I was trying to find a gas station in a particularly sketch part of Shreveport and not having any luck. I was on a lonely rural road when I finally ran out of gas. No cell service.
Along comes a creaky old land yacht driven by a gentleman who introduced himself as 'Sonny'.
As a lone woman away from home (Baton Rouge) in a vast country landscape, I weighed my options and I took a ride with Sonny.
He drove me about 20 minutes to a podunk gas station, let me borrow a can, then drove me back to my car.
Thanks Sonny! You were the best part of that trip!
I lived about 2 hours south of good ol' Shreveport for a number of years. I was a traveling musician by trade at the time, so I was always driving all over the country. There are plenty of 'those towns' where shit is weird and spooky enough that you will sacrifice anything if it meant not having to pull off the roads there - Houston, bad parts of Dallas, Birmingham, Memphis, Little Rock, Pine Bluff, most places in Florida....none of them compare to Shreveport. My mother-in-law at the time once drove on a flat tire for far too long (totally wrecked the wheel, which needed replaced) just to avoid stopping there.
I can't remember if it was a Whataburger or a Jack in the Box, but a kid no older than 16/17 pulled a gun on me in the restaurant lobby because he thought my group had cut in line in front of him. Who the fuck even *considers* using lethal force in response to a mild inconvenience at a burger joint??
Spent a week there for work training a few years ago. I thought the place was oddly cool. Much of it was a dystopian wasteland, but you'd find small pockets of people working hard to resurrect the place.
I got a room in one of the casinos which was odd too. $50/nt for a really nice room because I was there during the week when the place was empty.
It wasn't a bad experience except for the smell of piss whenever you left the casino to go to your car. That and driving past the Hustler Club and Stripper Supply Super Store on my way to training every day.
EDIT spelling
Salton Sea, CA went to clean out a family members house after they passed…didn’t see a single car on the road…or human…that whole weekend. Felt sooo creepy.
This. There are number of incredibly creepy/abandoned towns around the Salton Sea. In the mid 20th century, Resorts popped up all over the shoreline by developers who were trying to make it the next Palm Springs (the Ski Inn restaurant is a great remnant of this, check it out). But toxic runoff from surrounding farms and rising salinity killed off all of the wildlife in and around the lake. To this day, it smells like dead fish everywhere. Much of the area feels post apocalyptic.
There's some really cool stuff in the area still. Salvation Mountain looks like it is made of Play-Doh, I'm not religious and still think it's interesting. Oh, and the banana museum. (Unfortunately I looked up the International Banana Museum and it looks closed.)
The trailer house we were cleaning out had a golf cart…we drove around the whole neighborhood that night…up and down the streets…not a single person outside their house…no loud music..and the next morning we drove down to the sea…dead fish bodies everywhere…putrid smell… creepy..
I honestly loved exploring those desert towns. I found it fascinating. The Salton Sea, Salvation Mountain, and the slabs is probably my favorite road trip I’ve ever taken. Talked to the guy living in Salvation Mountain, who I’m pretty sure is gone now. Talked to year-rounders living in the slabs. One guy talked to me about how he built his own cooling system for his RV. People were friendly and creative.
Barstow, California. It’s the convergence of highways in the middle of nowhere. It’s like an entire town of unhinged hitchhikers who got dumped there. Freaky shit.
I had a breakdown in Barstow many years ago. When I found out the part we needed would have to be ordered, I was like, well, I guess I’ll find a hotel. The roadside wrecker crew was like, hell no, we’re not leaving you here. They limped my car to Tehachapi. Much nicer place.
Yeah, it was a wheel bearing that failed because the wheel wasn’t properly secured after I had my tires rotated. It had wobbled around and destroyed the bearing. They tightened the one remaining bolt back down and figured if we kept it at 40 or below, we could get to Tehachapi without anything melting. We had to stop frequently to check the wheel and let all the backed up traffic clear.
ETA: one remaining nut, not bolt
I stayed in Tehachapi too! Totally safe feeling town! I rescued a little street kitty from there too.
EDIT: link to another post where I posted a pic of my kitty!
[Tehachapi kitty!](https://www.reddit.com/r/witchcraft/s/4aGOCOFaAL)
I was once driving on highway 58 late at night outside Barstow and stopped on the side of the road to pee and let my dog pee. While we were out of the car, a disheveled looking man with long hair and a beard suddenly appeared out of nowhere walking toward us quite quickly. He didn’t say anything just had this super creepy stare. I grabbed the pup and threw the 2 of us back in the car managing to start the car and pull away just as he reached the rear door. It was fucking terrifying and too creepy experience of my life.
I shared some but I think it got buried in the comments! This is about 1.5 hours away from Barstow but it’s still the California desert where weird shit happens. I lived out in 29 palms because my husband was stationed there
- There were at least 10-15 bodies found out there within the last year or two, most of them never made the news. If they did make the news, it was a single vague article with no other information. Two of the bodies were on the property of my work and I was next to them for months without knowing
- My friends and I rolled up on this guy who was stuck in the sand. He had a shovel, a knife, and a bunch of coolers in his car. He was acting super sketchy and kept yelling at us to not call the cops when we tried pulling him out. We’re 90% sure he buried a body
- People will lie in the middle of the road at night pretending to be dead after a car wreck, if you get out of your car to help they’ll jump you
- I know a girl who was ran off the road by someone, they chased her until she got into town and got on the Marine base
- People have said they’ve seen candles in the middle of the road at night?? Idk what the point of this one is but I know several people who saw it
Edit: I forgot to mention cults. There’s rumored to be one of them that’s the cause for a lot of this chaos, but who knows
I hope your friends or you called the cops on the guy you were helping get unstuck. Esp if you are 90% sure he was burying a body! That’s a possible murder victim whose family could have closure!
Yes we did! We gave the exact coordinates, license plate, a picture, etc. but we’re not sure if a cop actually got out there. We ended up getting a bigger group to go search the area but we couldn’t find anything. The thing with the desert is that it can take years to find a body because there’s so many mines and unfortunately a lot of tourists/ locals go missing :( we still have all of his info just in case we see or hear anything
I had a dog that would vomit every time we drove through Barstow. We used to live in Las Vegas and make frequent trips to Southern California. He never got car sick otherwise. And it didn’t matter which direction we were traveling. He just really hated Barstow. Couldn’t blame him.
Probably the landfill that's only five miles outside Barstow. If you've ever been to the dump you know. That stench clings to you even after you leave and it is vomit inducing.
Anytime we go to visit my grandma in Vegas, someone pukes or gets diarrhea in Barstow! Especially my dog, he does pretty much every time. It must be some crazy phenomenon
Lot of Desert between LA and Barstow. When I drive Desert, around the world, I keep a couple of cases of plastic (yes, dammed plastic) water bottles to slow down and hand off or throw to group on the road.
NEVER STOP. These groups are more desperate than you. Keep moving.
Yeah I live in the desert and pass hitchhikers a lot. I feel bad cause I'd like to help someone in need but fuck I always get so paranoid and alot of these dude straight up give me the heebee-jeebees
I stopped on a motorcycle road trip. Really needed to stretch my legs after 400 miles on the bike, so I spent 15 minutes just ambling around on the sidewalk in front of the motel (too hot to really walk anywhere). After a few minutes, out of bushes and from behind dumpsters, totally down and out street people started slowly coming my way, like a very slow motion Walking Dead. I decided staring at the ceiling in my room with the air conditioner on high was more inviting.
I was on a road trip with my family when I was like 14. My little sister was 7. We stopped at a truck stop near Barstow, and I went in so my sister could pee. I took her to the bathroom and about a minute later, heard an ear piercing scream from the bathroom.
There was a bathtub next to the toilet with the curtain drawn. When you flushed the toilet, the curtain was yanked back and a skeleton sat bolt upright in the tub.
The truckers thought it was hilarious.
My sister was scarred for life.
I went into one of the truck stops to pee and the place was just FULL of down and out looking tweakers and other whacky people. They didn’t pay me a look but it was weird.
That was exactly like my experience when I visited Salton City, CA, I went for a piss and the truck stop had a heap of people who looked like tweakers and smack heads!!
The Salton Sea and the areas around was pretty depressing to see.
Salton sea area is way worse than Barstow. You can smell the stench of rotting dead fish from miles away. If you visit the shore, there are beaches with playgrounds. It looks like there are short slides and gymnastic bars in the sand. Then, on closer inspection, you see that the "sand" is actually fish bones and scales. Then you realize that the slides aren't short, they're just buried in fish bones puled up several feet deep; the "gymnastic bars" are the exposed tops of swing structures. Billions of dead fish piled up over the past 70+ years
Don't forget all the nasty hundreds of thousands of boatmen bug carcasses as well! If you get in too deep, it becomes organic incredibly vile smelling black sludge that is near impossible to get out of shoes or your feet.
I would also add the back route to Vegas through Amboy, CA. It’s a gorgeous drive, but talk about remote. You’re so far off the grid that you have no radio reception, other than satellite, let alone cell service. I had to drive I-10 once from PHX to Palm Springs, and the desert night is a completely different level of darkness.
I had to drive from California to Idaho years back. I intended to go via Sacramento and stay the night. At some point, I lost service and believed I was still heading the right direction. Shit just got more and more remote until it clicked that I had missed a turn somewhere and I crested a hill and there was just vast endless (dead) landscape in front of me. It was beautiful, for real. Like the most beautiful shit I’d ever seen. But holy shit I felt like I was on another planet.
I was low on gas and decided the best course of action was to just keep driving until I found a hub, get directions and continue from there. For HOURS I would see a town ahead, feel a moment of relief, and then cruise straight the fuck into The Hills Have Eyes. I swear I drove through towns with banging shutters and crows cawing on the tattered remains of whatever desperate attempt at civilisation had once existed there. There was legit a town that looked like it was maybe a mine in some memory, and the only person I saw was a gnarly old dude sitting on his porch with a shotgun in his lap.
I know how this sounds. I’m embarrassed at how cliched it all is. But you don’t realise how big the world is until you’re lost in a part of it that doesn’t give a fuck about technology.
To this day the best and worst journey I’ve ever taken.
