There are a few career paths that call for more than experience, education or a polished CV. Sometimes, for some remote location workers, what’s needed is nothing less than nerves of steel to get the job done.
While it may sound peaceful to get away from offices and cities, opting instead for work in the wilderness, jobs where you barely see another soul can on occasion be truly terrifying. Without anyone else around, these workers have to make split-second decisions – alone – if events should ever take a sinister turn.
Whether it’s strange noises in the darkness, extreme weather or an unexpected visitor, these tales of secluded workplaces will send shivers down your spine.
Here are some of the creepiest real-life stories from remote workers, as narrated on Reddit.
1. Jump scare
I used to be a delivery driver… I had to deliver to some pretty remote places. One time I delivered to a trailer park just barely inside our designated “delivery zone” and it was very dark and poorly lit.
I leave my car running and keep the headlights and inside lights on to go deliver the pizza. Upon returning to my car, I sit down in the drivers seat and look up to see a creepy old man standing less than 3 feet from my side of the car. He was just staring. It was the equivalent of a jump-scare.
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I just started driving forward, had to do a u-turn to get out of the park. When I turned around the man was standing in the middle of the road, so I freaked out for a second before speeding around him only to watch him attempt to chase my car out of the trailer park. I put in my two weeks after that.
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2. Singing in the dark
I used to work at a Boy Scout Summer Camp. Every week I had to take a big group of campers to a “secluded” spot for their wilderness survival badge where they had to build a shelter out of sticks, leaves, etc and sleep in it overnight. The spot was only about 1/2 mile from the main camp, but we took them a circuitous route that made it seem really secluded.
Anyways, on this one night all the campers had made their shelters, we had cooked dinner, and were all just sitting around the campfire. It was getting late, maybe 11:00, so I sent all the campers to their shelters for the night and started cleaning up the fire. That’s when we heard in the distance what sounded like church bells. They were pretty faint, but myself and my fellow staffers could definitely hear them.
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They went on for about 30 minutes, ringing every 30 seconds, or so. We were all a little creeped out, as there were no churches or towns within 20 miles of us. After the bells stopped, though, the singing started. It was too faint to hear the words, but it sounded like church choir music, but a lot of people, and a lot more enthusiastic. Also, it was almost midnight at this point. The singing went on for well over an hour, sometimes quieting down until we almost couldn’t hear it, sometimes getting so loud we thought it was getting closer.
All of the campers were super creeped out, but I lied to them, telling them there was a church service going on in camp, and that there was nothing to be scared of. Eventually, at almost 1 AM, the singing stopped. I found out a few days later that there had been a large KKK rally only a few miles away that night, and that’s what we had heard.
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3. Silent companion
We were wrapping up for the day in northern Canada. I am fuelling up the sideboom, I’m all by myself at this point cause I was tired of listening to the labourers whine of the cold so I told ’em I would take care of the rest. (Think bulldozer with no blade but a giant metal boom on the side that we use to raiser and lower pipe). It’s February, so pitch black. I keep hearing some weird sound. I can’t quite hear it cause the pump is too loud.
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I search around a couple times and see nothing. I get in the truck and take off drive past the front of the sideboom to see a cougar sitting on top of a dirt pile 15 feet away. The damned thing was just watching me there and probably could have ended me without me even realizing it. I’ve never seen a cougar in the wild before and it’s hard to understand just how big they are and how powerful until you see one up close. That thing leaped off the 6 ft pile and probably didn’t touch ground for 15-20 ft.
It’s terrifying to think something so big and powerful could just be sitting there deciding if they want to make you dinner.
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4. Scary stories
I used to teach outdoor education. Which was essentially just summer camp during the school year and school groups would come up and spend a few days at the camp. On their last night we would always tell them a scary story around the campfire. It was the same scary story every time.
We worked in partners so there were always two staff members for every school group. One staff member would tell the story and the other staff member would go hide in the forest and make scary noises. So, I’m telling the story and every few minutes there’s like a snap of a twig or rustling in the bushes and of course as always the kids all get freaked out and they start getting scared. It’s very fun.
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Well, as I’m telling a story I’m walking around the campfire looking at all the kids faces and I noticed a familiar one. My partner Eric. Sitting there smiling at me wondering why I’m staring at him.
My heart has never started beating so fast in my life. Eventually I sped through the story and all the kids left and I explain to Eric that I thought it was him in the woods and his eyes got very wide and he said are you telling me that that wasn’t one of the staff members? So we both RAN back to the main road.
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5. Haunting cries
I was on a boat sitting on anchor in a secluded bay in the early hours, in southeast Alaska a few years ago. I stepped outside for a smoke and all of a sudden I heard the most horrific sounds of a wild animal being murdered by another wild animal.
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It went on for probably 10 minutes, I know it’s just nature but man, I can still hear that sound in my brain and it haunts me.
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6. Shadowy figure
I spent a summer in Wyoming going to BLM [Bureau of Land Management] land and other remote locations collecting data on bats and herpetofauna. Heard a lot of weird noises like mountain lions screaming, deer snorting, what sounded like owls fighting. Woke up one morning to find two bull moose sleeping 20 yards behind my tent.
All of this was “part of the job” until one night a truck was driving towards us when we were on a BLM square in the southwestern part of the state. The truck was going overland, no road and was slowly driving at us. It stopped about 100 yards away, turned off the lights and we could see a person get out.
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They walked a full circle around us at ~100 yards away, got back in the truck and turned around. This was after dark and this shadowy figure did a complete circle around us. You could hear them walking through the sage brush and I’m sure they could hear us talking. We packed up after that and drove to a hotel an hour away.
I called the office and told them I was taking a gun when we went back out. Didn’t like having the bear mace as our only defence.
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7. Never been so afraid
I worked in a store once in a really small town that was always absolutely dead, a customer every hour or so, shifts all alone too which I’m sure wasn’t even legal but hey.
Anyway it’s a dark evening and I’m sat on reddit as usual when I hear the door open. I look up and see the back of a man as he begins walking down the first aisle towards the tin foods and he appears to be talking to someone on the phone, I think nothing of it and go back to reddit.
All of a sudden I get this intense smell of soil and earth, I look up and the mans approaching the counter and he’s wearing some kind of overalls and his face and long grey hair and body is just covered in dirt. That’s when I notice he isn’t on the phone at all and is just talking to himself in this absolutely bizarre tone, he sounded like a cartoon elf or something, he’s just sort of murmuring and doing this really weird hehee sort of laugh.
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I’m just frozen solid, as he’s stood at the counter in front of me thinking I’m about to be killed when a policeman storms through the door, he asks if I’m ok to which I don’t respond because i’m just in a complete state of what the f*** is happening, tells the man to come outside to which he starts murmuring gibberish and saying the words legal over and over again.
They come grab the man and put him in the back of the police car and that’s the last I ever heard of it, I have no idea who he was, what was going on but I have never been so afraid of another person before, you know when you just sense a bad bad situation. So grateful the police showed up when they did.
