reportedly haunted.
We had a few drinks and ate possibly the best handmade hamburger I’ve ever had.
We venture upstairs which still looked like an old boarding house with dark-colored beadboard on the walls and ceiling. It was darkly lit with empty rooms filled with dim colored lights, broken pianos, jukeboxes, odd furniture, broken desks, etc.. The upstairs bathroom had a claw foot tub with a single red light bulb in there.. it felt like a murder scene. We were buzzed but I still felt a bit uneasy up there.
There was one door closed and you could tell someone was in there. Figured it was the office or something.
The end of the hallway had an upstairs bar that we chilled at for a while and left soon after.
A few months later I read about the owner, who lived upstairs (and was probably who I saw in that upstairs room), committed suicide in that very room.
It was a very cool place but I will probably never go back in there.
13. War, War never changes
Back during Vietnam, my unit got hit hard in the jungle. We split and one group went to help find the VC who attacked us, we stayed behind to evacuate the wounded. The 4 able bodies were supposed to hop on with the injured and go. We load up and one chopper doesn't make it back so we 4 can't load we would be grossly overweight. Its late sun is low pilot says he will drop these guys and come back for us. So we divvy up ammo from the wounded and squat in an open field. 20 minutes go by then an hour, two hours it's now pitch black and were seated in a grassy field.
We spent the whole night looking at every stick and leaf that twitched, you could feel the tension. We sat in a star back to back with our rifles pointed out. We knew we couldn't repel the attack but we decided to take as many as we could before being overrun, if overrun we would pull grenades and do everyone and the VC for 25 feet in every direction. The tension was thick, sunrise we heard the Huey come.
On the way back he had a hydraulics issue they worked all night to fix it so we could get flown out ASAP. All 4 dust offs had issues and took bullets so that is why the other one didn't return the first time. That field of grass was extremely spooky even if it was just in our minds.
Every rustle of grass, every bug flapping its wings got a muzzle pointed at it. No sleep was had by anyone. We didn't even get up to pee just hung it out and wizzed in the grass.
12. I have a pretty good guess what that room was used for
I was working at Livingston Mall in New Jersey at Toyzam in 2011/2012. This mall is dirty behind the scenes. It was supposed to be a mall for the rich as Livingston is full of rich people but no one came because they went to the vastly superior Short Hills Mall.
Anyway, one of my things is exploring new places and this was the first time I was able to explore this place. We had pallets that we needed to get rid of too, and my boss gave me the job of making them disappear.
So anyway, one day I’m traversing the labyrinthine back halls of this place and I come upon a door that seems to be in a weird place. I open it up and peek inside and it’s like a 3 by 11 foot mini hall, maybe a bit longer. In it is a long series of shelves with nothing on them. There's leaves on the ground, roaches both living and dead on the shelves and floor, and a set of overhanging tube lights that had at best three semi-functional bulbs, casting a pale eerie glow from them. Of that, there are chains hanging off of them. This thing looked and seemed straight up out of a horror film.
Amusingly my boss when I told him and showed him the place said: “Why am I not surprised you found a place like this?” Because he knew I liked exploring and it’s just something I do. I never found out what the place was for, but it did make a good place to stow some wooden pallets.
11. This dude actually lives in the Twilight Zone
We're a Middle Eastern family, my dad left his home country and fled to Saudi Arabia to work there, went back after making some money and got married in his home country and went back to Saudi with his wife. my mom gave birth to her first son in the early 90s, and then they had another three kids in the late 90s. Three sons and a daughter. I was the youngest.
We lived in an annex, an apartment at the top of the building that takes around 25% of the roof of the building, the rest of the roof is a large area filled with TV satellites and other junkies.
My parents were quite discreet about all the shady things that happened in that apartment until we grew up and they became more open about it.
The apartment had three bedrooms, a living room, two bathrooms, a very tiny wooden attic, and a small kitchen.
I used to sleep in a bunk bed with my older brother being at the top, until he asked me to switch with him, and I liked it at first, but then I realized my brother didn't switch with me for no reason, after a while, whenever we go to bed every night, around 11 pm, I keep hearing some noise on the ladder of the bed, like someone is climbing it,I never had the guts to look. sometimes I would feel the presence and pressure of someone sitting on the bed too, but by then I've developed this technique where I would just cover my whole body with the blanket and force myself to sleep. I told my mom and she was like: there's nothing, just be a real man and sleep.
