17 Deeply Unsettling Places Across America People Think You Should Avoid
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Note: This post contains mentions of racism and childhood sexual abuse.
Have you ever pulled over to get gas or grab a snack, only to find yourself in a town that just felt wrong in a way you couldn't put your finger on? Well, recently, u/scrambl987 asked people on Reddit to share the creepiest town they've visited in the United States, and people had so many unsettling stories to tell. Here are some of the top replies:
1."Elgin, Kansas. The motto of the town is 'A town too tough to die.' A person told me a story about a time they stopped there on a cross-country motorcycle trip. When they parked, they could see people peaking around the corners of buildings. Shortly after, a woman in an old dirty wedding dress came around a building pushing an old Victorian baby stroller. There wasn’t a baby in the stroller — it was a baby doll. There are trees growing out of buildings. The Main Street is an out of place, super wide, brick road for herding cattle through the town back in the way back times. For such a small town of nothing, in the middle of nothing. It was, for a short time, 'one of the world’s busiest cattle shipping towns.' It’s a creepy place."
"I’ve driven through there, and it’s as cool and weird as it is creepy. The view of Main Street, like you were talking about, is just so weird. It's like a block long but a block wide, just all grandiose in the middle of shitsville."
"Drove through there on the same cross-country motorcycle trip (the Trans America Trail).
I didn’t see a single soul, and the town looked abandoned. I do remember there being this weird tower randomly in town in some guy's house. Wish I took a picture of it."
2."Tonopah, Nevada. Clown Motel next to a cemetery full of infants and workers who died in a silver mine."
"The owner of the clown motel upgraded me for free when I stayed — to the room where he keeps the paintings of clowns that he paints himself.
To get there, you need to drive through a few hours of pure desert and past the Area 52 nuclear testing site.
Fun times.
We ended up barely sleeping because every hour on the hour, there was insane stomping and walking back and forth from the room above us for about 10-15 minutes. My friend thought it was the owner trying to scare us, but eventually, we figured it was probably ghost hunters of some kind."
"Stayed one night in a casino hotel down the street from the clown motel. Seriously creepy, it reminded me of The Shining."
3."Shreveport is like The Last Of Us at night time."
"I spent a week there for work training a few years ago. I thought the place was oddly cool. Much of it was a dystopian wasteland, but you'd find small pockets of people working hard to resurrect the place.
I got a room in one of the casinos, which was odd, too. $50/night for a really nice room because I was there during the week when the place was empty.
It wasn't a bad experience except for the smell of piss whenever you left the casino to go to your car. That and driving past the Hustler Club and Stripper Supply Super Store on my way to training every day."
"Aye!!! That’s my hometown right there. I was born and raised in Shreveport, dammit. Just cause everything you just said is 100% true don’t mean you have to say it."
4."Salton Sea, California. I went to clean out a family member's house after they passed. Didn’t see a single car on the road…or a human…that whole weekend. Felt sooo creepy."
"There are a number of incredibly creepy/abandoned towns around the Salton Sea. In the mid-20th century, Resorts popped up all over the shoreline by developers who were trying to make it the next Palm Springs (the Ski Inn restaurant is a great remnant of this; check it out). But toxic runoff from surrounding farms and rising salinity killed off all of the wildlife in and around the lake. To this day, it smells like dead fish everywhere. Much of the area feels post-apocalyptic."
"I remember the first time I visited the shoreline and realized the odd crunch beneath my feet was fish bones and scales… literally the whole shore. Not just a little section."
5."Barstow, California. It’s the convergence of highways in the middle of nowhere. It’s like an entire town of unhinged hitchhikers who got dumped there. Freaky shit."
"I was once driving on Highway 58 late at night outside Barstow and stopped on the side of the road to pee and let my dog pee. While we were out of the car, a disheveled-looking man with long hair and a beard suddenly appeared out of nowhere, walking toward us quite quickly. He didn’t say anything; he just had this super creepy stare. I grabbed the pup and threw the two of us back in the car, managing to start the car and pull away just as he reached the rear door. It was fucking terrifying."
"Stopped late at night at a Jack in the Box there on my way back from the Sierra Nevadas. While we were ordering in the drive-thru, we started hearing gunshots in the motel complex nearby. We asked the drive-thru worker if we could come inside because we didn’t feel safe, and she laughed and said, 'You must not be from around here, huh?' Never going back to that shit-hole town ever again."
6."East St Louis, Illinois. Never seen a town that looked post-apocalyptic before going through there."
