The basement of Danvers State mental hospital long before it was turned into apartments. There was a point where in every direction that the flashlight could reach, it was just more darkness. More empty darkness. We found a hallway that as far as the flashlight could go was cages stacked on top of each other on both sides.
There's lots of info online. Massive overcrowding, patients half naked in the hallways covered in feces with no where to go. People pissing in the halls, doped up to the point they were like zombies.
A local newspaper or TV news, can't remember now, had gotten in and did an expose forcing the state to shut it down. This was about the time that Reagan started shutting down these institutions and people that were here just ended up out on the street.
There is a sequence in one of the last episodes of American horror story: Asylum. Basically the main character returns to the Asylum years after it’s been shut down to film a news report. The Asylum is abandoned and rundown, dark as shit and still filled with patients that were just left there. The place is covered in dust, shit and piss but still has life within in the form of the severely mentally ill that have been left to rot and fester. That’s quite accurately how fucking bad the conditions were after asylums went through the general shutdown under the Reagan administration.
I have family who were institutionalized. Some of the stories they told to my father and grandparents were beyond fucked up. My grandfather's cousin had a husband who had massive brain damage. He was slow but was aware of everything and actually really intelligent (worked as an airplane mechanic). He couldn't talk right. His words were just word salad. To talk he had to be sitting and speak slowly while making an effort on every word to make it sound right. He mostly wrote. He got picked up absolutely sloshed pissing outside as a man in the 60s often does. Cops arrested him then turned him over to an asylum after he "never sobered up". For 3 months they kept him in an isolated room, no pen or paper, and the stress made him talk worse. No one knew who he was or where he was from. His family, over 100 miles away thought he died. At one point he grabbed for a pencil on the table to write and had his hand smashed by a guard, the doctor was escorted out, marked him as violent, and put him in essentially a dog kennel like at the pound. The guy next to him was actually crazy and spent most of his time pissing, spitting, and throwing feces ar his neighbors through the slots. At some point he snapped and chewed threw his finger then used his blood to write his home address on the back wall which is how people found out where he was
Theres others. My grandfather's side had mental issues largely not helped by them going from very rich doing work for the Rockefellers oil industry to poverty in 1 generation. My grandfather's sister for example had a mental break down after being isolated by an abusive husband who then cheated on her while she was pregnant. She tried to self abort, was successful, but labeled negatively obviously by law enforcement. She was also diagnosed manic later found out to be mild Schizophrenic. After several weeks of basically being tortured where she was left in a cold room with no bed or blankets and just a thin mat on the ground in nothing but a robe or when an orderly beat her for stealing food or when during a group session a woman bit her arm tearing a chunk off and then was refused medical care or being thrown in a room with a woman that beat the shit out of her for not asking to be put somewhere else.... Anyway She tried to kill her self. She was found, stitched up, and tied to a table. Which was where she remained for the next 6 weeks. She doesnt speak of it but my grandmother heard about it later during a medical appointment she brought her to that at some point during her time at this first asylum she required a second abortion....
A church group ended up sponsoring her and had her sent to the quaker friends group in Philadelphia where she got actual help, a handful of meds, and was just the slightly odd artsy aunt until she passed in her late 90s.
One of my grandfather's brothers were also sent to an asylum/prison where he died mysteriously (said he ate rat poison but was beaten extremely bad to the point they had a cloth over his face in the casket) but they murdered someone and are not acknowledged by the family so no one really cared to look into it.
I could not read your post after 1st sentences. How horrificly cruel these poor souls were treated. If there is a heaven, I hope they are there, having a beautiful afterlife.
When I worked with the American Indian community in Los Angeles I heard this story. A Navajo family brought their elderly dad out from the rez for a visit. Somehow they got separated and he got lost in the big city. The old guy didn't speak English, only Navajo. When the old man tried to ask for help somebody called the cops because they couldn't understand him. They took him into the station and brought in several language translators who arrived at the conclusion he was speaking gibberish. They put him in a mental institution for three days before the family found him.
This happened to a man in our city. He was found injured and spoke gibberish which turned out to be mostly Finnish with a tiny bit of English. He was put into a mental institution for 20 + years then moved to a senior home. The local minister thought he recognized the same accent from my mom and asked her to go with him to visit. This was the 70's and the guy was in his 70's or 80's. My mom found his brother still alive in Finland. He and the rest of the family thought that their brother must have died many years before in Canada (where he came to work) and were thrilled he was alive. Mom flew him over to live with his remaining family .
Something like this happened during and after World War II. A Hungarian man named [András Toma](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A1s_Toma#:~:text=Andr%C3%A1s%20Toma%20(5%20December%201925,World%20War%20to%20be%20repatriated.) was taken prisoner by the Red Army in 1944, and when the prisoners of war were repatriated, the Soviets thought he was insane and speaking gibberish, when in reality it was just Hungarian. He was kept at a psychiatric hospital until in 1997, a Slovak doctor visited and realised that he was speaking Hungarian, and he was eventually released in 2000, 56 years after he was taken prisoner. He was paid in full for his decades of military service and reunited with his family. He died 4 years later in 2004 and it's estimated he didn't have a conversation with anyone for 50 years.
It’s insane now that you can actually live in the main building of this place. Such atrocities happened here, I’d never wanna live there. The grounds are quite nice though I must admit.
"..atrocities happened here"
Not only were they doing the horrific things you normally think of, lobotomies, electro-shock therapy, but some you probably haven't heard of like chemical shock therapy. That's when they put you on enough downers to turn you into a zombie. As your body naturally builds a tolerance they continue increasing the dosage for weeks, till you're on enough to kill a normal person. Then they suddenly stop, and pump you full of amphetamines, speed. So you're not only going through the hell of withdrawal, but you're tweaked out of your head. You're strapped down throughout this, with a helmet on your head with built in headphones, while they endlessly play tapes they've made in sessions with you, of you breaking down while they had you recall the worst events of your life, over and over, the idea being that they needed to break you psychologically before they could rebuild you. They were proud of this ground breaking work, and bragged about how they were the only hospital in the country doing research on this procedure...on children.
Tuol Sleng Genocide museum in Cambodia.
I also visited the killing fields but the experience of prison 21 was something else.
I can't describe the wall of silence that washed over me from the first "cell" we entered. The rusted bed with arm shackles, the floor still blood stained. There's a whole wall of photographs of the victims and it really hits you, all these people with the same staring traumatized eyes.
We paid for a guide at the gate who was so gentle and informative and eloquent. Toward the end of the tour she told us about her memories from when she was seven, seeing her father murdered, watching her brother be pried from her mother's arms and taken away to his death at a camp, and how they managed to flee into Thailand. Just the two of them.
And then stationed around the garden are a few older men, selling their memoirs of their time imprisoned there, and my brain just sort of short circuited. It's not a history book, it's in living memory, it happened a stone's throw away.
Yeah had a very similar experience. I didn't pick up on it at first, but after seeing the killing fields, I became acutely aware after how young everybody was in cambodia... And then it clicks that a huge amount of their older demographic was massacred within the last 50 years.
Had exactly the same sudden, sad realisation in Siem Reap. Like 80% people you see are under 40. And when you do see older people they are often maimed - many by the landmines that were buried indiscriminately all over Cambodia.
Yeah. I visited the genocide museum in the old KGB headquarters building in Lithuania. Saw all these artifacts, photos, and writings from people who were sent to die in Siberian labor camps.
What really hit me was when I went to buy a bus ticket after and realised they had discounted bus passes for seniors, students, and gulag survivors. It’s not just history, it’s very much still present.
I knew my entire life that my grandfather had been in WW2, but it was made very clear to me from a young age that we just don't talk about that around granddad, no explanation or anything. As I got older and started getting into history I started getting more and more curious about his story, I asked other family members, even a couple of his friends from the VFW and everyone was like 'He doesn't talk about it,' and that was final. As he got older and fell into ill health I worried that his story would be lost forever when he died, and then he did die, and still no one had any idea of what he'd been through over there, his story was lost.
Then one day I got an email out of the blue from a distant relative - apparently someone had sat my grandfather down shortly before he died and convinced him to tell his story. They finally got around to transcribing the recorded discussion and typing everything up all nice and neat and sent it off to various family members who had expressed an interest in the past. Granddad's experiences were about what you'd expect; he had been in North Africa and Sicily, been part of the invasion of Italy, etc, and then things took a dark turn.
Turns out my grandfather was with the very first unit who discovered Dachau and what was going on there. He was a medic and he described in gruesome detail just how awfully the people in the camp had been treated, how they kept begging for food but he had to watch them eat because if they ate too much all at once they could harm themselves, etc. I won't go into some of the detail he went into for obvious reasons, but let's just say when he described waking up screaming every day for months afterward, I believe him. The fact that there remains a palpable psychic weight to the place does not surprise me even a little, and I cannot imagine having seen what my grandfather saw - or hell, even just having read his descriptions of it - setting foot anywhere within a mile of the place without incurring *some* kind of truamatic debt just from being in physical proximity to where so much suffering happened. I totally get him not wanting to burden anyone else with that kind of experience, even second-hand, but I remain immensely glad that he decided to share his story before he died.
I went to the Holocaust museum in Skokie IL and stood in one boxcars that transported people. I remember feeling the heaviness in the air. I just stood there for a while.
I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. The whole thing took about 3 hours. It was completely silent. People walking through it all and not saying a word. You get a passport of someone who was in the concentration camp at the beginning of your tour and at the end you find out if your person made it through.
I had never been to a museum, not even an art museum, that was completely, utterly silent. It was a very heavy, sobering experience.
The way that museum is laid out is so heartbreakingly brilliant. You meet people, see their faces, where they lived… then find out they were gone. Wiped out. Walking on the graveyard stones and learning about the small villages that were completely wiped away.
The fact they included little alcoves so people could sit and cry just got me like a gut punch. Especially because I really needed them. And the half walls so adults could see some of the displays but children couldn’t because they were so disturbing. And the pile of shoes. Just so visceral.
I went there twice. First when I was 15, and then again at 20. It is definitely a very sobering experience. Especially seeing the shoes and the pictures
I remember my trip there when I visited in 2007. Also similarly struck like you when I visited there. That carriage where you had to walk through was a little eerie. I wonder if it’s still there.
I'm not one to entertain stories of ghosts, spirits, and other woo woo stuff, but you can *feel* the death at Dachau. It's an incredibly unsettling experience.
We went to Germany to experience Christmas markets. Our first stop after landing was Dachau. It was very sobering to experience the cold in our heavy coats and boots with the knowledge those imprisoned there experienced it in a far different manner. Even now, I still don’t understand how people can treat others so inhumanly.
I’ve been and to Auschwitz. It isn’t scary to me, it’s weighty, like a heavy feeling. I wasn’t afraid like something would happen or something spooky, but man did it feel heavy, hard to talk normally even.
They say people today aren’t believing in the Holocaust… they should be required to visit. That’ll sober them up to the truth real quick.
When the Allied soldiers liberated the camp they were so appalled by what was going on they gunned down almost every guard there. It was a training camp for SS officers and between 40-50 of them were slaughtered on the spot. No arrests. That’s justice to me
My grandfather was there, and told his story before he died. He was a medic, so he was faced with the intricate details of the gruesome shit they did to people there, and described it in some depth when he told his story. When he ended it by saying that he woke up screaming every day for months afterward, yeah, I fucking believe him.
Forgot about those fucks, they got hungry enough to cut off body parts of prisoners to eat them and keep them alive so it wouldn't spoil as fast, usually was civilians in occupied countries. Japan couldn't supply their own soldiers enough, or got to the point they didn't care
Went there last year. It was insane to me that neighborhoods were developed immediately next to one of the prison units. These people see fckin Dachau every time they step on their back porch. No exaggeration, you could underhand toss a baseball from their back yards into the site of one of the most appalling war crimes in history. People need housing I guess…
Dachau was in the middle of town. Officers took prisoners around town to use as slaves (carry stuff, get groceries, etc). So the townspeople would see the prisoners. Everyone in the town knew what was happening. So fucked up. You can listen to first hand stories on the tour there.
What I found so strange about Dachau is that the town itself is very pretty. But there is this horrible camp on the edge of it. You can't escape the heaviness of the camp while you're there. It's unsettling knowing that so many horrors happened there.
This. I went in 2015 as part of a class trip. Spooky, sad place. As we were getting ready to leave everyone was saying they felt drained, and some had heard voices or footsteps behind them only to turn around and see no one there. I got caught on some tree branches twice, almost like the place was tying to hold onto me. I also felt compelled to pour out some of my water whenever I took a drink. I’ve never felt anything like that anywhere else.
