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Note: The following content has mentions of death, sexual harassment, and other sensitive matters. Reader discretion is advised.
After watching MANY horror and suspense movies, I realized that writers really love the setting of a small, isolated town. It just adds to the film's mysterious allure. At first, I thought that this was another stereotype about small towns. That is, until I read this Reddit thread, "Those who've driven across the US, what's the scariest town you've stopped in?". I quickly understood that small towns, indeed, are really creepy.
Here are 34 of the creepiest towns people have been to, and their experiences will seriously terrify you:
1. "Colorado City, Arizona. It sits right on the border of Utah and Arizona and is basically the headquarters for the FLDS (the Fundamentalist Mormon cult). We had no idea and just pulled in to get gas. The whole town is full of these massive, sprawling houses with high privacy walls, and a lot of them look intentionally half-finished. We went into the convenience store, and every single person inside just stopped what they were doing and stared at us. Complete silence. The women were all wearing pastel prairie dresses, their hair pinned up. The cashier didn't say a single word to me when I paid. I have never felt such a heavy, suffocating feeling of being watched in my life. We got back in the car and just sped out of there."
2. "Don’t see anyone else saying it, so I will: Cairo, Illinois. It may have been a big city a century ago, but nowadays it’s like being in a Fallout quest."
"I took the scenic route home on the way back to Indiana from Arkansas earlier this year and I had to put a pin in the map to look up where I was at later. Cairo, Illinois.
That place didn’t even seem real. As I’m driving through, I’m looking at how NOTHING is alive. No businesses or anything. Then I see a guy leave a house and get in a car, and I’m thinking “where do you work?? What in the world possesses you to live here?” It was a super bizarre, real-life Nuketown."
— McCHitman
3. "I don’t live there anymore, but when I was out in Ohio, there was a group of “satanist” kids that dug up bodies and played with them. One of the women recently killed herself after having been raped and kidnapped by some random dude she met online. She was briefly my roommate in the '90s."
4. "Philadelphia, MS. Scariest night of my life. Leaving a casino to head back to school in AL, my friend who was driving swerved slightly bc we were talking pretty animatedly, but she was not at all intoxicated. Officer immediately pulled us over and arrested her for getting “mouthy”. They threw her in the drunk tank and locked me in the conference room while I waited for some other friends to come pick me up, several hours away. My friends, who were three Black men and one White man, showed up, picked me up, and we headed back to school. We were told we’d have to come back and bail out my friend once the courts opened on Monday."
"We were about five minutes up the road when we saw the lights start flashing behind us. The same officer who'd just "released" me to them, despite never having been officially "in custody,” was pulling us over. Spent a good 15 minutes trying to intimidate my friends, insinuating that I wasn't safe with them, and questioning me about how well I knew them, before letting us go.
Once we got on the highway, my friend, who was from AL and was driving, said, in the lowest "I'm freaked tf out but trying to stay calm" voice I've ever heard, "Have you guys ever seen 'Mississippi Burning'?" We all said yes. He said, "That's the police department where it happened." That was a quiet fucking drive back to school. I'm lucky they came to get me once they knew where I was, and in hindsight, I wouldn't have blamed them if they'd refused." — LucyJordan614
5. "I wish I could remember the name. I really do. Somewhere in Texas, we were told that, "Yeah, you can use the restroom, but after that, you’d best get the hell out of this town." Scared the hell out of me."
— JamesLingk
6. "My stepfather, God rest his chaotic soul, was a West Texas redneck through and through. We're talking cut the seat belts out of all his vehicles, owned a property with a dozen dogs running loose and an equal number of broken down Cub Cadet mowers type redneck. Guy fuckin' looked like vintage '90s Alan Jackson and drove a 1978 Blazer Cheyenne. I'm just painting a picture so you can visualize what kind of environment this guy came from. One time, we were hauling cotton module builders across the state during cotton harvest, and we ended up in some shithole town in East Texas near Arkansas that made even him uncomfortable. We're both white, very clearly involved in agricultural work due to how we're dressed and all the farm equipment we had...and even we got hit with that "Sundown Town" shit."
