Creepy, odd places you have been

[JohnnyMcGrathSaysFuckOff]

I have been dying for a good creepy thread for ages so thought I'd start one

Two stand out for me -

Doing the Dales Way with DH, we stopped one night in a tiny Dales hamlet. 2-3 houses, pub, church. That was it. Not much to do and it was a summer evening so we followed a public footpath through a kissing gate and went for a dip in a deep stream.

When we came back the same way about 30 mins later, someone had nailed 3 freshly dead voles to the gate.

Also, on holiday in France, staying in a rural villa, I went for a run early one morning. Ran past a back road signposted to a quaint sounding village. Decided to take a look. Down a narrow wooded road for a hundred yards, quite a dark road, then out into bright August 8am sunshine in a naice little village.

It was the vacances and the place was deserted, but it was just.... off. The cars were on the drives in most cases, but the shutters were all shut. No dog or cat, not even birdsong, just dead. There was a local noticeboard where the most recent notice was from the previous October. It was a lovely day but the whole place just felt dead. I tried to be brave for about 5 minutes and then cracked and fled, back down the dark road, with the strongest feeling that something was right behind me, just like when you're a kid going downstairs in a dark house and you daren't turn round to look back at the landing.

Anyone else have a creepy place story to share?

I had a strange turn while on a primary school trip to the Tower of London. We were all mucking about and having a laugh - then went into the Wakefield tower. We were all marching past the displays (not taking much in to be honest) but when we got to the beheading block i stopped dead in my tracks. I could see blood all over it and i could feel desperate panic and intense misery. I felt sick and weak. Next thing i knew i was outside on the grass in the sun with a teacher shouting for some water for me. I'd fainted. Never forget that.

Another time as a late teen i was babysitting a 3/4 year old boy for a friend. Their house was in a small wooded area near a river. I took the boy for a little walk, sunny day, down to the stream. We wandered along to a bridge. Bubbly shallow water over the stones, dappled shade, lovely. Suddenly i felt sick dread and needed to get away. Picked up the boy and practically ran back up through the woods. Learned much later (years) that that place has a haunted reputation. Young woman was killed there or something. Very strange.

i love a bit of Woo and have seen 'ghosts' and other unexplained things and never felt scared but........ we were buying a house and had a viewing of a huge mansion of a house, needed work but really really cheap. When I arranged the viewing the estate agent said he'd meet us outside, fine. Got there and we were beckoned in by an old man who apparently lived in a shack next to the gates to allow people access! That was creepy enough but when we got into the house it felt just pure evil. We practically ran through the viewing and when we got to the orangery it was awful all my hairs on the back of my neck shot up and i noticed a photo on the wall saying it was built by a builder named West in 1965! I legged it out of there. When we got out to the cars the agent admitted that was why he wanted to meet so that he didn't have to go in on his own cause it was so creepy. It was in the area that the Wests lived and picked up their victims.

I'm not generally a woo person but I find the Hartlepool Headland pretty evocative. I could just imagine it in a Scandi thriller!

Glastonbury. Fucking eerie place. I didn't get a headache but was just generally very uneasy there.

Hartlepool Headland, really? I lived near there for years and it always felt peaceful and welcoming to me.

Runny Hack Green is indeed near Nantwich. I actually found the mannequins quite funny and the owners seem to have got hold of a job lot of Soviet uniforms during a post-Communist auction session. The What To Do In The Event Of A Nuclear Warning information is so scary because it was real; I remember my parents receiving a governmental instruction leaflet in the 80s that was so scary they hid it from young teenage me (but not that well as I found it behind the display plates on the dresser).

Agree with PP about Warwick Castle. I couldn't get out of the dungeons fast enough.

LEMtheoriginal Many years ago we took the kids to Pluckley on Halloween. Older son bent over to do up his trainer and farted.. so loudly he terrified not only himself but several other people! Still tease him about it now.

stormy was that the poster who was house sitting? thought she lost a dog and went looking when the dog she had on the lead laid down and whined and something whispered in her ear wen she said "jesus christ" what now "!? ? she ran back to the house only to find all the dogs where there but she had defo seen a black dog run past her out of the house.

i pm'd her. it truly sounded terrifying. i asked if shed ever told her friend who owned the smallholding. only after shed sold it apparently! i think thats the one woo story from here that haunts me still.

My STBXH purchased a holiday home at auction. It was very very cheap. Including all fees etc it set him back 30,000 euros (back before the pound went to shit).

