Y’all, I’m going to be honest – I live for stories like these. The weirder and more unsettling the better, as long as I don’t have to be the one who experienced it firsthand.
These 18 people work in remote areas and are often on the job alone, and so you know they’ve seen a few things – things they’re about to share with you.
Enjoy!
18. At least once a week.
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.”
Alright. Cool.
Coolcoolcool.
17. Unsettling is the word of the day.
I do a lot of stream work so I spend time out in pretty rural areas walking streams and rivers. Once my coworker and I were working in a more urban environment and came across what we initially thought was a body – which of course triggered “Oh s*%t!!” from us – but it ended up being a firefighter’s dummy that had fallen down a hill. We felt pretty dumb.
Other notable things include a small grave in the middle of nowhere for someone’s dog (pretty sad), and a stuffed rabbit with shotgun shells placed where its eyes should be, a mannequin very purposely placed in a chair in the middle of the woods, and lots of little random alters.
I also did work in Myrtle Beach (what a hell hole) and accidentally walked into an inhabited homeless camp. I was peering into a stormwater grate when I looked up and saw a homeless person standing in his shelter staring at us and saying nothing. I felt like I was trespassing so we quietly left.
16. The face I’m making.
I used to work out in the woods in Florida a lot. Creepiest thing would be this day we were working near Big Cypress, tromping thru the brush all day.
At the end of the day my coworker and I do a quick drive thru of some of the property and realize the place was absolutely infested with water moccasins. We had been unknowingly essentially walking around a giant water moccasin pit all day.
That one kinda messed me up.
15. Very unnerving.
I work on North sea oil rigs on an ad-hoc basis (off the coast of Scotland) .
Wouldn’t say anything was particularly paranormal creepy but it can be very unsettling/weird place.
Fog can come rolling in out of nowhere and other rigs you can see off the sides can disappear in front of your eyes. Sometimes you can’t see the walkways 6ft in front of you or if you’re walking over grating you can’t see the sea below your feet (about 60m down from feck to sea) but you can hear it, all be it muffled. The fog can roll in over the course of a few minutes too so a perfectly clear day becomes pea soup.
You can also feel the rig moving/swaying on high winds /rough seas. Even though it’s a fixed leg Platform. Very unnerving to feel your office swaying when it shouldn’t be.
My last trip was my first ever Nightshift and I found it particularly unsettling as you’ve got the background noise of the plant but I walked around the whole rig without seeing another living soul for the whole shift (usually there are about 130 people on board although smaller rigs have smaller headcounts) .
Usually once a trip im hit by this awareness that you are just very isolated and in the middle of no where (most rigs I’ve worked on are an hour’s chopper ride from land). So if things go wrong it can escalate very quickly.
14. I would have had a heart attack.
I’m not sure this counts but I’m a teacher at an urban public school and was at work late grading and getting ready for the next day. Time had kind of flown by and before I knew it, it was 7pm. I start packing up to leave in a building that is, in theory, locked and empty besides me, when our ALICE alarm goes off, indicating an armed intruder in the building.
I am 1. Alone 2. Young 3. Freaked AF because I am absolutely not ready to fight a gunman over my lesson plans.
I book it out of the school and dive into my car, hearing the alarm blaring the entire time. I peel out the parking lot, and can see in my rear view the alarm lights still flashing and debate never going back, cause eff that lmao
Turns out they were doing “routine maintenance” and didn’t send out an email to the teachers 🤦🏻♀️
13. It felt like a weird dream.
During college that was located away from major cities, the woods were all around us. That being said, there was a highly rated trail, the Loyalsock Trail, which was about an hour drive from the university. I invited a friend to come with me as he had never been on an extended backpacking trip. A 50+ mile trail that we intended to backpack over the four day weekend.
I am an Eagle Scout who has spent countless hours in the woods and went on backpacking trips consistently throughout my college experience. As many have said before me, you get used to the minor “spooky” things happening; Coyote howls, raccoons in the middle of the night, even the occasional unknown noise. The scariest thing to find in the woods, however, are people.
We were about 20 miles into the trail and, being Pennsylvania where the underbrush and trees line the trails pretty densely, I always walk about 100 meters off of the trail to reduce the chances of me disturbing people/people disturbing me (especially in the early morning when I choose to sleep in).