I would also hear kids laugh in the living room, which is next to our bedroom, but I grew to ignore these voices and eventually It stopped bothering me.
I remember a few nights where the neighbors would knock on our door at 3 am and they'd ask my parents to not let us ride our bicycles in the roof because it's disturbing them, my parents apologized to them, even though we were all asleep and there was no one on the roof riding their bicycles!
I knew there was something wrong with that place when I noticed that our bicycles were in different places in the roof the next morning, and there's no way anyone can go to the roof and play around cause the door was locked, and the only person who had the locks was my dad.
My siblings knew about this too but they didn't talk to me about it, cause I was the youngest and they didn't want to scare me.
We moved back to our home country because my dad wanted to start some business over there and we stayed there for three years. that was when my dad decided we should go back to Saudi. It was so hard to find an apartment and our apartment has already been rented to a couple. but there was an empty apartment on the first floor in the same building, And my dad took it cause it was the closest to his workshop. I thought that this time it'll all be normal, but on the contrary, it was way much worse than that annex.
After just one week, I woke up around 4 am at the sound of Fajr Prayer (Sunrise prayer) and as soon as I opened my eye, there was someone sitting next to me, wearing worn-out clothes with broken eyeglasses, and blood stains all over his shirt. He was rubbing his hands on my blanket, I looked at him and he smiled. That was the scariest moment in my whole life. I felt like I'm going to be killed or something, It wasn't sleep paralysis ( Cause believe me, I know the difference) I lied my head back and I probably passed out till the next morning. When I told my mom she said it's just a bad dream. Whatever. and no one at my school believed me, it was like a funny thing for them to do, to make me talk about what I've seen, just to laugh about it. The next day I woke up at the same exact time, this time there was no one on my bed, but I saw a guy wearing weird gothic kind-of clothes and he was next to my sister, playing with her hair.
I haven't seen anything else after that one, but I always heard people talk in the room, more like hisses and whistles, sometimes someone would breathe in my ears while I'm asleep, sometimes they'd take my pillow away. but that was it. they never truly hurt us. I find it fun to talk about it right now.
My sister was friends (kind of) with our neighbors daughter, she was with her in school, she told me some creepy things about their family, things I haven't given much attention at the time because I was young, and I think they had something to do with all these shady things: They never closed their apartment door. it's always open. ALWAYS. My sister also told me that she once saw her friend bathing with her clothes on? And she always smelled so bad.
She also told me that the bathroom lock would be unlocked in our apartment sometimes when she's showering.
My oldest brother said that he would usually see my mom wandering in the house while he's pretty much sure that's asleep in the bedroom. and when he asked her she'd say that she was asleep. My other brother said he once saw two shadows dancing on the wall in the living room.
My mom opened up about it a few years ago and told me that sometimes she would check on us while we're asleep, and then she'd see us playing in the living room at the same time. she also said that every couple of months she would ask my dad to buy new cups and glasses cause they would go missing for no reason. she said she never knew what was going on, neither did my dad. but they didn't want to acknowledge it to us cause they didn't want us to be afraid, my dad couldn't afford to move to another place. She also said that some of my sister's dolls would be scattered around the house sometimes. She told me that she once saw a man with a long beard in the corridor and that she ran to her bedroom and locked the door till my dad came back from work. She also told me that when she was at the hospital (before giving birth to me), My dad woke up to another woman next to him, he said she kissed him and told him that she loves him, when my dad asked her who is she, she just left the room and he never saw her again.
That's everything I can remember right now, we live in different countries now and we rarely meet, but when we do we talk about it and laugh as if it was a funny thing to talk about. We never knew what was happening, but it was quite an experience.
10. With a name like Forest Haven, you would expect it to be a lot nicer
Forest Haven was 100% The scariest place I've ever been. The patient records scattering the floor have names and dates up to 1995 and there are old blood vials and needles all over the floor too.
