11. I was on a family vacation to Atlanta, about 1972. We went to visit some cousins of my grandmothers. 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 ’30s 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 to 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.
– jahnudvipa93
12. My own attic when I was 8. Shut the lights off on your way out and sprint down the steps like the ceiling is collapsing behind you. Whoever says childhood is fun and beautiful is wrong, it’s terrifying.
– Tmanning47
13. More or less a combination of creepy and sad, but Cambodia.
Went with 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 wtf just happened and he relayed this to us:
Apparently, in Cambodia (and some other countries), gangs will profit off of not only sex trafficking from children but also 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? We did some research online and found stuff about sex trafficking but not much about the toddler swapping and child mutilation. 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.
– WhatShouldIDoNoSleep
14. My old house. 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 the bull run and buried as the Union army marched back to DC.
Also, the basement was unfinished, flooded constantly, and had a cricket infestation.
– that_one_guy_reese
15. A room converted from the previous morgue in a hospital about 135 years old.
– RegisteredGinger
16. 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 to not 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 “WTF 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 the dog, ever. I go back through the house with him, and sure enough, there is a photo on the wall of Mr. Bates(TM) and Mother. I got the hell 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.
– WrongedCorinna
17. When I was in Iceland, I walked past a school at roughly 9:00ish in the morning and heard children laughing. It was VERY dark out, and I didn’t know I was near a school. The combination of the sudden sound of children’s laughter coupled with the darkness created one of the very few occasions I have felt unsettled like that. Kids should only be allowed to laugh in groups during daylight, in plain sight.
– brightyellowgarland
18. 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 nope’d right out of there.
– theowlsfavoritejoke
19. The gas chamber in Mauthausen concentration camp, it’s a deeply truly horrifying experience.
– JezerezehElin
20. I was working at Livingston Mall in New Jersey at Toyzam in 2011/2012. This mall is very 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 the 11-foot mini hall, maybe a bit longer. In it is a long series of shelves with nothing on it and it seems like this may have been the pet of something at some point. There are 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. Never found out what the place was for, but it did make a good place to stow some wooden pallets.
– Calabask
21. The solitary confinement cells at Alcatraz which is a pretty creepy place all on its own. But those cells are like the Heart of Darkness. There are four or five of them just off the library, all the cell doors open onto a windowless hallway, so it’s dark leading to dark.
I went in there on my own and I swear something evil was squatting in the corner waiting for me leave my soul unattended. 10/10 for creepy, will not go back.
– kadyg
22. When I was a kid, we lived in my dad’s old house, from when he was a kid. It was one of the oldest houses in town, & had been there since the 1800s, but had been redone a few times. The house had three bedrooms…a master that used to be a screened in porch, a regular room, & a room off to the side that was barely big enough for a twin bed. When my dad was about 11, his older brother died of heart failure, & they had his coffin put in that room, for the viewing. When my grandfather died about 10 years later, he was put there too. When I was born, my grandmother offered the house to my parents, as she’d gotten remarried, so they took it for $30 a month. That room always creeped me out for some reason growing up, & I didn’t like going in there. When I was older, & renting the house from my grandma myself, that’s when my dad told me about the viewings. Still was a creepy room & I kept only things I didn’t use on a regular basis in there!!
– poohfan
23. In a B&B in the Isle of Skye in Scotland.
It was right next to a nursing home that was suspiciously silent.
It was right above the sea in October and it was very windy and cold.
The B&B owner was a very old lady with a TON of porcelain figures in the house.
The room she rented as a B&B was on the top floor of her house.
It was very creepy. We just went in to see the room out of respect to the lady and got the hell out from there.
– amitizle
24. 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 beers 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.
– Scottolan
25. Any school block in my primary school when you are alone. I swear that place is haunted and can have its own horror game since it’s so huge.
– AnnoyingSphee
