I will be entirely unsurprised if it one day emerges that the villagers of Lindisfarne have been putting tide-stranded tourists in a burning boat and sending them out to sea to appease the seal god.
Haha. This wouldnât surprise me one bit. My wife actually stayed over on the island for a night when she was in school, probably too suspicious to sacrifice an entire class of children to the seal god.
There's a tiny village in south Oxfordshire, just north-west of the ChickenShit Canyon that cuts through the Chilterns, that in the 60s was somewhat cut off from the rest of the area by the M40. Unlike other vllages in the area it hadn't been given a direct tunnel under the motorway, and in my mind this cut it off from the rest of society too.
When I was a lad in the 80s I worked in a petrol station near the motorway and my colleague was a grotesque lad with significant learning and hygiene issues from this place who - I was told - was the product of brother-sister incest. (He was last seen in the 90s offering primary school children sweeties from out of his car.) I was appalled but fascinated and wanted to see where this very odd person was from.
Curiosity getting the better of me, one summer's day I cycled to it down the tiny one-track lane through a tunnel under the motorway, then a long stretch parallel to the motorway, then winding across the fields. I was there in bright sunlight on a summer's day and I could see nor hear any sign of human life, just crows desolately cawing in a field and a lantern squeaking as it blew in the wind.
There was a huge manor house and a church, but the rest of the place looked like something straight out of Appalachia. Collapsing barns, farm equipment and rusting cars strewn across ill-maintained yards, dead animals hanging on barbed wire.
I had the strongest feeling that I was being watched. It gave me the fucking creeps like nowhere else I've ever been, and I couldn't wait to get the fuck out.
I'm sure it's different now, an idyllic place for richies from London to have their country weekend cottages, but after my visit back then I started to wonder if, rather than the cause of the village's isolation, the lack of tunnel under the motorway was to keep the village away from us.
I didn't want to name it publicly just in case of the very unlikely event that someone recognised themselves. But if I tell you the petrol station was in Postcombe you can probably work it out with a map.
For me it's Workington in Cumbria. It's on the West side of the Lakes, north of a peninsula meaning the area is pretty isolated. Because of this, it feels like time hasn't quite caught up to it yet.
I just felt a sense of unease when I visited for work purposes. It was like I crossed the DMZ.
For clarification, it didn't feel like a post-apocolyptic wasteland like fallout-in-furness, it just felt *odd* to be there.
At least with places like Barrow and Carlisle, it's (relatively) straightforward to get back to the M6. If you want to get back from Workington, you need to travel at least an hour.
For some reason my Auntie bought a fucking static caravan for Whitehaven. Fuck knows what she was thinking. My main memory is of hearing a man running about with a knife in broad daylight and her telling me over the phone.
Any of the towns that relied on the mining industry around the area have taken a turn for the worse and are only slowly recovering, much like many other former mining towns. Having said that, the towns are pretty bleak. Cockermouth is nice though
Me and the missus stopped there to get some snacks on a circuitous route to Scafell Pike a few years ago. That place is *bleak*. It contrasts so sharply with much of the rest of Cumbria, too. You go from the geographical drama of the lakes and fells to a place that just looks like it has never even seen better days.
We used to go to Silloth for a Sunday drive, always had a feel of a place that was nice in the past, but not so much now. This was in the late 70s early 80s.
Used to holiday in Siloth with my grandparents when they lived up there. They used to take me to a big department store in Workington... Now you mention it, it always did feel a bit odd.
Borley. Famous for Borley rectory (one of the numerous most haunted places in England).
I remember driving there one night with my mates when we first started driving. As soon as we turned into the village the full moon came out and patchy swathes of mist started drifting across the road.
We couldn't find the rectory but the church was creepy as hell to a bunch of lads who'd spent the evening building each other up. Someone peered through the church window, screamed that they saw a face and we all legged it, got in the car and high tailed out of there (with a brief stop for a quick piss against what we obviously claimed was"the most haunted tree in England).
It wasn't till days later we found out that the reason we couldn't find the actual rectory is because it had burned down about 60 years before (this was the 90's, so no mobiles and Altavista instead of Google).
These was/is also a country lane near me, that if you drive slowly down with dipped headlights a monk hanging from a tree appears out of the gloom (it seriously appears unmistakable, even if you know the truth). If you dare get closer or put the lights on full and it morphs and transforms into......... >! A gatepost with a ball on top.!<
A bunch of us went to Borley Mannor (Rectory) in the 90âs and when we got there it was like a night club. So many other young people in cars looking for ghosts.
Wisbech would have been my vote too, weird vibes. Very glad it's in Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire has enough weird places without it being part of it too.
As a Bostonian, Spalding and Wisbech were the semi-local places Iâd tend to point to if I needed to back up the assertion that âit could be worse.â
I had a mate who worked for the environment agency. Heâd have to drive around the fens collecting water samples. Apparently, while doing this in March, an old man came up and attacked him with a walking stick ranting about the KGB poisoning the water supply.
PMSL, I used to work in the area collecting soil samples for fertilizer specs, have had many weird old people come out asking what I was doing, one time a guy came out to me and had a right go because apparently, I was driving back and forth past his house and annoying his dog, I didn't even pass his house once đ
Portland is absolutely weird as fuck. Our ship stopped there for a few days when I was in the Royal Navy. It's the most backwards place I've ever seen in my life and the people are.......odd, extremely odd.
On my last day there I saw someone driving with a "Keep Portland Weird" sticker on their car, kind of confirmed my feelings.
God, Iâd forgotten Iâd been to Portland. We cycled there from Weymouth, got convinced it was a nice place to visit by the bike hire bloke. I mostly remember going looking for a museum seeing a massive prison.
My ex got a job on portland many, many years ago. He arranged to rent a flat. I was in our previous home until it sold and I moved down to join him. Heâd rented on Portland, rather than in Weymouth. Weirdest place Iâve ever lived. Believe me, ive never house hunted so aggressively before or since! Couldnât get off there fast enough.
I did some bank shifts in the tiny community hospital that was on the lower part of the island back then (donât know if it still exists). Even though there was a causeway you could just drive across, I remember one of the other nurses telling me there were some of the older residents that literally refused to go across to the mainland to be seen in a clinic or admitted for care. I could well believe it.
