It's since been torn down, but there used to be an abandoned mental hospital near where I grew up. When I was a teenager I broke into it a few times to do...stuff.
It was crazy because everything was still there. It was like everyone went home for the day and then they just shut it down. There were papers on desks, coffee cups, made beds, even framed pictures on the desks.
Had a luxury fitness gym and rec center shut down back when I was a teen. It was just behind some wooded division by my Mom’s job at church. This rec center was untouched outside of dust when we got into it. It was nothing short of spectacular and we had the entire place to ourselves to explore. It was like going back in time 10-20 years. It must have been out of use for a while as all the posters and magazine/media around was all about that old.
I don’t get the kids who break and deface everything. It ruins what is special. Such selfish, idiot degenerates. Can’t stand people who just wreck it all just “cause”.
In college I went to work at the Spaghetti Warehouse in the Ft Worth Stockyards. The building used to be part of Swift's meat packing company's buildings at the stockyards. I was told it had been the head office.
The basement of that building had tunnels which used to connect to other Swift buildings, but by the time it was a Spaghetti Warehouse most of the other buildings were gone or in poor shape. Homeless people had taken up residence in the tunnels. They had fencing and stuff blocking those off but they'd shout at you when you went down to get liquor out of the locked up section where that was stored in the basement.
Once one of the bartenders got curious why there were a bunch of keys where they kept the key to the liquor stores and we found out one of them was for the door to the stairs to the upper floors of the building. There were offices up there with all the furniture and people's personal belongings like coffee cups and artwork from their children, as well as all the paper files. Some of the desks looked as though people had only left for the day never to return with account books left open to partially completed pages.
Too bad camera phones weren't a thing then. It was just a random day at work so none of us had cameras with us.
Also TB sanitoriums. They're huge, and used to be everywhere. Some have been repurposed, but many have been abandoned.
Any place that was the scene of misery & despair seems to echo it for decades.
I never remember AC being particularly nice, but the last time I was there a few years ago, the city was sooo much worse than I recall. The rotting remains of the parking garage for Trump's old Plaza casino was still standing, and even though his name had long since been removed, the weather-staining of the façade kept the outline of the name still visible. Talk about dystopian symbolism....
I grew up about 25 miles away from there before the demolitions started and still live nearby.
Just took my own kids there a few weeks ago to see the place for themselves.
The borough hall/police station/fire department building still standing and empty with an American flag flying in front of it is the most eerie thing left there.
Edit: spelling
I’ve always wanted to visit Centralia. I’ve heard the bridge is now gone, though and they’re making it, I guess, less fun to visit because it really is still on fire.
Bridge?
Centralia's up on a ridge top, no bridge.
I think you mean the old PA Route 61 coming up the hill by the fire that was closed, vacated by the state to the landowner, became Graffiti Highway that out-of-state tourists trashed during the pandemic and the landowner covered it up with 300 tri-axles of fill.
Isn't New Straitsville the place where water from wells used to be boiling hot due to a coal fire down in the mine? One of my great-aunts told of them making pour over coffee directly with water drawn from the well on their property when she was a kid.
yep
striking miners soaked timber in oil and sent it down the mine in defiance. this did cause the heating of the ground and for smoke to pour out of the ground for decades
the pouring smoke out of the ground very conveniently covered the smoke that a moonshine still produces, which led New Straitsville to call itself the moonshine capital of the world
Empty freeways between small towns, especially at night. I’ve made a few late night drives and I’ve never felt more alone than when I was driving at night without anyone else on the road.
As a Californian, I was blown away that rush hour for Minneapolis…lasted an hour, max.
It could be 2 am here and the freeway will look like what a lot of other places experience as rush hour.
It was a dream to drive from Minneapolis to Detroit Lakes on a completely empty road.
I wish to experience this one day (meaning night). In particular, I want to be driving with my wife in the passenger seat, with the nearest human being still tens of miles away from us... Sounds romantic and cozy as fuck.
Oh it's fine. The deer already made it across the road. Its not like it would run back across the road where it already came from. I don't need to slow down.
If you're in a place with little light pollution and it's a clear full moon night, you can turn off your headlights and drive by the light of the moon. It's incredible. Used to do this in Wyoming sometimes. It seems like an unsafe idea, and you COULD get ticketed for it if you got caught, but if you're the only one on the road it's not unsafe. You can see really well.
There's a tall story from where I grew up in Africa
Apparently, some kids did this, but also drove on the wrong side of the road. A couple of minutes in, a car driving without lights passed them on the wrong side of the road.
Dude if you really want to feel freaked out turn your lights off and realize how utterly hopeless/vulnerable you'd be out there without cell service/a functioning car.
Not terribly far from your choice, but Daggett, California. I had to drive through it in the dead of night due to a bad accident closing part of the 15 freeway on the way to Vegas.
It looks like something out a bad 80's horror movie
I drove out to Joshua Tree a few years ago and outside of Palm Springs and the little towns around the park entrances (29 Palms for example) it was spooky to say the least. Reminded me of The Hills Have Eyes. Definitely didn’t want to break down anywhere out there, especially at night. It didn’t help that a nearby mountain had been stuck by lighting so there was an eerie orange glow in the sky from the smoldering fire.
Side note: I find relics of the Old West fascinating and love watching YouTube videos about people exploring the old abandoned sites in that area. Don’t know if I’d want to just go out exploring those places myself though
So funny to see my hometown mentioned. It actually was once a nice place to live with many families and some economy. Those days are long gone. I feel bad for my grandparents having to see it in such a state of decline.
Sleepy Creek Wildlife Management Area.
We maintain a section of the Tuscarora trail that weaves through here. It's a very foreboding area. It's hard to explain. There have been bodies found there, but it seems like it's more than that. Something just isn't right in those woods. Most hikers kick it out past it to avoid sleeping there, even without knowing the body history.
Most locals claim there are bodies in the lake, heard that from old timers for years.
Driven through there a couple times. You can see how it used to be a booming industrial town in the 60s. Even the surrounding areas seem like they’re stuck in time and never moved forward. The only infrastructure in that town are the county government buildings and the highway.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eddwx/what_the_hell_happened_to_cairo_illinois/
There was even a subreddit dedicated to getting Redditors to move to Cairo and start up businesses there that went about as well as you can imagine.
Lost a friend to Death Valley. He was a very experienced hiker, camper, outdoorsman who survived a lot of dicey situations. Death Valley was the end of him.
Not sure what happened to this guy's friend but it can be as simple as heatstroke. Doesn't matter how experienced you are, sometimes your body just cannot handle the heat and exertion. Grew up camping in and around the mojave and surrounding area. ONE bad day out in the sun can kill you.
Someone else mentioned that there’s packs of wild dogs out there. Not coyotes, but like actual packs of normally domesticated feral dogs that seem to have a hatred of humans. He said he got chased by one of these packs on his I think quad, and that the head of the pack appeared to be the chihuahua (which was hilarious) but there were much larger dogs in the pack.
I recently watched some guys on YouTube hike the path that the Death Valley Germans took to their deaths. It was a very sobering video, imagining their last moments in that place.
Can you provide the link? Interested in watching that. Never heard of this incident before. I'm reading about it now and it sounds terrible to say the least.
This is his [original video](https://youtu.be/dcwD9hj9vik?si=VnRDyc3oFBfRsxvw) on the subject, and [here is the video](https://youtu.be/pj4b950na_s?si=ay01ZqB6LPJrcMvf) with the YouTuber recreating their path.
I remember my family driving through or near Death Valley when I was young. We kept seeing signs warning that the next gas station was the last one for X miles, as well as signs saying it's a good idea to stop driving for a bit to let your tires cool off in the shade or something. I'd never seen anything like that before or since. It definitely made me nervous.
I remember the intense heat when rolling down the windows. It felt exactly like when you open an oven to check on your food. I’m okay with never going back there.