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8. Strange rituals
I do a lot of work out in the woods. Creepiest thing was finding some headless doves. I also found sticks arranged in circles and paint on the trees in the same spot. Not sure if it was part of a ritual or not, but that’s what I saw.
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… It could have been just wildlife or cats catching the doves. That’s totally possible. I’ve seen cats do that before too. To add some more context, the type of doves found were not native to this area. It’s possible they escaped or were released and had a run in with a hungry house cat. And the painted circle of trees and sticks nearby was coincidence. Who knows–I certainly don’t know what really happened so it’s all speculation. It’s still the weirdest/creepiest thing I’ve ever found.
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9. Running footsteps
I used to do agricultural work, alone in a field for 10 hrs a day kinda thing. The pure amount of times I heard the sound of running & snapped up to see literally nothing there was horrific.
I was convinced it was surely animals between the trees for a while but the weirdest moment was when I heard it loudly from a row of trees next to me & immediately ducked under to see the feet of whatever animal was running by and there was absolutely nothing.
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I remember trying to stay calm and walking really fast to the toilet block and sitting in there for a good long while before I came back. I never thought I’d be so freaked out in the day time but there wasn’t a soul nearby for quite a way & it really amped up my imagination.
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10. Ghostly wails
I’ve been fishing out in the Gulf of Mexico where they have some oil rigs. This rig wasn’t being used (from what we knew) so we would get pretty close to it to fish for red snapper.
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While we were out there, we could have sworn we heard screams of a woman over and over. It was some s*** but the explanation was the wind making the noises as it blew through the rig.
Well, that’s what we were told but it totally creeped us the f*** out.
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11. Lonely work
I’ve worked in Canada’s north for a few years now in oil and gas. It’s pretty creepy when during night shift you realise a moose has just been standing at the tree line staring you down for an unknown length of time. Or finding bear tracks crossing the tracks you just made 5 minutes ago.
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Honestly the silence of a snowy forest in the dead of night 100s of km away from anything is pretty spooky. When your only contact to the outside world is a radio channel nobody’s listening to, you feel pretty alone.
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12. Ghost postcode
I used to be a delivery driver, for a supermarket in the U.K. A lot of our customers were in the middle of nowhere, and my last delivery of the night was a new customer I’d never been to before. I was already running late from all my previous deliveries and I was still trying to find this house at 10:30 pm, even though my shift was supposed to finish at 10 pm.
I’m driving around the narrowest of country roads with nothing surrounding me but dark fields and hedgerows, looking for anything that might be a driveway. I hadn’t seen another car or person for miles. Then all of a sudden I hear a loud thud on the side of my van, like something was thrown at it.
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No trees or anything else around for something to fall from, and I remember it specifically hitting the side. I looked in my mirrors and out the window but there was nothing around me. Then it happened again… another thud on the side of my van.
I drove back to the supermarket so fast and told my manager that I couldn’t find the place (I had spent 30 mins looking to be fair), there was no house where the listed address/postcode took me.
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13. Gory offerings
I worked at a public forest. One day we had someone report a dead animal on the side of one of our trails. A few of us from the front desk hiked out to see what it was. It looked like a giant piece of…liver maybe? Just a pile of smooth red meat…no blood around.
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And it was wrapped up in a t shirt, with some coins scattered around it. We called our rangers to go check it out, and one of them was pretty sure it was a placenta. The weird part is, you have to check in thru a front desk. So someone either snuck a placenta/liver in or gave live birth/removed an organ on our trails. We never got an answer on what the pile of meat was, how it got there, or why.
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14. Light from nowhere
There was one night I was on a ship sailing through Alaskan Waters. And it happened to be my first night ever seeing Northern Lights. I can’t believe how awesome that was…. it made the sky clear, made the night look like it was dusk, we were able to see clearly for miles.
Few buddies and I hit the roof or what we call, Lido deck at 1am just to gaze at it. An hour or so in, there was 6 of us on top, nearly the entire crew now. A big white spot light shines at us. We were near land, but where the spotlight was, was above the water and it wasn’t low enough to be on a ship, this was very high up. It shined on us for about 15-20 seconds. Once the light turned off we looked to see what it was. Saw nothing; no trace of an aircraft or anything.
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Couple minutes go by and the same light shone on us, this time it was on the other side of our vessel, above mountains. Still, unable to see what it was. We all saw it, we all have never seen any aircrafts hovering above these waters, especially at 2am.
We don’t know what it was. We think it might have been some sort of silenced aircraft the military was probably doing drills or something. But anyways, that was one of the weirder things to happen out on the ocean.
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15. Alligator hunting
I used to work as an alligator hunting guide for trophy hunters during my summers, south of New Orleans. Spending sunup to sundown deep in the heart of cajun swamp territory definitely left me seeing some weird and creepy things.
The first one that comes to mind is when I saw what my hunting partner at the time called the Loup-Garoux. I personally would have called it a chupacabra but that’s because I’m a native of the southwest, not the south.
We were riding through an area deep in the swamp looking for signs of a big gator. The banks were close on both sides of the boat there was barely enough water for us to push ahead. But those mud boats are impressive and can practically run on dry land so onwards we pressed.
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Suddenly, I saw a grey flash in the trees out of the corner of my eye. It made me nervous. Swamp deer are small and shy. There’s not many mammals that want to hang out in thick undergrowth and knee-deep mud and hidden gators.
I tapped my partners shoulder to catch his attention over the sound of the motor and pointed in the direction I saw the flash. He cut the motor and asked if it was a gator slide. I shook my head and said I had no idea what it was but I saw something.
As we were looking around us the creature I saw stepped out from the trees. It was big, on all fours, with mottled grey skin. It’s movements were janky, jerky. It had a canine-like face and it locked eyes with me and I felt sick to my stomach. My partner immediately struck the motor back up and we reversed out of there as quickly as we could.
My rational brain said “poor creature with mange, either a massive coyote or maybe a wild dog” but my primal monkey brain was screeching “MONSTER! RUN! OR DIE!”
It was definitely a freaky experience, even knowing what it probably was.
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16. Hide and seek
I grew up on a farm and in high school used to mess with my friends by hiding and making them find me. One night my friend was over and we were waiting on this other guy. We see him pull up so we take off running to hide.
It’s funny because they have to wander around somewhere they’re unfamiliar with or go ask my parents and be told too bad you’ll have to find her. It’s like forced hide and seek. Anyway this one night I saw my friend hide in one building while I ran for the trees. I was hiding under some bushes and heard breathing. Like human breathing. There were no animals around.
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It creeped me out so bad I ran out of hiding to greet my friend. I felt so uncomfortable for the rest of the night. Some time during the night my dad heard something and went out to investigate. In the morning he discovered that one of our cows was killed and butchered.
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17. Dead birds flying
I spent several seasons working at a remote field camp in Antarctica…over 1000 km from the main station in McMurdo. Every once in a while, a Skua bird or Antarctic Tern would accidentally end up following one of the small planes (Twin Otter) out to our camp.