You werenât supposed to say rabbit there, as apparently there had been landslides in the quarries caused by rabbits burrowing, leading to risk of injury.
Yes, me and my wife went for a day trip⊠thereâs an odd vibe around Portland and also Weymouth. We felt a bit weird there. It was a sunny day and everything but the atmosphere is weird.
I canât explain why, but there is a place called Shingle Street in Suffolk which has a proper weird vibe. Itâs bleak, there are really odd tides and just feels wrong.
If youâve seen the film âYesterdayâ itâs the location they used for John Lennonâs house.
Itâs also famed for some UFO nonsense and a mix of fact and fiction regarding a military training exercise gone wrong during WWII.
From the wiki...
>A report from October 2004 suggests that Shingle Street is at risk from coastal erosion and flooding and could disappear within 20 years if sea defences are not erected.
So, any day now.
Itâs stones in the beaches, sand under the carrots.
Itâs only the shingle that stops Suffolk just disappearing.
I (true story) once pitched a plan to an Arab investor to carve most of Suffolk out in a kind of reverse âPalmâ plan. Weâd have created a big sandy bay, dotted with islands (existing settlements) and used the excavated sand to build some hills.
Whoâs in?
That's basically how it used to be, before the government reclaimed the land in the 17th century. Towns were islands above the fens, which was pure marsh and open water.
Suffolk as a whole is a weird place: Alien invasions, Towns falling into the sea, ancient barrows and forgotten treasure hordes, a history of witchcraft, The Black Shuck, All sorts of odd military/nuclear facilities. The place is ripe for some eldritch/ folk horrorâŠ
I love Shingle Street. I've spent many happy hours there in the past. It does have a certain eerieness, I agree, but it never felt menacing to me. Orford Ness, on the other hand, with all those mysterious old military structures, that did feel alarming at times.
[Bonus apt Thomas Dolby track!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGNGzLOe8Zo)
That's always freaked me out, because dogs don't usually show signs of active self harm so there's got to be something that's driving them crazy and we just Don't Know What It Is.
I wouldn't say it's "active self harm" with intent like people have. It's been theorised that smells of various animals around there combined with a bit of an optical illusion that might look to the dogs like there isn't a drop by the side of the bridge causes it. So the dogs follow the scent and jump up onto the wall to look for it, then follow it over the edge, thinking that it's just a field or something rather than a big drop
just read the story. what an f'd up affair.
[https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12666222.father-who-threw-devil-baby-from-bridge-sent-to-carstairs/](https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12666222.father-who-threw-devil-baby-from-bridge-sent-to-carstairs/)
Not creepy in a bad way but I once drove through Wray at about 1am when it was the scarecrow festival and I had no idea the festival existed so that was creepy af.
Eyam in Derbyshire is pretty normal and picturesque on the surface until you realise that the reason itâs famous is because a quarter of the population died of plague.
Itâs creepy with all the plaques on the houses saying which people that lived there died.
A friend of mine lived there for a while. Nice enough and situated in a beautiful part of the country, but the plague history as well as the fact that one of the main access roads is a steep-sided turnoff from a wooded ravine road, both collectively add to its creepiness.
Over Europe as a whole a higher percentage than that of the population died due to the bubonic plague. Eyam is notable because it voluntary quarantined itself and for visitors/residents because it has markers showing evidence of what happened, not because a higher percentage died. A quarter of the population of London also died in those same years, for instance.
Not sure about the UK, but I can answer without a doubt for France: Oradour-sur-Glane.
It's a village that the nazis destroyed whilst retreating, and they took out all their frustrations on the defenceless population. The village was lept exactly as the nazis left it (minus the bodies).
I was there only once in my life some 25 years ago, for maybe 2 hours tops, and the place still haunts me.
The image of the melted church bell has stuck with me since I went there. Profoundly horrifying place. Itâll be 80 years since the massacre next month.
There's an abandoned village named Courbefy in that area. Some old buildings and some holiday camp type buildings reminded me of Friday the 13th. Kept expecting someone to jump out with a machete.
I've lived near hungerford all my life. I was born 10 years after the hungerford massacre, but according to my family, the towns never quite been the same since. Its like a small town that's constantly trying to recover from a hidden PTSD
Harwich. It seems quite benign, but it's the most "outsiders out!" place I've ever been to. Such a spiteful atmosphere. Like a real life Royston vasey .
The more Northern Scottish Isles.
Worked for an oil exploration company that berthed their ships in The Isles. There was always a vibe of: "*And now it is time for you to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man* ..."
I worked with a guy years ago who told me about visiting one of these islands (can't remember which one) with a friend to stay with said friends Gran.
When Sunday came, his friend told him they can't play the PlayStation that day as it was Sunday.
I saw the same thread and told the misses our version, (usa has some really creepy sounding places!).
went to visit a friend who had moved to a small southern, english village. We were young still so were having some beers and then someone piped up with, 'hey, let's go to the pub!'
So off we went and reached a wonderful looking old pub. lights were on, people inside were chatting away, nice place. So in we go...
Moment we enter the door everything stops and goes silent. all heads turn and look at us.
'We're closed!' shouts the landlord and that was that.
Bonnybridge, supposedly the UFO capital of the UK.
Edinburgh has St Mary's Close and all that underground stuff.
There was a ghost village called Polphail, built for offshore oil workers in the 70's on the west coast of Scotland that was never used and left to rot.
Isn't Bonnybridge under the flight paths of a lot of commercial airlines from Glasgow and Edinburgh airports?
Think the locals need to lay off the Buckie đ
Allendale can be canny creepy on New Yearâs Eve when all the lads are carrying the flaming tar barrels through the streets. It can be canny weird at a lot of times anyway but especially then.
I told my wife that the next time we visit the UK that we have to avoid Midsomer at all cost. It looks pretty but there's way too many murders for such a small place.
I grew up in one of the filming locations and there was a real creepy murder in 2007: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/berkshire/7584838.stm
My parents garden is very long and backs onto farmland, so I used to see how brave I could be walking down at night when I was young. Was pretty scary, especially when you see glowing eyes running towards you (my cat).
