To me, the scariest places in the world where I’m the most creeped out aren’t in supposedly “bad” neighborhoods in big cities.
I’m scared when I’m in total isolation. Driving down a country road alone. Staying in a hotel by myself in the middle of nowhere.
Or, the most terrifying scenario, pulling over at a deserted highway rest stop to use the bathroom late at night.
Have you ever seen anything scary in a remote area?
AskReddit users shared their creepy stories.
1. In the woods.
“Used to be an avid hunter and, if anyone isn’t aware, “scouting” is a normal part of the process when in a new location. I had become accustomed to doing a night scout in addition to a day scout when I was in an unfamiliar area to better feel out their bedding and feeding trails. I had never hunted this one area before, but saw lots of good sign in a previous season and marked it to come back in a following season.
Anyway, this occurred during my first night scouting to prep for a weekend hunt. At about 12:30 a.m., I’m driving around the general area that I had marked the previous season and take a dirt road off of the main one to see if it leads to a spot with hunting activity (a lot of times you can find gems this way).
I’m following the road for a while until I finally get to a dead end with a dirt semi circle (about 3 lengthwise trucks in diameter) with a clearing and foot trail leading into hardwood. I got out, threw my rifle over my back, flashlight & GPS in hand, and trekked in.
Not even 5 minutes and 100 yards into my walk through the woods, my flashlight catches a gleaming about 40 yards out. I start inching forward and eventually see what it was – a chain, tied to a branch, wrapped around a deer skeleton with various messes of flesh decaying on it.
The tree it was chained to had knives stuck into its trunk (level to the deer) in a circular pattern and there were some whacko red symbols painted onto the tree.
I quickly spun my flashlight around the area to make sure I wasn’t a target in some sadistic ritual and spotted a crudely-drawn face on to a tree behind the one described above, also in red. That face had huge, exaggerated, pin-pupil eyes and might have freaked me out nearly as much as the chained deer.
Took me about 1 millisecond after that to sprint my way back out, into the truck, and do a 7 point turn back down the dirt road I came in on.
I also started bringing a partner for night scouts after that, which didn’t stop me from accruing a few other creepy experiences!”
2. Don’t go back there.
“Just outside of Scranton, PA there’s an old abandoned medical center that used to treat people with polio.
As high schoolers, we would go there at night for no other reason other than it was creepy and we were bored.
I went there probably around 15 times over the course of 4 years. It was always very creepy, but the only time I ever absolutely and completely noped out of there was when I walked into one of the rooms, found a (newish) mattress on a bed frame (there were many bed frames, but never mattresses, as the place was abandoned long ago).
A circle drawn on the ground in the middle of the room, naked dolls sitting around the circle, a candle in the middle of the circle (not lit), “play with me, children” written on the wall in huge letters, and a few other things that freaked us out. I’m 90% sure there was more writing on the wall saying something along the lines of, “if I’m not here when you arrive, wait for me”, but that might be a false recollection.
Anyway, if it was an attempt by the land owner to stop kids from trespassing, it worked, but to this day I think we accidently stumbled upon a crazy person’s new living area. I never went back after that.”
3. Weird vibes.
“I remember going camping w/ my buddies. On the way there, we stopped by a small town. The car had heated up so we had to stop somewhere. We decided to park by a church.
Right when my friend drove into the parking space I noticed how everyone (literally everyone) turned back at us at the same time. That gave me the creeps. It was like a scene straight out of a horror movie lol. They were dressed in old fashioned clothing.
Kids were playing w/ jump ropes, signing nursery songs, holding hands jumping and singing in a circle, etc. I felt their eyes on us the whole time.
That shit gave me weird vibes. We decided to leave and park somewhere else.”
4. Now that is scary.
“I was hunting about 3 years ago, down in the south Texas hill country.
I had went out at about 5:30 am so I could get to the blind in time before he feeder went off. I was walking through a large grove of pecan trees when I got a feeling I was being watched. I stopped and looked around me and loaded my .223 because I knew whatever was watching me wasn’t friendly.
I waited for about five minutes in some bushes before I saw the largest mountain lion I’ve ever seen jump down from a tree. This thing easily outweighed me by 80 lbs and had me scared out of my mind.
I quietly snuck out of its sight and booked it back to the house and didn’t go hunting for the rest of the trip.”
5. On the reservation.
“Okay a bit of backstory, on the Navajo reservation (Not far from where this is) it is told that coyotes are the messengers from our world to the next.