Following that same strategy, my friend and I go out of our way to be in this amazing spot a good ways off of the trail where it would even be difficult to see our flashlights from the trail. This spot was on a peninsula where a creek met a river, meaning there was only one way into our camp and only one way out. We start a fire, cook our food, and drink some (but not enough to get either of us drunk). We put the fire out about midnight and head in to our individual tents. All is quiet.
It is the fall semester, so leaves are on the ground, the moon is brightly shining through the bare trees, and the air is cool. The only noise is the occasional time when I would hear my friend turn over in his sleep. Then, I hear the voices…
The voices sounded very close for being on the trail 100+ meters away. I check my watch; 3am. Who hikes at 3am? We are 20 miles in. I slowly get out of my sleeping bag, slowly unzip my tent, only to see my friend peaking out of his tent in the exact same fashion. He quickly moves his finger over his mouth in an exaggerated “hush” signal, then used the same hand to frantically motion towards the way of the trail.
Then we see them. Four adults, three men and one woman, walking directly towards our camp. No lights illuminating their path; They are walking silently at this point. Only one of them has a backpack; An impossibility for the long hike they were 1/3 of the way through.
Being a long trip, you bring wood cutting supplies to chop branches into smaller branches to burn; For me, this was a survival knife. Grabbing the knife, believing it is my only way of defending myself, I am more disheveled than I ever have been, especially knowing that a knife is barely defense at all. These people walk into our site, sit down by our extinguished fire pit, and just sit there for what felt like an eternity.
My friend speaks up and asks what they are doing in our campsite. Without answering the question, they ask if we have any food. Having packed as lightly as possible for the long trip. We had only a few extra Mountain House, MRE-style meals. I grab one out of my bag and toss it to one of the men. In rapid succession, I ask why they aren’t using a light, if they need help finding the trail, and why they are hiking so late. They respond with the following:
“We don’t use lights”
“We know where the trail is”
“It is better to hike late at night”Unnerved at this point, my friend asks them to leave. They respond by asking if we want to light the fire and hangout for a bit. No we do not. They grab their bag, get up, and leave without speaking another word. We watch them leave and take shifts making sure that they didn’t come back. Needless to say, we both got very little sleep that night.
When the sun rose the next morning, we finally got “real” sleep. By the afternoon, when we woke up, it all felt like a weird dream of sorts. The only evidence was a fuzzy cap that they must have dropped that I have to this day.
I have never had something as weird/spooky as that happen in the woods and hope to never have it happen again. In the eight years since that trip, I haven’t been back to the Loyalsock Trail.
12. Thank goodness he wasn’t hungry.
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 labourers 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). Its 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 damned 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 didnt touch ground for 15-20 ft.
Its terrifying to think something so big and powerful could just be sitting there deciding if they want to make you dinner
11. People say they hear things.
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
10. What a brave kid.
When I was 15 years old, I was doing my 4am newspaper delivery round on bicycle. I was driving into the garden of this one subscriber where I saw two guys with flashlights looking through the windows of the house. I was a bit in shock and just said ‘Goodmorning guys’. They were just as much in shock and an awkward silence followed.
I tried to break the silence by asking if I could pass them to deliver the newspaper through the door. One of the guys said the person living in that house did something to his family and they took it as an opportunity to get away in their car that was still running.
When they were gone I rang the doorbell at the house to tell them what happened and they should keep an eye out.
9. I don’t know what to say.
I’m a little late to this thread but I hope this doesn’t get buried because this story still haunts me. I worked as the county historic preservationist in southern Appalachia, working on the buildings and properties the county owned. One of the “benefits” included with my job was living on-site at one of the historic properties. The historic house was an imposing brick mansion built in the 1810s and I lived in a small caretakers house about 20 feet away. This was in the backwoods, so to deter trespassing and vandalism the county had built an 8 foot tall fence around the entire 5 acre parcel and put barbed wire on top of the fence. I mention this all just to show it was basically impossible for anyone, or anything, to jump or climb over the fencing and onto the property.
One night, after working late at another property, I pulled up to my entrance gate, let myself in, locked it behind me and then drove the 100 yards down the gravel road to my house. There were no lights on the property so I could only see by my headlights.