No cell service, no internet, massive open area with plenty of cliffs to fall off of. Extreme heat and no water or food sources. Very few people nearby. Break an ankle with no one around to help, and you're as good as dead.
Centralia sounds like it would be super creepy, but in reality it looks just like most of the landscape in the surrounding towns and counties. There is nothing left there to see.
I see you're from CLE (me too, we may even know each other)
I vote for East Cleveland. [Here's a video of someone driving through it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNsBFjIlORg) I actually live about a 5 minute drive from it lol.
It was recently ranked the #1 poorest city in America.
The last time I went there, a fire department had setup a mock apartment building to train on. It really felt like a zombie apocalypse. I don't think you'd really notice if you didn't actually stop though.
I hadn’t heard of the place before, I drove through because I took a wrong turn coming back from Kansas City, it was super creepy. It looks like the place where gangsters drop off bodies. Nobody is going to ever look there
It's funny you say that, because most people believe that's what happened to [Ashleigh Freeman and Lauria Bible ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Lauria_Bible_and_Ashley_Freeman).
No idea why, but the woods in southern Delaware. I grew up in a rural house there and was always scared of the woods, then I moved away and married a man who loves hiking. He's been all over North America and Europe doing it, and I started going with him on smaller, far less impressive trips.
One of the first times we went to visit my family my husband suggested we go for a walk, and since I've done a lot more camping and hiking with him I didn't even think about how much it used to creep me out. After just 15 minutes or so he said, "What the fuck is wrong with these woods? They're too dark or something." We turned back and left right away. We've never gone back into them, and he's mentioned since then how weird it feels there.
That’s really interesting actually. I’m curious I want to check it out now 😂
I went camping not too long ago in northern Arizona, and tbh those woods are weird. We were on the border of coconino and tonto and another forest I’d never heard of or been to before then, and those woods are pretty weird too. I’d been through there before driving up to chinle, and we had some weird shit happen. Tbh I’m normally super explorative and want to go hike and check shit out but something about that area just said don’t do it so we never strayed far from the camp site.
Bruce Crossing.
My family pulled off at an RV park while on a road trip through the U.P. one summer night in 2017 and the entire place had super eerie vibes to the point where it was almost comforting; an extremely strange feeling. There were a few other trailers around, but my family never saw anyone as we were setting up. It was just us setting up our tent with the hot July sun beating down on us. It was too quiet. The only noises were the buzz of flies around a dead bird in the fire pit and a rooster crowing in the distance even though it was late afternoon when we pulled in.
The park seemed well-maintained so it felt weird being the only sign of life in the area, especially since there were a few other vehicles but nobody to be seen. It was like everyone had just gotten up and left right before we arrived. It also made the few things that weren't well-maintained stand out even more, like the buzzing from the giant hornet's nest on the rusty shower facility, or the dead bird in the firepit.
A stone's throw away from our campsite was a small playground, consisting of a merry-go-round and a swing set. With the bright sun and complete absence of life along with the eerily quiet atmosphere, I imagined that the sounds of the swings creaking would add the perfect horror ambience to the setting.
Perhaps the strangest thing at the place was an old, rusty dunk tank a few yards away from the playground. There was no water in it, but rather just an empty cage and tub with a ledge. My siblings and I took turns putting pieces of firewood on it and trying to knock them off by hitting the button on the front.
Stannard Township RV Campground is far from the creepiest place I've been, but clearly something about it has stuck with me enough to make it significant seven years later.
So this is gonna sound weird I live in ohio in a rural area. There is an area of a road on the way to Lancaster (Google it if you want a general area) that just feels off. Like nothing is outwardly wrong, mostly farms, spots of woods, and couple stream/rivers. Then you come up over a hill and come out to a flat area. Left and right is just fields usually soybeans or wheat. This flat area extends for about a mile until it ends at a rise, just enough to break the LOS to the rest of the road. At this rise their is a farm house, not the most run down or the best. Solid ehh home. This bit of road just feels wrong. My wife and me both noticed and try to avoid it. Just makes your hair stand and paranoia to set in but nothing ever happens there.
Is the infirmary still there? Years ago in college I remember getting some weird effects on our film when my friend and I took a trip down there to Fairfield co.
Nah Just fields and a house with a dead tree out front. Keep going and a big modern barn with combines and stuff. But only felt weird going while driving through the flat depressed area.
Kiryas Joel. The first place I've been literally thrown rocks at and chased out of a place.
People stop what they're doing, men, women, kids, when they see an outsider (especially a woman) driving into their town.
The houses were shoddy third wordly bloc buildings on top of each other. Nothing in English such as signage, store names, etc. Everyone wearing full black clothing with those weird fluffy hat in the middle of summer. You could've very much been dropped into an eastern European town.
Estacada, Oregon.
Grew up there. It's a redundant community that has been bypassed with a highway, very small population and densely wooded, but it's still very close to Portland and the I-84 and I-5 corridors. It's right next to the massive Mt. Hood ntl. Forest.
Prime dumping ground.
There are a LOT of bodies dumped there. I personally know at least 5 people who have found multiple. My uncle found a few, one was a serial killer victim that was really not good. It fucked him up. My sister, as a teen, was chased after seeing someone dumping a corpse as she was coming home from work one night. My dad found someone who was hung, not a suicide.
Chester PA for my own state. Imagine going to a casino there without knowing anything about the area. As you get close to the exit, you start noticing youre in a rough area. Housing projects, graffiti all over the interstate, overgrown plants on everything. And then you turn off. You drive down streets with bars on the windows, graffiti everywhere, tall grass coming out of sidewalks, and urban decay everywhere, and then you get to your destination. You have to drive past a LITERAL PRISON to get in. It's literally right next door. And then when you go in the parking garage, you look out and see that youre literally overlooking the prison, seeing guard towers, fences, and tons of barbed wire from said garage.
That place was unsettling AF.
A different kind of unsettling was going up 321 in south carolina from just north of savannah to columbia. Why would I do that? because it was 2017, i was on vacation in savannah, we had a hurricane evacuation, and the roads were packed.
So, you go through tons of crazy back roads areas down there. And it's a different kind of ghetto from chester. You go through all of these run down towns with boarded up windows and businesses. You stop at gas stations with gross bathrooms. Your best rest stop is some grocery store along the way. A lot of the people there had confederate flags on their cars and literally looked inbred. It was really fricking weird. Southern rural poverty is no joke.
As someone from Appalachia, this is a TikTok trend that nobody in Appalachia historically ever really said.
…however, you can definitely stumble upon sketchy things. Last time I was in the boonies I was walking through the woods in the middle of nowhere and happened upon a tree with a rotting noose attached to it, tied up hangman style.
Otherwise, Appalachia is generally beautiful and relatively safe so long as you take the right precautions and don’t make unwise decisions about whose privacy you intrude upon. Not to build upon a trope, but occasionally people who are up to no good choose seclusion for a reason. That, and Appalachians can be a pretty fiercely independent and reclusive people (for good reason, historically).
But yes, it’s creepy at night, and you generally want to be armed when in the deep woods (and can expect others to be as well, if you see anyone else at all).
Same for deep East Texas, then. Although less weed once the authorities figured out they could use heat sensing cameras to spot it from helicopters at night. Back in the day I used to know of several large patches before the authorities set up to catch people coming out to harvest after doing a night survey to find where people were growing it.
I think the TikTok trend just kinda melded together a bunch of local Appalachian legends with the skinwalker, but I definitely heard my fair share of warnings and ghost stories to ignore the voices in the woods growing up.
Generally it went without saying, you just stay out of the woods at night.
Yeah there are definitely a good number of local superstitions. I don’t come from a particularly superstitious bubble so it was all typically viewed with a bit of bemusement.