"They refused to serve us in two different restaurants (there were only two), and eventually a very chipper sheriff's deputy told us the only thing we'd be allowed to purchase in their little hovel was the fuel to leave. I, for the life of me, cannot remember the name of this God-forsaken shithole, but I can only imagine how much worse it would've been had either of us had any melanin."
7. "I don't even know the name of the town, but it was somewhere deep in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia. I was driving from DC to Ohio, and there was a massive wreck on the interstate. My GPS decided to "save time" by rerouting me through the backroads. It was around dusk, and the roads kept narrowing, winding down into a steep valley where the tree canopy was so thick it felt like pitch-black night. My cell service dropped to zero. My gas light came on, which was terrifying in itself, but I eventually saw a lit sign for a convenience store and pulled in. It was a flat-roofed cinderblock building with two old pumps."
"There were about half a dozen guys standing around in the parking lot. The second my tires crunched on the gravel, they all stopped talking and just stared at me. Complete, dead silence. I got out to use my card at the pump, and the guy working inside came out to the screen door and just stood there with his arms crossed, watching. Not a single person said a word or broke eye contact the entire time I was standing there.
I pumped exactly ten dollars, just enough to get me back to civilization, and got back in my car. As I pulled out, one of the trucks in the lot turned its headlights on and pulled out right behind me. They tailed me so closely I couldn't even see their headlights in my rearview mirror for about five miles of twisting mountain dirt roads. As soon as my tires finally hit a paved two-lane state highway, they just stopped dead in the middle of the road and turned around. I have never been so relieved to see a painted center line in my life."
8. "I live in La Vernie, Texas. The craziest thing that happened to us was actually recently. An even smaller sister town of ours (Sutherland Springs) was massacred by a dick bag with a horrible reputation around town. We lost members of both towns in the massacre. And I live right down the road from the church. I would never think that something like that could happen in my own backyard."
9. "I lived in a small town in Oregon. The teenagers would often throw bonfires in pretty, remote mountain areas. Once, my friend and I took a wrong turn heading up the mountain. We ended up on this weird, uneven, narrow road. We stopped when two old women appeared in the headlights. Just motionless, standing in the road, wrapped in blankets. We reversed out of there as quickly as we could, screaming and certain that we just stumbled upon something we shouldn’t have."
— denicajo
10. "East St. Louis, IL. I used to be a long-haul truck driver. Was delivering a load of locomotive parts to some warehouse 20+ years ago. Called for directions the day before my scheduled delivery, and the lady I spoke to said it was fine (and safe) if I wanted to just park in their lot for the night. “We’re a fully fenced and secure facility,” she said. Anyways, I followed her directions through some neighborhood full of burnt-out houses, flipped-over cars, an abandoned boat, and a lot of angry stares. Pulled up to the security shack, and the old fella inside was like, “What on earth are you doing here at this time of night?”
"I told him what I’d been told on the phone, and he just shook his head in disapproval. “Well, you’re here. Probably would be unwise if you left, so park over there under that light post,” he said. “At least I can see you if they come over the fence during the night…”I didn’t sleep a wink. Just lay there in the dark and prayed for morning to arrive. I made it out the next morning in one piece, but I never went back. Once was enough for this cat. I was in my mid-20s at the time, and I’m Canadian. I’d never seen a city like East St. Louis before. We don’t have places like that here."
11. "Gary. The only time we've just run a red light. THREE dudes were walking up to my car, and one of them was carrying a bat. They didn't seem like they were going to ask me how my day was going, so I made a decision to blow that red light and get out of there."
12. "I deliver pizza in a small town. Last year, some kids thought that it would be funny to give a false address. We do security callbacks to try to prevent prank calls, but there was nothing in their behavior that suggested that it was anything other than some teenagers ordering pizza. I knocked on the door to the farmhouse and was promptly greeted by the business end of a shotgun. They screamed at me to get off their property, or they'd shoot me. I thought that I was actually going to die delivering a fucking pizza."