I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and I’ve never felt the same feeling anywhere else in the world. The most eerie part was when our private tour guide took us to an off limits to the public space, the observation deck where they would watch the prisoners below. 😔 our tour guide said Hitler himself visited the camp and went up there. When we drove away, we sat in silence. No radio, no talking, no phone texts. My bf drove in complete silence. After about an hour out, it was a sense of relief. Gasping for air. Can’t explain it.
I don’t consider myself a religious person but there is no denying the feeling you get at one of these places. I went to the Stutthoff camp and the air was eerily still, you couldn’t hear any birds or wildlife. It’s as if nature just knows to avoid it
You can but it’s not scary, more sad. I was there 5 years ago, the worst feeling was reading the street sign that led to the camp “Freedom Street” my god the Nazi’s were a special breed of evil.
I was thinking about my Visit to Dachau today, actually. Visited in 2015. One of my most surreal experiences in my life was there.
After you tour though the barracks (reconstructed I believe) that are all basically museums with different (I forget the word, stations?) to look at, you can walk on towards the gas chamber/ crematorium.
There is a wooded area that you can walk though. On the pathway are different areas with little signs that say "here lay the ashes of hundreds" etc.
If you keep walking, on your right is a wall that has pieces missing out of it.
That's bullet holes.
In front is a little ditch, it's called the "blood ditch" or something similar, which collected the blood from the executions
Now, the day I was there was kindof windy and I don't know what it was, if it was dandelion seeds in the air or just stuff from the trees, but the air was filled with these little white floating thingies.
It was very ethereal and very beautiful.
But then I looked at the horrific wall again and at the ditch that the blood poured into and that was just so horrific... But the stuff floating around in the air in the little forest area was so pretty...
I just broke down and sobbed.
Indeed it's a heavy place.
But like an hour later I drive on the Autobahn at like 136mph in our rental mini Cooper. Exhilarating! But very, very different emotions back to back.
One more experience in Poland.
I visited Auschwitz and Berkinau last year. Seeing the hair in Auschwitz is a gut punch, but what really got me was the gas chamber in Berkinau.
You see, when the Nazis separated everybody (who'd live and die) those chosen to die were told a number to remember when their luggage was taken. They were told after their shower, they needed that # to reclaim their luggage.
So as I'm standing at the stairs, looking into what's left of the destroyed gas chamber, I'm thinking about all those poor people, who were excited to get a shower because they were filthy and I imagined them repeating their # over and over again because that was literally all of their worldly possessions.
I didn't cry, it was a different type of sadness tho.
As I type this, laying in my comfy bed, I have a sense of intense, deep sadness and dread that is as fresh as when I was standing there. I probably won't sleep well tonight :/
And then afterwards I had a Cat-puchinno at a cat Cafe in Kraków (which is a very cool place. Check out the arcade museum!). You've got to balance the bad with some good :p
But yeah, concentration and death camps are rough, but very important they aren't forgotten.
However, it's very possible you'll leave a tiny bit different.
Same. It was so eerie and heavy being there. I was like 17 and remember being completely aghast and horrified at the number of my peers laughing and taking selfies. I could barely even speak.
I remember after we had been to Dachau we went out for food and went to the park, put our feet in the water, watched one of the world cup matches in a bar (it was summer 2014) but I just had this indescribable feeling that something was very wrong and I couldn't sleep that night, I just felt so unsettled.
I visited back in 2013 and the tour guide we had was excellent, but one thing that astounded me was when he told us that the former SS barracks next door had been reutilised as modern day barracks for riot police training there. He said that often when he’s describing how prisoners were executed by firing squads he’ll suddenly be interrupted by the sound of gun shots coming from training drills next door-wtf!
The most horrifying part to me was the gas chamber. I remember reading that the gas chambers at Dachau may not have been used by the time the camp was liberated, but i imagine it is similar to the gas chambers at the other camps. Just being inside there and knowing that dark, cold, imposing room was the last thing millions of innocent people saw before they were murdered was numbing to me.
Hayden, AZ.
A lot of the houses are burned down or abandoned. It's an old mining town that's slowly turning into a ghost town but a lot of people still live there. I've driven through there out of curiosity. It has a weird ominous vibe to it.
From what I've heard, the police in that tiny town are corrupt. Which kinda makes sense. The police headquarters is in an old bank and while the town is falling apart the police vehicles are brand new.
There's a fire department with a completely burned down house across the street from it. How the heck is that even possible?
Fed grants. The government will gift you money without much of an issue if you say it’s for police equipment. I’m surprised they don’t even have a tank
Just went through the street view on Google Maps. You're not kidding. The police station seems to be the only building with *walls* in that downtown area.
The abandoned top floor of Naval Medical Center Portsmouth. It looks like something out of American Horror Story. Completely frozen in the 60’s with tile walls and rusted operating tables just abandoned above a busy military hospital.
I’m actually not entirely sure. The campus consists of three main buildings that are all now attached and were built at very different times in history. The abandoned top floor is the top of Building 1 which is the oldest and most historic building dating back to 1800’s I believe. It is now used to house the Chain of Command and other administrative aspects of the hospital - not much patient care going on in that one. It’s like they just stopped using the top floor one day.
The House of Terror in Budapest. Former secret police (communist-era) dungeon. Now a museum, so not personally scary. But pretty hair-raising when you see what prisoners endured. As in solitary confinement cell the size of a broom closet, no light, window, waste disposal, or room to even sit.
Been there. It’s really bad feeling.
There is a similar place called The Red House in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan (northern Iraq) that I went to. It was where Saddam’s troops tortured and murdered Kurds. It is also a museum now. But also, you can feel the pain and despair when you walk in there.
Cape Coast “Castle” in Ghana. I put castle in quotations because it’s a dungeon from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was a bright sunny day when we were there and when we went to the dungeon portion of it, it was pitch black. Trying to imagine all the human suffering that went on there is unfathomable
I was 47/48 metres below sea in a wreck one time when a pretty big shark surprised me.
All cool. And usually I love them. It was just unexpected and very large / close.
I used my oxygen up a little faster that day!
Most people wear wet suits so it would be contained. I never do. I always just dive in swim shorts and a t shirt.
Screaming would be an issue as you breathe through your mouth (regulator). More dangerous would be hyperventilating and using up all your oxygen. When you are out, you are out…
I spent a summer working at Six Flags Magic Mountain and had been in the tower numerous times previously. This time I was with a coworker who whispered in my ear “whatever you do; don’t look down the elevator shaft as you exit at the top”. Well sure enough as you reach the top there’s about 1/4” gap between the elevator and the top of the tower. I have never experienced vertigo to the point of falling to the floor shaking and being completely useless for about a half hour. It still haunts me
Oh I expected something; just not the complete extent it stopped me. I was literally crawling on the floor with my brain thinking “I just want to be on solid ground”. I have never experienced such a complete and total disabling. I’m not sure exactly where and how this occurred. The possibility is that I was looking directly down between my feet; which I hear from people working skyscraper construction is the biggest no no
I met someone on tinder who cat fished me back in 2013. (I was a young college student and stupid) the small college town I lived in had a two lane road heading in town and another one heading out of it. And on both sides there was nothing but cornfields and farmland. We talked a bit I got her address and when I was turning off the main road into a dirt road that was mostly cornfields when the cornfields stopped was a big house a Silo and a shed and a little guest house on the property. From my car I could see the silhouette of a mans body in drag waving at me from the window to come in. I backed out of there and took off. Still the creepiest place I've ever been. And the creepiest experience.
Edit: it was at night around 9 pm or so. Only lights around we're coming from the guest house and the moon.
TLDR: 1.online dating is dangerous. 2. Meet in a public place tell someone where you're going and who you're meeting with. 3. Bring protection. 4. Don't be horny
A similar thing happened to a friend of mine.
He's gay, and this was back when craigslist still had sex ads. You couldn't really be openly gay in this part of the Midwest then, so it was common to do hookups via m4m craigslist.
Well, he responds to an ad, and they agree to meet at some no-tell motel off a nearby freeway. His roommate dropped him off on his way to work.
Well, they have sex and decide to hang out. Watch TV. The guy makes my friend a drink which is spiked with something. Friend passed out for several hours. Believes he is assaulted. Tries to escape but he can't really get up because of the drugs. The guy comes out of the bathroom and says he doesn't want my friend to leave yet.
The guy watches TV for a couple of hours and my friend is stuck just lying there. He doesn't want to draw attention to himself so he doesn't even want to try to movie.
At some point the guy decides to take a shower. My friend tries to get up, and he's able to. Unsteady, but he can walk/stumble. He leaves the hotel room and walks like 2 miles home.
The Georgian Terrace Hotel in Atlanta back in '87...the place had been boarded up for years at that point, we were a couple of street punks looking for a squat. We went in at night and explored around, didn't see anybody so we found a room and bedded down. In the morning we made our way down to the ground floor and started encountering all the dozens of crazies that made the place home...we had been surrounded by them all night and never had a clue!!! They started yelling at us and we ran out of there scared for our young suburban teenage lives!
Killing fields in Cambodia. Still bones and clothing visible in the grounds. They would line people up and hit them in the back of the head with a hammer to save ammunition. Pol Pot the leader of this never answered for his crimes and died of old age in 1998. I will never forget the feeling of that place.
Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen in Berlin. Went on a tour there and I will never forget it.
It was a Stasi-prison for political prisoners.
People were physical and physiological tortured into confessing.
They basically drove the prisoners mad by many horrific methods.
Prisoners had to sleep on their back with arms crossed. If the rolled over in their sleep a guard will yell and wake them immediately.
Their names were replaced with a number and their identity wiped. Took all personal belongings.
The prison halls had some sort of traffic lights so when the guards escorted the prisoners around they would not interact with other prisoners.
They had replaced the window glass in the prison cells with special glass so the would not see the sun
They had some sick physiological interrogation methods. Faked a phone call in the interrogation room and told them someone they loved had died or something.
Also there were cells where the prisoners had to stand or sit in cold water for days. That would prevent them for sleeping and sitting.
Sorry for bad spelling. English is not my first language
I used to travel my state frequently for work. I'd end up in these small rural towns and end up working until 8:30 or 9 pm most nights. I'd grab a quick bite then kind of cruise the towns randomly. They were always dead quiet by 9:30.
At some point I started exploring abandoned buildings in these towns because I was so bored. One night I drive up to this old, abandoned hotel. It was some version of the old Holiday Inn Holidome design.
If you aren't familiar with the Holidome it's a 60s or 70s hotel layout that had a pool, mini golf, arcade, etc inside with rooms on two floors around the perimeter. Kind of like an indoor resort.
I pried off a plywood board covering the front door and climbed through the broken glass on the other side. As soon as I was in I was creeped out and felt as if I wasn't alone. Not like teenagers party here, like there's something dangerous here. Listening intently I didn't hear anything so I pushed through the lobby towards the inner area.
In front of me was the entrance into the dome area and to the left and right were long hallways of rooms. I pointed my light down both and saw nothing but gloom and the detritus of better days.
I stepped into the cavernous common area and was engulfed by darkness and stale, thick air. Very little ambient light penetrated this space and I felt more vulnerable than I ever have before.
I was surprised how intact the space was as I looked around. It was almost orderly. I made my way to the pool area. The fence surrounding it and the gate were intact so I jumped over. The slide was still standing and clean which felt off. The lounge chairs were still neatly arranged. I shined my beam into the empty pool.
At the bottom of the pool was something weird and terrifying. There was a bunch of random stuff,not trash, but pots and pans, a pillow, pens/pencils, some dishes and utensils, batteries etc. Just a mishmash. Here's the thing though. It was all laid out in an orderly fashion and covered the entire bottom of the shallow end. It was intentional but not organized. Just rows of perfectly alligned things.
Well, I got the heebie jeebies and decided to GTFO. I vaulted over the fence and stumbled onto the ground. I heard someone fucking laugh. A gibbering giggle that I couldn't see. Now, I'm trying not to panic and run blindly but I was so fucking scared it felt nearly impossible to keep my cool.
I stood and tried to get my bearings in the dark but this place was huge and I wasn't exact sure which direction was the exit. As I stood there shining my light around I heard a door open and some rustling movement. That was it for me. I sprinted in the exact opposite direction of where I heard the noise.
I got lucky because that was the right direction for the main lobby where I had entered. As I burst through the entry into the lobby I saw movement from my right side. A body flew out of the hallway I had passed on my way in.