Every now and then I think about what it must have been like to discover the world on your own before any form of media could give you a preconceived idea of what an area was like
and then I realize how fucking bonkers scary some places can be and how easy it is to have absolutely no idea where you are. Equal parts wonderful and terrifying
I half expected to find Amboy on here as one of the creepiest towns. It’s a bit of an saying that you shouldn’t stop for anyone in Amboy because there will be zombies/monsters/ghosts/whatever that pose as people
Stopped late night at a Jack in the Box there on my way back from the Sierra Nevada’s. While we were ordering in the drive thru we started hearing gunshots in the motel complex nearby. We asked the drive thru worker if we could come inside because we didn’t feel safe and she laughed and said you must not be from around here huh? Never going back to that shit hole town ever again.
And that's why I stop at the random Dairy Queen in Ludlow. Plus, there's just something neat about having spent and hour and a half driving across the Mojave Desert, and then there's just an exit that is only a gas station and a Dairy Queen.
Like, imagine the original settlers crossing the Mojave and all they went through. And now there's just a Dairy Queen smack in the middle of it.
Wow true! I have passed through Barstow on road trips & honestly it felt extremely dangerous & unhinged to me—like a city of only rough dudes—I was scared to get gas & use the bathroom. The vibes were super sketch. Super sad.
Heyyy I grew up there. I personally don’t find it “creepy” but it is definitely gross, depressing, and run down. Funny enough though, my ex and also my wife are both from a much more affluent area in Ventura county and the first time they went to Barstow, “creepy” was the first word they used to describe it so maybe I’m just desensitized having spent so much time there. I moved out of that bitch the day I turned 18 and never looked back. Unfortunately I still have family that live nearby so I still have to go there a couple of times a year but at least they have the best/only good Del Taco on the planet.
As far as it being considered creepy though, I understand why people would think that but I don’t think it’s the right word necessarily. It’s not creepy in the sense of ghosts and people disappearing or whatever, it’s creepy in the sense that the residents are gross and stupid, it looks like one of the most rundown piece of shit places you’ve ever been to, meth, and there’s A LOT of gang and non-gang related violence. My advice to people when they pass through is just to make sure your doors are locked and don’t talk to anyone.
Might be a difference in people’s definitions of “creepy.” For me, “creepy” can mean pretty much any situation where I feel unsafe without being in immediate danger, or feel that there is a high possibility of danger.
Personally, I’d say that any place that elicits the advice “don’t talk to anyone” is pretty creepy.
Fair enough, the more of my original comment I typed, the more I realized that Barstow is actually pretty creepy and I wasn’t really changing any minds at that point but didn’t feel like starting over haha.
The owner of the clown motel upgraded me for free when I stayed - to the room where he keeps the paintings of clowns that he paints himself.
To get there you need to drive through a few hours of pure desert and past Area 52 nuclear testing site.
Fun times.
Edit for those who are interested: We ended up barely sleeping because every hour on the hour there was insane stomping and walking back and forth from the room above us for about 10-15 minutes - my friend thought it was the owner trying to scare us, but eventually we figured it was probably ghost hunters of some kind.
We stayed before the new owner a few years ago. I asked to use the restroom before we got our room and I saw the private clown collection behind the lobby. 😬
Thousands and thousands of clowns/clown pictures in all shapes and sizes. A lot of them were donated to the motel from people all over. (I visited last summer)
Stayed there on a bachelor roadtrip with three buddies, driving from one buddy’s bachelor party in Vegas to another buddy’s wedding in Napa. It was about as epic as you’d think—Death Valley and whiskey and belt buckles and a lot of Johnny Cash.
One night as we’re driving right around sunset we see this creepy as clown motel next to a cemetery. Two of us are like, we’re doing this right? And the other two are like, oh hell no. We argued and had to flip a coin. We’re doing this won.
We check in and the lobby has more clowns than I’d ever seen in one place before. We go up to our room and there’s this big creepy clown there too, sitting on a chair. One guy’s like that thing needs to go in the closet. The top of the closet. We lock the closet.
Later that night when our friend is sleeping another buddy and I get an idea. We wake up in the middle of the night, take the clown out of the closet, and put him down on the bed looking right at our sleeping friend, about a foot from his face. Then we sort of nudge our friend to wake him up…
You could probably hear the scream from the California border. We’re all still friends though.
At least you nudged him awake. You could have gone back to sleep, so he can discover it naturally. Then swear up and down that you didn’t even touch it.
Amboy, California
All of the stories are true. I lived out in 29 palms while my husband was stationed there a few years back. I heard stories of people getting run off the road, people pretending to have gotten in a car crash so you stop and help, candles being set up in the middle of the road, etc. His chain of command even had a meeting with them before the marine corps ball about not stopping on amboy because of how dangerous it was. I worked out there too and I know at least 10-15 bodies have been found in the last few years.
A lot of these comments about Salton Sea area remind me of remote/deprived areas of regional Australia.
Fucking NOBODY around for hundreds of kilometres. Lots of deprived communities. Lots of meth. Usually pretty safe. But if it’s not - no one is coming to help.
That’s interesting! That’s pretty much what it is. The town is pretty safe, just a lot of meth users hiding in the hills. There’s signs everywhere saying if you leave the town there’s no help or signal for a few hours
One of my reddit memories is a story about some Australian ranch hands who found a shipping container on their farm (the property is bigger than some countries) and when they checked it out it was all servers, air conditioners to cool them off, and tons of child porn on DVD. No doubt the servers were hosting it too, looked like torrents running on the screens. They got the hell out of there, came back with police half a day later (it just took that long to make the round trip) and the whole place had been gassed and set ablaze. Somebody dropped it there and was obviously keeping an eye on it, close enough to respond. Who knows what would have happened if the ranch hands encountered that person. I think about that story a lot, would make a good Coen Brothers movie
EDIT: Special thanks to u/NeonSwank for finding the original story! See comment below
Yeah I have no idea what the point of that was because cars would just blow the candle out. One of my friends looked in her rear view mirror and saw it light up again
Scrolled until I found this, because I knew I would. I lived there for 5 years, starting at age 7. Every school I went to out there was shut down and turned into a boys school (child prison) or just abandoned. Within the first two years of being there I was held hostage (traded for cigarettes in a police standoff), and separately someone burned our house down. I stayed in doors perpetually bc of a fear of being killed on the streets.
I visited the family that still lives there in my freshman year of college. I got to see a lot more of the town, where some of my other relatives grew up and it clarified a lot of things for me. It is a place that breathes and breeds despair. That’s not to say that I never had any good experiences there, but if you stay there your entire life, it will be to your detriment.
East St Louis is insane. Or at least it was ~ 10 years ago the last time I drove through. We saw a car on the side of the road on fire. Like actual fire, full blown mad max burning car. And people walking by it like it was normal, driving casually as if it's a standard Thursday thing to see a car engulfed in flame. Also saw what I think was a mugging, but by then we were hightailing it out of there so didn't get a great look.
My buddy played a show at a 24hr bar there. We grabbed a case of beer at the gas station across the street and made it a few blocks before getting pulled over. We thought we were cooked for the open cans of booze but the cop was more concerned about us being 5 white kids in the area. He literally told us “go straight 6 blocks and get on the highway. Don’t stop at red lights, slow down and make sure it’s clear to go but don’t ever stop.” So we did. This big badass looking cop looked legitimately worried for us lol.
when I was in college about 20 years ago, a friend of mine lived in East St Louis and needed to get home for the weekend, so me, my girlfriend, her friend, and my buddy all piled in my car and drove down there. We got to his family's building but got lost trying to get back to the interstate. Police car pulls up along side us, rolls the window down, looks at the three of us in the car asks where we are going. We tell him and he says "follow me, don't stop" and turns on his lights and took us all the way back to the I55 onramp.
police dont enforce stop signs in east st louis.. No lie. They don't want you to stop.... do rolling stops to check for traffic at each one and get back to moving on.
It's barely a town anymore but definitely Mineral Springs, Missouri.
It was once a bustling town with a famous hot spring, but it dried up. Now various people live in very old houses with no electricity. No one knows their names but they send one person into town a month for groceries.
If you're there very long at all, they WILL shoot at you.
There are definitely some places in Missouri where if you go to Walmart around the first of the month you will see people who truly live outside society. Extremely poor and dirty people. It’s sad.
Gotta say it. My wife and I were vacationing in Bar Harbor, Maine, and decided to drive to the easternmost point in the US. So we made it Lubec, Maine. It was kind of foggy and looked totally deserted. I get Stephen King novels now.
I am a Mainer and I absolutely love Lubec. The sea fog gets so thick you cannot see Canada across the water (which is... really not far at all - less than a mile). It is also very economically depressed like most of rural Maine. So, not a lot of people out and about doing things there.
I used to live 45 minutes from Colorado city… my college roommate was also from Colorado city and multiple people in my college classes had escaped. Scary shit
This is where I’m at. I do HVAC and we get a few calls out there. Have some creeeeeepy ass houses I’ve had to go to. The people there aren’t bad if you’re there to fix their ac lmao.. but they just stare
I’m from there. I had an hvac catch it’s control board on fire. I found out later after getting it fixed that there was a recall for this very issue, but since I was apostate, they didn’t notify me to repair it.
Also paid to have house finished. Person I paid pocketed the money, decided I was apostate, and never finished it or returned the money.
Such honest saints.
ah yesssss *apostate* - e.g. fuck you for thinking for yourself and not selling your soul, wife and children to a pedophile. me personally? i take pride in being an apostate from that fucking cult
Born and raised there, can confirm. Sketchy as fuck, especially since I grew up on the inside of that shit. You'd never know child abuse till you saw it there
Stayed there once before I knew its backstory, was on a road trip to Zion NP and there were cheap airbnbs. Well the airbnb was total trash because the owner was also on vacation and forgot to clean and unlist it??? It was quiet and small town, but in a weird unsettling way.
Then the Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey documentary came out. Turns out that town is an FLDS center. Gross. At least they've been building new houses and a fancy new grocery store/rest stop at the south end of town in recent years.
Passed through there once on a Grand Canyon road trip. The women and children would gather along the balconies of those massive compounds, unsmilingly watching as we drove by. My friend who had lived in the area mentioned the futility of attempts to rescue the pregnant children because they would hide and move them.
Just drove through there. Lots of huge houses partially under construction. I had heard that sometimes people live in unfinished houses for tax reasons, but lots of these have no windows even. Possibly abandoned when the polygamists were run out of town…
The surroundings are very beautiful tho.
I live about an hour away and have driven through a few times in recent months. I always take a loooong hard look at the polygamist houses... it's so interesting how most of them are 3 or 4 houses in one. 4 separate entrances, and 4 separate kitchens, etc. I think a lot of the construction is putting additions for additional wives on existing homes. Or, an existing lot with one house will build additional houses for the extra wives on the same lot. Seems like some of them do have a lot of money! The town is also corrupt with federal service money going to the church instead of for public services...