13. "In 2005, I drove from San Diego to New York with a friend. My dad is from Austria but has been living in Houston for over 20 years. He and his colleague (Texan) told me not to drive through East Texas. I regretted it. Sure. I watched too many horror movies, but the shit you see there is like one. There are some so-called towns Stephen King would not even touch."
14. "Vidor, Texas. As a kid, I didn't really understand how sketchy it was (I'm white). I was so confused when my black friend wasn't allowed by her parents to come with me to a new playground that had just opened there. As I got older, I realized it is the center of the KKK and a big-time sundown town. Even today, I think they only have 25-30 black residents living there, and I suspect they don't have a good time."
15. "I grew up in a small town in upstate NY. A while back, I went up to spend a month during the summer visiting and staying with my old neighbor. She called me one afternoon, after I had been home alone all day, and told me to call her kids inside and lock all the doors. Two murderers had escaped the maximum security prison a few miles up the road early that morning and had not been found. It took the entirety of my stay to locate them. One had been killed by the cops, and the other had been detained."
16. "Went to a friend's wedding in Jackson, MS. The next day, we wanted to check out a soul food restaurant everyone raved about, so we took an Uber (we had to wait an hour to get one). Guy dropped us off and asked how we were getting back. I said I would just order another Uber, and he said, "Uh, nobody is going to pick you up from here. I'll wait and just make sure we are out of here before it gets dark." He was super nice and relaxed the whole drive, but got serious when he told us that last part."
17. "Bakersfield, CA. I asked the guy at the hotel front desk where I should go to grab dinner, and he said, “I wouldn’t leave the hotel.”
18. "Goldfield, Nevada. If you take Highway 95 between Vegas and Reno at night, you hit it after hours of absolute pitch-black nothingness. It is essentially a living ghost town. There are almost no street lights, just your headlights sweeping over collapsed wooden shacks, rusted mining equipment, and this massive, completely dark, 100-year-old brick hotel that looms right over the road. I stopped at the single automated gas pump in the middle of town at around 2 AM. The silence was heavy. No bugs, no wind, just the hum of the pump. Every time I looked over my shoulder at the blacked-out windows of the abandoned buildings, my fight-or-flight was screaming. It felt like the entire town was holding its breath and just watching me in the dark. I didn't even wait for the receipt, just slammed the gas cap shut and got the hell out of there."
19. "I don’t know the name (or if it was even big enough to have a name), but years ago, my best friend and I took a road trip across Tennessee to go to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The main highway into Pigeon Forge had just been hit by a massive wreck, and it was either find a detour or sit in traffic for hours. We were in our early 20s and didn’t know much better, so we used Waze to find the fastest route to Pigeon Forge. This route took us off the highway and deep into what I can only describe as backwoods Appalachia. It was a narrow dirt road with no guardrails that kept going up and up. My best friend was driving, and we were both nervous but still treating it as a fun little adventure."
"The road took us into an area that was marked with a sign that said, “White Community.” He and I kinda laughed, but we both had a horrible feeling that we weren't safe. Neither of us is white; we are both Indigenous, he being Cherokee and me being Navajo, and we clearly look it. We couldn’t drive quickly because the road was still dirt and high up, but I will never forget how we had to stop to turn onto a different road, and someone sitting on their porch gestured to the other people on their porch, and they just stared at us. We made it to Pigeon Forge, but I could have gone my whole life without finding out the hard way that there are still communities like that."
