Many of us really like to travel and to explore places off the beaten path. It allows us to experience things others have not and can leave us wtih some really interesting stories to tell!
But there are some places that are off the beaten path for a reason... and the stories we gain from there might be a lot more creepy than funny or interesting.
Curious about which towns others knew about, Redditor _Persona-Non-Grata asked:
"What are some mysterious, cult-like, bad-vibes towns across the USA?"
They're Watching You
"Powers, Oregon. We stopped in the diner for coffee once on a drive-thru. I s**t you not, like straight out of a horror movie, the other patrons just turned and quietly stared, not touching their own plates, until we left."
- SkylieBunnyGirl
"Some friends and I experienced the same kind of thing in a bar/bowling alley in Wisconsin. We decided to go out for bowling, and when we walked into the bar in the front, it was like it went from bustling to very hushed and everyone was watching us. The bowling alley in the back was totally deserted and eerie."
"It was super awkward to be the only people playing, and I swear anytime we glanced behind us towards the bar, we'd catch everyone staring. We all agreed it was one of the creepiest experiences we've had."
- TheRipsawHiatus
Came for the Sitesighting, Left for the Locals
"Man, this was years ago, but it was around 1998 or 1999 when I was nine. My family drove us to Mount Rushmore from Denver. We stopped off the highway in a random Wyoming town with a population of just over 100. We had a choice between two restaurants and entered one."
"Straight from a horror movie, when we walked in, the entire restaurant, packed with most of the town, fell silent. We ate and everyone was staring at us. My sister and I believed they were going to murder us."
"We left and it turns out our parents also thought we were going to be murdered."
- Starbucks__Lover
Not Here to Cause Trouble
"I was driving through LeGrange, Wyoming, and got pulled over."
"The cop literally said, 'I don't recognize ya. You're not from around here, huh?'"
"I was convinced he was going to write a bulls**t ticket (they have a 25-mile-per-hour zone through town), but he wanted to make sure I wasn't gonna cause 'trouble.'"
"Some towns, man."
- persondude27
A Little Too Perfect
"Seabrook, Washington."
"It is idyllic. perfectly idyllic. Too much so. Strong 'Stepford Wives' vibes. I read somewhere that it was inspired by the town in 'The Truman Show.'"
- lotsalotsacoffee
"My niece got married in Seabrook. I just kept thinking, 'This is where serial killers live.' So d**n creepy."
- checkitbec
"The idyllic facade is made creepier by the fact that it's located minutes from Taholah, an impoverished reservation town that's literally sinking into the ocean. Driving through both towns is a weird as f**k contrast."
- AndronicustheGreat
Not Outsider-Friendly
"Mora, New Mexico, is pretty d**n scary to outsiders. Lots of rural mountain towns that are isolated from tourists can be strange. I've spent a lot of time in West Virginia and Arkansas, but rural New Mexico is probably the most hostile place to outsiders I have been."
- Marcoyolo69
"I got that vibe in Llano, New Mexico, as well. I only got there by making a wrong turn. Road turned to dirt at the end of town so I turned around and went back the way I came. Glad it was during daylight hours."
"For what it's worth, I had a friend who worked at a rural hospital in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, during college and has stories of family feuds with shotgun victims, and people moving there to try and open small businesses only to have them burned down after a couple of months."
"Hundreds of years of isolation does things to people."
- manniax
Legend Has It
"Amboy, California. It was a Route 66 boomtown, with a railroad stop. When I-40 was opened, bypassing Amboy, it withered and died. Only it didn't give up the ghost. There are some famous murders that occurred in town (If you can call it a town, it's only three buildings at a crossroad)."
"Legend has it that Charles Manson and the Manson family would frequent the diner in the 1960s as it was the closest part of civilization to their nasty little hippie commune."
"The last time I was there was about 25 years ago, driving through. There's not a lot of traffic that drives through obviously, but there are people that live there and as God is my witness, every time I've driven through, those people are outside in the scorching Mojave heat of the day staring you down as you drive past."