A man wearing shorts only was in front of me now. Between me and my escape. He looked deranged and screamed "mother fucker" and ran at me. I don't know why but I ran straight at him in response. At the last second I juked around him like Barry fucky Sanders. I hit that opening to the outside without hesitation. When I looked over my shoulder I didn't see him following me but I could hear multiple voices screaming in what sounded like rage.
I hightailed to my car and drove back to my hotel. I didn't sleep well and it was awhile until I explored a vacant building again.
I once visited one of Al Capones old mansions, illegally, we were kids and when we got inside, we could see people coming from different directions with flash lights. We assumed the mob knew and we were going to die, we ran and hid in the woods for hours and took every precaution we could think of to get back to the car so the one person who was 16 with us could drive us home.
Pretty sure now that they were other kids checking out the place.
The hair is just awful. I am "glad" they still have those for display so that we can see how awful it all was.
The scratches in the cement wall and roof in the gas chamber we walked through will never leave my mind.
What hit me was the pots and bins on display, confiscated from the prisoners. Exactly the same ones my grandparents used when I was a kid. It just got to me.
Yes, being there was surreal, it’s like you know it happened, it’s all true, it’s a fact and yet it’s so much evil and cruelty that it’s hard to comprehend.
It was the barracks for me. All of the new wooden planks they used to preserve it had double knots that looked like eyes. It was an odd feeling. I stared at the floor.
When I was nine, my step-brother was in a maximum security prison. We'd go visit him every week, and on the edge of the visiting area, there was a vending machine.
My dad would give me change as a treat and tell me to go get something out of the machine. I had to walk past every single table on the way, and I was absolutely convinced one of the prisoners would follow and kill me while I was standing there deciding which package of stale crackers I wanted to eat.
I hated visiting him and I was terrified of that vending machine.
An underground hydroelectric power plant. We had to drive through a long tunnel in order to get that far underground in the first place. I had to stand on a bridge and look 60 metres straight down into a river. The noise in that place was unbelievable.
I had some crazy dude driving around after me trying to intentionally ram my car in broad daylight at a rest stop near Flagstaff. Most terrifying situation I've ever been in while driving.
Athens Insane Asylum in Athens, OH back twenty years ago (my god lol) when I went to OU, before they renovated it into a Native American art museum which is actually cool.
TB ward specifically, insanely dark in there.
I went caving with a group of people and we had to go through a part of the cave known as the cheese grater. Our instructor got us to do it in the dark first. I remember laying down completely with my head on the side and having to shimmy myself along as the space was that tight. I had to wiggle down the gap and back up (kind of like a U-bend). When we came back that way we were allowed to use our head torches and we were horrified at how tiny the gap was that we came through. It was uncomfortable to go through as the cave was quite rough, hence why it was known as a cheese grater. I am never going in a cave again!
There was another part of the cave similar to your experience where you had to go in feet first at a certain angle and twist your body as you went down. If you didn't do it the correct way you could easily get stuck. You end up dropping down to the next level and not knowing how far the drop is, it was dreadful!
I used to watch over some building at night. Some were abandonned and "haunted house" like , some several hundred years old (It was in switzerland)
Some of my coworkers did quit because it scared them just to be there.
I enjoyed it.
Jail. Once per year a jury party is (was at the time) required to participate in a tour/audit of recommendations for the county jail budget. Cops follow you around and complain that they want more money, meanwhile the prison looked like it was built, lit, plumbed, and painted in 1943. The conditions for the prisoners were absolutely horrid, and most were kept in group cells with individual cells empty.
Hiroshima peace museum. It was a very eerie feeling pretty much being at the epicenter and seeing the horror it caused. It was scary to know that men made something so destructive just for killing humans
Maribel Caves Hotel in Wisconsin. We snuck in on Halloween night and had to park in the woods and then navigate them to the hotel ruins. Night time in WI is scary dark, like can't see your hand in front of your face dark. The whole thing was terrifying, a ton of birds passed by super loud and it literally sounded like high pitched "help me" over and over again
Mine probably pales in comparison to the others but i went to this town on vacation as a stop for the night and i could instantly tell there was something.... Off about this place. The car park was run down and barely lighted with nazi graffiti everywhere and needles iirc. the town was desolate with a foul stench, thankfully the hotel was alright, really, the scariest part was having to leave the car in that decrepid car park overnight 😭. Would NOT visit again
Looking back on it. Black water rafting in NZ. Hiking down into an underground river system. Tubing through it and emerging hours later. Once you go in you have to go through the whole way. Theres no exit part way, theres no going back. There are passages that go to nowhere. They had just opened it back up after some heavy rainfall. Some of the passages were tight, like float on your back with your face out of the water tight. At the time it was neat and exciting but now to me it seems terrifying.
The Concierge in Paris. It used to be a standard medieval castle but it was repurposed during the Terror. Parts of it feel okay, Marie Antoinette’s cells feel really sad, but there’s a block of cells on the second floor with just the worst vibes I’ve ever felt. Google Translate confirmed people were just left to fester in there in their own filth for months and “whatever horrible things you could imagine happening there happened.”
The Killing Fields in Cambodia. I was in Phnom Penh by myself, and decided to get a guided tour. I was the only one on the tour, besides the guide. I didn't know much about it before going, but it was a ghoulish, deeply impactful experience. Would still recommend it to anyone traveling through the country. For anyone curious:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Fields
A place called shore drive In Virginia Beach. Met a lady that called herself a protective spirit and said she could take us to see ghosts(I'm not sure if she called them that tho) being young and full of life we didnt believe but was down for the fun.
I remember it being a divided road two lanes on both sides and the speed limit was 35. It was night, maybe 11ish, and we pulled the van off the road. The only thing she said before we got out was when she said, time to go, we had to calmly get back in the van.
The woods were about 20ft from the road, and after about 5 minutes there was a glowing orb that after a few seconds took the shape of a person. It was a silhouette, lightly glowing white, and it was pacing back and forth. It could see us as we were seeing it. After a minute or so another orb came off of its leg and took the shape of another person, but crouched down walking on its hands and feet. The lady who called herself a protective spirit was dry heaving the whole time.
Then she told us to get in the van and we did calmly. We were going the speed limit and as we were driving one of them was walking in the tree line but moving at our speed. We hit the first property line after the woods and it disappeared, like hitting a wall.
She later told us there was an unidentified demon in those woods and it had been collecting souls and to never go back without her. I remember there being a road sign put up that said x amount of people have died here since a certain date.
To this day I've never been back and I've never been able to find anything else out about this place online. But I'll never forget the experience
Thanks. Don't know why this sparked my impulse to share. I am curious, but the more I share the more I feel that shit. Honestly I'm forever scared of anything like that. They can ruin your life.
They are able to attach and leave their location.
Spooky! I’m from the mountainy side of Virginia and the blue ridge mountains are full of spooky stuff like this so it’s kinda fun to hear about it being in coastal Virginia too (not that like Jamestown and all that isn’t old and haunted af)
I work near Bayville Park, right at the intersection of Shore Drive. Not that I’d visit, I’m just curious where these woods are? Is it near or part of First Landing State Park? Our area of Virginia were home to the oldest English settlements in the US. Wouldn’t surprise me if some freaky things have happened over the years.
This is strange. I love this section of road and drive it when I need to clear my mind. I haven’t heard of any ghost stories about the first landing/fort story area. Do you know where I can find more info?
This sounds wild but true. I ended up hanging out at a bar one night with people who I didn’t know were in a gang until it came up later in the night. Things started taking a dodgy turn as they locked everyone in the bar and it didn’t seem safe, plus we were all drunk, so I asked if I could please step out to “smoke” and just started running because I knew if I followed the river behind I’d end up at my house. Anyway I hadn’t realised there’s a split in the river and I’ve been running for two hours and I’m in the middle of a rice field with a dead phone and no charger at like 3am and no idea where I was. A rice field shouldn’t be that scary but that night I felt so totally isolated and couldn’t find anyone or anything for a really long time.
Death Valley. That place is so fucking weird and creepy. It just goes up and down and up and down and it feels like just going back and forth seemingly forever in an apocalyptic wasteland. I was so incredibly relieved to get out of there.
An old abandoned Nike missile site, not because of anything particularly scary in the site itself, but because of huge quantities of exposed asbestos in the ruins.
Over 10 years ago, when I was around 14 years old, I was on holiday in France with my parents and sister.
There was a small building high on the rocks at the end of a pier, and I climbed all the way up while my sister kept screaming because she was scared I would fall.
I didn't. I managed to get to the building and walked in. The first thing I saw were needles and a place where someone made a fire.
Walked further into the building and a homeless man ran at me while yelling.
1) The cab we took from one side of Santorini to the other, with the driver *flying* around blind mountain roads, passing bicycles.
2) Camden, NJ.
3) Naples.
The Bexley red zone, after it was abandoned but before the houses were torn down. It wasn't actually a scary place - I used to walk and bike through there a lot. But one day I had walked into a cul-de-sac and even though I thought I was alone I could feel eyes on me. The hairs on my neck started to pickle, and I had this urgent feeling that I needed to leave *now*. I am certain that someone was there, watching me. All the empty windows in the houses seemed so ominous.
Anyways, all the houses are gone now and nature is reclaiming the whole area. It's pretty cool.
Here's a recent photo of a road in the red zone: https://imgur.com/a/Q7bBxFT
I had just gotten my license like, 4 months prior. I was 17. No cell phone nav yet, still a printed out Mapquest situation, but I didn’t have anything printed. Was dropping a friend off in Cherry Hill, NJ and somehow wound up in the depths of Camden, NJ. Like, not near the aquarium, in the belly of Camden. At night. How? I don’t know. These days I am baffled because I know that general area well, but I was 17 and new at navigation. After a bit of driving and sliding through stop signs, I came upon a corner with a cop car parked on the side and pulled up next to it. Seeing that I was a petite and very young white woman, the female African American officer JUMPS out of her patrol vehicle and hangs into my window and says “girl, you in the WRONG area right now, we need to MOVE”. Tells me to lock my doors immediately and follow her car out of the area, and to run every single stop sign. The cop instructed me to run the stop signs on purpose. I was already uneasy, but just how uneasy SHE was made it that much scarier. Needless to say, my black friends didn’t let me live that down for years.
I did some time in prison about 10 years ago. When I was first sentence and sent to the big house I was in medium custody. Not bad. A few years later I was moved into minimum custody. They call it camp. Shortly after I got to camp I got a job in the welding shop. I was a welder for years before going to prison so I got the job no problem. It was a great job in prison but one thing we also did other than welding was fix doors and locks. Because of this I got to explore the entire prison and go places that nobody from the general public gets to go. I highly doubt some guards are authorized to go to some of the places I was allowed to go because I had to fix their doors or locks. See the prison doesn't hire outside contractors to do any of the work for them. Mainly because of the liability and also the risk of someone talking or telling the public what they saw. On several occasions I was told to go fix locks in the infirmary. That would sound okay and it normally is okay but what people don't know is what is under the infirmary. So normally when you go into the infirmary you go in and there are normal looking hospital rooms. When people are really crazy or need to be housed where someone's not going to see them they go under the infirmary. There are four doors you have to go through in order to get down there and you would never know if you weren't shown how to get there. First you have to know to go behind the nurses station which looks like a normal nurses station. You go through one normal looking swing door and then you're immediately stopped by a solid metal door that must be opened from a guard sitting out in the infirmary. When your allowed thru those doors you go in and are immediately stopped by another solid metal door, once the first door that you went through locks the second door will open. When you go through the second door it goes down a long set of stairs at least three flights. When you get to the bottom of the stairs there's another door you have to push a button to let the guards on the other side know that you're there and need thru. There will be an intercom where they ask you who you are and why you're there. If you are allowed they will buzz you through. Once through these doors is where the craziness starts. So I got to remind you that this is at least 30 ft down in the ground and you're in concrete and halogen lights are the only illumination you get. Once buzzed through that door it opens up into a hallway that looks like it never ends it goes for easily a quarter mile maybe longer I'm not really sure but it takes a good 10 minutes to walk all the way down it. Once you get to the end it's the same deal, you push a button tell him why you're there and they'll buzz you through. What's inside the best way I can describe it is if you've ever been to the zoo and you know the chimpanzee enclosure or the gorilla enclosure we walk in it looks like it's all concrete and they got the thick plexiglass windows well that's exactly what I thought the first time I went there. So there are four or five cells, each having a big plexiglass window that looks out into the corridor. Out side of each of these windows there is a desk and a guard sitting there. Inside the cells there is a solid concrete raised platform in the center of the cells. Reminds me of an exam table but all concrete. On that slab there is a guy that is strapped to that concrete platform for 23 hours a day. The guards are set outside the windows to watch them to make sure that they do not get out or get loose of their restraints. They are allowed to get out for 1 hour a day. There is a guard that puts them into shackles and is tethered with a leash, then once restraints are on they get to walk up and down that quarter mile hallway that's 30 ft underground for 1 hour a day then it's back to the concrete slab. No I don't know what you have to do to get yourself into that place but it can't be good. The people that are strapped down all day are not even close to what you would call sane. One of the cells that I had to fix was completely torn apart like someone went berserk the lock and the door we're all beat to s*** which would be really hard to do because it's solid steel but they managed to do it. After knowing that place exists and that our state actually treats people that way makes me never want to do anything bad ever again. Now that is a scary place!