It's a large campus and some buildings are far far creepier than others. I can confirm you are NOT supposed to be there. We snuck through the woods about a mile down from the guard station. It also is STILL an active campus! We started in the main building with the dorms and operating rooms, which wasn't too bad. The crematorium was a little creepy. Then onto some classroom-style buildings. The administration offices and clinics were the most horrible things I've ever walked into. Definitely, the feeling of 'you shouldn't be here." There is one admin/clinic building that is barbed wired off very well for some reason. I did not feel the desire to go in.
Me and my Significant other got warier and freaked out the worse the buildings we went into got, and I think at some point I stopped taking photos because I was just too distracted by that eerie feeling. We ended up getting spooked when we thought we heard a person's voice in the distance and sprinted through the woods the mile back. I wasn't even sure if we left the way we came in.
Driving home we sat in silence and were both like "hey... let's never do that again." just as a panel underneath my car broke and started to scrape the ground! Fixed it in place with some wire, and then the next day my Brakes failed on the interstate and almost died. Now I'm not superstitious but... I think I was cursed by Forest Haven
9. Wait, doesn't everyone have a guillotine to discourage thieves?
My house. The guy who lived here last was super into DIY home renovation, except he wasn’t very good at it. Our basement has three sections, one being regular basement with like a washing machine and a dryer and stuff. The second section is a little workshop area. When we toured the house there were a lot of studded collars in there.
The third section is where it gets terrifying. The guy who lived here last put a hot tub in the basement. There’s already one on the deck, and he built a room underneath the deck and put in another hot tub. It didn’t work very well because he was bad at building, and so it’s a dark room painted all black with a hole in the middle where the hot tub was. There’s mold growing EVERYWHERE. There are 3 doors that don’t open, with what looks like small bones coming out from under. There’s also a shower. Pretty sure this is where the guy kept his dead bodies. Also, there are nearly 45 light switches in the house, half of which do absolutely nothing. Also, all the walls are painted lime green.
I have one more creepy thing:
I live in a very sketchy town. When I was I’m middle school, my walk home took me through the roughest part of town. Boarded up houses and constant fighting on the streets. The one house that I always walked by had always given off a really creepy vibe. The grass was always dead, windows were broken, etc. One day when I walked past they had their curtains drawn back and there was a guillotine in the window. Like a full-sized guillotine with a blade and everything. Freaked me out.
8. I'm out
For myself, I think it would be a call I responded to about two years ago or so. I work in a pretty rural part of my province in Canada, and there’s usually only about two or three other constables out at any one time and we’re always at least twenty minutes in the opposite direction from one another.
So anyway, dispatch gets a call about someone standing across the highway from a farmhouse maybe ten or fifteen minutes away from where I was at and the occupants of the house were really frightened by this (they were two teens, parents were out of home for whatever reason). Keep in mind, most folks in Canada don’t really keep firearms in the home and we, in fact, encourage people to avoid using a firearm if they feel threatened and to just wait for the police to arrive.
So I get on my way down to this place and it’s about half past 8 on a Tuesday evening in mid-November. It’s dark about 6 pm at this point and by 6:45 it’s pitch black outside. I can see the farmhouse and the kids had all the lights on and the curtains closed. I don’t see this person they called about so I come up the driveway and knock on the door and announce my presence and the older kid (the girl we will call “Stella”) opens the door. I ask them where their parents are and I learn they’re out of town, so at this point, I’m like “they’re just freaked out”. We get scared kids thinking people are breaking in at least once a month so I’m totally understanding. I take a look around for them and I don’t see anything so I’m just like “alright, I took a look and your place is safe, yata yata” and the kids still don’t seem so convinced, so I tell them to just keep the curtains drawn and lights on and I’d be back through their area a few More times throughout the night to check in for their comfort. I leave, everything’s fine.
Two hours later I’m dispatched out there AGAIN and when I’m rolling up this time I can see a person trying to open the shed to the left of their house, and they notice me so they start running toward the field. I follow and lose sight of them. Call another unit to come in, so my partner arrives and she and I look about and can’t find the dude. I hung around there for the rest of the night to be safe.
So I come in again next night for shift and day shift guys tell me they found an old army style tent out in the wooded area near the house id been babysitting, and they arrested the dude for trespassing and outstanding warrants. Apparently, he had a thing for kids, and I don’t mean “he wanted to be friends”. It makes my skin crawl that I was there the first time and he was probably watching me, and lord knows what he could’ve done to those kids.