Once there though, they’d basically be stranded with no way to get back to the coast. I’d get out of my tent some mornings and see a lonely Tern circling overhead, knowing it was a dead bird flying. It was quite creepy.
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Along these lines, when birds (or seals) do die down there, it’s so cold and dry, that their bodies don’t decay either. They essentially mummify. Outside McMurdo at Scott’s Discovery Hut, there is still a perfectly preserved seal carcass from 1912 sitting by the entrance of the hut.
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18. Ghost tales
Lived up north for a while on a 3 year job. A local took me way out into the woods one night because he swore that at midnight at this one spot you could see the ghostly carriage where some people froze to death.
Obviously we expected to see nothing. So we’re sitting there in absolute pitch black darkness. You can’t see your hand in front of your face or anything around you. The sky is slightly, slightly grey from the thin cloud cover reflecting distant lights but that’s it. You can’t even really make out the tree line.
We never do see a carriage. Or anything.
At about 12:20 or so we’re just smoking and chatting, thinking about leaving, when we hear the unmistakable sounds of someone walking through the underbrush. Loud crackling of breaking sticks and branches.
But still, everything is black.
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It gets closer and louder, but we don’t see anyone coming. There’s nothing. And all we can think is how it’s basically suicide to trudge through these woods at night. Good way to get a stick in the eye at the very least, and eventually you will twist an ankle or break something when you step off a ledge – the ground around here is very uneven.
But it’s definitely someone coming. Crack, snap, snap… In the pitch black? Nope. We drive the hell out if there.
We weren’t afraid it was a ghost. We were afraid it was a person insane enough to be marching through the woods without a light. Do not want to meet that guy.
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19. Watching and waiting
I spent some time in the peat swamp forests of Borneo studying wild orangutan. We would go into the forest very early around 4 am. One morning there was a clouded leopard on the trail we used to enter the forest. It was just crouched there watching us.
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We shouted, tried to act big, one of the indigenous people we worked with even took out his slingshot and shot rocks at it (he missed on purpose just trying to scare it off). It stayed there for a good 5 minutes watching us before it slowly walked into the thick brush off the cleared trail.
When we walked by, I shone my light to where it had walked to and could clearly see a pair of reflective eyes only three metres away crouched watching us pass. Creepy but also incredibly cool to see one in person for how critically endangered they are.
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20. Creepy cathedral
I’ve been locked inside a vast Gothic cathedral at night, alone inside the structure practicing the pipe organ for a forthcoming recital.
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During thunder & lightning storms as I sat up high in the gallery at the console:
Intense lightning flashes would cause the saints and other departed souls depicted in the stained glass windows to light up with such dramatic energy that it seemed as though they were about to step right out of the window and start roaming the cathedral nave.
Even their stained glass jeweled eyes glowed with a “fiery spirit” of reality – as if they had resurrected at that very moment.
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21. Lurking sharks
I used to work in the Gulf of Mexico on oil rigs for years, and it may not exactly be creepy, but I found it really unsettling.
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In deep, open water, the water itself is really clear, so everyone can plainly see all the tuna and barracudas hanging around the rig waiting for the onboard cook to throw off whatever food waste he needs to. Every once in a while a huge great white shark would swim up from underneath and snatch a tuna and it really took like less than a second. They’re really scary.
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22. The graveyard shift
I work for a Medical Examiner and used to be on the graveyard shift alone. The first night I was on at midnight on the dot our air system shut off which caused the vents to warp. That s*** sounded like somebody running through the vents in the ceiling on all fours.
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Thankfully I got used to it lol but def creepy at first. Another night we lost power and stupid me watching a horror movie working so hard almost s*** my pants when EVERYTHING went dark and knowing that a room with around 30 dead bodies in it was walking distance away. That one I stayed in my car for. Not to mention the constant long dark red lit hallways. Glad I’m not on overnight now.
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23. A gruesome discovery
I used to do salmon spawning surveys, which involved walking up streams looking for fish. Some of the streams are quite remote and/or inaccessible on timber land, and you don’t really expect to see any other person when you’re out there. As a naturally smile-y, friendly, small feminine woman, I’ve learned to be wary of people 100% of the time in the field. I actively try to avoid running into people when I’m alone in remote places.
One of the survey locations is close to a highway. To get to it, I had to park at a pullout, follow a river downstream to a flagged trail, hike over a ridge to meet up with an old logging road on private timber land. I walked along the logging road for about 100 m before peeling off into the woods (very thick second growth Douglas fir reprod), where game trails eventually lead to the stream at the base of the hill slope.
I came here during spring to survey steelhead, but this stream was also a survey location for other types of salmon during the fall. The game trails off of the logging road were flagged by previous surveyors, and multiple routes were marked. This made it kind of confusing, and not all routes actually led to the stream. Some just petered out once the vegetation got too thick. Another led to a cliff face overlooking the riverbed. Lots of faint trails.
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One day I turned off into the woods one of the survey flags tied around a branch at the side of the road. I followed some pink flagging heading south along the hillside. I noticed the trail seemed freshly turned up, and figured maybe a bear clambered through recently since the time I was there last (2 weeks previously). The trail led to a small claustrophobic clearing, and the ground was freshly torn up in the shape of a circle. Seemed strange. I was looking for elk tracks but didn’t see any.
Then I noticed an assortment of bones scattered around the edges of the clearing. These weren’t there before. Everything was dead silent, and something about it was setting me on edge. I poked around the bones a bit, trying to piece together this scene. I noticed another slight path, which strayed from my main route, veering to the right from the clearing. I walked a bit down that way, and gazed ahead trying to see if this path was flagged. It was densely packed with trees.
A subtle movement caught the corner of my eye ahead and to the right as I walked — I turned my head to look past the trees and saw the silhouette of a large shelter maybe about 50-75 feet from the clearing. It was surrounded by what looked to be jugs and bones. Tons of plastic jugs. Light shapes of bones on the ground. The lighting made seeing anything else impossible. Everything was so, so quiet.
I left in a hurry, off the trail, without trying to get a better look, without getting to the stream. The alarm bells in my brain were screaming.
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24. The mystery room
On our drill ship that was built in China, we noticed on the drawings there was a room. We went to look at it and couldn’t find an entrance but the spacing was obvious there was an extra room. It might not sound so creepy unless you’ve been in these shipyards where two things are known to happen: stowaways, although i doubt it in this case, but also hundreds of workers at any given time following orders blindly.
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So we confirmed that the room had all six sides, yet not a single weld on the outside. There is only one way this could’ve happened and I’m sure you’re starting to get it now. They must have welded from the inside for this room and then realized they had no way out upon completion if the gasses didn’t kill them first.
It’s extremely heavy around that room. People say they hear things. I have definitely. This isn’t some old ship either. I rode this ship from China to Amsterdam after completion and then the maiden voyage to America.
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25. Pure horror
I know a forest ranger who regularly stays at these remote cabin / fire tower outposts.