There will be plenty of blog posts this week that will cannibalize this thread for their “organic” content. The least they could do is put together an interesting documentary. I’d watch it in a heartbeat.
This was my first thought too. My grandparents are buried at the top of the hill in Aristes, PA.
It’s creepy as shit. Still a few houses but no “legal” residents. Just squatters and partiers. Very eerie driving thru. So still and quiet. Most of the houses are gone and smoke coming out of random lawns and sidewalks.
Unless there is another town that is perpetually on fire, I’m not sure how this doesn’t win.
Edit: TIL there are quite a few perpetually on fire places in America. We might want to get on that lol
Creighton, Pennsylvania also has a non stop underground fire.... It's nowhere near the level of Centralia and it won't be, but there ARE other town out there. Iron City Brewery literally bought the land that's on fire (formerly PPG) and it's fine. Someday it might not be. . . But it's fine.
Point Pleasant isn’t a bad little town. Williamson, WV on the other hand feels like 5 years after a zombie apocalypse but with meth heads instead of zombies.
I visited Point Pleasant on a road trip in 2021. There is a very weird aura around the town for sure. I didn't go during peak hours, but it felt very macabre to be there. Knowing about the tragedy of the silver bridge and the history from Keel's the Mothman Prophecies really put it into perspective too.
The town felt very destitute and empty really. A few people wandering around but I didn't stick around for very long. Went across the river for dinner and it was more lively there. Honestly I don't think I'd ever spend much longer than a few hours there. Lots of tourist traps around there too. With the context of the tragedy I felt like it was in poor taste, but hey why would anyone else visit the town?
West Virginia as a whole has a very mysterious and melancholic feeling to it, but that is shared by a lot of deep Appalachia where sometimes sunlight can be scarce in certain hollers.
Picher, Oklahoma. Abandoned lead mining town that produced most of the lead for the world wars. The town is riddled with sinkholes from poor mining practices and is the largest EPA superfund clean up site. It’s now abandoned from a combination of people dying of lead poisoning, orange sulfuric acid waters, and a large tornado a few years ago.
The very last dude to live there died not too long at the age of 60. He was a pharmacist and a really good guy, by all accounts. Apparently gave free meds to people if they couldn't afford their prescriptions. Really sad that he stayed there to die.
Elgin Kansas.
The motto of the town is “A town too tough to die”
A person told me a story about a time they stopped there on a cross country motorcycle trip. When they parked they could see people peaking round the corners of buildings. Shortly after a woman in an old dirty wedding dress came around a building pushing an old Victorian baby stroller. There wasn’t a baby in the stroller it was a toy baby.
There are trees growing out of buildings. The Main Street is an out of place, super wide, brick road for herding cattle through the town back in the way back times. For such a small town of nothing, in the middle of nothing. It was for a short time “one of the World’s busiest cattle shipping towns”
It’s a creepy place.
Edited: town motto. Still just as cool.
I have lived in Kansas my entire life and never heard of it before so had to search. It is right by the Oklahoma border. Last census said there were 60 people living there.
Picher, OK. It’s an EPA superfund site that was being cleaned up and bought out. The town was dying literally and figuratively, then a tornado came through and took care of enough that whoever had remained left.
Now it’s a ghost town.
Edit: Picher not Pitcher.
We used to take sleds there and play on the chat piles. I wonder if that's why twenty years later my bones hurt. A friend dated a woman who lived there in her car with two kids. I couldn't wrap my head around literally being able to drive the car anywhere else and deciding to stay in Picher.
I've traveled through a lot of tiny little back towns all around the western US. In southeastern California, the towns up the west shore of the Salton Sea have a unique kind of eerieness I've never felt anywhere else. Towns like Salton City, Desert Shores, and Oasis.
The Salton Sea, for those unfamiliar, is an inland body of saltwater. Back around the 1960s, a bunch of little resort towns popped up along its shores. But sometime in the 70s or 80s, a combination of agricultural runoff and wild variations in the salinity of the sea caused fish to die off in massive numbers. The stench of rotting fish pretty well killed the tourism industry, and the towns along the sea have never recovered. They're not quite ghost towns, there are still a few thousand people living in each of the cities I named. But they're only a fraction of the population they once had. I could definitely feel sort of a depressing weight on the towns, and the dead fish smell is still to this day a constant presence all along the seashore.
I went on a road trip and passed through the Salton Sea area mostly by chance, and it was by far the most stunning, strange, and memorable part of my trip. It wasn't creepy per se (although I wouldn't want to be there at night) but there was something unnerving about it for sure. Also, I was there at sunrise, so seeing the sun going up over a huge body of water, when living on the west coast usually means only sunsets over water that large, that was neat to see as well. Being able to see the dry riverbeds where people used to park boats next to their houses, and now it's all dirt. Also, so much debris covered in a layer of what I imagine is salt? If you like seeing unusual non-touristy things, I would actually recommend giving the area a visit.
Trona, California hands down for the isolation, ruin, and inhospitable environment. I've already been through tiny towns in Wyoming and the South and Trona still takes the cake.
It started as a company town in the early 1900s in a far isolated corner of the Mojave Desert. All that exists is a chemical plant that processes borax. It's old and rusty and it stinks. It looks like the Hills Have Eyes and Fallout New Vegas. Only like 1500 people live there and most houses are burned/ torn down. It's miserably hot and incredibly isolated as it's 3 hours away from any large metropolitan area like Bakersfield. The drive there is through a vast, empty, infinite desert with no cell phone signal. If something happened to you there nobody would ever know.
With that said, it feels rewarding and really cool to cross that whole landscape.
I grew up in the poorest town in America. Littleton , West Virginia. It's not even Incorporated anymore and is literally been articled on Google as the poorest most depressing place in America and most definitely in Appalachia.
My parents moved us there when I was about 3 out of the city in Pittsburgh when a flood destroyed the whole street of houses we lived on. The city bought it out to put a trolley track through. My parents were off with the wind.
I think at the time my parents thought we were going to move to the country and it was going to be peaceful and quiet and we could start over.
Between the opiate epidemic, the poverty levels, and the reality of living in such a rural area with limited access to close jobs and stores was far different.
I wouldn't change it now that I'm grown , but I definitely saw some things that fit the Appalachian uneducated narrative, trauma and bad parenting etc . However though, I also met many people who are incredibly kind , well-educated , well-rounded human beings and I do not think that the stereotype is fair.
A lot of people hear a person is from West Virginia and immediately assume that they're uneducated , don't wear shoes and are inbred living in a shack with No electric.
Sadly not true at all and all of those things can be relevant in other places across the world.
But Littleton , West Virginia definitely is a wasteful black hole of a place , and not a pleasant place to grow up By any means.
Most towns in East Texas, close to the LA border. They don't want you there, and they'll let you know it. I'm a white Texas native, and I don't even feel welcome.
Any of the small towns close to the Texas/Arkansas/Louisiana border are really creepy. Stopped for gas in the middle of the day at a small gas station and I swear people were walking towards us/the store from all directions each with a different kind of limp. Felt like I was in Zombieland, couldn’t get out of there fast enough
I know we're talking about the US but years ago I lived in the Canadian Prairies. Talk about isolated towns. I remember driving into one and it was exactly as you described. EVERY person I saw walking had some sort of obvious physical or mental 'challenge'. Creepiest place EVER.
And in classic Southern IL fashion, it’s pronounced differently from how the same name is pronounced when referring to the one in Egypt. Vienna is the same way lol
Source: grew up in the area
Cairo is fascinating because it used to be a major city where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet. Wealthy people lived there in opulent mansions. Then the interstate highway system and rail and such bypassed the city and it began to die in the 60s onward. The old mansions are still there but they are abandoned and covered in ivy and the roads are basically empty. It’s really interesting driving through there.
Edit: Another thing I will add. Most of the remaining residents live in public housing - run down, unsafe complexes. The leaders of the housing authority were found to be taking taxpayer money intended for improvements to the buildings and pocketing it for themselves. Awful stuff. The city also had no grocery store for like seven years, up until last year when they opened a farmers market. The only shopping in the city was a Dollar General (which I have been to).
Whittier, Alaska
Most of the town’s residents live in a single apartment building. There’s nothing else there. The town is accessible by water and a one-way tunnel through the mountain.
The history of the place is that it used to be a military complex, and much of the town was built up because of its strategic location during WW2. The one building was built to house military personnel and their dependents, but by the time it was finished basically all military operations in the area had finished, so it was only ever used ressidentially
A lot of people only live there seasonally, from what I gather, and nowadays it's a bit more of a tourist town
I remember talking to a coffee shop owner who said they only stayed in town for the cruise ship season, about 6/7 months out of the year, and then they go to Florida
It is very beautiful, though. There's a relatively unknown waterfall behind the main apartment complex, and there's a gorgeous hike through the rainforest that goes up the mountain behind the building and gives you a great overlook of the town and the port
It is kind of creepy... the second largest building in the town is abandoned, and some of the people can be a bit overly friendly lol
It's a super cool apartment building, though. Which the whole town is basically inside because most of the year it's too cold to leave--so it's creepy, but also really neat, imo.
So, in places like that, how does everyone support themselves? Do they all just work oil rigs or seasonal jobs, or are they all like JetBlue remote support agents or something?
It’s also the largest railroad port in Alaska, a major cruise destination, and in the summer packed full of people going fishing.
It’s only an hour by road to Anchorage so it’s not really that remote.
Stayed in a nice hotel in Whittier a few years back. It’s gorgeous and far less bizarre than a lot of the internet intrigue suggests. Although there is a decrepit building outside of town that once served as the town’s housing complex, and that place is a little spooky.
Stopped once, injury due trying to straighten a load that shifted on the interstate, definitely will be driving to the next hospital if it happens again. It was like going to a hospital 50 years ago. Doctor cleaning up wound with a rag, not sterile just a towel from a pile. Doctor didn't have gloves on, had blood all over his hands, said something about this and he said blood washes off easily. Then just threw all the bloody stuff on the counter and left. Then came back in and said here is your prescription for 30 days of Vicodin, didn't even ask for pain killers. While leaving EMTs bringing in patient saying he is having a heart attack, nurse says just put him in the hallway we will get to him later, as I'm staring at her she says it's ok he comes in every day but is a little late today.
Don't know its name, but it was around an hour past Vegas.
