Warning: This article mentions suicide and drowning.
Have you ever had a feeling someone's watching you or lurking about? That disaster could happen at any moment? You get a gut feeling that something's very wrong? Well, someone on Reddit asked people what the most horrifying parts about where they lived are, and they had some answers. Here are some of the most disturbing stories from the replies:
1."I live out in the country, on a quiet dirt road surrounded by woods. My nearest neighbor is a five-minute drive away, so I’ve always thought of this place as isolated and peaceful. But recently, I’ve had a couple of unsettling experiences. Twice now, I’ve caught two different people emerging from the woods and looking into my house."
"It makes me wonder how many times this has happened without me knowing. My dog often goes into a barking frenzy at what I assume is nothing, but now I’m not so sure. I’m starting to realize I might not be as alone out here as I thought.
Both times I’ve seen the strangers, they’ve come from the backside of my property. There are no roads out there, just miles of untouched land. So either they’re making a long, quiet loop from the dirt road, staying far enough away that even my dog doesn’t hear them, or they’re coming from somewhere back there. I’m not sure which possibility is worse.
I used to be afraid of all the usual things before I moved out to the country. Ticks that carry disease, a few venomous snakes around here that could kill you, some aggressive wildlife you’d rather not cross paths with. Hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and being too far for anyone to save me. But after living here for a while, I’ve realized it’s not nature I fear most, it’s people.
Animals act on instinct, not malice. Nature doesn’t discriminate; it just is. But people? People show up with intention. And too often, that intention feels like harm."
"This is the first entry that raised my eyebrows. Snakes, ticks, and tornadoes are all scary, but precautions can be taken. People emerging from the woods to look in your house is a scene from a horror movie."
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2."100+ years ago, the slaughterhouses in Chicago dumped so much of their waste into the Chicago river that there is a portion of the river that is still bubbling today because there are piles of rotten meat remaining at the bottom."
"Edit: Even more horrible, don't look up what happened to the fat that floated to the top of the river back in the day."
"It says that the part of the river where this occurs, the river bed is covered in 8 to 18 feet of animal carcasses and other stuff. Holy shit. Edit: I found a video from 6 years ago. It looks nasty."
"Bubbly creek! Chicago basically invented the factory farm with their pig slaughterhouses. They'd dump the waste products in the river, and the gases from the decomposition made the water bubble. That's the part of the river that still bubbles, though there's been some restoration work to it in recent years to clean it back up. It's mentioned in The Jungle and Devil in The White City."
3."I live in a neighborhood, but basically behind my house, two minutes out there is this river in a thick forest. We call it Rapid, real original name, I know. One of our buddies had gone alone to Rapid about three months ago and came back terrified. He told us he saw these people in the woods wearing strange clothing. Apparently, they didn’t notice him, and he was far enough away."
"Naturally, me and the boys didn’t believe him. He was so adamant about the story even weeks later. Eventually, we finally cracked. So a few weeks later, the five of us, including him, went out late at night around 1 a.m. to go to Rapid. It’s pretty easy to get there because it's a natural path we’ve created after so many years of going.
We get there. We are at the river side where we usually hang. And I’m not even joking, on the other side of the river, there is a man-made campfire with about six people surrounding it, standing. Our buddy was right, they wore weird clothing, almost like deer skin. The craziest part about that whole thing is that they had a severed deer head with antlers on a spike.
Lemme tell you we hightailed it so fast out of there. We called the police that same night to hopefully investigate the situation. They did, and went into the woods with us. They found nothing. The people were gone.
A month and a half ago, our local town police arrested 12 individuals. Apparently, it was a small cult that had been killing most of the bucks in the area, and they were allegedly living in the woods.
We haven’t been back to Rapid since."
4."I have a friend who lives in a town nearby and likes to take her dog for a walk along the riverbank. She's so far found several washed-up people and several people trying to commit suicide by jumping into the river."
"The last time she found a washed-up body, she and another passerby actually had a brief discussion where she politely asked the guy to call the police because she's already done it so many times that it was starting to look suspicious even to her."
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5."The number of people who underestimate Lake Michigan and drown every single year, year-round."
"Lake Michigan is HUGE, and it has its own currents, including the undertow, which every kid in this region has been taught to avoid at all costs and to swim diagonally to try to get out of it if they do get caught in it.
Still, people underestimate it, either because they're tourists who have never experienced a Great Lake, or it's people from the region who think they know better because 'I've been on this lake my whole life, it's fine.' Even in the winter, people will walk on the ice shelves WITH THEIR YOUNG KIDS. If you fall through the ice shelf, good luck getting out before you get hypothermia and drown. It's horrifying how many people do not respect the danger of the Great Lakes."
"I remember one summer on Lake Michigan, watching the Coast Guard helicopters go back and forth along about a ten-mile stretch of shoreline all day. All day. Turns out that those riptides claimed seven people in one day along that stretch."
6."I work at an alfalfa farm up in Arizona with an inmate crew out in the middle of nowhere (9 p.m.-7 a.m.). We see rattlesnakes and javelinas every night, and random mountain lion sightings. If any of us were to be bitten or attacked, medical response would more than likely be too late for any of us to survive."
7."High desert of California: dead bodies keep being found throughout the desert. Cops just say 'man/woman/child found deceased.'"
