It takes a certain kind of person to work a job that requires them to be out in remote locations, far away from other people…and far away from any kind of help, should they need it.
But there are a ton of these kinds of jobs out there, and the people who work them sometimes encounter some pretty weird stuff.
Are you ready to get spooked?
Let’s check out some creepy stories from AskReddit users.
1. A ritual?
“I do a lot of work out in the woods. Creepiest thing was finding some headless doves.
I also found sticks arranged in circles and paint on the trees in the same spot. Not sure if it was part of a ritual or not, but that’s what I saw.”
2. Hell no.
“I worked night shift at a prison for years.
The one thing that really creeps you out is when a hit is put on someone in the middle of the night.
Inmate’s code says it is kept as quiet as possible. No one says a d*mn word. The only thing you’ll hear are grunts and moans from the victims. Then, it goes and stays silent. If you hear it happening, it’s already too late to stop it. It’ll be over before you pull your keys out.
Occasionally, if someone needs medical attention the first sign we got was an inmate approaching the bars saying they need to go to medical (and are usually bleeding all nonchalant.)
The creepy ones are where no one shows up. All you get is grunts of pain and that’s it.”
3. SNAKES.
“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 f*cked me up.”
4. Ugh.
“I was a field geologist in the Outback about 12 hours north of Adelaide. One day I was driving the truck and saw what looked like a flagpole sticking up in the middle of nowhere.
I wasn’t anywhere near a farm or anywhere else that people would be, so I decided to drive over and check it out. It was a dead dog fully impaled on a spike. Like, from *ss to mouth.
Took some pictures and had my boss call the cops, but for the rest of the assignment I was freaked out that some maniac was out there with me.”
5. Out at sea.
“I’m in the Navy and work on aircraft carriers. A girl sadly hung herself in one of the spaces right near where me and my shop slept.
One person swore he saw her sitting in the chair as he was getting undressed one day and ran screaming out of the berthing.
I waited about a week to go into the space where she hung herself and when I did I heard the loudest screeching noise I had ever heard in my life. I quickly turned around and got the f*ck out of there.
The system connected to where she slept didn’t work at all for the next two weeks or so to. The systems break a lot so it was pretty coincidental that it happened just as she did this.”
6. Voices.
“When I was in college I interned with the Forest Service.
A lot of the time I just spent patrolling hiking trails. Right near Grandfather Mountain I thought I heard someone yelling for help but my supervisor told me to ignore it.
Apparently someone went missing in the area in the 1960s and was never found and people would hear that voice all the time. I heard it twice more after that and it always creeped me out.”
7. Shook.
“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.”
8. Remote areas…
“Biologist, lots of time in remote areas:
Meth labs. Often tucked away in absentee landowner property. Usually some POS RV.
Meth houses. Homes that were clearly abandoned >40 years ago but clearly occupied within the last 5, if not currently. I got curious a few times and poked around inside, but didn’t push too much because they would have heard me in the brush long before I got inside the house. I’d see drug stuff, junk food, mattresses drug in on the floor. Think of the row houses in Hamsterdam in the Wire.
Two of my colleagues have found dead bodies. They were all illegal immigrants crossing north into the US. Most accidents, one was a gunshot. I’ve been in areas with unsolved murders, I just tread lightly with the locals (think of the Ozark tv show).
More sad than creepy, but abandoned graveyards. Dozens of them. Locals try to keep up but there is a natural progression of decline and neglect until they’re outright forgotten. It’s sad to see a bunch of graves of kids from ~1900 that all died within a few weeks of each other. More anti-vaxxers ought to see those.
I got shot at once.
I stumbled into a herd of feral hogs, at night, in really tall cattails. That was more frightening than the snakes, alligators, etc. I couldn’t see them but they were freaking out that I was there.
I’ve seen a few “shrines” of pagans or whatever, but they’re pretty harmless and don’t leave any permanent damage to anything. No harm no foul.
A guy in the front yard of his trailer house, deep in the woods in a swamp, sh*tting in a 5 gallon bucket. Very awkward eye contact.”
9. Middle of nowhere.
“I used to be a delivery driver, but for a supermarket in the U.K.
A lot of our customers were in the middle of nowhere, and my last delivery of the night was a new customer I’d never been to before. I was already running late from all my previous deliveries and I was still trying to find this house at 10:30pm, even though my shift was supposed to finish at 10pm.