As I turned my car around the corner of one of the outbuildings and parked it, my lights shown on a thing that I still have a hard time describing effectively. It was the size of a deer, but with long spindly legs and long shaggy hair. Almost like a taller Maned Wolf, if you’ve ever seen pictures of one of those. That alone shook me as there was no way something of that size should’ve been able to get through, or over my fencing.
What follows is absolutely true: I got out of my car to get a better look at what the hell the thing was and as I opened the door and got out, the thing took off running away: not on four legs, but on two! I literally watched this thing raise it’s back up, stand at full height on its back legs and sprint away.
I absolutely freaked out at that point, grabbed my maglight and my shotgun from inside and tried to find the thing again. There was no trace. No tracks or anything; I have no idea how it got in OR out of my property.
I didn’t sleep at all that night, just sat on my couch with my shotgun watching my front door, hoping that whatever I saw didn’t come back and burst in. I cannot explain what the hell I saw that night but it still raises the hair on my neck every time I think about it.
8. A near miss.
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.
7. No answers around.
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 piece 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.
6. The tail-slapping worked.
Some friends and I were fishing a small pond just after dark for catfish. We started to hear sounds coming off the water like someone throwing softball sized rocks, but they were coming from all over the pond.
We thought someone was messing with us and we called out a few times for them to stop, but we eventually got freaked out and left. Cut to a few years later, I’m fishing a different pond and hear the same sound.
Turns out it was a beaver slapping it’s tail on the water to drive me from it’s territory. When beavers become problems in rivers, they relocate them to ponds in town.
5. Not where you want to be.
When I was a kid living in Queensland, Australia I used to “bush bash” meaning, walk off the beaten track through thick scrub. I knew the national park my house backed onto like the back of my hand. I knew from the topography where I was at all times. Both my parents were ex-military and had a sort of “hands off.” Trusting me even as young as 12 to venture off on my own into the wilderness.
So I could just pack a lunch, and my sister and neighborhood friend would come with, we’d head off early in the morning, returning just before sunset usually.
Once, when I, the oldest, was about 14, we had been following creek beds and bashing over heavily forested hills towards an area I’d never been.
We came down a hill, through a gully full of ferns and followed a dry creekbed for another hour, the sides of the creek became steep and rocky, before long we were passing through a gorge.
As we emerged from the gorge, we noticed what looked like a dwelling. Being idiot kids we wanted to see what was up. It looked abandoned at first. But as we got closer we saw that tarps had been affixed to the ramshackle structure. Chicken-wire surrounded what looked like a pen just outside.
As my eyes traveled across it, I suddenly caught another pair of eyes looking directly back at me. A rottweiler. We started slowly edging back away from the property, but it was too late. The dog started going nuts and, worried that it was coming after us, or at least alerting the person/s living in the hut, we bolted.
I went back to the area a few times, but not too close to the abode itself and found discarded bones from small game and other bits and pieces, spent .22 casings and such.
As an adult and knowing the area, it’s very likely we stumbled across either a homeless person camping out. Or a meth lab. As the area, as I would find out as an adult, was absolutely riddled with meth labs.
4. That’s what they were told.
I’ve been fishing out in the gulf 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 s*%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 the heck out.
3. My heart just dropped into my butt.
I work for a power company restoring power after a storm. Was working when a lady came up complaining that her power went out. We explained to her thats why we were there and she should have power back soon. She said, “oh good, my son went down in the basement and now I can’t find him”.
I went with her with a flashlight down the road to a run down house that was partially caved in. She walked inside and I went to follow. As soon as I walked into the door she disappeared from my sight and I called for her multiple times.
No one responded so I ran back to our work truck to call for help. A man that was living on her street called to me asking whats wrong and I told him the situation.
He looked at me with a cold stare and said a mom and her son died in that house 4 years ago. I’m still shook to this day.
2. Makes you want to go the other way.
I work as a polar bear guard. As in, I escort people across tundra and mountains and protect them from polar bears.
I once saw a snowman totem with reindeer antlers coming out of his head. It was deformed, full of bullet holes and rather creepy.
1. Unnerving to be sure.
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.
I could honestly read these all day y’all.
What’s the creepiest story in your arsenal? Share it with us in the comments!