7. That guard seems bad at his job
In high school, my friends and I would go up to the local abandoned state mental hospital to explore. The rooms were mostly creepy from the state of decay they were in. There was a lot of graffiti, with things like “666” and band names (Tool, Marilyn Manson) spray painted on the walls. The graffiti wasn’t creepy, just markings from other teenagers. Sometimes we would find bullet casings scattered on the floor.
However, the creepiest area I saw was the underground tunnels. A security guard “caught” us on the property and told us to come back in a half hour after the State did their rounds. We met up with him and he took us down into the tunnels that staff would have used to travel between buildings. I just remember how dark it was and he was the only one with a flashlight, as that cell phones at this time were Nokia bricks.
The other creepy part was when he drove us around the property in his Dodge Caravan that had his cat in it. Dry cat food was all over the floor.
16 year old me was really stupid, hahaha. Even though nothing bad happened it always sounds like the makings of a horror movie.
Like many other old hospitals, it was torn down and turned into condos. Only an administrative building still exists.
There is a little cemetery (Metfern) in the woods nearby where you can find the gravestones of the patients. They are only marked with C’s and P’s (Catholic/Protestant) and their patient numbers. I like to stop by every now and then to pay my respects. I have noticed that someone comes by, I assume on religious holidays, and leaves a flower on every grave.
6. Jim ain't afraid of no ghosts
When you're a teenager and first get your drivers license, you like to stay up late with your friends but there's nothing to do at night for a bunch of 17-year-olds. So you go find fun. There was a place that we all called Shadytown here in New Jersey. I don't remember what it was officially called, but I remember it was around Montgomery, NJ and I think it has since been demolished. I remember we parked at an elementary school and just behind it there was this place. It was an entire decrepit ghost town with houses, a school, and a psychiatric hospital all falling apart.
We went late at night a few times. We explored some of the abandoned houses and the school the few times we went. It was creepy for sure but after having been a few times we actually felt kind of comfortable around there. Comfortable may be a stretch, but we weren't exactly scared. I remember sitting on a bench outside of the school once, passing a bottle of Poland Spring around with my friends, as 17-year-olds do. It's not like we'd go there to hang out, we were there to explore, but it got less creepy.
Jim only came a few times but always seemed almost reckless in the way he moved about the horror movie buildings like he was doing a walkthrough with a realtor. He'd see a closed door, and open it up and walk right into the middle of the room. If you've ever been exploring abandoned creepy buildings, you'd know that you tend to creep about kind of slow, peeking around corners and through cracked doors before moving on. Jim just moved around like he belonged there, which he really did everywhere we went. Not with a swagger, just comfort and confidence.
On maybe our 8th or 9th visit Jim found a basement window into the psych hospital. The hospital was always hard to get into. The doors were always locked and the windows boarded up. We were all cool exploring the houses and the school, but the abandoned psych hospital in Shadytown was a little heavy for us. Not for Jim though. He went right for the window, and when some of us told him not to go in there, he just looked confused and said "why?" and went on in. We were all true, so we went in after him even though we really didn't want to. Our flashlights and headlamps showed us to be in really a typical basement, with pipes running along the ceiling and concrete floors. It was a big room but nothing was in it, but there was a door. Of course, Jim walked right over to and went through. The other 4 or 5 of us (it was a while ago, I don't remember) froze up, but Jim hollered, "come on" so we went.
We were in a really long hallway with concrete floors and cinder block walls, lit only by our flashlights. At least we were towards the end of the hallway and we could see the wall at our backs. At this point, I started to get really scared. Me and another guy said that we didn't want to go down that hallway. Jim said, "what, do you think there are ghosts here?" and I said that there might be. Jim yells down that hallway, "IF THERE ARE ANY GHOSTS HERE, DO NOT MESS WITH US." This made me really angry, and I asked him what he was trying to do to us. The other guys were really scared too, but Jim laughed at us and said that there aren't any ghosts here and started walking down the hallway. We were annoyed and scared but we kept going because who wants to be the first to run when you're 17 and abandoning creepy abandoned psych hospitals with your friends? We went into some rooms that had a bunch of old disgusting linens and mice in them, but then we eventually got into the morgue.