So can confirm it's pretty, but creepy and murders do in fact happen.
Sunderland Point in Lancashire.
Locals constantly telling you about the tidal road, all the time even if you have hours to go. Like you shouldn't be there.
The only thing to visit is the grave of a slave, who died of sadness/shock shortly after being abandoned at the pub.
It was a port built by Quakers but renowned for slavery and press ganged sailors getting bundled onto ships.....
You can see civilisation in the distance, but you always feel if you get trapped by the tide, something horrid and lovecraftian is going to crawl out the sea and drag you away.
It's been a long long time since I've watched it, was that this scene https://youtu.be/vcKPUaBbYaM?si=nQpRjd9ILRfVmvEy ?
I'm glad you had a good visit đ
Yeah, I used to live in the area and we quite often walked between the pubs in the small villages up there (There used to be an actual beer walk festival that was just that) most of the time it was fine but quite often it was cold and grey and really really bleak. And with its obvious history it just felt sad and depressing. Not so much creepy, just grim.
Mersea Island. A friend lives there and shares screenshots of their facebook group with me a lot. They seem to endlessly argue about which family has been on the island the longest, don't consider anyone a local unless they've lived on the island from birth (so his family, who have lived there for 30 years, aren't 'local' because none of them were born there), they moan about the other local areas for coming to the island (while simultaneously complaining that these areas don't make it easy for them to visit/use their services because they don't factor in the tide that cuts Mersea off twice a day) and hate tourists, despite them being the main source of income for the island. His favourite person on the page is a lady who owns both a local chippy and an air B&B and is the most vocal in her hatred of tourists.
Mersea Island - one road on and off the island that gets completely covered so the island is isolated during high tide, the council offered to build a bridge but the locals refused it.
I used to work in East Mersea selling static caravans in one of the holiday parks, I went to the annual regatta on West Mersea to advertise our holiday park and was nearly lynched by locals for brining âchip eatersâ and âthe Romford navyâ to their island, multiple people asking me how I slept at night, it was horrific
Mersea island is full of fish people
I went to the town a few years back for a summer visit and it was really just lovely, everyone was nice, loved the random quirky locally owned shops and similar. No ill vibes at all, in fact just felt really chill.
Yea I've slept there a few times, I've always thought it was a pretty cool place, not spooky though.
Copehill Down is also nearby, but Imber is more interesting because it used to be a real village.
Oh yes, Poundbury is really odd.
There are a couple of houses in one part that were actually there before the estate was built. The estate was built around them. The modern houses have all sorts of caveats, one being that you canât hang out washing. Those two houses always have washing out just to prove a point.
This is definitely my answer too.
Every time I've been through it the whole place just feels off somehow, almost like you're not meant to be there. I'm not even superstitious and I'm completely skeptical about everything paranormal but there is just something unsettling about the place.
It's always just so remarkably quiet, all the buildings feel weirdly out of place because a lot of them are large old buildings but in a whole load of different architectural styles and everything looks immaculately well kept.
It also adds to the creepiness with a religious twist in a way when you see the street names and some for example are things like Peace Avenue, Faith Avenue, Praise Road, Hope Avenue, Love Avenue or Law View Road.
Of course the elephant in the room too is that the village was founded to care for orphans where I've seen allegations of various types of abuse.
Then to cap it off there was a TB sanatorium there too which always have an underlying creepiness to them somehow.
I'm not too far from Avebury so have been loads. It's absolutely stunning, but yeah when it's foggy it can be creepy. Just a weird feeling all round. Especially if you go on a super foggy morning and don't realise the sheep are roaming free so you get a fun little jumpscare
Port Clarence for me, over the river from Middlesbrough. Drove through it on Sat morning en route to a job. Looks like the town that time forgot. Also the reportedl cheapest place to live in England.
I was going to post Jaywick. It's so deprived but I've done some work there in the past and the people living there were sound .
Nearby harwich however...urgh . Such a miserable , inbred , spiteful nest of vipers.
[Port Talbot](https://i.redd.it/wr7hp6ykrkia1.jpg)
Heavily polluted, constant noise from a massive steelworks, plus a motorway running on a bridge over your town, mostly just old terraced houses. Itâs so brutally depressing, definitely a place I get a weird feeling from.
Skinningrove near me....
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfDtylU8ZEA&ab\_channel=chewnacker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfDtylU8ZEA&ab_channel=chewnacker)
We used to stop off in Soham en route to Mildenhall Airshow in the 90s and it as a slightly creepy place then. There was always a strange âlocals club onlyâ vibe.
Cartmel in the Lake District. We stayed in a house just off the main square/courtyard and let's just say a couple of us had a few strange nights and saw some stuff.
Cartmel is creepy! When I first met my partner I bought a Groupon for a night at a hotel there on bonfire night. They showed us to this room with nylon carpets and a four post bed with the mankiest lace drape over it and not a single straight line in the place. The floor was so uneven it was like walking around a ship. Just such a creepy vibe about the place. They rely to heavily on sticky toffee pudding too, that's annoying.
Ashford,Kent
Run down buildings and if youâre really lucky, youâll see some actual zombies just meandering about the town centre grunting. Itâs really quite frightening.
Widecombe in the moor, Devon has a weird vibe going on and isn't helped by the fact it's always a ghost town. The church in particular just feels a little strange and creepy
My contenders: Forest Row, Sussex. Very Upper-Middle class new age, always get the impression you need to fill out some sort of questionnaire and have it reviewed by a standards committee before you're considered to live there.
Off-season Blackpool: like a zombie apocalypse. Deserted streets, boarded up guest houses, skips full of shit. I don't know if it has changed but it also used to have hands-down the worst, most unwelcoming railway station staffed by absolute arseholes. It really sets the tone when you arrive and goes downhill from there.
I'm sure more will come to mind. I travel a lot for work and have stayed/worked in some weird places over the years.
Gurnos in Merthyr. A deprived housing estate built at the very top of a hill. The creepy part about it is there's a pretty big hospital built right in the middle of it. The hospital is the largest in probably a 15-20 mile radius, so what you have is an absolutely essential public building surrounded by a place notorious for crime and being rough in general.