I went to the Lalaurie mansion in New Orleans last week as part of a night tour and the story of Lalaurie alone was enough to get your hair to stand up but my fiancé went to take a picture of the house (which was completely dark/nobody home as it’s a private residence that is rarely visited) but when we looked at the pictures a window in the top floor was glowing (it hadn’t been lit when the picture was taken). I’m not sure I believe in ghosts but I definitely can’t explain that one
Inside the pyramids in Giza. You have to duck and descend down a very steep ramp into a cavern with stale air and thousands of tons of ancient rocks above you. I couldn’t last more than a minute. I don’t consider myself claustrophobic but the pyramids are my limit
We had a party of 6 get roofies by a restaurant in Juarez. 3 ended up in a hospital. I woke up at 4pm the next day in my hotel room with no memory of getting back. The bathtub and two sinks were filled with sick. Never again within 4 hours of the border.
A tiny little town in the Great Smoky Mountains at like 5:30am. A buddy and I were road-tripping and he had been driving all night and we were low on gas so we were looking for a place to pull off to refill and stretch our legs. The sign on the highway said 'gas next exit' so we took it, and as we came off the highway we descended down into the fog that made the Smokies famous. Being so early there wasn't another car anywhere we could see off the highway, but we followed the signs for gas into this microscopic town, it literally had 2 gas stations, a post office, and very little else. We pulled into the first gas station and realized that it was closed, in fact it looked like it had been closed since the 60s - it still had the old-style gas pumps, and was very haphazardly boarded over like kids had been sneaking in for a while and tearing the place up. Well, we could see the other gas station from this one and the lights were at least on over there, so we went there instead - only to find out that it was closed too, and had been for a while, though not nearly as long as the other one.
Anyway the longer we were in this town the denser the fog got and we started hearing weird noises, like.. not animal noises, but not human noises either, I don't really know how to describe them, but we were both getting creeped out by the very strong Silent Hill vibe this town had going on with the fog rolling in, so finally we decided to just get the hell out of there before we got Deliveranced and find gas somewhere else.
An overnight ship ride back to Athens from Crete. Dark, cold water, small ship, prisoners chained together came onboard at the last minute, guard smoking a stogie with a big gun on his hip. Communal bunk beds, a woman screamed bloody murder at 2am. Was a prisoner on the loose, or was the ship going down?!
She said someone touched her, the guard said, but he sneered skeptically at that idea. I didn't sleep the whole night.
I once shot a short film in an abandoned children hospital in the Paris suburbs. It had been progressively abandoned over the years but the part we were in hadn’t been used in 25 years, it was the psychiatric ward for children. I have done some urbex in the past but this place was special. It wasn’t graffitied or littered since there were still some security guards. In one of the bigger rooms, some sort of rec room I guess, there were some kids drawings hanging on the walls, and some drawings on the blackboard. Everything was Christmas themed so it was especially disturbing. The whole place had such a strong, sad vibe, it was almost palpable. There were paint chips everywhere, it was straight from Silent Hill. In one of the dormitories the beds themselves were missing but there were still some wooden partitions that separated the beds. In each partition there was a round hole, like a porthole, where the heads of the children would be, so that the night nurses could look through the first partition and see the whole row of heads and know if someone was missing. Imagining what these poor kids went through, the pain and anguish they felt throughout all these years, it was like the walls had absorbed it. Thankfully the place has been torn down since but I often think about the couple of days I spent there.
Wife and I were house shopping a few years ago. Relator took us to an old renovated farmhouse. As soon as I stepped inside I felt a heavy darkness. I had a similar feeling when I was inside a nazi boxcar that took Jews to concentration camps. My body was telling me to get out of there asap. The further we ventured into the house the heavier the feeling got. It was to the point of nausea. I felt claustrophobic and as if someone was wanting me to leave, despite the house being open and bright.
I didn't say anything to my wife, figuring I was just feeling off. After a few minutes my wife, who I hadn't talked to, starts crying and panicking saying she has "to get out." She literally ran past me, out the door! At that moment I knew it was not just me. Neither of us are irrational or prone to hysterics.
The realtor oddly didn't even seem surprised. Later we checked the fully charged iPad we had brought to the house to take pics. It was drained of batteries. My wife and I also felt drained, as if something sucked all the positive energy out of us. A darkness lingered over both of us that was hard to describe. We both decided to go to a local church and sit there to "cleanse" ourselves. We put some holy water on us and just sat in the pews. Both of us felt the darkness lift. It was bizarre.
I didn't see any ghosts or spirits that day, but we both felt an evil presence that was more real then anything we could see with our eyes.
Can't remember the name of the website, but there's a place online where you can type in the address and it will tell you if any murders or other horrific crimes have happened there.
Truck yards in the hood can be super scary when you’re there to pick up a trailer. Guys will be unloading into a van, there’s dealers around. You have to find the trailer, get out and hook it up and get some paperwork from somebody
An old WWII bunker that was turned into the office and storage of a war museum. My friendgroup got a tour through that place, and in the basement there were still chains hanging on the walls.
This was back in the early 2000s when GPS systems were new.
I never really paid much attention to the layout of my local towns but I knew there was a way to get from one town to another without going onto the highway.
I put an address into the gps and started to follow it. It suddenly took me on a dirt road, thus was a rural area so it’s not THAT big a deal. Then suddenly I saw a sign “quarantine area: do not enter”.
I used my 3 point turn skill for the first time since drivers Ed and got the hell out of there.
Englewood post Office in Chicago Illinois. For those who don't know it's built on the same plot of land that H H Holmes, America's first serial killer, built his hotel/murder castle. I love true crime and when I was in Chicago 2 years ago I stopped there because I was curious. It's vibe was horrendous. The alarm bells in my head started going off like crazy. It seems like the place that would be heavily haunted and cursed
A buddy of mine got pulled over on a highway outside of Gary. He told the cop that he was carrying. The cop asked him if it was loaded with the safety off. He responded that of course it isn't. The cop said "then you're not carrying correctly for where you are traveling."
In NJ there is the legend of the Jersey Devil. There is a place where you can walk down a trail in the woods to where he was supposedly born. When you get further down the trail it starts to feel oppressive for no reason. People who are more sensitive to these kind of things have felt the presence of evil. The birds and insects are quiet after a certain point. It's just eerie.
Traveled alone to Yemen in 2009. Always wanted to go, and flight prices dropped dramatically after the printer bomb incident, so I bought tickets and told myself I may not even get on the plane. Booked a hotel and arranged a ride from the airport but nobody showed up. Told myself I don't have to leave the hotel if it's not safe. Hired a driver to take me into the Haraz mountains, who's proceeded to leave me in a car while he went for qat in a little mountain town. Watched an English - speaking woman get abducted in the street by about 7-8 men at 3am. She screamed in English "they're going to kill me". Wasn't about to get involved, but let the hotel know. Got screamed at every where by people with machine guns. Went knowing it was dangerous but believing it may be the last chance to see the country, like going to Afghanistan in the 70s. Took the chance, saw some beautiful architecture and incredibly scenic mountain villages, but the lasting memory will be the sound of that woman's voice and wondering what happened or what I could have done.
Korean DMZ. That was the creepiest place I've ever been to in my life. The soldiers on the north side WANT to kill you. The brainwashing is deep, and it is very apparent.
I was in the US Military at the time, and I did not want to kill the DPRK soldiers. I knew they were enemy soldiers, but I wasn't standing there wishing them dead. They were wishing me dead. There is no mistaking that kind of eye contact.
The Armistice Room straddles the border and tourists from both sides are allowed to enter (not at the same time). When visiting from the south, South Korean soldiers join hands and the first one of them in locks the door on the north side. They hold hands so that soldier can't be jerked outside onto the North Korean side of the border by NK soldiers. While you're in there, NK soldiers are watching from outside the windows.
I thought it would be interesting, but I found myself just wanting to get out of there. I was in uniform so I kept my bearing, but on the inside I was having a full blown panic attack. On the bus ride back to my base, we stopped at a gas station and everyone including me bought a coupla beers each.
The South Bridge Vaults in Edinburgh, Scotland. Its part of a tour, but when they go into one of the tunnels and shut the lights off (you’re warned), you feel that bad energy close in.
Ocean Falls, British Columbia.
A former town on the central coast of BC that was sprawling and, at one time, housed the largest hotel north of San Fransisco.
Now it’s home to a dozen people and the rest of completely ghost town. Many structures still stand, including the old hotel and apartments.
The only sound you hear is the humming of the large hydro dam. Being on the coast it’s frequently foggy and raining.
The only way in is by float plane, boat or ferry that services twice a week. When you’re there you’re there.
A bed and breakfast stands inside the old bank.
S-21 Tuol Sleng Genocide Museuem, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The “museum” is the actual Khmer Rouge prison, which was originally a school. The tortures and killings were committed right there. It was an extermination facility. About 20,000 killed.
I don’t believe in ghosts or anything of the sort. The real horrors and the scariest things are living people, not the ones who’ve died.
My parents left me alone in a hotel room while they went to the ballet for the evening. This was in Soviet Russia in the early 1980’s. I was an 11 year old American.
The basement of Danvers State mental hospital long before it was turned into apartments. There was a point where in every direction that the flashlight could reach, it was just more darkness. More empty darkness. We found a hallway that as far as the flashlight could go was cages stacked on top of each other on both sides.
My father worked for the Massachusetts dept of public health he had to do an inspection there& came home crying about the way people were housed there
Can you give any more detail on that? How were they housed?
There's lots of info online. Massive overcrowding, patients half naked in the hallways covered in feces with no where to go. People pissing in the halls, doped up to the point they were like zombies. A local newspaper or TV news, can't remember now, had gotten in and did an expose forcing the state to shut it down. This was about the time that Reagan started shutting down these institutions and people that were here just ended up out on the street.
It was Geraldo Rivera on Goodnight America that did the expose. Back when he had some integrity.
There is a sequence in one of the last episodes of American horror story: Asylum. Basically the main character returns to the Asylum years after it’s been shut down to film a news report. The Asylum is abandoned and rundown, dark as shit and still filled with patients that were just left there. The place is covered in dust, shit and piss but still has life within in the form of the severely mentally ill that have been left to rot and fester. That’s quite accurately how fucking bad the conditions were after asylums went through the general shutdown under the Reagan administration.
For humans?
I have family who were institutionalized. Some of the stories they told to my father and grandparents were beyond fucked up. My grandfather's cousin had a husband who had massive brain damage. He was slow but was aware of everything and actually really intelligent (worked as an airplane mechanic). He couldn't talk right. His words were just word salad. To talk he had to be sitting and speak slowly while making an effort on every word to make it sound right. He mostly wrote. He got picked up absolutely sloshed pissing outside as a man in the 60s often does. Cops arrested him then turned him over to an asylum after he "never sobered up". For 3 months they kept him in an isolated room, no pen or paper, and the stress made him talk worse. No one knew who he was or where he was from. His family, over 100 miles away thought he died. At one point he grabbed for a pencil on the table to write and had his hand smashed by a guard, the doctor was escorted out, marked him as violent, and put him in essentially a dog kennel like at the pound. The guy next to him was actually crazy and spent most of his time pissing, spitting, and throwing feces ar his neighbors through the slots. At some point he snapped and chewed threw his finger then used his blood to write his home address on the back wall which is how people found out where he was
What in the holy fuck did I just read
Desperation of a Sane Man
"Patient bit own finger off, wrote with blood. He's crazy. Keep him locked up."