It was almost cathartic to reach the morgue, like when the monster in the horror movie finally shows itself and is visible for the rest of the movie. Yeah, I detected that this was an extremely messed up place to be, and that we should definitely not be here, and that if a demon was going to possess me or tear out my throat it would happen in this room. But at least I didn't have to worry about it anymore, this was the hot spot. We stood still, and even Jim stood still for a second, and we flashed our lights on the old abandoned mortuary refrigerated chambers, where the bodies were stored. And here is the reason this story is about Jim. He went right over there and opened one of those doors, pulled out the gurney, and laid down on it. It's worth noting that the gurney itself was gross regardless of all the implications of death associated with such a thing. He asked for one of us to push him in and close the door. We all said no. He actually started to get kind of angry, and called us names, which caused Ed to go quietly push him in and close the door. We just stood there and waited for what seemed like a really long time, but who knows. It was probably 30 seconds. Eventually, we heard a knock, and we all jumped out of our skin. But it was Jim wanting to be let out, so Ed opened the door and pulled the gurney out.
We were really stunned at what we just saw. Who in their right mind would do such a thing? Why? We all had the bravado thing going on, but that is one of the scariest things I can even imagine doing. He went over to it like he had to like it was his job to go into that refrigerator chamber. When he got out he just laughed a little bit. He started opening other doors and pulling out the gurneys while we hung back towards the entrance. He looked like he got bored and left the room. Jim started to go BACK down the hallway to explore again, but we had enough. Forget you, Jim. We're not going down there, we are leaving. We walked back to the window we crawled in from and helped each other out. Jim followed us like a toddler who was told he can't have candy before dinner.
When we started immediately walking back to our cars, we were all quiet. We were totally freaked out by Jim. And when we got near to the cars he said "What's wrong with you guys? Listen, of course there are spirits. There just weren't any THERE." Then we probably went to Wawa. Jim is now some kinda lawyer last I heard.
5. Seems like a job for Mystery Inc
In rural Missouri, back in high school - there was an old abandoned house on a country road that everyone had heard rumors about - “the dad murdered his whole family inside and then shoved them in refrigerators” or “back in the 30s, the son would murder his classmates on the way home from school”
So, naturally, my friends and I decided to go check it out. The front porch was mostly all caved in, but once we got inside - it was very bizarre how abandoned it truly was. There were newspapers and pieces of mail from the 50s (this was in the early 2000s) and mattresses with what looked like old blood on them.
The kitchen had an old fridge - so I took a photo of it. Then, the room beside the kitchen had another fridge and two large freezers. There was a pair of overalls hanging on a door. It was mostly trashed and pretty creepy since we had to rely on our flashlights and we were all feeling super creeped out by the multiple antiquated refrigerators.
Once back in the car, we went back through the digital camera that I used to take several photos. Almost all of the photos had these very prominent orange/yellow streaks - and on one of the photos of a refrigerator, there was a perfect orange orb circle outline.
We noped out of there, but that wasn’t the last time we went in there either.
4. Every part of this story is crazier than the last
As a paramedic, I've been in people’s homes that are literally insane and have seen some unexplainable things. I've seen weird shrines worshiping things like a squirrel/bird skeleton. People living in a literal sea of cockroaches. No to mention the booby traps.
Get a call for a person down in an intersection. Respond early in the morning around 530 just before dawn. We approach the intersection street lights were still on and there was a fog bank that hadn’t cleared yet which was also very rare for our town. With low visibility, we proceed with caution and we see a power chair on the sidewalk. One that the elderly drive like a rascal. anyway, the power chair was empty.
We exit the ambulance and walk up to the power chair to investigate. The fog bank made it extremely eerie and quiet. I take a few steps down the sidewalk and noticed a small smear of what appeared to be blood. In a short distance, I find another smear. I tell my partner to follow me I think I have something. I soon realized I’m on a trail of smears of blood that are gradually getting bigger.
I’m assuming that a limb is being dragged across the ground and progressively getting worse and bleeding more. I begin to notice a faint sound in the distance. And I realized whatever was leaving this smear of blood was ahead of us. We walked for not being able to see much and the sound gets louder. It’s a moan. The moaning was mixed with a gargling sound. Whatever was up there was alive but as I would find out it shouldn’t have been. I see a figure in the air not touching the ground and I stopped dead in my tracks. My partner being less cowardly than me walks ahead. I follow close behind him and we come up to the figure.
