Redditor stories

Redditor stories-Eerie Towns, Disappearing Diners, and Creepy Gas Stations redditors describe their most creepy encounters.

Centralia, Pennsylvania

(Centralia, Pennsylvania) JohnDS

r/nachtkaese Centralia, PA – the whole town and interstate was removed in 1962* to accommodate an enormous underground coal mine fire that’s still burning today. The whole neighborhood grid (weirdly, I don’t remember if there’s houses still or not?) and highway is still there, and there’s still smoke coming up through cracks in the street. The whole dystopian vibe that always accompanies an abandoned town + wondering if I’d fall through a hole in the street into some literal hellscape below was plenty for me. Walked around for an hour or so and then hightailed it out of there. *edit after re-reading Wikipedia article: fire started in 1962, town mostly relocated in 1983 after kids started falling into sinkholes, rest of the re-location via eminent domain in 1992. Edit 2: jesus fucking christ yes, this town was the inspiration for Silent Hill.

Old barn

r/literal9

My grandparents had a big farm when I was growing up and all of the grandkids would help work it over the summer when we were out of school. Anytime we saw a rabbit we were supposed to get it with the hoe or grab the shotgun. I was around 12 or so when I saw a little rabbit in the beans and I didn’t want my grandfather to see it so I tried to chase it off. Followed it into the brush on the land and for whatever reason I just kept following it because usually I’d lose sight of them pretty quickly once they hit the brush. Kept following it until found what was clearly an old barn ruin. These are pretty normal to happen upon where I’m from and they’re fun to look around inside, so I went in. It was weirdly kept up really well with antique tools in great shape and fresh hay. I worried had crossed into our neighbors’ property so high-tailed it out of there. I asked my grandfather about it and he said our land went way far past what had described, and I couldn’t have left our land in the short amount of time was gone, so he followed me out there and we couldn’t find it. I checked every summer I worked there and never found it again. Not creepy but it always drove me crazy where that stupid barn went.

Old abandoned hotel

r/urgehal666

There’s this old abandoned hotel a couple hours away from me. It’s not like a modern hotel, but like an old Victorian house that was turned into a B&B. It’s totally boarded up, big fence around it with barbed wire. Apparently it’s pretty damn haunted. In high school me and some friends went to go check it out. It’s in the middle of this a circular road, not a roundabout but you can go around several times before feeding back onto the main road. It takes about ninety seconds to go around this circle. Anyway, the first time we drive through all the shades on the windows are drawn. We drive around again, only half of the shades are drawn. The next time we drive by all the shades are open. We drove around one last time and all the shades were drawn again. We freaked out and drove the hell out of there.

Abandoned buildiings

r/oceanceaser In the interior of BC I spent a lot of time exploring in the truck. Found loads of abandoned buildings and cabins but the coolest place that a friend showed me was an abandoned hippie commune deep in the forest. There were some crazy house designs, one looked like an ark, one was a ~40ft teepee clad with aluminum. The place was clearly built by people who had very little building experience, but lots of creativity and motivation. There was a lot of weird stuff found on the property, and I even found a bike that was stolen off me the year prior. I have an Imgur album I’ll find and link. https://imgur.io/gallery/5Ko6q

highway

r/CaptLongbeard Was driving through Illinois to get to Chicago about a decade ago with a group of friends and we stopped at a Taco Bell. The first thing we noticed was that the workers were acting very odd. Everything they said was monotone and rehearsed. After sitting in this fairly busy restaurant for a bit, we kind of all just looked at each other at the same time as we realized that none of the conversations happening around us made any sense. The people were speaking, and it was English, but the sentences weren’t logical. They were just saying words at each other. We didn’t say much about it until we got outside, at which point we all freaked out and confirmed each others’ experiences at once, and got the fuck out of there. We jokingly refer to that place as the “NPC Training Center” since the people didn’t seem to be real, or they were learning how to be human or something. Still freaks me out. Edit: yes, I believe the orders were all correct, which I guess just ups the creepy factor Edit 2: we were young and actually pretty straight edge at the time, none of us were high or anything. Edit 3: the best I can remember about the weird conversations was that they were stringing several prepositions in a row with no real sentence structure, forced laughter and nodding, stuff like that. Like they were mimicking how humans talk. Think of those “what English sounds like to a non-speaker” videos on YouTube, but EVERYBODY was doing it all around us.