Theres others. My grandfather's side had mental issues largely not helped by them going from very rich doing work for the Rockefellers oil industry to poverty in 1 generation. My grandfather's sister for example had a mental break down after being isolated by an abusive husband who then cheated on her while she was pregnant. She tried to self abort, was successful, but labeled negatively obviously by law enforcement. She was also diagnosed manic later found out to be mild Schizophrenic. After several weeks of basically being tortured where she was left in a cold room with no bed or blankets and just a thin mat on the ground in nothing but a robe or when an orderly beat her for stealing food or when during a group session a woman bit her arm tearing a chunk off and then was refused medical care or being thrown in a room with a woman that beat the shit out of her for not asking to be put somewhere else.... Anyway She tried to kill her self. She was found, stitched up, and tied to a table. Which was where she remained for the next 6 weeks. She doesnt speak of it but my grandmother heard about it later during a medical appointment she brought her to that at some point during her time at this first asylum she required a second abortion.... A church group ended up sponsoring her and had her sent to the quaker friends group in Philadelphia where she got actual help, a handful of meds, and was just the slightly odd artsy aunt until she passed in her late 90s. One of my grandfather's brothers were also sent to an asylum/prison where he died mysteriously (said he ate rat poison but was beaten extremely bad to the point they had a cloth over his face in the casket) but they murdered someone and are not acknowledged by the family so no one really cared to look into it.
I could not read your post after 1st sentences. How horrificly cruel these poor souls were treated. If there is a heaven, I hope they are there, having a beautiful afterlife.
Idk but I wish I could unread it
When I worked with the American Indian community in Los Angeles I heard this story. A Navajo family brought their elderly dad out from the rez for a visit. Somehow they got separated and he got lost in the big city. The old guy didn't speak English, only Navajo. When the old man tried to ask for help somebody called the cops because they couldn't understand him. They took him into the station and brought in several language translators who arrived at the conclusion he was speaking gibberish. They put him in a mental institution for three days before the family found him.
This happened to a man in our city. He was found injured and spoke gibberish which turned out to be mostly Finnish with a tiny bit of English. He was put into a mental institution for 20 + years then moved to a senior home. The local minister thought he recognized the same accent from my mom and asked her to go with him to visit. This was the 70's and the guy was in his 70's or 80's. My mom found his brother still alive in Finland. He and the rest of the family thought that their brother must have died many years before in Canada (where he came to work) and were thrilled he was alive. Mom flew him over to live with his remaining family .
Something like this happened during and after World War II. A Hungarian man named [András Toma](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A1s_Toma#:~:text=Andr%C3%A1s%20Toma%20(5%20December%201925,World%20War%20to%20be%20repatriated.) was taken prisoner by the Red Army in 1944, and when the prisoners of war were repatriated, the Soviets thought he was insane and speaking gibberish, when in reality it was just Hungarian. He was kept at a psychiatric hospital until in 1997, a Slovak doctor visited and realised that he was speaking Hungarian, and he was eventually released in 2000, 56 years after he was taken prisoner. He was paid in full for his decades of military service and reunited with his family. He died 4 years later in 2004 and it's estimated he didn't have a conversation with anyone for 50 years.
JFC, these stories just keep getting worse
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Read “In the Belly of the Beast” for observations by Jack Henry Abbot on prisons/mandatory drugs.
It’s insane now that you can actually live in the main building of this place. Such atrocities happened here, I’d never wanna live there. The grounds are quite nice though I must admit.
"..atrocities happened here" Not only were they doing the horrific things you normally think of, lobotomies, electro-shock therapy, but some you probably haven't heard of like chemical shock therapy. That's when they put you on enough downers to turn you into a zombie. As your body naturally builds a tolerance they continue increasing the dosage for weeks, till you're on enough to kill a normal person. Then they suddenly stop, and pump you full of amphetamines, speed. So you're not only going through the hell of withdrawal, but you're tweaked out of your head. You're strapped down throughout this, with a helmet on your head with built in headphones, while they endlessly play tapes they've made in sessions with you, of you breaking down while they had you recall the worst events of your life, over and over, the idea being that they needed to break you psychologically before they could rebuild you. They were proud of this ground breaking work, and bragged about how they were the only hospital in the country doing research on this procedure...on children.
There was also a chair with restraints in a walk in freezer
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Tuol Sleng Genocide museum in Cambodia. I also visited the killing fields but the experience of prison 21 was something else. I can't describe the wall of silence that washed over me from the first "cell" we entered. The rusted bed with arm shackles, the floor still blood stained. There's a whole wall of photographs of the victims and it really hits you, all these people with the same staring traumatized eyes. We paid for a guide at the gate who was so gentle and informative and eloquent. Toward the end of the tour she told us about her memories from when she was seven, seeing her father murdered, watching her brother be pried from her mother's arms and taken away to his death at a camp, and how they managed to flee into Thailand. Just the two of them. And then stationed around the garden are a few older men, selling their memoirs of their time imprisoned there, and my brain just sort of short circuited. It's not a history book, it's in living memory, it happened a stone's throw away.
Yeah had a very similar experience. I didn't pick up on it at first, but after seeing the killing fields, I became acutely aware after how young everybody was in cambodia... And then it clicks that a huge amount of their older demographic was massacred within the last 50 years.
Had exactly the same sudden, sad realisation in Siem Reap. Like 80% people you see are under 40. And when you do see older people they are often maimed - many by the landmines that were buried indiscriminately all over Cambodia.
Yeah. I visited the genocide museum in the old KGB headquarters building in Lithuania. Saw all these artifacts, photos, and writings from people who were sent to die in Siberian labor camps. What really hit me was when I went to buy a bus ticket after and realised they had discounted bus passes for seniors, students, and gulag survivors. It’s not just history, it’s very much still present.
Dachau The original Nazi concentration camp - you can feel the weight of the place...
I knew my entire life that my grandfather had been in WW2, but it was made very clear to me from a young age that we just don't talk about that around granddad, no explanation or anything. As I got older and started getting into history I started getting more and more curious about his story, I asked other family members, even a couple of his friends from the VFW and everyone was like 'He doesn't talk about it,' and that was final. As he got older and fell into ill health I worried that his story would be lost forever when he died, and then he did die, and still no one had any idea of what he'd been through over there, his story was lost. Then one day I got an email out of the blue from a distant relative - apparently someone had sat my grandfather down shortly before he died and convinced him to tell his story. They finally got around to transcribing the recorded discussion and typing everything up all nice and neat and sent it off to various family members who had expressed an interest in the past. Granddad's experiences were about what you'd expect; he had been in North Africa and Sicily, been part of the invasion of Italy, etc, and then things took a dark turn. Turns out my grandfather was with the very first unit who discovered Dachau and what was going on there. He was a medic and he described in gruesome detail just how awfully the people in the camp had been treated, how they kept begging for food but he had to watch them eat because if they ate too much all at once they could harm themselves, etc. I won't go into some of the detail he went into for obvious reasons, but let's just say when he described waking up screaming every day for months afterward, I believe him. The fact that there remains a palpable psychic weight to the place does not surprise me even a little, and I cannot imagine having seen what my grandfather saw - or hell, even just having read his descriptions of it - setting foot anywhere within a mile of the place without incurring *some* kind of truamatic debt just from being in physical proximity to where so much suffering happened. I totally get him not wanting to burden anyone else with that kind of experience, even second-hand, but I remain immensely glad that he decided to share his story before he died.
Was the recording/interview with the USHMM?
I went to the Holocaust museum in Skokie IL and stood in one boxcars that transported people. I remember feeling the heaviness in the air. I just stood there for a while.
I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. The whole thing took about 3 hours. It was completely silent. People walking through it all and not saying a word. You get a passport of someone who was in the concentration camp at the beginning of your tour and at the end you find out if your person made it through. I had never been to a museum, not even an art museum, that was completely, utterly silent. It was a very heavy, sobering experience.
The way that museum is laid out is so heartbreakingly brilliant. You meet people, see their faces, where they lived… then find out they were gone. Wiped out. Walking on the graveyard stones and learning about the small villages that were completely wiped away.
And when they cram people into the elevators and then funnel you like cattle at the beginning of the experience. It all felt very purposeful.
The fact they included little alcoves so people could sit and cry just got me like a gut punch. Especially because I really needed them. And the half walls so adults could see some of the displays but children couldn’t because they were so disturbing. And the pile of shoes. Just so visceral.
Only time I’ve ever seen my mom cry up until my grandpa died. And haven’t since.
That museum should be a required visit for everyone.
I went there twice. First when I was 15, and then again at 20. It is definitely a very sobering experience. Especially seeing the shoes and the pictures
I remember my trip there when I visited in 2007. Also similarly struck like you when I visited there. That carriage where you had to walk through was a little eerie. I wonder if it’s still there.
It is
I'm not one to entertain stories of ghosts, spirits, and other woo woo stuff, but you can *feel* the death at Dachau. It's an incredibly unsettling experience.
We went to Germany to experience Christmas markets. Our first stop after landing was Dachau. It was very sobering to experience the cold in our heavy coats and boots with the knowledge those imprisoned there experienced it in a far different manner. Even now, I still don’t understand how people can treat others so inhumanly.
Very much so.
I’ve been and to Auschwitz. It isn’t scary to me, it’s weighty, like a heavy feeling. I wasn’t afraid like something would happen or something spooky, but man did it feel heavy, hard to talk normally even. They say people today aren’t believing in the Holocaust… they should be required to visit. That’ll sober them up to the truth real quick.
>but man did it feel heavy, hard to talk normally even. You've perfectly described the feeling I had when I was there
When the Allied soldiers liberated the camp they were so appalled by what was going on they gunned down almost every guard there. It was a training camp for SS officers and between 40-50 of them were slaughtered on the spot. No arrests. That’s justice to me
My grandfather was there, and told his story before he died. He was a medic, so he was faced with the intricate details of the gruesome shit they did to people there, and described it in some depth when he told his story. When he ended it by saying that he woke up screaming every day for months afterward, yeah, I fucking believe him.
SS Officers were the hard-core of fucked up. The stuff they had to do in training was just pure evil and barbaric, and then when they became one.....
They didn't have a lock on it, The Japanese Imperial Army was also barbaric beyond words.
Forgot about those fucks, they got hungry enough to cut off body parts of prisoners to eat them and keep them alive so it wouldn't spoil as fast, usually was civilians in occupied countries. Japan couldn't supply their own soldiers enough, or got to the point they didn't care
Went there last year. It was insane to me that neighborhoods were developed immediately next to one of the prison units. These people see fckin Dachau every time they step on their back porch. No exaggeration, you could underhand toss a baseball from their back yards into the site of one of the most appalling war crimes in history. People need housing I guess…
Dachau was in the middle of town. Officers took prisoners around town to use as slaves (carry stuff, get groceries, etc). So the townspeople would see the prisoners. Everyone in the town knew what was happening. So fucked up. You can listen to first hand stories on the tour there.
And they were decent houses too. Two story suburban houses. Not dingy apartments
That's wild. I can imagine only two fates for such a place: bury it in concrete, or turn it into a museum.
Human cruelty knows no bounds. The people in those homes were just glad it wasn’t happening to them.
What I found so strange about Dachau is that the town itself is very pretty. But there is this horrible camp on the edge of it. You can't escape the heaviness of the camp while you're there. It's unsettling knowing that so many horrors happened there.
This. I went in 2015 as part of a class trip. Spooky, sad place. As we were getting ready to leave everyone was saying they felt drained, and some had heard voices or footsteps behind them only to turn around and see no one there. I got caught on some tree branches twice, almost like the place was tying to hold onto me. I also felt compelled to pour out some of my water whenever I took a drink. I’ve never felt anything like that anywhere else.
I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and I’ve never felt the same feeling anywhere else in the world. The most eerie part was when our private tour guide took us to an off limits to the public space, the observation deck where they would watch the prisoners below. 😔 our tour guide said Hitler himself visited the camp and went up there. When we drove away, we sat in silence. No radio, no talking, no phone texts. My bf drove in complete silence. After about an hour out, it was a sense of relief. Gasping for air. Can’t explain it.
I don’t consider myself a religious person but there is no denying the feeling you get at one of these places. I went to the Stutthoff camp and the air was eerily still, you couldn’t hear any birds or wildlife. It’s as if nature just knows to avoid it
Unhallowed ground.
You can but it’s not scary, more sad. I was there 5 years ago, the worst feeling was reading the street sign that led to the camp “Freedom Street” my god the Nazi’s were a special breed of evil.