That said, my grandfather did think he was a “water witch" (using a divining rod) and his great grandmother was known as an actual “witch” in her county, telling fortunes to soldiers passing through during the Civil War. That part of my family were historically “Melungeons” — tri-racial white, black, and native. But the boogiemen in the woods never seemed to hold much sway beyond stories you told the kids to keep them from going into the woods alone or at night.
If you hear whispering in the woods, don’t listen.
If you hear a voice calling your name, don’t answer.
If you see something through the trees, look elsewhere.
Whatever you are feeling, don’t acknowledge it.
That deer in woods…
It is not a deer.
I know that this is Appalachia knowledge 101, but fuck me if it doesn't go against every instinct ingrained in me to ignore the creepy crawly feeling that has saved me more than I care to admit. Appalachia logic infuriates me.
We have that same feeling, but it’s almost always a mountain lion, they really engage a part of our survival instincts that is sometimes mistaken for paranormal.
Edit: From CO
Which is exactly why I don't WANT to ignore it. The logical brain in me says it feels like I'm being watched. The logical brain in me says if it's a big cat, you CANT ignore it, because that's how they hunt. You have to let them know you know they're there. But there is a small part of me that does believe in the supernatural and henceforth I should do all of the above, which is ignore it.
So if it's a big cat and I ignore it, I'm fucked.
But if it's something else and I don't ignore it...I'm also fucked.
It's a lose/lose situation and that is why Appalachia logic infuriates me....
Fuck, I know that feeling. There’s occasional mountain lions in the hills above my neighborhood. I went on a small hiking trail that got way too isolated and narrow through the brush. I just got bad vibes and turned around rather than go further.
Yup.
Born and raised in Appalachia. Still live here.
It's like a cheap bar in a big city; after a certain hour there ain't no reason to be hanging around. Come nightfall, you'd best be in the house minding your business. These mountains are old as the earth itself. Add in the wild cats, bears, and coyotes to whatever else might be prowling around.
> old as the earth itself.
I was ready to be all "aKsHuLlY" but Google says the origins go as far back as the Mesoproterozoic. Holy shit! So yeah, that ain't far off.
I'm guessing it wasn't a someone, but some kind of animal. Mountain lions, specifically the Eastern Cougar, are presumed to be extinct but people claim they still see them occasionally. They definitely sound [like a woman screaming.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pxo8X5uIWRE)
A friend and I drove out from the DC area to a gig in West Virginia. I'd actually never been to that state but she'd grown up there, so she took the scenic route out. It was a lovely, winding country road through the hills. It was a great drive but I distinctly remember her telling me that if I was ever driving out on my own, I should never take this road at night. There were long stretches with no cell signal and it was very possible you wouldn't see another car driving past until the morning.
That night, we took the way less scenic but also way more trafficked interstate to get home. As fate would have it, her car broke down on the side of the road. Since we were well within "civilization," though, we had plenty of cell signal to get a tow truck.
So yeah, don't drive around the backwoods of Appalachia without a game plan.
Walpack Center, NJ. It's a town of only 12 people. It's bizarre driving there in the middle of the day and nothing being open, not even the post office.
State and county highways late at night out in the country. Where I live if your out there at night it’s usually just you and the moon is your only light source and cause I live in the prairie it’s super eerie cause you can go for miles without seeing a house
The New Jersey Pine Barrens. Although I find the area beautiful during the day, its a little bit unsettingly at night. The trees seem to muffle the sound of your own voice, yet you can still hear random, unidentified sounds echoing in the distance. It has this weird stifling feeling.
Walking through rural Idaho at night. It’s literally pitch Black out aside from the light of the moon, like literally can’t even see directly in front of you, and it’s so entirely lonely and isolated. Being away from people like that was super unsettling
I grew up in rural wooded NW Montana, so similar to northern Idaho.
I have spent many days, evening and starlit nights wandering through the woods. Usually I found it fairly peaceful, but occasionally something would make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Those times I turned around and went another way.
Several times when I went back home or another route I heard reports of bear or mountain lion tracks in the area I was going to go. So I learned to listen to my instincts when wandering the woods
Yea for sure, I’ve had that thought walking around LA at night before, that like this must be super scary and weird if you didn’t grow up around it haha
I think it was really just the darkness of Idaho that threw me off. Like seldom have I been anywhere where there’s like zero lights around at night. It’s kinda spooky if you’ve never experienced that much
I miss it so much. Just going out and knowing it's you and the universe and nothing intruding on that....
If its any consolation, the opposite is also true. Brightly lit streets at night make me a little jumpy.
I made a comment about Idaho earlier. Between CDA and Sandpoint and east to the Montana border, especially at night, is so absolutely unsettling. There's hardly anyone out on the highway or in the towns after dark. I've never lived anywhere that felt so haunted.
Kensington under the El... With all the opioid addicts, it's one of the scariest things I've ever seen...and I've lived in Philly pretty much my whole life.
It looks like a zombie movie
Can someone point me to any subreddits with this post's kinda vibe to it?
Unsettling old places with pictures, creepy landscapes, places that lead to nowhere, that kinda stuff?
I know there's some amateur and pro photographers that seek these things out, any sub recommendations?
Thx!
I found Maine surprisingly unsettling. Was in Portland area. My first trip there & was looking forward to it. But it felt weird. I could never really relax or settle in. Gazillionaire yachts docked in row was an odd sight too ( the kind with helicopter pads and many employees).
I’ve got two: driving at night in the Berkshires in western Mass, and similarly driving at night on the backroads in the Hockomock swamp area in eastern Mass. You get the eeriest feelings in those areas, like you could see some weird creature pop out into the road at any moment!
Walla Walla, Washington. Had to stop there once due to a malfunctioning rental car. It was stuttering, and obviously had electrical issues. Threw a bunch of error messages like that made it seem like turning the car off would result in it not starting again.
The town was like being in an episode of the Twilight Zone.
It was a nice looking place, good roads, cool downtown.
Every single person I interacted with was a rude asshole, everyone either had a glare or a glassy eyed, slack jawed stare.
Every business was dead. No one was walking around, shopping or eating, but every business was fully staffed.
It was like I had shit my pants and used the feces to paint a swastika on my forehead. I could practically hear screams of "UN FORASTERO!".
Had to wait 5+ minutes for the rental guy to get off his personal phone call to talk to me, he then told me they would look at the car and to come back in an hour. The place had like 6 people working.
Went to a restaurant, had to wait while the staff decided to stop talking to each other and glaring at me like I was interrupting them. Awful service, dirty, we left. Next place was better but extremely slow. Took 10 minutes to give us menus, 30 minutes for two cheeseburgers. They didn't have a bunch of stuff, their shipment didn't show that day?
Went back to the rental place, guy was on the phone again. Angry because we were "late". They hadn't looked at the car despite no other customers. "1 more hour.".
Went to a couple of random stores, we were followed and glared at by the store workers.
In the end "nothing" was wrong with the car. They turned it off, turned it back on, and it was fine. We drove it without issue for the rest of the trip to the next rental place where we exchanged the car for a different one.
The tiny dying meth towns scattered across the Midwest. You can feel the sour glares of the local residents searing into your vehicle as you dare to drive through their dilapidated village.
Grew up in one of those towns, 0/10 place to live as a mixed race kid lemme tell ya
Understandable. I think what really freaked me out about Dalhart were the birds. I already thought it was eerie driving through, but we spent the night and woke up to the sound of quite literally *hundreds* of grackles outside our hotel windows. They were EVERYWHERE. I like grackles as much as the next person - they’re interesting birds - but having that many just outside our very flimsy hotel door, cawing so loudly you couldn’t hear anything, felt a bit like an omen of death.
There’s an Austin artist who does great silly drawings of grackles smoking cigarettes and looking menacing in HEB parking lots. Obviously they don’t actually smoke (no thumbs, so they can’t use lighters) but when you can barely see tree limbs because there are so many grackles sitting on them and cawing, it can be unsettling.