- Resident_Job3506
We're Not in Good Ol' Kansas Anymore
"It would be interesting if the guy/gal driving the Google Maps car through all these places could chime in with experiences."
- univek2020
"Driver of a mapping vehicle here. Most of the truly creepy small towns are down dirt or gravel roads, which typically aren't mapped."
"I've worked every state except Hawaii and almost every Canadian province, and the only places that I've gotten the 'maybe I should get back in my car now' vibes from are a handful of small towns in Kansas."
"You could just feel the eyes the second your feet hit the ground, and not in the typical way you get used to being stared at in those vehicles. It was a palpable aura of unwelcome."
- Piqued_a_Pack
"YES! About 20 years ago, we drove on I-70 from Utah to Illinois. When we drove through Kansas, we exited, looking for a place to eat. We had to drive several miles from the interstate to reach the town. In the middle of the afternoon on a weekend, we maybe saw three or four people."
"It was a nice day in May. No cars driving around. No kids out playing. I have never in my life before or since then felt like I needed to leave a town. Both of us were getting the same vibes the entire time. We decided to not stop and drove back out to the interstate."
- ShaMaLaDingDongHa
A Town Untouched
"Clearwater, Florida. I had known it was the HQ for Scientology, but had never been there."
"Last month, I was visiting family in Florida and my best friend lives a few towns over from Clearwater. He took me to a place that entailed driving through downtown Clearwater. It is impossible not to notice that every building had brand new paint, all the shops looked sparking clean, and there was not a soul to be seen."
"All the neighboring towns had hundreds of people milling about, but Clearwater looked like a ghost town. It looked like the set of a 'Twilight Zone' episode."
- PirateJohn75
Basically Just a Cemetery Now
"Centralia, Pennsylvania, is still on fire though they ruined the graffiti highway. I don't know if anybody still lives there today, but when I went last, there were a handful of hangers-on."
- faceeatingleopard
"It currently has a population of four people."
- CurrentTadpole302
"One of the last guys left had a documentary made about him. His job is to mow the cemetery on top of the hill and the park across the road from the old row house he lives in, which sits all by itself now because everything else on the street was torn down."
"He was also disabled to a certain extent, but he's technically an employee of the church that owns the cemetery. He's the caretaker, locks up the fence gate each night, and maintains the church grounds."
"The big church that overlooked the town is well outside the danger zone, and many of the old families from there still attend. They mostly all live in neighboring towns now. From what I remember, those folks still get together every Memorial Day to reunion and do their remembrances for the holiday."
- toastmn7667
Cairo
"Cairo, IL is creepy as f**k. At one time, it was a very important commercial center because of its river location. Now it’s practically deserted and has really creepy energy. You can still see glimpses of how it might have been bustling and charming back in the day."
- jendickinson
"I didn't find Cairo scary as much as forlorn. Even spent the night sleeping in my car near one of the levees. The weird thing is it gets a lot of truck traffic as three US highways go through and connect to I-57. But the trucks never stop. Because there's nothing to stop for. The only functioning business I could identify was the Dollar General."
- xkulp8
An Example of How Not to Design a Town
"Breezewood Pennsylvania. I got stranded there once after wrecking the family car on the Pennsylvania Turnpike."
"It’s the town from the meme about how awful American urban planning is… basically just a series of state roads and strip malls."
"I went into the hotel bar where we were staying the first night, and this shirtless redneck was so drunk, he could barely stand. He had his trashed wife and two crying kids there with him. Some truckers at the bar were talking about where to score meth."
"I walked up to the bar’s jukebox out of curiosity, and the shirtless redneck threatened to kick my face in if I played any nonwhite music. Except he used more offensive language."
- CactusBoyScout
"I grew up one town over and wondered how far I'd have to scroll to find Breezewood. It's... an experience."