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She’ll wake up in the morning and look out the window to soak in the landscape only to see influencers posing for photos.
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26. Wild hogs
I work as a biologist, lots of times in remote areas…[one time] I stumbled into a herd of feral hogs, at night, in really tall cattails.
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That was more frightening than the snakes, alligators, etc. I couldn’t see them but they were freaking out that I was there.
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27. Abandoned playground
I worked in Japan and there was a playground that was close to where I worked. I worked in a remote location so it was kind of odd. The Japanese workers would always talk about how the playground was haunted because a bunch of kids died there during WWII.
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One night on my way into work I decided to stop at the playground to check it out. I noticed that the ambient air temperature in the playground was drastically colder when compared to what it was when i had the windows down driving. I stood still for a moment in the dark, just feeling the energy of the playground and it was electric. I could feel my hair standing up.
Maybe this was brought on by my imagination just giving me chills? On my way back to the car I could hear one of the swings squeaking as if it was being used.
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28. Biggest fear
I spend a significant amount of time in the woods, and finding a body was my biggest fear until my brother said, “Well, better that someone finds them, right?” So as much as I still hope I never find a body, that is a more positive way of approaching it.
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At least the person would be found, hopefully identified, and maybe their family or friends would get some closure, etc.
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29. Lake Erie
I worked in a salt mine under Lake Erie a couple years ago… In the 80s, U of Michigan and Cal Irvine were studying proton decay [there] … they dug out a pool, about 80’ by 70’, filled it with 2640000 gallons of purified water, and put fancy cameras and other equipment along the side. They had a whole shop, lab, and dive centre down there.
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… The whole study had to be accessed through this one door, which was dug into the wall, so after awhile, the earth slowly crushes, bends, and pushes the ground up. After several tries, I yank the door open and step inside only to s*** myself and fall back when I see a full scuba outfit (wet suit, mask, belt, gloves) hanging 3 feet inside. So I collect myself, find that I didn’t actually s*** myself (how, I’ll never know) and go inside, past the goddamned scuba dude. Everything inside was left exactly how it was left 20 years ago, coffee cups left out, day planners, job schedules, along with tons of scuba gear, oxygen fill tanks, and computers.
I make it about 10-ish feet to the edge of the pool, and it’s hard to see if the waters still in it because there’s no wind to move it, but eventually I see it’s still there, 60+ feet of pure water in an absolutely dark pool. The sight of a huge black pool in a huge black hole in the ground, lit only by the small amount of light my cap lamp put out, and the absolute silence of being underground made me really uncomfortable, so I left in a hurry.
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30. Spooking the workers
My oldest brother used to work the overnight sprinklers on a golf course. He took me out one time just for fun and as we were driving uphill on a fairway, a figure of a lady appeared in the headlights at the top of the hill.
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My brother steered a little to the left of her and kept driving right on by. I stared right into her eyes as we drove by and she stared back. Her eyes glowed like a cat in the night.
As soon as we were out of voice range I asked my brother “What the hell was that?!” He calmly responded, “Yea, she lives on the golf course and likes to terrorize the workers from time to time. I usually see her out here once a week.”
Alright. Cool.
Coolcoolcool.
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31. The ‘body’
I do a lot of stream work so I spend time out in pretty rural areas walking streams and rivers.
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Once my coworker and I were working in a more urban environment and came across what we initially thought was a body – which of course triggered “Oh s***!!” from us – but it ended up being a firefighter’s dummy that had fallen down a hill. We felt pretty dumb.
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32. Vanishing man
I used to work at a ‘resort’ deep in Algonquin Park. It was basically rustic living for super rich people. It was a half hour drive to cell service, and an hour drive to the nearest town. I finished my late shift at about midnight, and I was walking back to my cabin.
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I clearly saw an elderly man with suspenders and a plaid shirt walking by me on the path. We were not allowed to speak to the guests unless they spoke to us first so I didn’t say anything to him. It was pretty dark, to I turned around to make sure he was headed the right way to the guest cabins, and he had straight up disappeared. There was nowhere for him to go except into the thick woods, and if he had done that, I would have heard it. Very strange.
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33. Midnight commute
I work in a restaurant that has a heavily wooded country park next to it. I used to live the other side of it and would drive around it to get to work. One particular day, I had car issues and had to walk to work, going through the woods as it’s a 20 minute journey rather than an hour around.
Anyway, no issues, get to work, do my shift, finish just before midnight. I’d planned to walk home the long way but one of the girls who worked there lived near me and said she was just gonna walk through the woods as it was quicker so I thought f*** it, can’t be that bad, I’ll walk with her then.
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So off we go, into the woods, surprisingly easy to see. It was a full moon. “Beep” my watch chimed as it turns midnight. “Ahh, Happy Halloween,” she says.
It dawns on me, I’m walking through the woods on Halloween, at night, during a full moon. Every time I watch a movie and someone does something dumb like that I always think no one would be that stupid to do it in real life. Didn’t get murdered but I’ve never powerwalked so hard in my life.
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34. Bizarre graveyard
Archaeologist here– we had found a rural graveyard on USFS land in the middle of some mountain foothills in Nevada, and had started recording some features of the site.
We noticed there were these creepy little porcelain angel figures on top of the graves, meaning that these were not super old graves or at least were being somewhat maintained. We didn’t have enough time to finish before sundown, so we wrapped it up and headed back to the bunkhouse.
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When we came back Monday to finish the site, all the angels had been systematically covered by old cow patties, like someone was trying to hide them from us. That meant:
A) People had been watching us that Friday afternoon, unbeknownst to us B) People didn’t want us there
We called the USFS archaeologist we had been working with, and she told us to finish and leave as quickly as possible.
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35. Dog kennels
When I worked in a kennels up the mountains, in the depths of winter it would be dark by 5pm. I’d be in the office finishing up some paperwork. At this stage everyone would be gone and this particular building was a bit away from the main building, car park etc.
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All the dogs would be sleeping by this time after a busy day. You could hear a pin drop! Sometimes I would hear heavy definite slow footsteps so much so that I would get up, come out onto the main floor ready to explain we are now closed but no one would be there. It use to freak me out! A couple of times, I would even check the dogs in case it was coming from a kennel but nope, all sound asleep!
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36. Snake-infested
I used to work out in the woods in Florida a lot. Creepiest thing would be this day we were working near Big Cypress, tromping through the brush all day.
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At the end of the day my coworker and I do a quick drive through of some of the property and realize the place was absolutely infested with water moccasins. We had been unknowingly essentially walking around a giant water moccasin pit all day. That one kinda f***ed me up.
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37. Breaking in
I’ve seen a few things working in remote locations on land and working oil rigs / platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
… I was making the drive back home from the docks and around 3am I started getting so exhausted it was getting unsafe for me to drive. I was falling asleep slapping myself in the face and sticking my head out the windows trying to do anything I could to stay awake and make it home but nothing was working.