Just got back from a long road trip. I had read there was a ghost town along my route so I decided to detour through it. Turns out the town is really run down but not entirely abandoned with some people still living there.
They made it feel really wrong to go through there like some kind of poverty porn or something. I left quickly and didn’t share and photos from there out of respect to those who still live there.
Went on a cross country train trip when I was 15..can’t remember if it was Albuquerque or Arizona(I think it was Albuquerque) but from the train I could see Native American reservations..and they looked..bad..like makeshift houses that looked like rundown shacks spread through out open land..kinda ruined the trip for me.
It sounds like a joke, but it's what I came here to write. It's like a ghost town but a whole city. There's this horrifying area on the edge of town that's all dirt roads and semi-abandoned houses that freaks me out in a big way.
Once you're truly alone on roads with literally no one, little light pollution like Slope County ND. Wait for dark and stare at the stars.
When have you ever been truly more than a mile from another human being?
Abandoned Paper mills. There's a lot of them in the West. Some are still in limited operation. Most look like you'd need a hard hat and a tetanus shot just to set foot in them.
I was driving solo late one night in light fog and sprinkling rain in August of '22 on my way home to Georgia from Minnesota, doing my usual thing of taking non-interstates as much as reasonable, and I'd just driven through [this unsettling place discussed here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/1drq0lz/what_are_some_of_the_most_unsettling_places_in/lax44f0/) when [I turned this curve heading southeast](https://www.google.com/maps/place/36%C2%B056'08.1%22N+88%C2%B057'01.7%22W/@36.9355833,-88.9504722,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d36.9355833!4d-88.9504722?entry=ttu).
When I crossed over Mayfield Creek, I began seeing a diffuse red flashing in the distance, resolving into a slowly-flashing red light straight ahead through the light fog. I was only doing ~40 MPH due to the conditions, so it took ~3 minutes to get to the intersection the light was hung over two miles away. It was just your normal old incandescent flashing red over a dark rural intersection, but...
Eastern Oregon is pretty unsettling. Like, I drove 120 from Burns to the Idaho border at night, I just wanted to be out of there so badly.
The next most unsettling place would have to be the entire state of Pennsylvania. You have Centralia, sure, but Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are peppered with abandoned buildings, you have Worthington and its racist LED billboards, you have these tiny borderline abandoned hollers all over the goddamn place, you see more Confederate flags there than you do in fucking Mississippi for fuck's sake, the interstates are in rough shape, almost everything feels worn down like people stopped caring sometime 40-50+ years ago, and people there are just weird, like not the good kind of weird like you see in the southwest, but the bad weird.
Tidioute, PA- two hours and some change north of Pittsburgh. Desolate little river town in the Allegheny National Forest. More lively in the summer but very eery in its own beautiful way.
Blue Ridge Parkway, especially during the winter. Blanket of white and brown and not much else. Worried something may come up the mountain or down it and be upon you in seconds
west virginia is crazy bc people are paying millions of dollars for a shack with similar views on the west coast, yet the economic situation in WV is so bad that people don’t even consider it.
Years ago, Camden, New Jersey. It was just a desolate ghetto with the country’s saddest aquarium and an old battleship. It was that level of ghetto where nobody even lives there anymore. It’s apparently been fixed up, but I haven’t been there in over a decade
Gary , Indiana.
Entire city left to waste when the steel mills declined. I used to live in Pittsburgh and it was a frightening view of what Pittsburgh could have been.
The drive between Alamogordo and Artesia at 2:00 AM. You've got a steep climb, then a tunnel, then a super-quiet small town, then a windy-curvy highway in the forest, then the rolling hills of the plains with no houses or towns until the next super-quiet town of Hope (population a few dozen). Maybe one or two other cars driving past. Multiple spots where the hills block the radio.
Las Cruces to Alamogordo? Not bad. Artesia to Roswell or Hobbs or Carlsbad? Dull, long, but otherwise not bad. But Alamogordo to Artesia is extremely unsettling.
As absolutely beautiful as the Olympic peninsula is…I was solo traveling through there for a few days and I definitely felt as thought it was a little spooky. By day 3 I was ready to be out of there and as soon as I hit the sunshine I felt like a different person lol
Certain parts of West Virginia, any 30 mile drive through backroads, 90% chance you will see something at least baffling if not genuinely disconcerting.
Abandoned prisons and mental hospitals. There are ones all over the country and they're always eerie.
It's since been torn down, but there used to be an abandoned mental hospital near where I grew up. When I was a teenager I broke into it a few times to do...stuff. It was crazy because everything was still there. It was like everyone went home for the day and then they just shut it down. There were papers on desks, coffee cups, made beds, even framed pictures on the desks.
Had a luxury fitness gym and rec center shut down back when I was a teen. It was just behind some wooded division by my Mom’s job at church. This rec center was untouched outside of dust when we got into it. It was nothing short of spectacular and we had the entire place to ourselves to explore. It was like going back in time 10-20 years. It must have been out of use for a while as all the posters and magazine/media around was all about that old. I don’t get the kids who break and deface everything. It ruins what is special. Such selfish, idiot degenerates. Can’t stand people who just wreck it all just “cause”.
Tell us more, any pics per chance? Thanks for the share, and the respect of the history and environment in general.
In college I went to work at the Spaghetti Warehouse in the Ft Worth Stockyards. The building used to be part of Swift's meat packing company's buildings at the stockyards. I was told it had been the head office. The basement of that building had tunnels which used to connect to other Swift buildings, but by the time it was a Spaghetti Warehouse most of the other buildings were gone or in poor shape. Homeless people had taken up residence in the tunnels. They had fencing and stuff blocking those off but they'd shout at you when you went down to get liquor out of the locked up section where that was stored in the basement. Once one of the bartenders got curious why there were a bunch of keys where they kept the key to the liquor stores and we found out one of them was for the door to the stairs to the upper floors of the building. There were offices up there with all the furniture and people's personal belongings like coffee cups and artwork from their children, as well as all the paper files. Some of the desks looked as though people had only left for the day never to return with account books left open to partially completed pages. Too bad camera phones weren't a thing then. It was just a random day at work so none of us had cameras with us.
I never understand all the random stuff that is left when places like that close down.
Wait… i might know which hospital youre talking about. Did you live near the Lexington area by any chance???
The one near my hometown had ghost hunting shows come before it was torn down
Also TB sanitoriums. They're huge, and used to be everywhere. Some have been repurposed, but many have been abandoned. Any place that was the scene of misery & despair seems to echo it for decades.
East State Penitentiary in PA is was a prison, and they turned it into an incredible haunted attraction.
Atlantic City feels like it was built for a dystopian fantasy movie.
Put your makeup on Fix your hair up pretty...
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City
Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact
Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
Where "Back to the Future II" was reality, with Biff owning a casino
Niagara Falls, NY fits that description too.
I never remember AC being particularly nice, but the last time I was there a few years ago, the city was sooo much worse than I recall. The rotting remains of the parking garage for Trump's old Plaza casino was still standing, and even though his name had long since been removed, the weather-staining of the façade kept the outline of the name still visible. Talk about dystopian symbolism....
Centralia, Pennsylvania. A coal mine fire has been burning for decades and has caused the place to become mostly abandoned.
I grew up about 25 miles away from there before the demolitions started and still live nearby. Just took my own kids there a few weeks ago to see the place for themselves. The borough hall/police station/fire department building still standing and empty with an American flag flying in front of it is the most eerie thing left there. Edit: spelling
I’ve always wanted to visit Centralia. I’ve heard the bridge is now gone, though and they’re making it, I guess, less fun to visit because it really is still on fire.
Bridge? Centralia's up on a ridge top, no bridge. I think you mean the old PA Route 61 coming up the hill by the fire that was closed, vacated by the state to the landowner, became Graffiti Highway that out-of-state tourists trashed during the pandemic and the landowner covered it up with 300 tri-axles of fill.