20. "I stop in 'scary' places on purpose, for urbex photo ops, at least 50% of the time alone. I've been in many very dark, dank, filthy, dangerous places and have never felt super creeped out. Been to Gary, Cairo, New Orleans, plus lots of abandoned places across the US. That's actually the point. Never an issue. December 2022… I'm an hour from home, walking down the street, 1:00 in the afternoon in the shadows of downtown Dallas skyscrapers, feet from the Design District (not a bad part of Dallas), and I get my ass beat by a homeless guy right on the side of the road with cars driving by. Dude attempted to SA me and was trying to kill me, fractured my sternum, and left me with orbital fractures around one eye; the only thing that saved me was another homeless man walking with his dog. I never would have thought."
— soozeliz
21. "Another one is East Harlem, at least scary for me. As a kid, I used to go for two months every summer with my dad, who was an OTR truck driver. He did the household. We pulled up to this three-story apartment complex, and my dad checked to see if the address was right (pre-GPS days), and literally an entire group of maybe 15 people came walking toward the truck. This giant arm came out of a third-story window and shouted, "Hey, that truck's with me." Immediately, everyone turned and left. No questions asked. He then shouted loudly enough for us to hear. "You can leave it running. Ain't nobody gonna touch it." Scary to think what would have happened if it wasn't that guy's truck."
22. "Birmingham, Alabama, near Legion Field. Bham police came up to us a couple of hours after an Alabama game and told us we needed to leave. We protested, and they said, "You don't understand, we are about to leave. Once we do, y'all will be fair game. You should go."
23. "I was driving through the Appalachia in West Virginia and pulled over somewhere to photograph the sunset. It was a rural area in the mountains with trailers. As soon as I stopped, people started coming out of their trailers, staring me down, and I could tell I wasn’t welcome. IMO rural areas are scarier than any encounter I’ve had in the city. Had a similar situation when I accidentally wandered into a houseboat community along the Mississippi River."
— pinky997
24. "West Wendover, Nevada. Imagine if Reno had an illegitimate lovechild with Salt Lake City. Combine gambling addictions with generations of religious shame, and you’ve only scraped the surface of what West Wendover is. For reference, it’s the only town in Eastern Nevada for about a hundred miles, but it’s also the closest point on the Nevada/Utah border to Salt Lake City. In casinos in places like Las Vegas, you’ll frequently see people drinking, possibly doing cocaine in the bathrooms, living it up to the fullest while gambling at the same time. But West Wendover almost exclusively caters to gambling addicts, either currently or formerly of the Mormon community."
"There’s no hooting, no hollering. No drinking, no coffee. Just a quiet, solemn series of people shamefully stuffing bills into slots. Hoping, praying really, that Joseph Smith or Jesus will make the reels align just right. The Golden Nugget Hotel was dirt cheap, but I don’t know if it’ll ever be worth the price of what my soul lost that night on the way through."
25. "Grew up in a small town of 75 people. We had a guy break into a farmhouse, tie up the wife and she recognized him despite his mask, so she asked why he was doing this. He got scared and took off. Locals in the area went into lockdown. The police found him hiding in his house. When they searched his house they found loads of stolen items. Evidently, he was breaking into local houses and stealing women's/girl's clothing. They set up a table at the community center and asked people to come by and see if they recognized anything. He had one of my sister's swimsuits and a couple of pairs of my underwear (I was about 12). Fucking creep."
26. "A while ago, circa 2004 maybe, there was a car accident and someone's head flew out the window. When the cops got there, they were confused because everyone had their heads attached. Turns out, one of the guys in the wreck (pretty sure he was killed during the wreck) decapitated his girlfriend, threw her body in the canal, and took her head with him for God knows what reason."
27. "Someone broke into my garage and drove a knife into the wall by the door clicker thing. It was a town of about 2000. It was so unsettling because there's a good chance I've seen whoever did it. And they've seen me. And they broke into my space and scared the heck out of me. And I probably smiled at them at the local co-op or something. In a bigger town, you'd be like 'oh it was probably random' and maybe it was for me. But I probably interacted with the person who did it."
