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What are creepy, spooky or scary places you've been?
It's spooky month again! I've asked in the past for people to share scary, creepy and unexplained stories in October. But I figure the community doesn't grow enough to guarantee new people with new stories every year. So this year I'll mix it up:
What are some of the creepiest, spookiest and scariest places you've been?
Can be genuinely scary with a personal story attached. Can just be a spooky haunted house exhibit. Can be a place you just found really creepy for no specific reason. It could be as big as a historic mansion with a macabre background, as simple as abandoned buildings, could be that weird attic room with a lock on the outside of the door...
So share away!
There is an old abandoned fort thats now mostly underground in Łomża, Poland that my cousin took me to. Iirc he said it was from around the Napoleonic era. Its multi-floored with towers that have broken stair cases leading up and completely flooded going down, pretty classic video game setup. As well as winding corridors with little slits for guns that would have been used to defend against invaders but are now completely submerged under dirt. Its basically a completely dark bunker with ambush corridors and HEAVY metal doors to lock out invaders at checkpoints. Most doors but the really rusted ones were taken at one point and probably resold, id guess. It just felt like a place that time had forgotten.
It was a scary experience exploring the place, you're constantly crunching glass or stepping over debris and the walls are obliterated by graffiti and we didnt come prepared or have phones so it was pitch black in most sections. The echoes were insane and it always sounded like someone was walking with you.
You said it's now "mostly underground"? How exactly did that happen? Did dirt pile up somehow, did the building sink...?
Either way, that place sounds terrifying. Just the thought of seeing water at the bottom of stairs gives me chills.
The minus 40 level of one of the old reactors on site. Reinforced concrete, no windows, echoey (no soft surfaces), lots of cobwebs and old equipment, and if the lights go out, you better have a flashlight!
The Paris Catacombs is easily the creepiest place I've ever been.
Yep, that would definitely rank up there. There are so many creepy stories relating to the catacombs, like that infamous video supposedly found from a camcorder showing a man getting lost. Jury is out on whether the footage is real or a hoax since last I heard, the footage only appeared on Scariest Places on Earth and hasn't been released separately.
I also remember a TV show when I was a kid showed a body with preserved eyes that I swear was in the Catacombs. I'm trying to look it up now, but all results are about that urban legend or the body of Rosalia Lombardo.
On a less macabre note, there was also an awesome secret cinema there at one point.
Yeah, I've heard the urban legend about someone getting lost down there and dying too. I've never seen the video you mentioned, but the photos of the supposedly dead body of a "19 year old girl" found by some teens in a catacomb that has gone viral a few times over the years (and is commonly misattributed to the Paris catacombs) was apparently really from the Odesa Catacombs. However, even the Odesa "person who died after getting lost in the catacombs" story couldn't actually be verified when VICE investigated it in 2015: https://www.vice.com/en/article/dying-in-ukraines-endless-labyrinth-of-catacombs-341/
Regardless, I sure as hell wouldn't want to get lost in either catacombs, especially with no lights. :/
Kingston Penitentiary is really the creepiest place I have been. Not for the nonsense about ghosts, but I generally find prisons creepy in the first place. Add in the long history and that it was still in use until 2013 and it just gave me the creeps.
We used to mess around in the abandoned barracks at the local navy base growing up. They were all built during WW2, I think 6 stories high, and had been derelict for about 10-15 years. Many of the rooms were open, often there would be lights randomly left on throughout the complex, and so many of them had been vandalized. Broken tvs, beer bottles, graffiti, trash, needles, smashed window, piss everywhere... it was a pretty grotty place. Often we'd take dates there (I know, but highschool right?) and end up sending people to check out rooms alone. It was always so freaky.
The Korean DMZ, and by extention, The Third Tunnel of Aggression. Seeing into North Korea from this giant auditorium after being told in no uncertain terms that we were prohibited from taking any photographs certainly was very unnerving. It was perhaps the primest example of a 'looking into a fishbowl' trope, because that's truly what it felt like.