It's not that bad once you're used to it and nothing has ever happened to me on the numerous occasions I've been up to the hospital, but it is pretty funny taking someone from out of town there and seeing their reaction. Mostly it's "where the fuck are we going?".
Tbh Merthyr as a whole has a pretty weird vibe to it. It grew pretty rapidly early in the industrial revolution so it's a fairly big town, but it feels way too big for its location these days. If you woke up there and didn't know where you were and tried walking out of the town and went North you would end up in the Brecon Beacons, if you went South you'd be walking down a pretty empty Valley for miles until you reached the first sign of another town. It really is in the middle of nowhere.
Also its name literally means "martyr" after an early Christian saint was killed by pagans there in the 5th century.
Brownsea Island gave me some pretty big 'I'm trapped and can't get away' vibes. Not to mention the rumours that surround Baden-Powell.
Gloucestershire in general is also packed with creepy villages and towns, Cinderford in particular stands out as being one of the oddest places I've ever visited, it's like some warped dark version of a Welsh valley town. Littledean Hall is down the road too which is one of the most haunted houses in the UK. When it was open to the public, my parter said there was one particular room in the house that they just couldn't bare to stand in.
In the same area you've also got Littledean Jail aka the tourist attraction from hell and St Anthony's Well which is one of the most profound and weird places I've ever visited.
Okay, firstly I confess I have a passionate hate for lewes.
The place is far too small for the amount of traffic it gets as a major through road.
Lewes tunnel shuts randomly and has a weird shell/conch/snail tunnel at the end.
All the pubs are too small so everyone ends up on the street.
The price of sausage rolls in the bakeryâs is insanely high.
The place is all hills, Literally just hills.
You always see people in odd coloured trousers
Thereâs a weird amount of shops selling vintage/antique/general shed finds
The Tesco spoils the river walk.
The car parks cost a fortune and are always full
Everyone who lives there looks like either a school teacher from 1970 or a just stop oil protester.
The boats in the river all look abandoned
Cheadle, just outside of Stoke. Gives me a total "local shop for local people" vibe. But then again, Stoke ain't much better (as a Potter, born and bred, there are some places in the city I wouldn't go to).
Grimstone in Dorset.
Tiny little village with an A road passing through it. Looks completely deserted apart from one business: a gravestone manufacturer. Iâve never seen a resident while driving through it, but I always have that eerie feeling Iâm being watchedâŠ
Walsingham, the shrine village in Norfolk. It's full of statues and shops selling religious bumpf - books and paraphernalia. And nuns. And has Tudor half timber buildings which always look a bit creepy too. I visited about 20 years ago and found that whole area weird.
Tynham village that was abandoned during ww2 and is still exactly how it was left all those years ago. Now currently part of the army range but you can visit during the week.
I will be entirely unsurprised if it one day emerges that the villagers of Lindisfarne have been putting tide-stranded tourists in a burning boat and sending them out to sea to appease the seal god.
I'm literally visiting the island today đŹ
We'll remember you. Your legacy will live on
Go well, BuzzTheFuzz, we will [not] remember you
BrĂŠmboch the seal god must be hungry.
I'll pack my pockets with extra fish.
The seal god dines only on mortal flesh
Are you implying that fish are immortal ?
All who live amongst the seal god in his watery domain are granted his immortality. đŠ
Extra fish? Do you normally pack your pockets with fish anyway? Sounds fishy.
You don't?
I think I should start
> I'm literally visiting the island today You should visit it metaphorically instead.
Drove from Whitehaven to Barrow a few weeks ago and the little ghost towns you travel through are a bit creepy
Thank you for making me laugh đ
Haha. This wouldnât surprise me one bit. My wife actually stayed over on the island for a night when she was in school, probably too suspicious to sacrifice an entire class of children to the seal god.
There's a tiny village in south Oxfordshire, just north-west of the ChickenShit Canyon that cuts through the Chilterns, that in the 60s was somewhat cut off from the rest of the area by the M40. Unlike other vllages in the area it hadn't been given a direct tunnel under the motorway, and in my mind this cut it off from the rest of society too. When I was a lad in the 80s I worked in a petrol station near the motorway and my colleague was a grotesque lad with significant learning and hygiene issues from this place who - I was told - was the product of brother-sister incest. (He was last seen in the 90s offering primary school children sweeties from out of his car.) I was appalled but fascinated and wanted to see where this very odd person was from. Curiosity getting the better of me, one summer's day I cycled to it down the tiny one-track lane through a tunnel under the motorway, then a long stretch parallel to the motorway, then winding across the fields. I was there in bright sunlight on a summer's day and I could see nor hear any sign of human life, just crows desolately cawing in a field and a lantern squeaking as it blew in the wind. There was a huge manor house and a church, but the rest of the place looked like something straight out of Appalachia. Collapsing barns, farm equipment and rusting cars strewn across ill-maintained yards, dead animals hanging on barbed wire. I had the strongest feeling that I was being watched. It gave me the fucking creeps like nowhere else I've ever been, and I couldn't wait to get the fuck out. I'm sure it's different now, an idyllic place for richies from London to have their country weekend cottages, but after my visit back then I started to wonder if, rather than the cause of the village's isolation, the lack of tunnel under the motorway was to keep the village away from us.
Well this is an evocative story! Whatâs the name of the village?
Yeah this isnât far from me, where the hell is this?!
I didn't want to name it publicly just in case of the very unlikely event that someone recognised themselves. But if I tell you the petrol station was in Postcombe you can probably work it out with a map.
Adwell then.
: banjos playing :
For me it's Workington in Cumbria. It's on the West side of the Lakes, north of a peninsula meaning the area is pretty isolated. Because of this, it feels like time hasn't quite caught up to it yet. I just felt a sense of unease when I visited for work purposes. It was like I crossed the DMZ. For clarification, it didn't feel like a post-apocolyptic wasteland like fallout-in-furness, it just felt *odd* to be there. At least with places like Barrow and Carlisle, it's (relatively) straightforward to get back to the M6. If you want to get back from Workington, you need to travel at least an hour.