"There are a few houses further out with injured wandering dogs, high fences, and abandoned grow ops. The desert as a whole is creepy once you get to the less populated areas. The stories I’ve heard make me wonder if we have a serial killer somewhere out there."
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8."Wildfires are a pretty serious reality right now in Canada, and I live in a city that is literally carved into a forest. For the past decade, the smell of smoke in the air has been a common thing in the summer. It's a scary reminder of the distant but not too distant fires burning away. There have been times when the smoke lasts for days or even weeks. When this occurs, a subtle mounting fear begins to take hold as there's no escaping it."
"Even without the smoke, the looming threat is always finding ways to make itself known. As a major evacuation centre for the region, I will often drive past refugee camps for the various communities that had to bail out. Some of them have homes to return to, others don't. Every year, it seems like there's at least one significant community impacted. I don't know if we can anticipate insurance to be able to keep up. And what then? I'm only 37, and I presumably have 40-50 years left on this planet. I'm left pondering the odds and I feel it's very unlikely that I won't be forced to flee for my life as well."
9."Valley Fever. It’s a million-year-old fungal spores that live in the dirt. If you inhale the dust, the spores activate in your lungs and you get chronic fungal infections for life."
10."The Strid. A very narrow section of a river in Yorkshire. It's deceptively dangerous. It almost looks like you could step across it, but both banks are covered in slick, mossy rocks, and if you fall into the water, you will be instantly sucked under by the currents, washed into any one of dozens of underwater tunnels or caves, and you will never be seen again."
11."The urban legend of the Candlestick man. In Ballarat (Rural Victoria, Australia) in the 90s, there was a serial prowler who would break and enter using a candlestick as his source of light. You often only found out you were a victim of his crime due to the dripping of wax on the carpet next to your bed."
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12."The summer power outages. They started about 10 years ago or so, the grid would get overwhelmed, and entire neighborhoods would go dark."
"The first year it happened, every power outage was met with comments about it. Everyone complaining, neighbors yelling, 'YOU GUYS TOO OR JUST US?' 'WE'RE DARK HERE TOO!' 'SAME HERE! THOUGHT I TRIPPED A BREAKER THANKS NEIGHBOR.' Chatter, activity, just without power.
A couple of years went by, with Summer outages, and the comments became more scattered. It stopped being a noteworthy event. Just another one. No neighbors interacting. No people sitting outside anymore. No one taking advantage to grill instead. I just bought backup power and small solar panels to keep things going when it inevitably happens.
But then a new neighbor moved in last year with a baby and a dog. The power went out as usual. She freaked out, alone with a baby. She came knocking on my door while I was home alone. It was past sunset, so it was pitch black, and she was scared, standing on my porch with her phone flashlight, baby in a carrier, as she asked what was going on. No one else had opened the door for her, no one responded to the knocking and the calling out. Her dog looked uneasy. I asked if she needed anything, all she wanted was to know what was happening. I told her it was just one of the summer power outages.
It didn't hit me until that interaction that every summer, for hours at a time, my neighborhood just accepts not having power. It's like the whole neighborhood gets turned off. We're ready for it and we don't bother asking each other about it. When people move in and it happens to them, they're met with silence about it. If the new neighbor hadn't had a baby with her, I'm not sure if I would've answered the door. I'm not suspicious of people in general, but when the power goes out I already assume everyone knows and is home dealing with it, so a stranger showing up is immediately unwelcome and suspect. All my neighbors have said the same. Usually, we're pretty chill with people knocking on our doors, but when the power goes out in the summer, we regard them differently. Even known neighbors. Why are they out there, it can't be the power outage, something must be wrong."
13."My town has been around since New Jersey was a colony. There are lots of historic homes and places around town, but also lots of old stories. There are numerous stories of homes being haunted, with what I would consider proof."
"I have a friend who claimed their house was haunted. They and their family lived in the house for over 200 years. The first known person to live in the house was the son of a famous writer. The home was a two-story mansion, but it’s now a one-story, and I’ll get to why. All the families reported similar things happening in the house and on the property. My friend said her son was sick in his room one day. She was working in the kitchen when she decided to go check on her son in his room. It was just the two of them in the house. She checked on him, everything was fine, and when she returned to the kitchen, every single cabinet door was wide open. Strange, right? But all the families that lived there all said one thing: at night, if they looked out the front window, they would see a gray figure of a woman. Not a reflection, but a flowing, gray woman outside holding a burning candle. But the house used to be a two-story mansion, and became a one-story. The second floor was taken off by one of the families, and it was because they kept hearing footsteps above, but when they checked, nothing was there. And after the second floor was demolished, the footsteps were gone."
14.And finally, "There's a big wooded park on the bluffs above the Missouri River. The local rumor is that way back when, people were lynched in this park. Over the years, the park has also been rumored to have become a nocturnal albino colony and a hangout for Satanic worshipers. There's also a creepy 'haunted' staircase in the middle of the woods."
"I've driven in the park in the daytime, and though there is a creepy vibe, it is quite pretty with huge trees and great hiking trails. But a friend of mine who grew up here (I didn't grow up here) told me about one time back in the late '80s when she and some college friends were driving through the park at night around Halloween. As they came around a curve, there was a small clearing with a burning mattress just lying there."
What story creeped you out the most? Do you have any strange stories about the places you live? Share in the comments below!
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