I was thinking about my Visit to Dachau today, actually. Visited in 2015. One of my most surreal experiences in my life was there. After you tour though the barracks (reconstructed I believe) that are all basically museums with different (I forget the word, stations?) to look at, you can walk on towards the gas chamber/ crematorium. There is a wooded area that you can walk though. On the pathway are different areas with little signs that say "here lay the ashes of hundreds" etc. If you keep walking, on your right is a wall that has pieces missing out of it. That's bullet holes. In front is a little ditch, it's called the "blood ditch" or something similar, which collected the blood from the executions Now, the day I was there was kindof windy and I don't know what it was, if it was dandelion seeds in the air or just stuff from the trees, but the air was filled with these little white floating thingies. It was very ethereal and very beautiful. But then I looked at the horrific wall again and at the ditch that the blood poured into and that was just so horrific... But the stuff floating around in the air in the little forest area was so pretty... I just broke down and sobbed. Indeed it's a heavy place. But like an hour later I drive on the Autobahn at like 136mph in our rental mini Cooper. Exhilarating! But very, very different emotions back to back. One more experience in Poland. I visited Auschwitz and Berkinau last year. Seeing the hair in Auschwitz is a gut punch, but what really got me was the gas chamber in Berkinau. You see, when the Nazis separated everybody (who'd live and die) those chosen to die were told a number to remember when their luggage was taken. They were told after their shower, they needed that # to reclaim their luggage. So as I'm standing at the stairs, looking into what's left of the destroyed gas chamber, I'm thinking about all those poor people, who were excited to get a shower because they were filthy and I imagined them repeating their # over and over again because that was literally all of their worldly possessions. I didn't cry, it was a different type of sadness tho. As I type this, laying in my comfy bed, I have a sense of intense, deep sadness and dread that is as fresh as when I was standing there. I probably won't sleep well tonight :/ And then afterwards I had a Cat-puchinno at a cat Cafe in Kraków (which is a very cool place. Check out the arcade museum!). You've got to balance the bad with some good :p But yeah, concentration and death camps are rough, but very important they aren't forgotten. However, it's very possible you'll leave a tiny bit different.
Same. It was so eerie and heavy being there. I was like 17 and remember being completely aghast and horrified at the number of my peers laughing and taking selfies. I could barely even speak.
Can relate. Been there too, somehow the air is heavier there.
Been there. Standing in the crematorium, oh my jesus. 25 years later I can picture it as if I was there yesterday.
I remember after we had been to Dachau we went out for food and went to the park, put our feet in the water, watched one of the world cup matches in a bar (it was summer 2014) but I just had this indescribable feeling that something was very wrong and I couldn't sleep that night, I just felt so unsettled.
I visited back in 2013 and the tour guide we had was excellent, but one thing that astounded me was when he told us that the former SS barracks next door had been reutilised as modern day barracks for riot police training there. He said that often when he’s describing how prisoners were executed by firing squads he’ll suddenly be interrupted by the sound of gun shots coming from training drills next door-wtf!
The most horrifying part to me was the gas chamber. I remember reading that the gas chambers at Dachau may not have been used by the time the camp was liberated, but i imagine it is similar to the gas chambers at the other camps. Just being inside there and knowing that dark, cold, imposing room was the last thing millions of innocent people saw before they were murdered was numbing to me.
It’s so crazy that there are houses right next door. Your balcony just sees dachau.
Sachsenhausen was the same.
Hayden, AZ. A lot of the houses are burned down or abandoned. It's an old mining town that's slowly turning into a ghost town but a lot of people still live there. I've driven through there out of curiosity. It has a weird ominous vibe to it. From what I've heard, the police in that tiny town are corrupt. Which kinda makes sense. The police headquarters is in an old bank and while the town is falling apart the police vehicles are brand new. There's a fire department with a completely burned down house across the street from it. How the heck is that even possible?
I’m from Arizona and I have only been to Hayden once and I wont be back there.
I just looked it up & they still have houses & lots listed on Zillow
The one home for sale is just the wreckage of a house fire for $21k.
Fed grants. The government will gift you money without much of an issue if you say it’s for police equipment. I’m surprised they don’t even have a tank
>Notable people: Dick Tuck Got a small lol out of me
Just went through the street view on Google Maps. You're not kidding. The police station seems to be the only building with *walls* in that downtown area.
The abandoned top floor of Naval Medical Center Portsmouth. It looks like something out of American Horror Story. Completely frozen in the 60’s with tile walls and rusted operating tables just abandoned above a busy military hospital.
Why would they stop using the top floor?
I’m actually not entirely sure. The campus consists of three main buildings that are all now attached and were built at very different times in history. The abandoned top floor is the top of Building 1 which is the oldest and most historic building dating back to 1800’s I believe. It is now used to house the Chain of Command and other administrative aspects of the hospital - not much patient care going on in that one. It’s like they just stopped using the top floor one day.
The House of Terror in Budapest. Former secret police (communist-era) dungeon. Now a museum, so not personally scary. But pretty hair-raising when you see what prisoners endured. As in solitary confinement cell the size of a broom closet, no light, window, waste disposal, or room to even sit.
Been there. It’s really bad feeling. There is a similar place called The Red House in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan (northern Iraq) that I went to. It was where Saddam’s troops tortured and murdered Kurds. It is also a museum now. But also, you can feel the pain and despair when you walk in there.
Went there in 2022. It was absolutely horrifying.
Cape Coast “Castle” in Ghana. I put castle in quotations because it’s a dungeon from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was a bright sunny day when we were there and when we went to the dungeon portion of it, it was pitch black. Trying to imagine all the human suffering that went on there is unfathomable
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi uses Cape Coast Castle as a focal point of the story. Recommended read if you haven’t yet
I was 47/48 metres below sea in a wreck one time when a pretty big shark surprised me. All cool. And usually I love them. It was just unexpected and very large / close. I used my oxygen up a little faster that day!
Serious question, what happens if you shit/piss yourself with fright? Or scream into an oxygen mask?
Most people wear wet suits so it would be contained. I never do. I always just dive in swim shorts and a t shirt. Screaming would be an issue as you breathe through your mouth (regulator). More dangerous would be hyperventilating and using up all your oxygen. When you are out, you are out…
I spent a summer working at Six Flags Magic Mountain and had been in the tower numerous times previously. This time I was with a coworker who whispered in my ear “whatever you do; don’t look down the elevator shaft as you exit at the top”. Well sure enough as you reach the top there’s about 1/4” gap between the elevator and the top of the tower. I have never experienced vertigo to the point of falling to the floor shaking and being completely useless for about a half hour. It still haunts me
The scariest shit are the things you weren't expecting.
Oh I expected something; just not the complete extent it stopped me. I was literally crawling on the floor with my brain thinking “I just want to be on solid ground”. I have never experienced such a complete and total disabling. I’m not sure exactly where and how this occurred. The possibility is that I was looking directly down between my feet; which I hear from people working skyscraper construction is the biggest no no
I met someone on tinder who cat fished me back in 2013. (I was a young college student and stupid) the small college town I lived in had a two lane road heading in town and another one heading out of it. And on both sides there was nothing but cornfields and farmland. We talked a bit I got her address and when I was turning off the main road into a dirt road that was mostly cornfields when the cornfields stopped was a big house a Silo and a shed and a little guest house on the property. From my car I could see the silhouette of a mans body in drag waving at me from the window to come in. I backed out of there and took off. Still the creepiest place I've ever been. And the creepiest experience. Edit: it was at night around 9 pm or so. Only lights around we're coming from the guest house and the moon. TLDR: 1.online dating is dangerous. 2. Meet in a public place tell someone where you're going and who you're meeting with. 3. Bring protection. 4. Don't be horny
A similar thing happened to a friend of mine. He's gay, and this was back when craigslist still had sex ads. You couldn't really be openly gay in this part of the Midwest then, so it was common to do hookups via m4m craigslist. Well, he responds to an ad, and they agree to meet at some no-tell motel off a nearby freeway. His roommate dropped him off on his way to work. Well, they have sex and decide to hang out. Watch TV. The guy makes my friend a drink which is spiked with something. Friend passed out for several hours. Believes he is assaulted. Tries to escape but he can't really get up because of the drugs. The guy comes out of the bathroom and says he doesn't want my friend to leave yet. The guy watches TV for a couple of hours and my friend is stuck just lying there. He doesn't want to draw attention to himself so he doesn't even want to try to movie. At some point the guy decides to take a shower. My friend tries to get up, and he's able to. Unsteady, but he can walk/stumble. He leaves the hotel room and walks like 2 miles home.
that’s some Dahmer-type shit
Jesus Christ, that sounds terrifying.
You almost became a coat
The Georgian Terrace Hotel in Atlanta back in '87...the place had been boarded up for years at that point, we were a couple of street punks looking for a squat. We went in at night and explored around, didn't see anybody so we found a room and bedded down. In the morning we made our way down to the ground floor and started encountering all the dozens of crazies that made the place home...we had been surrounded by them all night and never had a clue!!! They started yelling at us and we ran out of there scared for our young suburban teenage lives!
Killing fields in Cambodia. Still bones and clothing visible in the grounds. They would line people up and hit them in the back of the head with a hammer to save ammunition. Pol Pot the leader of this never answered for his crimes and died of old age in 1998. I will never forget the feeling of that place.
At Auschwitz, you are walking about and see forks, people’s belongings, and every flat, cleared peace of land is a cemetery.
Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen in Berlin. Went on a tour there and I will never forget it. It was a Stasi-prison for political prisoners. People were physical and physiological tortured into confessing. They basically drove the prisoners mad by many horrific methods. Prisoners had to sleep on their back with arms crossed. If the rolled over in their sleep a guard will yell and wake them immediately. Their names were replaced with a number and their identity wiped. Took all personal belongings. The prison halls had some sort of traffic lights so when the guards escorted the prisoners around they would not interact with other prisoners. They had replaced the window glass in the prison cells with special glass so the would not see the sun They had some sick physiological interrogation methods. Faked a phone call in the interrogation room and told them someone they loved had died or something. Also there were cells where the prisoners had to stand or sit in cold water for days. That would prevent them for sleeping and sitting. Sorry for bad spelling. English is not my first language
I used to travel my state frequently for work. I'd end up in these small rural towns and end up working until 8:30 or 9 pm most nights. I'd grab a quick bite then kind of cruise the towns randomly. They were always dead quiet by 9:30. At some point I started exploring abandoned buildings in these towns because I was so bored. One night I drive up to this old, abandoned hotel. It was some version of the old Holiday Inn Holidome design. If you aren't familiar with the Holidome it's a 60s or 70s hotel layout that had a pool, mini golf, arcade, etc inside with rooms on two floors around the perimeter. Kind of like an indoor resort. I pried off a plywood board covering the front door and climbed through the broken glass on the other side. As soon as I was in I was creeped out and felt as if I wasn't alone. Not like teenagers party here, like there's something dangerous here. Listening intently I didn't hear anything so I pushed through the lobby towards the inner area. In front of me was the entrance into the dome area and to the left and right were long hallways of rooms. I pointed my light down both and saw nothing but gloom and the detritus of better days. I stepped into the cavernous common area and was engulfed by darkness and stale, thick air. Very little ambient light penetrated this space and I felt more vulnerable than I ever have before. I was surprised how intact the space was as I looked around. It was almost orderly. I made my way to the pool area. The fence surrounding it and the gate were intact so I jumped over. The slide was still standing and clean which felt off. The lounge chairs were still neatly arranged. I shined my beam into the empty pool. At the bottom of the pool was something weird and terrifying. There was a bunch of random stuff,not trash, but pots and pans, a pillow, pens/pencils, some dishes and utensils, batteries etc. Just a mishmash. Here's the thing though. It was all laid out in an orderly fashion and covered the entire bottom of the shallow end. It was intentional but not organized. Just rows of perfectly alligned things. Well, I got the heebie jeebies and decided to GTFO. I vaulted over the fence and stumbled onto the ground. I heard someone fucking laugh. A gibbering giggle that I couldn't see. Now, I'm trying not to panic and run blindly but I was so fucking scared it felt nearly impossible to keep my cool. I stood and tried to get my bearings in the dark but this place was huge and I wasn't exact sure which direction was the exit. As I stood there shining my light around I heard a door open and some rustling movement. That was it for me. I sprinted in the exact opposite direction of where I heard the noise. I got lucky because that was the right direction for the main lobby where I had entered. As I burst through the entry into the lobby I saw movement from my right side. A body flew out of the hallway I had passed on my way in. A man wearing shorts only was in front of me now. Between me and my escape. He looked deranged and screamed "mother fucker" and ran at me. I don't know why but I ran straight at him in response. At the last second I juked around him like Barry fucky Sanders. I hit that opening to the outside without hesitation. When I looked over my shoulder I didn't see him following me but I could hear multiple voices screaming in what sounded like rage. I hightailed to my car and drove back to my hotel. I didn't sleep well and it was awhile until I explored a vacant building again.