Yes! The ‘graffiti highway.’ Sorry, I’d never been, and all these years, my mind’s eye pictured a graffiti’d *bridge.*
I remember driving that road regularly when it was still open and the town still stood. It was actually a nice, tidy proud little coal town.
The first thing that came to mind. Inspiration for silent hill, no?
I think so, yeah. :)
*Forcibly* abandoned by order of the state.
new straitsville, Ohio fits the bill too you can go to Shawnee down the road if New Straitsville isn’t enough
Isn't New Straitsville the place where water from wells used to be boiling hot due to a coal fire down in the mine? One of my great-aunts told of them making pour over coffee directly with water drawn from the well on their property when she was a kid.
yep striking miners soaked timber in oil and sent it down the mine in defiance. this did cause the heating of the ground and for smoke to pour out of the ground for decades the pouring smoke out of the ground very conveniently covered the smoke that a moonshine still produces, which led New Straitsville to call itself the moonshine capital of the world
I didn't even know it was possible for a coal mine to be on fire for fucking decades...
Empty freeways between small towns, especially at night. I’ve made a few late night drives and I’ve never felt more alone than when I was driving at night without anyone else on the road.
As a Californian, I was blown away that rush hour for Minneapolis…lasted an hour, max. It could be 2 am here and the freeway will look like what a lot of other places experience as rush hour. It was a dream to drive from Minneapolis to Detroit Lakes on a completely empty road.
I wish to experience this one day (meaning night). In particular, I want to be driving with my wife in the passenger seat, with the nearest human being still tens of miles away from us... Sounds romantic and cozy as fuck.
Sounds like the plot of a horror film. lol.
especially when pickup lights show up as they pull out of a side road, approaching fast in the dark. Lots of horror movies start that way
The car breaks down and there's an old big house...
You try to take a peek under the hood but your flashlight goes out
It’s a great experience. Only downside is sometimes animals can/may cross the road. Gotta be alert for that late at night especially
Oh it's fine. The deer already made it across the road. Its not like it would run back across the road where it already came from. I don't need to slow down.
*guh-GLUNK* "YOU MOTHERFU--"
I mean, this is Wyoming. I guess I don't get why this feels so spooky to people because, fuck, this is how I grew up.
Oh wow, you'd love Australia!
i think he's talking about 10 or 20 miles between population centers, not 2000 :D
If you're in a place with little light pollution and it's a clear full moon night, you can turn off your headlights and drive by the light of the moon. It's incredible. Used to do this in Wyoming sometimes. It seems like an unsafe idea, and you COULD get ticketed for it if you got caught, but if you're the only one on the road it's not unsafe. You can see really well.
There's a tall story from where I grew up in Africa Apparently, some kids did this, but also drove on the wrong side of the road. A couple of minutes in, a car driving without lights passed them on the wrong side of the road.
I do this every night on the way home from work. 3 a.m. and the last 30 minutes of my drive is on empty roads with just a few houses.
Dude if you really want to feel freaked out turn your lights off and realize how utterly hopeless/vulnerable you'd be out there without cell service/a functioning car.
Not terribly far from your choice, but Daggett, California. I had to drive through it in the dead of night due to a bad accident closing part of the 15 freeway on the way to Vegas. It looks like something out a bad 80's horror movie
The Mojave Desert is full of half abandoned towns like that. Mojave, California City, Boron, Desert Center, anything surrounding the Salton Sea.
I drove out to Joshua Tree a few years ago and outside of Palm Springs and the little towns around the park entrances (29 Palms for example) it was spooky to say the least. Reminded me of The Hills Have Eyes. Definitely didn’t want to break down anywhere out there, especially at night. It didn’t help that a nearby mountain had been stuck by lighting so there was an eerie orange glow in the sky from the smoldering fire. Side note: I find relics of the Old West fascinating and love watching YouTube videos about people exploring the old abandoned sites in that area. Don’t know if I’d want to just go out exploring those places myself though
So funny to see my hometown mentioned. It actually was once a nice place to live with many families and some economy. Those days are long gone. I feel bad for my grandparents having to see it in such a state of decline.
Sleepy Creek Wildlife Management Area. We maintain a section of the Tuscarora trail that weaves through here. It's a very foreboding area. It's hard to explain. There have been bodies found there, but it seems like it's more than that. Something just isn't right in those woods. Most hikers kick it out past it to avoid sleeping there, even without knowing the body history. Most locals claim there are bodies in the lake, heard that from old timers for years.
Cairo, Illinois. Looks like a bombed out German town in 1945. Rilpleys Belueve It Or Not should buy the whole town.
Driven through there a couple times. You can see how it used to be a booming industrial town in the 60s. Even the surrounding areas seem like they’re stuck in time and never moved forward. The only infrastructure in that town are the county government buildings and the highway.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eddwx/what_the_hell_happened_to_cairo_illinois/ There was even a subreddit dedicated to getting Redditors to move to Cairo and start up businesses there that went about as well as you can imagine.
Death valley is terrifying. Beautiful, but I was a little on edge the whole time I was there.
Lost a friend to Death Valley. He was a very experienced hiker, camper, outdoorsman who survived a lot of dicey situations. Death Valley was the end of him.
How does that happen? I’m sorry for your loss.
Not sure what happened to this guy's friend but it can be as simple as heatstroke. Doesn't matter how experienced you are, sometimes your body just cannot handle the heat and exertion. Grew up camping in and around the mojave and surrounding area. ONE bad day out in the sun can kill you.
Someone else mentioned that there’s packs of wild dogs out there. Not coyotes, but like actual packs of normally domesticated feral dogs that seem to have a hatred of humans. He said he got chased by one of these packs on his I think quad, and that the head of the pack appeared to be the chihuahua (which was hilarious) but there were much larger dogs in the pack.
Racetrack Playa is beautiful, incredible, and very eerie
I recently watched some guys on YouTube hike the path that the Death Valley Germans took to their deaths. It was a very sobering video, imagining their last moments in that place.
Can you provide the link? Interested in watching that. Never heard of this incident before. I'm reading about it now and it sounds terrible to say the least.
This is his [original video](https://youtu.be/dcwD9hj9vik?si=VnRDyc3oFBfRsxvw) on the subject, and [here is the video](https://youtu.be/pj4b950na_s?si=ay01ZqB6LPJrcMvf) with the YouTuber recreating their path.
This place, I also want to visit one day with my future wife:) or maybe not. Idk if she'll like the idea, so...
Make sure you go in the winter
Yeah that's not an ironic name.
I remember my family driving through or near Death Valley when I was young. We kept seeing signs warning that the next gas station was the last one for X miles, as well as signs saying it's a good idea to stop driving for a bit to let your tires cool off in the shade or something. I'd never seen anything like that before or since. It definitely made me nervous.
I remember the intense heat when rolling down the windows. It felt exactly like when you open an oven to check on your food. I’m okay with never going back there.
Why?
No cell service, no internet, massive open area with plenty of cliffs to fall off of. Extreme heat and no water or food sources. Very few people nearby. Break an ankle with no one around to help, and you're as good as dead.
It’s called Death Valley for a reason. I’m looking at you, European tourists.
Centralia, PA
Centralia sounds like it would be super creepy, but in reality it looks just like most of the landscape in the surrounding towns and counties. There is nothing left there to see.
I see you're from CLE (me too, we may even know each other) I vote for East Cleveland. [Here's a video of someone driving through it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNsBFjIlORg) I actually live about a 5 minute drive from it lol. It was recently ranked the #1 poorest city in America.
Salton Sea. Looks like something straight out of Fallout.
I viewed it on Street View and it looks like the surface of Venus.
I visited it in July once. Be grateful Street View doesn't have Smell-O-Vision.