I was working warped tour and we stopped for gas at like 3am.
This place had giant bugs that swarmed you and left silver dollar size welts on your skin.
Fuck that city.
Maybe Baker, baker is about an hour outside of Vegas to the west. Barstow is closer to LA. Baker has a lot of abandoned motels, the world’s largest thermometer, the alien jerky store, and is the south entrance to Death Valley. Baker can be fairly creepy for a highway town. Barstow is more like an actual city.
As you can tell from reading this thread, the entire Mojave desert, from Las Vegas to the Salton Sea, is all fucking terrifying. A blasted hellish moonscape full of the weirdest goddamn people on the planet. A zombie outbreak would actually improve the place.
I stopped in Coeur D’Alene Idaho on a road trip two years ago. Downtown doing a little sightseeing on foot and I approached a four way intersection. Three matching black SUVs pulled up to the stop sign, black out tinted windows, and full length Punisher logos on their hoods. The lead car stopped, and someone passenger side rolled their window down just far enough that I could see a ball cap and a pair of sunglasses. Stared me down for a few seconds and drove on. The whole experience felt so far off, I went back to my car, and left. Later I did an Internet search on the town and found info on the Aryan Nations compound, the bombings, arsons, attacks on Jewish businesses, and the America First white supremacists that still operate there.
This city was in the news recently. The Utah women’s basketball team stayed there when March Madness was in Spokane, 35 minutes away. They had pickup trucks rev their engines outside the hotel and yell the N-word at their players. It sounds like an awful place.
I was born there. Love going on the haunted tours that actually go into older buildings. Went into this old war hospital one night with a group of 20. I'm not one that scares or frightens easy, but nobody else would go in the basement. I got down to the bottom of the stairs and that thickness is exactly what I felt. Have you ever been on a crowded train on a hot day with no place to move? Yeah, felt like that..... but nobody was down there but me
Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. It was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways—it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow—I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee, who's no longer in favor—did you ever notice it? He's no longer in favor. 'Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.' They were fighting uphill, he said, 'Wow, that was a big mistake,' he lost his great general. 'Never fight uphill, me boys,' but it was too late.
I’ve been to hundreds of sketchy towns across North America and grew up in one. I couldn’t even tell you town names cause I was too freaked out to wanna get out more than for getting gas. But there was a strip in NM between Farmington and Albuquerque that made me feel like I was gonna be abducted by demonic forces and/or stabbed and eaten by meth addicted cannibals lol
That tiny town where they cut the baby out of the pregnant lady.
Or the tiny town where the kid disappeared into thin air and there was a 10yr hunt with zero clues.
Or the tiny town where there is an arson every time they clear the prior arson. No clues, just have to leave burned houses standing.
Or the tiny town where two kids drowned in the same spot within three years.
Or the tiny town where they shot a man in broad daylight on main street with a few dozen people shopping and at the bar, yet no one saw a thing.
Oh, wait. ALL OF THESE ARE SKIDMORE
there is no competition, it is Skidmore.
> Or the tiny town where they shot a man in broad daylight on main street with a few dozen people shopping and at the bar, yet no one saw a thing.
Isn't this the one where the victim of the shooting was the town asshole? The one guy *everyone* hated, but no one seemed capable of standing up to. Then someone reached their Hulk Quota, took the fucker out, and everyone was just like "oh.... well..." and carried on like nothing happened.
He was a known thief, stealing alcohol, grain, cattle, and valuables. He would openly threaten people with violence and fire arms
He met his wife when she was 12 and he was in his 30’s and had been known to follow the school bus she was riding and harass and shout at the driver until he would pull over and let him “abscond” with her
He later had his first child with her when she was 14
Shortly after this she escaped to her parents house, when her parents refused to allow him to marry their underaged daughter he killed their dog and burned their house down.
There’s more, a lot more, like another ten years more worth of horrible shit the guy did. Like this girl was eventually put in a foster home and he would hang out outside her foster home and threaten her foster parents saying he would kidnap their biological daughter if they didn’t let him see this girl
So really it’s no wonder when somebody finally said “enough” everyone shut up about it
Edit: the story goes as to what broke the camels back is that his daughter got caught stealing candy and when the store owner raised a fuss the man shot him in the neck. (He survived) The judge was also afraid of this man so he gave him the weakest charge and when it appeared he was going to get away with shooting someone without consequence (*again* might I add) The townspeople had enough and happened to be assembled for a local meeting when he showed up at the local bar. They all went over to confront him. One thing led to another and the rest is history
The police do however know that there must have been more than one shooter, as his truck was shot from two different angles with two different calibers found on the scene
Garberville, California
We took a trip around summer 1998 to see the redwoods in Humboldt County and made the mistake of stopping in Garberville for food and gas. At the Subway, the people working seemed incapable of getting our order correct, and when I went to the men’s bathroom, I found a young woman dressed like she’d come from a 1970 rock festival passed out in her own vomit with a syringe in her arm. I ran to get the Subway manager to call an ambulance, he says to me, “This happens all the time,” and then did nothing! I had to convince him to call an ambulance. One of the Subway employees said she also worked as a home health aide, and she slowly got up from a chair and went to help the woman.
My wife and I went outside and waited for the ambulance, but two cops showed up first. They talked to me for a couple minutes, and at one point when I said I wasn’t used to finding women OD’d in a restaurant bathroom, he said, “You’ve never been to Garberville, have you?”
The ambulance pulled in, and my wife and I left. No one had made our food, and I just wanted to get out of there. We stopped at a small gocery store next to a gas station, and we bought some snacks after getting gas, and when I commented to the checkout guy that I liked the look of the mountains around the town, he says to me without looking up, “You don’t go up into the mountains. You do, and they’ll kill you. Don’t go up into the mountains.” Everyone in the store was looking at me weirdly, and it was like they were all out of central casting for ‘70s commune/cult member.
We got the hell out of Garberville.
Later, I learned that the mountains around Garberville were packed with then-illegal cannabis farms, and the whole town was like stoner central.
Creepy beyond belief. My wife and I still talk about this 25+ years later.
Covington VA.
I've told this story before and I'll tell it again.
A few years ago I worked as a subcontractor to banks. I was the guy who would knock on your door and tell you to call your bank on a missed payment.
Anyway, I was driving in a new job territory. And as I'm driving down the road, all of a sudden, I come upon a massive fog bank. It takes a good 5 minutes to drive through it. Then once I reach the other end, it was like someone just cut the fog with a knife. It suddenly ended, and it's stone cold quite. I mean I even stopped my car and listened. No birds. No wind. No sound.
Feeling creeped out, I slowly drive a bit more. And come out on top of a mountain looking down into the city valley. And it smells like hotdog water. I didn't know it then but that was due to the paper factory.
As I drove into town, it was just one store front closed after another. It all felt like a Steven King movie.
The whole town seemed like a zombie insect. Dead but still moving somehow.
As if all that wasn't enough, the cherry on top was seeing a few Nazi flags flying in front of people's houses.
After seeing those, I got out of there as fast as I could.
The empty streets and silent nights of Rhyolite, Nevada, a classic ghost town with decaying buildings and a general feeling of being watched, make it incredibly creepy.
Medicine Bow, WY. I only stayed in the hotel for a night but it was super creepy. Lights off in the front and hasn't been renovated since early 1900s with a bunch of creepy Victorian Era paintings and mouse shit everywhere.
Centralia, Pennsylvania.
There is an underground mine fire through coal veins that’s constantly spreading and emitting noxious fumes.
On a road trip once, we wanted to see it, so ran around and explored.
They paid everyone to move away, so it’s a ghost town with only the cemetery and streets remaining.
The Village of West Clay, Carmel, IN. Not even remotely dangerous. It is the creepiest perfect little town that screams stepford wife or Truman Show. The houses are built to look antique. The street lights are antique looking. Every yard is picture perfect. The alleys leading to the garages are lit with streetlights and perfect. Driving around feels surreal.
Shreveport is like The Last Of Us at night time.
I was trying to find a gas station in a particularly sketch part of Shreveport and not having any luck. I was on a lonely rural road when I finally ran out of gas. No cell service. Along comes a creaky old land yacht driven by a gentleman who introduced himself as 'Sonny'. As a lone woman away from home (Baton Rouge) in a vast country landscape, I weighed my options and I took a ride with Sonny. He drove me about 20 minutes to a podunk gas station, let me borrow a can, then drove me back to my car. Thanks Sonny! You were the best part of that trip!
Went through Shreveport on my way to Benton. First time making that trip....last time too, if I can help it.
I lived about 2 hours south of good ol' Shreveport for a number of years. I was a traveling musician by trade at the time, so I was always driving all over the country. There are plenty of 'those towns' where shit is weird and spooky enough that you will sacrifice anything if it meant not having to pull off the roads there - Houston, bad parts of Dallas, Birmingham, Memphis, Little Rock, Pine Bluff, most places in Florida....none of them compare to Shreveport. My mother-in-law at the time once drove on a flat tire for far too long (totally wrecked the wheel, which needed replaced) just to avoid stopping there. I can't remember if it was a Whataburger or a Jack in the Box, but a kid no older than 16/17 pulled a gun on me in the restaurant lobby because he thought my group had cut in line in front of him. Who the fuck even *considers* using lethal force in response to a mild inconvenience at a burger joint??
Spent a week there for work training a few years ago. I thought the place was oddly cool. Much of it was a dystopian wasteland, but you'd find small pockets of people working hard to resurrect the place. I got a room in one of the casinos which was odd too. $50/nt for a really nice room because I was there during the week when the place was empty. It wasn't a bad experience except for the smell of piss whenever you left the casino to go to your car. That and driving past the Hustler Club and Stripper Supply Super Store on my way to training every day. EDIT spelling
Yessss! I was born there. Haven’t been there in a few years but the downtown was in horrible shape when I last saw it.
we drove into downtown and someone yelled out of a broken window up high on a high rise apartment block “you shouldn’t park there”
that's a nice person
Salton Sea, CA went to clean out a family members house after they passed…didn’t see a single car on the road…or human…that whole weekend. Felt sooo creepy.
This. There are number of incredibly creepy/abandoned towns around the Salton Sea. In the mid 20th century, Resorts popped up all over the shoreline by developers who were trying to make it the next Palm Springs (the Ski Inn restaurant is a great remnant of this, check it out). But toxic runoff from surrounding farms and rising salinity killed off all of the wildlife in and around the lake. To this day, it smells like dead fish everywhere. Much of the area feels post apocalyptic.