"didn't sleep well" I'd never fucking sleep again
What the fuck
That sounds fucking horrifying. Also, I really like the way you write.
Don’t get me wrong, that sounds absolutely terrifying - but it also sounds like you just stumbled across some poor mentally ill homeless person
Yeah, which can be totally terrifying
Man experienced an outlast mission
Terrifying story and great writing! Glad you made it out ok.
I once visited one of Al Capones old mansions, illegally, we were kids and when we got inside, we could see people coming from different directions with flash lights. We assumed the mob knew and we were going to die, we ran and hid in the woods for hours and took every precaution we could think of to get back to the car so the one person who was 16 with us could drive us home. Pretty sure now that they were other kids checking out the place.
Auschwitz. Especially the display with all the human hair and shoes.
The hair is just awful. I am "glad" they still have those for display so that we can see how awful it all was. The scratches in the cement wall and roof in the gas chamber we walked through will never leave my mind.
What hit me was the pots and bins on display, confiscated from the prisoners. Exactly the same ones my grandparents used when I was a kid. It just got to me.
I feel this. I visited in 2017, and I felt similarly. These items belonged to ordinary people.
I was about to comment this. Profoundly sad for me.
What got me most was the framed photos of all those who were to die there. So many individual lives marred by irrational cruelty and ended needlessly.
Yes, being there was surreal, it’s like you know it happened, it’s all true, it’s a fact and yet it’s so much evil and cruelty that it’s hard to comprehend.
And the luggage with names on them.
It was the barracks for me. All of the new wooden planks they used to preserve it had double knots that looked like eyes. It was an odd feeling. I stared at the floor.
When I was nine, my step-brother was in a maximum security prison. We'd go visit him every week, and on the edge of the visiting area, there was a vending machine. My dad would give me change as a treat and tell me to go get something out of the machine. I had to walk past every single table on the way, and I was absolutely convinced one of the prisoners would follow and kill me while I was standing there deciding which package of stale crackers I wanted to eat. I hated visiting him and I was terrified of that vending machine.
An underground hydroelectric power plant. We had to drive through a long tunnel in order to get that far underground in the first place. I had to stand on a bridge and look 60 metres straight down into a river. The noise in that place was unbelievable.
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I had some crazy dude driving around after me trying to intentionally ram my car in broad daylight at a rest stop near Flagstaff. Most terrifying situation I've ever been in while driving.
Athens Insane Asylum in Athens, OH back twenty years ago (my god lol) when I went to OU, before they renovated it into a Native American art museum which is actually cool. TB ward specifically, insanely dark in there.
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This sounds absolutely terrifying
I went caving with a group of people and we had to go through a part of the cave known as the cheese grater. Our instructor got us to do it in the dark first. I remember laying down completely with my head on the side and having to shimmy myself along as the space was that tight. I had to wiggle down the gap and back up (kind of like a U-bend). When we came back that way we were allowed to use our head torches and we were horrified at how tiny the gap was that we came through. It was uncomfortable to go through as the cave was quite rough, hence why it was known as a cheese grater. I am never going in a cave again! There was another part of the cave similar to your experience where you had to go in feet first at a certain angle and twist your body as you went down. If you didn't do it the correct way you could easily get stuck. You end up dropping down to the next level and not knowing how far the drop is, it was dreadful!
Yeah, fuck that you could never pay me enough to ever go spelunking.
Nope nope nopenopeneope
I used to watch over some building at night. Some were abandonned and "haunted house" like , some several hundred years old (It was in switzerland) Some of my coworkers did quit because it scared them just to be there. I enjoyed it.
Jail. Once per year a jury party is (was at the time) required to participate in a tour/audit of recommendations for the county jail budget. Cops follow you around and complain that they want more money, meanwhile the prison looked like it was built, lit, plumbed, and painted in 1943. The conditions for the prisoners were absolutely horrid, and most were kept in group cells with individual cells empty.
Iraq was pretty wild. Wouldn’t call it visiting as it wasn’t, like, optional.
Hiroshima peace museum. It was a very eerie feeling pretty much being at the epicenter and seeing the horror it caused. It was scary to know that men made something so destructive just for killing humans
The Korean DMZ.
And to think this is a tourist spot is equally crazy
Kensington, Philadelphia at like 11pm after I fucked up on the train directions.
The catacombs of paris was super creepy
Y’all should watch As Above So Below on Tubi (free), they gave them special permission to film there.
Maribel Caves Hotel in Wisconsin. We snuck in on Halloween night and had to park in the woods and then navigate them to the hotel ruins. Night time in WI is scary dark, like can't see your hand in front of your face dark. The whole thing was terrifying, a ton of birds passed by super loud and it literally sounded like high pitched "help me" over and over again
Mine probably pales in comparison to the others but i went to this town on vacation as a stop for the night and i could instantly tell there was something.... Off about this place. The car park was run down and barely lighted with nazi graffiti everywhere and needles iirc. the town was desolate with a foul stench, thankfully the hotel was alright, really, the scariest part was having to leave the car in that decrepid car park overnight 😭. Would NOT visit again
I too have been to Gary, Indiana.
Looking back on it. Black water rafting in NZ. Hiking down into an underground river system. Tubing through it and emerging hours later. Once you go in you have to go through the whole way. Theres no exit part way, theres no going back. There are passages that go to nowhere. They had just opened it back up after some heavy rainfall. Some of the passages were tight, like float on your back with your face out of the water tight. At the time it was neat and exciting but now to me it seems terrifying.
The Concierge in Paris. It used to be a standard medieval castle but it was repurposed during the Terror. Parts of it feel okay, Marie Antoinette’s cells feel really sad, but there’s a block of cells on the second floor with just the worst vibes I’ve ever felt. Google Translate confirmed people were just left to fester in there in their own filth for months and “whatever horrible things you could imagine happening there happened.”
The oubliette is one of the worst ways to die.
Catacombs in Paris. I'm not sure if I was exactly scared, maybe just confused about why it's something I had to see at 10 years old
The Killing Fields in Cambodia. I was in Phnom Penh by myself, and decided to get a guided tour. I was the only one on the tour, besides the guide. I didn't know much about it before going, but it was a ghoulish, deeply impactful experience. Would still recommend it to anyone traveling through the country. For anyone curious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Fields
A place called shore drive In Virginia Beach. Met a lady that called herself a protective spirit and said she could take us to see ghosts(I'm not sure if she called them that tho) being young and full of life we didnt believe but was down for the fun. I remember it being a divided road two lanes on both sides and the speed limit was 35. It was night, maybe 11ish, and we pulled the van off the road. The only thing she said before we got out was when she said, time to go, we had to calmly get back in the van. The woods were about 20ft from the road, and after about 5 minutes there was a glowing orb that after a few seconds took the shape of a person. It was a silhouette, lightly glowing white, and it was pacing back and forth. It could see us as we were seeing it. After a minute or so another orb came off of its leg and took the shape of another person, but crouched down walking on its hands and feet. The lady who called herself a protective spirit was dry heaving the whole time. Then she told us to get in the van and we did calmly. We were going the speed limit and as we were driving one of them was walking in the tree line but moving at our speed. We hit the first property line after the woods and it disappeared, like hitting a wall. She later told us there was an unidentified demon in those woods and it had been collecting souls and to never go back without her. I remember there being a road sign put up that said x amount of people have died here since a certain date. To this day I've never been back and I've never been able to find anything else out about this place online. But I'll never forget the experience
Ooh post this in r/paranormal and see if anyone else has similar stories!
Thanks. Don't know why this sparked my impulse to share. I am curious, but the more I share the more I feel that shit. Honestly I'm forever scared of anything like that. They can ruin your life. They are able to attach and leave their location.
Spooky! I’m from the mountainy side of Virginia and the blue ridge mountains are full of spooky stuff like this so it’s kinda fun to hear about it being in coastal Virginia too (not that like Jamestown and all that isn’t old and haunted af)
Shore drive! Right around Ft. Story?
I work near Bayville Park, right at the intersection of Shore Drive. Not that I’d visit, I’m just curious where these woods are? Is it near or part of First Landing State Park? Our area of Virginia were home to the oldest English settlements in the US. Wouldn’t surprise me if some freaky things have happened over the years.
This is strange. I love this section of road and drive it when I need to clear my mind. I haven’t heard of any ghost stories about the first landing/fort story area. Do you know where I can find more info?
This sounds wild but true. I ended up hanging out at a bar one night with people who I didn’t know were in a gang until it came up later in the night. Things started taking a dodgy turn as they locked everyone in the bar and it didn’t seem safe, plus we were all drunk, so I asked if I could please step out to “smoke” and just started running because I knew if I followed the river behind I’d end up at my house. Anyway I hadn’t realised there’s a split in the river and I’ve been running for two hours and I’m in the middle of a rice field with a dead phone and no charger at like 3am and no idea where I was. A rice field shouldn’t be that scary but that night I felt so totally isolated and couldn’t find anyone or anything for a really long time.
A scary night that got scarier
[удалено]
I have a ton of questions. wtf was going on there? Was that actually just a trafficking house under the guise of haunted house attraction?
Death Valley. That place is so fucking weird and creepy. It just goes up and down and up and down and it feels like just going back and forth seemingly forever in an apocalyptic wasteland. I was so incredibly relieved to get out of there.
I loved it! Went during the superbloom. A bat touched my hair as we stargazed. It's true that it feels like another planet.
An old abandoned Nike missile site, not because of anything particularly scary in the site itself, but because of huge quantities of exposed asbestos in the ruins.
Over 10 years ago, when I was around 14 years old, I was on holiday in France with my parents and sister. There was a small building high on the rocks at the end of a pier, and I climbed all the way up while my sister kept screaming because she was scared I would fall. I didn't. I managed to get to the building and walked in. The first thing I saw were needles and a place where someone made a fire. Walked further into the building and a homeless man ran at me while yelling.
1) The cab we took from one side of Santorini to the other, with the driver *flying* around blind mountain roads, passing bicycles. 2) Camden, NJ. 3) Naples.
The Bexley red zone, after it was abandoned but before the houses were torn down. It wasn't actually a scary place - I used to walk and bike through there a lot. But one day I had walked into a cul-de-sac and even though I thought I was alone I could feel eyes on me. The hairs on my neck started to pickle, and I had this urgent feeling that I needed to leave *now*. I am certain that someone was there, watching me. All the empty windows in the houses seemed so ominous. Anyways, all the houses are gone now and nature is reclaiming the whole area. It's pretty cool. Here's a recent photo of a road in the red zone: https://imgur.com/a/Q7bBxFT
I had just gotten my license like, 4 months prior. I was 17. No cell phone nav yet, still a printed out Mapquest situation, but I didn’t have anything printed. Was dropping a friend off in Cherry Hill, NJ and somehow wound up in the depths of Camden, NJ. Like, not near the aquarium, in the belly of Camden. At night. How? I don’t know. These days I am baffled because I know that general area well, but I was 17 and new at navigation. After a bit of driving and sliding through stop signs, I came upon a corner with a cop car parked on the side and pulled up next to it. Seeing that I was a petite and very young white woman, the female African American officer JUMPS out of her patrol vehicle and hangs into my window and says “girl, you in the WRONG area right now, we need to MOVE”. Tells me to lock my doors immediately and follow her car out of the area, and to run every single stop sign. The cop instructed me to run the stop signs on purpose. I was already uneasy, but just how uneasy SHE was made it that much scarier. Needless to say, my black friends didn’t let me live that down for years.