Now the day of my birth father’s funeral we were all back at my parents house with all my siblings and family and my stepdad points out a coyote in the road, it’s really rare to see these guys out in the day especially alone like that.
It stood there in the middle of the road and looked right through the big windows at all of us for about 5 seconds before lazily going up the road.
It was definitely a weird experience.”
6. Turn around.
“Up in the bush around Rock Creek and Midway BC, there’s a bunch of weird dolls tied up in trees in sexual positions/lingerie. My friends and I saw them and noped the fuck out.
Later on the locals told us that if we continue up that road there’s mutilated animals strung up in the trees and that we don’t want to make it onto the people’s property up there.
I guess turning around was a good idea.”
7. On the road.
“Ima long haul truck driver, I used to run from Midwest to West coast. On my way back to the Midwest from LA I would run at night.
Easier that way not as much traffic. Well 6 or 7 hours into my trip in Utah really can’t remember the city name but I was on i15 getting on i70 heading towards the Rockies. Now if any of you have traveled especially but car, bus, or train you know you can see the night sky and almost all it’s starts clearly.
I remember I passed my favorite truck stop for a quick lunch. As I’m driving my xm goes a little haywire. Even though I just got it professionally installed. Im “thinking great got ripped off”. Then I look up and I see a light, I’m thinking to my self idk where that plane is going, I’ve been up and down these roads awhile now.
So I’m thinking did they build a new airport in this direction. Now I’ve been driving for a bit after my lunch and I realized I’m coming up to an area that is completely empty isolated nothing for hundreds of miles in any direction and I still see this light.
I look down at my clock I have driven 3 hrs from when I last stoped. I remember 2 of those hours. So I pull off the interstate and look at my dash cam everything from when I stoped to when I pulled over was recorded. I look up and the light. Literally the light also stoped moving and just hooved over me.
I jumped into my truck busted a u turn on the highway and raced back to my favorite truck stop called my dispatch told him “fuck trader Joe’s and it’s food , I ain’t moving till I see sun light” I hung up locked my doors shut my curtains and went to bed.
Next morning I look over my body look over everything on my truck even the damn fuel and I find nothing wrong or anything new to it or me. To this day I refuse to go pass the Rockies I tell my dispatch take the tip of Nebraska of the west side of it and draw a line from North to South.
That’s is my cut off to take my up to. To this day I can’t remember that 1hour and that damn light even followed me almost to the truck stop I lost about 5 miles before I pulled in for the night.”
8. Holy sh*t!
“I was driving home after an extremely late night at work. I lived in the middle of nowhere, about a mile before I got there a woman covered in blood jumped out of the woods into the middle of the road screaming.
I panicked and went around her and then slammed on the brakes to help.
Her boyfriend had beaten her and was currently chasing after her in the woods. I got her in my car and called the police, they met us at the hospital because I told them there was no way I was waiting on the side of the road when he was coming.”
9. Never to be seen again…
“We live in Kentucky.
Not rural by any means, but still woodland is mostly everywhere. I was about 12 and in the 7th grade, I believe. So, it’s fall and I’m sitting outside Waiting at my bus stop, which was like 3 or 4 houses down from ours.
My mother was sitting on our front porch smoking a cigarette when she points across the street and we see this lady walking out from the tree line. She had waist-length hair and a long white/possibly grey night gown on. We both didn’t think much of it, because a little less than a block from our house was a nursing home and we figured that she was just a patient who has gotten out or lost or whatever.
So we’re sitting there watching this woman pace and walk in circles, until she sits herself down at the foot of this tree, when suddenly it looks as if an invisible lasso was thrown around her and she was reeled from her waist up into the base and to the top of the tree, to never be seen again.
My bus eventually came and my mom called the cops, but they apparently never found her or any signs of a struggle or anything like so.
Nobody EVER believes me when I tell them this story and had my mother not been there, I wouldn’t believe it myself. Either way, I never went to that fucking bus stop alone again. Craziest shit I’ve ever seen that I couldn’t rationalize.”
10. Scary dog.
“I was driving home from night classes in rural Virginia.
It was around 10:30PM and I was on back road I have driven hundreds of times. I was going around 40mph when I saw a dog ahead in the road. I slowed down to almost a stop to let it finish crossing the road. The dog stood up on its hind legs and ran like a fucking human into the woods on the other side of the road. I wasn’t the only one in the car who saw it, my best friend also saw it as well.
The dog looked scraggly, super lanky, and was a dark color. It’s something we’ll never forget.”