It’s not floating. It’s caught on a chain link fence. And it’s a person. This guys clothes were all torn up. His skin was cold and gray. His head was hanging low and his body was positioned like he was being crucified. And he had no legs. Yes, no legs. Hence the power chair. He had been there all night. Once we cut him down and gave him glucose he was able to tell us his story. His power chair had run out of battery on his way home from the liquor store. No one was around to help him and he didn’t have a phone. So he tried to crawl to a payphone. But his sugar got low being a diabetic and he got caught on a broken chain link fence and ended up climbing half way up it.
This is the closest I’ve ever been to coming across a real zombie. But since zombies don’t exist it was just a diabetic double amputee on a broken fence. The scene was straight out of a movie and felt so real.
3. Sounds like some art project, or maybe a cult, probably a cult
So, my fellow constable and I had a lunch break at the same time and we met up at a little rest area off one of the county line roads. Window to window - typical cop stuff - and we’re chatting and eating. He tells me he got the new set of spike strips (for stopping fleeing vehicles for those that don’t know), and he’s like “oh come look they’ve got a better egress handle”.
I pull up a bit so I can get out at his trunk and he shows me and we’re admiring the new kit and I dunno why he noticed this but for some reason, there were human tracks leading into the wooded area off to our right about 5 meters away. Just beyond where the trees start there’s a barbed wire fence and the area is provincial property and it’s not accessible to the public.
The reason being, there’s an old abandoned mining town down about ten minutes into the woods.
We radio about possible trespassers and we go slogging into the woods. We get there and this place looks like something out of that episode of Looney Tunes where bugs bunny and Yosemite Sam are braving the Klondike gold rush. Only creepy and... well, empty.
Tracks lead toward the mine itself. Of course, it does. Why wouldn’t it? We get to the mine entrance and waltz in like we own the place and there are all these old chains and whatnot hanging from the ceiling of the cave, and it smells like ammonia from animal urine. Bunch of old wooded construction stations strewn everywhere. Creepy.
Yeah well then we turned the flashlights on and both of us nearly pooped a sea turtle:
There were four mannequins in Native American garb in a semi-circle around a dais with some sort of bovine skull and just a bunch of charred wood and things laying around, and the mannequins were painted with eyes and such. No people around though. I guarantee you the screech we heard was from wind passing through a crevice in the cave wall but we both, again, nearly poo'ed a marine reptile. Decided “Nope. Day shift can deal with this crap”.
Yeah anyway, that was the creepiest thing I’ve ever experienced. Maybe it wasn’t even that creepy? Maybe I’m a little scared cat? All I know was it startled me.
2. This one is rough just reading about it
My worst experience was on a ghost tour in New Orleans 2 years ago. We went to some fairly non-active, unimpressive places first. Last, almost as an afterthought it seemed, we ended at this museum on Rampart St. it was a voodoo museum that the tour company operated out of. A total tourist trap. There were four of us, two couples. The tour guide showed us there was a door behind a body bag that was hanging on the wall. She explained behind the door was our last location to investigate for the evening and we would go in twos as we had done before.
My partner and I had gone first at the other big location so we let the couple with us go into this place first. The tour guide took us into another room and showed us to a room with some chairs and a night vision monitor with our friends on it.
They looked to be in a tiny apartment and we could hear they were above us. After not long at all, maybe 3 minutes, they both came back into the room. Looking shaken. They both said “We don’t know what’s going on in there but no bueno. We had to get out.” These were not people who were easily rattled.
Curious, my partner and I went next. There were a few flights of stairs that led into a small apartment. There was a main room with a door off of it to the left that led to a small bedroom. To the right was a door leading to a galley kitchen, a narrow hallway and a bathroom at the end.
We walked around in the living room and bedroom. There were some dolls in the bedroom. One was a Chucky doll. Har har har. We heard what may have been a small child giggling at one point. Nothing big and scary. At that point, I was just wondering if they were not a fan of little kid ghosts or Chucky.
The second we walked across the threshold into the kitchen everything changed. It was small and cramped with a dirty stove and an empty dirty fridge with the doors hanging open. Nothing remarkable, but it was how it FELT. The only way I can describe it is I instantly had that feeling in my stomach that you get on rollercoasters but not in a good way. My mouth went dry and there was something else that seemed to be building...