Nothing like the smell of polluted, dead, rotting fish 🤢
[Picher, Oklahoma ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picher,_Oklahoma)
The last time I went there, a fire department had setup a mock apartment building to train on. It really felt like a zombie apocalypse. I don't think you'd really notice if you didn't actually stop though.
I hadn’t heard of the place before, I drove through because I took a wrong turn coming back from Kansas City, it was super creepy. It looks like the place where gangsters drop off bodies. Nobody is going to ever look there
It's funny you say that, because most people believe that's what happened to [Ashleigh Freeman and Lauria Bible ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Lauria_Bible_and_Ashley_Freeman).
No idea why, but the woods in southern Delaware. I grew up in a rural house there and was always scared of the woods, then I moved away and married a man who loves hiking. He's been all over North America and Europe doing it, and I started going with him on smaller, far less impressive trips. One of the first times we went to visit my family my husband suggested we go for a walk, and since I've done a lot more camping and hiking with him I didn't even think about how much it used to creep me out. After just 15 minutes or so he said, "What the fuck is wrong with these woods? They're too dark or something." We turned back and left right away. We've never gone back into them, and he's mentioned since then how weird it feels there.
That’s really interesting actually. I’m curious I want to check it out now 😂 I went camping not too long ago in northern Arizona, and tbh those woods are weird. We were on the border of coconino and tonto and another forest I’d never heard of or been to before then, and those woods are pretty weird too. I’d been through there before driving up to chinle, and we had some weird shit happen. Tbh I’m normally super explorative and want to go hike and check shit out but something about that area just said don’t do it so we never strayed far from the camp site.
Why has no one mentioned Michigan...not everywhere but...there are places
Bruce Crossing. My family pulled off at an RV park while on a road trip through the U.P. one summer night in 2017 and the entire place had super eerie vibes to the point where it was almost comforting; an extremely strange feeling. There were a few other trailers around, but my family never saw anyone as we were setting up. It was just us setting up our tent with the hot July sun beating down on us. It was too quiet. The only noises were the buzz of flies around a dead bird in the fire pit and a rooster crowing in the distance even though it was late afternoon when we pulled in. The park seemed well-maintained so it felt weird being the only sign of life in the area, especially since there were a few other vehicles but nobody to be seen. It was like everyone had just gotten up and left right before we arrived. It also made the few things that weren't well-maintained stand out even more, like the buzzing from the giant hornet's nest on the rusty shower facility, or the dead bird in the firepit. A stone's throw away from our campsite was a small playground, consisting of a merry-go-round and a swing set. With the bright sun and complete absence of life along with the eerily quiet atmosphere, I imagined that the sounds of the swings creaking would add the perfect horror ambience to the setting. Perhaps the strangest thing at the place was an old, rusty dunk tank a few yards away from the playground. There was no water in it, but rather just an empty cage and tub with a ledge. My siblings and I took turns putting pieces of firewood on it and trying to knock them off by hitting the button on the front. Stannard Township RV Campground is far from the creepiest place I've been, but clearly something about it has stuck with me enough to make it significant seven years later.
So this is gonna sound weird I live in ohio in a rural area. There is an area of a road on the way to Lancaster (Google it if you want a general area) that just feels off. Like nothing is outwardly wrong, mostly farms, spots of woods, and couple stream/rivers. Then you come up over a hill and come out to a flat area. Left and right is just fields usually soybeans or wheat. This flat area extends for about a mile until it ends at a rise, just enough to break the LOS to the rest of the road. At this rise their is a farm house, not the most run down or the best. Solid ehh home. This bit of road just feels wrong. My wife and me both noticed and try to avoid it. Just makes your hair stand and paranoia to set in but nothing ever happens there.
Is the infirmary still there? Years ago in college I remember getting some weird effects on our film when my friend and I took a trip down there to Fairfield co.
Nah Just fields and a house with a dead tree out front. Keep going and a big modern barn with combines and stuff. But only felt weird going while driving through the flat depressed area.
The Oregon Outback. I drove a hundred miles in Malhuer and Harney counties and didn’t pass another car till I got to Idaho
I find that area the opposite of unsettling. To me, it is relaxing being away from people.
Oh me too 100% but my wife who is from a big city was very paranoid about the gas. Beautiful area, I love Steens Mountain and the Alvord desert
Oh that's absolutely gorgeous country, but yeah remarkably desolate and devoid of people save for the Burns area
Watching the herds of pronghorn and listening to the mating calls of the sagehens was otherworldly. And the night sky is the best in the lower 48
Kiryas Joel. The first place I've been literally thrown rocks at and chased out of a place. People stop what they're doing, men, women, kids, when they see an outsider (especially a woman) driving into their town. The houses were shoddy third wordly bloc buildings on top of each other. Nothing in English such as signage, store names, etc. Everyone wearing full black clothing with those weird fluffy hat in the middle of summer. You could've very much been dropped into an eastern European town.
Never been in that town but I go to the nearby outlets from time to time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/nyregion/kiryas-joel-a-village-with-the-numbers-not-the-image-of-the-poorest-place.html
Gettysburg Cemetery at Dawn, particularly in the fall
Kensington philadelphia pa
Estacada, Oregon. Grew up there. It's a redundant community that has been bypassed with a highway, very small population and densely wooded, but it's still very close to Portland and the I-84 and I-5 corridors. It's right next to the massive Mt. Hood ntl. Forest. Prime dumping ground. There are a LOT of bodies dumped there. I personally know at least 5 people who have found multiple. My uncle found a few, one was a serial killer victim that was really not good. It fucked him up. My sister, as a teen, was chased after seeing someone dumping a corpse as she was coming home from work one night. My dad found someone who was hung, not a suicide.
Kensington Philadelphia
the outer banks felt surreal to me...way too flat
The outer banks in the winter feel like they are lost in time and space, it's VERY eerie.
Agreed. It's unsettling how a place that's so built-up can still feel so wild.
Why? All of Florida is that way so what’s the difference?
It’s much more sparsely populated and also Florida isn’t quite so full of barrier islands where there’s water to your east and west at the same time.
Certain areas of Baltimore
Fuck you, Baltimore!
Chester PA for my own state. Imagine going to a casino there without knowing anything about the area. As you get close to the exit, you start noticing youre in a rough area. Housing projects, graffiti all over the interstate, overgrown plants on everything. And then you turn off. You drive down streets with bars on the windows, graffiti everywhere, tall grass coming out of sidewalks, and urban decay everywhere, and then you get to your destination. You have to drive past a LITERAL PRISON to get in. It's literally right next door. And then when you go in the parking garage, you look out and see that youre literally overlooking the prison, seeing guard towers, fences, and tons of barbed wire from said garage. That place was unsettling AF. A different kind of unsettling was going up 321 in south carolina from just north of savannah to columbia. Why would I do that? because it was 2017, i was on vacation in savannah, we had a hurricane evacuation, and the roads were packed. So, you go through tons of crazy back roads areas down there. And it's a different kind of ghetto from chester. You go through all of these run down towns with boarded up windows and businesses. You stop at gas stations with gross bathrooms. Your best rest stop is some grocery store along the way. A lot of the people there had confederate flags on their cars and literally looked inbred. It was really fricking weird. Southern rural poverty is no joke.
The woods of Appalachia at night. You’re just waiting for some horror movie shit to happen.
As someone from Appalachia, this is a TikTok trend that nobody in Appalachia historically ever really said. …however, you can definitely stumble upon sketchy things. Last time I was in the boonies I was walking through the woods in the middle of nowhere and happened upon a tree with a rotting noose attached to it, tied up hangman style. Otherwise, Appalachia is generally beautiful and relatively safe so long as you take the right precautions and don’t make unwise decisions about whose privacy you intrude upon. Not to build upon a trope, but occasionally people who are up to no good choose seclusion for a reason. That, and Appalachians can be a pretty fiercely independent and reclusive people (for good reason, historically). But yes, it’s creepy at night, and you generally want to be armed when in the deep woods (and can expect others to be as well, if you see anyone else at all).