11. A strange encounter.
“My husband and I were driving my sister in law home one early evening.
This was a well populated, well used road in the center of town. As we’re passing a church, I see what I can only describe as a huge, black dog appear in the middle of the road. It runs toward the church and encounters a fence.
The dog like legs then stretch out like arms as it crawls through a wooden slat fence; it’s back legs pulling through as a human would.
My husband looked at me and said, “So… You saw that, right?”
Spooked the hell out of him since he doesn’t beleive in the paranormal.
So I just talked to my husband about this, since I have trouble with my memory. He said we were talking to each other while this thing was running across the street, like, “You seeing that shit?”. He jogged my memory, too.
The dog materialised in the left lane next to us; in the middle of the lane in a puff of smoke. It ran across in front of our car, and as it got to the church fence, it’s legs went from bending low like a dog to having an elongated humanistic bend. It was maybe 100 feet in front of us.
My husband says it climbed over the fence, but I remember it going under the top rail. Either way, it’s the single most creepy encounter we’ve ever had.”
12. Man with a machete.
“I remember going off-roading with my friend in this really remote wooded area.
A lot of people around the area are familiar with the spot and once you drive it with a friend that knows his way around it’s pretty simple. There’s a part of the dirt road where two roads becoming one.
Not a huge deal going in, but getting out we couldn’t remember which of the roads we came from. Both of our phones were completely dead. So, we decided to go right and see if anything looked familiar which was tough because it was just trees for miles with no telling landmarks.
We spot this pond, which immediately tells us we picked the wrong road. I was relieved we knew now, but frustrated that we drove 30 min in the wrong direction. By now it’s dark, but we couldn’t drive fast because we didn’t want to miss where the split was.
After a bit of driving I saw what looked to be a small animal on the side of the road just outside the tree line.
As we got closer, a cold sweat came over my body as I could now make out a pretty big man crouching with a machete. In a panic my buddy gassed it and flew by him. He stood still in the crouching position and followed the truck only turning his head.”
13. Oh, no!
“Back in 2017, on the 3rd of February, my friend and I took a walk with my dog down to the woods through the park. It was a day after his 20th birthday and 2 days after mine.
We got to the railway bridge and it was absolutely pissing it down, to the point that my friend suggested we turn back. I absolutely loved the woods, though, even in the rain. I insisted we push on, the trees would cover us mostly once we got into the woods and we would stay relatively dry. So we kept on walking and got into the woods, my friend just a few steps a head of me with his hood right up.
A couple of minutes after entering the woods, we came across another walker staying to the side of the path to give us enough room to pass by. As I turned to say thanks to him for letting us by, I noticed that it wasn’t someone out for a walk but was, in fact, a man hanging from a tree.
One blood curdling scream and stressful call the the police later, I got home and absolutely sobbed into my dad’s shoulder, then my mum’s shoulder, and then I went for a really long bath.
The look on his face is still clear as day in my mind, and I haven’t really been back there many times since.”
14. Alabama.
“In Auburn, AL in 2008. It was halloween and we googled haunted houses. I cant remember what the website was like or if there even was one, but it was like 45 min away. I know that it wasnt like a big attraction and we figured it was on someones land and would be like a local deal. We drove out there at like 10pm. This was before iphones and GPS so we had mapquest directions.
We ended up going down a pretty country road for a while with no street lights, then turned down a legit dirt road that went through the woods. Pitch black. Went down it for like 10 minutes and finally saw an old house with a sign by the driveway that was handwritten and said “Haunted House”. No other cars or lights or people anywhere We pulled in the driveway and sat there for a second like “alright this is fucked up, we should leave”.
All of the sudden an old pick up truck turned on about 15 ft in front of us facing us, lights shining right in our faces. It started driving towards us (down their own driveway).We backed out and peeled out. It followed us, like almost bumping our rear end.
Right on our tail down this pitch black dirt road in the middle of the Alabama woods. We were flipping our shit. It was texas chainsaw massacre/hills have eyes stuff. He stayed out our tail blinding us and almost bumping us all the way back home until we got off our exit and he finally let us go.
No idea who was driving.”
15. Lovecraftian.
“There’s a section of Joshua Tree National Park called “Samuelson’s Rocks” where an old swedish prospector who lost his mind used to live.
He carved all sorts of crazy sayings into the rocks. During the day they look pretty neat. At night in a lightning storm they look like something of of Lovecraft.”
Okay, now we want to hear from you.
In the comments, share your true, creepy stories with us.
We can’t wait to hear from you!