I’m driving around the narrowest of country roads with nothing surrounding me but dark fields and hedgerows, looking for anything that might be a driveway. I hadn’t seen another car or person for miles. Then all of a sudden I hear a loud thud on the side of my van, like something was thrown at it.
No trees or anything else around for something to fall from, and I remember it specifically hitting the side. I looked in my mirrors and out the window but there was nothing around me. Then it happened again… another thud on the side of my van.
I drove back to the supermarket so fast and told my manager that I couldn’t find the place (I had spent 30 mins looking to be fair), there was no house where the listed address/postcode took me.”
10. Whoa.
“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.”
11. Alarm bells.
“I used to do salmon spawning surveys, which involved walking up streams looking for fish. Some of the streams are quite remote and/or inaccessible on timber land, and you don’t really expect to see any other person when you’re out there.
As a naturally smile-y, friendly, small feminine woman, I’ve learned to be wary of people 100% of the time in the field. I actively try to avoid running into people when I’m alone in remote places.
One of the survey locations is close to a highway. To get to it, I had to park at a pullout, follow a river downstream to a flagged trail, hike over a ridge to meet up with an old logging road on private timber land. I walked along the logging road for about 100 m before peeling off into the woods (very thick second growth Douglas fir reprod), where game trails eventually lead to the stream at the base of the hill slope.
I came here during spring to survey steelhead, but this stream was also a survey location for other types of salmon during the fall. The game trails off of the logging road were flagged by previous surveyors, and multiple routes were marked.
This made it kind of confusing, and not all routes actually led to the stream. Some just petered out once the vegetation got too thick. Another led to a cliff face overlooking the riverbed. Lots of faint trails.
One day I turned off into the woods one of the survey flags tied around a branch at the side of the road. I followed some pink flagging heading south along the hillside. I noticed the trail seemed freshly turned up, and figured maybe a bear clambered through recently since the time I was there last (2 weeks previously).
The trail led to a small claustrophobic clearing, and the ground was freshly torn up in the shape of a circle. Seemed strange. I was looking for elk tracks but didn’t see any. Then I noticed an assortment of bones scattered around the edges of the clearing. These weren’t there before. Everything was dead silent, and something about it was setting me on edge.
I poked around the bones a bit, trying to piece together this scene. I noticed another slight path, which strayed from my main route, veering to the right from the clearing. I walked a bit down that way, and gazed ahead trying to see if this path was flagged. It was densely packed with trees. A subtle movement caught the corner of my eye ahead and to the right as I walked — I turned my head to look past the trees and saw the silhouette of a large shelter maybe about 50-75 feet from the clearing.
It was surrounded by what looked to be jugs and bones. Tons of plastic jugs. Light shapes of bones on the ground. The lighting made seeing anything else impossible. Everything was so, so quiet.
I left in a hurry, off the trail, without trying to get a better look, without getting to the stream. The alarm bells in my brain were screaming.”
12. Eerie.
“I worked in a store once in a really small town that was always absolutely dead, a customer every hour or so, shifts all alone too which I’m sure wasn’t even legal but hey.
Anyway it’s a dark evening and I’m sat on reddit as usual when I hear the door open. I look up and see the back of a man as he begins walking down the first aisle towards the tin foods and he appears to be talking to someone on the phone, I think nothing of it and go back to reddit.
All of a sudden I get this intense smell of soil and earth, I look up and the mans approaching the counter and he’s wearing some kind of overalls and his face and long grey hair and body is just covered in dirt. That’s when I notice he isn’t on the phone at all and is just talking to himself in this absolutely bizarre tone, he sounded like a cartoon elf or something, he’s just sort of murmuring and doing this really weird hehee sort of laugh.
I’m just frozen solid, as he’s stood at the counter in front of me thinking I’m about to be killed when a policeman storms through the door, he asks if I’m ok to which I don’t respond because i’m just in a complete state of what the f*ck is happening.
He tells the man to come outside to which he starts murmuring gibberish and saying the words legal over and over again. They come grab the man and put him in the back of the police car and that’s the last I ever heard of it.
I have no idea who he was, what was going on but I have never been so afraid of another person before, you know when you just sense a bad bad situation. So grateful the police showed up when they did.”
Now we want to hear from you.
And we want creepy stories!
Whether you worked out in the middle of nowhere or not, share your scariest experiences with us in the comments.
Please and thank you!
