Ordinary places that have creeped you out.....

[JohnnyMcGrathSaysFuckOff]

I love to hear stories of these and need some distraction!

One was a house I used to babysit in as a teen. V "arty" parents, walls painted oxblood or black, real animal skulls on the walls and great vast black French windows with no curtains.

The first English dept I worked in. Dark wood, stained glass, coupled with modern "emergency" lighting at floor level as only source of light..... I was always so relieved to get away on a quiet weekend evening and shut the door on the spookiness behind me.....

Yours?

Theme pub in Devon. We went in for lunch and it was completely deserted but had 1920's songs playing as background. When we asked what was on the menu the landlord told us 'pasties' in a very strong Devon accent. We made our excuses and left convinced we were being eyed up as the ingedients for the next batch

Glastonbury. V. weird vibe to it. We were glad to leave and I am not woo in the slightest.

We were driving back to our b&b in Somerset after a pub dinner & as the road curved round & a tall wall started at the side of the road, I felt/heard a scream inside me. It continued as we drove past the wall & stopped exactly as the wall stopped - that's what was so freaky. But I didn't feel afraid.

Some years later I looked the place up on google maps & the wall just surrounded a big house which was being used as a nursing home.

Another holiday one: DH & I spent the day in Cardiff (first & only time) & all day I had this sense of foreboding & felt as if a bomb might go off.

I don't normally get this sort of feeling!!

What's even weirder is that afterwards I mentioned it to DH & he said he'd felt exactly the same thing, including the 'bomb' idea. I promise you he isn't woo (as previous poster said), either.

We stayed in a 17th century customs house at Lake Trasimeno in Italy years ago. The place felt fine apart from one bedroom, which had the most evil atmosphere. There was a large portrait of an old man in religious garb on the wall, and some big hooks in a beam that ran across the ceiling. Every day, after we'd been out sightseeing, my skin would crawl at the thought of returning to the house. By the end of the week we wouldn't even open the door to that room.

Forton Services on the M6. The one with the huge abandoned tower. Just seems totally out of place and menacing.

We stopped on our way to holiday on a gorgeous sunny day, but it still felt odd. The ancient lift to get to Costa is the same one that goes right up to the top, but the buttons for top 2 floors have been disabled.

Watching videos of people exploring it on YouTube probably hasn’t helped my feelings but has helped me manage to not need the loo for another 20 odd miles!

Palace Hotel, Manchester (think it might have changed its name). Had a night terrified on the mezzanine level and lots of others on Trip Advisor said same thing.

I used to live in Potters Bar , I always felt a weird sense of foreboding when I walked down the high street.

When I was 8, my DM and I moved in with my great grandmother. I was terrified of the stairs and would never go upstairs alone. The toilet was downstairs and you had to walk past the bottom of the stairs to get to it. I would race past every time with my heart pounding and avoid glancing up them at all cost. I was terrified.

Years later DM told me how she felt the house was haunted. One night she woke up and saw what appeared to be a rocking chair with an old man sat in it asleep in the middle of the room. She was so petrified she stuck her head under the covers, when she got the courage to look again, he was gone. I am not woo at all but I was not surprised to hear she had seen something in that house.

Culloden. There was a real feeling of devastation in the air, I have never felt anything like it. DP at the time agreed with me once we were in the car heading far far away. It was like there was a stench of death. It was moving, but horrible.

I get creeped out by ancient monument places, mainly if I'm with preschooler DS without DH. It's not the ancient monument itself - it's that they're often deserted and I feel exposed and vulnerable! When DH is with us, I love to sit and imagine what it would have been like there thousands of years ago.

The South Downs in East Sussex from Brighton to Eastbourne . Something about them ..to me very bleak and even in Summer have an feel of ancient malevolence and a history of bad things happening... Lewes is a beautiful town but has an odd undercurrent too .

The Brijuni Islands off Croatia. We visited the one which had been Tito’s private islands and there were some sad animals which had been part of his private zoo.
I found the island to have an extremely menacing feel to it, I guess because of atrocities carried out during Tito’s rule.
This was some time ago and apparently the Four Seasons Hotel chain were planning a hotel there. Not sure if this happened but even the offer of s free holiday wouldn’t persuade me to visit again.

