18 People Describe Their Creepiest Stories Of Places That Shouldn’t Exist
Life presents people with all sorts of unexplained phenomena. In the following compilation of Reddit stories, people describe places that seemingly disappeared, thus putting the mysteries of the universe on full display. Many of these experiences occurred during hikes in remote stretches of forest or in isolated locations along largely untraveled roads, but a few occurred in surprising places - like the heart of New York City.
If nothing else, these stories prove that people don't have everything figured out just yet, and there are still riddles to ponder that make this life even more confounding, beautiful, and - in some cases - really scary. Let's take a deep dive into Reddit narratives about creepy locations that vanished.
- 12,068 VOTES
The Land Of The Dancing Man
From Redditor u/Sterling_-_Archer:
I was relocating across Texas and, as I normally do, was driving through the night to skip traffic and because it’s more serene that way. I was driving straight through central Texas going northwest, so seeing the hill country change to desert in the full moon was super cool. Anyways, I was driving with my (now ex) wife, and we were running low on gas. Luckily, we were pulling into a tiny no-name town, and we could see an old gas station come around the bend. This encounter happened at about 2 am.
Now, this town only has one road, and this station was right at the edge of town at the end of it. When I say old, I mean very old; the type that you have no option [to prepay], you simply flip up the handle on the machine, and you hear the pump inside start struggling to get the gas from the reservoir. It had the old-style tick readers too, not a thing electrical on it.
I, being the young man I was, had never seen one before, so I walked into the store to buy the gas before I pumped. The store only had one light on in the far back, and I almost thought it was closed since it was barely brighter inside than it was out in the moonlight. Upon entering, I saw the place was deserted; no customers, no workers, nothing. However, there was an odd tune playing on someone’s radio that I couldn’t place. An old-sounding, upbeat piano piece was playing somewhere around the corner inside, and I heard shuffling once I walked closer to the source.
This place made me feel scared. Not the “Whoa, this is creepy” scared, but the “All hairs are on end - something is seriously wrong here, but I can’t figure it out” scared. As I turned the corner, I saw a young man standing next to a large radio and... dancing. His dancing, though, was extremely off-putting and seriously didn’t match the tune at all.
Though the radio was cranking out what sounded like ragtime, this guy was running his hands up and down his body and pretty much “feeling himself” with his eyes closed in what looked like bliss. He was going far slower than the music and definitely wasn’t on tempo. For some reason, I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even move. I was in a trance as every part of me screamed to turn and leave.
Finally, I said, “Excuse me, I just need some gas.”
The guy kept dancing.
I said it a little louder, and he finally slowed down a bit, opened his eyes, and focused on me. But it was like he was looking at a finely cooked steak. He was looking almost through me, and he silently walked to the register, not saying anything. I said, “Uh, just $20 please.” He, again, didn’t say anything and just stood behind the ancient register, so I just figured maybe he didn’t speak the language or was embarrassed I caught him dancing, so I laid the money on the counter and went outside hoping he’d turn on the pump.
I filled up, told my wife about the weird-ass scene in there, and turned off the pump.
Weird thing is, when we were leaving, I looked back in the window, and the guy was still standing there behind the counter. This may sound fine, but my money was still on the counter in front of him. It was like he was a robot who just turned off once I left.
This is where it gets super weird:
A couple months later, I was driving back to San Antonio to visit family, and we figured we’d stop at that old gas station to see it in the daytime, since it had become somewhat of a running joke between us. We pulled into this tiny town, and... the thing was gone. The lot it sat on at the end of the road wasn’t even there. It was just grass. No rubble, no old pump, no lighting, nothing. It was like somebody picked it up and moved it. It looked like nothing had been there for years.
Still get freaked out thinking about it.
- 21,246 VOTES
An Abandoned Town That Disappeared
From Redditor u/wyckoffh1:
I was going for a drive around my hometown, and I decided to turn [onto] a road I didn’t recognize. This stood out to me because I live in a small town, and I know its layout by heart.
As I followed this winding road, the New England forest thinned, leading to a hilly area. The hills stretched as far as I could see. On top of each hill was a small house, which were all identical. There were no lights in the windows, no cars in the driveways. No trees. Only dead grass and empty houses.
After about 10 minutes, I passed a woman walking her dog. She looked at me like she had seen a ghost, as if she was in total shock that someone had driven by her. I kept driving.
The air smelled weird. I don’t know how to describe it, but it was kind of metallic. I drove for another 20 minutes and eventually saw a road leading to patch of woods, and I followed it. I emerged from where I had entered and got back onto the roads I was used to.