We went out to look at it properly and decide what to do with it. We bought a mattress to sleep on and were going to stay for the week.

I immediately didn't like the place, it made me feel very on edge. I told h this and he said I was being silly.

So we cuddled up in bed and went to sleep.
I got up for a wee and heard footsteps start from bedroom 1 to the left of the bathroom to bedroom 2 (where h was and where we'd been sleeping together) on the right of the bathroom. The door was shut so I didn't see anything.

I called out to h - he didn't respond. Not unusual, he sleeps very heavily. I called out 2 more times. No response.
The footsteps came back from bedroom 2 to bedroom 1, then slowly stepped over to the bathroom in the middle where I was I had finished but was too terrified to leave the bathroom. I heard heavy breathing on the other side of the door and it was creaking slightly. I sat down with my back to the door thinking it was going to be pushed open. I screamed for h.
I heard him half fall/roll out of bed (he wasn't steady on his feet and we had no bed just a mattress). The breathing slowly backed away and I heard what sounded like a very low animal like growl. I heard bedroom 1s door open and shut. H came to the door and opened it and we went back to bed.
I spent the night hid under covers clinging to h

We spoke in the morning about it.
H had heard me calling out, but said when he woke I was lying behind him, sort of spooning him telling him to go back to sleep it was only when he heard me scream later on that he realised I was not there.

As he had come out of bedroom 2 he saw someone walk into bedroom 1, but she did not open the door.
She was apparently short with very long light hair.
Apparently he saw her approach the door, the door opened on its own and she walked in. The door then shut behind her.

He thought he was seeing things and if not, if he'd told me at night I'd have freaked out even more (true - as soon as I found out we left).

As far as I'm aware STBXH still owns that house.
We decided to never rent it, nor sell and to keep it locked up and empty. We have someone who goes to check on it every week or so but we don't want anyone to live or stay there.

I'm not a woo person at all, it's all cobblers.

However, I worked at a homeless shelter in a Chinatown in North America. It had a basement that connected to tunnels that ran under Chinatown and supposedly were used by smugglers and traffickers. Bad things happened down there.

And I have to say that pretty hard workers and clients (bear in mind that it was a rough as fuck homeless shelter) wouldn't go down there alone. It was chilly, weird and very eerie.

I love all these stories! So interesting. A couple come to mind for me.

The Historic Hollywood Hotel in LA. I stayed there alone for a few days on a work trip, it's a renovated 1920s hotel and I felt such a sense of foreboding as soon as I got into my room. Like there was a presence in there watching me. I remember using the bathroom before bed and hanging the towel on a rail next to the bath, but in the morning the towel was in the bath like it had been thrown in there. The window opened all the way which I thought was unusual as hotels normally have safety windows, and I was suddenly overcome with a feeling of dread that the 'presence' would cause me to sleepwalk and jump out of the window. Having a nap one afternoon I was woken. Y crackling and white noise on the clock radio. My anxiety was at an all time high staying there! There's also a few trip advisor reviews saying similar things.

Another one - near my hometown is a disused fuel pumping station. It's all underground chambers with pipes running between them, from the outside it looks like little grassy hillocks with doors in them and pipes connecting them. As a teen some friends and I explored and went into the chambers, each one had some bizarre piece of machinery in painted in those industrial shades of red, green and blue. There was an abandoned shower block and a fallen safety sign, covered in dust and cobwebs, about what to do in the event of asphyxiation! It didnt feel dangerous or foreboding, just kind of bleak

Flippin eck QueenofVipers I'm too scared to switch the light off and go back to sleep now

That's terrifying Queenofvipers! So did your ex also have a bad feeling about the place after that visit or did he think it was his imagination?

That's the most shocking thing queenofvipers!!

stormytherabbit, Spangles1963 and stillvicarinatutu. Re the house sitting MNer who went to find the dog in the woods late at night and heard evil voices, IIRC it was in Savernake Forest.