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So due to the time and location there wasn’t any safe places I could park to get a little bit of rest. So in my sleep deprived state and I figured since I hadn’t seen anyone else on the highway with me I’d just pull over to the side of the road and get some rest. I leave my truck running with the lights on and set a alarm for 45 minutes. Well on that truck when you put it into park it automatically unlocks your doors. Thank God right before I fell asleep I had the presence of mind to relock all my doors because about 10 minutes before my alarm went off I woke up to the sound of the door handle on the rear passengers door on my truck getting repeatedly yanked on and it was shaking the whole truck.
Needless to say I was awake now and full of energy. All I can remember from the adrenaline dump that happened was I slammed the truck in gear and did probably the best burnout that truck has ever done and threw rocks and smoke at whoever was behind me. The rest of the drive home I remember swerving left and right trying to make sure if someone was in the bed of my truck that I’d knock them out. I think the creepiest thing about that whole ordeal for me is there isn’t a way for me to prove that it happened. At the time the incident happened I had been awake over 24 hours. But I’ve also heard instances of that happening to people on that stretch of road.
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38. Strange encounter
My previous partner was an amateur industrial archaeology photographer, so we were often hiking to semi-remote locations to find abandoned factories, mills, storage facilities, etc.
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… [There] was a massive paper mill located over a now dry stream… We were about to move deeper in, when we heard what seemed like several dogs growling and barking aggressively…I was starting to freak out, as I thought it might be rabid dogs and we had no way to protect ourselves. We tried to gather where they were coming from and move in the other direction, when suddenly the growls and barks turned into screaming, quickly getting closer. We were properly freaked out at that point and started running to the main exit, when a gigantic man covered in rags jumped in from the other entrance, yelling and screaming at us things we couldn’t understand in what was surely not our language.
We sprinted out of there like crazy and run back to the trail, and didn’t stop for a good five minutes before I couldn’t keep up anymore and had to stop to breathe. We were terrified, but the man hadn’t followed us outside the building and likely had no interest in pursuit once he got us to leave. Still we did the 2 hour hike back in a little over one hour, as the scare definitely motivated us.
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39. Glass house
I work off a secluded/Wooded area here in Texas. Every now and again when I finish with a job site, I’ll pop into the head office.
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It’s the creepiest feeling at night, mostly no light and I’ve seen a bobcat a couple of times. The kicker is… the walls are all glass, so when I have the light on inside… I know I’m being watched by someone or something.
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40. On the run
I worked at a state park for a few years, one day a co-worker was doing trail maintenance and a human skull rolled out of the woods onto the trail in front of him.
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Turns out it was a man who had been on the run from the police and was living in our woods. Evidently it was a good hiding place because they hadn’t found him until then.
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41. Timber wolves
I work in northern British Columbia doing bush grinding. My brother and I go in after the logging company’s and grind all the left over piles of wood into trucks to take to the mills for wood pellets.
Back in February of this year we were on night shift about 3 hours from the closest town and the few locals that lived out there warned us about a pack of timber wolves that was about 25 strong and oddly fearless.
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It was about 3 in the morning and we had worked our way down the block road about half a mile and one of us needed to walk back to the pick up truck to bring it closer to fuel up the machines. Of course I drew the short straw and went for a walk. Not even half way to the truck the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
I felt like I was being watched so I swept my flashlight beam across the treeline and all the eyes watching me lit up. Of course I left my shotgun in the truck, and I didn’t think running was a wise idea so I kept walking swiftly while focused on the treeline watching the eyes follow me the rest of the way back to the truck.
I got to the truck fine and obviously never left it too far away again. I’ve had many creepy and interesting encounters in the bush but this one was definitely one of the “Oh s***” moments.
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42. Late-night disturbances
I was about 14 years old when my dad went away on business for a couple weeks, leaving me to tend the “farm” by myself. Mostly just feeding horses and chickens, not a big deal. Farm was way outside of town and down a dirt road, nearest neighbours were two pastures away, and my dad insisted on never locking the doors.
After the first few nights, I started hearing tapping on the windows late at night, so obviously I broke dad’s rules and started locking the front and back doors…. One morning I found the horses stuffing themselves in the hay storage stall. The latch for that stall was very stiff and a little complicated, so it had obviously been opened by a person and not the horses.
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The worst morning, I stepped out on the back porch and found all the chickens sitting in a row along the side of a shed, evenly spaced, with their necks broken…
I think it’s worth mentioning that our next door neighbour was well-known for being bats*** crazy. Documented bits of crazy that my dad was entirely aware of included putting beartraps in his haystack to catch the kids who had been playing in it, and blocking off a neighbour’s driveway with a load of dirt as revenge for not letting him ride his horses on their property.
So my guess is, bats*** crazy neighbour could see that my dad’s vehicle was gone, could hear my music turned up in the distance across the pastures, and figured terrorizing a middle school girl would be a fun hobby for a couple weeks.
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43. Wide-eyed woman
I used to work for a pest control company and did most of the termite pre-treatment work. This typically involved working super late into the night to get the work done before concrete crews got started in the morning. I was on a job site for a big custom house way out in the desert. The entire job site was surrounded with high barbed wire fence with a drive through gate.
I was down in a dugout area for a basement with my truck working away when I heard the fence line rattle… I found a woman trying to climb the fence but unable to get past the barbed wire portion. I have hear people say “crazed look” before but never understood the statement before that moment. As soon as my flashlight hit her she dropped back to the ground and just stood there looking at me…
Her eyes were as wide open as they could get, like almost popping out of their sockets. She kept muttering to herself but I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and when she wasn’t talking she kept kind of smiling like her face muscles were trying to pull her mouth open. All she was wearing was a super dirty and torn up long shirt or dress and she had no shoes on.
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She kept walking back and forth along the fence line and I was pretty sure she was looking for a way in. I always locked myself in construction sites when working and thankfully I did that night too…
I was able to reach the police but it took almost 40 minutes for a sheriff’s officer to get out to me. As soon as his car started making noise on the dirt road leading to the work site the lady ran off into the desert.
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44. Empty factory
I work in environmental remediation and go to tons of abandoned buildings and remote sites.
One of the creepiest places I’ve ever been was an abandoned electrical parts factory in PA. Wasn’t remote, but the building was abandoned, gutted and not maintained for 25+ years. The roof was mostly gone, the ground floor collapsed into the basement (30 feet down) and it was pitch dark in most of the building.
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We had to sample from inside the building, so i sat in there with just a head lamp and small lantern, which intensified the dark around me. I heard scuffling off across the building, and nearly s*** my pants. I turned to look and saw nothing. I stared for a long time in silence before i got up to get a closer look.
It came from a room across the building, which was absolute black with no light infiltrating in. Imagine playing slender man but IRL. The room had a 20 foot ceiling, and was filled floor to ceiling with mattresses. Old, wet, rotten. And out from the pile was a squad of raccoons eating some s***.