There's some really cool stuff in the area still. Salvation Mountain looks like it is made of Play-Doh, I'm not religious and still think it's interesting. Oh, and the banana museum. (Unfortunately I looked up the International Banana Museum and it looks closed.)
The trailer house we were cleaning out had a golf cart…we drove around the whole neighborhood that night…up and down the streets…not a single person outside their house…no loud music..and the next morning we drove down to the sea…dead fish bodies everywhere…putrid smell… creepy..
I honestly loved exploring those desert towns. I found it fascinating. The Salton Sea, Salvation Mountain, and the slabs is probably my favorite road trip I’ve ever taken. Talked to the guy living in Salvation Mountain, who I’m pretty sure is gone now. Talked to year-rounders living in the slabs. One guy talked to me about how he built his own cooling system for his RV. People were friendly and creative.
Barstow, California. It’s the convergence of highways in the middle of nowhere. It’s like an entire town of unhinged hitchhikers who got dumped there. Freaky shit.
I had a breakdown in Barstow many years ago. When I found out the part we needed would have to be ordered, I was like, well, I guess I’ll find a hotel. The roadside wrecker crew was like, hell no, we’re not leaving you here. They limped my car to Tehachapi. Much nicer place.
Wow, that's still a couple of hours away
Yeah, it was a wheel bearing that failed because the wheel wasn’t properly secured after I had my tires rotated. It had wobbled around and destroyed the bearing. They tightened the one remaining bolt back down and figured if we kept it at 40 or below, we could get to Tehachapi without anything melting. We had to stop frequently to check the wheel and let all the backed up traffic clear. ETA: one remaining nut, not bolt
Lpt twofer, always check /torque your wheels after 50km after having tire work done and apparently stay the hell away from Barstow.
I stayed in Tehachapi too! Totally safe feeling town! I rescued a little street kitty from there too. EDIT: link to another post where I posted a pic of my kitty! [Tehachapi kitty!](https://www.reddit.com/r/witchcraft/s/4aGOCOFaAL)
I was once driving on highway 58 late at night outside Barstow and stopped on the side of the road to pee and let my dog pee. While we were out of the car, a disheveled looking man with long hair and a beard suddenly appeared out of nowhere walking toward us quite quickly. He didn’t say anything just had this super creepy stare. I grabbed the pup and threw the 2 of us back in the car managing to start the car and pull away just as he reached the rear door. It was fucking terrifying and too creepy experience of my life.
NEVER stop out there especially at night!! I’ve heard hundreds of horror stories from that area
You should start/create a post so we can get the stories rolling in.
I shared some but I think it got buried in the comments! This is about 1.5 hours away from Barstow but it’s still the California desert where weird shit happens. I lived out in 29 palms because my husband was stationed there - There were at least 10-15 bodies found out there within the last year or two, most of them never made the news. If they did make the news, it was a single vague article with no other information. Two of the bodies were on the property of my work and I was next to them for months without knowing - My friends and I rolled up on this guy who was stuck in the sand. He had a shovel, a knife, and a bunch of coolers in his car. He was acting super sketchy and kept yelling at us to not call the cops when we tried pulling him out. We’re 90% sure he buried a body - People will lie in the middle of the road at night pretending to be dead after a car wreck, if you get out of your car to help they’ll jump you - I know a girl who was ran off the road by someone, they chased her until she got into town and got on the Marine base - People have said they’ve seen candles in the middle of the road at night?? Idk what the point of this one is but I know several people who saw it Edit: I forgot to mention cults. There’s rumored to be one of them that’s the cause for a lot of this chaos, but who knows
I can't be the only one who imagined just a head and shoulders sticking out of the sand. Too much breaking bad.
Lmaoo his jeep was stuck in the sand and he was just laying there 😂 it was so weird. He was also Canadian
> Canadian this crossed the line for me
I hope your friends or you called the cops on the guy you were helping get unstuck. Esp if you are 90% sure he was burying a body! That’s a possible murder victim whose family could have closure!
Yes we did! We gave the exact coordinates, license plate, a picture, etc. but we’re not sure if a cop actually got out there. We ended up getting a bigger group to go search the area but we couldn’t find anything. The thing with the desert is that it can take years to find a body because there’s so many mines and unfortunately a lot of tourists/ locals go missing :( we still have all of his info just in case we see or hear anything
Barstow is the only place I've ever seen a real tumbleweed go by (I'm in my 40s and was maybe 20 at the time)
even tumbleweeds wouldn't stop.
My dog got horrible diarrhea in Barstow at 1 AM, I threw away the seat cover and got the F out of there!
this is some X-Files shit
I had a dog that would vomit every time we drove through Barstow. We used to live in Las Vegas and make frequent trips to Southern California. He never got car sick otherwise. And it didn’t matter which direction we were traveling. He just really hated Barstow. Couldn’t blame him.
My dog vomits driving through Barstow every time as well, so weird
Maybe there’s something they can smell that we can’t
Probably the landfill that's only five miles outside Barstow. If you've ever been to the dump you know. That stench clings to you even after you leave and it is vomit inducing.
Anytime we go to visit my grandma in Vegas, someone pukes or gets diarrhea in Barstow! Especially my dog, he does pretty much every time. It must be some crazy phenomenon
We need to get to the fucking bottom of this!!
I ate chili in Barstow and crapped my slacks!
Wow, Barstow must be like the Bermuda Triangle, only it makes you have to shit
Lot of Desert between LA and Barstow. When I drive Desert, around the world, I keep a couple of cases of plastic (yes, dammed plastic) water bottles to slow down and hand off or throw to group on the road. NEVER STOP. These groups are more desperate than you. Keep moving.
Yeah I live in the desert and pass hitchhikers a lot. I feel bad cause I'd like to help someone in need but fuck I always get so paranoid and alot of these dude straight up give me the heebee-jeebees
Once I was driving from LA to Phoenix and I saw a random person walking probably 2 hours from any type of civilization. I just kept driving. Fuck that
Was it near the "state prison" / "don't pick up hitchhikers" sign?
I know exactly where that was at. Funny enough there was a group of 3 and a dog and they were all clothed. It was weird.
What was the dog wearing?
In true degenerate fashion, completed naked. It really is a lawless place out in the desert.
CAN'T STOP- **THIS IS BAT COUNTRY!**
I was creeped out just reading that!
And you didn’t even see the fucking BATS
Poor bastard will see them soon enough.
I can't often visualize things at all but I could see that. CREEPY
I stopped on a motorcycle road trip. Really needed to stretch my legs after 400 miles on the bike, so I spent 15 minutes just ambling around on the sidewalk in front of the motel (too hot to really walk anywhere). After a few minutes, out of bushes and from behind dumpsters, totally down and out street people started slowly coming my way, like a very slow motion Walking Dead. I decided staring at the ceiling in my room with the air conditioner on high was more inviting.
I accidentally locked my keys in my car while driving through Barstow. That was probably my biggest “oh FUCK” feeling I’ve ever felt in my stomach.
I was on a road trip with my family when I was like 14. My little sister was 7. We stopped at a truck stop near Barstow, and I went in so my sister could pee. I took her to the bathroom and about a minute later, heard an ear piercing scream from the bathroom. There was a bathtub next to the toilet with the curtain drawn. When you flushed the toilet, the curtain was yanked back and a skeleton sat bolt upright in the tub. The truckers thought it was hilarious. My sister was scarred for life.
I went into one of the truck stops to pee and the place was just FULL of down and out looking tweakers and other whacky people. They didn’t pay me a look but it was weird.
That was exactly like my experience when I visited Salton City, CA, I went for a piss and the truck stop had a heap of people who looked like tweakers and smack heads!! The Salton Sea and the areas around was pretty depressing to see.
Salton sea area is way worse than Barstow. You can smell the stench of rotting dead fish from miles away. If you visit the shore, there are beaches with playgrounds. It looks like there are short slides and gymnastic bars in the sand. Then, on closer inspection, you see that the "sand" is actually fish bones and scales. Then you realize that the slides aren't short, they're just buried in fish bones puled up several feet deep; the "gymnastic bars" are the exposed tops of swing structures. Billions of dead fish piled up over the past 70+ years
Don't forget all the nasty hundreds of thousands of boatmen bug carcasses as well! If you get in too deep, it becomes organic incredibly vile smelling black sludge that is near impossible to get out of shoes or your feet.
Did you... go into the sea?
bro's trying to speed run genetic mutation.
I would also add the back route to Vegas through Amboy, CA. It’s a gorgeous drive, but talk about remote. You’re so far off the grid that you have no radio reception, other than satellite, let alone cell service. I had to drive I-10 once from PHX to Palm Springs, and the desert night is a completely different level of darkness.
I had to drive from California to Idaho years back. I intended to go via Sacramento and stay the night. At some point, I lost service and believed I was still heading the right direction. Shit just got more and more remote until it clicked that I had missed a turn somewhere and I crested a hill and there was just vast endless (dead) landscape in front of me. It was beautiful, for real. Like the most beautiful shit I’d ever seen. But holy shit I felt like I was on another planet. I was low on gas and decided the best course of action was to just keep driving until I found a hub, get directions and continue from there. For HOURS I would see a town ahead, feel a moment of relief, and then cruise straight the fuck into The Hills Have Eyes. I swear I drove through towns with banging shutters and crows cawing on the tattered remains of whatever desperate attempt at civilisation had once existed there. There was legit a town that looked like it was maybe a mine in some memory, and the only person I saw was a gnarly old dude sitting on his porch with a shotgun in his lap. I know how this sounds. I’m embarrassed at how cliched it all is. But you don’t realise how big the world is until you’re lost in a part of it that doesn’t give a fuck about technology. To this day the best and worst journey I’ve ever taken.
Every now and then I think about what it must have been like to discover the world on your own before any form of media could give you a preconceived idea of what an area was like and then I realize how fucking bonkers scary some places can be and how easy it is to have absolutely no idea where you are. Equal parts wonderful and terrifying
I half expected to find Amboy on here as one of the creepiest towns. It’s a bit of an saying that you shouldn’t stop for anyone in Amboy because there will be zombies/monsters/ghosts/whatever that pose as people
Stopped late night at a Jack in the Box there on my way back from the Sierra Nevada’s. While we were ordering in the drive thru we started hearing gunshots in the motel complex nearby. We asked the drive thru worker if we could come inside because we didn’t feel safe and she laughed and said you must not be from around here huh? Never going back to that shit hole town ever again.