"East St Louis is insane. Or at least it was about 10 years ago the last time I drove through. We saw a car on the side of the road on fire. Like, actual fire, full-blown Mad Max burning car. And people walking by it like it was normal, driving casually as if it's a standard Thursday thing to see a car engulfed in flame. I also saw what I think was a mugging, but by then, we were hightailing it out of there, so we didn't get a great look."
"I live about 40 minutes from East St Louis and drive through there every once in a while for work. Total apocalypse vibes. The weird thing about it is back in the '70s and '80s, it was one of the nicest towns in Illinois where a bunch of rich people lived. Oh, how times have changed."
7."My wife and I were vacationing in Bar Harbor, Maine, and decided to drive to the easternmost point in the U.S. So we made it Lubec, Maine. It was kind of foggy and looked totally deserted. I get Stephen King novels now."
"My pick was a town in Maine as well. We stopped off the highway looking for a place to eat and wound up in a town called Jonesport. We got followed by two cars the entire time we were there, and the whole town felt exactly like something you would see in a Stephen King novel. Really weird vibes."
8."Centralia, Pennsylvania. It has been on fire for over 50 years."
"This was my first thought, too. My grandparents are buried at the top of the hill in Aristes, PA. It’s creepy as shit. Still a few houses but no 'legal' residents. Just squatters and partiers. It was very eerie driving through. So still and quiet. Most of the houses are gone, and smoke is coming out of random lawns and sidewalks."
9."Colorado City, Arizona. Fuck you, Warren Jeffs."
"Born and raised there, can confirm. Sketchy as fuck, especially since I grew up on the inside of that shit. You'd never know child abuse till you saw it there."
"Passed through there once on a Grand Canyon road trip. The women and children would gather along the balconies of those massive compounds, unsmilingly watching as we drove by. My friend who had lived in the area mentioned the futility of attempts to rescue the pregnant children because they would hide and move them."
10."Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The Mothman is hiding there, somewhere."
"I visited Point Pleasant on a road trip in 2021. There is a very weird aura around the town, for sure. I didn't go during peak hours, but it felt very macabre to be there. Knowing about the tragedy of the silver bridge and the history from Keel's The Mothman Prophecies really put it into perspective, too.
The town felt very destitute and empty really. A few people were wandering around, but I didn't stick around for very long. Went across the river for dinner and it was more lively there. Honestly, I don't think I'd ever spend much longer than a few hours there. Lots of tourist traps around there, too. With the context of the tragedy I felt like it was in poor taste, but hey why would anyone else visit the town?
West Virginia as a whole has a very mysterious and melancholic feeling to it, but that is shared by a lot of deep Appalachia where sometimes sunlight can be scarce in certain hollers."
11."Most towns in East Texas close to the Louisiana border. They don't want you there, and they'll let you know it. I'm a white Texas native, and I don't even feel welcome."
"When you drive through, get gas, or walk into a store or restaurant, everyone stops and stares like you are an enemy."
"TRUE.
The difference in vibes from the Texas border to the Louisiana border is night and day. During a long cross-country road trip, we stopped on the TX side of the TX/LA border, and we were so fucking creeped out by the hostility (from literally every person we encountered) that we got back in the car and kept driving, choosing to rest stop in LA instead.
Crossed over into LA, and it was a completely different thing, almost like we were in another country. Gone was the intense, unfiltered hostility, and in its place were smiling gas station attendants saying, 'Hey baby, whatchu need today?' and when getting food nearby, 'Y'all ready to order? Okay, sugar, I'll get that right out.'
People on the LA side were WAY friendlier, happier, and welcoming in the most wholesome, charming way.
When friends road trip to visit me, I always tell them to gas up in Texas and DO NOT STOP until they're in LA."
12."Picher, Oklahoma. It’s an EPA superfund site that was being cleaned up and bought out. The town was dying literally and figuratively, then a tornado came through and took care of enough that whoever had remained left. Now it’s a ghost town."
"We drive through there when we go up to Kansas from time to time. It's real freaky. There's huge piles of dirt and stuff from the mining from WWI. Just MOUNDS of toxic material that anyone could easily get out and walk to. And there must have been a fire or something at some point because there are a lot of burnt grass patches and burnt homes. And there's a memorial to the high school. It's a different kind of eerie. It was a huge producer of metals for bullets during WWI, and yet, 100 years later, it's barely a blip on even a county map."
13."Danville, Illinois. It is also dangerous as fuck."
"I’ve lived in Danville for one month. I keep my head down to and from work. No major issues up til now, but I always have my eyes open and moving."