I just went back to my spot and finished sampling so I could get the hell out of there. Best part?? I get to go back to resample next week lmao, pray for me.
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45. Lethal wildlife
My buddy went to Singapore for his military jungle training.
He was woken up for his guard shift, and noticed a foot-long (very venomous) centipede curled up on top of his sleeping bag.
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He was trying to stay calm, and then his ice-for-blood buddy reached down, grabbed the thing by the head, walked outside, and chucked it into the forest.
Apparently the last thing he heard while the guy was walking outside with the little arthropod’s head clamped in his fingers sounded like a hissing noise.
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46. Planking prank
I used to deliver hotshot freight across the great plains/Minnesota area. One night around 2am I was hauling across North Dakota trying to reach Montana by morning. I was delivering a particularly valuable tractor part that a farm desperately needed for the following day…
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I noticed something long on the road… As I got closer I noticed it was two people, laying head to toe across the entire lane. I swerved into the other lane, successfully avoiding them and came to an almost complete stop. But they didn’t move. Not an inch.
I was just about to back up and check on them when I remembered a story that an old greybeard colleague of mine told me. He told me that in certain remote areas, people will lie down in the middle of the road and wait for a car or truck to stop and see what’s going on. At that point, the road-layers along with whoever else is hiding in the nearby bushes will beat the s*** out of the driver and steal his vehicle, leaving him in the middle of nowhere.
I decided not to back up, and when the two people in the road saw me put my truck back in gear and drive away, they both got up and walked toward the shoulder. I called the police and explained what happened, but we were so far away from civilization that I doubt anything came of it. Thanks to that old greybeard, I got to keep my truck, my job, and my teeth.
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47. Missing keys
I lived in remote CO studying sage grouse. I was way the f*** out there by myself and no cell service. One day I was particularly deep walking plots and looking for bird s***. It was starting to get dark so I headed back to my 4 wheeler.
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To my surprise the key was missing and there was a 30-06 shell just sitting there. F***, I was prob 3-4 miles out to my cabin and it was getting cold and dark fast. After about an hour, I found the key in some shrubs. As I drove off I heard a very close by gun shot. The whole experience was terrifying. I assume it was some poacher just f***ing with me but damn it took the CO wilderness fun meter down a whole lot.
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48. Railroad hikers
I work for a railroad. Not necessarily “remote” but sometimes it’s just a conductor and engineer cruising along +/-10mph on very isolated, fairly wooded track. I’ve heard a few older guys mention something about a family (or a man with a suitcase, something along those lines, don’t really remember) walking down the track with no concerns.
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Constant blowing of the horn, flashing of the lights etc just kept walking down the track. Then disappearing. Near Weatherly, PA.
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49. Lost soldier
Not me, but my Dad’s co-worker… In the Vietnam war, this guy was part of a special forces outfit who were dropped into Laos or Cambodia to map the Ho Chi Minh trail. Out of a group of about 20, only 3 or 4 made it out.
At one point late in the operation, he was separated from the rest of his squad mates, and was trying to find a river to follow back to a US outpost. He said something they were always taught was to keep their rifle in their hands at all times, and never set it down. After a few days of no supplies and avoiding Viet Cong, he hears the sound of rushing water, and as silently as he can, makes his way toward it. After coming through some trees, he finds a river that he recognizes, and immediately has this mental celebration in his mind of “thank god, I’ve made it”, and in his haste to get some water in his dehydrated system, sets his rifle down.
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He said he was guzzling water when all of sudden he hears this snapping sound, like a branch cracking, directly behind him. He said he immediately closed his eyes and prepared for a bullet to enter his skull. After a few seconds pass and he isn’t departing the world to meet his maker, he opens his eyes, and slowly turns around. Five feet away, a Buddhist monk is standing in the middle of the jungle.
The monk raises a finger to his lips, and beckons him to follow. Turns out, a monastery is nearby, and the monks were sympathetic to the US. They ended up sheltering him for a few weeks until they got him back to US forces. Crazy enough, years later he ended up running into the same monk that saved his life at a remote Buddhist temple in the US. They remained friends until the monk passed away from cancer.
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50. Deadly attack
I used to work with wildlife conservation and anti-poaching teams throughout Sub-Saharan Africa as an ecologist and ranger so I have lots of stories…the thing that always bothered me the most were leopards.
In one reserve we had a local guy who ran his own small guiding business. He would cruise around in his 80s Land Cruiser packed full with tourists and was notorious for breaking the rules (i.e. no off trail driving, don’t get too close to animals, etc.) which is probably why people always booked him cause they almost always saw more.
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Anyway, one day he stopped his Cruiser on a concrete and iron bridge that carried its users over a creek that swelled and cascaded through the valley during the wet season. It was dry season so the creek bed was cracked and bone dry. He let his passengers out to take pictures down the creek bed (it was a rather scenic spot).
He said he had to take a leak so he walked to the far side of the bridge and disappeared under the spot where the bridge connected to the top of the berm that slowly sloped 30′ down to the bottom of the creek bed.
Next thing the tourists snapping pics on the bridge see is a massive leopard bound out from under the bridge carrying the guide’s body by his neck. As soon as it appeared it vanished and a body was never found. All they located was a pack of cigarettes and a lighter he must’ve dropped in the attack. His last act of rule breaking got him killed.
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51. Polar patrol
I work as a polar bear guard. As in, I escort people across tundra and mountains and protect them from polar bears.
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I once saw a snowman totem with reindeer antlers coming out of his head. It was deformed, full of bullet holes and rather creepy.
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52. Blinking lights
I used to be a frack engineer in Wyoming. Probably the creepiest thing I ever saw was I was driving out to this location dead of night, saw this red blinking light really high up.
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At first I was like “Huh that is way too high for a windmill.” Then as I got closer I saw this dark shadow of building with the light blinking. I swore my stomach dropped. During the next day I saw it. I had to ask one of the operators what it was because coming from Florida I had no clue. Turns out it was just a big coal shute. I swore I was going to get abducted by aliens or something.
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53. Heavy breathing
Used to be a wildland firefighter. Was standing at my spot on the line against a gravel road, just waiting to put out spots and make sure no embers crossed the road, and suddenly heard like…loud heavy breathing out of nowhere just after twilight and was severely freaked out.
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Turns out it was a dead stump of a tree that had fallen earlier in the day. The fire was burning inside, but wasn’t getting air to sustain itself. So it was…breathing.
It’s a good thing I was dehydrated after the 12 hour shift because I was inches away from pissing myself otherwise. It was a fairly calm and low-lying fire, and a little crackling is kinda comforting when it’s in a fireplace or fire pit, but that like…rhythmic, wheezing, growling sound…I was startled so badly.
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54. Strange customer
I used to deliver food for Pizza Hut during high school and we had a 10 mile delivery radius. 10 miles to the east of the store was in all honesty a different universe from where I live. It was completely the boondocks.