28. "I grew up in a somewhat rural area outside of Anchorage, Alaska. One morning near the end of the school year in 6th or 7th grade, as I was leaving for the bus stop, a massive... bird thing flew out from under my porch. (The front door of our single family house was on the second story so there was plenty of room under the deck.) I'm admittedly not great at estimating measurements, but I was skinny, around 5'4", and its body was taller than mine, with wings easily capable of supporting flight at that size. Again, this was at the end of the school year, so it was broad daylight, and I was very awake."
29. "My room faces the street, and I had the window open because it was super hot that night. Around 2 a.m., I was lying in bed when I briefly heard what sounded like loud breathing coming from outside, and then suddenly my dog threw herself against the window, barking and growling like crazy. I grabbed the bat I keep under my bed, woke up my dad, and we checked outside. All we found was a set of shoe prints in the dirt in front of my window, so we just went back inside and locked everything. Now that the window hasn't been unlocked for two years, there are a couple of large rose bushes in front of it, and my family spoils my dog even more than before."
30. "I don't live there anymore, but I grew up in a tiny rural place. Everyone had a lot of land, so houses were far apart. When I was a teenager, someone murdered a man, cut his body up, and drove it out to that tiny rural town and dumped the pieces down a hillside. The guy who did it wasn't from the area, because if he had been, he would've realized he'd picked the absolute worst place to dump a body. Lots of hunters lived out that way, and since it was the county, they let their dogs roam free. Didn't take more than a few hours for someone's beagle to drag home part of an arm. They managed to find most of the body over the next couple of days (they never did find all of it, but assumed other animals had taken the rest). The guy got caught and went to prison for it. It was surreal, though, seeing all the cops and news crews out there. The body was dumped about two miles away from my house."
31. "This didn't happen to me, but the whole story is just unnerving from beginning to end, so the details are seared into my memory: In a fairly small town in Maine, a dog groomer answers a knock at her door one morning. A strange man stands there, smelling of "gasoline and pig manure" and asking for help with a pregnant dog in distress. The pregnant dog has a pup stuck in the birth canal; the man, seemingly in an attempt to extricate the pup, has pulled the pup's head off. I'm not sure exactly when in the timeline, but the dog groomer sensed something off about this man and had her young daughter hide in a dog kennel. Sure enough, the man starts attacking the dog groomer, and she is only able to fend him off with a sliver of glass from a picture that was smashed in the struggle."
"At the time I read this story, the guy hadn't been caught. The specificity of the man's smell, the kid hiding in a dog kennel, and the horrible detail about the poor puppy...yikes."
32. "When I first moved to the small town, with around 1000 people, I couldn't walk down the street without people staring at me. Not curious stares, aggressive "get the hell out of my town" stares. Took about six months until this stopped."
33. "My hometown is about 800 in population now... It's right on the Ohio River, and everyone knows everyone. We have a place there; people started calling it "Witches' castle" in the early '80's, before I was born. It's actually just what's left of a house that burnt down but kids made it into a scary place to go but a group of highschool girls talked a 12-year-old (who they were jealous of) into going there to start torturing her and then throw her in the trunk, driving around to eat with her in the trunk, stopping at the mall for a bit...and eventually burning her alive. Her name was Shanda Sherer. It was national news, and there are books about it. Some of the girls were recently released from prison, I think. I believe it happened in '92, but I was a baby. When I would tell anyone I was from Utica, Indiana, they would immediately ask me questions about it. Super sad story."
— MagzWebz
34. "Tucumcari, New Mexico. Not necessarily a run-down place or anything like that, but the vibes there are weird. As a tattooed guy who looks a little 'against the grain,' my stop at a Chinese restaurant in town was extremely uncomfortable. Everyone in there was staring and seemed to be whispering to each other about me. Anywhere I went, I was being sized up. I've never been anywhere else like that, where I truly felt I didn't belong, and my brain was telling me to get out."
Yeah...I'm just going to be a city girl for the rest of my life now. The crowd may be suffocating, but I'll deal with it. If you have had similar experiences in such small towns, let us know all about it below!
I also grabbed some responses from this thread.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
English (US) 