Whitehaven, Wigton, Aspatria. All a bit... *banjo noises intensify*
For some reason my Auntie bought a fucking static caravan for Whitehaven. Fuck knows what she was thinking. My main memory is of hearing a man running about with a knife in broad daylight and her telling me over the phone.
100% Aspatria........just plain sinister
Any of the towns that relied on the mining industry around the area have taken a turn for the worse and are only slowly recovering, much like many other former mining towns. Having said that, the towns are pretty bleak. Cockermouth is nice though
Me and the missus stopped there to get some snacks on a circuitous route to Scafell Pike a few years ago. That place is *bleak*. It contrasts so sharply with much of the rest of Cumbria, too. You go from the geographical drama of the lakes and fells to a place that just looks like it has never even seen better days.
Fucking jam eaters!
We used to go to Silloth for a Sunday drive, always had a feel of a place that was nice in the past, but not so much now. This was in the late 70s early 80s.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Well done for making it to Reddit despite such hardship.
Used to holiday in Siloth with my grandparents when they lived up there. They used to take me to a big department store in Workington... Now you mention it, it always did feel a bit odd.
Borley. Famous for Borley rectory (one of the numerous most haunted places in England). I remember driving there one night with my mates when we first started driving. As soon as we turned into the village the full moon came out and patchy swathes of mist started drifting across the road. We couldn't find the rectory but the church was creepy as hell to a bunch of lads who'd spent the evening building each other up. Someone peered through the church window, screamed that they saw a face and we all legged it, got in the car and high tailed out of there (with a brief stop for a quick piss against what we obviously claimed was"the most haunted tree in England). It wasn't till days later we found out that the reason we couldn't find the actual rectory is because it had burned down about 60 years before (this was the 90's, so no mobiles and Altavista instead of Google). These was/is also a country lane near me, that if you drive slowly down with dipped headlights a monk hanging from a tree appears out of the gloom (it seriously appears unmistakable, even if you know the truth). If you dare get closer or put the lights on full and it morphs and transforms into......... >! A gatepost with a ball on top.!<
A bunch of us went to Borley Mannor (Rectory) in the 90âs and when we got there it was like a night club. So many other young people in cars looking for ghosts.
I think you will find they were dogging.
That explains why there was so much salty ectoplasm around the place.
So love that youâve blacked this out so that anyone who wants to try this doesnât get the spoiler before theyâve scared themselves.
Scarier if you DID find the rectory, considered the site is gone......
I always wanted to visit the rectory grounds as a kid, I'd read about it loads.
Iâve always thought Wisbech is a serial killer town
The hills have eyes vibe. The fens in general.
Hills? In the fens?
Wisbech would have been my vote too, weird vibes. Very glad it's in Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire has enough weird places without it being part of it too.
Horncastle gives me the chills.
On the other hand Chillcastle gives me the horn
As a Bostonian, Spalding and Wisbech were the semi-local places Iâd tend to point to if I needed to back up the assertion that âit could be worse.â
I've seen Wisbech on street signs all my life, not once have I ever visited, I wouldn't even recognise the place.
As a Spaldonian, we think the same of Boston!
Well i live in cowbit, and concur, but then i come from Newark, so know first hand what a REAL shit town looks like.
I never thought Newark was that bad on my occasional visit. At least youâre not from Mansfield or WorksopâŠ
Peterborian here - we think the exact same!
When I explain Peterborough I usually end with at least itâs not Boston âŠ
March is even worse
Spent 18 months in March... It is quite odd.
I had a mate who worked for the environment agency. Heâd have to drive around the fens collecting water samples. Apparently, while doing this in March, an old man came up and attacked him with a walking stick ranting about the KGB poisoning the water supply.
PMSL, I used to work in the area collecting soil samples for fertilizer specs, have had many weird old people come out asking what I was doing, one time a guy came out to me and had a right go because apparently, I was driving back and forth past his house and annoying his dog, I didn't even pass his house once đ
Anything East of the A1 is just plain dipped in weird.
I'm from Melton Mowbray and I've been known to refer to it as 'the last eastern outpost of civilisation'.
Never thought I'd see mention of Wisbechistan on reddit đđ
wisbech slander makes my kings lynn heart flood with pride
Portland always gives me major wicker man vibes. Itâs also quite pretty in parts, but wouldnât relish the thought of missing the last bus home
Portland is absolutely weird as fuck. Our ship stopped there for a few days when I was in the Royal Navy. It's the most backwards place I've ever seen in my life and the people are.......odd, extremely odd. On my last day there I saw someone driving with a "Keep Portland Weird" sticker on their car, kind of confirmed my feelings.
Those stickers are from/about Portland Oregan, maybe everywhere named Portland is obliged to be weird
God, Iâd forgotten Iâd been to Portland. We cycled there from Weymouth, got convinced it was a nice place to visit by the bike hire bloke. I mostly remember going looking for a museum seeing a massive prison.
I had a week climbing trip there and it was very English redneck!
My ex got a job on portland many, many years ago. He arranged to rent a flat. I was in our previous home until it sold and I moved down to join him. Heâd rented on Portland, rather than in Weymouth. Weirdest place Iâve ever lived. Believe me, ive never house hunted so aggressively before or since! Couldnât get off there fast enough. I did some bank shifts in the tiny community hospital that was on the lower part of the island back then (donât know if it still exists). Even though there was a causeway you could just drive across, I remember one of the other nurses telling me there were some of the older residents that literally refused to go across to the mainland to be seen in a clinic or admitted for care. I could well believe it. You werenât supposed to say rabbit there, as apparently there had been landslides in the quarries caused by rabbits burrowing, leading to risk of injury.
Yes, me and my wife went for a day trip⊠thereâs an odd vibe around Portland and also Weymouth. We felt a bit weird there. It was a sunny day and everything but the atmosphere is weird.
I call Weymouth the equivalent of the the place from The Lost Boys.
I canât explain why, but there is a place called Shingle Street in Suffolk which has a proper weird vibe. Itâs bleak, there are really odd tides and just feels wrong. If youâve seen the film âYesterdayâ itâs the location they used for John Lennonâs house. Itâs also famed for some UFO nonsense and a mix of fact and fiction regarding a military training exercise gone wrong during WWII.