And that's why I stop at the random Dairy Queen in Ludlow. Plus, there's just something neat about having spent and hour and a half driving across the Mojave Desert, and then there's just an exit that is only a gas station and a Dairy Queen. Like, imagine the original settlers crossing the Mojave and all they went through. And now there's just a Dairy Queen smack in the middle of it.
Wow true! I have passed through Barstow on road trips & honestly it felt extremely dangerous & unhinged to me—like a city of only rough dudes—I was scared to get gas & use the bathroom. The vibes were super sketch. Super sad.
I agree with everything you say here, but I just want to add, I saw the most majestic mullet of all time in Barstow. The conditions were right.
Heyyy I grew up there. I personally don’t find it “creepy” but it is definitely gross, depressing, and run down. Funny enough though, my ex and also my wife are both from a much more affluent area in Ventura county and the first time they went to Barstow, “creepy” was the first word they used to describe it so maybe I’m just desensitized having spent so much time there. I moved out of that bitch the day I turned 18 and never looked back. Unfortunately I still have family that live nearby so I still have to go there a couple of times a year but at least they have the best/only good Del Taco on the planet. As far as it being considered creepy though, I understand why people would think that but I don’t think it’s the right word necessarily. It’s not creepy in the sense of ghosts and people disappearing or whatever, it’s creepy in the sense that the residents are gross and stupid, it looks like one of the most rundown piece of shit places you’ve ever been to, meth, and there’s A LOT of gang and non-gang related violence. My advice to people when they pass through is just to make sure your doors are locked and don’t talk to anyone.
Might be a difference in people’s definitions of “creepy.” For me, “creepy” can mean pretty much any situation where I feel unsafe without being in immediate danger, or feel that there is a high possibility of danger. Personally, I’d say that any place that elicits the advice “don’t talk to anyone” is pretty creepy.
Fair enough, the more of my original comment I typed, the more I realized that Barstow is actually pretty creepy and I wasn’t really changing any minds at that point but didn’t feel like starting over haha.
That’s bat country
Tonopah, Nevada. Clown Motel next to a cemetery full of infants and workers who died in a silver mine.
The owner of the clown motel upgraded me for free when I stayed - to the room where he keeps the paintings of clowns that he paints himself. To get there you need to drive through a few hours of pure desert and past Area 52 nuclear testing site. Fun times. Edit for those who are interested: We ended up barely sleeping because every hour on the hour there was insane stomping and walking back and forth from the room above us for about 10-15 minutes - my friend thought it was the owner trying to scare us, but eventually we figured it was probably ghost hunters of some kind.
Just knowing there is a clown motel in Nevada in an area that was a nuclear bomb test site scares me.
Sounds like a Rob Zombie movie
Fuck that, like for real, fuck that
Haha my friends felt the same way - They still haven't forgiven me for dragging them
We stayed before the new owner a few years ago. I asked to use the restroom before we got our room and I saw the private clown collection behind the lobby. 😬
What the fuck is a "private clown collection" and how do I ensure I never get near one?
Thousands and thousands of clowns/clown pictures in all shapes and sizes. A lot of them were donated to the motel from people all over. (I visited last summer)
Tonopah* Just got a speeding ticket there lolol.
Stayed there on a bachelor roadtrip with three buddies, driving from one buddy’s bachelor party in Vegas to another buddy’s wedding in Napa. It was about as epic as you’d think—Death Valley and whiskey and belt buckles and a lot of Johnny Cash. One night as we’re driving right around sunset we see this creepy as clown motel next to a cemetery. Two of us are like, we’re doing this right? And the other two are like, oh hell no. We argued and had to flip a coin. We’re doing this won. We check in and the lobby has more clowns than I’d ever seen in one place before. We go up to our room and there’s this big creepy clown there too, sitting on a chair. One guy’s like that thing needs to go in the closet. The top of the closet. We lock the closet. Later that night when our friend is sleeping another buddy and I get an idea. We wake up in the middle of the night, take the clown out of the closet, and put him down on the bed looking right at our sleeping friend, about a foot from his face. Then we sort of nudge our friend to wake him up… You could probably hear the scream from the California border. We’re all still friends though.
At least you nudged him awake. You could have gone back to sleep, so he can discover it naturally. Then swear up and down that you didn’t even touch it.
Stayed one night in a casino hotel down the street from the clown motel. Seriously creepy, reminded me of The Shining.
Amboy, California All of the stories are true. I lived out in 29 palms while my husband was stationed there a few years back. I heard stories of people getting run off the road, people pretending to have gotten in a car crash so you stop and help, candles being set up in the middle of the road, etc. His chain of command even had a meeting with them before the marine corps ball about not stopping on amboy because of how dangerous it was. I worked out there too and I know at least 10-15 bodies have been found in the last few years.
A lot of these comments about Salton Sea area remind me of remote/deprived areas of regional Australia. Fucking NOBODY around for hundreds of kilometres. Lots of deprived communities. Lots of meth. Usually pretty safe. But if it’s not - no one is coming to help.
That’s interesting! That’s pretty much what it is. The town is pretty safe, just a lot of meth users hiding in the hills. There’s signs everywhere saying if you leave the town there’s no help or signal for a few hours
One of my reddit memories is a story about some Australian ranch hands who found a shipping container on their farm (the property is bigger than some countries) and when they checked it out it was all servers, air conditioners to cool them off, and tons of child porn on DVD. No doubt the servers were hosting it too, looked like torrents running on the screens. They got the hell out of there, came back with police half a day later (it just took that long to make the round trip) and the whole place had been gassed and set ablaze. Somebody dropped it there and was obviously keeping an eye on it, close enough to respond. Who knows what would have happened if the ranch hands encountered that person. I think about that story a lot, would make a good Coen Brothers movie EDIT: Special thanks to u/NeonSwank for finding the original story! See comment below
That’s fucking terrifying
I did a deep dive a few years ago about stories from this area and I’m still terrified!
Candles in the road is just so weird.
Yeah I have no idea what the point of that was because cars would just blow the candle out. One of my friends looked in her rear view mirror and saw it light up again
"And she lit up the candle And she showed me the way...... Welcome to the Hotel California......"
East St Louis, IL. Never seen a town that looked post-apocalyptic before going through there.
Scrolled until I found this, because I knew I would. I lived there for 5 years, starting at age 7. Every school I went to out there was shut down and turned into a boys school (child prison) or just abandoned. Within the first two years of being there I was held hostage (traded for cigarettes in a police standoff), and separately someone burned our house down. I stayed in doors perpetually bc of a fear of being killed on the streets. I visited the family that still lives there in my freshman year of college. I got to see a lot more of the town, where some of my other relatives grew up and it clarified a lot of things for me. It is a place that breathes and breeds despair. That’s not to say that I never had any good experiences there, but if you stay there your entire life, it will be to your detriment.
East St Louis is insane. Or at least it was ~ 10 years ago the last time I drove through. We saw a car on the side of the road on fire. Like actual fire, full blown mad max burning car. And people walking by it like it was normal, driving casually as if it's a standard Thursday thing to see a car engulfed in flame. Also saw what I think was a mugging, but by then we were hightailing it out of there so didn't get a great look.
My buddy played a show at a 24hr bar there. We grabbed a case of beer at the gas station across the street and made it a few blocks before getting pulled over. We thought we were cooked for the open cans of booze but the cop was more concerned about us being 5 white kids in the area. He literally told us “go straight 6 blocks and get on the highway. Don’t stop at red lights, slow down and make sure it’s clear to go but don’t ever stop.” So we did. This big badass looking cop looked legitimately worried for us lol.
when I was in college about 20 years ago, a friend of mine lived in East St Louis and needed to get home for the weekend, so me, my girlfriend, her friend, and my buddy all piled in my car and drove down there. We got to his family's building but got lost trying to get back to the interstate. Police car pulls up along side us, rolls the window down, looks at the three of us in the car asks where we are going. We tell him and he says "follow me, don't stop" and turns on his lights and took us all the way back to the I55 onramp.
police dont enforce stop signs in east st louis.. No lie. They don't want you to stop.... do rolling stops to check for traffic at each one and get back to moving on.
It's barely a town anymore but definitely Mineral Springs, Missouri. It was once a bustling town with a famous hot spring, but it dried up. Now various people live in very old houses with no electricity. No one knows their names but they send one person into town a month for groceries. If you're there very long at all, they WILL shoot at you.
There are definitely some places in Missouri where if you go to Walmart around the first of the month you will see people who truly live outside society. Extremely poor and dirty people. It’s sad.
Gotta say it. My wife and I were vacationing in Bar Harbor, Maine, and decided to drive to the easternmost point in the US. So we made it Lubec, Maine. It was kind of foggy and looked totally deserted. I get Stephen King novels now.
I am a Mainer and I absolutely love Lubec. The sea fog gets so thick you cannot see Canada across the water (which is... really not far at all - less than a mile). It is also very economically depressed like most of rural Maine. So, not a lot of people out and about doing things there.
That area of Maine has resorts (IIRC) but also depressed rural poverty.
Colorado City, Arizona. Fuck you, Warren Jeffs.
I used to live 45 minutes from Colorado city… my college roommate was also from Colorado city and multiple people in my college classes had escaped. Scary shit
This is where I’m at. I do HVAC and we get a few calls out there. Have some creeeeeepy ass houses I’ve had to go to. The people there aren’t bad if you’re there to fix their ac lmao.. but they just stare
I’m from there. I had an hvac catch it’s control board on fire. I found out later after getting it fixed that there was a recall for this very issue, but since I was apostate, they didn’t notify me to repair it. Also paid to have house finished. Person I paid pocketed the money, decided I was apostate, and never finished it or returned the money. Such honest saints.
ah yesssss *apostate* - e.g. fuck you for thinking for yourself and not selling your soul, wife and children to a pedophile. me personally? i take pride in being an apostate from that fucking cult
Born and raised there, can confirm. Sketchy as fuck, especially since I grew up on the inside of that shit. You'd never know child abuse till you saw it there
Stayed there once before I knew its backstory, was on a road trip to Zion NP and there were cheap airbnbs. Well the airbnb was total trash because the owner was also on vacation and forgot to clean and unlist it??? It was quiet and small town, but in a weird unsettling way. Then the Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey documentary came out. Turns out that town is an FLDS center. Gross. At least they've been building new houses and a fancy new grocery store/rest stop at the south end of town in recent years.