I have never found that road again, or those houses and hills. I have looked on Google Maps and searched the area in person, but I have never found anything. The area that I had entered was a marshy forest, with no roads leading in or out, and it was nowhere near large enough to conceal the vast area that I had driven through. To this day, I am bothered by it.
- 31,416 VOTES
A Photo-Filled Shack In The Woods
From Redditor u/BattingElk5713:
Once I was walking through the woods with a friend of mine, and we were just messing around, telling jokes, and climbing on trees. After about a half a mile out, we found a small shed. We had no idea who owned it so ... we went inside. It was pretty dark since it was under a couple of huge trees and also early in the morning, so we had to turn on the lights on our phones.
When we could see, we found a huge collection of pictures, all seemingly having no context. Some pictures of people, some of animals, and some of places. The pictures were from all around the world, too. There were even pictures of the Colosseum and the Great Pyramid. They were all stuck on the wall with one piece of duct tape. But then we started to notice some weirder photos. We saw a photo of Eric Harris (the one from the security camera in the lunchroom) and one of a naked man with a bull hat on.
Then we noticed in the corner of the shack was a camera that most likely shot most of these pictures. We didn't want to steal anything, so we left. We told a couple of friends, and they were interested, [so] we went back to the shack with them. But instead of finding the shack, we found a chair exactly where the shack was. There was a picture of the shack on the chair, and that's all we could find. I never found out who owned the shack [or] where it went.
- 41,119 VOTES
The Canadian Blair Witch
From Redditor u/tattoovamp:
[Twenty]-some-odd years ago, I took my kids and parents on a driving trip through the eastern coast of Canada. My dad (who was currently driving) decided to take this "short cut" off the main highway down a dirt road.
About five minutes down this road, things go eerily quiet. We should be able to hear birds, the trees rustling, cicadas, yet we hear nothing. It was too quiet. Dad starts slowing down.
I am busy looking at the map. I know where we turned off, and there was no designated road on our map. I’m worried that I can’t find it.
I look up from the map as I have realized nobody is talking. Everyone is looking out their windows. There are little stick people and stick designs hanging from the trees. Some are just shapes and others are more intricately made. Dangling, swaying slowly.
Between this and the fact that it was dead-quiet, I made an instant decision and told Dad to turn around and leave as quickly as possible. I felt a huge pressure in my ears, like they needed to be popped. Mom had goosebumps, and my dad said we were just being silly. [Even so,] he obliged and got us out of there.
- 5921 VOTES
A Vanishing Community Of Old People
From Redditor u/taysoren:
I grew up a short distance from the Olmsted power plant in Utah. I'd ride my bike to the canyon where it sits and ride up the bike path. One day, I rode to the canyon entrance and was playing around the river. I was probably 10-ish at the time.
A young boy, probably around 7 years old, came over and started talking to me. We played and talked for a minute, and then he asked if I wanted to meet his grandma. Of course, being a kid, I went with him. There are some "homes" near the power plant, and I remember walking into the area with him and wondering how I had never noticed them. The grounds were well-kept, [as were] the large, old trees... The houses were very old but looked like they were well-maintained, and there were old people everywhere.
Every other person there, other than the boy, was a senior citizen. They all looked happy and were sitting on porches or walking around and talking. I do believe the boy introduced me to his grandma, who was sitting on the porch of a [white,] two-story building. Then we played by the river that [ran] alongside … the homes.
After a while, I said goodbye and headed home. I rode my bike to the canyon often, so it wasn't long before I was near there again. No people... none at all. No one had lived there (as far as I know) in a very long time.
- 6682 VOTES
A Portal Along The Blue Ridge Parkway
From Redditor u/darthbiscuit80:
When I was 14, I was driving home with my family one night through the Blue Ridge Parkway. Nothing but a lot of trees and rock faces lining the road. We came around a curve and face to face with a large tunnel/archway. It was daylight on the other side, and there were visible buildings. Big ones.
We weren’t going fast, and we all had time to get a good look at it as we drove by, so I know it wasn’t a hallucination. Also, my father has no imagination, and he saw it, too. Mind you, we were in the middle of nowhere on the Blue Ridge Parkway. This was back [in] ‘94, and portable HD projectors weren’t really a plausible explanation. (Besides, it was clearly a tunnel, or maybe an archway. The perspective moved parallax as we passed.)
We turned around to investigate the area again, but when we did, there was nothing there but a rock face. My dad said not to tell anybody about it or they would haul us away. It’s done a good job of sticking in my head for 24 years, though.
- 7691 VOTES
The Cave That Came And Went
From Redditor u/Economy_Cactus:
By my hometown, there was a hiking trail that people went to very infrequently. It was along the side of the Niagara Escarpment, so it had some climbable cliffs and some very shallow caves that you could crawl around on.