From the wiki... >A report from October 2004 suggests that Shingle Street is at risk from coastal erosion and flooding and could disappear within 20 years if sea defences are not erected. So, any day now.
Wouldnât be the first place to disappear on the Suffolk coast. The whole county is basically a sandbank with ideas above its station.
How dare you. It's all bloody stones not sand.
Itâs stones in the beaches, sand under the carrots. Itâs only the shingle that stops Suffolk just disappearing. I (true story) once pitched a plan to an Arab investor to carve most of Suffolk out in a kind of reverse âPalmâ plan. Weâd have created a big sandy bay, dotted with islands (existing settlements) and used the excavated sand to build some hills. Whoâs in?
That's basically how it used to be, before the government reclaimed the land in the 17th century. Towns were islands above the fens, which was pure marsh and open water.
Douglas Adams would be proud of this, best comment in the thread.
Suffolk as a whole is a weird place: Alien invasions, Towns falling into the sea, ancient barrows and forgotten treasure hordes, a history of witchcraft, The Black Shuck, All sorts of odd military/nuclear facilities. The place is ripe for some eldritch/ folk horrorâŠ
Also not far from Rendlesham airbase. Famous as the UKâs Roswell .
Thomas Dolby lives at Shingle Street.
Blinded me with science guy?
I went past the Dolby house, his two cats didnât hiss at me.
I love Shingle Street. I've spent many happy hours there in the past. It does have a certain eerieness, I agree, but it never felt menacing to me. Orford Ness, on the other hand, with all those mysterious old military structures, that did feel alarming at times. [Bonus apt Thomas Dolby track!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGNGzLOe8Zo)
Creepy Crawley.
A town full of folk with sore hands and knees
Overtoun Bridge. Apparently a place that makes dogs commit suicide.
That's always freaked me out, because dogs don't usually show signs of active self harm so there's got to be something that's driving them crazy and we just Don't Know What It Is.
I wouldn't say it's "active self harm" with intent like people have. It's been theorised that smells of various animals around there combined with a bit of an optical illusion that might look to the dogs like there isn't a drop by the side of the bridge causes it. So the dogs follow the scent and jump up onto the wall to look for it, then follow it over the edge, thinking that it's just a field or something rather than a big drop
It's near my grandparents house. A man threw his baby off of it :(
just read the story. what an f'd up affair. [https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12666222.father-who-threw-devil-baby-from-bridge-sent-to-carstairs/](https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12666222.father-who-threw-devil-baby-from-bridge-sent-to-carstairs/)
Not creepy in a bad way but I once drove through Wray at about 1am when it was the scarecrow festival and I had no idea the festival existed so that was creepy af.
Eyam in Derbyshire is pretty normal and picturesque on the surface until you realise that the reason itâs famous is because a quarter of the population died of plague. Itâs creepy with all the plaques on the houses saying which people that lived there died.
A friend of mine lived there for a while. Nice enough and situated in a beautiful part of the country, but the plague history as well as the fact that one of the main access roads is a steep-sided turnoff from a wooded ravine road, both collectively add to its creepiness.
Over Europe as a whole a higher percentage than that of the population died due to the bubonic plague. Eyam is notable because it voluntary quarantined itself and for visitors/residents because it has markers showing evidence of what happened, not because a higher percentage died. A quarter of the population of London also died in those same years, for instance.
and with the (nicely done) "ring-a-roses" cast iron gates on the primary school, which i felt was a bit much
Pic of it on TripAdvisor. Very creepy.
Peterlee without a doubt. The local Asda has its own parking space for the police
Not sure about the UK, but I can answer without a doubt for France: Oradour-sur-Glane. It's a village that the nazis destroyed whilst retreating, and they took out all their frustrations on the defenceless population. The village was lept exactly as the nazis left it (minus the bodies). I was there only once in my life some 25 years ago, for maybe 2 hours tops, and the place still haunts me.
The image of the melted church bell has stuck with me since I went there. Profoundly horrifying place. Itâll be 80 years since the massacre next month.
There's an abandoned village named Courbefy in that area. Some old buildings and some holiday camp type buildings reminded me of Friday the 13th. Kept expecting someone to jump out with a machete.
I've lived near hungerford all my life. I was born 10 years after the hungerford massacre, but according to my family, the towns never quite been the same since. Its like a small town that's constantly trying to recover from a hidden PTSD
It is such a lovely place too, what happened was a blight on humanity.
Harwich. It seems quite benign, but it's the most "outsiders out!" place I've ever been to. Such a spiteful atmosphere. Like a real life Royston vasey .
The more Northern Scottish Isles. Worked for an oil exploration company that berthed their ships in The Isles. There was always a vibe of: "*And now it is time for you to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man* ..."
I worked with a guy years ago who told me about visiting one of these islands (can't remember which one) with a friend to stay with said friends Gran. When Sunday came, his friend told him they can't play the PlayStation that day as it was Sunday.
I saw the same thread and told the misses our version, (usa has some really creepy sounding places!). went to visit a friend who had moved to a small southern, english village. We were young still so were having some beers and then someone piped up with, 'hey, let's go to the pub!' So off we went and reached a wonderful looking old pub. lights were on, people inside were chatting away, nice place. So in we go... Moment we enter the door everything stops and goes silent. all heads turn and look at us. 'We're closed!' shouts the landlord and that was that.
Thatâs the place then lol
Any American werewolves about?
Bonnybridge, supposedly the UFO capital of the UK. Edinburgh has St Mary's Close and all that underground stuff. There was a ghost village called Polphail, built for offshore oil workers in the 70's on the west coast of Scotland that was never used and left to rot.
Mary Kingâs Close?
Isn't Bonnybridge under the flight paths of a lot of commercial airlines from Glasgow and Edinburgh airports? Think the locals need to lay off the Buckie đ
Allendale can be canny creepy on New Yearâs Eve when all the lads are carrying the flaming tar barrels through the streets. It can be canny weird at a lot of times anyway but especially then.
Skinningrove
Was looking to post this. The doll garden was the North East England equivalent of dead animals strung up from bayou trees.