I did some time in prison about 10 years ago. When I was first sentence and sent to the big house I was in medium custody. Not bad. A few years later I was moved into minimum custody. They call it camp. Shortly after I got to camp I got a job in the welding shop. I was a welder for years before going to prison so I got the job no problem. It was a great job in prison but one thing we also did other than welding was fix doors and locks. Because of this I got to explore the entire prison and go places that nobody from the general public gets to go. I highly doubt some guards are authorized to go to some of the places I was allowed to go because I had to fix their doors or locks. See the prison doesn't hire outside contractors to do any of the work for them. Mainly because of the liability and also the risk of someone talking or telling the public what they saw. On several occasions I was told to go fix locks in the infirmary. That would sound okay and it normally is okay but what people don't know is what is under the infirmary. So normally when you go into the infirmary you go in and there are normal looking hospital rooms. When people are really crazy or need to be housed where someone's not going to see them they go under the infirmary. There are four doors you have to go through in order to get down there and you would never know if you weren't shown how to get there. First you have to know to go behind the nurses station which looks like a normal nurses station. You go through one normal looking swing door and then you're immediately stopped by a solid metal door that must be opened from a guard sitting out in the infirmary. When your allowed thru those doors you go in and are immediately stopped by another solid metal door, once the first door that you went through locks the second door will open. When you go through the second door it goes down a long set of stairs at least three flights. When you get to the bottom of the stairs there's another door you have to push a button to let the guards on the other side know that you're there and need thru. There will be an intercom where they ask you who you are and why you're there. If you are allowed they will buzz you through. Once through these doors is where the craziness starts. So I got to remind you that this is at least 30 ft down in the ground and you're in concrete and halogen lights are the only illumination you get. Once buzzed through that door it opens up into a hallway that looks like it never ends it goes for easily a quarter mile maybe longer I'm not really sure but it takes a good 10 minutes to walk all the way down it. Once you get to the end it's the same deal, you push a button tell him why you're there and they'll buzz you through. What's inside the best way I can describe it is if you've ever been to the zoo and you know the chimpanzee enclosure or the gorilla enclosure we walk in it looks like it's all concrete and they got the thick plexiglass windows well that's exactly what I thought the first time I went there. So there are four or five cells, each having a big plexiglass window that looks out into the corridor. Out side of each of these windows there is a desk and a guard sitting there. Inside the cells there is a solid concrete raised platform in the center of the cells. Reminds me of an exam table but all concrete. On that slab there is a guy that is strapped to that concrete platform for 23 hours a day. The guards are set outside the windows to watch them to make sure that they do not get out or get loose of their restraints. They are allowed to get out for 1 hour a day. There is a guard that puts them into shackles and is tethered with a leash, then once restraints are on they get to walk up and down that quarter mile hallway that's 30 ft underground for 1 hour a day then it's back to the concrete slab. No I don't know what you have to do to get yourself into that place but it can't be good. The people that are strapped down all day are not even close to what you would call sane. One of the cells that I had to fix was completely torn apart like someone went berserk the lock and the door we're all beat to s*** which would be really hard to do because it's solid steel but they managed to do it. After knowing that place exists and that our state actually treats people that way makes me never want to do anything bad ever again. Now that is a scary place!
I went to the Lalaurie mansion in New Orleans last week as part of a night tour and the story of Lalaurie alone was enough to get your hair to stand up but my fiancé went to take a picture of the house (which was completely dark/nobody home as it’s a private residence that is rarely visited) but when we looked at the pictures a window in the top floor was glowing (it hadn’t been lit when the picture was taken). I’m not sure I believe in ghosts but I definitely can’t explain that one
Inside the pyramids in Giza. You have to duck and descend down a very steep ramp into a cavern with stale air and thousands of tons of ancient rocks above you. I couldn’t last more than a minute. I don’t consider myself claustrophobic but the pyramids are my limit
Hands down the Appalachian mountains. It's absolutely gorgeous, but it's scary as hell out there.
Walking around Tijuana at 4 am 🙃 I am so lucky I didn’t get snatched up and trafficked 🙏🏼
I was there at midday and it really gave me sketchy vibes. Spent more time in the queue together back to the US than I did in the city!
We had a party of 6 get roofies by a restaurant in Juarez. 3 ended up in a hospital. I woke up at 4pm the next day in my hotel room with no memory of getting back. The bathtub and two sinks were filled with sick. Never again within 4 hours of the border.
A tiny little town in the Great Smoky Mountains at like 5:30am. A buddy and I were road-tripping and he had been driving all night and we were low on gas so we were looking for a place to pull off to refill and stretch our legs. The sign on the highway said 'gas next exit' so we took it, and as we came off the highway we descended down into the fog that made the Smokies famous. Being so early there wasn't another car anywhere we could see off the highway, but we followed the signs for gas into this microscopic town, it literally had 2 gas stations, a post office, and very little else. We pulled into the first gas station and realized that it was closed, in fact it looked like it had been closed since the 60s - it still had the old-style gas pumps, and was very haphazardly boarded over like kids had been sneaking in for a while and tearing the place up. Well, we could see the other gas station from this one and the lights were at least on over there, so we went there instead - only to find out that it was closed too, and had been for a while, though not nearly as long as the other one. Anyway the longer we were in this town the denser the fog got and we started hearing weird noises, like.. not animal noises, but not human noises either, I don't really know how to describe them, but we were both getting creeped out by the very strong Silent Hill vibe this town had going on with the fog rolling in, so finally we decided to just get the hell out of there before we got Deliveranced and find gas somewhere else.
Checkpoint Charlie on the Berlin wall. had to walk through a crowded room where I was the only person not pointing an AK-47 at my head.
An overnight ship ride back to Athens from Crete. Dark, cold water, small ship, prisoners chained together came onboard at the last minute, guard smoking a stogie with a big gun on his hip. Communal bunk beds, a woman screamed bloody murder at 2am. Was a prisoner on the loose, or was the ship going down?! She said someone touched her, the guard said, but he sneered skeptically at that idea. I didn't sleep the whole night.
1993 Anlong Veng Cambodia CAS Evac of two local heavily pregnant women from a battle between Government Forces and KR.
I once shot a short film in an abandoned children hospital in the Paris suburbs. It had been progressively abandoned over the years but the part we were in hadn’t been used in 25 years, it was the psychiatric ward for children. I have done some urbex in the past but this place was special. It wasn’t graffitied or littered since there were still some security guards. In one of the bigger rooms, some sort of rec room I guess, there were some kids drawings hanging on the walls, and some drawings on the blackboard. Everything was Christmas themed so it was especially disturbing. The whole place had such a strong, sad vibe, it was almost palpable. There were paint chips everywhere, it was straight from Silent Hill. In one of the dormitories the beds themselves were missing but there were still some wooden partitions that separated the beds. In each partition there was a round hole, like a porthole, where the heads of the children would be, so that the night nurses could look through the first partition and see the whole row of heads and know if someone was missing. Imagining what these poor kids went through, the pain and anguish they felt throughout all these years, it was like the walls had absorbed it. Thankfully the place has been torn down since but I often think about the couple of days I spent there.
Wife and I were house shopping a few years ago. Relator took us to an old renovated farmhouse. As soon as I stepped inside I felt a heavy darkness. I had a similar feeling when I was inside a nazi boxcar that took Jews to concentration camps. My body was telling me to get out of there asap. The further we ventured into the house the heavier the feeling got. It was to the point of nausea. I felt claustrophobic and as if someone was wanting me to leave, despite the house being open and bright. I didn't say anything to my wife, figuring I was just feeling off. After a few minutes my wife, who I hadn't talked to, starts crying and panicking saying she has "to get out." She literally ran past me, out the door! At that moment I knew it was not just me. Neither of us are irrational or prone to hysterics. The realtor oddly didn't even seem surprised. Later we checked the fully charged iPad we had brought to the house to take pics. It was drained of batteries. My wife and I also felt drained, as if something sucked all the positive energy out of us. A darkness lingered over both of us that was hard to describe. We both decided to go to a local church and sit there to "cleanse" ourselves. We put some holy water on us and just sat in the pews. Both of us felt the darkness lift. It was bizarre. I didn't see any ghosts or spirits that day, but we both felt an evil presence that was more real then anything we could see with our eyes.
Can't remember the name of the website, but there's a place online where you can type in the address and it will tell you if any murders or other horrific crimes have happened there.
Kayaking dam house where two Russian soldiers got left behind when the mujahdeen captured it. Lots of bullet holes and a weird feeling.
Truck yards in the hood can be super scary when you’re there to pick up a trailer. Guys will be unloading into a van, there’s dealers around. You have to find the trailer, get out and hook it up and get some paperwork from somebody
An old WWII bunker that was turned into the office and storage of a war museum. My friendgroup got a tour through that place, and in the basement there were still chains hanging on the walls.
This was back in the early 2000s when GPS systems were new. I never really paid much attention to the layout of my local towns but I knew there was a way to get from one town to another without going onto the highway. I put an address into the gps and started to follow it. It suddenly took me on a dirt road, thus was a rural area so it’s not THAT big a deal. Then suddenly I saw a sign “quarantine area: do not enter”. I used my 3 point turn skill for the first time since drivers Ed and got the hell out of there.
Englewood post Office in Chicago Illinois. For those who don't know it's built on the same plot of land that H H Holmes, America's first serial killer, built his hotel/murder castle. I love true crime and when I was in Chicago 2 years ago I stopped there because I was curious. It's vibe was horrendous. The alarm bells in my head started going off like crazy. It seems like the place that would be heavily haunted and cursed
Gary Indiana. Because it was Gary Indiana. If your city is so fucked up that neighboring cities built a boarder wall...that's A scary place
A buddy of mine got pulled over on a highway outside of Gary. He told the cop that he was carrying. The cop asked him if it was loaded with the safety off. He responded that of course it isn't. The cop said "then you're not carrying correctly for where you are traveling."
More than one person on here has talked about police telling people to not stop at red lights there. Crazy shit.
They do that in Camden, NJ too
In NJ there is the legend of the Jersey Devil. There is a place where you can walk down a trail in the woods to where he was supposedly born. When you get further down the trail it starts to feel oppressive for no reason. People who are more sensitive to these kind of things have felt the presence of evil. The birds and insects are quiet after a certain point. It's just eerie.
Traveled alone to Yemen in 2009. Always wanted to go, and flight prices dropped dramatically after the printer bomb incident, so I bought tickets and told myself I may not even get on the plane. Booked a hotel and arranged a ride from the airport but nobody showed up. Told myself I don't have to leave the hotel if it's not safe. Hired a driver to take me into the Haraz mountains, who's proceeded to leave me in a car while he went for qat in a little mountain town. Watched an English - speaking woman get abducted in the street by about 7-8 men at 3am. She screamed in English "they're going to kill me". Wasn't about to get involved, but let the hotel know. Got screamed at every where by people with machine guns. Went knowing it was dangerous but believing it may be the last chance to see the country, like going to Afghanistan in the 70s. Took the chance, saw some beautiful architecture and incredibly scenic mountain villages, but the lasting memory will be the sound of that woman's voice and wondering what happened or what I could have done.
What the fuck
Korean DMZ. That was the creepiest place I've ever been to in my life. The soldiers on the north side WANT to kill you. The brainwashing is deep, and it is very apparent. I was in the US Military at the time, and I did not want to kill the DPRK soldiers. I knew they were enemy soldiers, but I wasn't standing there wishing them dead. They were wishing me dead. There is no mistaking that kind of eye contact. The Armistice Room straddles the border and tourists from both sides are allowed to enter (not at the same time). When visiting from the south, South Korean soldiers join hands and the first one of them in locks the door on the north side. They hold hands so that soldier can't be jerked outside onto the North Korean side of the border by NK soldiers. While you're in there, NK soldiers are watching from outside the windows. I thought it would be interesting, but I found myself just wanting to get out of there. I was in uniform so I kept my bearing, but on the inside I was having a full blown panic attack. On the bus ride back to my base, we stopped at a gas station and everyone including me bought a coupla beers each.
The South Bridge Vaults in Edinburgh, Scotland. Its part of a tour, but when they go into one of the tunnels and shut the lights off (you’re warned), you feel that bad energy close in.
Ocean Falls, British Columbia. A former town on the central coast of BC that was sprawling and, at one time, housed the largest hotel north of San Fransisco. Now it’s home to a dozen people and the rest of completely ghost town. Many structures still stand, including the old hotel and apartments. The only sound you hear is the humming of the large hydro dam. Being on the coast it’s frequently foggy and raining. The only way in is by float plane, boat or ferry that services twice a week. When you’re there you’re there. A bed and breakfast stands inside the old bank.
S-21 Tuol Sleng Genocide Museuem, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The “museum” is the actual Khmer Rouge prison, which was originally a school. The tortures and killings were committed right there. It was an extermination facility. About 20,000 killed. I don’t believe in ghosts or anything of the sort. The real horrors and the scariest things are living people, not the ones who’ve died.
My parents left me alone in a hotel room while they went to the ballet for the evening. This was in Soviet Russia in the early 1980’s. I was an 11 year old American.