18 Urban Explorers Share Their Creepiest Experiences

1.

“Went to a closed up mental hospital in my city with some friends at night. Everything was cool until we got to the basement, where there were 5 meter wide and 4 meter high lit tunnels going far to both directions. We headed down one end and found a huge active generator, then we went the other way and as we were about to hit another intersection, we saw two men wearing full green attire and face masks walking at the end of one of the corridors at 2 AM. We got out of there real quick.”

2.

“Last winter I went into this abandoned parking lot under a closed shopping mall. It had two levels. The upper level had a bit of sunlight going in through the windows, but the lower level was pitch black. I made my way down this wide ramp that the cars would use and I decided to have a look at the bottom level. After turning my flashlight on I noticed that the space was huge, much bigger than the upper level. I remember how the light danced through the many supporting pillars and casted vivid shadows. I said “Hello” and “I’m just taking a look around” just to make my intentions clear, but was met with no response. So I decided to walk around for a bit, but couldn’t see anything of interest, just a lot of junk, some empty old bottles, but nothing that might indicate someone living or hanging around there. The place seemed completely abandoned, however this uneasy feeling that someone might be hiding in the pitch black shadow of one of those pillars took the better of me and I climbed back up the ramp. I left taking different route and passed under an overhead clearing that snow had fallen through. Just as I was about to hop the fence and leave I noticed that the patch of snow that had formed had footprints in it. I know this doesn’t really sound horrifying when you read it, as the logical explanation was that some poor chap had probably taken shelter from the cold inside the lot. But still, being there creeped the hell out of me.”

3.

“Exploring an abandoned construction site. It’s a site out in redneck country that’s got a bunch of old construction vehicles getting overgrown with plants and my gf and I decided to go check it out, see what it’s all about. We look around and don’t see a whole lot. It’s about to rain so we decide to head out. As we are getting in my car my gf freezes and says “There’s a guy in the woods watching us.” I shit myself and ask if she’s sure. She repeats herself and says he saw her see him and laid flat on the ground to hide himself. Noped out of there real fucking quick.”

4.

“I grew up in a very rural area in the Deep South, and spent most of my time riding my horse alone in the National Forests and expansive private properties that bordered our house. There was an old abandoned house about 2 miles’ ride through the woods from me, and I often rode by it on my journeys through the woods. Sometimes I tied my horse up outside, went in, and explored inside it but there was really nothing of interest. There was just trash and things like electric bills from the ’80s. I think an old woman used to live there based on some pictures that I found. Time went on and I went away to college. My horse went with me and lived on a farm near the college. I no longer rode past this abandoned house. After graduating college, my horse and I moved back home for a little while, and I decided to go back and explore it again. So, I rode my horse the ~2 miles through the deep woods to get to this house, which is itself probably 1000 feet (on second thought might be less, I’m pretty shitty at estimating distances) from a lonely gravel road that cuts through the forest. It is very secluded and almost creepy. The house is about 3 miles from a paved road…”

5.

“I am less brave than I used to be, so when I entered the house I felt out-of-place and slightly scared. But I used my cell phone light to explore the rooms anyway. A lot was just as I remembered, but right as I was about to leave, I found a calf skeleton in the corner of the entry room. I have no idea how this calf got shut up inside the building. The doors were firmly shut when I approached it. Also, the screen door opened one way, while the actual door opened the other, so that it was impossible for both to be open at once for some creature to accidentally wander in. Furthermore, the nearest cow pastures are a good bit away from the house. I left the abandoned house with the image in my head of some deviant cruelly trapping a calf in there for sick purposes.”

6.

“Nothing big but I was once exploring a drainage tunnel with friends. We were pretty deep inside of it and turned a corner to see someone leaning against the wall with a hat on. It ended up being a sandbag someone dressed up but scared the shit out of me because it was pretty deep in there. There were pants and shoes and a jacket with a hat on it. I don’t know what they did to make the jeans look like legs cause I didn’t touch it or go back. A friend of mine went back and told me it was a sandbag and I was already done for the day.”