If you see a camp fire, still, or weed crops just turn around and take a half mile radius around it lol
Same for deep East Texas, then. Although less weed once the authorities figured out they could use heat sensing cameras to spot it from helicopters at night. Back in the day I used to know of several large patches before the authorities set up to catch people coming out to harvest after doing a night survey to find where people were growing it.
I think the TikTok trend just kinda melded together a bunch of local Appalachian legends with the skinwalker, but I definitely heard my fair share of warnings and ghost stories to ignore the voices in the woods growing up. Generally it went without saying, you just stay out of the woods at night.
Yeah there are definitely a good number of local superstitions. I don’t come from a particularly superstitious bubble so it was all typically viewed with a bit of bemusement. That said, my grandfather did think he was a “water witch" (using a divining rod) and his great grandmother was known as an actual “witch” in her county, telling fortunes to soldiers passing through during the Civil War. That part of my family were historically “Melungeons” — tri-racial white, black, and native. But the boogiemen in the woods never seemed to hold much sway beyond stories you told the kids to keep them from going into the woods alone or at night.
If you hear whispering in the woods, don’t listen. If you hear a voice calling your name, don’t answer. If you see something through the trees, look elsewhere. Whatever you are feeling, don’t acknowledge it. That deer in woods… It is not a deer.
I know that this is Appalachia knowledge 101, but fuck me if it doesn't go against every instinct ingrained in me to ignore the creepy crawly feeling that has saved me more than I care to admit. Appalachia logic infuriates me.
We have that same feeling, but it’s almost always a mountain lion, they really engage a part of our survival instincts that is sometimes mistaken for paranormal. Edit: From CO
Which is exactly why I don't WANT to ignore it. The logical brain in me says it feels like I'm being watched. The logical brain in me says if it's a big cat, you CANT ignore it, because that's how they hunt. You have to let them know you know they're there. But there is a small part of me that does believe in the supernatural and henceforth I should do all of the above, which is ignore it. So if it's a big cat and I ignore it, I'm fucked. But if it's something else and I don't ignore it...I'm also fucked. It's a lose/lose situation and that is why Appalachia logic infuriates me....
Fuck, I know that feeling. There’s occasional mountain lions in the hills above my neighborhood. I went on a small hiking trail that got way too isolated and narrow through the brush. I just got bad vibes and turned around rather than go further.
It’s not “knowledge 101”. It’s a silly ghost story.
i’m also in western PA and yeah. having anxiety while my parents live in the woods isn’t great lol
That's the wild cats
Yup. Born and raised in Appalachia. Still live here. It's like a cheap bar in a big city; after a certain hour there ain't no reason to be hanging around. Come nightfall, you'd best be in the house minding your business. These mountains are old as the earth itself. Add in the wild cats, bears, and coyotes to whatever else might be prowling around.
> old as the earth itself. I was ready to be all "aKsHuLlY" but Google says the origins go as far back as the Mesoproterozoic. Holy shit! So yeah, that ain't far off.
The appalachians are extremely old and basically worn down very tall moutain range on the order of the Himalyas at their peak height
I had a friend from eastern KY who would get really freaked out by the desert at night. I told her "at least out here you can see them coming!"
Don't go into the woods if you hear someone screaming in the distance. Lost a friend that way
Alright now you have to tell that story
I'm guessing it wasn't a someone, but some kind of animal. Mountain lions, specifically the Eastern Cougar, are presumed to be extinct but people claim they still see them occasionally. They definitely sound [like a woman screaming.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pxo8X5uIWRE)
Fishers and foxes make screaming sounds, too, but they're not nearly as big.
A friend and I drove out from the DC area to a gig in West Virginia. I'd actually never been to that state but she'd grown up there, so she took the scenic route out. It was a lovely, winding country road through the hills. It was a great drive but I distinctly remember her telling me that if I was ever driving out on my own, I should never take this road at night. There were long stretches with no cell signal and it was very possible you wouldn't see another car driving past until the morning. That night, we took the way less scenic but also way more trafficked interstate to get home. As fate would have it, her car broke down on the side of the road. Since we were well within "civilization," though, we had plenty of cell signal to get a tow truck. So yeah, don't drive around the backwoods of Appalachia without a game plan.
Walpack Center, NJ. It's a town of only 12 people. It's bizarre driving there in the middle of the day and nothing being open, not even the post office.
State and county highways late at night out in the country. Where I live if your out there at night it’s usually just you and the moon is your only light source and cause I live in the prairie it’s super eerie cause you can go for miles without seeing a house
Slave houses in the south.
The New Jersey Pine Barrens. Although I find the area beautiful during the day, its a little bit unsettingly at night. The trees seem to muffle the sound of your own voice, yet you can still hear random, unidentified sounds echoing in the distance. It has this weird stifling feeling.
Walking through rural Idaho at night. It’s literally pitch Black out aside from the light of the moon, like literally can’t even see directly in front of you, and it’s so entirely lonely and isolated. Being away from people like that was super unsettling
Really? I suppose its what you grow up on. I always found rural Idaho at night to be peaceful and serene.
I grew up in rural wooded NW Montana, so similar to northern Idaho. I have spent many days, evening and starlit nights wandering through the woods. Usually I found it fairly peaceful, but occasionally something would make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Those times I turned around and went another way. Several times when I went back home or another route I heard reports of bear or mountain lion tracks in the area I was going to go. So I learned to listen to my instincts when wandering the woods
My little corner of Idaho was coyote country and those fellas usually announce themselves.
Yea for sure, I’ve had that thought walking around LA at night before, that like this must be super scary and weird if you didn’t grow up around it haha I think it was really just the darkness of Idaho that threw me off. Like seldom have I been anywhere where there’s like zero lights around at night. It’s kinda spooky if you’ve never experienced that much
I miss it so much. Just going out and knowing it's you and the universe and nothing intruding on that.... If its any consolation, the opposite is also true. Brightly lit streets at night make me a little jumpy.
There's a beauty to it, but it's definitely an eerie thing especially if you're from a bigger city (me being one of those ppl)
I made a comment about Idaho earlier. Between CDA and Sandpoint and east to the Montana border, especially at night, is so absolutely unsettling. There's hardly anyone out on the highway or in the towns after dark. I've never lived anywhere that felt so haunted.
Auburn Washington
Kensington under the El... With all the opioid addicts, it's one of the scariest things I've ever seen...and I've lived in Philly pretty much my whole life. It looks like a zombie movie
Can someone point me to any subreddits with this post's kinda vibe to it? Unsettling old places with pictures, creepy landscapes, places that lead to nowhere, that kinda stuff? I know there's some amateur and pro photographers that seek these things out, any sub recommendations? Thx!
The northern Maine woods. It's an extremely dense forest that's unbelievably quiet.
I found Maine surprisingly unsettling. Was in Portland area. My first trip there & was looking forward to it. But it felt weird. I could never really relax or settle in. Gazillionaire yachts docked in row was an odd sight too ( the kind with helicopter pads and many employees).
Parts of New Orleans
I’ve got two: driving at night in the Berkshires in western Mass, and similarly driving at night on the backroads in the Hockomock swamp area in eastern Mass. You get the eeriest feelings in those areas, like you could see some weird creature pop out into the road at any moment!