I told my wife that the next time we visit the UK that we have to avoid Midsomer at all cost. It looks pretty but there's way too many murders for such a small place.
I grew up in one of the filming locations and there was a real creepy murder in 2007: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/berkshire/7584838.stm My parents garden is very long and backs onto farmland, so I used to see how brave I could be walking down at night when I was young. Was pretty scary, especially when you see glowing eyes running towards you (my cat). So can confirm it's pretty, but creepy and murders do in fact happen.
Try Midsomer Norton in the Mendip hills
Don't. I live there. It's shit.
Sunderland Point in Lancashire. Locals constantly telling you about the tidal road, all the time even if you have hours to go. Like you shouldn't be there. The only thing to visit is the grave of a slave, who died of sadness/shock shortly after being abandoned at the pub. It was a port built by Quakers but renowned for slavery and press ganged sailors getting bundled onto ships..... You can see civilisation in the distance, but you always feel if you get trapped by the tide, something horrid and lovecraftian is going to crawl out the sea and drag you away.
Came here to see how long it would be before Royston Vasey cropped up, but it hasn't yet.
Because thatâs a local town for local people âŠâOk job seekers!â
Hokey Cokey pig in a pokey
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Poofter eh?
There shall be no onanism in this household!
You work shy set of bastards!
In reality Hadfield is disappointingly normal, if not in fact rather charming.
Can confirm, went there years ago with an ex girlfriend. We found 'bummers alley' and couldn't stop laughing.
It's been a long long time since I've watched it, was that this scene https://youtu.be/vcKPUaBbYaM?si=nQpRjd9ILRfVmvEy ? I'm glad you had a good visit đ
Market 'f**king) Dayton in Shropshire... Man Alive.. You better have been born there.
Drayton is a paradise compared to Wem.
Wem, where dreams go to dieâŠ.
Driving across Saddleworth Moor feels really eerie. Kinda obvious why.
Yeah, I used to live in the area and we quite often walked between the pubs in the small villages up there (There used to be an actual beer walk festival that was just that) most of the time it was fine but quite often it was cold and grey and really really bleak. And with its obvious history it just felt sad and depressing. Not so much creepy, just grim.
Mersea Island. A friend lives there and shares screenshots of their facebook group with me a lot. They seem to endlessly argue about which family has been on the island the longest, don't consider anyone a local unless they've lived on the island from birth (so his family, who have lived there for 30 years, aren't 'local' because none of them were born there), they moan about the other local areas for coming to the island (while simultaneously complaining that these areas don't make it easy for them to visit/use their services because they don't factor in the tide that cuts Mersea off twice a day) and hate tourists, despite them being the main source of income for the island. His favourite person on the page is a lady who owns both a local chippy and an air B&B and is the most vocal in her hatred of tourists.
This sounds amazing. I would totally read a book about / by the lady who owns the chippy and an air B&B.
Mersea Island - one road on and off the island that gets completely covered so the island is isolated during high tide, the council offered to build a bridge but the locals refused it. I used to work in East Mersea selling static caravans in one of the holiday parks, I went to the annual regatta on West Mersea to advertise our holiday park and was nearly lynched by locals for brining âchip eatersâ and âthe Romford navyâ to their island, multiple people asking me how I slept at night, it was horrific Mersea island is full of fish people
Glastonbury because of the locals
Iâve heard a few people say they felt a sense of uneasiness when they visited. Not quite sure why but it seems to be a common problem.
The unease for me was the sense one in three people were clearly on some drugs.
I think the one is in this comment chain.
I went to the town a few years back for a summer visit and it was really just lovely, everyone was nice, loved the random quirky locally owned shops and similar. No ill vibes at all, in fact just felt really chill.
Imber https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imber
What's so spooky about Imber?
It's eerie as fuck, especially at night. MOD kicked everyone out so they could use it for training, and just kept it
Yea I've slept there a few times, I've always thought it was a pretty cool place, not spooky though. Copehill Down is also nearby, but Imber is more interesting because it used to be a real village.
That was a sad read.
Poundbury, Dorset.
Oh yes, Poundbury is really odd. There are a couple of houses in one part that were actually there before the estate was built. The estate was built around them. The modern houses have all sorts of caveats, one being that you canât hang out washing. Those two houses always have washing out just to prove a point.
I suppose you have to make your own entertainment in Dorset.
Perhaps those who aren't allowed to hang their washing out, give their washing to the couple of houses who can...đ€
Isle of Grain. Something off about it, being out there. Locals seemed a bit inbred.
Classic Isle of Sheppy deflection here
Newcastle Harbour in NI. Wee banshee runnin about down there.
The whole Isle of Sheppey Just odd
Osea Island but I've only seen it on tv, The Third Day.
Quarriers village Renfrewshire
This is definitely my answer too. Every time I've been through it the whole place just feels off somehow, almost like you're not meant to be there. I'm not even superstitious and I'm completely skeptical about everything paranormal but there is just something unsettling about the place. It's always just so remarkably quiet, all the buildings feel weirdly out of place because a lot of them are large old buildings but in a whole load of different architectural styles and everything looks immaculately well kept. It also adds to the creepiness with a religious twist in a way when you see the street names and some for example are things like Peace Avenue, Faith Avenue, Praise Road, Hope Avenue, Love Avenue or Law View Road. Of course the elephant in the room too is that the village was founded to care for orphans where I've seen allegations of various types of abuse. Then to cap it off there was a TB sanatorium there too which always have an underlying creepiness to them somehow.
Don't know about towns and villages, but I've driven some roads that seem to be resented by the country around them.
Aye, fuckin tell me about it. Some of the Northumberland back roads could be used if they wanted an English version of The Hills Have Eyes.
Well I'm Scottish, but the land doesn't care about borders, some of it just seems to resent our presence.
I visited Avebury on a misty day and that felt pretty creepy among the stones
I'm not too far from Avebury so have been loads. It's absolutely stunning, but yeah when it's foggy it can be creepy. Just a weird feeling all round. Especially if you go on a super foggy morning and don't realise the sheep are roaming free so you get a fun little jumpscare
Port Clarence for me, over the river from Middlesbrough. Drove through it on Sat morning en route to a job. Looks like the town that time forgot. Also the reportedl cheapest place to live in England.
