This stuff is my bread and butter…I love it!
I’ve always wondered what it would be like to work out in the middle of nowhere. Like on an oil rig or a national forest. Well, as you’re about to find out, the folks that actually do these jobs encounter some pretty frightening situations.
Are you ready for this?
Prepare to get spooked by these stories from folks on AskReddit.
1. What is that?
“I worked at a public forest. One day we had someone report a dead animal on the side of one of our trails.
A few of us from the front desk hiked out to see what it was. It looked like a giant peice of…liver maybe? Just a pile of smooth red meat…no blood around. And it was wrapped up in a t shirt, with some coins scattered around it. We called our rangers to go check it out, and one of them was pretty sure it was a placenta.
The weird part is, you have to check in thru a front desk. So someone either snuck a placenta/liver in or gave live birth/removed an organ on our trails. We never got an answer on what the pile of meat was, how it got there, or why.”
2. Antarctica.
“I spent several seasons working at a remote field camp in Antarctica…over 1000 km from the main station in McMurdo.
Every once in a while, a Skua bird or Antarctic Tern would accidentally end up following one of the small planes (Twin Otter) out to our camp. Once there though, they’d basically be stranded with no way to get back to the coast. I’d get out of my tent some mornings and see a lonely Tern circling overhead, knowing it was a dead bird flying. It was quite creepy.
Along these lines, when birds (or seals) do die down there, it’s so cold and dry, that their bodies don’t decay either. They essentially mummify. Outside McMurdo at Scott’s Discovery Hut, there is still a perfectly preserved seal carcass from 1912 sitting by the entrance of the hut.”
3. Wild animals.
“I’ve worked in Canada’s north for a few years now in oil and gas.
It’s pretty creepy when during night shift you realise a moose has just been standing at the tree line staring you down for an unknown length of time.
Or finding bear tracks crossing the tracks you just made 5 minutes ago
Honestly the silence of a snowy forest in the dead of night 100s of km away from anything is pretty spooky. When Your only contact to the outside world is a radio channel nobody’s listening to, you feel pretty alone.”
4. Military aircraft?
“Working on ships. there was one night I was on a ship sailing through Alaskan Waters.
And it happened to be my first night ever seeing Northern Lights. I can’t believe how awesome that was…. it made the sky clear, made the night look like it was dusk, we were able to see clearly for miles.
Few buddies and I hit the roof or what we call, Lido deck at 1am just to gaze at it. An hour or so in, there was 6 of us on top, nearly the entire crew now. A big white spot light shines at us. We were near land, but where the spotlight was, was above the water and it wasn’t low enough to be on a ship, this was very high up.
It shined on us for about 15-20 seconds. Once the light turned off we looked to see what it was. Saw nothing; no trace of an aircraft or anything.
Couple minutes go by and the same light shined on us, this time it was on the other side of our vessel, above mountains. Still, unable to see what it was. We all saw it, we all have never seen any aircrafts hovering above these waters, especially at 2am.
We don’t know what it was. We think it might have been some sort of silenced aircraft the military was probably doing drills or something. But anyways, that was one of the weirder things to happen out on the ocean.”
5. Middle of nowhere.
“Spent a summer doing conservation work out in the absolute middle of nowhere in Wyoming. Was part of a crew that would spend two weeks camping in remote places to do manual labor in places machines couldn’t get to.
For this story, we were building new hiking/biking trails in the back portion of a designated wilderness area in a high altitude desert. This means that the nearest civilization was a 2 hour car ride to a town of 41 people in a sandy soil area where tracks last forever.
It was the middle of our stint during the early part of the night where everyone else had gone to bed but I stayed up to read, so maybe 11:30 or so. Still pitch black outside, clouds had covered stars. so my head lamp was probably the only light on in a 40 mile radius.
Suddenly I hear footsteps walking around our camp and head towards the tents from where I was in the community tent. That sound immediately put me on edge as I felt the hair on my arms raise and my adrenaline spike. I recall thinking to myself that two things are very wrong since the person was not using a light to see and the footsteps were not coming towards me from the tents, rather it was the opposite.
Within the four seconds it took me to drop my book, get up, and turn the corner of the tent to cast my light on the sleeping tents, the sound had stopped but I saw tracks in dirt before me. Looked like they came from one end of camp, looked into my tent, walked through the sleeping tents and kept going out of camp again.
I don’t know if I was making too much noise or not by walking around, but the rest of my crew ended up waking up and asking me what was going on from inside their tents. After explaining what I found, they all got up to look at the boot prints in the dirt.
They were d*mn near perfect copies of my own boots except for one small thing, I had a rock stuck in my treads that messed up the symmetry. (I was wearing fairly common work boots, except I also happen to wear US size 15 double wide boots, so there was no way in hell this was one of the other crew members)
I don’t think any of us slept much that night. Never saw or heard anything more after that night. A light rain removed the tracks a couple days later, but I do remember none of us were willing to step on the prints themselves and choose to step over them like cracks in the sidewalk.”
6. Creepy.
“On our drill ship that was built in China, we noticed on the drawings there was a room. We went to look at it and couldnt find an entrance but the spacing was obvious there was an extra room.