My dm's school. It had been a big school with boarders, and had shrunk down to being tiny. They used the building that had had boarders, but didn't use the top floor. The top floor was left as the last boarders had left it. Posters on the walls etc. Really creepy.

Fawsley Hall Hotel - I had to move room in the middle of the night because I was terrified.

Barbados. We loved certain areas but when you went out and ventured into some if the places the locals used (like the mall) it felt like we had two heads. It was out of season and i felt real hostility a couple of times. We got lost in a very rainsforesty bit on our way to Bathsheba and had to pull over to ask a man directions - he looked really dishevelled and when he turned around he had eyes that looked white! He then gave us really cryptic directions - it was like something out of a film!

Lewes.

Granted the one and only time I visited was Bonfire (quite the experience).

Verena I know York very well but no idea which shop you mean - Jack Wills? Oliver Bonas?

And I won't hear a word against York Minster - it's a truly beautiful building, how it could be described as dark and black is beyond me as the limestone it's built from is so golden. It glows when the sun is setting. Has always felt very benign and happy to me. Now Cologne cathedral on the other hand...

I was always scared as a child by those wax figures in museums - especially if I had wandered into a room first before my family got there, and there was a life-size person with fake hair and big staring eyes looking at me. Terrifying!

I agree with Walsingham though, bizarre place. Hutton le Hole is gorgeous but I admit I've never been there at night. Maybe it's the brooding moors.

Duggees - yes the Jack Wills there! The changing rooms, apart from 2 are all bedrooms, think one is called Lucy’s Room, another is called The Games Room.

I know Oliver Bonas is supposed to be haunted as well though.

@Duggeeswoggle I agree with you about York Minster. The last time I visited we were in the undercroft and Sunday evensong started. It was utterly beautiful.
I liked all of York, including the pub hotel we stayed in, whose claim to fame was Charles Wesley staying there once!
Not like Bristol. Bristol scared me and I don't intend to return.

Half the buildings in York are supposed to be haunted, Verena. I used to work in the Shambles when I was a student and never liked going down to the basement storeroom. Apparently all the attics and basements are linked down there, although most have put up partitions now. Will have to look in Jack Wills next time I'm in town (although I am very much not it's key demographic ), just to have a look at the creepy bedroom!

Luckily you only go up to that changing room if the lower two are occupied - I always pray now when I go in that I don’t have to go up to the top floor !
Ooh that sounds very creepy about The Shambles. I know, I always hear so many creepy stories about York, nothing ghostly happened to me yet, apart from the creepy Jack Wills changing room! York is a lovely place though

A shop I used to work in really creeped me out, and being the manager meant that I was often there alone finishing off paperwork. I had a strong feeling that there was a male presence and could bear to look up the stairs in the store room and hated having to go into the upstairs stockrooms. I never mentioned this to anyone but one day a staff member ran into my office and she was shaking because she said she'd seen man looking down at her from the top of the stairs.

Another place was a holiday cottage which we rented a few miles away from Bude in Cornwall. It was a very old building, a terraced cottage on a farm, and we'd staying in a neighouring cottage a couple of times and hadn't noticed anything strange but that cottage was unavailable when I tried booking again so we opted for the larger cottage next door. There was such an odd feeling to this one, I felt on edge whenever we were in and disorientated when going upstairs as the staircase and upper floor were very uneven and creaky. I remember one evening I was cooking dinner and randomly started to cry. Suffice to say, that was the last time we stayed on that farm.

Just last week, Brockhampton, a very pretty village near Ross on Wye with a gorgeous arts and crafts church. It was the Brexit Party signage that creeped me out. I find it very sinister. Who are these people living there?

@CigarsofthePharoahs I'm interested in your thoughts on Bristol as I didn't like it either. I felt a very uncomfortable vibe down by the docks, no reason why as it was a nice day and all nice enough. It just had a weird edge to it. The city as a whole wasn't how I expected it.

Dh and I stayed one night in Kamloops, Canada when we drove across the Rockies a few years ago. The hotel we stayed in and the town itself freaked both of us out. Couldn’t wait to leave!