7.

“Rural area, landscape photography. Happen upon a long abandoned house and set up to snap a few images. Look in window. It is perfectly furnished… piano, with music open …fishing gear …wood stove with firewood nearby …magazines on coffee table …jackets on coat rack …roll top desk, open with neatly stacked papers …family photos …small kitchen table with red top and matching chairs, and one is pulled out. It was all covered in inches of dust. It looked like someone walked out in 1950 and never returned.”

8.

“Walked about 3km into a storm drain once, and all of a sudden we saw a pair of glowing eyes staring at us in the distance. Then it made a noise, which was distorted by the acoustics of the drain and made us freak the fuck out. It was like a horror movie, we were very deep into the drain, and it was pitch black. We had no idea what it was and why it was down there. Anyway, I decided to approach it with caution, and it happened to be a small little white fluffball. A cat. It was soaking wet, skinny (probably hadn’t eaten for days), and was shivering. I wrapped it up in a jumper, and exited via a manhole. This manhole opened onto someone’s driveway, directly opposite a local football match. A handful of people in the audience noticed us, 2 random teenagers popping out of a manhole with a soggy cat. The facial expressions of the police officers were priceless when we had to explain why we were trying to take a cat with us onto public transport.”

9.

“When I was in college a few friends and I went to this local abandoned hotel. It was a swanky place back in like the 50s but had just been sitting around abandoned and fenced off ever since. We walked by and saw an open window on a second story ledge and ended up finding an old wooden ladder nearby on the property. We went in and hung around and saw a bit of great graffiti. The whole place was trashed with actual garbage as well as bits of the building that were falling apart. We made it up the staircase to the 3rd floor looking in each of the rooms. The area we were in used to be the housing for the staff of the hotel. The 3rd floor was covered in garbage from throughout the years. We got to the last room on the 3rd floor and looked in to find a lit candle with no one else around. Realizing we were not alone, we booked it out of there and once we were outside, looked up to see someone watching us from one of the windows.”

10.

“I had one creepy experience I already told, but my friends who always go exploring told me about this time they were just following a trail that went into the hills, and after almost reaching the freeway, they ended up near an old closed up train tunnel. They were able to squeeze through some loose fencing and after wandering through with nothing of interest, they eventually came to a bunch of shipping containers. They told me that when they glanced inside, they saw a ton of guns and ammo in one and just a shit ton of heavy boxes in the rest. After a few minutes of checking it out, they heard voices from further down the tunnel coming closer so they gor out of there. They also said it almost smelled like the ocean towards the end so the tunnel might have let out near the beach.”

11.

“I was exploring a certain abandoned mill near a large city on the coast with a friend. We snuck in, messed around a bit, and realized that we only had one flashlight. Took turns, weird noises, dark inside because there’s no power, evidence of homeless occupation and empty needles. Real horror game material. We come up stairway and turn a corner- ahead is a walkway bridge, aka the way to the rest of the building. To the right is a pitch black room that doesn’t feel very nice. As we walk towards the bridge, the flashlight picks out a sign that says TO: HELL and points towards this dark room. We didn’t go in. Didn’t feel right.”

12.

“A lone abandoned farmhouse in north-east Iceland, Langanes. This was real edge-of-the-Earth stuff, a few hundred metres from the Arctic Ocean, about 10km from the nearest sealed road, and not a single soul for miles. I was on my own and just headed up to it for a quick explore (I was on fieldwork up there for other reasons), went inside. It wasn’t too messed up inside, not much furniture, some things left in the kitchen with a homemade poster saying “AETTARMOT 1982″, a festival that celebrates the bringing in of sheep before the winter, so it was abandoned at some point after then. I was about to go to the top floor and heard a crrreeeakkkk. Stopped and listened for a few seconds, nothing else. Fine. Went up two more steps, heard the creak again and GENUINELY two or three footsteps, or at least the sound of it. This really got the hairs on my neck up. Now, logically I knew there was essentially zero chance of anyone else being in there, and I enjoy thinking of myself as a reasonable, not-easily-spooked man. I went up one more step, then heard two more footsteps, and something slam onto the floor above. I legged it.”