Walla Walla, Washington. Had to stop there once due to a malfunctioning rental car. It was stuttering, and obviously had electrical issues. Threw a bunch of error messages like that made it seem like turning the car off would result in it not starting again. The town was like being in an episode of the Twilight Zone. It was a nice looking place, good roads, cool downtown. Every single person I interacted with was a rude asshole, everyone either had a glare or a glassy eyed, slack jawed stare. Every business was dead. No one was walking around, shopping or eating, but every business was fully staffed. It was like I had shit my pants and used the feces to paint a swastika on my forehead. I could practically hear screams of "UN FORASTERO!". Had to wait 5+ minutes for the rental guy to get off his personal phone call to talk to me, he then told me they would look at the car and to come back in an hour. The place had like 6 people working. Went to a restaurant, had to wait while the staff decided to stop talking to each other and glaring at me like I was interrupting them. Awful service, dirty, we left. Next place was better but extremely slow. Took 10 minutes to give us menus, 30 minutes for two cheeseburgers. They didn't have a bunch of stuff, their shipment didn't show that day? Went back to the rental place, guy was on the phone again. Angry because we were "late". They hadn't looked at the car despite no other customers. "1 more hour.". Went to a couple of random stores, we were followed and glared at by the store workers. In the end "nothing" was wrong with the car. They turned it off, turned it back on, and it was fine. We drove it without issue for the rest of the trip to the next rental place where we exchanged the car for a different one.
The tiny dying meth towns scattered across the Midwest. You can feel the sour glares of the local residents searing into your vehicle as you dare to drive through their dilapidated village. Grew up in one of those towns, 0/10 place to live as a mixed race kid lemme tell ya
Having just driven through recently, gotta be Dalhart, Texas. Gave me apocalyptic horror movie vibes as soon as we set foot in town.
Seems like every other town in West Texas and Western Oklahoma to me
Understandable. I think what really freaked me out about Dalhart were the birds. I already thought it was eerie driving through, but we spent the night and woke up to the sound of quite literally *hundreds* of grackles outside our hotel windows. They were EVERYWHERE. I like grackles as much as the next person - they’re interesting birds - but having that many just outside our very flimsy hotel door, cawing so loudly you couldn’t hear anything, felt a bit like an omen of death.
There’s an Austin artist who does great silly drawings of grackles smoking cigarettes and looking menacing in HEB parking lots. Obviously they don’t actually smoke (no thumbs, so they can’t use lighters) but when you can barely see tree limbs because there are so many grackles sitting on them and cawing, it can be unsettling.
East St Louis
The Mississippi Delta. The land is so very flat and it is such an economically depressed place. It feels like the land that time forgot.
Just got back from a long road trip. I had read there was a ghost town along my route so I decided to detour through it. Turns out the town is really run down but not entirely abandoned with some people still living there. They made it feel really wrong to go through there like some kind of poverty porn or something. I left quickly and didn’t share and photos from there out of respect to those who still live there.
Highway 20 in Washington. Northernmost major highway in the continental US. There are some nights where I’m driving it and i can just feel eyes on me.
Went on a cross country train trip when I was 15..can’t remember if it was Albuquerque or Arizona(I think it was Albuquerque) but from the train I could see Native American reservations..and they looked..bad..like makeshift houses that looked like rundown shacks spread through out open land..kinda ruined the trip for me.
yep everything between Flagstaff and Albuquerque is basically a wasteland. Hopi/Navajo/Zuni land. it’s sad
Ohio
We don't speak of øĥīō.
Gary, Indiana
It sounds like a joke, but it's what I came here to write. It's like a ghost town but a whole city. There's this horrifying area on the edge of town that's all dirt roads and semi-abandoned houses that freaks me out in a big way.
*michael Jackson laugh* he he
It’s not like that song from “The Music Man”?
Once you're truly alone on roads with literally no one, little light pollution like Slope County ND. Wait for dark and stare at the stars. When have you ever been truly more than a mile from another human being?
I didn't feel too safe in Doyle, California and Gallup, New Mexico.
Tiny southwest desert towns are what I LIVE for
Abandoned Paper mills. There's a lot of them in the West. Some are still in limited operation. Most look like you'd need a hard hat and a tetanus shot just to set foot in them.
there are usually blighted areas all over in rust belt large cities where you think you're in some kind of post apocalyptic America
I was driving solo late one night in light fog and sprinkling rain in August of '22 on my way home to Georgia from Minnesota, doing my usual thing of taking non-interstates as much as reasonable, and I'd just driven through [this unsettling place discussed here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/1drq0lz/what_are_some_of_the_most_unsettling_places_in/lax44f0/) when [I turned this curve heading southeast](https://www.google.com/maps/place/36%C2%B056'08.1%22N+88%C2%B057'01.7%22W/@36.9355833,-88.9504722,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d36.9355833!4d-88.9504722?entry=ttu). When I crossed over Mayfield Creek, I began seeing a diffuse red flashing in the distance, resolving into a slowly-flashing red light straight ahead through the light fog. I was only doing ~40 MPH due to the conditions, so it took ~3 minutes to get to the intersection the light was hung over two miles away. It was just your normal old incandescent flashing red over a dark rural intersection, but...
Eastern Oregon is pretty unsettling. Like, I drove 120 from Burns to the Idaho border at night, I just wanted to be out of there so badly. The next most unsettling place would have to be the entire state of Pennsylvania. You have Centralia, sure, but Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are peppered with abandoned buildings, you have Worthington and its racist LED billboards, you have these tiny borderline abandoned hollers all over the goddamn place, you see more Confederate flags there than you do in fucking Mississippi for fuck's sake, the interstates are in rough shape, almost everything feels worn down like people stopped caring sometime 40-50+ years ago, and people there are just weird, like not the good kind of weird like you see in the southwest, but the bad weird.
Tidioute, PA- two hours and some change north of Pittsburgh. Desolate little river town in the Allegheny National Forest. More lively in the summer but very eery in its own beautiful way.
Concrete City in Nanticoke, PA.
If you go along Central and Zuni in Albuquerque a good ways, the amount of trash, homeless people, and poverty can be rather unsettling.
Blue Ridge Parkway, especially during the winter. Blanket of white and brown and not much else. Worried something may come up the mountain or down it and be upon you in seconds
Vidor TX and Harrison AR.
Little Bighorn Battlefield.
west virginia is crazy bc people are paying millions of dollars for a shack with similar views on the west coast, yet the economic situation in WV is so bad that people don’t even consider it.
Years ago, Camden, New Jersey. It was just a desolate ghetto with the country’s saddest aquarium and an old battleship. It was that level of ghetto where nobody even lives there anymore. It’s apparently been fixed up, but I haven’t been there in over a decade
Centralia, Pennsylvania
Gary , Indiana. Entire city left to waste when the steel mills declined. I used to live in Pittsburgh and it was a frightening view of what Pittsburgh could have been.
Most Walmart parking lots close to the interstate. Seen cleaner and safer places in Afghanistan.
Anywhere where UPS doesn't let Black people deliver to.
Shit, really? Like, they have an actual official list of places? I would like to see this list. It sounds like a useful list. I'm not kidding.
Like a Green Book for the brown trucks.
Harrison, AR, especially if you're not white or are in an interracial marriage.
The deep hill country in Texas. It felt very... *unwelcoming*. Hardcore "Deliverance" vibes.
Nevada. Pretty much all of it.
The Clown Motel in Tonopah Nevada. Creepy.
The drive between Alamogordo and Artesia at 2:00 AM. You've got a steep climb, then a tunnel, then a super-quiet small town, then a windy-curvy highway in the forest, then the rolling hills of the plains with no houses or towns until the next super-quiet town of Hope (population a few dozen). Maybe one or two other cars driving past. Multiple spots where the hills block the radio. Las Cruces to Alamogordo? Not bad. Artesia to Roswell or Hobbs or Carlsbad? Dull, long, but otherwise not bad. But Alamogordo to Artesia is extremely unsettling.
As absolutely beautiful as the Olympic peninsula is…I was solo traveling through there for a few days and I definitely felt as thought it was a little spooky. By day 3 I was ready to be out of there and as soon as I hit the sunshine I felt like a different person lol
Casinos. Lots of retirees and disabled just throwing their money away joylessly.
Certain parts of West Virginia, any 30 mile drive through backroads, 90% chance you will see something at least baffling if not genuinely disconcerting.