The tunnel however was something else entirely. Whilst not 'scary' in the traditional sense, when you realise what the tunnel's function was intended on being, you start to imagine what it would've been like. 'Several thousand North Korean soldiers duck-marching their way towards Seoul during an invasion, and I'm currently walking through that tunnel' is sort of the thought that was going through my mind. When you finally reach the blocked end of the tunnel, you get to peek through a tiny slit in a concrete barrier towards a steel barrier and by extention a very visual representation of the North Korean border.
As an aside, I would highly recommend a DMZ tour to anyone visiting Seoul. A word of advice on the tunnel, however: it is very steep and you may be surprised how long it takes to climb from the bottom to the top, so do heed the warnings of your guide.
Okay, this is a good one.
It's not supernaturally spooky, but still very scary.
Wow, that looks like a fascinating place to visit! The pictures of the visitor's entrance on the Wikipedia page look surprisingly warm given the tunnels' purpose. Looking on Google, the most relevant photos of the actual tunnel look like mining tunnels, maybe? How tall is it? Some of the photos make it look like people have to bend over a bit.
The Wikipedia page mentions there's a rubber-tyred train for tourists? How far does that go?
The reason there aren't many photos is because the Korean army prohibit photography of any kind. You have to put all bags and belongings into lockers before you hike down the shaft.
The tunnel itself was 'dug' using explosives (and you can still see some yellow residue where the explosives were placed and detonated in the tunnel). At its absolute maximum I'd say maybe 6 and a half feet of headroom, but those are few and far between, and on average I would say under 5 feet - I am 191cm and found it a real struggle squatting for a kilometer or so there and a kilometer or so back (and there's a reason they give you hard hats: you will bump your head a lot).
The train unfortunately wasn't working when I went and according to our guide, hadn't been for a while beforehand either. The train only goes to the bottom of the intercept shaft that South Korea built, and then you have to walk the rest of the way.
Because of the prohibitation of photography, it's hard to find a decent video inside the tunnels and this is the only one I can find in decent quality. That dimly lit green tunnel at the beginning is the intercept shaft I mentioned and is 358m long, and goes down 78m into bedrock. I'm not sure what the gradient is but it is definitely the steepest slope I've ever walked up/down, man-made or otherwise.
If you have any other questions, let me know.
For me, one of the creepier places I've been was one of the exhibit rooms in Ellis Island. It had a bunch of old machines on display, and my parents moved on while I hung back to read the signs so I was the only person in the room. I don't know why, but something about being alone in there just gave me chills and made me feel uneasy, so I ended up leaving pretty fast.
A minor one, but still one of the few times I've felt inexplicably creeped out by something. It was daylight and the room had windows, so it wasn't dark or anything. Very odd.
My father was in charge of maintenance in a hospital and they bought a whole new building which had previously been a hospital as well. It had been unoccupied for years and he took me there before they started fixing it. I got to run around the unlit, falling apart building on my own as a teen. The massive kitchen, the morgue. It all just felt so cool, like a creepy videogame.
My wife and I recently went to New Orleans and did a haunted cemetery tour. We don't personally believe in ghosts, but the tour guide did a good job of adding some spookiness to it. It was also really interesting and a little surreal to think about how there's all of these bodies above ground with you, and then countless dried remains all piled together just a few feet below you.
One thing I realized while we were on the tour - I've never been inside a cemetery at night. It was kinda peaceful with how quiet it was.
That sounds fun! I've never taken a haunted cemetery tour, but ghost walks are one of my favorite activities on vacations because you can learn a lot of interesting local history relating to daily life. Did any stories stick out in particular?
From what I know New Orleans has some really creepy and spooky places in general. It tends to rank pretty high when people talk about haunted cities. The LaLaurie Mansion in particular came to mind when making this topic. (Just a warning for those unfamiliar: Madame LaLaurie is notorious for heavily abusing her slaves, possibly to the point of torture. The link doesn't go into graphic detail and points out a lot of the claims are hearsay, but it's still a macabre rabbit hole.)