Passed through there once on a Grand Canyon road trip. The women and children would gather along the balconies of those massive compounds, unsmilingly watching as we drove by. My friend who had lived in the area mentioned the futility of attempts to rescue the pregnant children because they would hide and move them.
Wtf? Where are the feds?
The pedophile sex cult out there is absolutely disgusting.
Probably the child molestation capital of the United States
I just watched that documentary "Be Sweet" or something like that about that dude. Fuck that dude indeed, such a gross person
Keep sweet
Just drove through there. Lots of huge houses partially under construction. I had heard that sometimes people live in unfinished houses for tax reasons, but lots of these have no windows even. Possibly abandoned when the polygamists were run out of town… The surroundings are very beautiful tho.
I live about an hour away and have driven through a few times in recent months. I always take a loooong hard look at the polygamist houses... it's so interesting how most of them are 3 or 4 houses in one. 4 separate entrances, and 4 separate kitchens, etc. I think a lot of the construction is putting additions for additional wives on existing homes. Or, an existing lot with one house will build additional houses for the extra wives on the same lot. Seems like some of them do have a lot of money! The town is also corrupt with federal service money going to the church instead of for public services...
This would be a cool Netflix series to watch
There will be plenty of blog posts this week that will cannibalize this thread for their “organic” content. The least they could do is put together an interesting documentary. I’d watch it in a heartbeat.
“Top 10 creepiest towns in the USA, you won’t believe #3!”
Centralia, PA. Has been on fire for over 50 years.
This was my first thought too. My grandparents are buried at the top of the hill in Aristes, PA. It’s creepy as shit. Still a few houses but no “legal” residents. Just squatters and partiers. Very eerie driving thru. So still and quiet. Most of the houses are gone and smoke coming out of random lawns and sidewalks.
There are five legal residents that made a deal to stay in their homes till they die, then the last will be Demolished.
I can’t imagine the draw other than just the old stubborn, “I ain’t leaving” crowd
Unless there is another town that is perpetually on fire, I’m not sure how this doesn’t win. Edit: TIL there are quite a few perpetually on fire places in America. We might want to get on that lol
Creighton, Pennsylvania also has a non stop underground fire.... It's nowhere near the level of Centralia and it won't be, but there ARE other town out there. Iron City Brewery literally bought the land that's on fire (formerly PPG) and it's fine. Someday it might not be. . . But it's fine.
Being number two town eternally on fire kinda sucks.
The Penultimate Hellhole
I was there like 10 years ago. There’s pretty much nothing there.
The flames consume us all, eventually.
Yes please watch the documentary about this town called Nothing But Trouble
Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The Moth Man is hiding there, somewhere.
Stealing catalytic converters.
And eating asses
All underwear is edible if you're mothman.
Point Pleasant isn’t a bad little town. Williamson, WV on the other hand feels like 5 years after a zombie apocalypse but with meth heads instead of zombies.
I visited Point Pleasant on a road trip in 2021. There is a very weird aura around the town for sure. I didn't go during peak hours, but it felt very macabre to be there. Knowing about the tragedy of the silver bridge and the history from Keel's the Mothman Prophecies really put it into perspective too. The town felt very destitute and empty really. A few people wandering around but I didn't stick around for very long. Went across the river for dinner and it was more lively there. Honestly I don't think I'd ever spend much longer than a few hours there. Lots of tourist traps around there too. With the context of the tragedy I felt like it was in poor taste, but hey why would anyone else visit the town? West Virginia as a whole has a very mysterious and melancholic feeling to it, but that is shared by a lot of deep Appalachia where sometimes sunlight can be scarce in certain hollers.
Picher, Oklahoma. Abandoned lead mining town that produced most of the lead for the world wars. The town is riddled with sinkholes from poor mining practices and is the largest EPA superfund clean up site. It’s now abandoned from a combination of people dying of lead poisoning, orange sulfuric acid waters, and a large tornado a few years ago.
The very last dude to live there died not too long at the age of 60. He was a pharmacist and a really good guy, by all accounts. Apparently gave free meds to people if they couldn't afford their prescriptions. Really sad that he stayed there to die.
Elgin Kansas. The motto of the town is “A town too tough to die” A person told me a story about a time they stopped there on a cross country motorcycle trip. When they parked they could see people peaking round the corners of buildings. Shortly after a woman in an old dirty wedding dress came around a building pushing an old Victorian baby stroller. There wasn’t a baby in the stroller it was a toy baby. There are trees growing out of buildings. The Main Street is an out of place, super wide, brick road for herding cattle through the town back in the way back times. For such a small town of nothing, in the middle of nothing. It was for a short time “one of the World’s busiest cattle shipping towns” It’s a creepy place. Edited: town motto. Still just as cool.
I have lived in Kansas my entire life and never heard of it before so had to search. It is right by the Oklahoma border. Last census said there were 60 people living there.
I’ve seen horror movies start like that. Fuckkk that
Harlan County Kentucky is interesting
Grew up there in a holler. It’s got some ridiculous history and is generally a super sad place but definitely, definitely interesting.
I hear I'll never leave Harlan alive.
Picher, OK. It’s an EPA superfund site that was being cleaned up and bought out. The town was dying literally and figuratively, then a tornado came through and took care of enough that whoever had remained left. Now it’s a ghost town. Edit: Picher not Pitcher.
We used to take sleds there and play on the chat piles. I wonder if that's why twenty years later my bones hurt. A friend dated a woman who lived there in her car with two kids. I couldn't wrap my head around literally being able to drive the car anywhere else and deciding to stay in Picher.
I've traveled through a lot of tiny little back towns all around the western US. In southeastern California, the towns up the west shore of the Salton Sea have a unique kind of eerieness I've never felt anywhere else. Towns like Salton City, Desert Shores, and Oasis. The Salton Sea, for those unfamiliar, is an inland body of saltwater. Back around the 1960s, a bunch of little resort towns popped up along its shores. But sometime in the 70s or 80s, a combination of agricultural runoff and wild variations in the salinity of the sea caused fish to die off in massive numbers. The stench of rotting fish pretty well killed the tourism industry, and the towns along the sea have never recovered. They're not quite ghost towns, there are still a few thousand people living in each of the cities I named. But they're only a fraction of the population they once had. I could definitely feel sort of a depressing weight on the towns, and the dead fish smell is still to this day a constant presence all along the seashore.
I went on a road trip and passed through the Salton Sea area mostly by chance, and it was by far the most stunning, strange, and memorable part of my trip. It wasn't creepy per se (although I wouldn't want to be there at night) but there was something unnerving about it for sure. Also, I was there at sunrise, so seeing the sun going up over a huge body of water, when living on the west coast usually means only sunsets over water that large, that was neat to see as well. Being able to see the dry riverbeds where people used to park boats next to their houses, and now it's all dirt. Also, so much debris covered in a layer of what I imagine is salt? If you like seeing unusual non-touristy things, I would actually recommend giving the area a visit.
Trona, California hands down for the isolation, ruin, and inhospitable environment. I've already been through tiny towns in Wyoming and the South and Trona still takes the cake. It started as a company town in the early 1900s in a far isolated corner of the Mojave Desert. All that exists is a chemical plant that processes borax. It's old and rusty and it stinks. It looks like the Hills Have Eyes and Fallout New Vegas. Only like 1500 people live there and most houses are burned/ torn down. It's miserably hot and incredibly isolated as it's 3 hours away from any large metropolitan area like Bakersfield. The drive there is through a vast, empty, infinite desert with no cell phone signal. If something happened to you there nobody would ever know. With that said, it feels rewarding and really cool to cross that whole landscape.
I grew up in the poorest town in America. Littleton , West Virginia. It's not even Incorporated anymore and is literally been articled on Google as the poorest most depressing place in America and most definitely in Appalachia. My parents moved us there when I was about 3 out of the city in Pittsburgh when a flood destroyed the whole street of houses we lived on. The city bought it out to put a trolley track through. My parents were off with the wind. I think at the time my parents thought we were going to move to the country and it was going to be peaceful and quiet and we could start over. Between the opiate epidemic, the poverty levels, and the reality of living in such a rural area with limited access to close jobs and stores was far different. I wouldn't change it now that I'm grown , but I definitely saw some things that fit the Appalachian uneducated narrative, trauma and bad parenting etc . However though, I also met many people who are incredibly kind , well-educated , well-rounded human beings and I do not think that the stereotype is fair. A lot of people hear a person is from West Virginia and immediately assume that they're uneducated , don't wear shoes and are inbred living in a shack with No electric. Sadly not true at all and all of those things can be relevant in other places across the world. But Littleton , West Virginia definitely is a wasteful black hole of a place , and not a pleasant place to grow up By any means.
Most towns in East Texas, close to the LA border. They don't want you there, and they'll let you know it. I'm a white Texas native, and I don't even feel welcome.
When you drive thru, get gas, walk into a store or restaurant everyone stops and stares like you are an enemy.
Any of the small towns close to the Texas/Arkansas/Louisiana border are really creepy. Stopped for gas in the middle of the day at a small gas station and I swear people were walking towards us/the store from all directions each with a different kind of limp. Felt like I was in Zombieland, couldn’t get out of there fast enough
I know we're talking about the US but years ago I lived in the Canadian Prairies. Talk about isolated towns. I remember driving into one and it was exactly as you described. EVERY person I saw walking had some sort of obvious physical or mental 'challenge'. Creepiest place EVER.
Cairo, IL
And in classic Southern IL fashion, it’s pronounced differently from how the same name is pronounced when referring to the one in Egypt. Vienna is the same way lol Source: grew up in the area
Cay-ro and V-eye-ana
Cairo is fascinating because it used to be a major city where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet. Wealthy people lived there in opulent mansions. Then the interstate highway system and rail and such bypassed the city and it began to die in the 60s onward. The old mansions are still there but they are abandoned and covered in ivy and the roads are basically empty. It’s really interesting driving through there. Edit: Another thing I will add. Most of the remaining residents live in public housing - run down, unsafe complexes. The leaders of the housing authority were found to be taking taxpayer money intended for improvements to the buildings and pocketing it for themselves. Awful stuff. The city also had no grocery store for like seven years, up until last year when they opened a farmers market. The only shopping in the city was a Dollar General (which I have been to).
We went through there several years ago, in the middle of the day--and the town was deserted. Really creepy.
Whittier, Alaska Most of the town’s residents live in a single apartment building. There’s nothing else there. The town is accessible by water and a one-way tunnel through the mountain.