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Anyways I pull up to a house along a dirt road, it’s dark about 8pm and this lady comes out and greets me. Hands me $11.37. The only issue is that her order was 26.54. I told her I’d need the additional money and she insisted that “when heaven comes there will be no need for it.” She then offered me her prayers and went back inside. Not exactly the criteria you asked for but still kinda a creepy remote incident.
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55. Bear in the dairy
When I was running a crew in Northern Alberta on an oil site I was always the first one into the trailer every morning. One morning I walked in and a black bear was sitting on its ass with his arm resting on the lunch table.
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Funny part was that we both startled each other. The bear had been drinking our coffee creamer packs one by one and left a massive mess. Needless to say I backed out really slowly, closed the door and ran to my truck.
Bears were quite common on this site. In fact, it was such a large parcel of crown land that problem bears from across the province were often tranquilized and sent to this area. We called in a contractor that dealt with bears. He showed up with 3 dogs and chased the bear out of there.
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56. Onlookers
Was working on some rich couple’s house in the middle of nowhere Oregon. I went out to work alone early in the morning because it was nice to look at the beautiful scenery before all the other workers showed up. After about 20 minutes of working, three people emerged from the woods and just kinda stared at me for a couple minutes.
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They never went past the tree line and never made any gestures at me, they just kinda stared. After a couple minutes they turned around and went back into the woods. When the other workers showed up I asked if they were pranking me and they all denied it.
I don’t know how those people got there, what they were doing there or what they were doing staring at me. I never had any other incidents at that location and I continued to show up early in the morning.
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57. Fresh tracks
I work in backcountry wilderness hunting camps. One time, I was working at one that was a two hour drive to the trailhead from the ranch, then an eight mile horseback ride into camp. That morning, I rode out to a glassing spot with two clients and another guide. It was late November in the mountains, so it was frigid and with at least a couple feet of snow.
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After getting the guys to their location, I rode the couple miles back to camp alone. My horse was extra fidgety. Then I noticed the mountain lion tracks in the fresh snow that followed us on our way out but not back. It’s an unsettling feeling.
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58. Menacing driver
Years ago, I worked at an adult store outside city limits. I always had the graveyard shifts because no one else wanted them, but was completely fine with it. Saw the typical weird things you’d expect from a business like that.
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However, one night a tractor pulled into the parking lot and turned to face the entrance. I couldn’t see who was driving it with all the lights they had mounted on it, but I could hear them revving their engine. They then started circling the store, tearing up the grass until they parked back next to the entrance.
By this time, I had already locked the door and was calling the cops. They drove up to the door and just gently hit the tractor into the building and revved their engine. I seriously thought I was in the beginning of a horror movie. And then they just left. Like, peeled out of there. Never saw who it was or never found out.
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59. Navy drill
Middle of the pacific running night drills at 3am, I was the helmsman on a Navy ship, we had two other ships running close by. Drill was the usual tired sailors trying to get the drill done so they can go back to sleep.
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This was a moan space fire drill so for me it was just basically staring out the window and staying on a set heading. All of a sudden night became day for what seemed like 20-30 seconds. Everyone on the bridge goes into WTF mode going out over bridge to bridge to the other ships trying to figure out what just happened, yelling at the look outs to report. First thought was it was a distress flare but it disappeared to quickly.
Best explanation between the 3 bridge crews is that a meteor passed over us. We figured this because flares will generally stay lit till they hit the water. It was a strange thing that came out of nowhere in the middle of the night in the middle of the pacific but I still remember it as I’ve never seen the lights turn on and off like that sense. I was literally like some flicked a light switch on paused and switched it off.
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60. Galloping figure
I’m an EMT on an 911 ambulance in rural Arizona. I work 24 hours shifts, and regularly make long drives in the desert at night. We are part of a company that covers an area about the size of New Jersey where hospitals are few and far between.
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One night around 2 AM my partner and I were driving back to the station from a hospital. We were driving on a 2 lane highway in the middle of the desert as per usual. I’m not entirely sure what I saw, but it looked like 2 legs and the lower portion of a person sprint across the road about 100 feet in front of me. The weird part was that it’s knees were backwards. I couldn’t see anything above the waist because my headlights don’t project that far and I didn’t have my high beams on.
Honestly not sure if I saw the back-end of a deer or if I was hallucinating because I was tired. But whatever it was creeped me out and still think about it when I’m out on the road late at night.
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61. Late night call-outs
I work on cell towers. Sometimes service needs to be done at night and we’ve come across some crazy stuff. A lot of the sites are in remote places, like mountain tops, abandon buildings and even 6 stories underground in an old national doomsday shelter.
A Mountain lion was stalking the site one night. We saw it in the road when grabbing a tools and we retreated. Thing would not leave the area and we kept seeing it pass through what little light we had outside at the time.
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Have heard and seen people in buildings that are supposed to be empty. No cars in the parking lot and nobody logged in.
Saw weird lights above a tower one night. Next day we weren’t allowed access to the property and got booted by cops. Real scary sometimes.
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62. Murky waters
I’m a commercial diver in Eastern Canada. I mostly dive for the salmon farms. One day last summer we were tying a net back in after a lice treatment, which basically involved swimming to a weighted ring, grabbing a rope that was tied onto it, turning around and swimming back to the net to pull it down and tie it tight. There’s slightly more, but you get the gist.
Well, New Brunswick waters aren’t known for their visibility. It’s not super uncommon to only be able to see 5-10 feet in any direction, which can be creepy enough on its own.
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So, this one time, I swim out to grab the rope, turn around to swim back just in time to see a shark swim by right in front of me, close enough to touch. The worst part was that just as quickly, it was completely out of sight, and now I had no idea where it was. We finished the job and saw it a few more times hanging around. That started our shark summer. Shark sightings were waaaaay up last summer.
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63. Explosive stash
I ran Mountain Search and Rescue for years… we were in an extremely behind on its luck town where there were the remnants of an abandoned concrete factory in the woods behind our staging area.
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This came complete with drifts of 40 bottles and used needles. I found out years later talking to some feds that they’d later found a concrete box filled with ~10lbs of decades old TNT stored at ambient conditions right against the fence we’d searched along. They ended up pouring diesel on it and burned it from afar.
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64. Shadowy shape at sea
Once while I was on deployment in the navy I was the aft lookout, pacing back and forth on the flight deck. As I did a turn I saw something in the water coming straight at the ship.
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It was dark, and cylindrical. For a split second I thought it was a torpedo. Had it been, I would have been dead before I could have called out a warning, let alone anyone do anything about it.
Luckily it was just a dolphin…
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65. Hidden flammables
I did field work in the Northern wilds of PA on abandoned oil mining infrastructure.
There are oil drums that are from so long ago, that they are wooden. And a lot of them still have either oil residue or like… a significant amount of petroleum in them. And a lot of the pumps and derricks from the 1970s that were abandoned are now leaking natural gas. Not enough to be be labelled as a superfund site and get major funding for removal, but enough that if you struck a match, you could probably blow yourself up.