It might not sound so creepy unless youve been in these shipyards where two things are known to happen: stowaways, although I doubt it in this case, but also hundreds of workers at any given time following orders blindly. So we confirmed that the room had all six sides, yet not a single weld on the outside.
There is only one way this couldve happened and im sure youre starting to get it now. They must have welded from the inside for this room and then realized they had no way out upon completion if the gasses didnt kill them first.
Its extremely heavy around that room. People say they hear things. I have definitely. This isnt some old ship either. I rode this ship from China to Amsterdam after completion and then the maiden voyage to America. I guess it happens quick.”
7. Ghostly.
“My oldest brother used to work the overnight sprinklers on a golf course. He took me out one time just for fun and as we were driving uphill on a fairway, a figure of a lady appeared in the headlights at the top of the hill.
My brother steered a little to the left of her and kept driving right on by. I stared right into her eyes as we drove by and she stared back. Her eyes glowed like a cat in the night.
As soon as we were out of voice range I asked my brother “What the hell was that?!” He calmly responded, “Yea, she lives on the golf course and likes to terrorize the workers from time to time. I usually see her out here once a week.””
8. Bodies.
“We have a PTO pump spot that comes out of a canal for our rice fields. When I was like 12 years old my uncle found two bodies dumped in the little sump area where our pump sat.
Both of the ladies that were dumped there had the same tattoos so they think it was gang related but it was 45 minutes away from where that “gang” operated.
I still look in the hole every time I go by there and that was 20 years ago.”
9. In the dark.
“Spent a summer in Wyoming going to Bureau of Land Management land and other remote locations collecting data on bats and herpetofauna.
Heard a lot of weird noises like mountain lions screaming, deer snorting, what sounded like owls fighting. Woke up one morning to find two bull moose sleeping 20 yards behind my tent. All of this was “part of the job” until one night a truck was driving towards us when we were on a BLM square in the southwestern part of the state.
The truck was going overland, no road and was slowly driving at us. It stopped about 100 yards away, turned off the lights and we could see a person get out. They walked a full circle around us at ~100yards away, got back in the truck and turned around.
This was after dark and this shadowy figure did a complete circle around us. You could hear them walking through the sage brush and I’m sure they could hear us talking. We packed up after that and drove to a hotel an hour away.
I called the office and told them I was taking a gun when we went back out. Didnt like having the bear mace as our only defense.”
10. Scary noises.
“I’ve been fishing out in the gGulf of Mexico where they have some oil rigs. This rig wasn’t being used (from what we knew) so we would get pretty close to it to fish for red snapper.
While we were out there, we could have sworn we heard screams of a woman over and over. It was some sh*t but the explanation was the wind making the noises as it blew through the rig.
Well, that’s what we were told but it totally creeped us out.”
11. That is creepy.
“My mom used to live in a small town in the cascade mountains and worked as a forest ranger.
The creepiest thing that happened was when the oldest male ranger kept hitting on her and trying to get her to come home with him, not very out of the ordinary, but many years later after she’d left the town she found out he had been convicted of manslaughter and had killed a young female ranger right before she got hired.
She would have probably been his next target.”
12. In the wild.
“We were wrapping up for the day in northern Canada.
I am fueling up the sideboom, Im all by myself at this point cause i was tired of listening to the laborers whine of the cold so i told em i would take care of the rest. (Think bulldozer with no blade but a giant metal boom on the side that we use to raiser and lower pipe).
It’s february so pitch black. I keep hearing some weird sound. I cant quite hear it cause the pump is too loud.
I search around a couple times and see nothing. I get in the truck and take off drive past the front of the sideboom to see a cougar sitting on top of a dirt pile 15 feet away. The d*mned thing was just watching me there and probably could have ended me without me even realizing it.
I’ve never seen a cougar in the wild before and its hard to understand just how big they are and how powerful until you see one up close. That thing leaped off the 6 ft pile and probably didn’t touch ground for 15-20 ft.
It’s terrifying to think something so big and powerful could just be sitting there deciding if they want to make you dinner.”
13. We have the video.
“Used to be a supervisor for a janitorial company and a couple times a week I had to go to a middle school and clean their hallway floors and gymnasium with a zamboni type vehicle that mopped and scrubbed the floor.
When I was there I had the whole school to myself. Used to get finished quickly and go to the library and read while eating my dinner. Well, one morning after being there, I get a call from school security and they want me to come in. When I get there I see a police car too. Uh oh, I think.
They ask me a few questions like “did you notice anything out of the ordinary or strange while you were here last night?” No, I hadn’t (usually have headphones in). Security then shows me camera footage of someone breaking into one of the classrooms WHILE I WAS RIDING THE ZAMBONI not far away. I was there for another two hours. Nothing was stolen.
But the worst part was they didn’t have footage of the person leaving, they didn’t go out the way they came in, and police had to sweep the entire school. Never did find out what happened with that one.”
How about you?
Have you ever worked in a remote location?
If so, please tell us what it was like and if you ever had any scary experiences.
Talk to us in the comments!