I went with some friends when I was 19/20, and we were crawling around and found a cave that went pretty deep. We had never been in there before, had never even seen it before. So we pushed forward and decided to check it out, even though we had no flashlights and this was when cellphones didn't really have a flashlight function.
We stepped into the cave, and it was easily 20-30 degrees cooler than outside. Upon looking around with what light we had, we noticed it was really clean inside the cave, as in it didn't have beer cans littered everywhere like all the other small caves did. While in there, we got a really eerie feeling and heard weird and strange things. [We felt] like we were being touched, poked, and pulled, and [we didn't have] any way to figure out who was doing it because it was too dark. We were just using lighters to see what was around us.
We were convinced one of us was messing with the others, although any time we sparked up a lighter, we were all decently far apart.
We decided to hightail it out of there after only a few minutes, convinced to come back with flashlights. We came out to see that it was [then] dusk outside… when we entered, it was midday. Somehow, we had lost roughly three hours inside of this cave.
We went back with flashlights the next week [but] have never been able to find this cave again.
- 8857 VOTES
The Old-School Gas Station In The Middle Of The Desert
From Redditor u/InfamousCrown:
Many years ago, my family and I moved from California to Nebraska. I was still a young kid, probably 5 or 6 years old. We were driving through Nevada, and shortly after Las Vegas ... we needed to stop and fuel up. We stopped at your typical old-school gas station that rings when you pull up to the pump. I don't remember it that well, but my dad told me it looked normal.
He got out to stretch while my mom went inside to pay for gas. My mom said that when she walked in, the gas station had quite a few people inside (despite us being the only car there). When she walked up to the counter to pay for gas, everyone turned to her, and the lights went out.
She ran outside, where my dad witnessed everything and helped her into the car, and we sped off down the interstate, not caring whether we ran out of gas or not. To this day, my mom says that [was] one of her scariest encounters because she can't explain nor figure out exactly what was going on. And yes, we found a better gas station down the road and made it to Nebraska.
- 9984 VOTES
The Town That Disappeared At Night
From Redditor u/xilstudio:
[I was] driving in rural areas in New England, near the borders of Vermont and Massachusetts, so I am not sure which one I was in. It was late... Well, okay, so late it was actually early. And there was fog - dense, dense fog. Like Silent Hill levels of fog. [...]
I am driving on back roads. First my headlight just up and goes out, cannot use high beams because of fog. I am in the middle of nowhere, I haven't seen a house or town in a long time. Car starts making noise, check engine light comes on. So I pull over, nothing much around: field and fog and dark. Creepy as hell. I gamely look at the engine … I can fix electronics, not engines. I tighten all the things I know.
Car now won't start. So I am in the dark, in the middle of nowhere, on the side of the road. Because of the natural rules of how things work, my cell phone has no service as well. It is like one big cliche. [...] So I recline my seat and decide to take a nap for a couple hours until the sun comes up.
I wake up, the sun is coming up, the fog is going away... and I am [on] the main street of a tiny town, parked in front of what looks like the Bates Motel house. Houses everywhere. It was the the creepiest feeling. I was sure [I was] in the woods. There was not a light on in any house all night? There was a service station 50 yards up the road, I walked up to it, talked to the guy (who looked perfectly normal), he walked over to look at the car, asked me to try to start it... and it did. F*cking thing turned over right away. And... BOTH headlights were working.
I drove on, never got the name of the little village, and I couldn't find it on a map. I always felt like I was in this big set-up for a horror movie that just didn't pan out.
- 10850 VOTES
Only She Could See These Rooms
From Redditor u/Letha0al:
A house that I grew up in in Tennessee had two rooms that I used to play in that don't exist.
In the downstairs, there was a larger open space that just about ran the length of the house with rooms splitting off of it. There was a bedroom with a sliding glass door to the outside, a mostly unfinished bathroom, another spare bedroom, and a laundry room. However, growing up, I regularly played in another spare bedroom and a storage room down there that don't exist and [that] my parents could never find.
To the right of the second bedroom was an empty-ish third one. [...] There was a large bed and in-wall shelving, but that was about it, unlike the peach room to the left, which my mum used for her storage. Of the two non-[existent] rooms, I could find this blue room the least often. When we were packing to move, I left a box of my toys in this room and was unable to find the room again to retrieve it.
The storage room would pop up next to the laundry room, where there was absolutely no room for it. It was a large room with multiple stand-alone metal shelves with boxes of junk. I pulled an old sterling silver vanity set out of this room, with a mirror, brush, and comb, which confused the hell out of my folks because they didn't know where I got it. I also got an old book in Hebrew out of there: white paperback, a bit large, with a color-printed front. My folks, again confused, just gave it to a woman at their church who could read it.