Years ago I went to Townend House in the Lakes, with my preteen sister. There was one room that had a small wooden cot in it and I got such a horrible feeling looking at it, such sadness and menace. Didn't mention it to my sister but on the way home we were chatting about the house in general and she said "I really didn't like that horrible little cot!"
Talking to my Aunt a couple of months later about Townend (she's a fan of historic places too) she also said "It's an interesting old farmhouse but I don't know what the story is behind that cot in the bedroom. Not a nice one, I'll bet"

He thought he was seeing things initially until we spoke about it and I told him about the footsteps and breathing etc.
his first thought was intruder, then the door opened and shut without her touching it so he then thought he was seeing things due to sleep deprivation (had just done a 95 hour work week and then we had an awful sleepless but mercifully short flight over).
It was when I said no I wasn't next to him, didn't tell him to go to sleep (I don't know if that was his imagination or not as I didn't see or hear this I was in the bathroom) and
Told him the rest that he realised something had happened. Quite what we don't know but he initially wanted to sell (didn't want to stay there nor be responsible for letting it out) but I pointed out I'd feel awful if we sold and then someone had bought it for a holiday home or something and got the fright of their lives too.

I'll never ever ever go back and I wouldn't let him take dd there either (she wasn't born then) but whatever he does with the house now is his business.

This is a fab thread!!
We visited a castle built into the cliffs in France 'maison de reignaic' which was really creepy. Had a completely interior room (no windows) which had a terrible feel to it, I tried to translate the French - something about being used to 'correct' the wife...
There was also a barn FULL of torture equipment, collected by a previous owner...
So creepy I volunteered to buy the kids ice cream to get out of there!!

It's funny when the opposite happens as well isn't it? If you've ever house hunted you'll perhaps know the sudden feeling that you've 'come home' and your search is over. Did that with my old cottage in 2000. The owners were going through an awful divorce, so it was a mess and their attitude was unpleasant, but when i walked in i felt like it was mine already. I felt i'd finally arrived to sort it out and the relief was mutual somehow. I floated round the place smiling, hardly registered the horrible state of the rooms and just kept saying 'oh yes, here's the bathroom ect, yes this is it' Offered the full asking price there and then. (I worked hard on it and it was lovely in the end and i miss that place. Had to sell up for divorce ironically!).

I've remembered one really unexpected place i got the really bad heebie-jeebies. It was in the hotel on an (otherwise fantastic) holiday to Egypt of all places. Our room was beautiful, huge, cool and airy, tiled floor, lanterns, Persian rugs, four poster bed, lovely old 'Arabic' style furniture, floor cushions ect. You get the picture. But every.single.damn.night in the early hours i would wake up suddenly and feel so vulnerable and peculiar as if something was in there with us. So hard to explain: someone or something very unfriendly roaming about in that room with us and we were unwelcome. There was never anything to see, but I felt exposed and as if dragging the sheets over me (which usually protects us from anything, right?) was, on this occasion, pointless and i was being watched. It was every bloody night for 3 weeks. I told DH on about day 4 but he was just so didn't say anything much after that. Just odd.

Another odd hotel room was just the one night in a lovely country Inn back here in rural England. I love staying in hotels and have stayed in a fair few. On this occasion the room felt off as soon as i walked in. Massive fire place, much much too big for the room. It had obviously been a bigger room split in two when it was made into a hotel. Big bed with lots of cosy throws ect. Nice room. But off. I woke in the night and looked down the bed and thought i could see someone in the dark standing by the en suit bathroom door. A small figure just standing there. I sat up and it was gone. I wasn't scared as such, the room just felt - wrong. All the time. Again hard to describe.

Interesting that people find Blackpool creepy. My family and I have visited a lot over the years, and I've never felt any strange feelings while being there.

cant I've namechanged for this obvs but I've lived in Pluckley most of my life. I used to work at the pub in the 90's when Pluckley was slightly more famous as we had the world record for most haunted village (now sadly removed as unproven!). We used to have ghost hunters in and we'd sneak outside and chuck handfuls of gravel at the pub windows when we had ghost hunters in. Crashing around in the cellar or rooms upstairs was another good one. I have to say I've never seen anything remotely spooky round here.

I do remember as a child at the burial mounds on St Mary's in Isles of Scilly just suddenly going cold, feeling sick and absolutely bolting. My dm chased after me and her first thought was that a bloke had been hiding in there and flashed me . Felt a bit silly just saying it felt creepy.

@FruBayerischOla thank you! I have been searching for the thread with the story ever since.

Happisburgh in Norfolk. We visited for a couple of hours but for some reason it felt creepy and like we weren't meant to be there. I can't really explain it but I was glad to leave. It felt a bit dark and creepy somehow.

The German underground hospital on Jersey

Yes, I agree you could feeling the misery and suffering which took place there....

The spooky tale about Savernake Forest is in this thread.