2007 or so my now-ex needed a mannequin. I found this dude on craigslist who had a lot of them. We get to the house and its an absolute Grey Gardens situation but with the guy, his wife/sister/both, and the mom. They had a few mannequins fully assembled upstairs, but the guy insisted that we should look at the full inventory.
He grabs a lamp with no shade and an extension cord and takes is down to this massive basement that is wall to wall sorted mannequin parts. As the light moves around it catches the glass eyes of about 60+ mannequin heads... dead eyes staring back...
We opted for one upstairs and got the fuck out. We later used that mannequin to freak people out when they'd stay over, which was fun.
In the moment it was scary, but looking back on it, I wish I spent more time there.
Okay, that's both creepy and hilarious to me. Sounds like a horror movie situation in the moment so don't blame you for wanting to get out (why would he take a whole lamp to the basement—), but actually pretty neat in retrospect. Glad you got some good use out of the mannequin!
I think about that lamp a lot... who owns a lamp without a shade‽
Basically, the mother retired and needed a hobby and figured she'd get in to fixing up mannequins. They bought a few shipping containersworth of them for some reason... then a few weeks in she was bringing some parts up the stairs, slipped, broke her hip... and couldn't really do it anymore.
We bought the thing for $50, which is a steal. I later sold it to this super rich lawyer who was getting into photography but had exhausted all of his friends' patience while he learned lighting and stuff.
When we had it, my then-wife made some new eyes for it that looked almost too real and they followed you around.
Maybe not exactly creepy but maybe eerie and luminal in its own way.
I used to work for a compay and its main quarter was in a very very very old building (800 years old give or take).
Most of the offices has been renovated around the 80s / 90s so moving there was strange because they were not old as the building but they were aged nonetheless. It was like they were froze in time... in between.
Anyhow, the building had 4 stories underground and we were always curious about what was there so one day, during the lunch break, we decided to explore... and believe it or not it wasn't that hard... you only had to go down some stairs. No security or anything. We could go down and see what was there.
Archives of... stuff.
One floor was full to the ceiling of old fornitures. Some of them probably had already 100 years or more, abandoned, with chairs on top of them, there was a chandelier in a corner, a rusty safe in another one full of ancient books, some dusty covers that probably protected mirrors but we didn't push our luck to touch them.
It was straight from resident evil.
Another floor probably hosted a kitchen in the past because it was all covered in small white tiles and had gutters on the floor. Only that now the kitchen was no more and the room was full of machines, i think they were air conditioning units they had to install in the underground since they couldn't put them on the outside of an old building.
The third floor down... looked more like a mechanics office. It was connected to an underground garage and there were some little rooms maybe for the guardian? And every time we changed the floor it was like we were passing through a portal in another time. In the beginning we were in the 80s but then we landed around the 50s? I suppose the kitchen had been build around the 20.. and the mechanic office was probably timeless :)
Then we heard some noise and we run as fast as we could upstairs, again, to see the light... as they say.
I still ask to myself what the fourth floor could hide :)
That sounds creepy enough to me, and really dreamlike. The idea of an 800 year old building with four underground stories is already pretty mind blowing to me as an American, especially since some of those floors were apparently still in use in recent decades rather than just relegated to storage. I really wish you had pictures to show or knew what was on the fourth floor!
You said the mechanic's office was connected to an underground garage? Do you mean an actual parking garage people could still use? Did any of it look like it was in use? And what do you mean by "guardian"?
State Village for Epileptics in Skillman NJ.
Before they tore it down and turned it into a park
We were young and doing the urbex thing back in the day and it was extremely creepy inside one of the buildings we were in. Loads of medical records, graffiti, and children's toys. There were treatment rooms with tubs in the basement filled with evil black rusty water that gave off bad vibes.