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And someone from out of PA, or even in the major cities of the state would probably not know they were so close to danger while walking around out here.
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66. Ghostly diners
[I found] a full dining room table set in the woods during a wetland delineation. But the chairs where all facing down.
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They were the cheap metal chairs from the 80s with the auburn upholstery seats. Weird thing is that the leather wasn’t torn or anything, like it had been redone recently. Which wouldn’t really surprise me except that it was a military munitions storage facility and was extremely difficult to get access to as a civilian.
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67. Walkie talkies
Worked in the woods as an ecological field assistant. We were studying mice and mice are nocturnal, so we did almost all of our work alone in pitch dark.
We had a walkie-talkie we could use to contact the other field workers, but half the time it didn’t work. Sometimes cause they were behind a berm. But whenever we got to this one patch of forest the walkies would start crackling. At one point they crackled, then went quiet, then unleashed this UNGODLY scream. All three of our team were there and there wasn’t supposed to be anyone else for miles.
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Another time we showed up to a site in the morning to find our traps just annihilated. These things were steel and bolted to the ground with footlong spikes. They were everywhere. Some were in half. We figured it might have been a bear, but ofc you don’t want to run into a bear in the middle of the night either.
Also, there was one trapline that ran along a dirt cliff. As I was walking along that line one night I grabbed a tree to keep my balance and the whole thing uprooted. I fell, I dunno, maybe ten feet down, taking the tree with me. When I got my bearings I realized I was surrounded by bones, which had been buried under the tree and got jostled loose when it uprooted. They were… large enough. No skull, so I still can’t be sure what they were. My co-workers and I chalked it up to a deer and just left them where we found them. They were mostly gone the next day.
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68. A splash in the dark
Worked nights on an ultra-deep water drillship about 100 miles offshore. One night I’m going to “lunch” around midnight and walking outside from my workplace to the galley. Sometimes you forget you’re on a vessel since it’s generally so well lit and industrial looking everywhere.
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Well I heard a dull quiet “thunk” followed by a splash. Generally you don’t hear sounds on the hull so it piqued my interest. I walked over to the railing and looked out over the ocean and saw the usual glassy black abyss with a few sparkles on the horizon from the other facilities off in the distance. Just as I looked down I saw a flying fish skip out of the water straight into the side of the hull and get gobbled up by a dolphin. Not creepy in the end, but one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
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69. Distant roars
A few years back I was in the rainforest looking for juvenile electric fish for my research. This entailed hiking miles in, often going off any existing trails, and following along riverbeds with a tool that would pick up the electricity they gave off.
This was my first time going into this area and I had familiarized myself with the local predators and what most of the wildlife looked like, but as I was walking in the forest I heard this low roaring sound off in the distance. I kept going but the sounds started from another direction too and they started getting closer.
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To picture this imagine you are miles into a rainforest, by yourself, no one is coming, no one is expecting you back for a few days, and you hear a deep unknown sound echoing in the distance and getting closer and closer. It can be really unsettling
I knew it probably was nothing too dangerous, but it just got more and more unnerving as it closed in. At that point I had finished finding sites for the day and was about ready to head back anyway so I turned around and calmly but quickly noped out of there.
I found out later that it was howler monkeys and they were following a bit out of curiosity. If you want to know what they sound like I recommend looking up a video of them in Panama where they are not close to the camera. When it is off in the distance the sound is almost haunting if you don’t recognize it.
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70. Owl attack
I work in the natural gas business around the tri state area of Pennsylvania Ohio and West Virginia.
My job is to drive a tanker truck to load up produced water from wells that have already been fraced, among other things. Typically you’ll start out on night shift, and you’ll be sent to well sites in the middle of nowhere and sometimes it gets creepy if you look around too much with a flashlight and notice coyotes and other critters watching you.
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However there is a site that is notorious and well known, near Eighty Four, PA. There is an owl that likes to swoop down at you just above head level in the dark. There is also an unmistakable dread of someone standing right behind your shoulder. I’ve had other drivers report the same experiences.
Haven’t ever witnessed this myself but some say they hear strange voices on the CB in the truck near that site. Not someone talking into the mic but something else.
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71. Men in white
When I was training to be a volunteer wildland firefighter, we would do night scenarios where we’d hike at night in full gear, single file. We all have headlights.
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One of these scenarios was in a dense forest. All you really had to do is hike and act like you’re approaching a fire, getting a few theory lessons as you go. But for the most part you stay silent so you can hear what’s happening over the radio. It was 1-2 am and we ran straight into a group of 4 men all dressed in white with no shoes and no lights. We weren’t sure if this was apart of some initiation or a religious thing.
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72. Death threats
I used to work for Vestas, a wind turbine company, and we were in Payne, Ohio, a rural farmland s*** hole, and we would get threats from the locals if we didn’t stop putting up the wind turbines.
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They went as far as putting signs on our trucks saying that they had sniper rifles and had our heads in the cross hairs…we had to get protection after a while.
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73. Stuck in a snow storm
Lived on a nature preserve in a destination town as a caretaker. One morning, before dawn in the depths of winter, in the middle of a snow storm, I hear an animal screaming… I go to investigate, but only had my phone for a light. I let myself in through the gate, and began to hear that the screams are words, “Help….Aaaaaagggggghhhhhhhhh….me…..help….me…….”
So I yelled that I needed my headlamp and I would be right back. Ran as fast as I could while calling the police. Got back to near the guy with my headlamp and try as I might, my headlamp blinded me against the falling snow and I could see no prints and he wouldn’t respond to verbal commands to tell me where my light was in relation to him.
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I am told by dispatch that an officer is at the gate and I run back to guide him in…About an hour and a half later, I get a call from the officer and he said it by the the time backup showed up and they were able to perform a proper search they found the shirtless drunk kid who had partied too hard, punched a friend, and ran off after the cops approached him and disappeared the night before.
He was unconscious by the time they got there. Managed to get him to hospital and he survived. Really scary thing was for part of the night he set off our game cameras and we watched them. He spent four hours….in the snow….screaming bloody murder….and from inside my house I never heard him from maybe 100 yards away. If I had slept in, or had another cup of coffee I never would have heard him and in the spring we would have found his body.
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74. Woodland folk
I’ve worked in some remote archaeological sites in northern Alaska. Far away from any trail, road, or river system, and far away from any remote village.
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What always creeps me out is the sheer amount of people who have just popped out the woods, when you’re really in the middle of nowhere.
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75. Electric failure
I was recently working for a hunting outfit in the remote parts of the Yukon Territory, Canada. Myself and the other 2 individuals I was with came across a small area in a valley where all of our electronics seemed to fail. The hunters range finder randomly shut off and wouldn’t turn on again until we left. Not that big of a deal except for the fact that he had just put brand hew lithium batteries in it the day before.
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When we returned back to that same spot the next day, all of our cellphones shut off and my Inreach GPS also shut off. We all had decent battery life on our electronics when we left camp.
As soon as we would leave this little valley, our units would turn back on and work as normal…
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