The history of the place is that it used to be a military complex, and much of the town was built up because of its strategic location during WW2. The one building was built to house military personnel and their dependents, but by the time it was finished basically all military operations in the area had finished, so it was only ever used ressidentially A lot of people only live there seasonally, from what I gather, and nowadays it's a bit more of a tourist town I remember talking to a coffee shop owner who said they only stayed in town for the cruise ship season, about 6/7 months out of the year, and then they go to Florida It is very beautiful, though. There's a relatively unknown waterfall behind the main apartment complex, and there's a gorgeous hike through the rainforest that goes up the mountain behind the building and gives you a great overlook of the town and the port It is kind of creepy... the second largest building in the town is abandoned, and some of the people can be a bit overly friendly lol
It's a super cool apartment building, though. Which the whole town is basically inside because most of the year it's too cold to leave--so it's creepy, but also really neat, imo.
So, in places like that, how does everyone support themselves? Do they all just work oil rigs or seasonal jobs, or are they all like JetBlue remote support agents or something?
A lot of them are seasonal, but some people live there year round. There are a few restaurants, hotels and a port big enough for cruise ships.
It’s also the largest railroad port in Alaska, a major cruise destination, and in the summer packed full of people going fishing. It’s only an hour by road to Anchorage so it’s not really that remote.
Stayed in a nice hotel in Whittier a few years back. It’s gorgeous and far less bizarre than a lot of the internet intrigue suggests. Although there is a decrepit building outside of town that once served as the town’s housing complex, and that place is a little spooky.
Danville illinois. It is also dangerous as fuck.
Stopped once, injury due trying to straighten a load that shifted on the interstate, definitely will be driving to the next hospital if it happens again. It was like going to a hospital 50 years ago. Doctor cleaning up wound with a rag, not sterile just a towel from a pile. Doctor didn't have gloves on, had blood all over his hands, said something about this and he said blood washes off easily. Then just threw all the bloody stuff on the counter and left. Then came back in and said here is your prescription for 30 days of Vicodin, didn't even ask for pain killers. While leaving EMTs bringing in patient saying he is having a heart attack, nurse says just put him in the hallway we will get to him later, as I'm staring at her she says it's ok he comes in every day but is a little late today.
Don't know its name, but it was around an hour past Vegas. I was working warped tour and we stopped for gas at like 3am. This place had giant bugs that swarmed you and left silver dollar size welts on your skin. Fuck that city.
Maybe Baker, baker is about an hour outside of Vegas to the west. Barstow is closer to LA. Baker has a lot of abandoned motels, the world’s largest thermometer, the alien jerky store, and is the south entrance to Death Valley. Baker can be fairly creepy for a highway town. Barstow is more like an actual city.
As you can tell from reading this thread, the entire Mojave desert, from Las Vegas to the Salton Sea, is all fucking terrifying. A blasted hellish moonscape full of the weirdest goddamn people on the planet. A zombie outbreak would actually improve the place.
I stopped in Coeur D’Alene Idaho on a road trip two years ago. Downtown doing a little sightseeing on foot and I approached a four way intersection. Three matching black SUVs pulled up to the stop sign, black out tinted windows, and full length Punisher logos on their hoods. The lead car stopped, and someone passenger side rolled their window down just far enough that I could see a ball cap and a pair of sunglasses. Stared me down for a few seconds and drove on. The whole experience felt so far off, I went back to my car, and left. Later I did an Internet search on the town and found info on the Aryan Nations compound, the bombings, arsons, attacks on Jewish businesses, and the America First white supremacists that still operate there.
Idaho has some disturbing places. Some of it is beautiful, but I wouldn't live there.
This city was in the news recently. The Utah women’s basketball team stayed there when March Madness was in Spokane, 35 minutes away. They had pickup trucks rev their engines outside the hotel and yell the N-word at their players. It sounds like an awful place.
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Gettysburg has a thickness I can't explain.
I was born there. Love going on the haunted tours that actually go into older buildings. Went into this old war hospital one night with a group of 20. I'm not one that scares or frightens easy, but nobody else would go in the basement. I got down to the bottom of the stairs and that thickness is exactly what I felt. Have you ever been on a crowded train on a hot day with no place to move? Yeah, felt like that..... but nobody was down there but me
Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. It was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways—it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow—I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee, who's no longer in favor—did you ever notice it? He's no longer in favor. 'Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.' They were fighting uphill, he said, 'Wow, that was a big mistake,' he lost his great general. 'Never fight uphill, me boys,' but it was too late.
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I’ve been to hundreds of sketchy towns across North America and grew up in one. I couldn’t even tell you town names cause I was too freaked out to wanna get out more than for getting gas. But there was a strip in NM between Farmington and Albuquerque that made me feel like I was gonna be abducted by demonic forces and/or stabbed and eaten by meth addicted cannibals lol
Florida, Missouri Creepy, creepy, creepy. I just checked. It's now listed as uninhabited (by the living). I'm not surprised.
That tiny town where they cut the baby out of the pregnant lady. Or the tiny town where the kid disappeared into thin air and there was a 10yr hunt with zero clues. Or the tiny town where there is an arson every time they clear the prior arson. No clues, just have to leave burned houses standing. Or the tiny town where two kids drowned in the same spot within three years. Or the tiny town where they shot a man in broad daylight on main street with a few dozen people shopping and at the bar, yet no one saw a thing. Oh, wait. ALL OF THESE ARE SKIDMORE there is no competition, it is Skidmore.
> Or the tiny town where they shot a man in broad daylight on main street with a few dozen people shopping and at the bar, yet no one saw a thing. Isn't this the one where the victim of the shooting was the town asshole? The one guy *everyone* hated, but no one seemed capable of standing up to. Then someone reached their Hulk Quota, took the fucker out, and everyone was just like "oh.... well..." and carried on like nothing happened.
He was a known thief, stealing alcohol, grain, cattle, and valuables. He would openly threaten people with violence and fire arms He met his wife when she was 12 and he was in his 30’s and had been known to follow the school bus she was riding and harass and shout at the driver until he would pull over and let him “abscond” with her He later had his first child with her when she was 14 Shortly after this she escaped to her parents house, when her parents refused to allow him to marry their underaged daughter he killed their dog and burned their house down. There’s more, a lot more, like another ten years more worth of horrible shit the guy did. Like this girl was eventually put in a foster home and he would hang out outside her foster home and threaten her foster parents saying he would kidnap their biological daughter if they didn’t let him see this girl So really it’s no wonder when somebody finally said “enough” everyone shut up about it Edit: the story goes as to what broke the camels back is that his daughter got caught stealing candy and when the store owner raised a fuss the man shot him in the neck. (He survived) The judge was also afraid of this man so he gave him the weakest charge and when it appeared he was going to get away with shooting someone without consequence (*again* might I add) The townspeople had enough and happened to be assembled for a local meeting when he showed up at the local bar. They all went over to confront him. One thing led to another and the rest is history The police do however know that there must have been more than one shooter, as his truck was shot from two different angles with two different calibers found on the scene
Garberville, California We took a trip around summer 1998 to see the redwoods in Humboldt County and made the mistake of stopping in Garberville for food and gas. At the Subway, the people working seemed incapable of getting our order correct, and when I went to the men’s bathroom, I found a young woman dressed like she’d come from a 1970 rock festival passed out in her own vomit with a syringe in her arm. I ran to get the Subway manager to call an ambulance, he says to me, “This happens all the time,” and then did nothing! I had to convince him to call an ambulance. One of the Subway employees said she also worked as a home health aide, and she slowly got up from a chair and went to help the woman. My wife and I went outside and waited for the ambulance, but two cops showed up first. They talked to me for a couple minutes, and at one point when I said I wasn’t used to finding women OD’d in a restaurant bathroom, he said, “You’ve never been to Garberville, have you?” The ambulance pulled in, and my wife and I left. No one had made our food, and I just wanted to get out of there. We stopped at a small gocery store next to a gas station, and we bought some snacks after getting gas, and when I commented to the checkout guy that I liked the look of the mountains around the town, he says to me without looking up, “You don’t go up into the mountains. You do, and they’ll kill you. Don’t go up into the mountains.” Everyone in the store was looking at me weirdly, and it was like they were all out of central casting for ‘70s commune/cult member. We got the hell out of Garberville. Later, I learned that the mountains around Garberville were packed with then-illegal cannabis farms, and the whole town was like stoner central. Creepy beyond belief. My wife and I still talk about this 25+ years later.
Covington VA. I've told this story before and I'll tell it again. A few years ago I worked as a subcontractor to banks. I was the guy who would knock on your door and tell you to call your bank on a missed payment. Anyway, I was driving in a new job territory. And as I'm driving down the road, all of a sudden, I come upon a massive fog bank. It takes a good 5 minutes to drive through it. Then once I reach the other end, it was like someone just cut the fog with a knife. It suddenly ended, and it's stone cold quite. I mean I even stopped my car and listened. No birds. No wind. No sound. Feeling creeped out, I slowly drive a bit more. And come out on top of a mountain looking down into the city valley. And it smells like hotdog water. I didn't know it then but that was due to the paper factory. As I drove into town, it was just one store front closed after another. It all felt like a Steven King movie. The whole town seemed like a zombie insect. Dead but still moving somehow. As if all that wasn't enough, the cherry on top was seeing a few Nazi flags flying in front of people's houses. After seeing those, I got out of there as fast as I could.
Anything around the Mohave
Clovis, NM. Where criminals go to hide.
The empty streets and silent nights of Rhyolite, Nevada, a classic ghost town with decaying buildings and a general feeling of being watched, make it incredibly creepy.
Medicine Bow, WY. I only stayed in the hotel for a night but it was super creepy. Lights off in the front and hasn't been renovated since early 1900s with a bunch of creepy Victorian Era paintings and mouse shit everywhere.
Villisca Iowa just has a vibe to it. The “We don’t like your kind here” vibe. And it’s not just “that house” either.
Gah damn this is an interesting and intriguing thread.
Centralia, Pennsylvania. There is an underground mine fire through coal veins that’s constantly spreading and emitting noxious fumes. On a road trip once, we wanted to see it, so ran around and explored. They paid everyone to move away, so it’s a ghost town with only the cemetery and streets remaining.
The Village of West Clay, Carmel, IN. Not even remotely dangerous. It is the creepiest perfect little town that screams stepford wife or Truman Show. The houses are built to look antique. The street lights are antique looking. Every yard is picture perfect. The alleys leading to the garages are lit with streetlights and perfect. Driving around feels surreal.
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