"I stopped there once with an injury due to trying to straighten a load that shifted on the interstate. I definitely will be driving to the next hospital if it happens again. It was like going to a hospital 50 years ago.
The doctor cleaned up the wound with a rag, not sterile, just a towel from a pile. The doctor didn't have gloves on, and he had blood all over his hands. I said something about this, and he said, 'Blood washes off easily.' Then he just threw all the bloody stuff on the counter and left. Then he came back in and said here is your prescription for 30 days of Vicodin. I didn't even ask for painkillers.
While leaving, EMTs were bringing in a patient, saying he was having a heart attack. The nurse said, 'Just put him in the hallway. We will get to him later.' As I was staring at her, she said, 'It's ok. He comes in every day but is a little late today.'"
14."Cairo, Illinois."
"Cairo is fascinating because it used to be a major city where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet. Wealthy people lived there in opulent mansions. Then, the interstate highway system and rail and such bypassed the city, and it began to die in the '60s onward. The old mansions are still there, but they are abandoned and covered in ivy, and the roads are basically empty. It’s really interesting driving through there.
Another thing I will add. Most of the remaining residents live in public housing — run down, unsafe complexes. The leaders of the housing authority were found to be taking taxpayer money intended for improvements to the buildings and pocketing it for themselves. Awful stuff. The city also had no grocery store for like seven years, up until last year when they opened a farmers market. The only shopping in the city was a Dollar General (which I have been to)."
"We went through there several years ago in the middle of the day, and the town was deserted. Really creepy."
15."I stopped in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho on a road trip two years ago. Downtown doing a little sightseeing on foot, and I approached a four-way intersection. Three matching black SUVs pulled up to the stop sign, blackout tinted windows and full-length Punisher logos on their hoods. The lead car stopped, and someone on the passenger side rolled their window down just far enough that I could see a ball cap and a pair of sunglasses. Stared me down for a few seconds and drove on. The whole experience felt so far off. I went back to my car and left. Later, I did an internet search on the town and found info on the Aryan Nation's compound, the bombings, arsons, attacks on Jewish businesses, and the America First white supremacists that still operate there."
"This city was in the news recently. The Utah women’s basketball team stayed there when March Madness was in Spokane, 35 minutes away. They had pickup trucks rev their engines outside the hotel and yell the the n-word at their players. It sounds like an awful place."
"I'm a Black man with a white female partner. We stopped in Couer d'Alene on our way back home from a road trip. The hotel front desk asked my partner out loud, in front of me, if she was okay.
My girlfriend was confused, but I knew immediately what the guy meant. 'Why are you with a Black man?' We were refused service at a local diner for no reason the next morning."
16."Whittier, Alaska. Most of the town’s residents live in a single apartment building. There’s nothing else there. The town is accessible by water and a one-lane tunnel through the mountain."
"The history of the place is that it used to be a military complex and much of the town was built because of its strategic location during WW2. The one building was built to house military personnel and their dependents, but by the time it was finished, basically all military operations in the area had finished, so it was only ever used residentially.
A lot of people only live there seasonally, from what I gather, and nowadays, it's a bit more of a tourist town
I remember talking to a coffee shop owner who said they only stayed in town for the cruise ship season, about 6/7 months out of the year, and then they go to Florida
It is very beautiful, though. There's a relatively unknown waterfall behind the main apartment complex, and there's a gorgeous hike through the rainforest that goes up the mountain behind the building and gives you a great overlook of the town and the port
It is kind of creepy... the second largest building in the town is abandoned, and some of the people can be a bit overly friendly, lol."
17.And finally, "Gettysburg has a thickness I can't explain."
"I don't know that I believe in ghosts, but I camped on the battlefield once as a boy scout many years ago. It was part of a trip where we hiked around the area kind of memorializing the battle that took place. In the dead middle of the night, my tentmate and I were woken up by the sounds of cannons firing, men shouting, and horses neighing/galloping past our tent. This was before technology was really capable of producing these sounds in a mobile delivery method easily, so I honestly can't imagine that we were being pranked in any sort of way. The fact that we both experienced it and talked about it the next day really makes me think it wasn't a dream, and it still gives me chills to this day."
"I was born there. Love going on the haunted tours that actually go into older buildings. Went into this old war hospital one night with a group of 20. I'm not one that scares or frightens easily, but nobody else would go in the basement. I got down to the bottom of the stairs and that thickness is exactly what I felt. Have you ever been on a crowded train on a hot day with no place to move? Yeah, it felt like that... but nobody was down there but me."
What's the creepiest town you've ever visited? Tell us every unsettling detail in the comments!