- 111,102 VOTES
Diner Of The Dolls
From Redditor u/PancakeParthenon:
A group of friends and I decided to take a small Saturday afternoon road trip into the backcountry of South Carolina. We figured we'd just drive around, head southwest, and see if we could find some antique shops, cemeteries, abandoned buildings, and the like. We pile into my car and start driving. It's about an hour of nothing, just some light conversation and southern pine forests.
We pass a few horse farms, some quaint old mill towns, and a few gas stations, but nothing interesting yet. 2 pm rolls around, and we decided we wanted to get something to eat. As a rule, we always like to try local diners and restaurants, so we kept driving until we saw a faded road sign for a town. It was about 5 miles down the road, and we figured that [was] good enough.
As we're driving through the town, we notice there's no one out. No cars on the roads, no people on the streets, and no real houses. The streets are lined with abandoned and boarded-up warehouses, shops with broken windows, and a few broken-down cars from the '90s. The further we go, the worse it gets. We finally get to a diner that's right off their main street.
It looks like there [are] about 10 people eating inside, and there [are] a few cars in the parking lot. Seems like they're open. Here's where it starts to get weird.
We open the door and step in. As soon as we clear the threshold, everyone stares at us. It's like in movies where the record scratches on the jukebox and everyone looks, except far more uncomfortable. In the middle of the diner is a large table with six people around it, who all turn back to their food and start [whisper]-talking. The waitress nervously shuffles up to us and quietly asks how many.
My friend Chris takes the lead and says, "Four," in just a normal speaking voice. Everyone looks at us again, and the waitress (who looks barely older than 16) recoils, but takes us to our table. She's sat us [at] a basic four-top near the large table in the middle. She takes our drink orders and leaves.
Once she goes, we all whisper about how weird that was. While we're talking, the line cook just stares at us. We all figure out what we want and wait. We sit in awkward silence for about 10 minutes before the waitress comes back.
She takes our orders and disappears into the back of the diner, leaving us alone in the dining room with the people at the other table. It gives us some time to look them over. They're a basic southern family. [A wife, a husband, three daughters, and] then her.
The other woman was dressed like the younger girls, but looked very much in her 40s. She wore a red, paisley-patterned dress, with frilled lace at the collar and cuffs. Her hair was long and stringy and covered the bulk of her round face. To the left of her was a doll, seated in a high chair for babies. The woman would sometimes lean in towards the doll and whisper something, then giggle.
Soon the waitress dropped food off at their table but set a meal down for the doll, too. She commented on how pretty the woman's daughter was and left. About 10 minutes later, she came back with our food, silently left it, gave us the side eye, and walked away.
The waitress came back to refill the other table's water, where she asked everyone how the food was but asked the doll, too. When she asked the doll, she spoke in a baby voice. The woman then picked up the doll, held it in front of her face, and spoke in a little girl's voice. She was being the doll. [...] We shoveled our mediocre food down, and my friend Chris just dumped 40 dollars on the table, and we left.
As we were leaving the town, Chris was looking for any sort of town name. I was checking to make sure we weren't being followed. This happened about six years ago, and we still can't find that town. No one remembers the name or the road it was off of, but we remember being there and what the diner looked like.
- 12482 VOTES
In Craters Of The Moon
From Redditor u/Pskipper:
About 15 years ago, driving from Billings, [MT,] to Boise, ID, I hit a weird fog in Craters of the Moon at twilight. It was patchy and stratified, hovering about three feet off the ground and ending maybe six feet up, so I could sort of see above and below but not through it, with brief flashes of the volcanic landscape around me.
At some point, a truck pulled up behind me and started following way too close, [...] and with the fog and their high beams, I was terrified. I can’t remember how I got away from it, but I must have turned somewhere. Eventually, I came around a bend on a back road, and Boise was in sight, three hours sooner than I was expecting to reach it on the interstate.
There isn’t a highway or frontage road that can shave three hours off the 10-hour trip; god knows I’ve tried to find it since then. Craters of the Moon and Arco still give me the creeps.
- 13521 VOTES
Down The Rabbit Hole
From Redditor u/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 I 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 I had crossed [onto] our neighbors’ property, so I hightailed it out of there. I asked my grandfather about it, and he said our land went way far past what I had described, and I couldn’t have left our land in the short amount of time I 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.
