Places you have visited with a strange vibe

Can anyone explain how Townsville is weird and creepy ? I've been invited to visit there by my elderly Aunt (she actually lives on Magnetic Island - but if she wants to do anything gets the ferry to Townsville) My Uncle was in hospital there during the final weeks of his life and I was phoning him every day towards the end. They've lived there for years (as did my cousin) and never mentioned any weirdness. My curiosity is peaked :D

Il-de-re, France. Wanted to visit for years. We hired a campervan and planned on staying at Sainte-Marie for 5 nights but stayed only 2. Both of us could not settle and had fever dreams all night. Couldn't wait to leave (shudders)

Hull.

Football ground had a sponsor who make toilets, another who make chemicals including those for toilets. No takeaways open at 5 pm on a Saturday.

City of culture apparently. Culture of a Petri dish perhaps. The only time we nearly had a lengthy disagreement at work on one project was over who should visit Hull as no one wanted to go.

@CounsellorTroi I agree. The style is all a bit Victorian/Dracula, but its a a weird angle from the road. It was closed in 1990 due to subsidence and has a local legend that it was built on a 'wrong axis' (there's a particular alignment East to West). I'm not sure there is any factual basis to this, but the architect is supposed to have hung himself in the bell tower when he realised.

(Suitably spooky tale but I doubt you could build a church and not realise this before completion!)

Stayed in a Rock House in Kinver. Didn't like it.

Elmesthorpe plantation woods

I think it was Wallsend museum in my previous post.

Another odd works trip, stopped off in York for a coffee and walk and had never been there before as an adult so didn't know where I was going. Found a cafe, it was busy, ordered a cup of tea went and sat upstairs the whole room went silent when I entered, the decor washed non existant it was like a white box, tiny windows to so no views or ability to people watch... My tea never arrived... I left!

I think it's the fact that it's a bowl within the hills around.
Or a petri dish.

Though oddly lacking in any ghost stories - I have looked/asked.

There is just one house that is continually on and off the market which is locally reputed to be haunted.

I live nearby and work with people who have been here all their lives (and back in generations too).

It's the kind of town where you need 3 generations in the churchyard before you are classed as a local.

@contrary13 St Margaret's church, East Wellow, it's haunted I've just googled it !

Not a place as such but when we were house hunting, we viewed a fairly standard 1930s semi. It was furnished but didn’t feel lived in at all. It felt grubby but not in the sense it needed cleaning. I still can’t put my finger on it to this day - it just felt like something terrible had happened there, the atmosphere was all wrong. Suffice to say, we didn’t put in an offer!

This is so weird, I opened the thread and I was about to say how Saltburn leaves me feeling really weird. Creeped out now lol

@contrary13 that church is in East Wellow in Hampshire - just south of Salisbury (so Wilts/Hants border maybe). My mum and her friend rented rooms in the vicarage, right next to the church, when they were training to be nurses in the 1950s and became friends with the vicar (he'd advertised the rooms in the Nursing Times because of the Florence Nightingale connection!) I was christened in that church in the 60s and am seriously considering a little pilgrimage back there. I have been as a child and remember it as idyllic! Now having second thoughts!!

I agree with PPs about Snowdonia, and this thread has brought a fascinating realisation ... a common link seems to be socially-deprived villages and communities set in stunning landscapes. So there's a disjunct visually between the towns and the settings. And the people can often seem wary/kind of resentful of tourists, which doesn't help ...

ps I am currently making a list of some of these places!!!

Went to a place in Australia, can't remember the name of it, got off the train at the wrong stop, the tiniest station in the middle of nowhere and there was machine speaking on a loop basically just telling you to have a nice day, a bench and a shut up station with no timetable anywhere. Middle of nowhere. I felt like I was in an episode of Fargo or the like. Waited five hours for the next train (pre mobile phones so just sat there hoping nobody would come and simultaneously that someone would come!!)

Anyone else feel this way about Cardiff or just me? I’m not sure if I’m imagining it but it feels unsettling.

I had previously read on another forum about Kamloops having a strange vibe.

Those poor children and their families. To have it in law that your children should be removed purely due to your culture and race, and to know that many of the children would perish (death rates vastly higher than the norm in those schools).

Louise Erdrich (Native American heritage novelist - talks about the Catholic schools and the children taken for 're education') if anyone would like to understand more. Fiction but based in fact.

Monrovia in Liberia. I didn't like it at all, i didn't feel relaxed the whole time I was there. It was shortly after the civil war and there had been a lot of suffering and there was a very tense and unpleasant vibe, it was quite threatening even though the people individually were lovely.

Slebech Church. Wales.

You could go through a hole in the barbed wire to get closer but I felt quite unnerved by it.

Dachau.

I love the Isle of Wight! I first went there about 15 years ago, and it felt like mainland UK in the 1970s. I wonder if it's that feeling of stepping back in time a bit which makes it seem 'off' to others?

I think of it as such a peaceful place - we always go to the Donkey Sanctuary which is just lovely. When we went last year one of the volunteers urged us to make lots of fuss of the donkeys as they'd not seen many people due to Covid restrictions and were missing human interaction, poor things!

I mentioned Kamloops, we were there in 2000. Had a weird vibe.

[quote Lairymary]The Hellfire Caves in West Wycombe. The actual website won't tell you the extent of why it's so creepy but this link will, for anyone that's interested.... en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellfire_Caves[/quote]
Also these: creepy!

Osterley House

Such an oppressive vibe and as I stood at the top of the grand staircase I suddenly thought "I'm going to jump, I can't stay here" - which is weird for me.

Another vote for Glastonbury but it might be the people who gravitate there rather than the place. I went into one shop and there was honestly an evil radiating from the shopkeeper, I'm certain of it.

Isle of Wight - love it. It can be a bit, 'the land that time forgot' in places, i.e. turn left into 1975. I get it that it can be atmospheric. To me, that's part of the charm.

Whitby - interesting. Didn't feel spooky at all. Not even the old Abbey which we walked around in the day. We even went on the ghost walk around Whitby in the evening. Very interesting. Earlier in the day, some people had dressed up as pirates just for the heck of it! It was the anniversary of Captain Cook setting sail for New Zealand. There was a replica boat in the harbour which for a fee you could look round. So we did. Very interesting. Captain Cook museum and Whitby museum were interesting too.

Apparently, Halloween is the time to go. The town goes mad for it.

We walked from 'Boggle Hole' to Robin Hood's Bay and back. Nice little village, albeit living there would be awkward. Bet there's all sorts of smuggling history !

My husband got a weird vibe from Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. It's a museum now. I forget the names of the executed men but the yard where they were executed has a heavy atmosphere. Their names are on a wall plaque and it's as if the executions happened last week not over 100 years ago.
We stayed in a converted piggery miles inland from Whitby/Scarborough. Didn't go to Saltburn. Didn't like Scarborough and I usually like a kiss-me-quick holiday town on the coast.