13.

“I was at Liban Quarry earlier on in the year – I heard laughing in the distance so turned around to see a fox just sitting there staring at me, heard laughing in the other direction so turned around – nothing. Looked back at the fox to find it was gone. Noped the fuck right outta there.”

14.

“Me and a few friends decided to explore this abandoned child’s hospital we’d heard about which was in a small village about an hour from us. We went in the building and immediately there was a different vibe unlike the other night. We jumped over the broken staircase to get to the ground floor (this was next to a large heavy duty wooden door with multiple bolts and chains over it) and found a trapdoor with a ladder underneath which led to the basement. I convinced my girlfriend to come with me but she wouldn’t explore he basement when we were there, just stayed at the bottom of the ladder with her torch while I had a quick look around. That’s went it got really scary. I walked past some machines into the small room which was completely empty with the exception of a kicked over chair and a noose hanging from a pipe directly above the chair. I shit myself (not literally) and turned round to leave, when on the wall there was red graffiti ( not prepared to believe it was blood because there was a lot) saying “DONT COME BACK”. Needless to say I haven’t been back.”

15.

“My wife and I and a friend of ours were exploring an abandoned state run school for troubled youth with a very nasty history that includes the torture and death of some of the students. Behind the campus through some woods was a grave site with a couple dozen simple crosses to mark the graves. My wife and I were working on photographing the crosses and our friend was wondering around the grave site probably 50 feet away from us. He hurries over to us with eyes as big as saucers and tells us he saw someone in the woods watching us. Considering how we were not in our home town, trespassing, and near a county jail we packed our gear up quickly and started heading back the way we came. We would stop every so often in the woods between the grave site and the school to watch and listen. I never saw the person that was supposedly watching us but I did hear someone else walking through the woods after us.”

16.

“We were kids exploring an underground flood channel… there were spots we could climb up and dangle our arms out of the storm drains on the street, but that required crawling up weird diagonal tunnels. There was 4 of us, maybe 12 years old. One flash light. The walls were all graffitied with a lot of gang stuff, and even warnings to turn back… blah blah blah…. we just took it as other kids that were bored. We got to the spot where the ceiling angled down quite low to the point the opening was so small we had to crawl to continue… Challenge accepted… it looked like it opened up again shortly. So we crawled through 5-6ft of the low area and when it opened back up, it looked like we were in a large round concrete pipe (before it was square or rectangular). Still lots of graffiti. We started yelling and playing with the echoes, then we thought we heard something so we got quiet. Then a real loud “you are going to fucking die” came echoing from the darkness… The kid with the flash light ran so fast and the rest of us were left in absolute darkness. None of us died that day, The rest of us ended up quietly and slowly walking out in the darkness.”

17.

“I drove a friend who was doing genealogy research on his family tree to an old cemetery that had individual family mausoleums (granite, with bronze doors and stained glass windows) for those who could afford them “back in the day.” It had been decades since his family mausoleum door had been unlocked and opened, so the caretaker had a hard time with the skeleton key trying to make the lock work. Finally, once we got inside, we discovered that a window on the back side (along the cemetery property line, back-to-back with a garage, so you couldn’t easily see it) had been broken and vandals had entered through the rear. Sadly, they had pried open the sealed lids on several marble vaults and removed some of the remains, along with rings that had been entombed with the bodies at the time.”

18.

“While exploring an abandoned steel factory, we went around the corner in to the next hallway when we came face to face with what appeared to be a security guard/creep at first, my heart dropped until i saw it was only a dummy.”