- 14438 VOTES
The Lost Lake
From Redditor u/crack-wolf:
I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Texas. It’s a small town named Hawley, a little ways outside of Abilene. From what I remember, it wasn’t even a one-stoplight town, it was a no-stoplight town. There was one school - pre-K through 12th, two diners, and two gas stations. Nothing else but sand/dust and mesquite trees.
Some of my earliest memories are of me and my two older brothers exploring the dry woods around our house. One of my most VIVID memories of my life there is of us coming across a massive lake one day after spending hours out in the woods. We were maybe 30 minutes from our house as the crow flies but had been exploring since sunrise. When we came across it, we all got a bad feeling and started trying to retrace our steps home immediately.
As soon as we got home, we told our parents, and they told us we were silly. We tried going back and never found it… [We] moved several years later, but even to this day, both of my older brothers have the same memory of us seeing this huge lake in the woods. But even after multiple return trips and an uncountable amount of Google Maps searches, we’ve never been able to find anything that could even be considered a pond - the nearest lake [is about] 30 minutes down the interstate.
- 15572 VOTES
A Truly Mystic Pizza
From Redditor u/Baelgul:
I was staying at a friend's place in the Financial District in NYC. They were out of town, so I was babysitting their cat. At some point in the late evening, I realized I hadn’t eaten dinner, so I went out to find something fast.
Hurricane Sandy had recently come through, so many shops and restaurants were still closed and in recovery mode, so my search turned up nothing of interest. On my way back to the apartment to order delivery, I walked by a place with a woman standing outside, and she said, “Free pizza.”
Now, I’m not one to ever turn away from those words, so I turned to her, and she repeated the phrase while opening the door to a small pizzeria. I went inside, and sure enough, there was free pizza. I ended up getting two large slices and headed back home for the night, stopping to give one to the doorman at the apartment complex.
The next day, I walked the entirety of the Financial District and found absolutely no trace of this pizzeria. To this day, I still call it my ghost pizza story.
- 16456 VOTES
Where Did That Restaurant Come From?
From Redditor u/sichbumba:
[Ten] years ago, my friend and I were bored one night and were driving around. We were on a highway in New Jersey about 30 minutes from our houses, and through the trees, in the middle of nowhere, we see this beautiful, freshly paved cement pathway with lampposts every 100 feet just lighting this pathway up. It was beckoning to us... and so we found the nearest exit.
We drove around for a while through darkness until the road came to a dead end and the path began. We got out and started walking on this path through the trees and these beautiful, wide-open fields until eventually, it ends at a little small town after a couple miles.
At this point it's like 2 am, and in a small town like this, there was nothing open except for this pizzeria... which is odd... so we go in. It is empty except for the older gentleman behind the counter. We order and start eating... then another older customer walks in.
The gentleman behind the counter and this customer do a double take at each other and then smile. Both of them run around the counter and embrace... "Mario!" "Stefano!" "What, has it been 40 years?" They talk the whole time about their childhood and growing up back in Italy. We think what are the chances we would be here... at this moment... seeing friends reunited after 40 years[?] [It's] just plain odd.
My friend and I, we finish up and we head back down the brightly lit path and back to the car and call it a night. Ever since that night, my friend and I tried to find that brightly lit path, but to no avail.
We haven't seen it since from the highway or driving down that road. In the small town, the pizzeria is there, but it closes at 10 pm, so no explanation why it would be open at 2 am. Just plain odd and something we never could explain, experiencing an unlikely moment to watch friends be reunited after 40 years.
- 17346 VOTES
In Eerie Rural New Zealand
From Redditor u/hey_there_kitty_cat:
There [are] a whole lot of places in rural New Zealand that will scare the sh*t out of someone who isn't used to it. [...] If I had to choose one, we were doing a five-day hike, had pretty good maps and directions.
Now, there [are] 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 [and] 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 actually 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?
- 18367 VOTES
The Tale Of The Chinese Jacket
From Redditor u/doomladen:
I got engaged to my (now) wife some 20 years ago, and I decided to wear a traditional Chinese silk jacket for my wedding. Problem is, at the time I was living in rural Yorkshire, England, and these were not easy to find, nor was it yet possible to buy them over the internet and have them shipped to me.
I spent a few months trying to find places that sold them in big cities nearby, […] without much success. Then, whilst on a shopping trip into my nearby town, we walked past a shop that only sold these Chinese jackets - nothing else. It was owned by a Chinese couple, which was remarkable, as virtually no Chinese people lived in the area, and I couldn’t begin to imagine what their target market was. They stocked exactly the jacket I was looking for in my size, [so] I bought it on the spot and wore it to my wedding.
Next time I was in town, I looked for the shop but couldn’t find it - presumably it shut down because who else was buying Chinese silk jackets in a town without Chinese people?