I tried to shake it off and walked down the narrow hallway to the bathroom. Again, standard bathtub, sink, mirror but that feeling wouldn’t go away and the second feeling crept up even more until I finally pinpointed it. I felt like there was an incredibly angry, evil, malevolent something that hated me to the core of my being staring me down from a quarter of an inch from my face but it was invisible. This thing hated me like nothing could possibly hate anything on this earth and it had just met me. And there was not a shred of a doubt in my mind that this thing was inhuman.
I don’t remember if I told my partner I wanted to leave or if I ran out on my own. I honestly don’t remember coming down the stairs back to the museum. I just remember being in a chair hyperventilating, chilled to the bone with fear. The tour guide looked unaffected. I said “What is in that kitchen?!!” almost sobbing.
She said, kinda blandly, “He doesn’t like me much either.” And then she told us.
This was what’s known as The Rampart Street Murder House. A couple who met during hurricane Katrina lived up there. Their names were Zack and Addie. They were well-known bartenders from the French Quarter. They fought, occasionally, but nothing too serious, it seemed.
One night, out of nowhere, Zack strangled Addie to death and then dismembered her corpse in the bathtub. He cooked her on the stove, then stored the rest of her in the refrigerator, including her head. He wrote a suicide note, then partied for the weekend and capped it off by jumping off the roof of the Omni Hotel.
All of the appliances were the original appliances.
1. Yeah, I'm not really a guy to get scared of anything, but even I might have second thoughts about this house
I investigated a fatal fire in the middle of nowhere in the woods. This house was set off so far into the woods it took me forever to get back there on a dirt road. I pull up in front of the house and of course, the whole thing is boarded up. But the house is huge and old. I got creepy feelings just looking at the place. The front door was boarded up with a bit I didn’t have so I had to climb through a window in the back that the family had left open.
As soon as I stepped foot in the house I felt like everything was wrong. I shouldn’t be there. I shouldn’t walk around. And I shouldn’t take pictures. It was that feeling like when someone is mad at you and the slightest thing will set them off so you just kinda sit there in silence hoping they’ll forget you exist so you can do your thing.
But I was there to do a job and so I started to do my walkthrough and take photos. This was clearly a set fire and the guy who died had been murdered by his grandson. But I still had to document each area of origin thoroughly and do diagrams and all that because fatalities are a big deal. The entire time I’m walking through the house it feels like there’s someone standing behind me, looking for me to slip up just once. Like when your boss is there the one time and he’s just staring at you waiting on you to screw up so he can correct you.
I finished the first floor and headed down into the basement where the guy had died. It was mid-July and it was hot. But as soon as I got to the basement it was like somebody turned on the A/C. Of course, it was pitch black in the basement because A) it’s a basement and there’s not much light down there on a normal day and B) that’s where the bulk of the fire was so everything was pitch black. I walked through the basement into the bedroom. The fire hadn’t reached the bedroom as it had been started at the stairwell which acted as a decent chimney to prevent fire spread throughout the basement, but it did get hot enough in this room that the outline of the guys body was in the carpet right next to his dog’s body’s outline.
As soon as I entered that room every single alarm bell in my mind was screaming “get out you moron, have you not seen a horror movie? This is where the angry ghost of gramps murders you with a hatchet!” But I had a job to do so I stayed, took my photos and collected samples, searched the whole basement for anything to give an idea why this would happen. I frequently had to leave the basement to go outside to give my brain time to stop freaking out. And every time I walked back in the house everything in me was telling me to leave. The whole time I was in the basement it was like someone was standing In the corner, just watching me. And of course, I was working by my tiny flashlight that’s basically useless so that didn’t help much.
The last time I left the house, I crawled through the window and noticed that it had gotten cloudy and really windy while I was inside. Thinking it was a random midwestern storm I walked around the deck and looked out into the yard to find a buck just staring at me. I’d never seen a deer look angry but it just looked furious. I just kinda shrugged my shoulders and half waved and it turned and walked away. As soon as it walked away the wind died and it started to get warm again.
The creepiest house I’ve ever been to and weirdest stuff I’ve ever experienced.