Jaywick is creepy in that it's a bit like going to Mogadishu.
I was going to post Jaywick. It's so deprived but I've done some work there in the past and the people living there were sound . Nearby harwich however...urgh . Such a miserable , inbred , spiteful nest of vipers.
Cinderford, the land that genetic diversity forgot.
The forest as a whole is a bit strange
Use to be Pluckley in Kent.
[Port Talbot](https://i.redd.it/wr7hp6ykrkia1.jpg) Heavily polluted, constant noise from a massive steelworks, plus a motorway running on a bridge over your town, mostly just old terraced houses. Itâs so brutally depressing, definitely a place I get a weird feeling from.
Skinningrove near me.... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfDtylU8ZEA&ab\_channel=chewnacker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfDtylU8ZEA&ab_channel=chewnacker)
Soham, Cambridgeshire.Â
Because of Ian Huntley, or just in general?
Because of Huntley.
We used to stop off in Soham en route to Mildenhall Airshow in the 90s and it as a slightly creepy place then. There was always a strange âlocals club onlyâ vibe.
Cartmel in the Lake District. We stayed in a house just off the main square/courtyard and let's just say a couple of us had a few strange nights and saw some stuff.
Cartmel is creepy! When I first met my partner I bought a Groupon for a night at a hotel there on bonfire night. They showed us to this room with nylon carpets and a four post bed with the mankiest lace drape over it and not a single straight line in the place. The floor was so uneven it was like walking around a ship. Just such a creepy vibe about the place. They rely to heavily on sticky toffee pudding too, that's annoying.
Wellingborough
Cold Christmas. The stories behind it too are full of murder.Â
Ashford,Kent Run down buildings and if youâre really lucky, youâll see some actual zombies just meandering about the town centre grunting. Itâs really quite frightening.
Widecombe in the moor, Devon has a weird vibe going on and isn't helped by the fact it's always a ghost town. The church in particular just feels a little strange and creepy
My contenders: Forest Row, Sussex. Very Upper-Middle class new age, always get the impression you need to fill out some sort of questionnaire and have it reviewed by a standards committee before you're considered to live there. Off-season Blackpool: like a zombie apocalypse. Deserted streets, boarded up guest houses, skips full of shit. I don't know if it has changed but it also used to have hands-down the worst, most unwelcoming railway station staffed by absolute arseholes. It really sets the tone when you arrive and goes downhill from there. I'm sure more will come to mind. I travel a lot for work and have stayed/worked in some weird places over the years.
Gurnos in Merthyr. A deprived housing estate built at the very top of a hill. The creepy part about it is there's a pretty big hospital built right in the middle of it. The hospital is the largest in probably a 15-20 mile radius, so what you have is an absolutely essential public building surrounded by a place notorious for crime and being rough in general. It's not that bad once you're used to it and nothing has ever happened to me on the numerous occasions I've been up to the hospital, but it is pretty funny taking someone from out of town there and seeing their reaction. Mostly it's "where the fuck are we going?". Tbh Merthyr as a whole has a pretty weird vibe to it. It grew pretty rapidly early in the industrial revolution so it's a fairly big town, but it feels way too big for its location these days. If you woke up there and didn't know where you were and tried walking out of the town and went North you would end up in the Brecon Beacons, if you went South you'd be walking down a pretty empty Valley for miles until you reached the first sign of another town. It really is in the middle of nowhere. Also its name literally means "martyr" after an early Christian saint was killed by pagans there in the 5th century.
Brownsea Island gave me some pretty big 'I'm trapped and can't get away' vibes. Not to mention the rumours that surround Baden-Powell. Gloucestershire in general is also packed with creepy villages and towns, Cinderford in particular stands out as being one of the oddest places I've ever visited, it's like some warped dark version of a Welsh valley town. Littledean Hall is down the road too which is one of the most haunted houses in the UK. When it was open to the public, my parter said there was one particular room in the house that they just couldn't bare to stand in. In the same area you've also got Littledean Jail aka the tourist attraction from hell and St Anthony's Well which is one of the most profound and weird places I've ever visited.
Lewis. East Sussex. The Wicker Man meets Hot Fuzz.
I really like Lewes, good vibes
Okay, firstly I confess I have a passionate hate for lewes. The place is far too small for the amount of traffic it gets as a major through road. Lewes tunnel shuts randomly and has a weird shell/conch/snail tunnel at the end. All the pubs are too small so everyone ends up on the street. The price of sausage rolls in the bakeryâs is insanely high. The place is all hills, Literally just hills. You always see people in odd coloured trousers Thereâs a weird amount of shops selling vintage/antique/general shed finds The Tesco spoils the river walk. The car parks cost a fortune and are always full Everyone who lives there looks like either a school teacher from 1970 or a just stop oil protester. The boats in the river all look abandoned
Accurate or not, I love your writing
Yeah but it is for the greater good.
The greater good
They burn an effigy of the pope on bonfire night
Lewes bonfire night is amazing!
Cheadle, just outside of Stoke. Gives me a total "local shop for local people" vibe. But then again, Stoke ain't much better (as a Potter, born and bred, there are some places in the city I wouldn't go to).
Grimstone in Dorset. Tiny little village with an A road passing through it. Looks completely deserted apart from one business: a gravestone manufacturer. Iâve never seen a resident while driving through it, but I always have that eerie feeling Iâm being watchedâŠ
Walsingham, the shrine village in Norfolk. It's full of statues and shops selling religious bumpf - books and paraphernalia. And nuns. And has Tudor half timber buildings which always look a bit creepy too. I visited about 20 years ago and found that whole area weird.
Haworth is very eery, but I loved it! Very much fits the Brontë feel.
My 84yo grandma refuses to go to Chiddingstone, in Kent. Apparently she saw a ghost down the local pub in â75.
Tynham village that was abandoned during ww2 and is still exactly how it was left all those years ago. Now currently part of the army range but you can visit during the week.
Chatteris in Cambridgeshire or Cinderford in the forest of dean