- MeowsAllieCat
Ghost Pockets of Ohio
"Lifelong Ohioan here. I’m from Belmont County, one of the weird southeast ones near Wheeling, West Virginia."
"I could list so many towns that are just strange here…some that I’ve personally been to: Smithville, Perrysville, Glenmont, Twin Lakes, and Dogtown (in Guernsey County, I don’t know what it’s actually called)."
"My great aunt and her family used to live in Xenia, which is the setting for the movie 'Gummo.' I’d say it’s about medium accurate."
"The absolute weirdest one to me is Holloway. It’s a tiny, and I mean tiny, town/village by where I grew up. You can stand on a hill and overlook the whole thing, it’s so crammed together."
"The tiny streets still have badly rusted white signs, the houses all look pre-1900 with few signs of updating, and overall it looks completely abandoned, except people still definitely live there. There’s a post office and what appeared to be a functioning bar."
"Every time we drove through Holloway, anyone on the street (never more than a single person at a time) would stare directly at us, angrily, like we should be fully aware we aren’t welcome there. It has the vibes of the Goosebumps episode 'Welcome to Dark Falls.' It’s not a cult-type vibe, more like churchy people who still think it’s 1700."
- MrLanesLament
Absolutely Chilling
"I have three stories, two of mine and one of a guy I heard about."
"I don't remember the details too well, but there was a guy motorcycling across America. He was going down a road in a small town that seemed to be empty. The whole town just seemed to be that one road with houses on each side. The road dead-ended and he turned around. Coming back the same way, there were people on the porches of those homes, just staring at him as he rode by. That would be absolutely terrifying."
"I once exited the highway driving through Utah. There was a sign saying 'no service,' but I ignored it. Right off the exit was a small town. People were just looking at me like I did not belong there. I decided to get back on the highway."
"Another Utah story. Just passing through and it started snowing. I decided to find a hotel instead of getting stranded miles away from everything. So as I was checking into this small hotel, the guy looked at my driver's license. He apparently noticed that I was marked as an organ donor because he asked, 'What organs are you donating?'"
" I kind of laughed and said, 'Why, do you need something?' I literally barricaded the door after checking in, woke up early, and got out of there."
- AlphyCygnus
Ghost Clowns, You Say?
"I am probably misunderstanding the assignment but Tonopah, Nevada."
"The Clown Motel, located next to the Tonopah Cemetery, is a popular place to stay because of all the reports of being haunted by 'ghost clowns' and miners who were killed in the 1911 Belmont Mine Fire."
- F**k_You_Downvote
"This is exactly what I thought of when I read the question."
"We did a road trip from Reno to Las Vegas and stayed a night in Tonopah at the Clown Motel. We stopped at a bar to try to eat dinner and as soon as we walked in, the place went quiet and everyone just stared at us. They didn’t serve food, so we left, but we both thought it was a very odd thing. I’ve never felt so uncomfortable walking into a public place in my life."
"We did stay in the 'It Suite' with no issues, but we won’t ever be doing that again."
- MollyKnope
"The current owner of the Clown Motel is a really sweet man with a background in hospitality, a genuine love for clowns... and the type of business savvy you only find in Nevada."
"I spent a good hour chatting with him when I passed through town. Nicest man, who has no qualms about freaking out guests who are afraid of clowns."
- WordIsTheBirb
Might Not Be the Best Idea...
"Making the most f**ked up road trip map ever right now, BRB (be right back)."
- goatghostgoatghost
"This would make an amazing docuseries or documentary!"
- alwaystakeabanana
"Yeah, can we have your stuff when you get eaten by mutant locals?"
- FecusTPeekusberg
To each their own, but we won't be following that last Redditor's lead and planning a trip to all of these locations anytime soon.
While some of these might simply be neglected and in need of some TLC, some of these sounded incredibly creepy and unwelcoming. Maybe we're better off planning our vacation for somewhere else?
@sanho/Bluesky
@dytsras/Bluesky