r/Illbeanicefella A couple years ago a buddy and I got turned around on a side road in rural north Missouri. I had no service for GPS and it was pouring rain so I headed south toward my destination hoping to run into a main highway. We ended up coming into the town of Skidmore MO. It’s a tiny town in the middle of nothing but there’s something dark about that place. Infamously in the 80s a man known as the town bully was killed in broad daylight in the middle of town there. Not one person spoke up about who killed him and it’s never been solved despite many witnesses. There’s also been disappearances, and a brutal crime a few years ago involving a baby being cut out of a woman’s womb. Keep in mind this is a town of only 270 people. As we drove down the main drag several people gave us a blank but intimidating stare, completely unnerving. Once we got out of the town my buddy mentioned he’d had a sense of impending doom or danger as we drove through, weirdly enough I’d been feeling the same way. I’d never had a such a persistent gut feeling of danger like that before. We agreed to never ever fucking go through Skidmore again. There’s something seriously evil about that town, it shouldn’t exist.

r/hey_there_kitty_cat

Not just one, but there’s a whole lot of places in rural NZ that will scare the shit out of someone who isn’t used to it. Hell even some of my Kiwi friends would sometimes be like fuck no l’m not hiking out there with you guys, good luck. If had to choose one, we were doing a 5 day hike, had pretty good maps and directions. Now there’s a lot of nationally funded huts throughout the island, very well marked. We found this one random hut that was definitely not on the maps, with a bunch of older guys just hammered partying inside. And this was way out of where these guys could’ve just walked up from town to party in for the afternoon. No gear whatsoever, just the craziest looking 60+ guys hammered in this random unmarked cabin. When we came back by later the place was absolutely empty and musty, so they packed up their trash and stuff but it still seemed all gross and dirty. We were all kind of baffled, did we actualy meet all these crazy hillbilly old men partying in the middle of nowhere? They obviously weren’t going up there to clean it up, and where the hell did this cabin even come from just in the middle of these mountains? And how did they just randomly hike up there with cases of beer and booze and speakers?

Closed down sign

r/NamesJeffrey Not creepy, just weird to me. A music store seemed to just show up in my town. I’d lived here three years and never saw it. Went in, and the guy had one bass guitar in the store. Me, being a bassist, played it and fell in love. Bought it, and then the next week when was in town, the store was totally empty, and looked like it hasn’t been open in a long time. Got a new bass out of it though, so I’m cool with it being a spooky ghost store.

r/seersucker. In the 7th grade I had a friend that lived near a beach on a bay of lake Michigan. One day in early May it reached 70 degrees, nearly unheard of for that time of year in northern Wisconsin. My two friends, including the beach friend, excitedly rode our bikes down to the beach to maybe dip our toes in, expecting still frigid waters, and then “tan” for the rest of the afternoon. The water, though, was surprisingly warm. Like bathwater warm. In this particular area of the bay the water was shallow for about a half mile out, and we joyously splashed around, wading deeper and deeper until we were about chest deep. As we dunked each other and swam with abandon I started to feel sick. Bad headache, nausea, wobbly. Just then, my other two friends mentioned that they also felt sick. We headed back to shore, nearly crawling by the time we got out. The three of us collapsed under a tree and fell asleep for 2ish hours. When we woke up we talked about how weird it was. I dipped my toe back in the water and it was freezing cold. To this day have no idea what was in there. I do know that there is a chemical plant in town that used to manufacture things like agent orange, and that their practices were known to be less that environmentally conscious. I have never touched that water since.